Debates with Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel and Kracauer 239natural sound, for in doing so he conceals the way in which the sound
effects have been created. ‘The occultation of production by the outward
appearance of the product – that is the formal law governing the works
of Richard Wagner.’^120
A striking passage of the essay reproduces Adorno’s interpretation
of ‘dominion over nature and subjugation by nature’, which he explained
with reference to The Ring: ‘Man emancipates himself from the blind
identity with nature from which he springs; he then acquires power
over nature only to succumb to it in the long run.... The parable of
the man who dominates nature only to relapse into a state of natural
bondage gains a historical dimension in the action of The Ring: with the
victory of the bourgeoisie, the idea that society is like a natural pro-
cess, something “fated”, is reaffirmed, despite the conquest of particular
aspects of nature.’^121
The form of music drama as Wagner developed it in the Gesamt-
kunstwerk was one theme of Adorno’s essay; another was the relation
of myth and modernity in the subjects Wagner chose for his operas.
These ideas led in the final chapter to ‘motifs towards a redemption
of Wagner’.^122 The composer was ‘not simply the willing prophet and
assiduous lackey of imperialism and late bourgeois terrorism’, he also
possesses ‘the neurotic’s ability to contemplate his own decadence and
to transcend it’.^123
Although Benjamin was greatly taken with Adorno’s ‘portrait of
Wagner’, and with ‘the precision of his materialist deciphering’, he
cautiously advanced some reservations. He asked whether Adorno had
not made a too undifferentiated use of ‘the concepts of the progressive
and the regressive’. Adorno’s polemical approach ultimately distorts
his efforts to provide ‘a redemption of Wagner’. Important elements
of Adorno’s theory of music remain undeveloped. ‘Perhaps such a
redemption of Wagner might have created a space precisely for one of
your earliest themes – that of décadence and the Trakl quotation of
which you are so fond. For the decisive element in such salvation – am
I not right? – is never simply something progressive; it can resemble the
regressive as much as it resembles the ultimate goal, which is what
Kraus calls the origin.’^124 Adorno accepted his friend’s critical remarks,
but did not agree that his wish to redeem Wagner was something that
could be related to his childhood experience of the composer: ‘Wagner
never really belonged among the stars above in my childhood, and
even today I could not invoke his aura any more effectively than I have
already attempted in certain passages.’^125 Adorno was convinced that
he had salvaged as much of Wagner as was possible to save. In May
1938 he wrote to Krenek, saying that his sharp debate with Wagner
had had as happy an end as was to be found in one of Marlitt’s novels.
‘The couple are united; nihilism is rescued. In other respects, too, the
book is not far behind Marlitt, since it does not lack tension as it shows
how Wagner’s form develops from the gestures of the conductor.’^126