In the use of this material to us by the philosopher I believe I will proceed most appropriately for our purpose if I turn to one of the remarks with which Schopenhauer refuses to regard the Idea that proceeds from our knowledge of relations as yet the true nature of the thing-in-itself, but only as the revelation of the objective character of things--as the revelation, that is, once again only of their appearance. "And even this character"--so Schopenhauer continues in the place in question--"we would not understand if the inner nature of things, at least vaguely and in terms of feeling, were not known to us from another quarter. For this nature cannot be understood through the Ideas nor in general by means of any merely objective knowledge; thus it would forever remain a mystery if we did not have access to it from a completely different side. Only insofar as each observer is at the same time an individual and thus a part of nature does the entrance into the inner side of nature stand open to him: in his own consciousness of self, as the place where this is manifest most directly--as the will.(2)
If we now keep in mind what Schopenhauer lays down as the condition for the entrance of the Idea into our consciousness, namely "a temporary predominance of the intellect over the will, or physiologically considered, a strong excitation of the intuitive activity of the brain without any arousal of our inclinations or emotions," we have only to grasp clearly the explanation directly following this, that our consciousness has two sides: in part it is a consciousness of our own self, which is the will, and in part a consciousness of other things, and as such it is first of all the intuitive or contemplative knowledge of the external world, the apprehension of objects. "Now the more the one side of consciousness as a whole comes to the fore, the more the other side recedes."(3)
From a close consideration of what has here been adduced from Schopenhauer's chief work it must now be apparent to us that musical conception, since it can have nothing in common with the comprehension of an Idea (for this is completely tied to the contemplative knowledge of the world), can have its source only in that side of consciousness that Schopenhauer describes as turned towards inwardness. If this recedes entirely in its functions for a time in favor of the entry of the pure knowing subject, it follows from the opposite point of view that the ability of the intellect to comprehend the character of things can be explained only on the basis of this inwardly turned side of consciousness. But if this aspect of consciousness is the consciousness of our own self, and thus of our will, it must be assumed that although its suppression is doubtless indispensable for the purity of the intuitive consciousness that is turned outward, yet the nature of the thing-in-itself that is so incomprehensible to that intuitive knowing would be made possible to the inwardly turned consciousness only when this achieved the ability to see inwardly with just as much clarity as the other can see outwardly in the comprehension of the Ideas through intuitive knowledge.
Schopenhauer also gives us reliable guidance for our continuation along this path in an impressive corollary hypothesis that deals with the physiological phenomenon of clairvoyance and with a theory of dreams based on this.(4) For if the inwardly turned consciousness in the phenomenon of clairvoyance achieves true clairvoyant vision, that is, the power of seeing where our waking consciousness, turned towards day, only darkly senses the powerful basis of the emotions of our will, then tone will penetrate into actual waking perception as the direct expression of the will. As every experience of dreaming confirms, there stands alongside the world that is directly contemplated by means of the functions of the waking brain, a second world, fully equal to the first in clarity, and equally manifesting itself as one that is directly contemplated. As an object in any event, this second world cannot lie outside ourselves, and therefore must be brought to knowledge in consciousness by an inwardly directed function of the brain, and only in that peculiar form of perception which Schopenhauer calls precisely the mental faculty of dreams. Now a no less definite experience, however, is this: that alongside the world which presents itself both in the waking state and in dreaming as visible there is a second world accessible to consciousness which announces itself only in sound and is perceivable only by means of hearing--a world of sound, we may in fact say, alongside the world of light, of which we can say that it is related to the latter as the dream is to waking. For it is exactly as distinct to us as is the waking world even though at the same time we must acknowledge it as completely different And as the intuited world of the dream can be constituted only through a special activity of the brain, so music also enters our consciousness only through a similar cerebral activity; but this is just as different from the activity that is instigated by vision as the dream faculty of the brain is distinct from the cerebral function that is provoked in the waking state by external impressions.
Since the dream faculty cannot be provoked into activity by external impressions, from which the brain is at that time completely shut off, this activity must occur by virtue of events in the inner organism that are adumbrated only as dark feelings. It is through this inner life, however, that we are directly related to the whole of nature, and become participant in the essence of things in such a way that our relations to this essence permit no application of the forms of external knowledge--time and space. From this circumstance Schopenhauer convincingly derived the origin of prophetic dreams, or of those fatidic dreams that make the most distant things perceptible, or indeed, for the strangest and most extreme instances, even the occurrence of somnambulistic clairvoyance. Prom the most frightening dreams of this kind we awake with a scream in which the oppressed will finds expression with the utmost immediacy, entering decisively and before all else into the world of sound in order to announce itself outwardly. If we now think of the cry, in all the modifications of its violence down to the tender complaint of longing as the fundamental element of every human utterance addressed to hearing, and if we cannot but agree that it is the most immediate possible externalization of the wilt which in this way addresses itself outwardly with the greatest possible rapidity and certainty, then we will marvel less over its direct intelligibility than over the elaboration of an art upon such an elemental basis, since it is otherwise apparent that both the creation and the contemplation of art can proceed only if consciousness turns away from the excitations of the will.
To explain this wonder, let us first of all recall again the profound observation of our philosopher that we adduced above: we would not understand even the Ideas, which are comprehensible, in accordance with the ir nature, only through contemplation that is free of will--or in a word, objective--if there were not another access to their foundation in the nature of things, namely, the immediate consciousness of the self. For it is through the consciousness alone that we are able to understand the correspondingly inward nature of the things outside us, and in such a fashion, indeed, that we recognize in them again the same fundamental nature that manifests itself in our consciousness of the self as our own. All deception in this regard proceeded from simply seeing a world outside us, which we perceived in the light of appearance as something entirely different from ourselves. Only through the mental discernment of the Ideas, that is, through a considerable mediation, did we arrive at the first stage of undeception in the matte; where we now no longer recognize individual things, temporally and spatially separate, but instead their character in itself; and this speaks to us most clearly from works of plastic art whose true element it is, therefore, by virtue of a highly conscious play with semblance, to use the deceptive appearance of the world that is displayed before us by light to make manifest the Idea it veils. It is in keeping with this that the sight of objects in themselves leaves us cold and unsympathetic, and that our emotions are aroused only when we become aware of the relationships to our will of the objects seen. For this reason the first valid principle of plastic art is quite correctly that these relationships to our individual will must be set aside in its representations, so that by way of contrast the kind of quiet be prepared for vision in which alone the pure contemplation of the object in accordance with its own character is made possible. But what is effective here always remains no more than the appearance of things, in the contemplation of which we sink into an aesthetic intuition that is free of will. It is also this quieting effect of the pure pleasure in appearance which, carried over from the effect of plastic art to all the arts, was posited as a requirement for aesthetic pleasure in general, and as a result of this created the concept of beauty (Schönheit), which is thus, in the root of the word, clearly connected in German with "appearance" (Schein), as of an object, and with "gazing" (Schauen), as of a subject.
But consciousness, which alone made possible to us the comprehension of the Idea that manifests itself in the contemplation of appearance, must finally feel forced to cry out with Faust: "What a stage play! But alas, only a stage play! Where do I grasp thee, infinite nature?"
This cry is now answered in the most affirmative way possible by music. Here the external world speaks to us with such incomparable intelligibility because it communicates to us, by virtue of the efficacy of sound, precisely what we cry out to it from the depths of our inwardness. The perceived tonal object coincides exactly with the subject emitting the tone: we understand without the mediation of any concept what the perceived cry of help, lament or joy says to us, and answer it at once in a corresponding sense. If the cry, the sound of lament or bliss, is the most immediate externalization of the affection of the will, we similarly understand this very sound, pressing in upon us through hearing, incontrovertibly as an externalization of the same affection. No illusion is possible here, as it is in the realm of apparency and light, that the fundamental nature of the world outside us is not fully identical with our own; the chasm presented to vision closes at once.
Now if we see an art come forth from this immediate awareness of the unity of our inner nature with that of the external world, it is apparent before all else that this must be governed by completely different aesthetic laws than every other art. It appeared unacceptable to every aesthetician also to have to derive an actual art from what seemed to them a purely pathological material, and they were therefore willing to acknowledge the validity of this art only when its products revealed themselves to us in the dispassionate apparency that is characteristic of the forms of plastic art But that even its elemental material, as an Idea of the world, is no longer beheld, but sensed in the depths of our awareness, we immediately learned to recognize so successfully through Schopenhauer; and we understand these Ideas as a direct revelation of the unity of the Will, which represents itself inescapably to our consciousness, proceeding from the unity of human nature, also as a unity with nature, which we equally perceive through sound.
Enlightenment concerning the nature of music as an art in spite of the difficulty it presents, we believe to be obtained most securely by way of a consideration of the creativity of the inspired musician. In many respects this must be fundamentally different from that of other artists. Of these we had to acknowledge that pure contemplation of objects, free of will, must first have taken place, just as it is again produced by the effect of the displayed work of art on the viewer. Such an object, however, which he is to elevate to the Idea through pure contemplation, does not present itself to the musician at all; for his music itself is an Idea of the world in which the world exhibits its essence directly, while in the other arts its essence is exhibited, and only as mediated by knowledge. This can be comprehended only as follows: the individual will that is silenced in the plastic artist through pure contemplation awakens in the musician as the universal Will, and recognizes itself as such, above and beyond all contemplation, in its true consciousness of self. Thus the very different condition of the conceiving musician and the shaping artist. Thus the fundamentally so different effect of music and painting: in the one the deepest pacification of the will, in the other the highest excitation. But this says only that the will considered in the first case is trapped in the individual as such, in the delusion of his differentiation from the nature of the things outside him; it then can rise above its confines only in the pure, disinterested contemplation of objects. In the other case, that of the musician, the will by contrast feels itself immediately as one, above all the confines of individuality: for through hearing the gate is opened through which the world presses in upon it just as the will presses outward to the world. This vast overflow of all the bounds of appearance will necessarily call forth an ecstasy in the enraptured musician with which no other can be compared; in it the will recognizes itself as the omnipotent Will in general: it need not mutely restrain itself in the face of contemplation, but announces itself loudly as the conscious Idea of the world. Only one state can excel that of the musician: the state of the saint. For this is lasting and cannot be clouded over, while the ecstatic clairvoyance of the musician, by contrast, must alternate with a continually recurring state of individual awareness, which he must think the more miserable after the enraptured state has carried him high above all the confines of individuality. Because of this suffering with which he must pay for the state of rapture through which he delights us so inexpressibly, the musician may well seem to us more deserving of honor than other artists-- almost, indeed, as having a claim to sainthood. For in truth his art is related to the complex of all the others as religion is to the church.
In the other arts, as we have seen, if the will longs to become transformed entirely into knowledge, this is possible only to the extent that it remains silent in the depths of inwardness. It is as though it expected the message of its redemption from the outside. If this expectation is not met, then it enters into a state of clairvoyance in which--beyond the limitations of time and space--it knows itself to be the one and all of the world. What it sees there cannot be conveyed by language. Just as the dream of deepest sleep can enter waking consciousness only as translated into the language of a second, allegorical dream that immediately precedes awakening, so the will devises for the direct image of its own introspection a second instrument of communication. And while one side of this instrument is turned towards its inwardly directed gaze, the other side--through the uniquely sympathetic and direct announcement of tone--impinges upon the external world that emerges again with the awakening of the will. The will cries out; and in the cry that responds it knows itself again. Thus cry and counter-cry become a consoling and ultimately an ecstatic play with itself.
During a sleepless night I once stepped out onto the balcony of my window overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice. Like a deep dream there lay spread out before me in shadow the legendary city of lagoons. From the totally soundless silence there arose the powerful, rough cry of lament of a gondolier just awakened on his bark who cried out in this way repeatedly into the night until from the furthest distance the same cry answered along the canal. I recognized the archetypal, sad melodic phrase to which in his time the well known verses of Tasso were set, but which itself is certainly as old as the canals of Venice with their inhabitants. After a solemn pause the far-sounding dialogue was finally revived and seemed to melt into a unity, until again the tones both far and near gently died away in newly attained slumber. What could the colorful, swarming Venice of daylight, glistening in the sun, tell me of itself, that the sounding nighttime dream would not have brought directly to my consciousness with infinitely more profundity?
On another occasion I was walking through the sublime loneliness of a highland valley in Uri. It was bright day when I perceived from a high alpine meadow to one side the shrill, raucous cry of a Swiss cowherd, which he directed across the wide valley. Soon there answered him through the awesome silence the same high-spirited shepherd's cry; into this there now intruded the echo of the towering walls of rock; the serious, silent valley rang joyfully with the tonal combat.
Thus the child awakens from the night of the mother's womb with his cry of distress, and the lulling caress of the mother answers him. Thus the longing youth understands the seductive song of the birds of the forest. Thus speaks the complaint of the animals, of the breezes, the howl of rage of the hurricane to the musing man upon whom there now comes that dreamlike state in which through hearing he now truly perceives what his sight beheld so deceptively in its distraction: that his innermost nature is one with the innermost nature of all that is perceived, and that only in this perception is the essence of the things outside him also really known.
The dreamlike state into which the indicated effects place us by sympathetic hearing and in which there dawns upon us that other world out of which the musician speaks to us, we recognize at once from the experience accessible to everyone that through the effect of music vision is robbed of its force, so that with our eyes open we no longer really see. We will experience this in any concert hall while listening to a musical work that truly moves us, when the most distracting things possible, and the intrinsically ugliest, transpire in front of our eyes, all of which, at any rate, if we really saw it, would divert us completely from the music and even dispose us to laughter, for besides the quite trivial effect of our view of the listeners, there are the mechanical movements of the musicians--the very strangely animated accessory apparatus of an orchestral production. That this sight, which alone busies anyone who is not affected by music, eventually does not at all disturb anyone who is enthralled by it, shows us clearly that we are no longer consciously aware of what we see, but on the contrary now fall into that state, with our eyes open, which has an essential similarity to the state of somnambulistic clairvoyance. And in truth it is only in this state that we will belong fully to the world of the musician. From out of this world, which is otherwise indescribable, and by means of the interconnection of bis tones, the musician in a sense stretches out his net towards us, or we may equally say, he disintegrates our perceptive capacity with the miraculous droplets of his sounds, rendering it powerless, as though by magic, for every perception other than that of our own inner world.
If we now wish to make clear to ourselves to some degree his procedure in this regard, we can once again do this best only by returning to the analogy of this procedure with the inner events through which--according to Schopenhauer's brilliant assumption--the dream of the deepest sleep, totally removed from the waking cerebral consciousness, is translated, to so speak, into the lighter allegorical dream that immediately precedes awakening. The capacity of speech that is analogically taken into consideration here reaches for the musician from the cry of terror to a deployment of the consoling play of euphonious sounds. Since in the use of the profusion of gradations that lie in between these extremes he is governed by the impulse towards an intelligible communication of his innermost vision, he approaches--like the second, allegorical dream--the representations of the waking brain, by means of which the brain is ultimately able to secure its first fixation of the vision. In this approach, however, he makes contact with, as the most outward component of his communication, only the representations of time, while he receives those of space in an opaque veil, the raising of which would at once make the vision he has seen unrecognizable. While the harmony of tones, which belongs neither to space nor to time, remains the most proper element of music, the musician now as a formative artist reaches out his hand in understanding, so to speak, to the waking world of apparency through the rhythmical succession in time of his message, just as the allegorical dream attaches itself to the customary representations of the individual so that the awake consciousness, turned towards the outside world, and immediately recognizing the great difference even of this allegorical image from the course of actual life, can nevertheless hold it fast. Through the rhythmical ordering of his tones, then, the musician enters into contact with the contemplated plastic world, by virtue, that is, of the similarity of this order to the laws according to which the motion of visible bodies makes itself intelligible to our intuition. Human gesture, which in dance seeks to make itself intelligible through expressively changing and regulated motion, thus seems to be for music what bodies in turn are for light which without striking against these would not be luminous, while we can say that without rhythm music would not be perceptible to us. But it is precisely here, at the meeting place of plasticity and harmony, that the nature of music--which can be grasped only by the analogy of the dream--reveals itself quite clearly as totally different from the nature of plastic art. For where this simply fixes gesture in space, but must leave motion to be supplied by reflective contemplation, music expresses the innermost nature of gesture with such immediate intelligibility that--as soon as we are completely filled with music--it even renders our vision inadequate for the full perception of gesture, so that we ultimately understand it without actually seeing it. If music thus draws into its realm of dreams, as we have termed it, that component of the world of appearance most related to it, this happens only in order to turn contemplative knowledge inward, so to speak by means of a miraculous transformation that takes place in it, where now it is able to grasp the nature of things as this is conveyed in its immediacy--to interpret the vision, we may say, that the musician himself has gazed upon in his deepest sleep.
Concerning the action of music with respect to the plastic forms of the world of appearance as well as to the concepts abstracted from these things themselves, nothing more enlightening can possibly be adduced than what we may read on this subject in Schopenhauer's works in the relevant place, for which reason we will turn from any superfluous lingering over the matter to the real task of these inquiries, which is the investigation of the nature of the musician himself.
We must first still take time, however, for an important decision about the aesthetic judgment of music as an art. For we find that the forms in which music seems to attach itself to external appearance have become the basis of a thoroughly senseless and perverse demand on the character of what it communicates. As we mentioned previously, views have been applied to music which arise specifically from the judgment of plastic art. That this error could take place we must in any event attribute to that close approach of music--which we have just described--to the contemplated side of the world and to its appearances. Actually the art of music has gone through a process of development in this direction that laid it open to the misunderstanding of its true character to such an extent that an effect was demanded from it similar to what was demanded from works of plastic art--namely, the arousal of pleasure in beautiful forms.(5) Since there crept into this demand at the same time an increasing decay of judgment concerning plastic art itself, it can easily be imagined how profoundly music was degraded in this way, when it was demanded, basically, that it should completely suppress in its most particular nature merely in order to arouse our delight by revealing its most external aspect
Music speaks to us solely in that it brings to life the most general possible concept of feeling--which is in itself so obscure--with the greatest clarity and in the most numerous gradations conceivable. It can be judged in and for itself only according to the category of the sublime, since as soon as it floods into us it excites our sense of boundlessness to its highest ecstasy.(f) By contrast, what happens to us in consequence of our absorption in the contemplation of a work of plastic art, namely, the (temporary) release of the intellect from service to our individual will that is finally obtained by relinquishing the relations of the contemplated object to that will--the effect that is called for, in other words, of beauty on the emotional disposition--this is exerted by music the instant it begins in that it at once draws our intellect away from any comprehension of the relations of things outside us, and as pure form freed from all objectivity, shuts us off, so to speak, from the external world, allowing us now to gaze, by contrast solely into our inwardness and into the inner nature of all things. It follows from this, then, that the judgment of music should be supported by a knowledge of those laws by means of which the most direct progress is made, through the action of the sublime, from the effect of beauty in appearance, which is the very first effect of the mere sound of music, to the revelation of its most intrinsic character. It would be the character of truly empty music, by way of contrast if it lingered over a prismatic play with the effect of its first appearance, and thus continued to detain us merely by the relations with which the most external side of music confronts the contemplated world.
Actually a continuing development was given to music in this direction only, specifically through a systematic organization of its periodic rhythmic structure, which brought it on the one hand into comparison with architecture, and gave it on the other hand a surveyable character which inevitably exposed it to just those false evaluations we have mentioned that are based on the analogy of plastic art. It is here, in its most rigid confinement within banal forms and conventions, that music seemed to Goethe, for example, to be so happily applicable to the standardization of poetic conceptions. To be able, in these conventional forms, only to toy with the gigantic power of music in such a way that its real effect, the proclamation of the inner nature of all things, was shunned like the danger of a flood, passed for a long time in the judgment of aestheticians as the true and only fortunate outcome of the elaboration of tonal art. But to have penetrated through these forms to the innermost nature of music in such fashion that he was able from that side to throw the inner light of the clairvoyant outward again in order to reveal to us these very forms once more only in accordance with their inner meaning: this was the work of our great Beethoven, whom we therefore must lead forward before us as the true epitome of the musician.--
Retaining the frequently cited analogy of the allegorical dream, if we wish to think of music, which is provoked by an innermost vision, as conveying this vision outward, we must assume as the actual organ for this purpose, just as we previously assumed the dream faculty, a cerebral capacity by virtue of which the musician initially perceives the inner in-itself: an eye turned inward which directed outwardly becomes hearing. If we wish to imagine that what the musician perceives--the innermost (dream-) vision of this world--is brought forth before us in its truest copy, we can do this in the most strangely suggestive way if we listen to one of those famous church pieces of Palestrina. Here the rhythm is perceptible solely through the changes of the harmonious succession of chords, while apart from this, as a symmetrical temporal succession in itself, it does not exist at all. Here the temporal succession is therefore stili bound so tightly to the inherently timeless and spaceless nature of harmony that the help of temporal laws in the understanding of music such as this does not even come into question. The only temporal succession there is in such a work can be said to manifest itself simply in the delicate alterations of a basic color, which presents to us the most manifold transitions (all at the same time retaining their broad relationship) without our being able to perceive in this variation the lines of any drawing. Now since this color itself does not appear in space, however, we are here receiving an almost equally both timeless and spaceless picture: a thoroughly spiritual revelation which affects us with such inexpressible emotion because at the same time it brings to our consciousness more clearly than anything else the innermost nature of religion, free of every dogmatic conceptual fiction.
If now once again we think of a dance piece, or a symphonic movement that copies the dance, or finally even an operatic number, we at once find our fantasy captured by a regular arrangement in the recurrence of rhythmic periods, by which the force of the melody is primarily determined by virtue of the plasticity given to it. Music that evolved along this path has very appropriately been designated as secular, in contrast to the former sacred type. Concerning the principle of this evolution I have expressed my opinion clearly enough elsewhere,(7) and I shall take up here by contrast the tendency of the development only in the sense already touched on above of its analogy with the allegorical dream. According to this it would seem as though the eye of the musician, having awakened, now remains fixed on the appearances of the outer world until these become directly intelligible in accordance with their inner nature. The outer laws governing this fixation on gesture and ultimately on every manifestation of life that contains motion become for him those of rhythm, by virtue of which he constructs periods of contrast and recurrence. Now the more these periods are filled with the true spirit of music, the less they will as architectonic characteristics divert our attention from the pure effect of music. But in contrast, where that inner spirit of music which we have sufficiently characterized falls away in its true communication in favor of the regular columnar order of rhythmical caesurae, only this external regularity will continue to arrest us, and we will necessarily lower the level of our demands on music itself in that we now chiefly connect it only with that regularity. In this way music deserts its position of sublime innocence; it loses the power of absolution from the guilt of apparency, that is, it is no longer the prophetess of the nature of things, but itself is enmeshed in the deception of the appearance of things outside us. For to this music we will now also want to see something, and this looking-at then becomes the central concern, as the opera reveals quite clearly, where the spectacle, the ballet and so on constitute what is attractive and arresting--which exhibits visibly enough the degeneration of the music used for this purpose.
NOTES 1. Our translation is of the middle portion of Wagner's treatise. The remainder of the work deals essentially with the music of Beethoven and the occasion of the oration (the centenary of Beethoven's birth). 2. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, 415. 3. Ibid., 418. 4. Ideas concerning the dream, which are based on the theories Schopenhauer presents in his Parerga und Paralipomena I, play a large part both in Wagner's aesthetics and in his operas. 5. It is apparent here that Wagner takes issue with the musical aesthetics of both Kant and Hanslick. f Cf. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, 39. 7. I did this briefly and in general terms, namely, in a tract entitled Zukunftsmusik, which was published about twelve years ago in Leipzig but without receiving any kind of attention. It has been included in the 7th volume of these Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, and may here be recommended to notice again.