pro and contra wagner 219In the story Beethoven, whom the narrator succeeds in meeting in
Vienna after overcoming considerable obstacles, is used to ventrilo-
quise Wagner’s own conception of a new kind of vocal and orchestral
music. ‘Beethoven’ maintains, in a manner that already suggests why
Schopenhauer will later become so important for Wagner (who reads
him in 1854 : see Dahlhaus 1990 : 148 ff.), that ‘The primal organs of
creation and of nature represent themselves in the instruments; what
they express can never be clearly determined and fixed, for they repro-
duce the primal feelings themselves as they emerged from the chaos
of the first creation.’ In contrast, the ‘genius of the human voice...
represents the human heart and its closed, individual feeling. Its char-
acter is therefore limited, but determinate and clear’ (Wagner 1907 :
1 , 110 ). The relationship between instrumental and vocal is often the
key to reflection on the relationship between philosophy and music at
this time.
The need ‘Beethoven’ feels to reconcile these two sides is reminiscent
of Schelling’sAges of the World: instruments play the role of the inchoate
expansive force, the voice that of the contractive force which makes
determinacy possible. Schelling saw language both as the condition of
possibility of determinacy and as entailing the danger of reducing the
abundance of the real to a limited number of signifiers. His view is
echoed in Wagner’s concern both with the excess of feeling over its
determinate expressions, and with the means for reconciling feeling
and determinacy. This concern will lead him to conflicting construals
of the relationship between music and language. The combination of
instruments and voice means, ‘Beethoven’ says, echoing E. T. A. Hoff-
mann, that ‘the human heart will, by taking up those primal feelings
into itself, be infinitely strengthened and expanded, capable of feeling
clearly in itself the former indeterminate presentiment of the highest
transformed into divine consciousness’ (ibid.: 111 ). The problem is,
he continues, that no text is able to bear the weight of this task, and he
adverts to his use of Schiller’s ‘Hymn to Joy’ in the Ninth, which cannot
say ‘what in this case no verse in the world can say’ (ibid.). Music and
text are here not given any intrinsic priority over each other: the crucial
factor is how they can interact to create something which is more than
either on its own.
Faced with Wagner’s speculative assertions it is easy to forget that
he was essential to the historical impact of Beethoven’s symphony, not
least because of his profound awareness of the technical and other prob-
lems involved in its performance (see, for example, the essay of 1873