MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

256 music, philosophy, and modernity

Christian tradition and the Enlightenment that Nietzsche is concerned

to attack.

The problems here are underlined by Nietzsche’s repeated judge-

ment that the German music represented by Wagner is merely a passing

historical phenomenon which will become obsolete because it emerged

in a particular – decadent – cultural climate. The fact that he is simply

wrong about this must have some impact on his later interpretation

of Wagner as both a sign and a cause of cultural decline.^10 Further-

more, this impact can extend to the extreme aspects of his critique of

Christian morality. In seeking to undermine the idea that there can

be a metaphysical foundation for art or morality he loses sight of their

significance in everyday life, which depends, not on their explicit philo-

sophical foundations, but rather on their ineliminable normative role

in social practices. Wagner might indeed constitute a danger in certain

cultural contexts – after Nazism one has to be very careful about this –

but this does not mean that he is mainly a sign of something to be

rejected because of his entanglement with ‘metaphysics’. The point is,

of course, that Nietzsche does also continue to recognise that Wagner

cannot be evaluated solely in terms of the idea that the rejection of

metaphysics must involve a major cultural upheaval. What significance

does this aspect of Nietzsche’s responses to Wagner have for philoso-

phy, particularly when it is contrasted with the responses we have just

examined?

Consider the following passage on Wagner: ‘Nobody is his equal in

the colours of late autumn, the indescribably moving happiness of one

last, very last, very, very brief enjoyment, he knows the sound for those

secret-uncanny midnights of the soul, where cause and effect seem to

have fallen apart and at any moment something can arise “from out of

nothing”’ (ibid.: 1043 ). Later the passage continues: ‘and many things

were first added to art by him that until now were inexpressible and

even seemed unworthy of art, and were in fact only chased away, not

grasped by words – many very small and microscopic aspects of the

soul: indeed he is the master of the very small. But he doesn’twant

to be that!’ (ibid.). Whatever one thinks of Nietzsche’s ensuing judge-

ment on Wagner’s failure to recognise that his real talent does not lie

in presenting the big picture, such passages do address the specificity

of Wagner’s art and can illuminate one’s responses to the works. They

10 Adorno’s valorisation of the Second Vienna School is equally mistaken, for similar rea-
sons, as we shall see in chapter 9.