pro and contra wagner 231that the music ‘renounces that deepest critique which inhabited it since
the invention of the operatic form and throughout the whole epoch
of bourgeois ascent: the critique of myth. As identification with myth
[music] is in the last analysis false identification’ (ibid.: 119 ). The con-
tradiction with the later text echoes the contradictions that we have
observed in Wagner’s theoretical writings. Once again the strictly log-
ical response would be that Adorno says nothing determinate about
myth and music in Wagner, because he asserts p and not-p. However, if
we see the appropriate way to respond to music as engaging with it in
shifting normative contexts, Adorno’s self-contradictions become more
informative.
Adorno’s earlier assessment is based on his analysis of Wagner’s musi-
cal technique in terms of the contrast between ‘developing variation’
and ‘leitmotif’. Adorno inflates this contrast into an ideological image
of the nineteenth century that echoes the move from Feuerbach to
Schopenhauer: ‘The abandonment by the one who uses leitmotif of
real thematic-motivic work, the triumph of the compulsion to repe-
tition over the productive imagination of developing variation, says
something about the resignation of a collective consciousness which
sees nothing more ahead of itself’ (Adorno 1997 : 14 , 245 ). In devel-
oping variation, which Adorno associates particularly with Beethoven,
musical material becomes significant by being incorporated into the
dynamic totality of the symphonic or sonata movement: think of the
development and variation of the opening material of the Fifth Sym-
phony. The individual musical element is not something self-contained
that is merely repeated, but is instead transformed by its contexts and
by the changes it undergoes. We saw how this conception related to
Hegel’s view of philosophy and dialectic in the preceding chapters.
Leitmotif, in contrast, repeats musical motifs as a means of signalling a
fixedcontent, be it a character or a theme of the drama, from Siegfried’s
horn-call, to the motif of the twilight of the gods. These are like gestures:
‘Gestures can be repeated and intensified, but cannot really “develop”’
(Adorno 1997 : 13 , 34 ). Wagner’s music consequently comes closer to
verbal language, because the motif functions as a signifier, and so loses
its freedom to express something new: ‘music and word mean the same
thing’ (ibid.: 119 ).
The underlying claim is that when artistic means develop according
to their own internal demands and avoid schematic repetition they
generate the greatest insights and are aesthetically most successful: ‘in
general symphonic form, the principle Schoenberg termed “developing