E FECTIVIDAD VIROLÓGICA EN LA COHORTE GENERAL

Only a few even get far enough to be able to hear themselves purely.

They end up beneath themselves, plunge into sleep, dream falsely and arbitrarily along the sound, drowsily and vaguely recoloring what had been buried as well as what has not yet come.

The better kind wake up, perhaps, not simply bringing themselves along just as they are, but then they also go dry. As connoisseurs, they brace themselves on the framework and believe that through it, through

The Philosophy of Music

the means they have seen through, the forms they have comprehended, they are being musically objective. Thus these rational types are also on the wrong track, and one would almost like to set the sensual sleepers right, who, however dully and erratically, at least move spiritually within the spiritual element. For however much it is only form which shapes, discovers, helps what is dawning to emerge, the musical miracle can hardly be comprehended through form alone if the most expressive per­ sonhood does not lead upward through it. Its question lies in the expres­ sion of what can be sung.

Unfortunately what fell precisely to the sleepers reveling beneath them­ selves was something that had already been heard many times before. For after all, the falsely associative listener rediscovers himself particularly eas­ ily in Wagner's peculiarly blurring character, too. Certainly not because here, even more than in Beethoven, small, long familiar, once respectfully incorporated forms have been shattered. Instead, an expressively even more deeply grounded form took their place, showing how extraordinar­ ily much more musically Wagner was defined than he himself, who trans­ posed musical into dramatic logic, wanted to acknowledge. It more than suffices here to point to the subtleties, to the floridly weaving

me/os,

to the extraordinary handiwork of the

Meistersinger,

to the harmonic innova­ tions, adaptations, and gigantic tensions, but above all to

Tristan's

syn­ copic and polyrhythmic wealth, and more to Wagner's highly specific counterpoint, which Bruckner then exalted; anyway, there is simply no way to exclude Wagner's genius from the development of music, especially not purely technically. If-albeit with questionable justification-one could call Beethoven's symphonies operas in disguise, then one would conversely, much more certainly, have to grasp and appreciate consider­ able stretches of Wagner's musical dramas completely musically-without knowledge of the text and its purportedly sole substantiating coherence­ as legitimate intensifications and developments, as elaborations of a purely musical logic. That has to be said against a mistaken and then again tremendously growing criticism; nevertheless, and of course, Wagner in many ways gave a great boost to the languishing sleepers, insofar as he lets listeners, in spite and even beyond all his technique, falsely arrive at them­ selves. He gave the dreamers who merely revel beneath themselves the all too somnambulistic opportunity to encounter the heat, the ambit, the dream-stratum of a merely animal memory. It becomes clear precisely

thereby just how little good

work

by itself can determine or salvage here. For Wagner's peculiarly sultry, sensuous character lies beyond melody, har­ mony, and rhythm, and proves to be caused by his peculiar

theory of the

object of music.

This is finally what forced the suppression of the sound, its objective restriction to what is numb, drowning, sinking, subconsciously unconscious, animalistic; the human conscience that struck back did not so much let the sound, its inborn spiritual language have its say, but held it down, blocked, inadequate, and overcompensated the murk through textual intelligibility alone. As such the "motifs" were indeed Romanti­ cally transferred to the orchestra, but the actual release and expressivity above them were not entrusted to the music, but rather, in an exceedingly Gluckian kind of Classicism, to the visual element, the text, the drama as music's ultimate tonic-but then of course only the expressivity of "ver­ worrener Vorstellung," the

petites perceptions

of dreaming monads, the

confusa conceptio

of pained, unfree affects guided by inadequate ideas all over again. In this way, then, Wagner's music-block�d, not allowed to finish speaking, robbed of the hour of its self-discourse, of its

humanly ab­

solute poetry a se,

robbed "poetically," to be precise-pushed ever further outward into realms of unfreedom. Certainly not without often cresting, without flaring powerfully up into the spiritual, not without luminous presentiments of the other, supraconscious side, but still on the whole tending toward the animalistic and the pagan, landing in the automatism of delusion, in the frightened or ecstatic cries of the inhumanly driven creature, in the raptures of satisfied lust, or, finally, in spite of the grail, in the deserted shadowland of the dead Pan.

So we drift along here, and craving is almost all that wants to sound.

Even the renunciation offered here operates with a worldly luster. Its heaven seldom lies very high above the strand where Tannhauser dreams in the arms of passionate love.

As we know, Wagner only occupied himself with Schopenhauer late, long after the bagpipes had begun to lure him. But however completely the composer of the underground developed out of himself, his art seems nevertheless like an immense test of the

Schopenhauerian

philosophy of music. In reality, the prototype for almost all of Wagner's objective cor­ relation can be found in Schopenhauer; but the latter neither teaches nor expresses anything about Beethoven's or Bach's objective correlations or even about the unimaginably expressive future of arrived music-even in

The Philosophy of Music

the world as Representation, it is the world as Will which quintessentially remains the object of music.

For here we really remain below, and this way of no longer being, but only seeing, finds only craving, and hardly anything to satisfY it. Indeed our eyes close readily, but the interior that consequently appears in Schopenhauer resounds only impulsively, frenziedly, full of fears or fleet­ ing pleasures; nothing more can be found here. The arts adapted to the light and to the principle of sufficient reason here mirror the same sub­ stance from the outside, but in the shadow of its correlations; their mod­ els are at best the forms of the objectivations of Will, these strange inter­ mediate constructs between multiplicity and unity, between illusion and reality. Nevertheless, precisely, the way that Schopenhauer's Will is im­ mediately proclaimed in the cry, and the way that time's reflexive phe­ nomenal form only still envelops, like a flowing veil, nature's kernel living

in the human heart: according to Schopenhauer, this is how

music

speaks,

no longer of phenomena and their endless interrelations, and no longer of their objectivations or Platonic Ideas, but rather of the all-one essence it­

self, of nothing but weal and woe, of universal Will and nothing else, as '

the absolutely most serious, most real thing.

Here one desires to rise no higher, then; one enjoys the music and is at the goal; the sound expresses life completely. Although it may not actu­ ally paint and imitate appearance, the Will's gradations certainly project into music: such that here the entire world is mirrored from its deepest registers up to the human voice above, all the way to the leading melody, which most putely and at the same time most mindfully expresses the mutably restless essence of Will. But Schopenhauer ultimately places no decisive emphasis on the particular correspondence between music and the mundane gradation of Ideas; what remains important is rather just this: Everythingthat happens relates to music as just an arbitrary exam­ ple; to any clothing of flesh and bone, to any operatic or mundane sce­ nario, music has always just a mediate relationship; music expresses the essence of Will

in abstracto,

so to speak, without any accessories, and therefore without motives; music is the extracted quintessence of the feel­ ings� the passions; in short, music is the melody to which the world

as a

whole

is ultimately the text, so that one can as well call the world "em­ bodied music" as "embodied Will."39 Indeed, Schopenhauer ultimately isolates music so completely from every and any parallelism to the objec­ tivations of Will that he even asserts: All the other arts objectivate the -

Will only mediately, in shadow form, from the outside, by means of the Ideas, and since our world is nothing but the manifestation of the Ideas within plurality, then music, since it ignores the Ideas, is entirely inde­ pendent also of the phenomenal world, ignores it altogether, could to a certain extent exist if there were no world at all; in short, music does not phenomenally posit the manifestation of its Platonic Idea, like the other arts, nor the cognition endlessly shunted from the one to the other as in the sciences, but rather it posits everywhere and at the same the One, the All-Pertinent, the timelessly, spacelessly Identical, precisely the Will itself as the thing-in-itself-on which, precisely, is supposed to rest music's in­ expressible intimacy, its power to offer a somnambulistic revelation of the

world's inmost essence.

Although the stratification of the world that pro­ jects into music is therefore ultimately not essential to it, music is never­ theless still built unshakably into the inmost essence of the world, and only of the world: so cyclical, in other words, is the reassurance that mu­ sic here grants us. The highest aesthetic elevation abdve the world only plunges man further back into the center of this world where music is supposed to eternally work its subhuman spell. The shaft of the soul, of reversal, of presentiment, is here completely sealed, and one cannot see what might force it open again. Nothing is darker here than precisely "the ineffable intimacy of music," nothing remains more incomprehensible than "the language of music, .so rich in content and meaning, the like of which would be unbearable composed in a language of words," and which Schopenhauer nevertheless is supposed to have completely deci­ phered. Vainly Schopenhauer affirms-vainly according to precisely the deepest conclusions of his philosophy-that every music is at its destina­ tion, since its object really remains always just the Will. Equally futile re­ mains the claim that music could exist to a certain extent even if the world did not, for the world could really only exist insofar as music here lets the world reappear with heightened significance, as in other words music represents an objectivation of the total Will just as immediate as the world itself, so that consequently-far from being a panacea for all our suffering-it more confirms and affirms than averts the universal Will whose cries it lets ring. Nowhere does Schopenhauer's philosophy in itself lead into the shaft of the soul, into an oceanic tranquillity of tem­ perament, into the void where he teaches that the universe is to be found, and which he nonetheless makes completely transcendent, although the mysticism of an "absolutely Christian philosophy" should really just be-

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