Wagner is an interesting figure with respect to German idealist philosophy, in that he brings two qualities to it that are wholly apposite but might not seem to be necessary. They are music and the idealised woman.

Music, philosophy and religion

It is true that the most influential German idealist philosopher, Kant, did not rank music as highly as the other arts, and that Hegel, who both continued the idealist tradition and gave it, additionally, considerable purchase in explaining how the narrative course of actual lived history was motored, wasn't obsessed by it either. But thereafter it was to come into its own. Schopenhauer turned repeatedly to music in order to suggest how, as a result of musical contemplation, we gain a deeper (or transcendental) sense of the (platonic) ideas which the material world (the external world of objects) merely represents. Furthermore, he thought music also facilitates a deeper, non-antagonistic experience of the ‘will’ (that mindless, non-rational urge; a life force that animates the world and seems to lie at the base of our instinctual drives) without compelling us to endure yet again the suffering and conflict that are otherwise to be found everywhere and which are, when all is said done, our inevitable fate. It is true that Schopenhauer privileged aesthetics in general, but it was music that, he argued, allowed us to communicate most directly with the platonic ideas and attain, however feebly, a degree of tranquillity in the face of the meaningless striving of earthly life ﹛I: 257f﹜. Thus, even putting aside the question of aesthetics, Wagner's personal penchant for suffering and his sense that the world was cruel, arbitrary and utterly unfair could not have found a better apologist. He first read Schopenhauer's major work, The World as Will and Representation, in 1854, and it and Schopenhauer remained, if the letters, essays and diaries are to be believed, the primary philosophical influence on his intellectual life thereafter.

Nietzsche pursued more or less the same agenda (at least initially), and one can see his notion of the will to power as a development of Schopenhauer's more generalised will. However, Nietzsche does not reproduce the pessimism and the overwhelming sense of hopelessness fundamental to Schopenhauer.