Music as a Way of Knowledge: Tannhäuser as a Modern Hero

Listening to music and being aware of music are not the same thing. The purpose of the present paper is to show how music canincrease self-awareness and our knowledge of the world, by analyzing Wagner’s Tannhäuser from the view point of the symbolic meaning of the main character, Tannhäuser himself. Wagner’s opera provides a wonderfully rich texture which combines music,words and images; therefore the emphasis will be on the relationships between musical sound and other forms of communication.