The concept of suffering in Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Berg’s Wozzeck via Badiou’s critique of Adorno’s negative dialectics

Abstract

In his only book-length text on music, French philosopher Alain Badiou wrote a treatise on Richard Wagner that largely defends the composer against his staunchest critics. Chief antagonist among them is the philosopher and Wagner polemicist, Theodor Adorno, whose own book, Negative Dialectics, is the central text that Badiou uses to argue against Adorno’s accusation of Wagner’s dialectical Hegelianism via the example of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser, which exemplifies unresolved suffering for the protagonist. Badiou also named the composer Alban Berg as Wagner’s true heir in expressing operatic suffering, and it was Berg’s opera Wozzeck that Adorno viewed as the essential prototype of his negative dialectics. This article appropriates Badiou’s views on Tannhäuser and expands his conviction of its conformity to the ideals of negative dialectics by ascertaining these traits in the opera’s libretto. The same approach is taken with Wozzeck to compare the two operas and pinpoint how they both denote the principles of negative dialectics via representations of suffering. The result allows these operas to be interpreted as artistic expressions of Adorno’s theory.