Myth, History and Revolution in the Nineteenth‐Century Reception of the Oresteia

In 1917, as the geopolitical status quo that had reigned during the nineteenth century was breaking down in the fire and death of World War I, a performance of Aeschylus's tragic trilogy Oresteia attended one of the foundational moments of the next century: the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. G. W. F. Hegel went on to become an immensely controversial figure in nineteenth‐century intellectual history; one of his many readers was the composer Richard Wagner, who also happened to be deeply fascinated by the Oresteia . Wagner's operatic cycle The Ring of the Nibelung has long been known as one of the most renowned receptions of the Oresteia in the nineteenth century. One person who was well aware of Wagner's deep debt to Aeschylus's tragedies was Friedrich Nietzsche.