224 music, philosophy, and modernity
is that the melody associated with the impression helps to imbue the
thought of something past with an affective significance, so that music
can itself become a signifier in a way that words cannot, even though
this possibility does also depend on words. Wagner puts it as follows:
Music cannot think; but it can realise thoughts, i.e. manifest their affective
content as what is no longer remembered but is made present: but it can
only do this if its own manifestation is determined by the poetic intention,
and this in turn is not revealed merely as what is thought, but is first clearly
presented by the organ of understanding, verbal-language.
(ibid.: 184 – 5 )The combination of means therefore changes how thoughts are con-
veyed to the subject. Music conveys its own kind of thought, because
what is signified by the melody is not just an object which is referred to,
but also an affective relationship to whatever is at issue in the object,
which depends on the object’s relations to other aspects of the world in
which it occurs. Once this kind of signification is established the melody
can also, for example, convey a presentiment of something to come, as
well as serve as a reminder of the feeling connected to something past.
What has been said so far might admittedly not appear sufficient
to characterise what is so different in Wagner from other composers.
This kind of ‘affective temporality’ is, though, of decisive importance
for Wagner’s compositional technique and for understanding how he
establishes new ways of using musical motifs. In the passage fromA
Message to my Friendsmentioned above Wagner talks proleptically of
the idea of a ‘web of themes which spread not just overonescene (as
previously in the single operatic aria) butover the whole drama’ (ibid.:
322 ). The idea of such an interconnected web is important for more
than just the development of opera, because the expressive power of
what Wagner develops affects other modern cultural forms, such as
novel, poetry and film, as well as philosophy.
It should by now be well established that Wagner’s famous assertion in
Opera and Dramathat ‘the mistake in the artistic genre of opera wasthat it made
a means of expression (music) into the end, but made the end of expression
(drama) into the means’ (ibid.: 3 , 231 ) doesnot,asDahlhaus ( 1990 )
definitively shows, mean that thetextis therefore the end, and the music
the means. The point is rather that ‘drama’ should involve a complex
interaction of the kinds of significance generated by both text and
music. However, if we consider Wagner’s later accounts of Beethoven
as an example of his later ideas about language and music, the contrast