28 - On absolute music

Summary

The christening of absolute music was meant to be something of a heroic funeral. When Wagner coined the term in 1846 he was announcing the death of instrumental music. The symphony, he claimed, was over. It was already history, buried by Wagner himself, whose music dramas were about to overcome the inchoate utterances of instrumental music through the word and deed. Since absolute music discharges itself from the reality of concept and action, says Wagner, anyone who writes a symphony after Beethoven would merely be an epigone, tinkering with a historically exhausted form instead of articulating the ever-progressing spirit of modernity.

Absolute music was evidently something to be negated in Wagner's dialectic of music history. The force of his argument was inspired by the Young Hegelians who had pushed the logic of Hegel's dialectical method to negate Hegel himself, in the hope that the long delayed promises of the French Revolution might finally be realised on German soil instead of evaporating in to what they regarded as the rarefied atmosphere of Hegel's speculative metaphysics and the religious abstractions that went with it. By 1846, revolution was in the air, and Wagner, under the pressure of world history, wanted to force music into a new synthesis that would seize the political initiative for the future.