Abstract Gustav Krug (1844–1902). Nietzsche’s Childhood Friend and Musical Companion. Following Martin Pernet’s genealogical and biographical study, this article focuses on the composer and jurist Gustav Krug as a musical advisor and discussion partner to Nietzsche. Starting out from the function of music in Nietzsche’s philosophical thinking, I examine Nietzsche’s and Krug’s joint music-making and exchanges about their own works as well as questions of compositional aesthetics and technique, before I offer a stylistic analysis of Krug’s surviving compositions. This allows us to round off our picture of Nietzsche’s childhood friend from a new perspective.
Wilfried Gruhn (Tue,) studied this question.