Notes from the Book with Flowers

If there is to be music in the play I would like to use Nietzsche's own.

In corresponding with Tali Makell, Executive Director of the Nietzsche Music Project I found that music itself was of great importance to Nietzsche, the man.
As a boy and a young man, he wanted to be a composer, and that is when a good deal of his music was composed.  So, between the ages of ten and 19, he composed some of his earliest music. His last composition, the Lied 'Hymnus an das Leben', or Prayer to Life, is based on a poem by Lou-Andreas Salomé.

It was transformed by his friend and amanuensis, Peter Gast, into a more extensive piece for chorus and orchestra in 1887, and it is mentioned in his correspondence of that time (and in Ecce Homo). He summed up his feelings about it by writing that he felt that "it summarized his thought".

"It is of no surprise to me that Nietzsche's first love was music. You can sense the dancer right through all his passionate creativity. He explains that music gives him the ability to "understand his feelings", of course by this he did not mean everyday emotions, but the emotions and desires of a creator and maker who desires to travel beyond the taught systems and dogmas of thought.

If you can visualize his writing, you can sense that he used to dance. In my research I have discovered that in his room he used to dance. He had nimble feet and beautifully formed hands.

It is only when his feet start to turn into the hooves of the satyrist that Nietzsche refuses to leave Ariadne "for man will follow Ariadne before he follows truth". That is when music was heard in the darkest roads of the labyrinth.

In seeking Nietzsche - the man - a completely new perspective was given to me by following the work of Gerry Goddard who in 1998 produced a study of the life of Nietzsche through astrology.

I felt I was looking at the invisible arteries that keep the earth and the sky alive, the roots of the impossible into the possible. Plato speaks highly about the mathematical world of the Stars, and Pythagoras who was also a dancer, heard the "cosmic music from the spheres" and knew of the stars and moon's influence upon our vulnerable beings.

External influences on the life of Nietzsche as viewed though Gerry's study may be found at The Eternal Return of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Probably one of the most useful books that I have read that provides an insight into the man has come from reading Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries.¹

Nietzsche's Yellow Dancer - Zenovia.

"I dance after you, I follow you even when only the slightest traces linger. Where are you? Give me your hand! Or just your little finger!"

Hand-painted design on the front cover of Nietzsche's Notebook N-II-6 (Memorabilia; Aphorisms, mainly for Human, All Too Human, Location: Weimar, Goethe und Schiller-Archiv)