232 music, philosophy, and modernity
variation”, is the completely anti-mythological principle’ (ibid.). This
debatable idea will be the basis of Adorno’s positive evaluation of ‘new
music’, which abandons reliance on many already existing forms and
procedures, and so is forced to develop an autonomous musical logic
which can avoid the – ‘mythical’ – repetition characteristic of the culture
industry (see chapter 9 ).
The kind of ‘consolation’ music provided in opera – Adorno cites
the link of the earliest operas to Orpheus, who is able to open the gates
of Hades with his music and the theme of hope inFideliothat informs
the very nature of the music – is missing when Wagnerian music and
language echo each other: ‘Music says once again what the words say
anyway...butthat affects the integrity of the music itself’ (ibid.: 98 ).
This criticism is underpinned by Adorno’s view of how the history of
European music’s increasingly close relationship to language, ‘to which
music owes so much of its liberation’, also involves a ‘negative moment’,
when music ‘merely imitates the curve of the linguistic intention’ (ibid.:
98 ). These ideas relating to Wagner will be crucial to Adorno’s thinking
about modern music as a whole: ‘By functioning in an explicatory man-
ner music has all the forces sucked out of it via which it, as a language dis-
tant from meaning, as pure sound, contrasts with the human language
of signs and only becomes completely human by this contrast’ (ibid.:
99 ). The point is specified in relation to Wagner as follows: ‘Wagner’s
music takes up as a whole a changed relationship to language. It does
not respond to it, it does not, like Schubert, wander into the wood and
cave of the word. Rather [music] makes language, as the interpreter of
its little allegorical images, of the leitmotifs, penetrate through its grid
in an alien, thing-like manner’ (ibid.: 56 ). Why, though, should lan-
guage be regarded as ‘alien’ and ‘thing-like’ in relation to music when
it is linked to the leitmotif? The answer for Adorno is that language
in modernity is affected by the processes with which he claims Wagner
comes to merely mythical terms.
Adorno adopts certain of his ideas about language from Walter
Benjamin (see Bowie 1997 : chs. 8 and 9 ). The connection to Wagner
can be explained quite simply: leitmotifs function as allegories, and
these are an index of a decisive fact about language in modernity. Ben-
jamin’s discussion of the changes in the nature of language that take
place in early modernity, inThe Origins of the German Play of Mourning
( 1928 ), contains the following, concerning the proliferation of alle-
gory in the baroque period in Germany and in the Shakespearean
era in Britain: ‘Every person, every thing, every relationship can