La notte del Tristano e la mezzanotte di Zarathustra tra Wagner e Bizet

Abstract

Zarathustra’s Midnight and the Night of Tristan: The Second DanceSong between Wagner and BizetTracking the Wagnerian sources and the allusions that echoes in Nietzsche’sfamous and poignant poem “Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht”, thispaper explores the biographical background to the text after Wagner’sdeath. The rootwords and the rimes are taken, in an antiphrasticor inverted sense, from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (act II, scene II).The roundelay appears at the endings of the third part of Also sprachZarathustra, in the chapter entitled The Second Dance Song; then, inthe second-last chapter, The Sleepwalker Song, of the fourth part. It wasset to music by Mahler in the third symphony (fourth movement) andby Richard Strauss (Song of the Night Wanderer) in the final section ofhis tone-poem on Zarathustra.