music, freedom, and metaphysics 191the future that will not be fulfilled. Transience is therefore not seen as
negation, but as what offers the positive possibility of new revelation,
without any final ‘Aufhebung’. Let us, then, briefly consider some of the
ways in which teleological structures relate to music in order to evaluate
differences between a Hegelian and a Nietzschean stance with regard
to music and metaphysics. The ideas in question will underlie many
subsequent attempts to understand music’s relationship to the modern
world.
In one sense all tonal music is ‘teleological’, relying on harmonic
resolutions both for its formal constitution, and for its aesthetic and
emotional effects. However, the degree to which some of the most influ-
ential music from the end of the eighteenth century until the advent of
atonality becomes oriented towards the final resolution into a tonic key
increases, particularly in the light of Beethoven’s dynamic new employ-
ment of tonality. How does the symbolic teleology of this kind of music
relate to teleology in the sense encountered in Hegel?^17 As we saw
in chapter 4 , Hegel’s conception is echoed in Beethoven’s manner of
integrating musical particulars into a totality (and vice versa). A reveal-
ing example here, which parallels Hegel’s remarks in thePhenomenology
( 1807 ), is Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony ( 1812 ), because it combines
rigorous structural integration with a strong sense of the Dionysian. The
integration of musical material via the accumulating power of Greek
rhythms (see Solomon 2003 ) leads to a work which (particularly in the
last movement) at the same time evokes the Dionysian, in a manner
influenced by the music of the French Revolution.^18 The Seventh Sym-
phony extends the expressive range of music in ways which create new
possibilities that are taken up by subsequent composers, like Wagner,
and also evoke the disturbing collective energy that fuels both the best –
and the worst – aspects of the French Revolution. How is this sort of
combination to be evaluated?
Nietzsche wants affirmation without teleology, and by the time of
his later work is often critical of Beethoven (and of the Revolution).
In the unpublished notes of the 1880 s, for example, he says: ‘just
say the word “Dionysos” before the best recent names and things,17 Adorno sees tonality as characteristic of the bourgeois era: in the ‘classic-liberal model
of the economy... the totality asserts itself behind the scenes via and over the heads
of individual spontaneities’ (Adorno 1997 : 17 , 284 )asthe tonic key does in relation to
the musical particulars.
18 Solomon thinks that the symphony may involve a ‘pull to ecstatic conformity’ (Solomon
2003 : 134 ), which echoes Adorno’s suspicion of Beethoven’s affirmative music.