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.
Indeed, the status of Wagner’s writings in isolation from his creative oeuvre is problematic in assessing his importance as a “philosopher” of music and the arts. His activity as a writer was intermittent, eclectic, undisciplined, and generally self-serving. Not only did he change his views about the nature and purpose of music and opera over time, but also the views themselves are frequently expressed in a style of such unexampled obfuscation that it is often extremely difficult to arrive at any clear reading of their significance. His own intellectual idol, Schopenhauer, offers a diagnosis of the problem when he describes in the preface to the second edition (1844) of The World as Will and Representation the ill effects of his intellectual nemesis, Hegel, with regard to the vacuous prolixity of German philosophical writing in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Without having acquired a proper understanding of Kant’s legitimately difficult idealism, writers of the post-Hegelian generation “are early accustomed to regard the hollowest verbiage as philosophical thoughts, the most miserable sophisms as sagacity, and silly craziness as dialectic; and by accepting frantic word-combinations in which the mind torments and exhausts itself in vain to conceive something, their heads are disorganized” (Schopenhauer 1969: vol. 2, xxiv). As he moved from the occasional journalism of his earlier years to tackling a large-scale systematic aesthetic critique in the so-called “Zurich” writings produced during the first years of his political exile (1849–52), Wagner found himself enmeshed in just such neo-Hegelian discursive toils. His passionate views about the relation of art and artists to society, of music to poetry and drama, of his own works to Beethoven or Weber (or for that matter, Meyerbeer) are by no means without substance; but they are routinely “tormented” by just the kind of “frantic word-combinations” Schopenhauer had complained of (Schopenhauer 1969: vol. 1, xxiv), leaving the reader more exhausted than enlightened. Wagner himself was well aware of this, and it is one reason there still exists no practical English translation of his major writings. After starting the Ring cycle and after his initiation into Schopenhauer, the writings are fewer, shorter, and concern a broader range of subjects. The style itself, however, was never substantially reformed.
The following short analysis of Wagner’s relevance to the philosophy of music summarizes some themes, terminology, and relevant cultural networks of the major groups of his published writings: the casual musical journalism up to his time as Kapellmeister in Dresden in the 1840s; the “Zurich” essays written in the aftermath of the 1848–49 political insurgencies across the European continent, outlining a new genre of musical drama; and some isolated essays on musical-aesthetic topics published during the period of his mature works, notably the retrospective on his earlier theories published under the title “Zukunftsmusik” (“Music of the Future,” 1861 (Wagner 1979)) and the Schopenhauer-influenced essay for the 1870 Beethoven centennial (Wagner 1895–99: vol. 5).
As he gravitated toward a career in music from the late 1820s and into the 1830s, Wagner was torn between a cultural and perhaps philosophical allegiance to the symphonic tradition of Viennese classicism, above all the recently canonized genius of Beethoven, and a temperamental affinity with the conjunction of poetry, music, and theater in opera. By 1833 at the latest (when he composed his first operatic score, Die Feen), he had definitively cast his lot with opera, and despite unrealized hopes to write additional symphonies or symphonic poems of some kind in his retirement (that is, after Parsifal, 1882), he rarely strayed from his chosen vocation. The allegiance to Beethoven and a “German” symphonic ideal continued to be carefully cultivated as part of his artistic persona, however, as evidenced throughout his writings, his autobiographical texts, and his activity as a conductor.
A dialectic of symphony and opera is fundamental to Wagner’s musical aesthetics, despite their shifting contours, throughout his life. The dialectic is fundamental to many issues in the philosophy of music during the whole nineteenth century, and, indeed, across much of the history of Western music, if we use it to frame questions about the relation of music to language, whether in evolutionary terms, in terms of musical expression and signification, or in terms of compositional technique. Wagner continually interrogated the sophisticated symphonic language his generation had inherited from Beethoven, on one hand, and the highly evolved conventions of opera as he learned them from Mozart, Weber, Marschner, and the major Italian and French composers of the early nineteenth century, on the other. Critics since the later Nietzsche have been skeptical about Wagnerian claims for a perfected, higher synthesis of symphony and opera. But as a theorist of operatic “reform” and as a composer for the theater, Wagner was always looking to both traditions in debating questions as to what music can signify or express on its own, how it is inflected by the words it sets, by the gestures and larger structures of drama, and by the images, symbols, or archetypes of myth.
The pattern of Wagner’s education and early professional career – a reverent absorption of German/Viennese instrumental classics (plus a little Bach) followed by an apprenticeship in the field of opera – is also reflected in the themes of his earlier writings. Almost from the beginning he understood it as his mission to advance the existing German hegemony in the realm of instrumental music into the wider musical public sphere of opera. This mission is adumbrated already in the very first paragraph of his very first published work, a brief article “On German Opera” in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt (10 June 1834). “By all means, we have a field of music which belongs to us by right, – and that is Instrumental-music; – but a German Opera we have not, and for the selfsame reason that we own no national Drama. We are too intellectual and much to learned to create warm human figures” (Wagner 1895–99: vol. 8, 55). Contemporary German opera composers such as Weber and Spohr are seen to lack a proper sense for “song,” by which the young Wagner means the art of singing, generally, but also its perfection in the cantabile of Italian bel canto opera. “Song, after all, is the organ whereby a man may musically express himself; and so long as it is not fully developed, he is wanting in true speech” (Wagner 1895–99: vol. 8, 55). Channeling the paradigmatically German art (or science, Wissenschaft) of music into a new form of “national” drama, animating this with “warm human figures” (what he would later celebrate as “the purely human”), and communicating it through the “true speech” of singing – all this would continue to define the aims of the great Wagnerian project up to the end of his life.
Even at the moment he was completing what was to be his big operatic breakthrough, Rienzi (1838–40), a work one might fairly describe as “absolute opera,” Wagner could extol the essentially German virtues of purely instrumental music and the culture of private domestic music-making or Hausmusik. An essay “On German Music,” published in the Parisian Revue et gazette musicale in 1840, paraphrases E. T. A. Hoffmann’s paean to the Romantic values of instrumental music, where the listener’s imagination “is not restricted to the expression of a single specific passion,” and where he can “lose himself in the great realm of indefinite feeling” (Wagner 1973: 41). At the same time he also echoes the earlier writer’s belief in the potential of a new Romantic genre of German opera, as expressed in Hoffmann’s 1813 vignette “The Poet and the Composer.” For the young Wagner, however, there are two routes toward this ideal: the application of the German’s “universalizing” genius to the advancement of contemporary international (Italian and French) operatic idioms, and a synthesis of operatic and symphonic languages into a new, more potent (German) genre.
The lodestar of this second route was a work Hoffmann never knew, the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. In another piece from 1840, imagining the “pilgrimage” of an idealistic young German musician to Beethoven in Vienna in the early 1820s, Wagner turns the aging symphonic composer into a mouthpiece for the “musical-dramatic artwork of the future” he would later go on to theorize at length. “Why shouldn’t vocal music be considered as great and serious as instrumental music?” asks Wagner’s Beethoven. The symphony thrives on the expression of infinitely malleable, indefinite feelings, intimations of the sublime and the infinite. “The genius of the voice,” this fictive Beethoven opines, “is completely different: this represents the human heart, the separate individual sensibility, limited, but clear and definite. Imagine, now, these two elements brought together and united!” (Wagner 1973: 80). Modern opera had cultivated all the advances of instrumental virtuosity in its orchestral accompaniments, and its vocal writing had emulated these as well. What it lacked, however, was a symphonic ambition of Beethovenian proportions. While Wagner understood that Beethoven’s choral-symphonic setting of Schiller’s ode “To Joy” in the finale of the Ninth was no more explicitly “dramatic” in genre than the orchestral movements preceding it, the gesture of appending this vocal movement to his last and most audacious symphony was of immense symbolic value. When Wagner conducted the Ninth in April 1846, in Dresden, he published a hermeneutic gloss on the whole symphony drawing on quotations from Goethe’s Faust. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that music of this kind possessed an expressive or imaginative “content” that could be poetically intimated, if never semantically fixed. He locates the symbolic crux of the work not so much in the hymnlike setting of Schiller’s verses, but in the way in which Beethoven moves from tones to words. With the shattering harmonic dissonances that open the finale and the urgent instrumental recitative that follows, the music “leaves behind the character of pure instrumental music . . . the realm of infinite and indistinct expression,” preparing “the entrance of language and the human voice as something both anticipated and necessary”; “nearly transgressing the boundaries of absolute music, this recitative engages the other instruments with its powerfully emotional discourse, pressing for some resolution, and finally issuing in a lyrical theme” (trans. Grey 2009: 376). It was not the musical style but the revolutionary gesture of this passage that would fuel much of the theoretical speculation Wagner was soon to undertake as a prelude to the creation of his magnum opus, the Ring of the Nibelung cycle.
The overriding message of the three increasingly lengthy essays Wagner wrote during the first three years of his political exile in Zurich – Art and Revolution (1849), The Artwork of the Future (1849), and Opera and Drama (1850–51) – was that the arts, in order to remain culturally relevant in the life of modern peoples and nations, needed to collaborate in a new way. The truly relevant arts, however, were really just drama and music. The imperfect wedding of these in the existing genre of opera is critiqued in first of the three parts of the longest essay, Opera and Drama, starting from a manifesto-like statement embedded in the preface to the book: “The error of the genre of opera has consisted in this: that a means of expression (the music) has been made the end, while the end of this expression (the drama) has been made a means” (Wagner 1984: 19). The three large parts of Opera and Drama then go about detailing the shortcomings of conventional operatic practice, in which more or less “purely musical” values provide a framework for mere vocal display and theatrical spectacle (part 1); reflecting on the nature and history of spoken drama and the importance of myth (part 2); and outlining in general terms the nature of the musical-dramatic “artwork of the future” that must supplant the failing genre of opera (part 3), including proposals about language (Stabreim or alliterative verse), the hierarchical integration of “poetic-musical periods,” and a network of associative “melodic moments” or what would later be known as “leitmotifs.” Music may be, in the end, the most potent element of this new genre (one Wagner could not bring himself to saddle with a specific generic designation). However, its ultimate cultural significance rests on its presentation of a mythic content in dramatic form, speaking to the entirety of the Volk (people) and not just to affluent fans of music and singing.
The revolutionary impulse that gave rise to these “Zurich” essays is more overt in the preceding two, which also concern a revaluation of ends and means, in a broader sense. The title Art and Revolution might suggest that Wagner was advocating the use of art as a means toward achieving social or political reforms, in the manner of politically committed artists in the twentieth century. While he does claim that art must be regarded as “the outcome of political life” and as “a social product” (Wagner 1888: vol. 3, 9), he is not thinking here in terms of agitprop. His notion of the “ends” of art is rather more in line with those of the Weimar classicism of Goethe and Schiller, above all the notion that drama has the potential to educate and edify the public in ways that will contribute to a gradual improvement of society and its institutions. Art (drama) is to this extent a means to a social-political end, albeit a vague and idealized one, tending toward that of cultural nation-building. As a means, the individual arts must be re-integrated into a collective art such as the Greeks had once possessed in their tragedy.
The Wagnerian coinage Gesamtkunstwerk – the total, collective, or communal work of art – is first applied by Wagner to that ancient Greek tragedy (1888: vol. 3, 12). With the decline of ancient tragedy, he explains, art ceased to be “the expression of public consciousness.” “The drama was dissolved into its constituent parts: rhetoric, painting, music, and the rest all left one by one, the circle in which they had once moved in concert, so that each alone might pursue its own path and develop independently, but egoistically” (Wagner 1888: vol. 3, 29). Wagner admits (somewhat grudgingly) that the long development of autonomous artistic media in the hands of professional castes had actually performed important work. Now, however, it is essential to avoid an alienating specialization on the part of these professional castes, on one hand, and to avoid the commodification of their production on the part of modern market forces, on the other. The modern or future Gesamtkunstwerk would avoid these perils in reconnecting art with the Volk; the Volk would then come to realize that art in this new sense is for them a genuine “need” and not merely an appetite artificially generated by commercial interests.
Other dichotomous rhetorical questions might be posed with the aim of highlighting important questions about Wagner’s later theory and practice. For instance, “Culture, National or Universal?” with regard to the messages of Die Meistersinger and the agenda of the Bayreuth Festival; or “Drama, Sacred or Profane?” with regard to that agenda again, the diffuse and often questionable legacy of Wagnerian ideas summed up in the term “Wagnerism,” and the critique of that phenomenon waged by the likes of Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Theodor Adorno. But retaining, for practical purposes, a focus on musical expression and “meaning” in relation to text and drama, we might just consider what becomes of these issues after the crucial encounter with the ideas of Schopenhauer in 1854.
Bryan Magee claims, with good reason, that 1854 was “the ultimately decisive year of Wagner’s creative life” (2000: 225). Wagner finally began to compose the Ring cycle, completing all of Das Rheingold and drafting much of Die Walküre. He read for the first time Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which continued to dominate his understanding of life and art to the end of his days; and he conceived (largely under the impress of Schopenhauer) the idea for a musical drama on the legend of Tristan and Isolde, a work which became the most radically innovative of his entire oeuvre. It was the same year, we might recall, that saw the publication of Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (“On the Beautiful in Music”), articulating a theory of “specifically musical” value in opposition to the ingrained habit of locating meaning, value, and “content” in the alleged expression of feelings or emotions (Hanslick 1986: 28). Throughout The Artwork of the Future and Opera and Drama, Wagner had applied the modifier “absolute” as a pejorative, following Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of “absolute philosophy.” In this sense it described any branch of knowledge cut off from real life and pursued in isolation, turning ultimately sterile, lifeless, and irrelevant. “Absolute melody,” in this sense, was mere sonic decoration or pattern-making, and “absolute music” a practice that uprooted the art from its original and necessary nourishment in words, voice, and drama. Schopenhauer’s thesis that music, without any reference to words or ideas, figured the very nature of the “will” (the noumenal essence or drive he posited as preceding all forms of phenomenal “representation”) gave Wagner cause to re-think his position on music as a mere means to a larger, synthetic end and his critique of music’s aesthetic autonomy in modern times.
In the somewhat lopsided apologia for Liszt’s symphonic poems published as an “open letter” to the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1857, Wagner attempted momentarily to redefine the terms. “Nothing is less absolute than music (that is, as regards its phenomenal appearance), and the advocates of an absolute music clearly don’t know what they are talking about; to confound their arguments it would suffice to have them point to any music without a formal basis either in corporeal motion or poetic verse” (Wagner 1888: vol. 5, 191). To this extent he is retaining earlier arguments about the origins of musical form and melody in dance, song, and the combination of these in drama. But at the same time he now declares in defense of Liszt and the honor of music: “This most splendid, incomparable, independent, and unique of all the arts . . . music can never, in any union into which it might enter, cease to be the highest, most redemptive art” (Wagner 1888: vol. 5, 191). Following Schopenhauer, but resisting Hanslick, Wagner grants to music a kind of absolute or noumenal essence while insisting that, as phenomenon or “representation,” in Schopenhauer’s terms, it will necessarily be conditioned by various ritual or discursive modes of human utterance. Dance, song, and drama are thus analogous to the a priori conditions of space, time, and causality that enable the representation of the “will” as perceptible phenomena.
In later writings, Wagner continues his attempted reconciliation with a Schopenhauerian notion of absolute music (music as an immediate reflection of the “will” prior to its objectification as representation of categorical Platonic ideas or forms) and his opposition to a Hanslickian formalism sidelining the role of expressive content. In the essay “On Conducting” (1869) this involves an appeal to “the sentimental genre of new music” ushered in by Beethoven, as against the older, classical “naïve” type, referring to Schiller’s categories of “naïve and sentimental poetry” (Wagner 1979: 65–6). A year later, in the essay Beethoven commemorating the centennial of the composer’s birth, he invokes the “sublime” as the category relevant to evaluating the achievement (and future potential) of post-Beethovenian music. Beethoven realized a capacity of music “thanks to which . . . it moved far beyond the realm of the aesthetically beautiful,” that by which Hanslick thought to analyze it, “and into the sphere of the sublime, where it becomes freed from the constraints of any traditional or conventional forms” (Wagner 1888: vol. 9, 102). This is all consistent with a fundamental notion of dramatic music established in the “Zurich” writings, further developed in “Music of the Future” and revisited in the late essay “On the Application of Music to the Drama” (1879). In order to recuperate its originary potential – intuited by, but then lost with the ancient Greeks – and at the same time to sublate the formal and expressive conventions of modern tonal music of the Baroque and Classical eras, modern music should take its bearings from a new kind of drama drawing on fundamental mythic plots or archetypes and structured in such as way as to “motivate” a new level of expressive, psychological, and structural sophistication. The more fully this is achieved, the more music itself will acquire the character and even the status of drama, whose principal locus will thus cease to be identified in the text.
In the later sections (16 through 25) of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche further developed Wagner’s Schopenhauerian intuitions about the modern musical-dramatic Gesamtkunstwerk in relation to the original Greek tragedy. In particular, he relates Wagner’s argument for replacing an aesthetics of the beautiful with one of the sublime to his own categories of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Modern music, such as Wagner’s, has the potential to reinvent the Dionysian impulses that first gave rise to the genre of tragedy. Both are reflections of noumenal essences or drives (the “will”) prior to their Apollonian (or “Apolline”) objectification in the form of phenomenal appearances, the figurative realm of myth.
The tragic myth can only be understood as the transformation of Dionysiac wisdom into images by means of Apolline artistry; it leads the world of appearances to its limits where it negates itself and seeks to fall back into the womb of the one, true reality; at which point it seems to sing, with Isolde, its metaphysical swan-song.
(Nietzsche 1999: 105)
Like the tragic myth, the role of musical dissonance and the apparent destruction of “form” in Wagner’s works both figure art’s ability to replicate our own relation, as living phenomena, to the all-creating and all-consuming force of the “will.” Myth and music “both originate in a realm which lies beyond the Apolline; both transfigure a region where dissonance and the terrible image of the world fade away in chords of delight . . .; both justify by their play the existence of even ‘the worst of all worlds’” (Nietzsche 1999: 115).
There is no doubt, of course, that Wagner channeled his understanding of Schopenhauer’s philosophy into some of the central themes of his later dramas, most clearly in Tristan und Isolde (sexual desire as the most immediate manifestation of the “will” in human life, the urge of the lovers to transcend their individuated status as “appearance” and to return to a primal state of unitary, noumenal “essence”), but also in Die Meistersinger (where the simultaneous creative and destructive principle of Wahn already prefigures Nietzsche’s idea of the Dionysian) and in Parsifal (sympathy with the sufferings of other living beings and the renunciation of the individual will as avenues to “redemption”). Bryan Magee goes further and proposes that Wagner’s musical language was fundamentally changed by his exposure to Schopenhauer, explaining the freer, more expansive unfolding of musical designs and the intensified levels of expression in Die Walküre and Tristan (as compared to the tentative, experimental quality of Das Rheingold) as a response to the philosopher’s views on the unique, essentially autonomous status of music as an unmediated reflection of the will (Magee 2000: chs 11 and 12). While, as suggested above, Schopenhauer did provide an account of musical autonomy more palatable to Wagner than Hanslick’s version, it seems unlikely that such an abstract articulation of the matter (fairly primitive where it enters into details) could have a compositional effect, even if the chronology is roughly plausible. (Nietzsche offers a better account of a liberated modern music recuperating its archaic birthright, so to speak –– but in response to Wagner, of course, not as an influence on him.) On the other hand, Magee is certainly justified in claiming that philosophical ideas “in the broadest sense, a sense that includes political and social ideas of a general nature,” do “suffuse” Wagner’s works (Magee 2000: 123), and that in their intended totality these works manage to integrate in viably artistic form the “mainstream traditions” (“at the point of their highest development”) of Western music, theater, and philosophy (Magee 2000: 193). In other words, in assessing Wagner’s contribution to the philosophy of music, we should by no means limit the discussion to the ideas he put into print, however wide-ranging those may be. The interface of those ideas with the dramatic texts of the works and their musical scores must be the ultimate proving ground of any attempt to evaluate Wagner’s “philosophical” significance.
See also Adorno (Chapter 36), Aesthetic properties (Chapter 14), Composition (Chapter 47), Hanslick (Chapter 33), Music’s arousal of emotions (Chapter 22), Nietzsche (Chapter 32), Opera (Chapter 41), and Schopenhauer (Chapter 31).
Grey, T. (2009), ed. Wagner and his World, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hanslick, E. (1986 [1891 8th edn]) On the Musically Beautiful, trans. G. Payzant, Indianapolis: Hackett.
Magee, B. (2000) Wagner and Philosophy, London: Penguin Books. (Also published 2001 as The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy, New York: Henry Holt and Company.)
Nietzsche, F.W. (1999 [1872/1888]) The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. R. Geuss and R. Speirs, trans. R. Speirs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schopenhauer, A. (1969 [1818, 1844]) The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols, trans. E.F.J. Payne, New York: Dover.
Wagner, R. (1895–99) Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 8 vols, trans. W.A. Ellis, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.
—— (1888) Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 10 vols, ed. H. von Wolzogen and R. Sternfeld, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
—— (1973) Wagner Writes from Paris . . . Stories, Essays, and Articles by the Young Composer, ed. and trans. R.L. Jacobs and G. Skelton, London: Allen and Unwin.
—— (1979) Three Wagner Essays, trans. R.L. Jacobs, London: Eulenburg Books.
—— (1984) Opera und Drama, ed. K. Kropfinger, Stuttgart: Reclam.
Adorno, T. (2005 [1952]) In Search of Wagner, trans. R. Livingstone, London and New York: Verso. (An influential, if often elliptical, essay in Wagnerian cultural criticism.)
Bermbach, U. (2004) Die Wahn des Gesmtkunstwerks: Richard Wagners politisch-ästhetische Utopie, Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler. (Wagner’s thought read from the perspectives of nineteenth-century political and social history, including themes of revolution, anti- Semitism, nationalism, and Schopenhauerian philosophy.)
Borchmeyer, D. (1991) Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre, trans. S. Spencer, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Essays on themes in Wagner’s writings and stage works with reference to Enlightenment and Romantic literary history and history of ideas.)
—— (2003) Drama and the World of Richard Wagner, trans. D. Ellis, Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Cultural-historical essays on the operas, with chapters on Nietzsche and Mann.)
Goehr, L. (1998) The Quest for Voice: on Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press. (Issues of musical autonomy, censorship, performance, and exile, including an essay on the aesthetic, political, and philosophical “lessons” of Die Meistersinger.)
Grey, T. (1995) Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Interprets leading ideas and terms concerning music, opera, and music drama in Wagner’s writings in relation to contemporary music-aesthetic discourse and examples from Wagner’s works.)
Kitcher, P. and Schacht, R. (2004) Finding and Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s Ring, New York: Oxford University Press. (A study of themes and characters in the Ring with an emphasis on ethical values and problems.)
Kühnel, J. (1992) “The Prose Writings,” in U. Müller and P. Wapnewski (eds) Wagner Handbook, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 565–651. (A survey of the published writings with detailed summaries.)
Liébert, G. (2004) Nietzsche and Music, trans. D. Pellauer and G. Parkes, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. (A musical-intellectual biography, putting the relationship to Wagner in that larger context.)
Magee, B. (1997) The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, rev. and enlarged, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A comprehensive primer on the philosopher’s work, with extensive treatment of music and aesthetics.)
Scruton, R. (2004) Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. (Introduction to the text, sources, and music of the opera, interpreting these with reference to ideas about erotic love, ritual and sacrifice, redemption, and aesthetic experience from Plato to Schopenhauer.)
Treadwell, J. (2003) Interpreting Wagner, New Haven: Yale University Press. (Themes in Wagner’s writings read through the stage works.)