Schopenhauer, Wagner (3): Screaming, Clairvoyant Dreams and Parsifal

Follows a path through a tangle of closely related topics. It leads from Wagner's nightmares (which often caused him to wake up screaming), through the scream as a primitive, instinctive utterance and supposed origin of music and language, the unmusical screams of his operatic heroines (in particular, Kundry in Parsifal), to the essay Beethoven of 1870. Conceived as an aesthetics of the 'sublime' in response to Eduard Hanslick's aesthetics of the 'beautiful', this is an attempt to merge a Rousseauist cri de la nature with Schopenhauer's theory of dreaming. The essay closes with the thorny issue of Parsifal's pseudo-Christian ethics.