On the Phenomenology of Music and Word in The Birth of Tragedy or Nietzsche and Beethoven Babette Babich Fordham University, New York City …that which we call “invention” (in metrics, for example) is always a self-imposed fetter of this kind. “Dancing in chains,” to make things difficult for oneself but then to cover it over with the illusion of ease and facility — that is the artifice they want to demonstrate for us — Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy should be read as a phenomenological undertaking including his ‘reduction’ of traditional scholarly assumptions and theories regarding the history of the tragic work of art as well as the history and function of the tragic chorus as a musically poetic performance that can only be understood, so Nietzsche was at some pains to argue, in the full context — political and social and religious — of the life-world of Greek antiquity. Without such an encompassing focus it is difficult to understand Nietzsche’s counter-arguments regarding Aristotle’s theory of tragedy as also concerning Schlegel on the chorus as well as the critical “working” of the work of tragic art in the political/a-political 1 and socio-cultural context involving the entirety of the Athenian demos. And there is still more.