212 music, philosophy, and modernity
It is more problematic in the case of works of art than of theoret-
ical essays to link an interpretation of a work to the author’s inten-
tions. How, for example, does the question of moral intentions apply
to music? Could Wagner have intended to promote anti-Semitic or
other ideas with hismusic,ifthe libretti do not overtly do so? Some
of the music of Beckmesser, Alberich (and Hagen) is notably more
technically advanced and ‘difficult’ than much of the rest of the work
in which it appears, and this suggests that the music conveys a nega-
tive judgement on the character concerned (Said 1991 : 41 – 2 ). This
issue becomes more complex, though, when one considers Dahlhaus’
demonstration of how the supposed ‘music of the future’, represented
by Walther’s Prize Song inDie Meistersinger,isactually quite traditional,
compared with Beckmesser’s music in the pantomime of Act Three. Is
dissonance, etc., therefore merely to be understood as standing for evil,
and other forms of ‘negativity’? The question of the ethical intentions
in music is, however, even more tricky because Wagner himself was con-
vinced for a long time of the political power of music. How do the more
dissonant aspects of his music, which helped make possible many subse-
quent new musical forms of expression, relate to his social and political
vision?
For a large part of his career Wagner saw himself as promoting a new
social vision for humanity by his musical work, a vision which appeals
to those critical of the effects of unfettered capitalism on human well-
being. Like too many others at the time and since, he tended, though,
to attach this view to the idea that ‘the Jews’ were at the root of money’s
dominance of the modern world. Adorno suggests that
The most elevated, specialised, inevitably isolated intensification of musi-
cal productive force obviously leads away from the overall spiritual aware-
ness of the epoch; the greatest modern composers tend to become stub-
bornly fixed in their own naivet ́e. It is not least here that one may seek one
of the explanations for Wagner’s anti-Semitism: through it he thought he
would be able to see through the social mechanism [i.e. the dehumanis-
ing nature of capitalism] that was impenetrable to him.
(Adorno 1997 : 18 , 215 )Although theRingmight at times be understood in terms of the myth
of Jewish monetary domination, to stage it in a manner that makes
that connection requires a lot of tendentious interpretation. George
Bernard Shaw’s idea that theRingand Marx’sCapitalare actually telling
something like the same story about the end of feudalism and the