258 music, philosophy, and modernity
secularised transcendence be turned into a version of Schopenhauerian
metaphysics, rather than being an enrichment of the here and now that
Dewey talks about when he talks of art as ‘experience’. It is therefore not
surprising that Nietzsche’s most plausible versions of his criticisms of
metaphysics and music emerge where he refuses to adopt the dogmatic
perspective apparent in his criticisms of Wagner, and instead enacts
an evaluation through the ‘musical’ tensions and interactions between
differing parts of his texts.
This pragmatist point might appear to invalidate the idea that Wag-
ner’s work does indeed have to do with cultural crises in modernity
associated with the decline of metaphysics. There is little doubt that
the perceived intensification of the significance of music in moder-
nity does have to do with this decline. However, Nietzsche does not
always argue at the level of the best accounts of this issue that we have
explored via Romantic philosophy. His strong anti-Wagner stance leads
him instead to the idea that music is just another version of what is
offered by traditional religion and philosophy, as the ‘resonance... of
the metaphysical string’. One can, though, take the same phenomena
and interpret them differently. Part of the significance of Wagner lies in
his liberation of music from received forms and in his extension of its
expressive possibilities. The actual reception of his music has, though,
often been dominated by its appropriation by ‘official culture’, most
notoriously when Bayreuth becomes a place for the Nazis to seek cul-
tural respectability. Making such appropriation the primary criterion
for assessing his work is, however, to fall prey to one of the most mis-
taken ideas in progressive cultural politics. Concentration on the ways
in which works of art have been received in a dominant culture too
frequently becomes an excuse not to keep alive their cultural and polit-
ical potential. The history of the public reception of Wagner does not
pass an adequate verdict on his music: thinking that it does surrenders
the possible future of the work to the past. Keeping alive the potential
in Wagner is evidently not easy, but the failure to do so conspires with
what progressive cultural politics should seek to oppose, namely the
appropriation of the greatest culture by those in power.
The crucial factor here is the need to engage with the specificity
of the works’ challenge to existing culture, rather than be blinded by
their ideological accompaniments and institutionalised reception. That
is why, despite all, Adorno’s concern with art and truth is so important.
His claim that ‘The condition of all truth is the need to give a voice
to suffering’ (Adorno 1997 : 6 , 29 ) captures one of the reasons why