Neil Bowen on
Nietzsche reacts against Hegel's ‘bloodlessly intellectual’ approach.
Tragedy is not caused by the clash of ideas as Hegel argued (or good vs. bad characters) but through the conflict between essential aspects of human nature, which Nietzsche labels the Apollonian and the Dionysiac.
Broadly the Apollonian is the rational, ordered, individualised consciousness; the Dionysiac drive represents the forces of intoxication, irrationality, dissolution of the self.
In tragedies the protagonist realises the incompleteness of the Apollonian self and collapses back to a Dionysiac state. Think of King Lear raging on the heath. For Nietzsche, human motivation in tragedies comes from atavistic impulses, not from reasoned arguments.