ABSTRACT
The inclusion of Richard Wagner (1813–83) as the sole composer meriting an individual entry in the Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music (assuming we are to regard Rousseau principally as a philosopher, not as a musician) should come as no surprise. Many musicians have written on issues of musical theory, contributed to aesthetic debates on music and culture, and above all written musical criticism, but none approaches the scope of Wagner’s literary output, much of it devoted to central issues of philosophical aesthetics concerning music and language, meaning and signification, the social value of music, and, most famously, theories of a synthetic “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk). More than any other composer, Wagner read and responded to important contemporary thinkers such as Hegel, the French social theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the materialist “Young Hegelian” Ludwig Feuerbach, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and, most fundamentally, Arthur Schopenhauer, whose ideas shaped the later music dramas from Tristan und Isolde to Parsifal and, arguably, the composition of the Ring cycle. Similarly unique is the impact he himself exerted on the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche (or, for that matter, on the modernist aesthetics of the French symbolists). “There is no other example in the whole of our culture,” writes Bryan Magee about the case of Nietzsche, “of a creative artist who is not himself a philosopher having a philosophical influence of this magnitude on someone who was indeed a great philosopher” (Magee 2000: 81). Beyond the vast corpus of published writings, correspondence, and autobiography, Wagner’s contribution to the philosophy of music might also be sought in the musical works, the later so-called “music dramas,” which variously exemplify, refine, and even critique the theoretical perspectives of the writings.
