pro and contra wagner 235it, one side of Adorno’s position becomes questionable. Quite simply,
language often does function ‘allegorically’ in his sense: one can get
a word to mean anything if one puts it in the right context. However,
this does not mean that everything is simply arbitrary. It just means that
an account of verbal meaning has to take account of context and of
the inherent underdetermination of the meaning of utterances in any
interpretation that is occasioned by their indefinite number of possible
relationships to their contexts. This now widely accepted hermeneu-
tic assumption necessarily affects Adorno’s evaluation of Wagner and
allegory.
Consider his own example of Hans Sachs. The widower ‘becomes
Mark’ inDie Meistersingerwhen music fromTristan,inwhich King
Mark laments Tristan’s betrayal of him over Isolde, is echoed when he
renounces his hopes for happiness with Eva, realising that she belongs
with the younger Walther. The effect of this moment depends on the
differing contexts: feelings relating to troubles of the heart of an older
man can have a different impact (and so, in some senses, be different
feelings) when the music that evokes them is echoed in very different
contexts. What can, because it results from a necessity which transcends
the moral aims of the characters, be tragic inTristanis, although still
melancholic, partially redeemed inMeistersinger. There is no ‘unam-
biguous’ way of interpreting these moments, and the interpretation
will also be changed by familiarity with the relationship between the
two works. It is precisely this intertextual, musical ambiguity, which can-
not be equated with indeterminacy, that makes Sachs’ renunciation so
touching, and gives it a utopian ethical quality in relation to the tragic
despair of Mark inTristan.
The specifically philosophical focus of Adorno’s remarks tends to
lead him to the idea of music as just the ‘intentionless’ Other of verbal
language, which is seen as related to the cultural consequences of the
commodity form. However, he wants it both ways. On the one hand,
leitmotifs are too language-like and ‘intentional’; on the other, their
meaning is merely arbitrary because of their allegorical quality. Verbal
articulation would presumably be necessary for their meaning to be
unambiguous, but that comes into conflict with the idea of music as
an intentionless language of sounds which contrasts with the language
of signs. Adorno could therefore be seen as prey to precisely what is at
issue in intentionless music’s manner of signifying: he seeks to identify
in language something whose real value lies in its resistance to being
definitively identified. Wagner’s musical technique cannot be reduced