pro and contra wagner 217possibilities, and leads to an awareness of the perennial threat of inco-
herence and madness. The dangers in this conception become appar-
ent when philosophy invokes a conceptually inaccessible ontological
foundation, like the Will, which is resistant to discursive analysis. Such
invocation can, rather than leading to new possibilities, lead in the
direction of mythology, as the expression of the idea that the reality
which underlies our thinking and practices is essentially unchanging.
The expression of such a reality in mythology is then used as a counter
to the sense that modernity has undermined any possibility of a fixed
ontological order. Music’s ambiguous relationship to these issues was
suggested by Schopenhauer’s elevation of music to being the key to
metaphysics, and by Kierkegaard’s conception of music as the expres-
sion of the sensuous which is connected to the ‘demonic’. In both cases
music’s non-conceptuality is the basis of the assessment, but the theories
arrive at significantly opposed results.
Wagner was not familiar with all the texts discussed in the last
chapter, but he read plenty of philosophy, and he would have regis-
tered the effects of many texts he did not read, or would have heard
about them from other people. Adorno’s remark inPhilosophy of New
Musicthat ‘Wagner, whose music points in more than a merely literary
sense to the German philosophy of the earlier part of the nineteenth
century, has in mind a dialectic between the archaic – the “Will” –
and the individuated’ (Adorno 1997 : 12 , 153 ) makes this clear. Wag-
ner’s change of philosophical orientation from Feuerbach to Schopen-
hauer also makes evident his relationship to the tensions between the
conceptions of freedom which result from these thinkers’ divergent
approaches to metaphysics. The crucial issue is how his combination of
music and text relates to these tensions.
Adorno’s own complex relationship to Wagner’s musical works
results not least from his own location between Feuerbachian and
Schopenhauerian perspectives. He is concerned both with the emanci-
pation of somatic existence from forms of repression, and with music’s
relationship to philosophy in a world seen in historically – though gen-
erally not metaphysically – pessimistic terms. His approaches to Wagner
are structured by the issue of freedom. For Adorno, as we saw, Wagner
develops new means of musical expression, which make possible ‘new
music’, and yet he also reverts to mythology in his failed attempt to
comprehend the driving forces in modernity, thus revoking the eman-
cipatory potential of other aspects of his work. Adorno, however, takes
too little account of the fact that Wagner’s ambivalent status depends