| Summary: | In this article the author endeavors to present music as socially powerful and effective art, which has enormous potential to participate in the complex process of constructing reality, especially the reality of "symbolic universe" (in Peter Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s meaning of this term). In an attempt to define the role music could play in the process of reality construction, special attention is paid to music’s ability to create temporal and spacial coordinates of a "symbolic universe", as well as to the importance and consequences of belonging to the so-called "community of listeners". In the second part of the article the conclusions are tested by being applied to the audience of Richard Wagner’s Festival Theatre in Bayreuth. The main reason for examining the socially-constructive power of music is found in the fact that Wagner established his theatre with the express purpose of constructing (by optical and acoustical means) an essentially deviant reality of a novel "symbolic universe", reality strong enough to outgrow the reality of everyday life and replace it at the position of paramount - or, in Wagner’s words, "genuine" - reality.
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