Dionysian-Dithyrambs


Dionysian-Dithyrambs is a collection of nine poems written in second half of 1888 by Friedrich Nietzsche under the nom de plume of Dionysos. The first six poems were published in the 1891 edition of Also sprach Zarathustra. Other three poems are compositions drawn from those found in Also sprach Zarathustra only slightly altered. Ruhm und Ewigkeit was published at the finis of the 1908 first edition of Ecce Homo; however, it is now deemed to be a requisite part of Dionysos-Dithyramben.
In January 1889, during his dementia, Nietzsche drafted "dedications" of Dionysos-Dithyramben to Catulle Mendès, a French poet, critic and novelist, an exemplar of Parnassianism, and author of the libretto to the operetta Isoline composed by André Messager, which made its debut at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris on 26 December 1888, in which he states his high regard for Mendès, calling him des grössten und ersten Satyr, der heute lebt—und nicht nur heute.

Musical settings

included text from Dionysos-Dithyramben in his Third Symphony, in 1964. Wolfgang Rihm composed an opera, Dionysos, and compiled his own libretto from the Dionysian Dithyrambs. It premiered at the Salzburg Festival on 27 July 2010.

Editions