music, freedom, and metaphysics 167are just one interpretation of the real content of his works, and by no
means always the best one.
This claim already suggests a further factor relating to our main
themes. Performances of Wagner’s musical works continue to trans-
form what the works reveal and how they are interpreted. His works
have, for example, come to be seen as playing a disreputable role in the
history of anti-Semitism. The suspicions of anti-Semitism are, though,
not confined to the portrayal of characters, but extend to aspects of
the music itself, as the literature on Wagner suggests.^2 I shall return to
this issue in thenext chapter. However, the same works articulate fea-
tures of the experience of modernity, from the sense of the individual’s
being overtaken by social and historical forces which they cannot con-
trol, to the complexities of desire and of human identity, in ways that
only the greatest art does. A similar ambivalence pertains with regard
to Nietzsche’s writings, which can be seen both to contribute to reac-
tionary politics, and yet to offer emancipatory resources for the interro-
gation of theological and metaphysical orthodoxies. The difference lies
in how Wagner’s musical works transform, in ways which verbal texts
alone cannot, what he assimilates from the philosophical, political, and
other culture of his day. How, then, does this transformation take the
works beyond the undoubtedly problematic ideas upon which Wagner
relies, and what does this mean with respect to the works’ relationship
to philosophy? The response to these questions in this and thenext
chapterwill be a rather demanding one, but the issues are anything but
simple.
The Wagner–Nietzsche relationship provides a further illustration
of the entanglement of music and philosophy. Bryan Magee claims
that ‘There is no other such example in the whole of our culture of
a creative artist who is not himself a philosopher having aphilosophi-
calinfluence of this magnitude on someone who was indeed a great
philosopher’ (Magee 2001 : 81 ), and he agrees that the influence arose
more from Wagner’s music than from his texts. The relationship is, how-
ever, highly complex. Nietzsche’s philosophical development involves
a move away from the influence of both Schopenhauer and Wagner,
which leads to a change in his assessments of music. Wagner’s theo-
retical and musical development in his work in the 1850 s is, in con-
trast, deeply affected by Schopenhauer, whose work takes the place
2 As Adorno argues, however, this aspect can readily be made to recede by staging the works
in a manner which is critical of any suspicion of anti-Semitism.