226 music, philosophy, and modernity
becomes more central to music in the wake of Wagner. In the third
movement of his Ninth Symphony, for instance, Mahler’s turning of an
expressive thematic phrase (based on a musical ‘turn’) into a parody of
itself, by speeding it up, distorting it, and moving it to the high-pitched
E-flat clarinet, is both ironic in the manner of verbal irony and con-
veys a ‘musical irony’ which cannot be reduced to a verbal statement.
The phrase then forms part of the main musical material of the sym-
phony’s last movement. This movement is often heard as a ‘farewell to
life’, which sets up a further series of relationships of the phrase to its
previous manifestations. These constitute a musical narrative based on
the interplay of past and present moods and contexts. In inferential
terms the intelligibility of these aspects of the symphony relies on the
ironic version of the phrase not being the serious version, and on
the degrees of difference between the ironic and the serious cases of
the employment of the pattern of notes in question. Music here func-
tions meta-linguistically, the phrase offering alternative ways of constru-
ing its meaning as it occurs in different contexts. The affective content
conveyed cannot, as we saw in chapter 4 ,bereduced to its inferen-
tial constitution: if it does not have some immediate affective impact,
it cannot become part of a musical inferential context. Once the sym-
phony has been heard as a whole the pattern can then be understood as
conveying all three temporal dimensions via these thematic relations.
Something similar already applies to the later Beethoven in particular.
The last movement of the Opus 135 String Quartet plays with serious
and ironically transformed versions of a phrase headed ‘Muss es sein?’
(‘Must it be?’) in the score, but in a way which can still make sense to
a listener who does not know that the words are in the score. Wagner’s
later account of Beethoven is more able to make sense of phenomena
like this than his earlier view.
The best illustration of the change in Wagner’s conception is a pas-
sage in the 1870 commemorative essay on Beethoven, where he dis-
cusses Beethoven’s thirdLeonoraoverture:
Who will hear this thrilling piece of music without being filled with the
conviction that the music also incorporates the most completedramainto
itself? What is the dramatic action of the text of the opera ‘Leonore’ but
an almost objectionable enfeeblement of the drama experienced in the
overture, rather like a boring interpretative commentary by Gervinus on
a scene of Shakespeare?
(Wagner 1907 : 9 , 105 )