Schopenhauer and Rossinian Universality On The Italianate in SCH

13 Schopenhauer and Rossinian universality:
on the Italianate in Schopenhauer’s

metaphysics of music
yael braunschweig
Do convey my thanks to your friend Wagner for sending me his

Nibelungen text. He should quit writing music; he has more genius as a
poet! I, Schopenhauer, remain loyal to Rossini and Mozart.1
Arthur Schopenhauer’s daily regimen of rehearsing Rossini on the flute

tends to be looked upon with bemusement, as a quaint if incongruous detail
in the philosopher’s life.2 Yet among the writings on Schopenhauer by his
contemporaries are the reminiscences of several friends who not only note
his passion for privately playing Rossini (he owned flute arrangements of
most of Rossini’s operas), but also hint at a connection between Rossini’s
music and Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Robert von Hornstein, for exam-
ple, related that “Schopenhauer’s musical ideal was Rossini. ‘I admire and
love Mozart and attend all the concerts in which Beethoven symphonies are
played, but once one has listened to a lot of Rossini, everything else sounds
clumsy in comparison.’ When he spoke of Rossini, his eyes looked up
reverently to the heavens.”3
Schopenhauer’s aesthetics remain a familiar part of nineteenth-century
music history, of course, not least thanks to the prestige he granted to music
above all other arts. It alone provided a direct copy of “will,” the true,
unchanging core of all matter that exists beyond the superficiality of an
object’s “appearance.” As a result, music was “much more powerful and
penetrating” than any other mode of artistic expression, in portraying the
“thing in itself . . . the innermost essence”; all other arts “speak only of the
shadow,” but music gives “that profound pleasure with which . . . the deep-
est recesses of our nature find expression.”4 And such an equation of music
with depth, inwardness, and philosophical truth seems to fit straightfor-
wardly enough within the vocabulary and ideas of mainstream German
Romanticism: as Holly Watkins has argued, the very notion of musical
depth emerged in German criticism in the years around 1800 as a way of
describing the “special force” with which certain instrumental works could
“stir the soul.” In the hands of critics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, those works 283
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284 yael braunschweig
in turn tended to be by one composer above all others: Beethoven.5 By

contrast, and as explored elsewhere in this volume, Rossini’s Italian operas
were defined by Hoffmann and many others through their lack of depth,
presenting an ornamented, beautifully unfolding “surface.”
The ubiquity of such metaphors can perhaps in part explain why musi-
cologists have tended to pay little attention to the connections between
Schopenhauer’s conception of will and Rossini’s Italian operas.6 Yet it
would be surprising if all the early-nineteenth-century Italian opera
Schopenhauer heard in performance and played on the flute had not shaped
his metaphysics of music, and it is therefore rewarding to examine how this
repertoire might have helped to fashion his conception of melody, his
depiction of music’s “grades of objectification,” and his ideas concerning
mimesis and music’s ideal relation to a verbal text. Seen in this light,
Schopenhauer’s music-theoretical and philosophical understanding of
music can provide a means not only to explore the idea of depth in
Rossini’s Italian operas, but also to consider how vocabulary long used to
discuss the music of German Romanticism was developed in part through
reflection on the music of Rossini.
Melody’s depths
The development of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system coincided precisely

with the establishment of Rossini’s fame in Italy. In 1818, Schopenhauer
completed the first edition of his magnum opus, Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung (WWV ).7 His earliest written ruminations on music that bear
close resemblance to the metaphysics in this work seemingly stem from 1814.8
During this time Schopenhauer lived in Dresden, and probably attended
performances of Rossini’s operas from 1816 onwards.9
Schopenhauer theorized a system of gradations in WWV by which the
will became increasingly manifest in the world of objects. While everything
contained will, certain forms more palpably objectified it. In a roughly
evolutionary schema, Schopenhauer proposed that the more complex the
object or being, the greater the manifestation of will: “[The will] appears in
every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate conduct of
man, and the great difference between the two concerns only the degree of
the manifestation, not the inner nature of what is manifested.”10
Schopenhauer also constructed an analogical system that correlated archi-
tecture, painting, poetry, and drama, in that order, to this same schema. A
masterwork in any of these genres granted access to a Platonic Idea – that
Schopenhauer and Rossinian universality 285
which is essential (“original,” “unchanging,” the “real,” the “archetype”) to a

form, and exists outside of time, space, and causality.11
Music stood beyond this spectrum: “In [music] we do not recognize the
copy, the repetition of any Idea of the inner nature of the world . . . music
must be related to the world as the depiction to the thing depicted.”12 Music,
as a copy of the will itself, also possessed its own ascending grades, linked by
Schopenhauer to the four primary vocal ranges: bass, tenor, alto, and
soprano. He further conceived of melody and harmony as entities
enmeshed within this hierarchical structure: melody was the “voice” that
contained the will’s most palpable objectification.13 As he explained in
WWV I:
in the melody, in the high, singing, principal voice, leading the whole in progressing
with unrestrained freedom . . . I recognize the highest grade of the will’s
objectification . . . melody alone has significant and intentional connexion from
beginning to end . . . [and] relates the most secret history of the intellectually
enlightened will, portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the
will, everything which the faculty of reason summarizes under the wide and negative
concept of feeling.14
Just as humanity stood as objectified will’s highest grade, while still con-
nected to (and dependent upon) phenomena of the lower grades, so too did
melody relate to harmony. Though their relation remained hierarchical, the
grades depended upon each other, forming a synthesis corresponding to the
unity of the will. “Melody as an integral part strikes into the harmony as does
the latter into the former. In just the same way, the will is only one in all the
stages of its phenomena, and in the sum-total of these it reveals itself.”15
This evidently goes against the norm of much German Romantic musical
discourse in its relative valuation of harmony and melody.16 Schopenhauer’s
equation of music’s primary force with melody, and his argument for
melody’s capacity to disclose the “depth” of the will, instead helped situate
his writing towards the Italian side of contemporary debates;17 indeed, one
could be more specific: his high “singing” melody, moving “lightly” through
“runs” in “unrestrained freedom,” begins to suggest nothing less than the
stylistic conventions of primo ottocento opera.18
Not all (or even most) melodies possessed authenticity for Schopenhauer.
Rather, “creative genius” could harness melody to create music that
expressed “the kernel of an event.”19 This sort of depth through melody
proved authenticity (just as, tautologically enough, disinterested composi-
tion through “pure contemplation” by a person capable of “complete objec-
tivity” – i.e. a genius – ensured depth).20 And sure enough, the melody
praised most prominently in Schopenhauer’s writings was none other than

“Di tanti palpiti,” the cabaletta from Rossini’s Tancredi (1813), which the
philosopher’s friend Ernst Otto Lindner also remembered seeing on
Schopenhauer’s music stand.21 With specific reference to this most famous
of early-nineteenth-century tunes, Schopenhauer later observed in his
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) that Rossini’s “wonderful melodies
have spread over the whole globe and have refreshed and regaled every
heart, as much [when they were composed] as they still do today and will do
in saecula saeculorum.”22 For Schopenhauer, then, certain Rossinian melo-
dies “[expressed] in the universal language of music, the stirrings of will,”
and in so doing, became “immortal.”23
Tessitura and the grades of the will’s objectification
The link between Schopenhauer’s privileging of melody and higher tessi-

turas in relation to his model of the wider world would be most systemati-
cally articulated in WWV II (1844):
the four voices . . . bass, tenor, alto, and soprano, or fundamental note, third, fifth,
and octave, correspond to the four grades in the series of existences . . . to the
mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, and to man . . . in this rule we recognize the
musical analog of the fundamental disposition of nature . . . organic beings are
much more closely related among themselves than they are to the inanimate,
inorganic mass of the mineral kingdom.24
The bass, in this model, occupied the “inorganic” sphere, and thus remained
most isolated from the higher voices, which became increasingly complex
and individualized. In contrast to the bass’s mineral nature appears the
soprano voice, which “stands out” distinctly
even in the most powerful orchestral accompaniment . . . and thus obtains a natural
right to deliver the melody . . . [I]n this way the soprano becomes the suitable
representative of . . . enhanced sensibility . . . and consequently of the most highly
developed consciousness that stands at the highest stage of the scale of beings.25
Music’s movement up the scale, as it were, is movement along an evolu-

tionary path from murkiness to clarity, plodding steps to agile turns.
Though all voices remain interdependent, the soprano is pre-eminent.
Schopenhauer’s discussions of melody, harmony, and tessitura inevitably
suggest his own musical tastes and training, and as a result map easily onto the
standard textures in vocal ensembles in contemporary Italian opera. In
Tancredi, for example, Rossini drew upon a complement of voice types fairly
common to his opere serie, with the role of Tancredi being cast for musico,
alongside the soprano of the heroine, Amenaide. Moreover, the ensembles in a
work like Tancredi often provide just the kind of staggered layering that
Schopenhauer declared analogous to the will’s grades of objectification.
The Largo concertato to Tancredi’s Act I finale (“Gli infelici affetti miei”)
can provide one possible musical exemplification of the process described
by Schopenhauer, as the villain Orbazzano (bass) and the father Argirio
(tenor) come together with Tancredi and Amenaide for their static moment
of reflection. The three men, united in condemnation of Amenaide, sing the
same text in thirds, while Amenaide’s florid prayer to heaven (“Ah, se
giusto, o ciel”) floats above, as she appeals for recognition of her innocence.
Next, Tancredi’s and Amenaide’s voices are left suspended in the air, as the
two lower voices drop out; the procedure is then repeated with tenor and
bass alone, but it is Amenaide’s re-entry that draws most attention, seeming
to rise up out of the depths of the lower registers themselves. When she is
re-joined by the other voices and orchestra for a repeat of the opening
material, she continues to soar over them, ornamenting and elaborating,
once again supported by the individuated yet subordinate voices below.
Schopenhauer’s characterization of music’s grades of objectification, with
its concomitant privileging of ornamented upper ranges and melody, in
short, fits with the sort of opera he loved. The phenomenal world he knew,
with its minerals, plants, animals, and humans, was an embodiment of will. It
could “just as well” be called “embodied music”; or even, perhaps, embodied
Rossini.26
The universality of primo ottocento opera
Any conception of the world as “embodied music” clearly rests upon a belief
in the presence of timeless and universal musical values. Characters in opera
express ideas and stories through their singing, however, and such depend-
ence on words, for many Romantic critics, separated the genre from the
realm of the “absolute.” In contrast to the Beethovenian symphony, by this
argument, the words in primo ottocento opera muddied music’s potential
purity. This provides another reason why Schopenhauer’s metaphysics,
with its strong advocacy of the singularity of music, can appear distant
from Italianate stylistic conventions.27 Once again, however, Schopenhauer’s
paeans to musical purity derive in large part from his reflections on Rossini’s
Italian operas.
Even so, Schopenhauer’s ideal of musical purity is often linked directly to

the Beethovenian symphony.28 The pretext is a single laudatory paragraph
in WWV II that appeared complete only in the 1859 edition of the text:
[1844 edition:] Now if we cast a glance at purely instrumental music, a symphony of

Beethoven presents us with the greatest confusion which yet has the most perfect
order as its foundation . . . It is [1859:] rerum concordia discors . . . [1844:] a true and
complete picture of the nature of the world . . . [1859:] [A]ll the human passions
and emotions speak from this symphony . . . yet all, as it were, only in the abstract
and without any particularization . . . We certainly have an inclination to realize it
while we listen, to clothe it in the imagination with flesh and bone . . . On the whole,
however, this does not promote understanding or enjoyment of it, but rather gives it
a strange and arbitrary addition. It is therefore better to interpret it purely and in its
immediacy.29
Where words and stories lacked precision, in other words, music, as a copy
of the will, could sharply characterize a multitude of emotions, stories, and
meanings.
But this posed no necessary contradiction to Schopenhauer’s admiration for
Rossini. Just as Hegel, in the words of Bernd Sponheuer, made a case
for “Rossini’s operas as the origins of absolute music,” so Schopenhauer
saw the composer’s concentration on melody as an example of music freed
from language.30 Moreover, Michael Zimmermann has suggested that, in
the passage on Beethoven quoted above, Schopenhauer “describes the
Beethovenian symphony as though it were a Rossinian finale.” He focuses on
the idea of “confusion” transforming into “order”: rerum concordia discors.31
The argument that there was a lack of fit between words and music in
Rossini’s operas was a familiar one at the time.32 Some, though, would
choose to turn this into a virtue: at several points in his Vie de Rossini, for
example, Stendhal argues against the importance of text:
Once we have caught two or three words to inform us that the hero is in despair, or
at the height of happiness, it matters very little whether we clearly hear the words of
the rest of the aria . . . the inflection of the words is much more important in music
than the words themselves . . . who pays attention to the words of an opera seria?33
By mocking values that would place textual clarity before melody, Stendhal
often argued that words were more or less redundant. And Schopenhauer, if
anything, went still further: one reason that Rossini’s Italian operas could
give particular pleasure was because of the “sneering contempt” (die
höhende Verachtung) with which Rossini sometimes treated his texts.
Such disregard for words, Schopenhauer affirmed, was “echt musikalisch.”34
The same kind of reasoning could also justify Rossini’s use of his own
music in new and often highly contrasting dramatic contexts:
Music makes every picture . . . every scene from real life and from the world, at once
appear in enhanced significance . . . it is due to this that we are able to set a poem to
music as a song, or a perceptive presentation as a pantomime, or both as an opera.
Such individual pictures of human life, set to the universal language of music, are
never bound to it or correspond to it with absolute necessity, but stand to it only in
the relation of an example, chosen at random, to a universal concept.35
Music made the particular universal. It could thus receive innumerable

compelling textual realizations. Multiple text settings caused no incon-
gruity because music disclosed shade and nuance impossible by word
alone.
In The Idea of Absolute Music, Dahlhaus asserted that “whoever considers
the text of a song or an opera to be ‘extra musical’ has appropriated
Hanslick’s central thesis [in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen], whether willingly
or unwillingly.”36 Yet describing the texts of Rossini’s operas as a “foreign
trimming” ( fremde Zuthat) – a phrase of Schopenhauer’s from the early
1820s – was familiar long before Hanslick’s treatise, as praise or reproach,
depending on the critic.37 And in this context, Schopenhauer’s formulation
of music’s status as “independent,” “abstract,” and “universal” derives as
much from grappling with highly ornamented arias as it does from reflec-
tion on “pure” instrumental music.
Rossini and Beethoven
The defense of Rossini offered by Schopenhauer and Stendhal explicitly

inverted many of the dominant criticisms of the composer that circulated
during his period of greatest success. In Berlin, in particular, where
Schopenhauer lived intermittently during the 1820s while giving lectures
at the university and working as a translator, outspoken Beethovenian
acolytes, such as A. B. Marx and E. T. A. Hoffmann, took a strongly negative
line. Hoffmann, for instance, used an 1821 review of Spontini’s Olimpia as a
vehicle to excoriate Rossini:38
One can hardly understand how it could have happened, that in the country that
gave birth to the greatest composers . . . all authenticity in art could so completely
disappear! Rossini, admittedly a frivolous composer and therefore not worthy of
true art, has actually stood the principle [of opera] on its head.39
The very aspects of Rossini’s style that Schopenhauer had found compatible
with the will – the ornamented and overpowering melody, the elevation of
the “purely” musical over dramatic function combining with “genius” to
bestow “authenticity,” are precisely the values against which Hoffmann
rails. Words, characters, plot, and setting all served as pretexts for “strings
of notes, forming successions of flourishes that titillate the ear.”40 Indeed,
the excessive ornamentation, the ingratiating ease by which melody could
captivate and convert, corrupted public taste. Rossini’s music effected
degeneracy in musical taste, fostering a proliferation of musical consumers
“who pursue musical activities without any inner calling . . . merely because
of fashion.”41
Hoffmann expressed opinions on Rossini that were commonplace in
highbrow corners of the specialist German music press.42 Another criticism
involved pitting Rossini’s “melodic” brilliance against his “harmonic”
incompetence. In reference to an 1818 performance of L’inganno felice,
for example, a reviewer in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung carped
that “one finds in the arias much melody, but also much bad deportment
in the harmony.”43 A year earlier, a Dresden correspondent had grumbled
that Tancredi needed “more harmonic force and impact.”44
Against this background, Schopenhauer again appears to come closer to
Stendhal than to German critics, for example in Stendhal’s reflections on the
balance between harmony and melody:
If I feel the need to listen to magnificent harmony, I go to a symphony by Haydn,

Mozart or Beethoven; but if I desire melody, I go to Il matrimonio segreto . . . If
I wanted to enjoy both these pleasures united . . . I go to La Scala to see Don
Giovanni or Tancredi.45
As in Schopenhauer’s musings on Rossini, Stendhal takes Tancredi to

represent melody united with harmony – a simultaneous sounding of the
various musical dimensions.46 And Stendhal continued with the familiar
eighteenth-century maxim that “scientific knowledge is necessary for writing
harmony.”47 To conceptualize harmony as scientific and rule-based was in
part to justify granting it secondary status. Similarly, Schopenhauer, after
laying out the basic rules of tonal harmony, analogized that “mere physics
and metaphysics without ethics will correspond to mere harmony without
melody.”
This, then, provides one way of understanding the presence of ecstatic
praise for Beethoven’s symphonies next to his encomia for “Di tanti palpiti”:
“Rossini” and “Beethoven” were complementary rather than mutually
antagonistic symbols of musical values. Schopenhauer’s conception of
music in fact united what would become antitheses in contemporaneous

discourse, creating a higher union that mirrored the will itself, which “is free
from all plurality, although its phenomena in time and space are innumer-
able. It is itself one, yet not as an object is one, for the unity of an object is
known only in contrast to possible plurality.”48 As Werner Keil has argued,
“from Schopenhauer’s perspective, the reproaches made against Rossini’s
music . . . must have seemed senseless. His aesthetics of music is diametri-
cally opposed to dichotomy.”49 Schopenhauer could take from both sides of
the emerging binary; his metaphysics of music offered a critique of dichot-
omy itself.
Schopenhauer had begun to articulate his Rossinian aesthetics in the
1810s and 1820s, but it was in the additions that he made to WWV in the
late 1850s that he explicitly set out his conception of Rossini’s Italian operas
as examples of “universal” music:
Universality belongs uniquely to music, together with the most precise distinctness,
that gives it that high value as the panacea of all our sorrows. Therefore, if music
tries to stick too closely to the words . . . it is endeavoring to speak a language not its
own. No one has kept so free from this mistake as Rossini; hence his music speaks its
own language so distinctly and purely that it requires no words at all, and therefore
produces its full effect even when rendered by instruments alone.50
By the time of this quotation, the values and concepts invoked by

Schopenhauer – interiority, musical purity (and the attendant idea of the
extramusical), the universality of music – were still rarer in connection with
Rossini than they had been in earlier decades. Schopenhauer was aware that
his musical philosophy was out of step with a German critical mainstream
that relied on the loaded sets of binary oppositions founded on “harmony”
and “melody”; hence his desire to spell out his support for Rossini, and to
undermine the accepted truths of contemporary aesthetics: “In present-day
compositions more account is taken of harmony than of melody. Yet I hold
the opposite view.”51
In fact, no references to Rossini by name appeared in WWV before 1859.
The date of these changes led Dahlhaus to speculate that Schopenhauer was
making an implicit jab at Wagner, who had ridiculed Rossini in his mon-
umental Oper und Drama (1850–1851).52 By 1859, Schopenhauer had read
the libretto to the Ring, leaving annotations that reveal his generally low
opinion of it.53 But a passage from the Parerga and Paralipomena may offer
a further insight into why Schopenhauer added the reference to Rossini in
the late 1850s. By this time Rossini’s operas had largely fallen out of the
repertory of theaters beyond Italy.54
Let us see how the envy of German musicians for a whole generation steadfastly
refused to acknowledge the great Rossini’s merits. At a large choral society dinner I
once witnessed how they sneeringly chanted through the menu to the melody of his
immortal Di Tanti Palpiti. Impotent envy! The melody overpowered and engulfed
the vulgar words.55
Patriotically inspired deafness, he argues, shut many ears a priori to Rossini.

Thus, while the added praise for Rossini may well have been prompted by
frustration with Wagner’s caricatures of Italian music, it seems likely that it
also reflected Schopenhauer’s decades-long frustration with the sort of
nationalist musical rhetoric of which Wagner’s Oper und Drama was just
the most recent manifestation. Here Schopenhauer only reiterates what had
been present in his philosophy all along: his high valuation of melody and
low regard for text and imitative music, developed in part through his
immersion in Italian opera.
By the time Schopenhauer publicly impugned the anti-Rossini senti-
ments he saw around him, “melody” and “harmony” had hardened still
further as ideological antitheses. At a time when most had become deaf to
any possible similarities between Italian and German music, Schopenhauer
was still able to hear interrelations between the two composers. And in
asserting the interdependence of “melody” and “harmony,” he attempted to
tell his contemporaries what they lost when they rigidly dichotomized
“Beethoven” and “Rossini.”
Historiographical legacies
The World as Will and [Representation] . . . is a marvel of a book, whose thought,

reduced to the shortest formula in the title and present in every line, is only one, and
in the four sections or, better put, symphonic movements of which it is built up,
reaches complete and all-sided development. (Thomas Mann, 1938.)56
It has often been noted that before 1853 Schopenhauer’s writings went
virtually unread.57 The following year Wagner received an enthusiastic
recommendation of WWV from friend and fellow political refugee Georg
Herwegh, and in Wagner’s later writings, he tells how he subsequently
strove to incorporate a Schopenhauerian valorization of music within his
evolving theory of drama.58 As a result, through Wagner, Schopenhauer’s
writings have become indissolubly connected with the theories of the
composer. One of Wagner’s longest discussions of Schopenhauer occurs
in the essay Beethoven (1870), written in honor of Beethoven’s centenary.
Despite the title, Wagner here paid homage to two heroes, constructing in
the figures of Beethoven and Schopenhauer his ideals of composer and
philosopher. The two figures intertwined, their philosophies, values, even
lifestyles merged as Wagner sought to popularize Schopenhauer in
Beethoven’s image and Beethoven in Schopenhauer’s.
Many of the links between the two men are character traits that
Schopenhauer celebrated as hallmarks of genius – isolation, introversion,
suffering. As K. M. Knittel has argued, “Wagner’s romanticization of
Beethoven’s suffering in general and his deafness in particular transformed
the way critics assess [Beethoven’s] life and works . . . [Wagner] created a new
Beethoven.”59 One might add that he created a new Schopenhauer as well.
Beethoven begins with an exposition of Schopenhauerian philosophy.
“Musical conception . . . can only have its origin on that side of conscious-
ness which Schopenhauer designates as introverted . . . the capacity of
the intellect to apprehend the true Character of things is alone explicable
from this introverted side of consciousness.”60 Both Beethoven and
Schopenhauer lived the introverted ideal. Denying the world, they devoted
themselves in Wagner’s terms to contemplation – philosophical, aesthetic,
musical. And this meant suffering:
A musician alternates within an ever-recurring state of individual consciousness,

which must be thought all the more miserable [because] in the inspired state he was
lifted [high] above the barriers of individuality. And by reason of the sufferings . . .
musicians may appear worthier of reverence than other artists.61
This lifestyle, postulated by Schopenhauer in his many discussions of

genius, was for Wagner Schopenhauer’s own modus vivendi:
The impulses of [Beethoven’s] Will were too strong to find the slightest satisfaction
in . . . light motley pursuits. If his inclination to solitude was nourished hereby, that
inclination, again, coincided with the independence he was destined for . . . which filled
Schopenhauer with that constant anxiety to keep his little inheritance intact and
determined his entire outer life, and which indeed accounts for apparently inexplicable
traits of his character – i.e., the discernment that the veracity of all philosophical
investigations is seriously endangered when there is any need of earning money by
scientific labor: that fostered Beethoven’s defiance of the world, his liking for solitude.62
Sacrificing worldly pleasure for the opportunity to express immortal truth,

Wagner’s Schopenhauer and his Beethoven fought to achieve the ideal state
of disinterested thought. That Schopenhauer praised Beethoven in WWV II
added weight to Wagner’s thesis, a thesis that placed Schopenhauer firmly
within the pro-German camp of nineteenth-century music criticism.
Though he wrote graphomaniacally, Wagner was short-winded and

laconic in his comments on Rossini.63 His most extended discussion of
Rossini’s music takes the form of an obloquy in Part I of Oper und Drama:
Beneath the jeweled and embroidered trappings [Rossini] disclosed the true life-
giver . . . and that was – Melody . . . the naked, ear-delighting, absolute melodic
Melody; i.e., melody that was just Melody and nothing else; that glides into the ear –
one knows not why; that one picks up – one knows not why . . . that sounds sad
when we are merry, and merry when we are out of sorts; and that still we hum to
ourselves – we haven’t a ghost of knowledge why . . . the whole world hurrahed
Rossini for his melodies.64
Both Wagner and Schopenhauer highlight similar aspects of Rossini’s

style – the “absolute” quality of Rossini’s melody, its lack of dependence
on plot, ornamentation’s obscuring of text.65 The apparent resonances
between Wagner’s and Schopenhauer’s positions, despite the political and
cultural gulf separating them,66 demonstrate how commonplace it had
become to discuss Rossini in terms of music-text relation, melody, and the
low status of the theater.67 But, given Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk ideal, as
expressed in Oper und Drama, and his broadly Germanocentric agenda,
Rossini ultimately served only as a straw-composer.68 Reflecting upon the
1859 edition of WWV, in which Schopenhauer professed his admiration for
Rossini, Wagner asked with envy-tinged sarcasm for “the piano scores of
this curiously gifted composer.”69 Thus was Rossini laughed out of
Schopenhauer’s formative world (much as he would increasingly come to
be belittled in general histories of early-nineteenth-century music).70
One of the first to echo and promote Wagner’s Beethovenian
Schopenhauer was his temporary acolyte, Friedrich Nietzsche. Adopting
Wagner’s veneration of Beethoven’s Schopenhauerian independence and
worldly abnegation, Nietzsche penned a paean to Schopenhauer’s mode of
living in the summer of 1874 entitled “Schopenhauer as Educator,” later to
be the third of the Untimely Meditations.71 Though Nietzsche’s knowledge
of the Beethoven essay may be supposed from the values expressed in
“Schopenhauer as Educator,” Nietzsche had already discussed his pro-
found respect for Beethoven in the dedicatory preface to The Birth of
Tragedy.72 Schopenhauer bestowed upon receptive students lessons for
independent living:
Schopenhauer had little patience with the scholarly castes, separated himself from
them, strove to be independent of state and society . . . [he] was a total solitary . . .
only natures of iron, such as Beethoven, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Wagner are able
to stand firm . . . from time to time . . . they emerge from their cave wearing a
terrifying aspect; their words and deeds are then explosions . . . This was the
dangerous way in which Schopenhauer lived . . . yet there will always be demi-gods
who can endure to live, and live victoriously, under such terrible conditions;
and if you want to hear their lonely song, listen to the music of Beethoven.73
“Schopenhauer as Educator” is seemingly the first Wagnerian-cum-

Beethovenian reading of Schopenhauer’s life. And Nietzsche’s celebration
of independence, suffering, and inner strength as essential to the freethinker
would find frequent repetition up to the present.74 For example, starting
from an observation that visitors to his study often mistake Schopenhauer’s
portrait for Beethoven’s, the philosopher Bryan Magee begins a list of
character traits supposedly shared by both men:
As regards [Schopenhauer’s] personal appearance and character, a general resem-

blance which it became commonplace to draw in the late nineteenth century, when
the renown of both as culture-heroes was at its height, was between Schopenhauer
and Beethoven . . . Born only eighteen years apart, both men were North Germans
of Flemish or Dutch descent . . . both were bustlingly energetic and alarmingly
vehement, irascible, truculent, suspicious. Both were marked out above all by (apart
from genius) a disconcerting independence and forcefulness of personality . . . both
had a powerful heterosexual drive yet never married: they lived as solitaries, sub-
sisting on a thin and intermittent sexual diet of shallow, casual relationships . . .
Both longed for acceptance and love, yet fiercely drove everyone away from them,
persistently living in a self-created isolation which they bitterly resented and for
which they misanthropically blamed mankind.75
Yet the similarities Magee describes stem from a distinctly Wagnerian view
of both Beethoven and Schopenhauer. It was largely Wagner who estab-
lished an association between the two men, who helped to create
Schopenhauer’s immense late-nineteenth-century fame, and who crafted
Beethoven into an artist who revealed immortal truth through his suffering.
Magee’s reading, however creative, is a testimony to Wagner’s enduring
historiographical legacy.
To be sure, parallels between Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music and
Beethoven’s instrumental works and outlook can be compelling. Yet such
readings present only one side of the opposition that Schopenhauer cri-
tiqued and sought to erase. It was never an “either/or” but a “both/and” that
he articulated in his metaphysics of music, a sentiment that suffused his
manuscripts, that his added references to Rossini make clear, and that he
expressed through contempt for German critics’ alleged envy of Rossinian
melody. It would be no exaggeration to claim that Schopenhauer’s metaphy-
sics of music thus offers an alternative vision of early-nineteenth-century
European music history – one free of the oppositions that Wagner’s relent-
less output of polemic and self-justification did so much to propagate.
Indeed, having disentangled Schopenhauer from his Wagnerian and post-
Wagnerian appropriations, we can begin to rethink the importance of
Rossini to early-nineteenth-century German philosophy – and, more
broadly, to reconsider the various ways in which non-German musical
traditions were crucial in the development of the ideologies of German
Romanticism.
Notes
1 “Sagen Sie Ihrem Freunde Wagner in meinem Namen Dank für die Zusendung
seiner Nibelungen, allein er solle die Musik an den Nagel hängen, er hat mehr Genie
zum Dichter! Ich, Schopenhauer, bleibe Rossini und Mozart treu!” This conversa-
tion, from 1855, was reported by Franz Arnold Wille; see Arthur Schopenhauer,
Gespräche, ed. Arthur Hübscher (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1971), 200–201.
2 Among the earliest to characterize Schopenhauer’s fondness for Rossini as curious
was Cosima Wagner. Prompted by Richard’s ridicule of the references to Rossini
added to the first volume of the 1859 edition of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,
she referred to Schopenhauer’s “quaint worship” (drolligen Kultus) of the com-
poser. See the entry for March 8, 1872 in Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, vol. i:
(1869–1872), ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack (Munich: Piper, 1988),
498. Klaus Kropfinger discusses this diary entry in Wagner and Beethoven: Richard
Wagner’s Reception of Beethoven (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 130.
3 “Schopenhauers musikalisches Ideal war Rossini. ‘Ich bewundere und liebe
Mozart und besuche alle Konzerte, in denen Beethovensche Symphonien gespielt
werden, aber – wenn man viel Rossini gehört hat, kommt einem alles andere
dagegen schwerfällig vor.’ Wenn er von Rossini sprach, schlug er die Augen
andächtig zum Himmel auf.” See Schopenhauer, Gespräche, 220. Robert von
Hornstein made yearly visits to Frankfurt between 1855 and 1860, and during
these stays he would frequently have dinner with Schopenhauer.
4 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. i, trans.
E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 110, 257, and 256. (Henceforth WWV I
and WWV II. All my translations of The World as Will and Representation are
taken from this English edition.)
5 Holly Watkins, “From the Mine to the Shrine: The Critical Origins of Musical
Depth,” 19th-Century Music, 27/3 (2004), 179–207.
6 Notable exceptions include Werner Keil, “‘Gebt mir Rossinische Musik, die da
spricht ohne Worte!’ – Parallelen in Schopenhauers und Hegels Musikanschauung,”
Augsburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, 7 (1990), 87–116; Waltraud Roth,
“Schopenhauers Metaphysik der Musik und sein musikalischer Geschmack: Ihre
Entwicklung und ihr wechselseitiges Verhältnis” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Mainz, 1951), esp. 103–106; Mario Ruggenini, “La musica e le parole: Smarrimenti
filosofici in ascolto di Rossini” in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome:
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), 55–67; and Michael Zimmermann,
“Rerum concordia discors: Musik und Drama bei Rossini, Schopenhauer und
Richard Wagner,” Musica, 37 (1983), 23–28.
7 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung was first published in late 1818 by the Leipzig
publisher Brockhaus (though the first edition erroneously gives 1819 as the
publication year). In 1844, a second, two-volume edition appeared; volume
one was an edited version of the 1818 book while volume two was largely
devoted to expanding and clarifying ideas presented in volume one. A third
edition was published in 1859 with more emendations. Between the publication
of this edition and Schopenhauer’s death in 1860, he made further, handwritten
changes to both volumes, which were subsequently published in the Fassung
letzter Hand, ed. Julius Frauenstädt (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1873–1874). Payne’s
standard English edition incorporates all of Schopenhauer’s known additions
(the first volume of this edition, therefore, contains much that was not published
in 1818). Where relevant, I will note the date of the first publication of the
passages that I quote.
8 See Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, vol. i: Early
Manuscripts (1804–1818), ed. Arthur Hübscher, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1988). Roth asserts that Schopenhauer’s very first written
notes on a connection between the structure of the world and music date from
1812. See Roth, “Schopenhauers Metaphysik der Musik,” 10–11.
9 Roth speculates that Schopenhauer’s aesthetic predilections would have been
shaped by the Italianate repertoire at the Dresden opera from 1814–1817.
Schopenhauer would have had the opportunity to hear works such as Il turco
in Italia (Dresden performances in 1816), Tancredi (1817), L’inganno felice
(1818), and Elisabetta (1818). See Roth, “Schopenhauers Metaphysik der
Musik,” 50.
10 WWV I, 110.
11 Ibid., 169, 171.
12 Ibid., 256–257.
13 Keil, “Gebt mir Rossinische Musik,” 96–99.
14 WWV I, 258–259 (from 1818) (Schopenhauer’s italics).
15 Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. i, 284.
16 For a discussion of the connotations of “harmony” and “melody” in contempo-
rary German music-critical discourse, see Bernd Sponheuer, Musik als Kunst
und Nicht-Kunst: Untersuchungen zur Dichotomie von “hoher” und “niederer”
Musik in musikästhetischen Denken zwischen Kant und Hanslick (Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 1987), 9–35. Along with the creation of the melody-harmony
dichotomy came a simultaneous attempt to create a new kind of melody that
could be heard as distinctly German. Critical discourse on Weber’s Euryanthe
and Der Freischütz, for example, distinguished the characteristics of German
melody (e.g. “declamatory,” “simple”) from Italian qualities (e.g. “ornamented,”

“virtuosic”). On the contemporary discourse surrounding Weber’s operas, see
Stephen C. Meyer, Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
17 Keil, “Gebt mir Rossinische Musik,” 99.
18 WWV I, 259 (from 1818).
19 WWV I, 262–263.
20 WWV I, 185 (Schopenhauer’s italics).
21 See Schopenhauer, Gespräche, 167.
22 Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical
Essays, vol. ii, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 462.
Schopenhauer’s earliest published mention of Rossini occurs in this work,
which appeared in 1851. The German critical edition of WWV also contains a
paean to Rossini, as well as praise of the genre of the da capo aria. See Die Welt
als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. i, ed. Wolfgang Frhr. von Löhneysen (Stuttgart/
Frankfurt am Main: Cotta-Insel, 1960–1965), 723–726. These references to
Italian opera were added to the third, 1859 edition; Löhneysen is thus mistaken
in attributing them to the Fassung letzter Hand. The passages were printed in
1859 (and did not appear in the 1844 edition): see Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung, vol. i (Berlin: Bibliographische Anstalt, 1859), 259 (for Rossini),
261 (for the da capo aria), and Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. i (Leipzig:
F. A. Brockhaus, 1844), 296 and 299, where the additions do not appear. The one
composer mentioned in the 1818 edition is Haydn, in the midst of a diatribe on
imitative music: “All really imitative music . . . does not express the inner nature
of the will itself but merely imitates its phenomenon inadequately . . . for
example, The Seasons by Haydn, also many passages of his Creation, where
phenomena of the world of perception are directly imitated; also in all battle
pieces. All this is to be entirely rejected” (WWV I, 263–264). The reference to
“battle pieces” may well be directed at Beethoven, whose Wellingtons Sieg,
premiered in 1813, remained among his best-known concert works.
Schopenhauer tended to pair Beethoven with Haydn in his later writings as
examples of composers led astray by composing imitative works. Much of the
Parerga and Paralipomena had been sketched out in Schopenhauer’s notebooks
during the thirty years preceding its 1851 publication. One passage on melody
quickly turns into a criticism of imitation: “[melody] speaks not of things, but
simply of weal and woe as being for the will the sole realities. It therefore says so
much to the heart, whereas to the head it has nothing direct to say; and it is an
improper use if this is required of it, as happens in all descriptive music. Such
music should, therefore, be rejected once for all, even though Haydn and
Beethoven have been misguided into using it. Mozart and Rossini have, to my
knowledge, never done this” (Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. ii, 430).
23 WWV I, 262–263 and Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. ii, 462.
24 WWV II, 447.
25 WWV II, 451–452 (from 1844).

26 WWV I, 262–263 (from 1818).
27 Schopenhauer never used the term “absolute,” as in “absolute music,” but
instead drew upon the concept of “purity,” using words such as rein, bloß, and
echt. The tendency of present-day musicologists at times to use the terms
interchangeably obscures their complex relationship in nineteenth-century
usage; see also Sanna Pederson’s discussion of the term “absolute” in relation
to Hegel, a philosopher whose thinking Schopenhauer deeply distrusted and
frequently attacked: “Defining the Term ‘Absolute Music’ Historically,” Music &
Letters, 90/2 (2009), 240–262.
28 Andrew Bowie, for example, asserts that “Schopenhauer argues wholly within
the specific Western musical tradition which develops with Viennese classicism:
the resolution of tension within sonata form is the best example of the sort of
music [Schopenhauer] is referring to . . . The music in question moves away
from the more static contrapuntal music of the past and opens up the new
harmonically based dynamism and possibilities for subjective expression
encountered in Beethoven.” See Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity
from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester University Press, 2003), 267.
29 WWV II, 450. See also a similar passage that does not name Beethoven in
WWV I, 261.
30 Sponheuer, Musik als Kunst und Nicht-Kunst, 16–17. For further discussion of
Hegel’s conception of text and voice in Rossini, see the detailed examination by
Alessandra Belli, “Hegel e Rossini: ‘Il cantar che nell’anima si sente’,” Revue belge
de musicologie, 49 (1995), 211–230.
31 See Zimmermann, “Rerum concordia discors,” 22; on Schopenhauer’s opinions
of Beethoven and Rossini, see also Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical
Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008), 60–71.
32 See, for example, the discussion in James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A
Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 182–256.
33 Stendhal, Vie de Rossini (Paris, 1824), 470, 510. Marco Beghelli terms this (after
Eduard Hanslick in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen) a “morganatic marriage
between words and music.” See Beghelli, “The Dramaturgy of the Operas” in
Emanuele Senici (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rossini (Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 86–88.
34 Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena, vol. ii, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. v,
ed. Wolfgang Frhr. von Löhneysen (Stuttgart/Frankfurt am Main: Cotta-Insel,
1965), 513. (For an English translation, see Schopenhauer, Parerga and
Paralipomena, vol. ii, 435.) Moreover, Robert von Hornstein wrote during the
late 1850s that for Schopenhauer, “music is much more powerful than the word.
Music and words are the marriage of a prince to a beggarwoman. The story in
the opera is incidental, in essence only present in order to bring whatever reason
[to it]. Rossini has taken this to the extreme and has altogether scorned the
words” (“Die Musik ist viel mächtiger als das Wort. Musik und Worte sind die
Vermählung eines Prinzen mit einem Bettlermädchen. Die Fabel in der Oper ist
Nebensache, im Grunde nur dazu vorhanden, um der Vernunft auch was zu
geben. Rossini hat dies ins Extrem getrieben und die Worte geradezu
verhöhnt”). See Schopenhauer, Gespräche, 221–222.
35 WWV I, 263 (from 1818).
36 Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (University of
Chicago Press, 1989), 37.
37 Schopenhauer, Der handschriftliche Nachlaß, vol. iii: Berliner Manuskripte
(1818–1830), ed. Arthur Hübscher (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1985),
42. The epithet “fremde Zuthat” is found in Schopenhauer’s Reisebuch and was
written down between 1820 and 1822. See also the translation in Schopenhauer,
Manuscript Remains, vol. iii: Berlin Manuscripts (1818–1830), ed. Arthur
Hübscher, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Berg, 1989), 47.
38 Spontini’s own reception in Berlin is complicated; born in Italy and a citizen of
France, Spontini was criticized by those who wanted to promote German opera
in Berlin. Indeed, Count von Brühl, the manager of the opera, had originally
sought to hire Carl Maria von Weber, but the proposal proved too controversial.
Though eventually a strong supporter of Spontini, Hoffmann had written a
condemnatory review of him in 1815 that remained influential in the 1820s. See
Sanna Pederson, “A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National
Identity,” 19th-Century Music, 18/2 (1994), 94–96.
39 E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Further Observations on Spontini’s Opera Olimpia” in
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer,
Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 441.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 442. In The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, Hoffmann poked fun at
the ubiquity of “Di tanti palpiti”: “with rare fluency, uncommon expressiveness
and the utmost elegance, Kitty was now singing the famous aria Di tanti palpiti,
etc., etc. She rose magnificently from the heroic vigor of the recitative to the truly
feline sweetness of the andante. The aria might have been written for her, so that
my heart too overflowed, and I broke into a loud howl of joy. Ah, how Kitty
would surely delight a whole world of sensitive tomcat souls with that aria!”
E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, trans. Anthea
Bell (New York: Penguin, 1999), 152.
42 Rossini’s operas began to be performed in German-speaking lands in 1816,
though the first Berlin performance of a work by Rossini (Tancredi) did not
occur until 1818. By this time the work had already been performed in Munich
(seven times in 1816, as an exasperated critic observed in the AMZ), Vienna, and
Dresden: see AMZ, 18 (1816), cols. 857–858.
43 Report from Dresden: “genug, man findet im Gesange viel Melodie, aber auch
viel schlechte Haltung in der Harmonie.” AMZ, 20 (1818), col. 133.
44 Report from Dresden: “folglich, brauchen sie weniger Instrumente: dafür aber
bringen Sie mehr Einfachheit, Gesang und Haltung hinein, wenn Sie in der
Harmonie mehr Wirkung hervorbringen.” AMZ, 19 (1817), col. 330. A similar
1817 evaluation came from a Viennese correspondent: “Rossini’s Musik . . . trägt
den Stempel der Flüchtigkeit, und bietet nicht wenige Verstösse gegen die
Harmonie und die Regeln des reinen Satzes dar” (“Rossini’s music bears the
stamp of hastiness, and presents more than a few transgressions against the rules
of strict composition”); AMZ, 19 (1817), col. 61.
45 Stendhal, Vie de Rossini, 160.
46 For Stendhal, Tancredi possessed an ideal simplicity he famously referred to as
the opera’s “candeur virginale.” Yet the balance between melody and harmony
achieved in Tancredi would come to be lost in later works, Stendhal asserted, as
Rossini’s music became dominated by harmony; on this trajectory, see Benjamin
Walton, “1824. Deciphering Hyperbole: Stendhal’s Vie de Rossini” in Walton,
Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 24–67.
47 Stendhal, Vie de Rossini, 161 (italics in original).
48 WWV I, 113.
49 Keil, “Gebt mir Rossinische Musik,” 107–108.
50 WWV I, 262 (from 1859). This passage is similar to one from WWV II first
published in 1844 without reference to Rossini (see WWV II, 448–449), though
perhaps Schopenhauer already had Rossini in mind.
51 Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. ii, 430–431.
52 See Keil, “Gebt mir Rossinische Musik,” 104 n. 68; Keil also points out, however,
that praise for Rossini had appeared in Schopenhauer’s manuscripts from the
early 1820s, around the same time that references to Beethoven also emerge.
53 The widely circulated comment that Schopenhauer believed Wagner to be a better
writer than composer was evidently meant ironically. For Cosima Wagner’s
version of the line, see Schopenhauer, Gespräche, 200. For an overview of the
marginalia Schopenhauer left in his copy of the Ring libretto, see Hermann Ritter,
“Schopenhauers Randbemerkungen zum Ring des Nibelungen,” Neue Musik-
Zeitung, 26 (1904), 29–30. See also Roth, “Schopenhauers Metaphysik der
Musik,” 92.
54 The notable exceptions were Il barbiere di Siviglia, Otello, Semiramide, and the
French operas Moïse et Pharaon and Guillaume Tell. See Charles S. Brauner,
“The Rossini Renaissance” in Emanuele Senici (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Rossini, 37–38.
55 Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. ii, 462.
56 Thomas Mann, “Schopenhauer,” in Essays of Three Decades, trans. H. T. Lowe-
Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 392–393.
57 In 1835, Schopenhauer sent a letter to his Leipzig publisher Brockhaus requesting
sales statistics for the 1818 WWV. He was informed that “there was no sale [to
speak of].” See Brian Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 19. The few reviews that the first edition of WWV
received were on the whole negative. Schopenhauer came to blame the almost
total lack of interest in the volume on the influence of Hegel, Schelling, and
Fichte in the field of philosophy at the time (hence the vituperative attacks on
them that suffuse Schopenhauer’s writings). In 1853, John Oxenford published
an article on Schopenhauer in the Westminster Review – an article that was
quickly translated in the Vossische Zeitung, and was largely responsible for
igniting Schopenhauer’s mid-century leap to fame. See Bryan Magee, Wagner
and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2001), 148.
58 See Thomas Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 3–6.
59 K. M. Knittel, “Wagner, Deafness, and the Reception of Beethoven’s Late Style,”
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 51/1 (1998), 51.
60 Richard Wagner, Beethoven, with a Supplement from the Philosophical Works of
Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Edward Dannreuther (London: W. M. Reeves,
1903), 11.
61 Ibid., 21.
62 Ibid., 51.
63 Rossini died on November 13, 1868; Wagner’s memorial was published on
December 17, 1868 in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung. For an account of
Rossini and Wagner’s 1860 meeting in Paris, see Edmund Michotte, “Richard
Wagner’s Visit to Rossini” (Paris 1860) and “An Evening at Rossini’s in Beau-
Sejour” (Passy 1858), trans. Herbert Weinstock (University of Chicago Press,
1968). For a discussion of some of the problems with this source, see
Philip Gossett’s review in Notes, 25/4 (1969), 727–728, as well as the
Introduction to this volume.
64 Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Michigan:
Scholarly Press, 1972), 41–42; Wagner’s full account of Rossini here runs from
40–57.
65 In Wagner’s Zurich writings “absolute” acted as a term of contempt, to express
antipathy towards an object, performer, style, and/or composer. Grey observes
that “in the Feuerbachian context of his Zurich writings the predicate ‘absolute’
was a consciously pejorative alternative to the positively value-laden predicate
‘pure’ . . . The (pejorative) paradigm of musical autonomy in Opera and Drama
was the Rossinian aria, in flaunting the independence of music from poetry, or
rather the hegemony of the one over the other. (Here Wagner could count on
the support of a whole generation of anti-Rossinian operatic criticism, and not
only German.)” Wagner’s Musical Prose, 2–3, 13. As mentioned above in n. 27,
in Schopenhauer’s writings the adjective “pure” (rein) is used with reference to
the music of Rossini rather than the term “absolute.”
66 Schopenhauer was, for example, a counter-revolutionary, and was also anything
but a German nationalist, referring to having been born German as a “mis-
fortune.” He willed his wealth to a fund for the widows and orphans of soldiers
killed in suppressing the 1848 uprisings. See Magee, The Philosophy of

Schopenhauer, 19, 205, 266. As Thomas Mann opined, Schopenhauer’s “anti-
revolutionary position is based on his conception of the world; not only logically
and theoretically, but also as a matter of temperament. It is fundamental, it
belongs to his system of morals, his ethical pessimism”; Mann, “Schopenhauer,”
400. Wagner’s retreat from the radical political views that underlay his involve-
ment in the 1849 Dresden uprising might be understood in part as his response
to Schopenhauerian political values.
67 Hegel, for example, interpreted Rossini’s Italian operas similarly. See Sponheuer,
Musik als Kunst und Nicht-Kunst, 15–19; Werner Keil, Im Geisterreich des
Unendlichen: Ein Streifzug durch die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim:
Olms, 2000), Ch. 5; and Belli, “Hegel e Rossini,” 216–222.
68 Furthermore, Wagner of course mocked Rossini musically by quoting from “Di
tanti palpiti” in the Tailors’ Chorus from Act III of Die Meistersinger.
69 Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, vol. i, 498.
70 Reflecting on music historiography, for example, Leopold Schmidt wrote of
Rossini in 1908 that “in more recent times, and especially in Germany, it has
become the custom to lament in Rossini the deepest deterioration of music, the
victory of ‘materialism’ [Materialismus] in music, and to put him down as the
exponent of a perfectly trivial direction”; Schmidt, Meister der Tonkunst im 19.
Jahrhundert (Berlin: Julius Bard, 1908), 196.
71 “Schopenhauer as Educator” was first published in October of 1874. The four
essays that now make up the Untimely Meditations (the fourth being “Richard
Wagner in Bayreuth”) were published together for the first time in 1886.
72 In his essay “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” Nietzsche muses that “certain of
[Wagner’s] writings, such as Beethoven . . . strike dumb every urge to contra-
diction and compel one to regard them with the silent reverence appropriate to
the opening of a precious shrine.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations,
ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press,
2000), 248. Ironically, Nietzsche’s break with Wagner did not cause Nietzsche
to distance himself from the rhetoric of a Beethoven-Rossini style dualism. On
the contrary, his championing of Bizet’s Carmen and what he calls the opera’s
“cheerfulness,” its “southern, brown, burnt sensibility,” as well as the manner in
which the music “builds, organizes, [and] finishes,” reinscribes the dichotomy
for a new generation. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the
Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967),
157–158.
73 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 137–140.
74 The earliest published comparative study of the lives and work of Schopenhauer
and Beethoven seems to be A. von Gottschalck, Beethoven und Schopenhauer:
Musikphilosophische Studie (Blankenburg: Johannes Briest, 1912). Gottschalck
provides a bibliography of six sources, one of which is, unsurprisingly, “Richard
Wagner über Beethoven.” Though Nietzsche is not included in the list,
Gottschalck does refer to the essay “Schopenhauer as Educator” in his study (see
Gottschalck, Beethoven und Schopenhauer, 7–8).
75 Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, 18. Magee has perhaps done the most
to introduce Schopenhauer’s metaphysics to English-language musicology, and
also wrote the article on Schopenhauer for both the 1980 and 2001 editions of
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

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Do convey my thanks to your friend Wagner for sending me his

Arthur Schopenhauer’s daily regimen of rehearsing Rossini on the ﬂute

in turn tended to be by one composer above all others: Beethoven.5 By

The development of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system coincided precisely

which is essential (“original,” “unchanging,” the “real,” the “archetype”) to a

praised most prominently in Schopenhauer’s writings was none other than

Tessitura and the grades of the will’s objectiﬁcation

The link between Schopenhauer’s privileging of melody and higher tessi-

Music’s movement up the scale, as it were, is movement along an evolu-

The universality of primo ottocento opera

Even so, Schopenhauer’s ideal of musical purity is often linked directly to

[1844 edition:] Now if we cast a glance at purely instrumental music, a symphony of

Music made the particular universal. It could thus receive innumerable

Rossini and Beethoven

The defense of Rossini offered by Schopenhauer and Stendhal explicitly

If I feel the need to listen to magniﬁcent harmony, I go to a symphony by Haydn,

As in Schopenhauer’s musings on Rossini, Stendhal takes Tancredi to

music in fact united what would become antitheses in contemporaneous

By the time of this quotation, the values and concepts invoked by

Patriotically inspired deafness, he argues, shut many ears a priori to Rossini.

The World as Will and [Representation] . . . is a marvel of a book, whose thought,

A musician alternates within an ever-recurring state of individual consciousness,

This lifestyle, postulated by Schopenhauer in his many discussions of

Sacriﬁcing worldly pleasure for the opportunity to express immortal truth,

Though he wrote graphomaniacally, Wagner was short-winded and

Both Wagner and Schopenhauer highlight similar aspects of Rossini’s

“Schopenhauer as Educator” is seemingly the ﬁrst Wagnerian-cum-

As regards [Schopenhauer’s] personal appearance and character, a general resem-

melody (e.g. “declamatory,” “simple”) from Italian qualities (e.g. “ornamented,”

25 WWV II, 451–452 (from 1844).

killed in suppressing the 1848 uprisings. See Magee, The Philosophy of

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