pro and contra wagner 251In another passage Nietzsche gets close to something interesting, but
then just slips into a metaphysical determination of music of the kind
that is doomed to failure. Wagner ‘has given a language to everything in
nature which did not until now wish to speak: he does not believe that
there has to be anything that is speechless. He also plunges into dawn,
wood, fog, ravine, mountain heights, nocturnal shudders, moonlight,
and sees in them a secret desire: they too wish to sound’ (ibid.: 418 ).
Where the (Schopenhauerian) philosopher sees the Will in a theoreti-
cal manner in all aspects of nature, the musician sees that the Will wants
‘a sounding existence’ (ibid.) that speaks to feelings. The idea here of
the extension of modern music’s ‘linguistic’ capacity into the disclosure
of what was previously the domain of nature poetry and Romantic paint-
ing is an illuminating one, suggesting one root of modern music’s new
cultural power. However, the more general metaphysical point about
the Will actually takes away from this idea.
Nietzsche goes on to claim that ‘Wagner’s music as a whole is an
image of the world as it was understood by the great Ephesian philoso-
phers, as a harmony which creates conflict out of itself, as the unity of
justice and enmity’ (ibid.: 420 ). Like Adorno’s characterisation of the
Ring, quoted above, which could equally be applied toDialectic of Enlight-
enment, this just summarises Nietzsche’s own philosophical concerns
at the time. Wagner was admittedly for a time interested in Hegelian
thinking, which also ‘creates conflict out of itself’ and relies on unity
in contradiction, and versions of this idea can, as the link between
Beethoven and Hegel revealed, be used to shed light on the under-
standing of music in the nineteenth century. However, Nietzsche at
this stage offers versions of the entanglement of philosophy and music
in which, as in Schopenhauer, philosophy tends to be given priority.
Even though music is thought of as evoking in affective terms what
philosophy says in concepts, so countering the perceived rigidity of
convention-based language, the direction of the position is towards a
version of metaphysics 1. Things become more complex in the later
work because Nietzsche’s own anti-representationalist stance demands
that he should no longer have recourse to a metaphysical position that
seeks to provide a legitimation for his views of the significance of music.
A key issue here is how the contrast between formalist and
non-formalist approaches to music affects the understanding of
the language/music relationship. Formalism can serve as a counter
to metaphysical determinations of music by denying that music
has extra-musical content, but that denial is itself based on