Browning relates music to the will in one of his best-known poems, when he makes Abt Vogler say:
"But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them, and lo, they are!
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star."
Schopenhauer, in working out the details of his theory, tries to establish an analogy between music and the Ideas of the visible world, connecting the lower tones with the lowest grades of the objectification of the will, those of inorganic nature, and leading up gradually through the intermediate grades until the higher tones are reached, representing the other end of the scale, the highest organic forms of life. The melody, the high singing part, represents the intelligent life and effort of man, and progresses with unrestrained freedom, while it dominates the whole. This represents the unbroken, significant connection of one continuous thought. The melody, therefore, has significant intentional connection from beginning to end. It records the history of the will enlightened by intellect. In the world of experience the will expresses itself in action. But melody does more, it expresses the inner side of the action, drawing out from the deeps its secret history, its motives and efforts, its passionate yearning and inner excitements, all that which the reason includes in the concept of feeling. For this reason music has been called the language of feeling and passion, as words are the language of the reason. In melody there is a constant deviation from the keynote in a thousand ways, yet there always follows a constant return to the keynote. In all these digressions and deviations melody expresses the manifold efforts of the will. Its satisfaction is also expressed by the final return to a harmonious interval, and to the keynote. In melody, therefore, the composer reveals all the deepest secrets of human willing and feeling.
His work lies far from all reflection and conscious intention, and flows directly from inspiration. The abstract conception is here, as everywhere in art, unfruitful. The composer reveals the inner nature of the world, and expresses the deepest wisdom in a language which his reason does not understand. In the same way, a person under the influence of mesmerism tells things of which he has no conception when he wakes. In the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.
As quick transition from wish to satisfaction is well-being, so quick melodies are cheerful. Slow melodies are analogous to the delayed and hardly-won satisfaction, and are sad. Quick dance music seems to speak only of easily attained and common pleasure. Adagio movements speak of the pain of a great and noble striving, which despises all trivial happiness.
The effect of the major and the minor key is equally marked. In general, music consists of a constant succession of more or less disquieting chords, chords which excite "immortal longings," and also of more or less quieting and satisfying chords, just as the life of the heart is a constant succession of feelings of disquietude and of peace, following desire and satisfaction. Just as there are two general fundamental moods of the feelings, serenity and sadness, so music has two keys, which correspond to these, the major and the minor. Since music is founded deeply in the nature of man, the dominant national mood is reproduced invariably in a country's music. We find accordingly that the minor key prevails in Russian music, while allegro in the minor is characteristic of French music, "as if one danced while one's shoe pinched."
But in all these analogies music has no direct, but only an indirect relation to them. It does not express particular and definite joys, sorrows, pains, or horrors, but joy, sorrow, pain, or horror itself, the real, inner nature of each emotion. It is the essential character of these emotions that is represented, without disturbing accessories. Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never the events themselves. This inner meaning of life, the eternal truth of things, is felt and understood immediately when we listen to great music. "All things eternal," wrote Wagner, "can be expressed with unmistakable certainty in music." And in another passage, he says, "Music can never and in no possible alliance cease to be the highest, the redeeming art. It is of her nature, that what all the other arts but hint at, through her and in her becomes the most indubitable of certainties, the most direct and definite of truths."
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 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.