It is for this reason that our imagination is excited so easily by music, and that we seek to give it form by clothing it with words. This is the origin of opera and songs.
Wagner built up a whole theory of music, based on the philosophy of Schopenhauer. But in their views on opera they differed fundamentally. The text of opera, says Schopenhauer, should never forsake a subordinate position. The music should never become a mere means of expressing the words. That is a great misconception of the function of music, for music should always be universal. It is just its universality, which belongs exclusively to it, that gives music its high worth as "the panacea for all our woes." If music is too closely united to the words, and tries to express itself according to outward events, it is striving to speak a language which is not its own. Schopenhauer mentions Rossini as the composer who is most free from this mistake. His music speaks so clearly that it requires no words to explain it.
Nature and music, then, are merely two different expressions of the same thing. Music is a universal { 67} language, expressing the inner nature of the world. It resembles geometrical figures and numbers. They are the universal forms of all possible objects of experience, and yet are not abstract, but concrete and determined. All that goes on in the heart of man, and that is included in the concept of feeling, may be expressed by an infinite number of possible melodies, but always universally. Music represents the inmost soul of the event, without the body. We might therefore just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will. For this reason music makes every scene of real life, and of the world, more profoundly significant. It lays bare the inmost kernel which lies hidden in the heart of all things. It penetrates to the very heart of nature. The ineffable joy which we derive from music, which haunts our consciousness as the vision of a distant paradise, restores to us all the emotions of our inmost nature, but divested entirely of the sting of actuality, and far removed from its pain.
It is interesting to compare the view of Schopenhauer, that music is a copy of the will itself, with the theory of Plato and Aristotle, which maintained that music is a direct reflection of character. The modern art of music was not developed in their day, and yet both these philosophers seem to have had prophetic insight in understanding the nature of the marvellous spell and power of sound. Music to them was an imitation, a copy of character, and as such of profound importance in education. Music reflects character, and therefore moulds and influences it. The foundations of character, says Plato, are laid in music, which charms the souls of the young into the path of virtue. Rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul, making the soul harmonious and graceful. { 68} "If our youth are to do their work in life, they must make harmony their perpetual aim," and the soul can only be reached and educated in this way through music.