220 music, philosophy, and modernity
On the Performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony).^5 In programme notes
aimed at convincing a sceptical public for a successful performance
he conducted in 1846 ,Wagner uses quotations from Goethe’sFaustto
characterise the relationship of each movement to affective aspects of
life, as a means of rendering the music less alien. Despite his incon-
sistencies, Wagner always wants his audiences clearly to understand his
and others’ works of art. The difficult questions have to do with whether
this understanding is located at the affective or the conceptual level,
and how the levels relate. He says of the Ninth’s last movement that it
‘leaves behind the character of pure instrumental music that announces
itself in infinite and indecisive expression which is sustained in the first
three movements; the progress of the musical composition (‘Dichtung’)
presses for a decision, a decision which can only be expressed in human
language’ (ibid.: 2 , 61 ). The recitative in the double basses which pre-
cedes the appearance of the voice, and which employs musical rhetoric
of a kind normally reserved for the human voice, already ‘almost leaves
behind the limits of absolute music’ (ibid.). The attempt of the instru-
ments alone ‘to express a certain, determinate, joyful happiness that
cannot be marred’ is, however, not enough to overcome the ‘uncon-
trolled element’ (ibid.) in the reappearance of the dissonant ‘fanfare
of terror’, which opened the movement and which immediately pre-
cedes the entry of the voice. The voice then controls and determines
the expression of joy which was only a ‘tormented striving’ (ibid.: 62 )
when expressed by the instruments.
This text is written in the period during which Wagner is attached to
Feuerbach and to the idea expressed in the title of the essayThe Artwork
of the Future( 1849 ), which echoes that of Feuerbach’sFoundations of the
Philosophy of the Future( 1843 ). His philosophical aim is an integration of
aspects of human life which he thinks are being torn apart by modernity.
Like Schiller he regards aesthetic activity as the location of what is best
about human existence, and this activity must be part of the public
sphere as a whole, as Greek tragedy was for Athens. He consequently
seeks to promote precisely what Hegel thought was no longer possible,
namely a society in which art is the leading form of that society’s self-
awareness. Instead of accepting Hegel’s idea that modernity progresses
by the ‘reflection’ and ‘division’ inherent in the analytical procedures
of the sciences and in capital exchange, he seeks to overcome these
5 Adorno rightly takes texts like this one and the text on conducting seriously as major
contributions to a theory of musical reproduction (see Adorno 2001 ).