ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the relationship between words and music in Wagner's dramas and his relationship towards earlier composers and dramatists. The origins of the dialectical, psychological complexity intrinsic to Wagnerian music drama lay in the orchestral compositions of Haydn and Mozart – and, for Wagner, still more so in the operas of Mozart than in his 'works of absolute music'. In Wagner's dialectical schema, music, a means of expression, had in opera been transformed into the goal of that expression, whilst drama, the rightful goal of that expression, had become its means. The dialectic between the component parts of Wagnerian music drama, embodying the relative importance on the one hand of the dramatic characters and their words and gestures and, on the other, that of the metaphysical power of music, came to mirror the conflict in Wagner's thought between Feuerbachian anthropology and the philosophy of Schopenhauer.
