Chapters 18 to 25 of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy deal with the displacement of the cultural-historical into present-day interpretation. The opera, for Nietzsche, forms an aesthetic of word and musical art that he sees as a visionary resurrection in Wagner's tragedies and mythical wisdom. Art in this view is a consolation against the tragedy that Kant and Schopenhauer have worked out with their achievements in the field of reason and will (remember the relation between the Apollonian and the Dionsyian). Music and tragic myth are an expression of the Dionysian ability of a people and are inseparable from each other. This for Nietzsche is realized in Wagner's musical dramas and the true culture is reborn as a new German culture that emerged from Greece.
According to Nietzsche, the decline of the original greek culture was initiated by Socrates and Euripides. Through intellectual “cultivation” of the tragedies, Socrates and Euripides had set the human course for an enlightening, rational philosophy and had become pioneers of the “scientist” and thus the gravediggers of the ancient forms of art.
Nietzsche concludes that the Dionysian music has its origin in the Greek tragedies (or vice versa). Following Schopenhauer, he describes music as the metaphysical expression of the “will to live” and the actual breeding ground on which not only the tragedies grew, but the entire Greek culture that came under control of the Apollonian.
