Richard Wagner: redemption of the opera and significance of music

The debanalization of music through the empowerment of the opera as a form of transcendent expression

Abstract

It is through verbal language, through the word, that it is given to us, at least, to aspire to a certain degree of objectivity. In the context of a language, each word uniquely designates something, it contains a referentiality that we all share, even though each of us then expands or misrepresents that referentiality. Music, an expression of cathartic nature, insofar as it does not have that unique referentiality shared by all, constitutes a form of expression devoid of objective meaning. This has been evident in the opera, a form in which the simultaneity of music and word has traditionally meant the reduction of the second one to mere contingency, at the same time that it has brought to the forefront the emptiness of meaning of the first one. With regard to this, the objective of this brief work is to give an account, in Richard Wagner's work, of the discovery of a way to convert music into a transcendental expression. We will see how in his endeavor the German composer, through an enabling reformulation of operatic language, achieves a new form - musical drama - that corroborates an already imperishable lesson: music can only become a transcendental expression, that is, not accessory, through a process of literaturization.