pro and contra wagner 221effects of modernity in the name of ‘the people’, who will be the ‘artist
of the future’ (ibid.: 169 ), rather than of the individual poet or composer,
whose status is a result of the division of labour. The progressive side
to his ideas depends on an awareness, not unlike that of Marx and
the Young Hegelians, of the social injustices produced by unfettered
capitalism, but his politically undifferentiated concern with ‘the people’
as the basis of a new society not determined by money will be one reason
why his vision so easily becomes politically and morally indefensible.
How, then, does this vision relate to ideas about music and language?
Here we again encounter the issue of Beethoven. Wagner takes up the
Romantic idea of music as the expression of ‘infinite longing’, and
claims that it requires an object if it is to move from being just a feel-
ing into the determinacy of the ethical domain. In his Fifth Symphony
Beethoven ‘was able to intensify the expression of his musicalmostto
the point of moral decision’ (ibid.: 3 , 93 ), by the resolution from striv-
ing C-minor to triumphant C-major, but the music cannot express the
decision itself. Only in the Ninth does the word lead to the situation
where ‘thelast symphonyof Beethoven is the redemption of music from
its most proper element into theart that is common to all’ (ibid.: 96 ). This
is ‘drama’, in Wagner’s particular sense (see Dahlhaus 1990 ), which is
‘only conceivable via thecommon drive of all artstowards immediate com-
munication to acommon public’(Wagner 1907 : 3 , 150 ). Wagner sees the
possibility of major social transformation in the form of live events with
a collective audience. The exact nature of such events is the problem,
as subsequent history will demonstrate.
The concept of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ need not concern us in detail
here. It relates to Feuerbach’s Schiller-influenced perception of the
need to integrate the sensuous and intellectual aspects of humankind,
which Wagner thinks drama can achieve by combining understanding
and feeling. The specifics of Wagner’s ideas about music and drama
are considerably more interesting. Later in theArtworkessay he says
that ‘The orchestra is, so to speak, the soil of infinite, universal feeling,
out of which the individual feeling of the individual actor can grow to
the greatest plenitude’ (ibid.: 157 ). The philosophical issue through-
out the texts of this period is a version of the questions we examined
in Hegel concerning the relationship between the conceptual, that is
communicated by language, and the pre- or extra-conceptual, that is
communicated by music. Wagner’s change in his thinking after 1851
will rest on a revaluation, related to his changing political commitments,
of music’s relationship to conceptual determinacy. The difficult issue is