pro and contra wagner 243The point of his appearance here, however, is to show how the con-
tradictions arising from the entanglement of philosophy and music in
Wagner can be responded to without subjecting the work to a schematic
interpretation of the kind present at times in Adorno.
InRichard Wagner’s Music DramasDahlhaus offers a masterful few
pages onTwilight of the Gods, whose investigation of the text/music rela-
tionship has paradigmatic significance. He agrees with Adorno that the
persons in the play cannot be seen as developed characters, but are
rather ‘scenes/bearers of affects’ (Dahlhaus 1971 : 133 ). However, he
does not attach the critical historico-philosophical weight Adorno does
to this, regarding it instead in terms of how events and passions can
take over people, rendering their individuality secondary.Twilight of the
Godsis important because of the gap in time between the writing of the
main part of the libretto ofSiegfried’s Death(which would later become
Twilight of the Gods)in 1848 , when Wagner was a Feuerbachian, and the
composition of the music, completed in 1874 , when he has become a
Schopenhauerian. This change becomes vital in the conclusion of the
work, and we will see here how Adorno’s ‘fractures and contradictions’
do contribute to the truth of the work.
Dahlhaus gives an example of the limits of a purely discursive philo-
sophical approach when he shows how, inTwilight of the Gods,‘Wagner
was by no means certain what his own work meant, and one is better
off trusting the dramatist Wagner than the philosopher who was an
ideologue of himself’ (ibid.: 137 ). At the end of the drama the gold,
whose removal from nature to society set in train the destructive events
of theRing,inwhich Siegfried, the supposed inaugurator of a new
era, falls prey to the machinations of the old world, is returned to the
Rhine Maidens, thus annulling the curse placed on it. What does this
mean in relation to the world of nineteenth-century capitalism, whose
anti-human effects were the occasion of Wagner’s writing the original
libretto? The Gods, whose end in the early version was part of a Feuer-
bachian vision of a new order based on human love and the overthrow
of feudal power, are indeed finished as Valhalla crumbles. However, this
is now also part of Wotan’s ‘will who has made his own the doom he
could not elude’ (ibid.), which points in the direction of Schopenhaue-
rian resignation in the face of the brutality of modern politics. Does this
mean, Dahlhaus asks, that the demise of the old world is the birthplace
of a new and better one, given that the Rhine Maidens only belong to a
pre-social realm of nature? He cites differing texts which Wagner wrote
for the conclusion, and shows that ‘Wagner replaced in 1856 the lines