246 music, philosophy, and modernity
This possibility was implicit in the discussion above of the temporality
of musical leitmotifs, which can take music beyond immediacy to its
own specific kind of mediation.
Dahlhaus’ interpretations combine the awareness of the historical
situatedness of music that Adorno demands, with immanent demon-
strations of how Wagner transcends his contexts and opens up new
musical and dramatic possibilities. He thereby reveals limits in many
philosophical approaches to music and to language. Wagner’s ‘art of
ambiguity’ (ibid.: 153 ) makes it clear that there is no single answer to
the question of the relationship between musical and verbal meaning.
However, that is not a recipe for mere indeterminacy, as a further exam-
ple can suggest. In a discussion of the composition of the music and
text of King Mark’s lament inTristan, Dahlhaus shows how Wagner’s
reflections on words and notes are inseparable. The lament expresses
Mark’s feeling that if Tristan cannot be trusted nothing can, which
leads to sense of groundlessness. Wagner rhetorically elaborates the
first verbal text he writes by inversion and parallelism, and this leads in
the music to a rhythmic-melodic intensification based on the rhetori-
cal repetition of ‘da Tristan.. .’ (‘if Tristan.. .’). Rhetoric and music
support each other in a manner that allows Wagner to avoid traditional
schematic melodic patterning, because he ‘had recognised in rhetoric,
in the technique of parallelisms, inversions, and antitheses, an originally
musical moment. Rhetoric is musical in the music drama and the music
is rhetorical’ (Dahlhaus 1990 : 124 ). In such moments it becomes clear
that, while Wagner’s conceptual contradictions, and his political move
to the Right, may be philosophically and ethically questionable, they
are not what determines the truth of his greatest works. These function
instead according to a logic that cannot be captured in philosophical
or political terms. What, then, is Nietzsche’s contribution to evaluating
the case of ‘Wagner’?
Nietzsche and Wagner: bad faith?A recurrent tone in the later Nietzsche’s published criticisms of Wagner
is epitomised by his account of Wagner’s move away from Feuerbach,
which culminates inParsifal:
Remember how enthusiastically at that time Wagner walked in the foot-
steps of the philosopher Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s phrase ‘healthy sensu-
ousness’ sounded in the thirties and forties to Wagner, as it did for many