pro and contra wagner 215familiar with Wagner’s work should consult such introductions (and do
some listening). I want here, then, just to use one aspect of my overall
argument as a way into questions whose significance extends beyond the
immediate case of Wagner. The entanglement of music and philosophy
is crucial both to Wagner’s own perception of what he was doing and
to his influence on modern culture. Along with some of Wagner’s own
theoretical work, I shall, therefore, also use aspects of the philosophi-
cally and musicologically influential approaches to Wagner of Adorno
and Dahlhaus, to see what they can reveal about the musical works and
their relationship to philosophy.
Analysing the meaning of tensions between understandings of art-
works may generate more insights than seeking to overcome such ten-
sions. It is not always the ‘definitive’ interpretation – either in discursive
terms or in performance – which makes music significant, though there
are occasions when a revelatory performance or groundbreaking crit-
ical analysis can transform the reception of a piece. It is rather the
shifting perspectives which emerge from differing engagements with
music that bring about its significance, and this has to do with ques-
tions of freedom of the kind discussed in thelast chapter. The lack
of critical consensus on the assessment of performances is therefore
not a reason for espousing a relativist perspective. Performance is not
about the establishing of objective facts, but consists in participation in
a practice whose norms are always revisable, but not arbitrary, and in
which new norms may help to disclose what established norms did not.
The goal of musical practice may consequently, as we have seen, be
conceived of in terms of a regulative idea of ‘getting it right’, and this
points to a difference between music and certain conceptions of phi-
losophy. In philosophy the problem of using the notion of a regulative
idea is that one seems to be seeking something for which there can
be no criteria, unless one just dogmatically presupposes them. Such a
presupposition renders the point of the philosophical search unclear,
because in some sense one must already know what one is searching for.
The basic problem is that on the one hand truth has to be presupposed
in order to be recognisable at all – how would we even ask questions
about it if we were not already familiar with it? – and yet it also seems
to have to be a goal that cannot just be presupposed and which has to
be sought. I shall deal with this issue in more detail in chapter 9. For
the moment the important issue is the notion of ‘getting it right’ as a
regulative idea. The idea of a rightness for which we have no ultimate
criteria beyond a feeling of imperfection based on competing norms