228 music, philosophy, and modernity
which he adopts Schopenhauerian ideas, i.e.Tristan,Meistersinger, the
Ring, andParsifal,asexpressions of those philosophical ideas. But what
are we to make of his change of conception? The easy answer is that
he was a philosophical amateur whose real concern was ‘drama’, which
philosophy could be used to enhance. This is, as far as it goes, true.
However, it does not explain why ‘drama’ should be so important in
the first place. There are, though, more interesting ways of regarding
the question, which suggest why Wagnerian ‘drama’ might matter so
much at this time, and since.
Wagner’s texts just cited are contemporaneous with Nietzsche’s first
writings on Wagner, which claim that ‘the fate of culture as a whole
depends on that of Wagnerian music’ (Dahlhaus 1988 : 477 ), as ‘a work
through which music takes control of its metaphysical truth’ (ibid.:
476 ). This elevation of the significance of music even outstrips any-
thing we have encountered in Romantic thought. It establishes a tra-
dition to which Adorno also belongs, for which music can embody
criticisms of the cultural effects of modern philosophy and science.
Wagner’s initial theoretical conception stressed a word-based determi-
nacy of music, in the name of an art which would enable cultural and
political transformation of social existence by integrating the affective,
cognitive and other dimensions of human existence. His later concep-
tion is informed, in contrast, by a pessimism concerning the possibilities
of social and other transformation, and, like Schopenhauer, attributes
metaphysical dignity to music because it gives access to a way of contem-
plating an otherwise irredeemable existence. The question is whether
this philosophical position, as it did in Schopenhauer, diminishes what
the music achieves, thus whether metaphysics 1 obscures the possibili-
ties for metaphysics 2 .Iamnot concerned here with whether Wagner’s
earlier theoretical position is more, or less, convincing than his later
one. Instead my interest is in the ways that inconsistencies between the
philosophical claims and the musical works themselves offer a more
productive way of understanding the importance of Wagner. Which
brings us once more to Adorno.
Wagner and AdornoAdorno’s main work on Wagner, the polemicalEssay on Wagner, written
in 1937 – 8 ,isnot his definitive ‘philosophical interpretation’ of Wagner.
He explains on the occasion of its publication in Germany in 1952 that
‘The “Essay on Wagner” belongs to the works produced by the Institute