pro and contra wagner 225between his earlier and later theoretical positions poses some revealing
questions about philosophy’s relationship to music.
In a narrow logical sense, anything follows from a contradiction,
but can we still make sense of Wagner’s change of view? The change
goes along with his move from Feuerbach to Schopenhauer, a move
which poses questions about how the holding of philosophical posi-
tions relates to musical production. It is important to remember here,
as Dahlhaus points out, that ‘Beethoven’s symphonies did not come into
existence as absolute music’ (Dahlhaus 1988 : 373 ). Beethoven himself
thought of his music in terms of the ‘representation of character’ and as
a ‘speaking art’ (ibid.: 99 ). Indeed, ideas about music’s relationship to
discursive language in the period from the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury to Wagner are anything but stable or agreed,^7 ranging from the idea
of ‘absolute’ – wordless – music in Hoffmann’s sense, to ideas of inter-
action between the verbal and the musical of the kind we have observed
in Wagner. Liszt’s ideas concerning ‘programme music’ that accompa-
nied the composition of his ‘symphonic poems’ are important here. As
Wagner’s textOn Liszt’s Symphonic Poemsof 1857 indicates, Liszt’s ideas
and their enactment in Liszt’s music became part of his shift of concep-
tion. Dahlhaus cites the following remark by Liszt (which is best realised
in Liszt’s great B-minor piano sonata): ‘The unlimited changes which a
motif can undergo via rhythm, modulation, temporal duration, accom-
paniment, instrumentation, transformation constitute the language by
means of which we can make this motif express thoughts, and, as it
were, dramatic action’ (Liszt cited in ibid.: 383 ). It is not the individ-
ual elements of musical language themselves – which in Bach’s period,
for example, had involved a series of predetermined topoi – that now
enable signification, but rather the relations in which the elements can
stand to each other. We encountered a version of this stress on relations
rather than elements in Hegel and Brandom.
Liszt himself regards words as the carriers of pre-existing ideas, and
so thinks that musical motifs can do something similar to words. He
does not take account of the fact that the relational determinacy of
the words is a condition of possibility of the determinacy of ideas. This
fact matters less, though, than the idea of relationality as the basis of
both verbal and musical significance, and so of the development of
new kinds of connection between music and words. One way to high-
light what is at issue here is to take the issue of music and irony, which
7 This is obviously also the case after Wagner, but the degree of importance attached to
the issue will not be as great.