216 music, philosophy, and modernity
seems less problematic in art than it does in philosophy. This feeling
of imperfection underlies the early Romantic conception of art as the
means of understanding the absolute, which is often linked to music.
As Friedrich Schlegel puts it: ‘The smallest dissonance is...aconfirma-
tion of eternity’ (Schlegel 1963 : 18 , 213 ). The awareness of dissonance
points to harmony, even if harmony can never be said to be achieved.
What counts as dissonance is, however, as the history of music teaches,
not something independent of history.
The alternative to what I am suggesting here, as we saw, presupposes
the truth of a theoretical or philosophical perspective and applies it
to music. However, this is precisely what I have been questioning all
along. Such perspectives cannot be excluded or ignored: they are in
one sense unavoidable. They must, though, also take into account the
fact that they themselves can be put into question by the music to which
they are applied, otherwise the self-confirming circularity I pointed to
in chapter 1 is inevitable. Wagner provides a potent example of the
ways in which an undoubtedly problematic, but also wholly exceptional,
musical oeuvre can both be questioned by, and can itself question,
philosophical attempts – including those of its own creator – to interpret
it.
Wagner: music, text, and philosophyWagner’s work is remarkably disruptive of systematic attempts to charac-
terise it. The extended exploration of conceptual contexts in chapter 6
should, though, help us to understand some of the reasons for this.
The ways in which the relationships between the musical and the extra-
musical change in the period in question have very much to do with
changes in the perceived status of philosophy.^4 If Wagner’s work does
indeed affect philosophy, a purely philosophical characterisation of this
relationship will be one-sided, and so need complementing by an under-
standing – which does not itself just rely on philosophical ideas – of how
the music affects philosophy. Music can affect ideas if its relationship to
language is regarded, not as a problem to be explained by philosophy,
but as transforming how the world can be disclosed and responded to.
Modern philosophical exploration of human freedom is, as we have
seen, linked to a sense of groundlessness which both opens up new
4 See Goehr 1998 for an instructive attempt to come to terms with Wagner in relation to
the musical and the extra-musical.