teorema Vol. XXXI/3, 2012, pp. 137-148 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2012) 31:3; pp. 137-148]

Contrarianism in the Philosophy of Music and the Role of the Idea in Musical Hermeneutics and

Performance Interpretation1

Sara E. Eckerson RESUMEN

El tema central de este ensayo es la investigación de dos tipos de interpretación musical: la interpretación crítica en la tradición de la hermenéutica musical y la inter-pretación como ejecución. Se discutirá también la filosofía de la música de Søren Kierkegaard en relación, específicamente, con el tema de cómo una idea puede ser expresada por medio de la música. Las interpretaciones hermenéutico-musical y de la ejecución serán vistas, en el caso de Richard Wagner, no como actividades irreconci-liables, sino más bien como la progresión de un argumento basado en la ilustración del significado tangible en música. PALABRAS CLAVE: hermenéutica musical, interpretación musical, significado musical, Richard Wagner, G.W.F. Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard ABSTRACT

Two kinds of musical interpretation will be explored in this essay: critical inter-pretation in the tradition of musical hermeneutics and interpretation as performance. Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of music will also be discussed, specifically on how an idea in music is expressed. Richard Wagner’s musical hermeneutic and perform-ance interpretations will emerge from this background not as irreconcilable activities, but rather as the progression of an argument based on the illustration of tangible meaning in music. KEYWORDS: Musical Hermeneutics; Musical Interpretation; Musical Meaning; Rich-ard Wagner; G.W.F. Hegel; Søren Kierkegaard.

In this essay, I will examine a performance Wagner conducted of Bee-thoven’s Ninth Symphony (Op. 125) in 1846. This study will be directed at both Wagner’s critical interpretation (exhibited in the program he wrote for the occasion) and his interpretation as performance. I will show that it is in the spirit of contrarianism that Wagner proposes a specific way of hearing

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Beethoven’s Ninth, aimed in part to correct the understanding of the music by his spectators. This kind of contrarianism will be understood in a context with G.W.F Hegel’s philosophy to identify strategies in Wagner’s perform-ance and program to achieve this goal. A.B. Marx’s writings will be consid-ered in light of Wagner’s wish to convey the musical idea of Beethoven’s work. The concept of an idea as an element for understanding the meaning of a musical work from a philosophical and hermeneutic perspective, and the ar-ticulation of this idea in performance, will show us an affinity between Wagner’s method and Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Kierkegaard’s discussions of Don Giovanni (KV 527), and the idea of this work, will be brought forward specifically regarding how this idea can be manifested in performance. Thus the attention to specific detail of performance and the strain of contrarianism in Kierkegaard’s texts to correct spectators’ and performers’ understanding of the musical meaning of the work will provide us with insight into a method that is demonstrated by Wagner: the consideration of an idea in music and the mobilization of it via critical and performance interpretations intended for the establishment of this idea and instruction regarding its identification in its musical context.

Wagner’s critical program was specifically prepared to accompany his performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, on Palm Sunday in Dresden, 1846. The event gave Wagner the ability to present his critical interpretation of the Ninth in the form of his program, and the opportunity to exhibit his own performance interpretation of it, thereby creating a manifestation in two mediums of the work’s meaning. The performance included Wagner’s infa-mous orchestration amendments and changes to the original score (in addi-tion to his conducting), such as a three hundred-person choir positioned on a specially built semi-circle platform surrounding the orchestra in an “amphi-theater fashion” [see Wagner (1911), pp. 394–5].2 The program text is intro-duced as an aid especially to those who have never heard Beethoven’s symphony before: it serves the purpose of preparing the audience, giving a glimpse of the whole. The main theme throughout the text is to present the general “moods” of the different symphonic movements, as well as specific moods or images that arise at particular moments within these movements. The moods he describes range from “utter joylessness” in the first movement, “homely happiness” in the second, “sweet nostalgia” in the third, and “joy” in the fourth [Wagner (2005), pp. 63-8]. As a means to grasp the meaning of this musical work, Wagner makes a critical decision to cite Goethe’s Faust throughout the explication of the instrumental movements as he believes Goethe’s words “express the higher human moods of the soul that underlie [the Ninth Symphony]” [Wagner (2005), p. 62]. The particular moments or moods of greatest interest to Wagner are elucidated with a short narrative of the type “in isolated flashes of light, we glimpse the melancholy sweet smile of fortune” [Wagner (2005), p. 63] to describe the first movement, along with

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citations of Faust at length. Goethe is referred to in the program such that his work renders the concepts or “moods”, as well as the feelings and ideas that are otherwise hidden within Beethoven’s work intelligible. Goethe and Beethoven are used in these instances by Wagner to show a peculiar achievement, a tow-ering height of expression in both poetry and music. An additional hermeneu-tic complexity arises from Wagner’s treatment of the separate citations of Faust because they emerge as objects in their own right. These citations are accompanied by a peculiar strength because Goethe’s name is referred to throughout, without a mention of Friedrich Schiller when Schiller’s poetry is cited. The continuity between the musical to poetic references demonstrates Wagner found a convenient method for his purpose of showing how Goethe’s poetry along with Beethoven’s symphony both “sublimely” express the moods of the soul [see Wagner (2005), p. 62].

Reflecting on this method of combination of authors and works, Witt-genstein provides us with a befitting comment, “I hear that someone is paint-ing a picture, ‘Beethoven writing the ninth symphony’. I could easily imagine the kind of thing such a picture would shew us. But suppose someone wanted to represent what Goethe would have looked like writing the ninth sym-phony? Here I could imagine nothing that would not be embarrassing and ri-diculous” [Wittgenstein (2001), p. 156]. In his program, Wagner edges on no less than a representation or portrayal of Goethe writing the Ninth Symphony, as it is Goethe’s poetry that “conveys”, “articulates”, and “depicts” feelings likened to moments in Beethoven’s music. Consequently, this method crys-tallizes particulars within the whole of the symphony that a modest spectator could grasp. It further maintains, relatively explicitly, that Goethe’s work is more easily comprehended than Beethoven’s; thus Goethe’s “Ninth” would be a clearer picture exhibiting meaning than the original composed by Beethoven. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether such a method obscures the mean-ing of Beethoven’s music, eclipsed by the content of Goethe’s poetry.

For this reason, it is pertinent to determine what was the object, or idea, that inspired Wagner to make parallels of this kind in his program. To under-stand why Wagner may have chosen this method of description, we can turn to the influence of G.W.F. Hegel on Wagner’s thought. Although there are many dimensions attributed to Hegel’s influence, a strong thread throughout is Hegel’s claim that instrumental music has a vagueness of content and feel-ing, such that when a libretto is added to instrumental music it has the ability to help the listener gain a clearer idea of what the composer was imagining when composing the work [Hegel (1975), p. 934]. Thus, it is of relevance to see from a Hegelian perspective that Wagner, to clarify content and the musi-cal meaning in Beethoven’s Ninth, provides additional poetic text or frag-mented libretto alongside the original libretto to structure and impart meaning to “vague” sonorous space or the abstract, object-free inner life of the first three movements of the symphony. Yet another parallel to Hegel’s aesthetics

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can be discerned in the way Wagner links Goethe’s poetry so it bridles the movement of the otherwise abstract music, as Hegel firmly believes music would prefer to move on its own. This trajectory corresponds to rules of mu-sical sound, and consequently unhindered by the (arguably necessary) sup-port of words that would otherwise provide a “clearer and firmer unfolding of [ideas and feelings]” from within the music [Hegel (1975), p. 960]. It is in this manner that Goethe’s poetry is inserted in Wagner’s program to catch pivotal moments in the music, e.g. the transition between the third and fourth movements, the general feeling of the whole third movement, and the separa-tion of the second movement into a pseudo-introduction and middle section. Importantly, Wagner’s method is not exactly the introduction of a poem to serve as the text over an already established melody, but rather a foundation or support to be stored in one’s memory and brought out as an aid for hear-ing; Goethe’s verse serves the purpose of better understanding the musical work, much like using opera glasses at the opera, rather than merely support-ing something that has no content or strength on its own. Wagner is clear that the music is indeed powerful with commentary like, “how differently do these tones touch our hearts!” [Wagner (1994), p. 64], but nevertheless it is necessary to fortify the elements that touch our soul and have an effect on us, which is all the more felt in Goethe’s work.

We find another component of Wagner’s philosophy related to under-standing musical works, and the ideas contained in them, is Beethoven’s in-fluence on Wagner, with respect to understanding musical expression, poetic content, and possibilities in composition. For example, in his essay “Beethoven” (1870), Wagner writes of Beethoven as a musical dramatist, specifically in symphony, combining poetry with music to express intelligible content and not only emotional feelings [Kühnel (1992), p. 622]. When we see the word “poetry” in this context, it is understood that Wagner’s statement is directed at Beethoven’s Ninth, his only symphony that incorporates poetry sensu stricto. Furthermore, the content of the Ninth is supported and commentary generally reflects the revised Friedrich Schiller poem “An die Freude” (1785) from the libretto, which arguably neglects the fact that this text only appears in the final movement; albeit the task of unifying the parts of the symphony in a coherent whole is helped by Schiller’s libretto, such analysis places a great amount of weight on Schiller’s poem (that was corrupted by Beethoven). Analysis of Beethoven’s Ninth that follows this model generally encounters the danger where rather than drawing on all four movements equally to construct a meaningful whole, one strong idea emerges in the last movement that renders the other movements as subsidiary content to the final movement. Wagner’s method, whereby combining the libretto with passages from Goethe, imparts progress and continuity through the whole musical work. Yet Wagner pro-vides a longer explication of the final movement, suggesting the subsidiary nature of the preceding movements to the choral finale, which in turn reflects

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subsidiary nature of the preceding movements to the choral finale, which in turn reflects a notion of whole that is only comprehensible and self-contained in the final movement.

Wagner specifically intended his program to be primarily for those who had probably never heard the Ninth before, and secondly to make the moods expressed by it more tangible [see Wagner (2005), p. 62]. We can explore the motivation behind a program with these intentions if we recall the reception of some of Beethoven’s other works from his third period, approximately 1818 to 1827. Carl Dahlhaus describes at the first performances of Beetho-ven’s late string quartets (Opp. 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135 [1824-26]), au-diences thought they were victims of a joke, and felt they understood nothing of what happened in the music. Nevertheless, they maintained the belief that what they had heard “harbored a meaning, which with sufficient effort could be made intelligible” [Dahlhaus (1989), p. 10] even if they could not pin it down in the moment of listening. What is captured from the audience’s feel-ings is that, although lacking knowledge of formal music theory and compo-sitional techniques, the spectators were able to grasp the notion that the musical work meant something beyond a mere pleasurable experience felt when in the presence of a play of tones. Although Wagner is not the first mu-sic commentator to explain the meaning of a musical work in theoretical terms, as well as in light of aesthetic concepts and ideas, his text presents a curious undertaking: the presentation of meaning in Beethoven’s Ninth in the most concise manner possible (that is, short enough to fit on a concert pro-gram) so a layman might understand what is expressed in the music and pro-vide that individual with the possibility of grasping the greater meaning of Beethoven’s symphony.

The claims above nonetheless point to a conclusion that in order to un-derstand (that is, understand for one’s self) a work such as Beethoven’s Ninth, it is necessary to have knowledge about musical form, in addition to being able to talk about it on a level for non-musical experts. In Dahlhaus’s account mentioned earlier, two moments in hearing and understanding a mu-sical work of a kind like Beethoven’s arise: 1) hearing a piece and finding it agreeable sonorously, technically, etc.; 2) grasping the ‘aesthetic concept’ be-hind a work. The first moment is one like the musicologist A.B. Marx (1795-1866) describes in his Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen (1875). He writes that music can be identified as a play of tones upon the ear that can ei-ther serve as its own “self-satisfied goal” or can be identified as having a purpose toward expressing “a distinct goal that lies outside of itself, and has its own profound significance in all the arts and in human existence overall” [Marx (1997), p. 175]. Thus the first task of the listener is to determine whether the music is a mere play of tones, “a primal music [Urmusik]” or if it contains a distinct goal. The second moment involves a more critical ear and a listener who is “aesthetically prepared” for grasping the meaning. This aes-

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thetic concept is akin to Marx’s conception of an Idee as a concept residing in the music that a critic must discern and recognize without the benefit of a sci-entific conclusion supporting the nature of it and thus involves a critic’s spiri-tual investment to determine; It is the Idee that speaks to the goal of a piece of music that has a purpose beyond a free-play of tones. The Idee is thus “em-ployed as a symbol of the critic’s intuition about the wholeness and spiritual elevation of the musical work” [Burnham (1990), p. 190]. A relative to Marx’s Idee is the concept of “poetic idea” portrayed by Beethoven’s secretary Anton Schindler (1795-1864) in an unreliable account from his biography Bi-ographie von Ludwig van Beethoven (1840) as a device Beethoven also re-marked about to Carl Czerny, Franz Wegeler, and Ferdinand Ries [see T.S. Grey (1995), p. 52]. Schindler relates, “Beethoven hoped to convey the inner ‘poetic idea’ that had led him to compose each of his various works, and thus make possible a true understanding of them” [Schindler (1996), p. 400]. Wagner himself was familiar with Schindler’s biography and consequently with Beethoven’s (unknowing of Schindler’s forgeries and fabrications3) concept of the “poetic idea”, although he felt Beethoven had achieved a method of presenting this in his middle period (specifically Symphony No. 3, Op. 55, “Eroica” and Symphony No. 5, Op. 67), but he failed at it in his later period demonstrated by the problematic reception of these pieces [Grey (1995), p. 53]. It is in a progress toward theories like those presented in “The Art-Work of the Future” (1849)4 that we can identify Wagner’s appropriation of aesthetic concepts and poetic ideas in his program, to glorify the perspec-tive of how a literary text can combine with music to present a significant ap-prehensible meaning.

Wagner’s program text however was indeed subordinate to another in-terpretation of his own making; his critical interpretation gave rise to an ac-tive form: the aural experience of his Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony performance. (Even if Wagner conceived his performance interpretation prior to writing the program, the program is presented first to the listener at his concert.) This process shows the strength in Wagner’s contrarianism: we have two kinds of interpretations, which serve as guiding forces combining to mold a listener’s personal experience and opinions of the event. Considering the liberties taken by Wagner when conducting the Ninth, his performance interpretation should have helped many audience members grasp the ideas or “moods” of the work in the moment it was being performed. Similarly, his program text would have provided a different kind of determining of inde-terminate tones because the spectator would ideally reflect on the text while listening. Wagner’s performance interpretations were described as “expres-sively explicit performances” [Breckbill (2001), p. 101] and suggest a par-ticular agenda directed toward an audience’s comprehension, an agenda of showing how the piece should be understood. For example, if we take into account the three hundred-person choir Wagner enlisted to perform the final

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movement of the Ninth Symphony, we can presume the proportion the audi-ence heard what Wagner considered to be the “poetic idea”.

Against the backdrop of Wagner’s persuasion of his listeners, we draw a strong parallel to Søren Kierkegaard’s work related to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni (KV 527, 1787) in “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic” of Either/Or (1843). The kind of aural and philosophical exercise Kierkegaard demonstrates in his writing differs from Wagner’s method of approaching the meaning of a musical work: firstly, Kierkegaard is unable to produce an interpretation as performance; secondly, Kierkegaard’s hermeneutic understanding of the opera is based on a spatial kind of musical memory that recreates the motives of the operatic characters as interacting in space together; and thirdly, Kierkegaard’s philosophical and critical com-ments came to fruition via repeated attendance to operatic performances from a particular time period. (To complicate a contemporary understanding of how Kierkegaard may have witnessed the opera, many of the performances were in the form of a Singspiel, with spoken recitatives, and almost always with a Danish translation of the libretto.)5 It is of interest to focus on the thread of contrarianism present in Kierkegaard’s thought, mainly in the cor-rection of his reader’s way of listening or understanding the work, as a spec-tator at the opera. One of the examples of his visualization of motivic themes, crucial for his hermeneutic understanding of the opera (and as a result his contrarianism emerges in a clearer light than Wagner’s) is when he argues the idea of Don Giovanni is within Donna Elvira’s aria “Ah chi me dice mai” (No. 3 Aria: Act I, Scene V).6 Kierkegaard’s argument proceeds in this fash-ion: physically, on stage, there is a separation of characters (they cannot see each other), however this separation is not maintained in the music. What one hears is not one character separately, disconnected from the whole, but rather the characters (their motivic representation, or musical manifestations) inter-acting in space that is heard by the listener and interpreted as content or evi-dence for the idea of the whole. For Kierkegaard, Don Giovanni is proposed as the dominant tone that supports the whole [Kierkegaard (1987), p. 119]. The connections between characters are thus constructed via their sonorous presentation and the musical memory of the listener, rather than by purely theoretical links in the musical text or theatrical maneuvers as showcased in the opera’s plot. Kierkegaard describes Donna Elvira’s aria accordingly, “the spectator…should not see [Don Giovanni] together with Elvira in the unity of the situation; he should hear him in Elvira, through Elvira, for it is indeed Don Giovanni who is singing, but he sings in such a way that the more de-veloped the spectator’s ear, the more it seems to him as if it came from Elvira herself” [Kierkegaard (1987), p. 122]. From this perspective we understand the idea of the whole manifests itself in the aural experience of the listener, and not in the physical representation. Further, we recognize a very strong thread of Wagnerian contrarianism within his text, because even though Kierkegaard

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lacks advanced musical training, he strongly remarks towards an ideal per-formance of the opera. This is projected in several directions, suggesting a conviction for particular elements to be represented on stage in the perform-ance in a manner that, if he had had Wagner’s talent, he very well could have made his own creation as paramount conductor and form an agreement be-tween his writings and their realization as a performance.

Kierkegaard’s theories related to the performance of the opera, and the techniques to achieve a specific effect relevant to the meaningful content of the opera, is best portrayed in “A Cursory Observation Concerning a Detail in Don Giovanni” (1845).7 The focus of these texts is on Zerlina and Don Giovanni’s duet “Là ci darem la mano” [No. 7, Duettino Act I, Scene IX]. Boldly Kierkegaard claims, as he takes up study of this aria and the character of Zerlina, that generally people find these topics unworthy of aesthetic ex-ploration [Kierkegaard (1982), p. 36]. Kierkegaard expresses his opposition to this opinion, and directs his comments both to spectators of the opera and the actors singing the roles of Don Giovanni and Zerlina. For example, he writes Zerlina must not reflect much on her seduction. Developing this thought, he recalls an error committed by the Danish actress who performed the part [Madame Boline Abrahamsen Kragh (1810-1839)], stating she should have sung the line of the aria “No, I will not” (of the duettino in ques-tion) without determination and resolve. For Kierkegaard, this error expresses an act of reflection, “if reflection is attributed to [Zerlina] at this point, the whole opera is a failure” [Kierkegaard (1982), 30]. Instead, he suggests Zer-lina should sing the aria in a manner “au niveau [on the same level] with spontaneous gestures, for example, clutching her apron or repulsing Don Giovanni’s embrace” [Kierkegaard (1982), p. 31]. Rooted in this ideal por-trayal of Zerlina is the idea that Zerlina must not have an ability to reflect; if she had this capacity, she would not be “spontaneously” related to Don Gio-vanni in a “purely musical relation” because her character would represent a purpose of being against Don Giovanni. The meaning of Zerlina’s character would thereby turn into a negative element in the whole of the opera, rather than a positive one. It is in the performance interpretation of Zerlina’s naïveté and innocence that we see an important mark of transition between the meaning in the musical text in performance (according to Kierkegaard’s understanding of Mozart’s opera), and Kierkegaard’s hermeneutic and philosophical reflec-tions presented in “The Immediate Erotic Stages”.

The relations between the performance indications of “A Cursory Ob-servation” and the hermeneutic interpretation in “The Immediate Erotic Stages” are even more explicit in suggestions on how best to perform Elvira’s aria “Ah chi me dice mai”, previously described in “The Immediate Erotic Stages” [see Kierkegaard (1987), pp. 121-123]. Nevertheless, in “A Cursory Observation”, Kierkegaard criticizes the actor playing Don Giovanni [Jørgen Hansen, (1812-1880)], much in the same way he criticized Madame Kragh’s

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interpretation of Zerlina: the opera fails to present the work’s idea when per-formers incorrectly represent its meaning and content. Kierkegaard describes the scene when Elvira is singing “Ah chi me dice mai”, Don Giovanni should not sing the words “Poverina, poverina” to anyone in particular, nor should he sing the words distinctly; Don Giovanni is “standing there pondering and anticipating pleasure. Therefore, imagination must be combined with the voice, and the irony must not arise in Don Giovanni’s reflecting on the rela-tionship but must be in the mind of the spectator, who understands Don Gio-vanni” [Kierkegaard (1982), p. 34]. Kierkegaard presses this further, “the matchless effect of the situation … is to be sought in the total effect, as a writer has pointed out” [Kierkegaard (1982), p. 34]. The “total effect” is not only in the actors’ movements or the whole performance of the opera, but the spectators of the performance and their ability to understand the content as Kierkegaard elucidates. In addition, Kierkegaard’s comment enters into a dia-logue with his own work, by the “other writer”, thus forming a bridge of con-tinuity between his philosophical/hermeneutic text of “The Immediate Erotic Stages” and “A Cursory Observation”. We identify the intent of these texts is to express and mold his audience’s perspective and understanding, much like we find exhibited in Wagner’s program and performance interpretations.

The theory Kierkegaard presents in “The Immediate Erotic Stages”, viz. the dominant tone of the opera Don Giovanni is the idea of Don Giovanni that embodies the sensuous-immediate in its elemental originality, speaks to an idea that reaches beyond the musical text. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard’s partial reliance on the libretto for his theory about the opera, is not necessar-ily a different practice from what Wagner does in his program whereby draw-ing on the Ninth’s libretto, in addition to supplementary text from Goethe. Kierkegaard’s supplementary text(s) in mind, arguably E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Don Juan (1813), Molière’s, Dom Juan (1665), Laurids Kruse’s Danish translation of Da Ponte’s libretto (1807), Friedrich Rochlitz’s German trans-lation of Da Ponte’s libretto (1801), and Christian Dietrich Grabbe’s Don Juan und Faust (1829), aid in his formation of the history of the idea of Don Giovanni. However we find these texts already integrated in the thought; no specific work’s idea forces itself on the opera in Kierkegaard’s overall argu-ment. Furthermore, what Kierkegaard’s chapter does is encourage his reader to engage in listening to the work. In the form of suggestions, though as per-suasion towards a different way of listening and understanding a work, invita-tions come forth like, “hear the unrestrained craving of passion, hear the sighing of erotic love…hear, hear, hear Mozart’s Don Giovanni” [Kierkegaard (1987), p. 103]. Yet even more profoundly, Kierkegaard expresses fierce dis-agreement regarding a certain kind of interpretation critics make involving physical descriptions of Don Giovanni to illustrate his character. To demon-strate, Kierkegaard himself composes a description, in an exaggerated Ro-mantic style, of Don Giovanni resting “on the lake shore in the luminous night”

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[see Kierkegaard (1987), p. 103]. His “attentive reader” is accordingly infuri-ated with such an insult to Kierkegaard’s own listening-focused theory for grasping the character of Don Giovanni. The violent reaction Kierkegaard’s reader has to the visual representation clearly embodies Kierkegaard’s own opinion. He also alludes to the fact that his readers are surely aware of critical and literary examples that portray Don Giovanni as such, and therefore in-structs them to steer clear of these in order to gain a higher understanding of the idea. When Kierkegaard rejects the lake shore picture of Don Giovanni, primarily the reaction is founded on a principal inherited from Hegel, simi-larly reflected in Wagner, which is a conviction that music only exists in the moment it is performed, thus constraining it to an immediate sensuous me-dium, lacking reflection, and resulting in indeterminacy [Kierkegaard (1987), p. 70]. Kierkegaard on the one hand resolves some amount of the indeterminacy of tones by utilizing phrases or situations from the libretto, thereby relying on the words appropriate for determining meaning in the long run. However, on the other hand, the picture a spectator holds in their imagination of Don Giovanni must be thrown out in order to comprehend the idea of the opera.

In conclusion, Kierkegaard’s method of philosophical explication and per-formance indications for interpretation affords a clarifying look into Wagner’s program and performance interpretations of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. What we find mirrored in Kierkegaard is a process of argumentation: it is not sufficient to explain the idea of a musical work via a critical or musical her-meneutic analysis, but also importantly to capture the idea in the performance interpretation. Essentially it is the performance of the work that must submit to this design as the idea can be described in words but must also unfold in the hearing of the musical work. However, in order for this idea to be thor-oughly understood by spectators, the philosophy put forward both by Kierke-gaard and Wagner expresses a strong sense of contrarianism toward the public opinion or a previous experience an individual may have had with the work in question. The underlying scheme is for the spectator to listen to one voice, be it the voice of Kierkegaard conveyed in a Mozart-vehicle, or the voice of Wagner conveyed in a Beethoven-vehicle, transferred through a critical explication and thus rendering the meaning of the musical work intel-ligible through the ideal performance of it, whereby constructing the platform for their philosophy. Program in Literary Theory Faculty of Letters University of Lisbon Alameda da Universidade, 1600-214 Lisboa, Portugal E-mail: seeckerson@fcsh.unl.pt

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NOTES 1 My deepest thanks to Professor Miguel Tamen for his advice on the whole of

this article. Many thanks to Professor Elisabete M. de Sousa for her comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for European Philosophy & The Forum for European Philosophy (2011), and I am appre-ciative of the resulting discussion. I am grateful to the members of the project Intention, Action, and the Philosophy of Art, Institute for Philosophy of Language, New University of Lisbon and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia for their support.

2 Wagner’s performance is recently discussed in Raymond Holden (2011), “The Iconic Symphony: Performing Beethoven’s Ninth Wagner’s Way” in The Musical Times, Vol. 152, N. 1917, pp. 3-14.

3 Schindler’s forgeries became known to the musicological community ap-proximately in the early 1970’s, see Theodore Albrecht (2009), “Anton Schindler as Destroyer and Forger of Beethoven’s Conversation Books: A Case for Decriminaliza-tion” in Music’s Intellectual History, Zdravko Blažeković, Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (eds.), New York: Répertoire International de la Littérature Musicale, pp. 169-82.

4 See Richard Wagner (1850), Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft [1849], Leipzig: Otto Wigand, pp. 93-103.

5 For additional information regarding Kierkegaard’s reception of Mozart’s operas, see Elisabete M. De Sousa (2009), “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Love for Music and the Music of Love,” in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions, ed. Jon Stewart, Tome III: Literature, Drama and Music, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 137-168.

6 All aria references from W.A. Mozart (2005), Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni [1787]: Dramma giocoso in zwei Akten , KV 527, BA 4550a, Kassel: Bärenreiter.

7 The two texts with this title served as two parts of a review of the opera, printed in Fædrelandets Feuilleton, no. 1890-91, May 19-20, 1845. “A Cursory Ob-servation”, like “The Immediate Erotic Stages”, was written under Kierkegaard’s pseudonym A. REFERENCES BURNHAM, S. (1990), ‘Criticism, Faith, and the “Idea”: A. B. Marx’s Early Reception

of Beethoven’, 19th-Century Music, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 183-92. BRECKBILL, D. (2001), ‘Wagner as Conductor’, in Millington, B. (ed.), The Wagner

Compendium: A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music, London: Thames & Hudson, pp. 99-102.

DAHLHAUS, C. (1989), Nineteenth-Century Music. Bradford Robinson, J. (trans.), Berkeley: University of California Press.

GREY, T. S. (1995), Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Co ntexts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

HEGEL, G. W. F. (1975), Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art [1835], vol. II, Knox, T. M. (trans.), Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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KIERKEGAARD, S. (1982), ‘A Cursory Observation Concerning a Detail in Don Gio-vanni [1845]’ in The Corsair Affair and articles related to the writings. Hong, H.V. and Hong, E.H. (eds. and trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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