1 Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen, ed. and with an introduction by Morris Weitz (Indianapolis and New York, 1957), 6.Google Scholar

2 Thus Ernest Newman: ‘There is no need, no reason, to discuss the “philosophy” of such a mind. He is no philosopher: he is simply a perplexed and tortured human soul and a magnificent musical instrument’ (Wagner as Man and Artist, London and Toronto, 1914, 324-5). Thomas S. Grey dismisses Wagner's account of his own harmonic principles on the grounds of its ‘primitive technical vocabulary’ (Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts, Cambridge, 1995, 183-4).Google Scholar

3 Thus, for example, Carolyn Abbate recognizes that Hanslick's ‘absolutist conception of music as “sounding architecture” shapes most twentieth-century education in music appreciation’ (Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century, Princeton, 1995, 17). For an example of such influence see note 30 below. And in her recent study of music criticism in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Sandra McColl remarks upon the critic's seemingly disproportionate influence on twentieth-century music criticism and even theory, noting that in posterity's judgment Hanslick has dominated consideration of musical journalism to the exclusion of his colleagues (Music Criticism in Vienna, 1896-1897: Critically Moving Forms, Oxford, 1996, 2).Google Scholar

4 Hanslick, , The Beautiful in Music, 62.Google Scholar

5 For example: ‘an inward melody … and not mere feeling, prompts the true musician to compose’ (ibid., 73). Hanslick pre-empts audience response as irrelevant to ‘effects of music': ‘However strictly an aesthetic analysis ought to be confined to the work of art itself, we should always remember that the latter constitutes the link between two living factors - the whence and the whither, in other words, between the composer and the listener, in whose minds the workings of the imagination are never so pure and unalloyed as the finished work itself represents them. Their imagination, on the contrary, is most intimately associated with feelings and sensations'. (ibid., 71). Such emotion-finessing strategies are found not only among Romanticism-deconstructing musical but also literary critics; thus Paul de Man can argue that the ‘total duration of the fiction can only be understood and interpreted from the point of view of a subject capable of encompassing within its scope a consciousness of its beginning as well as of its end. Because the character of a fiction appears in the guise of an empirical person, it does not possess this knowledge which only the author can bring to light. Therefore, the relationship between author and character is not governed by intersubjective feelings such as desire or envy but solely by an act of understanding’ (Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, Baltimore, 1993, 21). Waiving de Man's incoherent categorization of ‘desire’ as a ‘feeling’ like ‘envy’ (a move that would obviate a number of belief-desire emotion theories, for example O. H. Green, The Emotions: A Philosophical Theory, Dordrecht, 1992, in which ‘envy’ is constituted by the ‘belief in the fact of an enemy's unjust reward plus a ‘desire’ that this fact not be true), erasing the logical circularity of ‘explaining the necessity’ of ‘understanding’ a thing ‘solely by … understanding’ simply leaves the standard anti-Romantic move to conjure away the intersubjective feelings and desires.Google Scholar

6 Hanslick, , The Beautiful in Music, 9-10.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., 104.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 104-5.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., 106-7.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 112.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 107.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., quoted from Ferdinand Hand, Ästhetik der Tonkunst, i (Leipzig, 1837), 50. Hanslick dismisses as merely metaphorical Hand's claims regarding the affinity of music for natural sounds (The Beautiful in Music, 109).Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 108.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., 110.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 66.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 50.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., 51.Google Scholar

18 Ibid.Google Scholar

19 Hanslick did not hesitate to appeal to the ‘nature of music’ in his critical writings, and McColl refers the ‘mysterious influences’ in this passage of The Beautiful in Music to inconsistencies in Hanslick's critical adjudications of specific bits of tonal syntax, for example to the critic's 1897 condemnation of the parallel fifths in the marcatissimo trumpet passage from Puccini's La Bohème as ‘harmonic atrocities’ and ‘ill-mannered monstrosities’ (Eduard Hanslick, Die moderne Oper, vii: Am Ende des Jahrhunderts, 1895-99; 2nd edn, 1899; repr. as The Collected Musical Criticisms of Eduard Hanslick, vii, Westmead, 1971, 84; quoting from the Neue Freie Presse, 7 October 1897, 1-3), whereas 50 years earlier he had defended a similar progression in a work by Alfred Julius Becher as ‘an aesthetical demonstration of force against the police régime’ (Wiener Abendpost, 20 April 1848, 333, as quoted in translation by Geoffrey Payzant, ‘Eduard Hanslick and the “Geistreich” Dr Alfred Julius Becher’, Music Review, 44 (1983), 104–15 (p. 111); quoted in McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna, 1896-1897, 212-13). McColl also notes ‘in Hanslick's reaction to Verdi, another Italian, a recurring protest against “ugly” dramatic situations which are at odds with the nature of music’ (ibid., 216) - a ‘nature’ which is to Hanslick specifically occult yet specifically non-linguistic.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., 58.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 50.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 20.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 10.Google Scholar

24 Budd, Malcolm, Music and Emotions: The Philosophical Theories (London, 1985), 24.Google Scholar

25 Enumerated by Hanslick as Mattheson, Neidhardt, Forkel, Mosel, Michaelis, Marpurg, Heinse, Engle, Kirnberger, Pierer, Schilling, Koch, André, Sulzer, Boehm, Gottfried Weber, Hand, Amadeus Autodidaktus, Fermo Bellini, Friedrich Thiersch, Dommer and Richard Wagner (The Beautiful in Music, 17-19).Google Scholar

26 Ibid., 20-1.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 21.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., 24. Such differentiation between subjective and objective sensations must be distinguished, for example, from the James–Lange theory in which the sensation component of emotion is firmly subjective and physiological in origin, and in whose terms Hanslick's metaphors ‘whispering’ and ‘clamour’ would be simply unintelligible. See, for example, William James, ‘What is an Emotion?’, Mind, 9 (1884), 188–205; repr. in Carl Georg Lange and William James, The Emotions (Baltimore, 1922), 1-30 (esp. pp. 18-19). For critiques of the theory's sufficiency that touch upon concerns relevant to musical emotivity, see Rapaport, David, Emotions and Memory (New York, 1971), esp. pp. 15-16; George Turski, Towards a Rationality of Emotions: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Athens, OH, 1994), 51-4; and Bruce Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology: A Study of ‘The Principles of Psychology’ (Bloomington and London, 1968), 212-16.Google Scholar

29 Hanslick, , The Beautiful in Music, 21-2.Google Scholar

30 To Scruton, Hanslick's argument exemplifies the ‘philosophical seriousness and competence’ of this ‘influential treatise’ that has ‘few serious rivals in the field of musical aesthetics'. Scruton thus follows the critic into similar incoherences, claiming that because ‘every emotion requires an object: fear is fear of something, anger is anger about something and so on’, ‘precision of emotion is always and necessarily consequent upon precision of thought’ and thus ‘music … is logically debarred from expressing emotion’ (Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture, Manchester, 1983, 58). Here Scruton's ‘precision’ is as imaginary as Hanslick's ‘indefinite emotion’ and for the same reasons. The object-boundedness argument is based not on empirical fact but on a prior assumption. Given that all general knowledge of emotion is based on reports of interrogated subjects and given the nearly universal testimony of composers and listeners representative of millions of normal persons, then even were musical emotion to prove ‘objectless’ (which it is not) the reasonable conclusion would simply be that emotion need have no object. That emotion may be real and yet have an empirically ‘imaginary’ object is evident from the Freudian ‘transference'.Google Scholar

31 For example: ‘the more overpowering the effect [of music] in a physical, i.e., in a pathological sense, the less is it due to aesthetic causes’ (Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, 87-8).Google Scholar

32 Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, trans. R. F. C. Hull, The Complete Works of C. G. Jung, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler and William McGuire, vi (London and New York, 1971), par. 983. Jung's opposition of Thinking and Feeling as two forms of rationality might have been lifted from Wagner's ‘Zukunftsmusik’ (Judaism in Music and Other Essays, trans. William Ashton Ellis, Lincoln, NE, and London, 1995, 293-315).Google Scholar

33 Thus Robert M. Gordon is obliged to establish point-of-view and value binarities as the foundation for further structural analysis of emotion: ‘With few exceptions, emotions are intuitively characterizable as “negative” emotions, such as fear, embarrassment, and anger, or as “positive” emotions, such as pride and gladness’ (The Structure of Emotions: Investigations in Cognitive Philosophy, Cambridge, 1987, 27 and discussion).Google Scholar

34 Wagner, Richard, ‘Beethoven’ (1870), Actors and Singers, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1995), 57–126 (p. 65).Google Scholar

35 Wagner, Richard, Opera and Drama, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1995), 287.Google Scholar

36 'Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung’, ii, 415, quoted by Wagner in ‘Beethoven’, 66. This was a concept Wagner had explored 12 years previously in ‘Zukunftsmusik'.Google Scholar

37 See, for example, Richard Wagner, ‘The Art-Work of the Future’ (1849), The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1993), 67–213 (esp. pp. 79-80).Google Scholar

38 Wagner, , ‘Beethoven’, 63-4.Google Scholar

39 Jung, , Psychological Types, pars. 753-4. The quotation is from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London and New York, 1929), 314.Google Scholar

40 For example, Wagner claims already to have expressed, in ‘Zukunftsmusik’, the same ideas concerning outer form and inner essence in terms of ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’ ('Beethoven’, 80n.).Google Scholar

41 For example: ‘Music does not portray the Ideas inherent in the world's phenomena, but is itself an Idea of the World, and a comprehensive one, it naturally includes the Drama in itself; as Drama, again, expresses the only world's-Idea proportionate (adāqual) to Music … As a drama does not depict human characters, but lets them display their immediate selves, so a piece of music gives us in its motive the character of all the world's appearances according to their inmost essence (An-sich)’ (Wagner, ‘Beethoven’, 106).Google Scholar

42 In putting the question ‘Does a vocal persona know he is singing?’ Edward T. Cone converges with Wagner upon a relevant insight: ‘every singing persona seems to be subject to a tension between the verbal and the vocal aspects of his personality. From the realistic verbal point of view, such a character is unaware of singing, and of being accompanied. Yet on the musical level he must in some sense be aware of both. How are these two aspects to be reconciled? A solution becomes possible if we conceive the contrast between the verbal and the vocal as a symbolic parallel to the contrast between the conscious and subconscious components of the personality. … Siegmund certainly does not understand the significance of the Walhalla motif by which the orchestra identifies for us his vanished father, nor does Siegfried comprehend the prophecy of the magic fire by which the orchestra foretells the occasion of his first and only fear. In this regard, Wagner's orchestra has sometimes been compared to a “collective unconscious”, in which each character participates according to his own knowledge and ability. To a certain extent every accompaniment is like this. Whether it is taken as symbolizing the individual or the collective unconscious, or Nature, or the Voice of God - or none of these - it must be assumed to be available to every character in question; but what the character makes of it depends on his own potentialities’ (The Composer's Voice, Berkeley, 1974, 33, 36). Cone arrives, via reasoning derived from the material exigencies of the operatic medium, at the formulation derived by Wagner from philosophical considerations.Google Scholar

43 Wagner, , Opera and Drama, 329.Google Scholar

44 Wagner, , ‘The Art-Work of the Future’, 134.Google Scholar

45 Wagner, , Opera and Drama, 330-1.Google Scholar

46 Wagner, , ‘The Art-Work of the Future’, 79.Google Scholar

47 Wagner, , ‘Zukunftsmusik’, 318-19. Wagner specifies music drama as ‘an equal inter-penetration of Poesy and Music to bring about an artwork that should produce an irresistibly convincing impression at the moment of its stage-performance, an impression such as to resolve all arbitrary Reflection into purely-human Feeling’ (ibid., 324).Google Scholar

48 Wagner offers this not as metaphor but as analogy, as described by Janet Martin Soskice: ‘Analogy as a linguistic device deals with language that has been stretched to fit new applications, yet fits the new situation without generating for the native speaker any imaginative strain. This can best be shown by example: suppose that one encountered intelligent life on another planet … that communicated by means of the arrangement of fibres on its body. If we were able to interpret this new mode of communication, even though it involved no sounds at all, we should quite naturally say that the Martian “told” us such and such, or made this or that “comment”. We would probably not regard it as speaking metaphorically; more likely we would regard it as justified extensions of what “told” and “comment” really mean. This would be not a metaphorical but a “stretched” or analogical use of language’ (Metaphor and Religious Language, Oxford, 1985, 64).Google Scholar

49 Hanslick, , The Beautiful in Music, 67.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 67-8.Google Scholar

51 Ibid., 47-8.Google Scholar

52 Ibid., 50-1.Google Scholar

53 See, for example, White, Roger, The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor Works (Oxford, 1996), esp. his analysis of Othello, Act 4, scene i, Il. 7ff. (e.g. Iago: ‘Heere he comes. As he shall smile, Othello shall go mad: And his unbookish Ielousie must construe Poore Cassio's smiles, gestures and light behaviours Quite in the wrong’, on pp. 107–10.Google Scholar

54 John R. Searle defines natural language as a behaviour constrained by rules, defining such rules as both constitutive and regulative. ‘Regulative rules regulate antecedently or independently existing forms of behaviour’, exemplified by Searle by rules of etiquette; whereas ‘constitutive rules do not merely regulate, they create or define new forms of behavior’ (Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge, 1969, 33-42). The former are normative, the latter permit new or extraordinary forms of behaviour to emerge in orderly or coherent fashion from normative behaviour. The tonal language of Parsifal may be analysed as language-like dialectic between regulative rules (e.g. rules constraining the behaviour of non-scale notes within a key-defining scale) and constitutive rules (e.g. several regulative rules may be employed simultaneously with new implications, or applied on organizational levels not previously considered normative).Google Scholar

55 Donald F. Tovey does so in discussing the historical development of harmony: ‘The art of music had not attained to the simplest scheme for dealing with discords before it traversed the acoustic criterion in every direction, it became a language in which sense dictated what should be accepted in sound’ ('Harmony’, The Forms of Music, London, 1963, 44-71 (p. 46)). Tovey reminds us that certain theoretically dissonant harmonic combinations were in fact incorporated into musical language as consonances in preference to others which, in acoustical terms, are actually more consonant. Grammar, itself unheard, is the form or structure that makes ‘sense’ of the ‘sound’ that is heard.Google Scholar

56 See, for example, Harris, James, Hermes, or, A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Universal Grammar (3rd edn, London, 1771).Google Scholar

57 Chomsky, Noam, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (New York, 1966), 22–3.Google Scholar

58 Wagner, , ‘Beethoven’, 78.Google Scholar

59 Wagner, , Opera and Drama, 337.Google Scholar

60 For example: ‘The commodity is anorganic because it exists as a mere piece of paper, as an inscription or a notation on a certificate. The opposition is not between nature and consciousness (or subject) but between what exists as language and what does not. Allegory is material or materialistic, in Benjamin's sense, because its dependence on the letter, on the literalism of the letter, cuts it off sharply from symbolic and aesthetic syntheses. “The subject of allegory can only be called a grammatical subject.” … Allegory names the rhetorical process by which the literary text moves from a phenomenal, world-oriented to a grammatical, language-oriented direction’ (Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis, 1986, 68; the quotation is from Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Frankfurt am Main, 1970, xiii, 512).Google Scholar

61 Hegel, , Vorlesungen, xiii, 512.Google Scholar

62 Dietrich Bartel provides an exhaustive study of the fusion of the disciplines of music and rhetoric that characterized the German Baroque period under the inspiration of Luther's theologically founded music theory. As opposed to pure music theory, which was classed with mathematics, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, and which involved cosmological speculations concerning both number and astronomical correspondences, ‘applied music, connected with elocution or delivery, was classed with rhetoric rather than mathematics’ in the medieval period (Musica Poetica-Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music, Lincoln, NE, and London, 1997, 12). The implication of philosophical inferiority is clear; it was thus recognized as an aspect of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric - precisely the elements that most strongly characterize Wagner's musico-linguistic theory and practice.Google Scholar

63 Grey, , Wagner's Musical Prose, esp. pp. 138–52.Google Scholar

64 For example: ‘A passion for extravagant clothing, in life, finds a parallel in Wagner's passion for extravagant metaphor in his prose’ (ibid., 130). Following a recently popular but waning analytical line, Grey later specifies such extravagances as evidences of psychological androgyny (pp. 146–70).Google Scholar

65 Ibid., 131n.Google Scholar

66 Morgan, Elaine, The Descent of the Child: Human Evolution from a New Perspective (Oxford, 1995), 132. See also ch. 20 generally.Google Scholar

67 Ibid., 105-6.Google Scholar

68 Pinker, Stephen, The Language Instinct (New York, 1994), 39–40.Google Scholar

69 See, for example, Searle, Speech Acts, 24-5.Google Scholar

70 Morgan, , The Descent of the Child, 105-6 (quote from Dorothy Parker, ‘Horsie'). If, as I believe, it is legitimate to understand Wagner's philosophy as being distributed across prose and operatic librettos, then we may take the music dramas in part as demonstrations, like the blackboard proofs in mathematics or philosophy classes. Understood thus, and taking the E♭ major Prelude in its intended sense as a specifically maternal ‘Chaos’, the Rhine scene of Das Rheingold offers a great deal of material evidence on Wagner's understanding of the nature of ‘Motherese’ (compare, for example, Miss Wilmarth's ‘wuzza wuzza wuzza’ with Woglinde's ‘weia, wala, woge'). For a discussion of the maternal significance of Wagner's key of E♭, see Jonathan Christian Petty and Marshall Tuttle, ‘The Genealogy of Chaos: Multiple Coherence in Wagnerian Music Drama’, Music and Letters, 79 (1998), 72–98.Google Scholar

71 Chomsky, Noam, ‘On the Biological Basis of Language Capacities’, The Neuropsychology of Language: Essays in Honor of Eric Lenneberg, ed. Robert W. Rieber (New York, 1976), 1–24 (p. 1).Google Scholar

72 Chomsky's citation is from August Wilhelm von Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808), trans. John Black (2nd edn, London, 1840), 340; see Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics, 22-3. Such views were shared by Romantic poets and might have been originated by them, as suggested by Chomsky's citation from Coleridge: ‘The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material - as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms - each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within - its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror’ (ibid., 23; the citation is from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Lectures and Notes of 1818’, Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and Other English Poets, ed. Thomas Ashe, London, 1893, 229).Google Scholar

73 Cartesian Linguistics, 22-3.Google Scholar

74 For example: ‘A poem's meaning is a poem's complaint, its version of Keats’ Belle Dame, who looked as if she loved, and made sweet moan. Poems instruct us in how they break form to bring about meaning, so as to utter a complaint, a moaning intended to be all their own’ (Harold Bloom, ‘The Breaking of Form’, Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Bloom, New York, 1979, 1-37 (p. 1).Google Scholar

75 Wagner, , ‘Beethoven’, 71.Google Scholar

76 Bloom, , ‘The Breaking of Form’, 1.Google Scholar

77 Wagner, , ‘Zukunftsmusik’, 319.Google Scholar

78 For example: ‘The ontology of the unconscious is strictly the ontology of a neurophysiology capable of generating the conscious’ (John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge, MA, 1992, 172 and argument, pp. 151–73).Google Scholar

79 Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘Ankündigung einer Schrift über die vaskische Sprache und Nation nebst Angabe des Gesichtspunktes und Inhalts derselben’, Gesammelte Schriften, 17 vols. (Berlin, 1903), iii, 288-99; translation of pp. 296–7 in Marianne Cowan, Humanist without Portfolio (Detroit, 1963), 236-7. These ideas are discussed by Chomsky in Cartesian Linguistics, 20-1.Google Scholar

80 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, ‘Über den grammatischen Bau der chinesischen Sprache’, Gesammelte Schriften, v, 309-24; translation of p. 311 in Cowan, Humanist without Portfolio, 237-8.Google Scholar

81 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, ‘Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Beziehung auf die verschiedenen Epochen der Sprachentwicklung’, Gesammelte Schriften, iv, 1-34; translation of pp. 14–15 in Cowan, Humanist without Portfolio, 239-40.Google Scholar

82 Chomsky, Noam, Language and Mind (New York, 1968), 3–4.Google Scholar

83 Wagner, , ‘Beethoven’, 65.Google Scholar