pro and contra wagner 245traumatic tangle of intrigue and deceit. This verbal judgement does not
mean that the last part of the work simply ‘says’ what the judgement
says, because the workenactsit via contexts detailed above, and by the
emotional effects produced by the connection of those contexts in the
music. To this extent the effect relies on the symphonic element of
the music: something similar applies in Bruckner’s – Wagner-influenced
- symphonies, which continually recontextualise musical motifs and
other material, bringing them together in a conclusion whose power
also derives from the accumulation of contexts.
TheRing’s concluding music might therefore be said to constitute a
refutation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music. Rather than point-
ing, as the action might seem to, to the need to renounce hope of sat-
isfaction in the world of representation, it connects us to ever-present
possibilities of affective renewal, not least by the pleasure it can convey
asthismusic atthispoint in this complex musical context. Music here
plays the role I have been referring to in terms of metaphysics 2.
Dahlhaus makes a further important point with regard to Schopen-
hauer in his discussion of the contradictory figure of Kundry inParsifal,
who is both seductress and penitent, and who poses the problem of how
music can present these opposed roles: ‘Music is, according to Schopen-
hauer, who thereby expressed thecommunis opinioof centuries, an art of
the representation of unbroken, unmixed feelings’ (ibid.: 151 ). Wag-
ner is obsessed by the idea of a clarity in which text and music elucidate
each other, but with the composition of the scenes with Kundry in his
last major work:
he realised that the technique of leitmotif is a means of opening up for
music a realm which otherwise remains closed to it. Leitmotifs are, as
soon as they are clearly enough expounded, musical metaphors, which,
by making transitions into each other, being linked together or referring
to each other, make possible the expression of dividedness or ambiguity
which is otherwise closed to music.
(ibid.)He cites the example of the motif of Kundry’s longing, which is the musi-
cal inversion of the motif of the suffering of Christ and Amfortas, and
so is ‘the expression of a desire for redemption which entangles itself in
its opposite’ (ibid.: 152 ). Verbal statements of conflicting desires have
to be articulated at separate times to be intelligible at all, but they can
be simultaneous in music. Musical articulation makes possible an affec-
tive significance which conflicting linguistic expressions cannot convey.