pro and contra wagner 239is conceived, which leads us back to the music/philosophy relation-
ship.
Adorno regards Wagner’s relationship to Schopenhauer as a key to
his music. The music echoes the ‘ahistorical’ philosophy of Schopen-
hauer, ‘in which the blind Will only individuates itself in order to swallow
up what is individuated into itself again’. This ‘unity of Wagner’s com-
positional procedure with the philosophy which has already become
thematic in him both gives it its power and on the other hand marks
the critical starting point: the untruth of that philosophy is the untruth
of his music’ (Adorno 1997 : 16 , 191 ). The untruth is the one we iden-
tified in thelast chapter, namely the philosophy’s ‘mythical’ character,
that derives from a founding ontological principle which subjects the
world to a cycle of endless repetition. The ‘adequate expression of
false consciousness’ in Wagner thus relates to the historical situation –
the capitalist world of commodification as the producer of reductive
identity – which leads to metaphysics like Schopenhauer’s. In Wag-
ner there is ‘the power of an imperialism and that feeling of catastro-
phe of a class that sees nothing before it but the endless disaster/fate
(‘Verh ̈angnis’) of expansion’ (ibid.: 14 , 131 ). This is tendentious stuff,
taking one dimension of Wagner as the meaning of the whole by making
a very unmediated connection between music, philosophy, and history.
Does the same apply, for example, to Bruckner’s symphonies, which
also no longer develop in the manner of Beethoven’s, and which con-
vey both a sense of repetition-based timelessness and an underlying
tension which is at odds with this timelessness? At such points Adorno
seems to lay claim to possession of ‘right consciousness’, even though
his method turns on the avoidance of such claims by working imma-
nently on the detail of musical problems. While it is possible to show
immanent connections between the later Wagner’s music and Schopen-
hauer’s philosophy – the music ofTristan, which delays harmonic reso-
lution over huge spans of time, does evoke Schopenhauer’s conception
of endlessly denied satisfaction – the music’s successes and failures do
not depend solely on what is revealed by these connections.
Consider now, in contrast, a comment by Adorno which offers a more
fruitful perspective on ‘right consciousness’. He makes the comment in
a passage which argues that it is mistaken to regard Wagner as inferior
to Beethoven because Wagner’s music does not convey a positive idea of
freedom: ‘The truth of the work of art is rather that its meaning (‘Sinn’)
names, and thereby perhaps transcends, the historico-philosophical
state of affairs, the contradictions of the situation, right into the depths