pro and contra wagner 223to ‘gesture’ as ‘an other unsayable’ (ibid.): both the orchestral and
the gestural aspects of music drama convey aspects of ‘feeling’. The
argument is close to Schleiermacher’s remarks about ‘feeling’ and our
non-cognitive relationships to the world.
It is easy to make fun of some of Wagner’s flights of rhetoric. However,
what he is trying to work out are ways of integrating forms of articulation
that allow him to say and do something different from what has been
said and done before. This is because he thinks that previous kinds of
music and drama, with the exception of the Greeks and Shakespeare,
failed to have the impact on society that he is seeking. There is, more-
over, little doubt that he succeeds in some respects, even though his
theoretical texts do not adequately characterise what he does, and the
nature of his success is still controversial.
In the same section ofOpera and DramaWagner makes observations
about the combination of ‘linguistic’ means in music drama that point
to a feature of his work which will affect many subsequent aspects of
music, the other arts, and philosophy. What makes his observations
interesting is their concern with the temporality of the differing kinds
of ‘language’ in musical drama. He asks how drama is to present the
ways in which people reveal themselves in the world, and contends
that this usually involves a ‘mixture of voluntary, reflected activity of
the will, and unconscious, necessary feeling’ (ibid.: 180 ), in which the
transitions from one to the other are crucial. Whereas gesture, under-
stood as ‘the whole external manifestation of human appearance to the
eye’, is ‘the most present’ (ibid.: 181 ), because its meaning is the feel-
ing it manifests, it fails to convey the significance of the feeling to the
understanding, because the understanding requires words. Wagner’s
idea is that ‘In verse-melody [i.e. his new combination of music and
text] not only does verbal-language combine with tonal-language, but
what is expressed by these two organs is also combined, namely what is
not present with what is present, the thought with the feeling’ (ibid.).
His concern is, then, with the temporal dimension of how the different
forms of articulation engage the audience, and this has consequences
for how philosophy thinks about ‘meaning’.
Wagner argues in an empiricist manner that the ‘thought’ is based
on the memory of the past sensuous impression of an object, as ‘the
image which recurs to memory’ (ibid.: 182 ). This is, though, not a
plausible explanation of what interests him. The identity of different
cases of the perception of something required to form a thought of it
cannot, as Kant showed, just depend on the sense impressions them-
selves. However, there is another point in Wagner’s contentions. This