pro and contra wagner 241so much more than the manifest content of the plot and characters
would seem to allow. He succeeds in addressing fundamental questions
in modernity, such as the relationship between desire and power, the
fragility of the self in the face of collective historical forces, and the
dangers and possibilities of secularised freedom. Much of his impact
lies in the astonishing transitions of mood and atmosphere in his works.
If one attends primarily to the text the works often seem to be mainly
concerned with ‘mythical’ issues, such, inTristan,asthe motivation of
the action through the love potion that binds Tristan and Isolde. Once
the music is taken into account, as Dahlhaus ( 1971 : 55 ) and others
point out, the mythical element often recedes. The music reveals that
Tristan and Isolde already love each other, so that the potion, which
they think is a death potion, becomes the occasion for acknowledging
what is already the case but too dangerous to say. The difficulty in how
to respond to Wagner’s works is epitomised by Adorno’s summary of the
Ring,asbeing about how ‘man emancipates himself from the blind con-
text of nature [i.e. the realm of myth] from which he himself emerged,
only in the last analysis to fall prey to it anyway’ (Adorno 1997 : 13 , 129 ).
There is some truth in this summary, butexactlythe same description
could be used to summarise the main contentions of Horkheimer and
Adorno’s 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Romantic thought regards works of art as being a mirror to their
recipients. The danger of a mirror is that it is an invitation to narcissism,
but it can also be a source of self-knowledge. Daniel Barenboim says of
music:
For me there is only one clear definition of music, by Ferruccio Busoni,
who said: ‘Music is sonorous air’. Everything else that is said about music
refers to the different reactions that music evokes in people: it is felt to
be poetic, or sensual, or spiritual, or emotional, or formally fascinating –
the possibilities are countless. Since music is everything and nothing at
the same time, it therefore can be easily abused, as it was by the Nazis.
(Barenboim 2001 )In the Introduction we encountered the circle in which the non- or
extra-musical assumptions that precede a philosophical position’s appli-
cation to music can just end up confirming those assumptions via
the music, and so not allow for what the music conveys that is not
countenanced by a particular position. The Wagner literature is full
of Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, Marxist, Schopenhauerian, and Niet-
zsche’s – conflicting – earlier and later interpretations, which offer