The German Genius

noumenon.” It is a metaphysical voice: “The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom, in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand.” It takes us away from the struggle for life. 23
    T HE S TARTING P OINT OF M ODERN M USIC
     
    The seriousness with which Wagner treated Schopenhauer and Kant helps inform us about his music. Disillusioned about politics—about the political process rather than any particular set of political views—Wagner was drawn to Schopenhauer’s argument that art could be a refuge from the world, as the only way to encounter, however briefly or unsatisfactorily, the noumenal world. He was intent on creating—or uncovering—something that existed outside space and time, and the redemption of mankind, bringing it back into the fold, removing alienation, was for him the culmination of experience. 24
    Wagner was at work on the music for The Valkyrie when he encountered Schopenhauer; he had completed the libretti but not the music for Siegfried and Götterdämmerung . It follows that only Tristan and Isolde , The Mastersingers , and Parsifal were created after he had imbibed the philosopher. 25 In these three above all, we see how Schopenhauer influenced the musician. Wagner himself said that Parsifal was his “crowning achievement,” after which he intended to cease writing opera and turn to symphonies, but in fact Wagner’s sound-world began to change with Siegfried . Composed two years after he first encountered Schopenhauer, the music of Siegfried is already very different from what went before, The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie . The main difference, as again Bryan Magee has noted, is the relationship of the orchestra to the characters. In the earlier operas the music rises and falls—always accompanies —the words; in Siegfried , for the first time, the spectator cannot always hear the words, the sheer weight of orchestral sound, the massive wall of music, compels attention.
    Schopenhauer’s belief that music held a special place in the arts led him to make a number of specific comments about music, about acoustics as the ground for metaphysics, and to include a technical device in harmonics known as “suspension.” 26 This reference seems to have found immediate resonance with Wagner, so much so that he decided to compose a whole opera based on the way suspension operates. * The idea was that “the music would move all the way through from discord to discord in such a manner that the ear was on tenterhooks throughout for a resolution that did not come.” This was, in effect, pure musical Schopenhauer in that “the unassuaged longing, craving, yearning, that is our life, that is indeed us,” would only be resolved in the final chord, which, in dramatic terms, would also be the end of the protagonist’s life. In Bayreuth he even lowered the orchestra pit to help this effect. 27
    This is what makes Tristan a revolutionary composition. Consisting of almost nothing but discords, it sounds different from most of what has gone before and has, since its first night, been regarded as the starting point of “modern music,” breaking all the rules. Tonality was the supreme aim—and achievement—of traditional music, and as a consequence it was composed in keys. Tristan was so different that the opera was not performed for five years after the score was published (for one thing, the bizarre succession of notes was impossible for the singers to sing or even remember). 28
    Exhilarating as this was, Wagner now argued plainly what was beginning to be obvious in his operas, that there is no equality between music and words. In opera, the experience is primarily a musical one, music is “the invisible world of feeling…As we construct the phenomenal world by application of the laws of time and space which exist a priori in our brain, so this conscious presentation of the Idea of the world in the drama would be conditioned by the inner laws of music, which assert themselves in the dramatist unconsciously, much as we draw on the laws of causality in our perceptions of the phenomenal world.” 29 Music, as Bryan Magee has observed, is thus elevated here to a level of philosophical importance it never had before or since. 30
    N IETZSCHE CONTRA W AGNER
     
    Just as Wagner looked up to Schopenhauer, so Friedrich Nietzsche looked up to Wagner. Nietzsche was twenty-four and still a student when the two men met in November 1868.