222 music, philosophy, and modernity
how to interpret the fact that his greatest musical works accompany his
disillusionment with radical politics and the move from Feuerbachian
commitment to Schopenhauerian resignation.
InOpera and Dramathe contradictions between conceptual deter-
minacy and what music alone can communicate are exemplified by
the choice Wagner sees in the operas of Weber and Rossini, of either
‘absolute melody which is completely self-sufficient’, or ‘thoroughly true dra-
matic expression’. He insists that ‘one of these had to be sacrificed, – the
melody or the drama’ (ibid.: 293 ). Beethoven is the composer who seeks
‘what is artistically necessary’, namely ‘the expression of a completely
distinct, clearly comprehensible individual content’ (ibid.: 277 ), pre-
cisely where it is not possible, in ‘absolute [i.e. wordless] music’, music
not having found a way of articulating such content. The very extent
to which Beethoven reveals the expressive possibilities of music is, how-
ever, also what makes him reveal limitations which open up the space for
Wagner’s own new dramatic combination of the verbal and the musi-
cal. This judgement can, as Wagner himself will later suggest, easily
be inverted, even while attending to the same musical phenomena, by
changing the priority between words and music.
Wagner subsequently returns to the Ninth Symphony’s combination
of melody and text, which he now regards, having outlined Romantic-
influenced ideas about language’s origins in melody, in terms of the
trite metaphor of ‘the female’, as the melodic, which is married to ‘the
male’, in the form of the poet who uses language: ‘The poet is initi-
ated into the deep, infinite secrets of female nature by the redeeming
kiss of that melody... The bottomless sea of harmony, out of which
that joy-inducing appearance emerged towards him, is no longer an
object of shyness, of fear, of horror’ (ibid.: 4 , 146 ). Later Wagner dis-
cusses the ‘capacity for language’ of the orchestra, which develops in
Beethoven’s symphonies to the point where ‘it feels itself compelled
even to say precisely what according to its nature it cannot say’ (ibid.:
173 ). The orchestra’s capacity for language consists in ‘announcing
the unsayable’, which is inaccessible to ‘the organ of the understand-
ing, verbal-language’ (ibid.). What the orchestra announces is not,
though, unsayable in a mystical sense, because instrumental music is
the ‘organ of feeling’ (ibid.: 174 ), and feeling cannot be conveyed by
the ‘organ of the understanding’.^6 He elucidates this claim by adverting
6 Too often, as I suggested in relation to Richard Taruskin, discussion of the unsayable is
regarded as somehow about a theologically tinged idea of the ‘ineffable’. There is no nec-
essary reason for this if we assume certain things may, for example, only be communicable
by gesture.