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But I am not sure that this is why, before the second act at a performance of Die Walküre I attended, a man chirped to his wife, "Well, I guess we're ready to sit it through!", apparently not feeling the sublimity that Scruton finds in late Wagner. It is unclear that people were better acquainted with passionate love in the old days, or that they were more comfortable with the idea of dying for religious principles. Rather, the problem is the very idea that Wagner's music is "universal." In itself, Scruton's book is a model of lapidary suasion. But with all due awe at Wagner's achievement in the formal sense, I fear that his conception of his Gesamtkunstwerke as couched in a "universal" language was a parochial one rooted in his time, nationality, and personal temperament, and that modern analysts who assume this universality are themselves misled by a different kind of parochiality.
No one disputes Wagner's solipsism in matters such as his claim that German was the only language that operas should be written in. Wagner argued that German "still displays an immediate and recognizable connection with its own roots," presumably referring to the fact that where English's word emergency is borrowed from French, German conveys the meaning with Notfall, composed from the words Not and Fall for need and case respectively—the German word transparently depicts an emergency as a "case of need." But as a linguist I cannot help but note that Wagner's thesis falls apart in the historical sense. However familiar German's vocabulary was to him, German is in fact an oddity among European languages in that a third of its words have no known ancestry in the ancient language that was father to most of Europe's languages. German's lexicon is oddly bastard as European languages go. Meanwhile, on other grounds, Wagner's notion is immediately ridiculous even to non-linguists. Few singers consider German an especially "singable" language, and in our modern awareness of the multicultural, we cannot help but chuckle at Wagner's assumption that out of the world's 6,000 languages, the one he happened to speak as a native was the one best suited to convey music of universal meaning.
But there is risk of a similar solipsism in the notion that European classical music is somehow "universal" in its appeal. Wagner's explicators operate under the assumption that even if the ordinary listener cannot identify the motifs in the orchestra as they pass and has no training in the mechanics of harmony, the music has its effects subliminally. This means that we are to take the complex demonstrations in works like Scruton's of how inner psychological states are conveyed by key changes, countermelodies, and details of instrumentation as representing what actually goes on the mind not just of musicologists, but all, or maybe most, people in an audience.
I don't buy this. Never mind that the case seems hopeless if we imagine, say, making a tribesman from Papua New Guinea sit through Tristan and Isolde. Do we really think that someone with no experience with hearing classical music and Western harmony would still find meanings and suggestions in the action based on the melodic fragments roiling by here and there, anymore than we respond meaningfully to the tribal music of his people? This, after all, is what we presumably mean by terming Wagner's music "universal."
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