230 music, philosophy, and modernity
unperturbed, realist and classicist art its decisive truth in that mythical
moment: that in it violence breaks through as the same law as it was in
prehistory. In this thoroughly modern work prehistory is still modernity
itself. That smashes the fa ̧cade of the bourgeois surface, and through the
cracks so much shines through of what only today developed fully and
became recognisable that this alone would suffice as proof of Wagner’s
actuality. No doubt his impulse (‘Gestus’), what his music advocates – and
Wagner’s music, not just the texts, advocates incessantly – is an impulse on
behalf of mythology. He becomes, one might say, an advocate of violence,
in the way that the main work glorifies the man of violence, Siegfried. But
as the violence in his work, in its terrible and entangled nature, becomes
apparent in a pure manner, without anything to hide it, it is yet, despite
its mythologising tendency, whether one likes it or not, an indictment of
myth.
(Adorno 1997 : 16 , 549 – 50 )The work is an indictment of myth because it conveys a truth which
transcends the mythical aspect of the work. This truth has to do with
the nature of the music because the texts alone cannot be said to ‘indict’
myth. It is the combination of advanced musical techniques with a less
sophisticated verbal narrative that relies on myth which reveals the bru-
tal reality of modernity. The degree of technological sophistication
employed in the modern era in the name of crude nationalist nar-
ratives makes Adorno’s point clear. The disparity between the accom-
plishment of music and libretto also has to do with the idea that Wagner
arguably succeeds in creating nineteenth-century tragedies in a way that
authors who do not employ music do not. The universal dimension
and the sense of tragic necessity generally lacking in most nineteenth-
century authors can be seen as being transferred into the music, whose
interaction with the text conveys what text alone cannot. Whatever one
thinks in moral or ideological terms of the passions and human relation-
ships inTristan, the sense of tragic necessity conveyed by the music is
undeniable.
In theEssay on WagnerAdorno had claimed that Wagner’s music fails
to indict myth, because myth penetrates into the very substance of the
work’s characters: ‘the “directive” function of the music of the tetral-
ogy is not just a principle of style, but is necessary for the sake of the
dramatic figures themselves. As representatives of the idea [i.e. rather
than as individualised characters], they are too empty really to have
“expression” at their disposal’ (Adorno 199713 : 119 ). Wagner ‘tech-
nologically administers’ the characters of his dramas, and this means