ABSTRACT
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) begins his main discussion of music, in Section 52 of The World as Will and Representation, by noting that “It stands quite apart” from all the other forms of art (1969: vol. 1, 256). (All further references to Schopenhauer are to this work.) “[M]usic is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas,” he writes, but is rather “a copy of the will itself … For this reason the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence” (vol. 1, 257). This is a claim that composers and musicians have, perhaps unsurprisingly, found extremely seductive: Richard Wagner, for example, held that Schopenhauer captures “the position of music among the fine arts with philosophic clearness,” and in doing so “recognises the true nature of music” (Goehr 1996: 201); other admirers included Liszt, Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mahler, Schoenberg and Prokofiev. But why did Schopenhauer hold that music “stands quite apart” from the other arts? Just what does he mean when he says that it, unlike them, speaks “of the essence” of things? These are the central questions facing anyone wanting to understand Schopenhauer’s theory of music, and in what follows I shall sketch (the beginnings, at least) of answers to them.
