THE MELODIES OF NIETZSCHE

By ELLIOT RAVETZ

"WITHOUT MUSIC, LIFE would be an error," Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote. The influential German philosopher (1844-1900) had an abiding, often passionate interest in music and wrote celebrated treatises both for and against the work of Wagner. Yet only a few specialists know that Nietzsche composed music himself.

Though the publication of Nietzsche's complete scores in 1976 brought his music to the attention of scholars, two fine CDs from Newport Classic should introduce it to a wider audience. In Piano Music of Friedrich Nietzsche, John Bell Young plays 14 solo works and is joined by Constance Keene in two pieces for four hands. In The Music of Friedrich Nietzsche, Young is again the pianist, joined at times by violin and a second piano, as well as by the excellent lyric tenor John Aler for 16 songs.

Most of the works for solo piano are brief (between one and two minutes), and were composed in 1862, when Nietzsche was only 17. His lack of formal training shows, but the pieces require no apology and display a true melodic gift, reminiscent of Schubert and Schumann. Paradoxically, this heroic visionary was most at home in such small-scale works; his more ambitious pieces for two pianos (written in 1871 and '73) owe much in vocabulary and gesture to Liszt and Wagner. But the seams show, and the intended grandeur is painfully strained. On the other hand, a charming violin fantasy anticipates Debussy. And the songs--which were written mostly between 1861 and 1864 (though the moving Prayer to Life dates from 1882) and set to poems by Nietzsche himself, Ruckert, Pushkin and others--are genuinely affecting.