pro and contra wagner 255Once again what he says is not based on a consideration of the music
itself, but rather on a particular way in which the music can be evaluated
in terms of a philosophical stance adopted by its composer. But is this
adequate to the works in question?
TakingTristanas Wagner’s most obviously Schopenhauerian work,
the issue is whether what it conveys concerning the unconscious, the
bounds of the self, the inevitability of loss, etc., is conveyed even to lis-
teners who have no time for Schopenhauer’s metaphysical account of
how these things are part of existence. IfTristandoes speak to these lis-
teners, the value of the musician with regard to these aspects of human
existence lies precisely in the excess of their music’s significance over
its notional philosophical source. In other words, metaphysics 2 is not
reducible to metaphysics 1. Nietzsche is prone to let philosophy set the
agenda for musical meaning. He criticises the music for contributing
to a philosophical stance he opposes, but himself relies on the assimi-
lation of music to philosophy to make his critical point, thus ignoring
the possibility that the music might resist such assimilation.
The inconsistency becomes evident when Nietzsche amusingly crit-
icises Wagner for having ‘immensely extended the linguistic capacity of
music–: he is the Victor Hugo of music as language. Always assum-
ing that one first accepts that music may bepermittednot to be music,
but language, but a tool, butancilla dramaturgica’ (ibid.: 920 ). This
criticism points in the direction of formalism, as did the remark con-
cerning Wagner’s desire to produce ‘more than music’. However, for
the case against Wagner to have any purchase Nietzsche has himself to
rely on the idea of musicseekingto have a metaphysical content beyond
formalism, otherwise the supposed cultural effects that he is opposing
become inexplicable. If ‘everything which has ever grown on the soil of
impoverishedlife, the whole forgery of transcendence and of the beyond
has its most sublime advocate in Wagner’s art’ (ibid.: 930 ), the kind of
music which Nietzsche wishes to advocate must either be regarded in
wholly formalist terms in order to escape what vitiates Wagner’s music –
which means its cultural effectiveness can be questioned – or it becomes
indeterminate, as we saw in relation to the idea of Dionysian music. It is
no coincidence that Nietzsche’s advocacy of ‘transvalued values’ seems
to suffer a similar fate. Either the values are all too familiar, as often
just rather provocative inversions of the Christian values of sympathy,
compassion, etc., or they are empty promises for the future. These have
in the interim come to sound more than a little problematic, in con-
trast to some of the still compelling democratic values derived from the