pro and contra wagner 227Schleiermacher remarked that it might seem that adding music to a text
would ‘express the thought even more strongly’ (Schleiermacher 1842 :
380 ), but that this is not so, because ‘if the thought is expressed in words
then one could underlay the same musical sentence/movement (‘Satz’)
with completely different verbal sentences; indeed each could have as
much justification as the others’ (ibid.). Wagner similarly insists that ‘a
piece of music loses nothing of its character even if it is underlain by very
different texts’ (Wagner 1907 : 9 , 103 ). The relationship between text
and music is now such that ‘A unification of music and poetry must...
always result in...adiminution of the importance of the latter’ (ibid.).
The introduction to the Beethoven essay offers a version of Schopen-
hauer’s account of music, in which ‘we understand without any media-
tion by concepts what the shout for help, the cry of complaint, or the
shout of joy says’ because it results from the ‘affect of the Will’ (ibid.:
71 )ofthe utterer, and this influences our Will-based ‘immediate con-
sciousness of our self’ (ibid.: 70 ). The musician ‘does not express his
view of the world, but the world itself, in which pain and joy, well-being
and suffering interchange’ (ibid.: 100 ). The emergence of the voice
in the Ninth Symphony is now significant, not for ‘the meaning of the
word’, but for ‘the character of this human voice itself’ (ibid.: 101 ). The
thoughts of the poem are not our prior concern, but rather ‘the famil-
iar sound of choral song’ (ibid.). When we hear a musical version of
the mass, like Beethoven’sMissa Solemnis,wedonot concentrate on the
words, which are just ‘familiar symbolic formulations of belief’ (ibid.:
103 ), but on what is conveyed by the music in question. In his earlier
conception the drama had been the totality within which the music
and the text were comprised. Drama is now, in the manner of Socrates’
‘mousik ́e’ (on this see Goehr 1998 ), comprised within music as ‘a com-
prehensive idea of the world’ (Wagner 1907 : 9 , 105 ), so that ‘drama
which presents the idea can in truth only be completely clear via those
motifs of music which move, form, and change’ (ibid.: 106 ). It is there-
fore hardly surprising when Wagner says inOn the Name Music-Drama
of 1872 that ‘I would have liked to call my dramasacts of music which
have become visible’ (ibid.: 306 ), and sees his works as involving similar
principles to symphonic compositions in their ‘web of basic themes’
(ibid.: 10 , 185 ).
The crude version of what Wagner is saying is that music, as it does for
Schopenhauer, embodies a version of metaphysics 1 :itconveys, without
concepts, the essential truth about the riven nature of existence. The
consequence might then seem to be to regard the works in relation to