pro and contra wagner 257therefore take one beyond the need simply to accept or reject Niet-
zsche’s polemical conclusion. The contrast here between Nietzsche’s
philosophically based and his aesthetic judgements leads to an issue
which will loom large in the coming chapters.
Wehave already touched on the idea that music could be understood
as being ‘critical’ of reality, an idea which is largely inconceivable prior
to modernity. For Nietzsche this can mean a variety of things. On the
one hand, Wagner’s music can be seen as critical because it feigns tran-
scendence, rendering one dissatisfied with one’s existence. However,
it does so on the basis of an alternative which is mere illusion: instead
of opening one’s eyes to the new possibilities of a post-metaphysical
perspective, it takes one back into a past that needs to be overcome.
On the other hand, a non-Wagnerian, Dionysian music is supposed
to take one forward into a future disabused of the illusions of meta-
physics, so criticising ways of thinking and acting which are still imbued
with the contrast between this world and the ‘true world’. Concretely
this would mean that such music reinforces the anti-teleological, anti-
redemptive view of existence that Nietzsche opposes to the Platonic
and Christian metaphysics he associates with Wagner. Neither of these
views of music as critical of reality is wholly convincing, even in Niet-
zsche’s own terms, as the passages on Wagner as miniaturist already
suggest.
The reason for this is a straightforward aesthetic one. InOn the
Genealogy of MoralityNietzsche opposes Schopenhauer’s idea of the
‘Will-calming’ effect of beauty with Stendhal’s idea that ‘“the beautiful
promiseshappiness”’, so that ‘for him thestimulation of the will(“of inter-
est”) by beauty seems to be the issue’ (ibid.: 847 ). Indeed, he contends,
even Schopenhauer’s view fails to live up to the Kantian idea of beauty
as devoid of ‘interest’, because beauty helps to take him away from the
‘torture’ of the world of representation. Wagner can, though, be seen
as achieving pretty much what is implied by Nietzsche’s interpretation
of Stendhal’s claims about beauty. An example of this would be the dis-
turbing music in Act Three ofTristan(which Adorno terms ‘the wound
as expressive content’ (Adorno 1997 : 13 , 173 )). The ‘stimulation’ of
this music must convey some sort of promise that is, given the unsettling
nature of the music, not merely ‘Will-calming’. The intensification can
therefore be seen as being ‘critical’ of ways of being which do not offer
more than a mundane acceptance of the given. This kind of ‘criticism’
is part of what I mean by metaphysics 2. Only if such music is regarded
predominantly in terms of a certain conception of philosophy can such