Wurzer, Wilhelm S.  "Nietzsche's Return to an Aesthetic Beginning," Man and World 11, nos. 1/2 (1978): 59-77.

Excerpt:

“When Nietzsche claims that his earliest work, The Birth of Tragedy, “smells

offensively Hegelian, ”1 he is referring to his “dialectic” description of the
Apollinian and Dionysian and their unique relation to the primordial one (das
Ur-Eine).2 In this description he is evidently under the spell of the Hegelian
dialectic, but without taking into account its fundamental discursive nature.
This and the “cadaverous perfume of Schopenhauer’s ”~ philosophy of the
“will and representation” create the epistemological ambiguity present in this
aesthetic work. What is so disturbing about this work is not–as Nietzsche
seems to imply–the Hegelian movement of the two art impulses which
originate from Nietzsche’s own adaptation of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics,
but rather the “un-Hegelian” way of fusing the dimensions of the Apollinian
and Dionysian on the basis of their relation to the primordial ground. It
seems to me that if The Birth of Tragedy would really smell Hegelian, it
would not be as “offensive” to the reader as Nietzsche himself thought.
Unfortunately, there is a quasi-Hegelianism that operates in this work.
Nietzsche was unaware that his “dialectic” was not yet conscious of itself
in The Birth of Tragedy. The result of this lack of reflection produces
complications that arise in any significant interpretation of the two main
aesthetic phenomena. Nevertheless, we are going to struggle with these
complications in order to arrive at a better understanding of one of
Nietzsche’s decisive innovations, namely the Dionysian phenomenon.”

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