The Essence of Music: Questions and Answers

GA 283 — 10 November 1906, Leipzig

Fourth Lecture

There are many different ways to talk about music; it is a vast subject. Today, I will limit myself to discussing the role music plays in human development from an intellectual standpoint, its place in the world, and its origins.

There are many different views on music, and some have a very specific meaning. Schopenhauer, for example, sees the arts as something that leads man from the transitory to the eternal. According to his view, archetypes are realized in the arts, but music tells man something very special. Schopenhauer saw two things in the world: mental image and will. He described the will as the “thing in itself” and the mental image as a reflection of the will. Humans cannot perceive the will, only the image behind it. But images are not all equal. Some say a lot, some say little. He described them as ideas, and it is from these that the artist creates. When we look at people, we may find them ugly, beautiful, repulsive, or attractive. A genius does not depict a human being. The brilliant artist picks out many characteristics and creates an image, an ideal, from them. The artist penetrates to the ideas and uses them to create his images, which are then particularly characteristic. This applies to all arts, but not to music. In music, Schopenhauer sees no ideas, but rather the thing in itself speaking to us. For him, sound, formed sound, is not a mental image, but the expression of the thing itself. Direct speech is musical speech. For Schopenhauer, it is as if the highest speaks to his soul in the most intimate way.

Schopenhauer's view influenced Richard Wagner. Wagner's soul sought to explore the meaning of the world's mystery in its own way. Great geniuses do not seek concepts, they seek the place where they can listen properly to hear the gods speak to them. Richard Wagner agreed with Goethe, who saw the arts as a continuation of nature. In our materialistic age, people see things differently. Goethe sees in and between things what nature strives to express. Goethe wrote from Italy: As I stand before the works of art in which great art lives, I see that something like God speaks from them. And in 1805, he wrote in his book about Winckelmann: “When nature unites all its powers, order, measure, and harmony, only then do we get a feeling for art.” Another time he said: “Things in nature are as if not quite finished, as if there were still a mystery behind them. In the great nature, the intentions of nature are what are admirable. This is what the artist should create.”

Richard Wagner felt the same way in a big way. He wanted to get to the archetypes of things. The intention should take center stage, and that's why he needed a different language for these superhuman figures. So he turned to music to express this.

What is the basis of Schopenhauer's view and what made an impression on Richard Wagner? To understand what lived in these people, we must try to penetrate deeply into the nature of the world, for Schopenhauer was only a philosopher, not an occultist. We must seek to understand the principle of the great Hermes Trismegistos: Above is as below. — Such a deeply initiated person recognized the physiognomic expression of the spiritual being everywhere. Behind the physiognomy, behind the gesture, lies the soul, which can be seen shining through. Everything that is in the soul is in the body. Hermes saw the above in the soul and the below in the body. Nature is only the physiognomy of the spirit. He saw artistically formed sound in music.

Sculpture is judged by its similarity to the model, as is painting. The heroes who stride across the stage have their models. The same cannot be said of music. The sound of a waterfall or the chirping of birds cannot be reproduced true to life.

Schelling and Schlegel, as well as others, held the view that architecture and building art were frozen music. If the structures could be made fluid, they would have a similar effect to music. They would bear no resemblance to the model. All art goes beyond something. But there is one difference: music speaks to people in a much more elementary and immediate way. It grips people and carries them away, whether they want it to or not. With other arts, it is possible to turn one's attention away, but with music this is not so easy.

But what are the models for music in the spiritual world? Here we must again concern ourselves with human development, in the occult sense. I have already hinted at how this happens, but I cannot explain it in detail today. So let us ask: What are the achievements of those who rise to the higher worlds? They penetrate the astral world. When he begins to see the astral world and stands in front of a plant, he looks at it without engaging with it in detail; when he is clear that his physical organs are no longer involved, he sees a flame forming, detaching itself and rising above the plant. In this way, the human being can see in the astral world how a quality stands out from things. The advanced, attentive student notices in his sleep that he is waking up in a very strange dream world. Colors flood together and the person stands out from this sea of colors.

Under the guidance of the teacher, he sees forms emerging that do not originate from this world. Later, he perceives these color formations in reality alongside other things. For such people, part of the night has become something completely different. It is an intermediate state between waking and dreaming. A dream from which higher truths are revealed. This is the astral world.

Now there is something even higher. Something special occurs within these color formations. A sound speaks from the color formation, a resonance is perceived. At this moment, the person has entered the Devachan; they are in the actual spiritual world. This is the real background of the two higher worlds that people enter. When they are in the astral world, they do not hear the sounds of this world. Here there is a great silence; everything speaks through color and light. And then a sounding world emerges from this world of colors, softly at first, then louder and louder. When a person is there, they experience the spirit of the world. There they learn to understand what great minds mean when they speak of the music of the spheres, as Pythagoras did. People have wanted to interpret the music of the spheres of the revolving suns symbolically, but it cannot be interpreted in this way. The sun resounding through space is a resounding reality.

An occult image is: seeing the sun at midnight. The moment the chela or disciple becomes clairvoyant, he sees through the earth, he sees the sun. But it is even greater when he hears the sun sound. Goethe's words in the prologue to “Faust” are not just a phrase: “The sun sounds in the old way.” The occultist knows the trumpets mentioned by John in Revelation to be a reality.

Errors occur in theosophical writings. Leadbeater, for example, describes the astral plane correctly, but his description of the devachanic plane is his own invention. However, he describes it more finely than the astral plane, but otherwise incorrectly.

Behind our sensual and astral world, we have a world of sound, the devachanic world. All your organs are created from the spiritual world. There would never have been a heart or a spleen if we did not have an etheric body. Imagine a vessel filled with water: if you create a vortex in it and can hold it steady quickly, you will obtain a structure. The liver and brain arose from the astral organism. Here you find the top and bottom again. Things that seem distant are strangely connected. An example: the heart is an involuntary muscle, and we believe physically that the heart is the driving force. Other muscles, for example those of the hand, are subject to the will. Occultists have never claimed that the heart is the driving force of the blood. They see the movement of blood as the cause of the heart's movement. They see the heart as an organ that will only reach perfection in the future. In the future, the movement of blood will be under the control of the human will. That is why the heart muscle looks the way it does and why the structure of the heart corresponds to that of a voluntary muscle. Only later will humans be able to set their hearts in motion at will, like a hand muscle. The heart is on a special path of development, as Hegel once hinted.

All this is connected with human development. Take the three basic parts and the ego. First, humans work unconsciously into their astral, etheric, and physical bodies and attach something of Manas, Buddhi, and Atma to them. But now there is also something conscious. The etheric body consists of two parts, the one that humans brought with them and the one that the I worked into it when humans were still at the animal stage, the fish stage. The heart is shaped by the transformation of the etheric body. Everything in this world is like the seal of the spiritual. This is also true of every cultural phenomenon. Human beings cannot perceive everything that surrounds them spiritually, but an artist experiences something of this seal of the astral world. I will give you an example of how a spiritual truth can be conjured up on canvas. There are two paintings by Leonardo da Vinci in the Louvre in Paris. They depict John the Baptist and Dionysus-Bacchus. The same model seems to have been used for both. Bacchus shows a peculiar reddish-bluish tone of the human body, while a yellow-golden tone seems to emanate from John's body. This is how the painter saw it. Dionysus seems to absorb the light and send it back with his own coloring. The light also approaches John, but it is reflected back by his body; he chastely pushes it back, it does not mix with his body, it remains in its ethereal purity. The painter only sensed this.

The painter paints astral colors. With the musician, however, the devachanic world resounds into our earthly one. Music is the expression of the tone in Devachan. In the harmonies of the spheres, a devachanic spirit indeed strides forth. Only there is no sensually sounding tone there, there is the archetype. The image of the devachanic sound is in the etheric body of the human being. This etheric body, which the human being has developed within himself, is permeated with the vibrations of the devachanic world.

Consider that this transformed etheric body of the human being is embedded in the lower body. And this new etheric body vibrates and vibrates, creating the feeling of the victory of the higher over the lower etheric body. When the feeling of the victory of the higher etheric body over the lower arises, a major key sounds. When the higher etheric body cannot become master of the unpurified, the feeling is evoked as if a minor key were sounding from outside. Through the major key, the human being becomes aware of his emotional mastery. If he feels that the high vibration cannot penetrate, he senses a minor key. When this musical element wants to join the cosmic world, that is the moment when the Buddhi element is stirred, and only then can the human being form artistic tones into harmonies. An approach to new development lies in music. It is not quite achieved in the other arts. There is something prophetic in music for future development. The new etheric body vibrates through music, and now the outer etheric body also begins to vibrate. In Mozart's works, but especially in Rossini's, the vibrations in the old etheric body continue, but to a very small degree. But if you could observe the listeners to “Lohengrin,” you would see how the effect is quite different. Wagner's music excites the buddhi body so strongly that it has a direct effect on the etheric body. Wagner's music thus brings about a change in temperament and inclinations in the etheric body, and with this you can guess what Wagner sensed and what was also expressed in his writings on music. The occultist says: When a person undergoes development and hears spherical music, they hear heavenly music. But everyday people cannot penetrate that far. Thus, human beings have the task of sealing the higher world into the physical world. In what human beings produce, they create an imprint of the spiritual world. Schopenhauer and Wagner sensed this, and that is why they attributed such an important role to music.

The time has come for spiritual science to help human beings to create consciously rather than in a dreamlike state. I wanted to try to make it clear to you why music has such a fundamental effect: We are at home in Devachan, where something eternal lives, and when something from our original home is given to people here below, it is no wonder that they are moved. And that is why the influence of music is so great, even on the simplest people, who have no idea what the tones of music are saying to them: I am you, and you are of my kind.

Question and answer (the question asked has not been preserved)

Art creates the bed for astral and devachanic influence. What is peculiar about Wagner is that his music has an enormous effect on the etheric body. Even people who are not musical feel this. Music affects the astral body via the etheric body. Bach was much more abstract; he did not have Wagner's immediacy. Every great musician, every musician, has acquired his talent in previous incarnations. However, one must take into account that even if someone is advanced in musical terms, he does not necessarily have to be so in other respects, for example in moral terms. Human beings are so diverse. One must judge them by what they have, not by what they do not have. I have noticed this so often in my Goethe lectures, how people like to focus on the negative instead of the positive, on what people do not have instead of what they do have. I have been asked a hundred times what the relationship with Mrs. von Stein was like and other things. I could only ever say: so much greatness came out of the relationship that that alone occupied me. It seems to me as if a collector is looking for precious stones among the pebbles. He only picks up the precious ones and ignores the others.