Schopenhauer philosophized, played, loved, read about, and wrote about music. He was a frequent attendee at the Frankfurt Opera. His philosophizing-thinking greatly affected Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, who gave The World as Will and Representation to the conductor Bruno Walter as a Christmas present. Also, Schönberg, Prokofiev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Brahms, and Liszt read and valued Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music.
For Schopenhauer, music deeply touches and profoundly affects our “innermost nature”. This strong and profound impact is something that we completely understand in our “innermost being”:
[Music] is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man’s innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Music and the Will
For Schopenhauer, what makes music profound or revealing and thus separates it from all the other forms of art is that it is a “copy of the will itself”.
More specifically, all the other arts provide us only with the Ideas in which and through which the will manifests itself and renders itself experienceable. Music, on the other hand, is “as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is”.
In other words, other arts are copies of the Ideas, but music is a “copy of the will itself”. Music avoids and hence does not pass through the Ideas in its revealing of the thing itself; it leads directly to the will itself and immediately renders it available, present, and experienceable.
That is, the will expresses, reveals, and says itself through music as music. Music does not need the Ideas in order to express the will. This makes music the extent through which the will is revealed and rendered completely available, present, and known, an extent completely lacking any need for the Ideas and their concepts and reasoning.
Unlike the other arts, music is in no way a copy of the Ideas; instead, it is a copy of the will itself, whose objecthood the Ideas are as well: this is precisely why the effect of music is so much more powerful and urgent than that of the other arts: the other arts speak only of shadows while music speaks of the essence.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Music is thus a language, which says, expresses, and renders available something, something essential. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer repeatedly says that music says the will and reveals its flowing and transitioning by rendering available and clearly presenting the thing in itself.
This does not mean that other arts do not express or represent the will. The difference between music and every other form of art is that music leads directly to the will. Music offers a direct and immediate passage to the will itself. Music delivers us directly into the essence of the thing itself, into the worldhood of the world, and into the thinghood of the thing.
This delivering into the essence of the thing itself sets music apart from every other form of art, for the object of every other form of art is merely the shadow of the thing, whereas the object of music is the thinghood of the thing itself. Music is thus the profoundest, deepest, and highest form of art because it delivers us into the essence of the thing, whereas all the other arts offer us mere shadows, merely the shadows of the things.
In other words, other forms of art only allow us to glimpse the mere shadows of things because they offer us the world only through phenomena and Ideas. Music, on the other hand, delivers into the will itself, the world itself, and Being. This is why music profoundly touches us and powerfully affects our being and our turning toward the world in its worldhood.
Because music directly leads to the will and immediately says it, Schopenhauer links the melodies of music together with our feelings and strivings, and says that melody expresses and depicts how the will flows in its strivings, satisfactions, and new strivings:
The nature of man consists in the fact that his will strives, is satisfied, strives anew, and so on and on; in fact his happiness and well-being consist only in the transition from desire to satisfaction, and from this to a fresh desire … Thus, corresponding to this, the nature of melody is a constant digression and deviation from the keynote in a thousand ways . . . Melody expresses the many different forms of the will’s efforts, but also its satisfaction by ultimately finding again a harmonious interval, and still more the keynote.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Schopenhauer says that the melodies of music, in their rapidness and slowness, are analogies of how we transition from suffering to happiness, from wishing to satisfaction, or from painful awaiting to eventual satisfaction:
As rapid transition from wish to satisfaction and from this to a new wish are happiness and well-being, so rapid melodies without great deviations are cheerful. Slow melodies that strike painful discords and wind back to the keynote only through many bars, are sad, on the analogy of delayed and hard-won satisfaction…The adagio speaks of the suffering of a great and noble endeavor that disdains all trifling happiness.
The effect of the suspension also deserves to be considered here. It is a dissonance delaying the final consonance that is with certainty awaited; in this way the longing for it is strengthened, and its appearance affords the greater satisfaction. This is clearly an analogue of the satisfaction of the will which is enhanced through delay.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Schopenhauer renders equal “the creation of melody” and “the discovery of all the deepest secrets of human willing and sensation”, and says that “melody expresses the many different forms of the striving of the will”.
Brisk melodies without long deviations are cheerful; slow melodies that fall into painful dissonances and take many bars before they wind their way back to the tonic are sad, by analogy with delayed and hard won satisfaction. Languor, delay in finding something new to excite the will, can be expressed in no way other than as a protracted tonic, whose effect is soon unbearable: very monotonous, inane melodies already come close to this. The short, easy phrases of swift dance music seem to speak only of common happiness that is easy to come by; by contrast, the allegro maestoso with its grand phrases, long passages and extended deviations describes a grander, nobler striving after, and eventual accomplishment of, a distant goal. The adagio speaks of the suffering of a great and noble striving that scorns all petty happiness.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Hence, Music, according to Schopenhauer, directly says the will and renders completely present and entirely available its different and diverse modes and faces of happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, suffering, boredom, striving, awaiting, wishing, longing, and pain.
Music and Emotions
There is a dominant view that music conveys, expresses, and sends forth the emotions of the composer. Schopenhauer disagrees with this view.
For Schopenhauer, the composer expresses, presents, and renders available a copy of the will in a language that exceeds the composer’s own understanding and reasoning. The composer creates a melody and, through this creating, reveals a path leading directly to the will, a path that exceeds the composer and defies reason and its concepts.
The concept is barren here, as it is everywhere else in art: the composer reveals the innermost essence of the world and expresses the deepest wisdom in a language that his reason does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist explains things that he has no idea about when awake. Thus, in a composer more than in any other artist, the human being and the artist are entirely separate and distinct. The poverty and limitations of the concept are obvious even in our explanation of this marvellous art.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
In and through music, the individuality of the composer is overcome so that a path leading directly into the will could be revealed. Overcoming subjectivity occurs when the composer becomes the extent through which music passes in its copying of the will and its inner flowing and detouring.
Music, in its copying of the will, is the disappearance of the subjectivity of the composer, of every subjectivity, and the subject itself. For Schopenhauer, music neither expresses a specific emotion belonging to a certain situation nor the emotion of a certain individual, but rather the emotion itself, detached from all situations and every individual.
Music expresses the “inner nature” of emotions, the “inner nature” that is completely detached and separated from every accessory and all motives.
Music does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without any accessories, and so also without the motives for them.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Music expresses, renders available, and directly leads to the essential nature or the original shape of, for example, pain or joy itself, and not a certain or subjective pain or joy.
The sorrow or pleasure that music reveals is non-subjective, non-conceptual, immediate, and direct. Music directly leads to and immediately reveals the will and its continuous drifting in its constant strivings and rare satisfactions.
“Music gives the innermost kernel preceding all form, or heart of things”. Music evades and defies subjectivity, rationality, concepts, and conceptualizations in its expressing and conveying of the will itself.
Concepts cannot express the depths of music. Neither the composers nor the listeners can conceptually explain that which profoundly touches their being and exceeds their reasoning. This means that what music says, in its inexpressible expressing of the will and in its deep and profound impact, cannot be explained.
The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of it floats past us as a paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Music and the World
Music copies, expresses, renders available, conveys, leads to, and delivers into the will. The same will that also the world of nature says yet indirectly, for it must pass through the Ideas that render representation possible in the first place. This means that there exists a parallelism between music and the world.
In other words, there exists between music and the world an imitative relation, in which music copies the world. For instance, in The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer says that the bass parallels or matches the mineral.
The four voices or parts of all harmony, that is, bass, tenor, alto, and soprano, or fundamental note, third, fifth, and octave, correspond to the four grades in the series of existences, hence to the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, and to man.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Another way in which there is a parallel between music and the world is how music is itself the extent in which and through which the expressions of the will are revealed and communicated.
The bass, for instance, is the “lowest levels of the objectivation of the will, inorganic nature, the mass of the planet”. The “leading voice” is “the highest level of the objectivation of the will, the thoughtful living and striving of human beings.”
“Between the bass and the leading voice that sings the melody”, there is “the entire sequence of levels of Ideas in which the will objectifies itself.” “Between the bass and the leading voice that sings the melody”, there are different and several expressions of the will, copying and rendering available the will throughout the inorganic world and “the plant and animal kingdoms”.
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