218 music, philosophy, and modernity
on his discursive writings, his libretti, and his music, each of which leads
towards very different assessments if it is given priority over the others.
Wagner’s work, and Adorno’s evaluation of it, can consequently best be
approached via the question of music’s relationship to language. The
friction between what Wagner regards himself as doing, and what he
can be construed as doing, are the crucial issue here.
Wagner’s own theoretical writings often function, as Dahlhaus shows,
more as means to aid the composition of his musical works than
as accurate descriptions of those works. His writings consequently
already offer a counter to representationalist philosophical approaches,
because their performative status cannot be understood in terms of
their descriptive claims. Dahlhaus cites the case of the 1851 Message to
my Friendswhich describesThe Flying Dutchmanin terms of the large-
scale use of leitmotif. This use of leitmotif actually applies to the as
yet uncomposedRingcycle, but generally not to theDutchmanitself. If
we regard both language and music as forms of communicative action
which can take on differing performative statuses in differing contexts
there is no intrinsic problem with the divergence between theoretical
text and musical work in Wagner. The real difficulty lies inhowthe var-
ious forms of articulation both relate to and affect different historical
contexts.
This issue is obsessively pursued by Wagner himself, particularly in
Opera and Drama( 1851 ), which tells a story of how forms of articulation
both enable and hinder human self-expression at different times in
history. The story culminates, of course, in Wagner’s own new – but at
that time by no means fully realised – synthesis of text, music, and stage
action.Opera and Dramaconfronts some of the issues examined in the
preceding chapters concerning the decline of theology and the effects
of this decline on the status of language, and sees art as taking over the
core of what had been religion. Given the prolixity of Wagner’s texts and
their frequent lack of consistency, it is best to focus here on a specific
topic to which he returns at various times throughout his career, namely
that of music and language in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. This topic
becomes the matrix of some of the frictions between Wagner’s musical
and theoretical conceptions.
In the early (thoroughly entertaining) fictional story,A Pilgrimage to
Beethoven( 1840 – 1 ), Wagner introduces the question of the Ninth via a
vision of the future of music. At this time he has just finished the by no
means radically innovative grand operaRienzi, but is beginning, with
the composition ofThe Flying Dutchman,tobecome a real innovator.