This essay explores Nietzsche's view of history as musical variations, shaping students' perceptions with past voices.
A great deal of interpretive energy has been expended on the first half of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditation on “The Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life,” however the second half of the essay, which frequently alludes to music, musical acoustics, and musical composition, has received far less attention. The essay argues that Nietzsche’s conception of history as musical variations composed on a well-known musical theme constitutes a philosophy of history, and a pedagogy of history in which the historian with an artistic disposition, or Stimmung, shapes the student’s temperament, or Stimmung, such his or her sympathetic vibration, in the present, with the most resonant voices of the past, renders them timeless.
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David Mosley (2014) studied this question.
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