music, freedom, and metaphysics 185world that is objectively manifested via the music, rather than being
located inside the subject.
Indicating a further important way in which music is thought of
as relating to freedom, Adorno contends that ‘Since music existed it
was the – always at the same time powerless – objection to myth and
invariant (‘immergleiches’) fate, to death itself’ (Adorno 1997 : 16 , 387 ).
There is an aspect of music which may transcend what it evokes, even
when this involves what can also make life a torment, from the phys-
ical and psychological threats of first nature, to the threat of ‘second
nature’. The latter can take the form, for example, of the destructive
features of modern technology, or the disorientation occasioned by the
rapid upheavals of modernity: ‘As music begins it already commits itself
to going on, to becoming something new. What can be called music’s
transcendence: that it has begun at each moment and is an other than it
is: that it points beyond itself, is not a metaphysical commandment that
has been dictated to it, but lies in its own condition, against which it can
do nothing’ (ibid.). Adorno’s animus against the music produced by the
culture industry will be generated by his conviction that it betrays this
potential for ultimately ‘powerless’ transcendence by merely repeating
what is already the case in the commodity market. His verdict on Wagner
will be instructively ambivalent in this respect. He is torn between his
awareness of Wagner’s capacity for innovative musical transcendence
that makes possible ‘new music’, and what he sees as Wagner’s simulta-
neous tendency to regress into myth.
One way of interpreting this idea of music’s combination of transcen-
dence and finitude becomes apparent in the association of music with a
modern return of tragedy. Schelling had hinted at this in thePhilosophy
of Art( 1856 – 61 :i/ 5 , 736 ), and the idea will become explicit both in
Wagner and in Nietzsche. A major issue here is the contested interpreta-
tion of the relationship of tragedy to myth, which is echoed in Adorno’s
concern with music’s being an ‘objection’ to myth as the expression of
the ‘ever-same’. Tragedy is concerned with the worst things in human
life, and yet is anything but a manifestation of the worst in human cul-
ture. Music may also have to do with the worst things, and depends
on how it transcends them. Why and how, though, do cultural expres-
sions which respond in a non-mythical way to the worst things become
so important? Whereas myth can be seen as a form of submission to
disaster, because it tells stories about why things must be the way they
are, Greek tragedy has a more reflexive relationship to calamity. This is
most evident in the ‘dual causality’ in many Greek tragedies, whereby