pro and contra wagner 213impact of capitalism suggests why: critiques of capitalism and anti-
Semitism are not inherently connected. In a further example of the
way Wagner’s social vision can be understood, Edward Said maintains
ofDie Meistersingerthat ‘Few operas in my opinion have done so relent-
lessly detailed a job of literally enacting the way in which music, if it
is looked at not simply as a private esoteric possession, but as a social
activity, is interwoven with, and is important to social reality’ (Said 1991 :
61 ). Wagner’s librettos’ openness to interpretation, and the effects of
the music on the action and on the words – and vice versa – make
it clear that judgements relating to intentions require a very vigilant
approach.
Even ‘authentic’, ‘period’, or ‘historically informed’ performance
practice does not rely just on what a composer said about their inten-
tions, but rather on a whole series of other contexts and practices
of the time of composition. Charles Rosen’s canny remark that ‘authen-
tic’ performance practice confuses what the composer got with what
they wanted indicates the problem. Concentration on intention as the
basis for interpreting works of art can also involve employing a question-
able subject–object model. The work becomes an object with properties
whose correct interpretation depends on their connection to what the
creator-subject supposedly intended. Strictly applied, this would mean
that all interpretations of Wagner that did not somehow instantiate a
correspondence between the subjective and objective sides would be
illegitimate. This is, of course, already wholly implausible in relation
to the performance history of the works. Moreover, works composed
over long periods involve so many intentions – theRingspans Wagner’s
move from Feuerbach to Schopenhauer, the text pertaining to the for-
mer, much of the music to the latter – that such a correspondence is
impossible to establish.
The subject–object model is anyway, as we have seen, inherently
flawed. In the case of music one is inevitably forced to extend the
scope of ‘intention’ to include the kind of shared, but often unthe-
matised, background knowledge that informs a musician’s practice at
a particular time. One has therefore already moved beyond a model of
intention that makes the ‘inner’ ethical status of the individual’s prac-
tice the main focus: the practices in question exist both on the ‘object’
and on the ‘subject’ side of the relationship. Furthermore, the idea that
the nature of performance should be dictated solely by historical knowl-
edge is contradicted, as Gadamer has shown, by the fact that interpre-
tations, including musical performances, involve a complex mediation