Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic 0521887615, 9780521887618, 9780511388491

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P O E T RY A N D T H E RO M A N T I C MUSICAL AESTHETIC

James H. Donelan describes how two poets, a philosopher, and a composer – H¨olderlin, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven – developed an idea of self-consciousness based on music at the turn of the nineteenth century. This idea became an enduring cultural belief: the understanding of music as an ideal representation of the autonomous creative mind. Against a background of political and cultural upheaval, these four major figures – all born in 1770 – developed this idea in both metaphorical and actual musical structures, thereby establishing both the theory and the practice of asserting self-identity in music. Beethoven still carries the image of the heroic composer today; this book describes how this image originated in both his music and in how others responded to him. Bringing together the fields of philosophy, musicology, and literary criticism, Donelan shows how this development emerged from the complex changes in European cultural life taking place between 1795 and 1831. james h. donelan teaches in the Writing Program and the Departments of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His areas of interest are music, aesthetics, poetry, and the teaching of humanities writing, and his articles have appeared in Philosophy and Literature and Critical Texts. He is the lead classical music critic for the Santa Barbara Independent. This is his first book.

For my wife and children

P O E T RY A N D T H E RO M A N T I C M U S I C A L AESTHETIC JAMES H. DONELAN University of California, Santa Barbara

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521887618 © James H. Donelan 2008 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2008

ISBN-13 978-0-511-38849-1

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

hardback

978-0-521-88761-8

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Musical Examples Acknowledgments Preface: The Sound and the Spirit

page vii ix xi

1 Self-Consciousness and Music in the Late Enlightenment Kant, Self-Consciousness, and Aesthetics Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, and the Systemprogramm Fragment: The Origins of Romantic Self-Consciousness Mozart and the Transformation of Enlightenment Musical Aesthetics The Beginning of Romantic Musical Self-Consciousness

2 H¨olderlin’s Deutscher Gesang and the Music of Poetic Self-Consciousness “Urtheil und Seyn”: Existence in Poetry “Wechsel der T¨one”: The Music of Poetic Language Divine Self-Positing: “Dichterberuf ” and the First Letter to B¨ohlendorff “Brod und Wein,” “Patmos,” and “Wie wenn am Feiertage”: The Divine Origin of Deutscher Gesang

1 5 14 24 30

33 35 40 43 49

3 Hegel’s Aesthetic Theory: Self-Consciousness and Musical Material

68

Hegel’s Aesthetic Lectures: Origin and Context Hegelian Self-Consciousness and Art Music and the Hegelian Forms of Art Music and Subjectivity The Problem of Absolute Music Poetry and Music

70 71 76 84 87 90

4 Nature, Music, and the Imagination in Wordsworth’s Poetry

97

Song and Articulate Meaning: “The Solitary Reaper” Natural Music in The Prelude Text, Voice, and Imagination: “The Dream of the Arab” Natural Sound and Childhood Death: “The Boy of Winander”

107 112 115 122

v

Contents

vi

Textual Silence: “The Blind Beggar” Conclusion: “On the Power of Sound” and The Prelude

5 Beethoven and Musical Self-Consciousness Beethoven’s Intellectual Life The Heroic Style (1803–12) The Late Style (1813–27) Opus 130/133, String Quartet No. 13 in B ♭: First Movement String Quartet No. 13: Middle Movements String Quartet No. 13: Große Fuge and Finale Reception of the Late Quartets Conclusion: The Meaning of a Quartet

6 The Persistence of Sound Notes Bibliography Index

126 130

136 140 143 148 154 165 169 172 174

176 179 205 213

List of Musical Examples

1. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B ♭ major, Opus 130, First Movement, Measures 1–4 2. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B ♭ major, Opus 130, First Movement, Measures 13–19 3. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B ♭ major, Opus 130, First Movement, Measures 51–55 4. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B ♭ major, Opus 130, First Movement, Measures 55–60 5. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B ♭ major, Opus 130, First Movement, Measures 94–105 6. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B ♭ major, Opus 130, First Movement, Measures 106–111 7. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B ♭ major, Opus 130, Second Movement, Measures 49–65 8. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B ♭ major, Opus 130, Sixth Movement, Measures 1–6

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Acknowledgments

This book is the result of the advice, assistance, and goodwill of many people over the course of twenty-three years. It began as an independent study project I undertook as an undergraduate at Yale University with Geoffrey Hartman; it became my doctoral dissertation at the same institution, under the wise and patient guidance of Cyrus Hamlin, the single person who has had the longest and most important influence on the project. John Hollander gave me a great deal of good advice, as did Leon Plantinga, Harold Bloom, Andrzej Warminski, J. Hillis Miller, Heinrich von Staden and many other members of the Departments of Comparative Literature, English, German, and Music at Yale University, where I studied and worked for fifteen years. Manfred Frank at the University of T¨ubingen was also extremely helpful and patient while I was there on a fellowship from the Deutsche Akademishe Austausch Dienst, an extraordinarily benevolent organization to which I am extremely grateful. Haun Saussy has been a good friend and patient listener since we began graduate school together. During my brief stay at the University of California at Berkeley, Lydia Goehr and Joseph Kerman gave me the crucial encouragement and advice that helped me turn the dissertation into a book. Here at UC Santa Barbara, I have had the assistance of many generous and kind colleagues, including Lee Rothfarb (who taught me music theory when I was a freshman in college), William Warner, Alan Liu, Bob Erickson, Simon Williams, and the members of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music. Luke Ma provided essential technical assistance in the preparation of the manuscript. Cody Franchetti’s efforts on behalf of this project rank as one of the most extraordinary demonstrations of generosity, intelligence, and idealism I have ever encountered, and I am grateful for his help and friendship in ways I cannot adequately express. He found a copy of my dissertation on a street in New York City and spent weeks finding me, a total stranger, in California, to tell me how important he thought it was and that it deserved publication. Over the next few years, he worked on the manuscript constantly, suggesting ix

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Acknowledgments

sources, editing it for clarity and correctness, and lending his considerable musical and linguistic expertise to the project. Many of its finest moments are the direct result of his suggestions, and I cannot imagine how I would have finished it without his help. Linda Peterson at Yale and Muriel Zimmerman at UC Santa Barbara have given me advice and employment when I needed both most. Steven Scher of Dartmouth College invited me to an National Endowment of Humanities Summer Seminar on music and literature that enlightened and energized me. My friends and colleagues in the UC Santa Barbara Writing Program, especially Judy Kirscht, Patrick McHugh, Craig Cotich, John Ramsey, Nick Tingle, Chris Dean, and Karen Lunsford, have all been supportive and encouraging. Victoria Cooper, my editor at Cambridge University Press, has been helpful and encouraging throughout the publication process. My brother Charles and I have always considered our scholarly efforts a kind of joint project, and I see no reason stop believing that now. My parents helped me with everything from the beginning. My wife, Martha, and my children, Jed and Emily, are the source of my energy and inspiration, and this book is dedicated to them.

Preface: The Sound and the Spirit

I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice That is my own voice speaking in my ear. – Wallace Stevens, “Chocorua to its Neighbor”

These lines, although written by a twentieth-century American, nevertheless provide an eloquent summary of what I intend to examine in European poetry, philosophy, and music between 1798 and 1830. Although many critics have studied vision and the visionary in Romantic poetry, relatively few have confronted the related issues of sound, voice, and music, and even fewer have looked into corresponding moments in musical aesthetics and composition. I attempt to answer several questions about these concepts and practices in all three fields and relate these answers to each other. How does musical sound become the articulate voice of the self? How does natural sound become music? How can music represent self-consciousness? I argue that H¨olderlin and Wordsworth, despite their obvious differences, follow a similar path of self-constitution through a musical conception of poetic sound. Furthermore, I maintain that Hegel and Beethoven, although working in radically different fields, nevertheless establish music and selfconsciousness as mutually positing, reciprocal dialectical structures. In other words, at the core of early Romanticism lies a structure – the dialectic of Idealist self-consciousness – and a metaphor – the self-sustaining aesthetic of absolute music – that mirror and support each other, often in ways difficult to discover. Proving this contention necessarily involves integrating arguments from all three disciplines; I therefore engage the scholarship of the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, and musicology and, when necessary, create ways to bridge their differences. In doing so, I hope not only to prove something that could not be proved by any other means but to follow the example of other researchers in all three fields who have recently created useful, xi

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profound scholarship that is nevertheless available to a wide audience. Among these authors, I include many whose works have been the basis for my own methodology. Lawrence Kramer, for instance, has revealed new possibilities for critical discourse in his recent work on the relationship between music and poetry, as well as on the possibilities of meaning in music. In musicology, Scott Burnham’s works on A. B. Marx and Beethoven, as well as Charles Rosen’s landmark studies of musical style and form, have provided a sound basis for a humanistic yet sophisticated understanding of the Vienna School. In philosophy, Andrew Bowie’s examinations of aesthetics, subjectivity, and the problem of music in Idealist philosophy have also enabled long-standing traditions in philosophical scholarship, literary criticism, and musicology to speak to each other. My purpose is to bring these strands of new interdisciplinary studies together into a single work of philosophical criticism. In calling this work “criticism,” I mean that my primary goal is to interpret individual works through historical, social, or biographical materials rather than to understand or create something outside them. However, that is not to say that this work is not also intellectual history; the nature of these figures and their works makes historical arguments inevitable. H¨olderlin and Hegel, for instance, knew each other well. They attended the T¨ubinger Stift together, sharing a room with Schelling; they read the same books and even worked on a strange manuscript together, which I examine in the introductory chapter. Idealist philosophy, in various ways and forms, also came to Wordsworth’s attention, mainly via Coleridge; Beethoven praised both Kant and Schiller, the great predecessors of Hegel and H¨olderlin. All four lived in Europe during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars and could not help but be affected by these events and the enormous social upheaval they precipitated. Nevertheless, another, less identifiable aspect of their lives and careers demands that I take a somewhat less historical approach. All four achieved, both within their lifetimes and in the two centuries afterward, a degree of autonomy that precludes any interpretation dependent on simple ideas of influence or causality. As precise contemporaries (all were born in 1770), none was the mentor or patron of another, and contact between any of them after Hegel’s mysterious break with H¨olderlin was minimal to nonexistent. Moreover, each embraced a principle of independent creativity and produced works of undeniable individuality. Whatever skepticism we may show in the present toward the idea of the creative genius, as well as toward the idea of subjectivity itself, the Romantic ideal of the autonomous self has an undeniable durability within these modes of discourse and in our

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understanding of philosophy, poetry, and music. I examine how the concept of self-consciousness became associated with music and musical creativity and describe the relationship between the highly abstract discourse of philosophy and the concrete works of poetry and music of the early Romantic period. My objective, therefore, is to understand their works in their cultural context while acknowledging the continuous tradition of interpretation each of these figures has generated in the intervening two centuries. In doing so, I hope to reconcile the philological and philosophical sides of current academic criticism, which have been engaged in a complex set of ideological disputes. The construction of the subjective self remains a live issue, despite many efforts to declare it dead. In the last few decades, examining Romantic subjectivity has not only involved acknowledging or denying that the idea still has currency but also determining whether it constitutes part of a destructive ideology. I hope that the present study establishes (among other things) that subjectivity, then and now, is more than a mere mask, and a great deal more benign than its detractors suggest. I admit that I believe that Idealist philosophy maintains an illuminating role in current intellectual life, but I must also acknowledge the insights of deconstructionist interpretations of Romantic era writings, especially those of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Andrzej Warminski, whose conclusions of unreliability, unreadability, and instability remain firmly within the rigorous tradition of Idealist philosophy and philosophical criticism even as they call its assumptions into question. Other critiques of the ideological basis for Romanticism – in literature by Jerome McGann and Terry Eagleton; in musicology by Rose Rosengard Subotnik and Lydia Goehr; and in philosophy by Judith Butler, among others – have also established an understanding of these works and ideas that represents, in my view, more a continuation of the history of Idealism than a break from it. Self-consciousness, as I demonstrate in the introductory chapter, emerged as the central principle of Idealist epistemology in a demonstrable progression from Kant’s distinction between a priori and empirical knowledge, to Fichte’s assertion of the self-positing subject, and from there to H¨olderlin’s and Hegel’s (and possibly Schelling’s) reworking of the idea in their early joint project in aesthetics, the Systemprogramm fragment. This progression depends on history, as represented by the personal, political, and chronological relationships among particular people at particular moments, yet it also depends on the internal history of philosophy itself – the contention between competing ideas within philosophical discourse that continues in our era.

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At this moment in cultural history, as I also argue in the first chapter, “Self-Consciousness and Music in the Late Enlightenment,” a new ontology of music began to emerge, partly because of Enlightenment developments in musical aesthetics, but primarily due to the achievements of Mozart. The autonomy of the artist, as a self-motivating creative force, is closely allied to the autonomy of the self; little of this Romantic notion would exist without Mozart’s struggle to overcome the noble patronage system of his time. Moreover, Mozart’s music reflects not only his extraordinary talent but also a new paradigm for music and its effects on listeners and musicians alike. Before Mozart, Western art music had two fundamental purposes: to proclaim the glory of God in His churches and to provide musical decoration for the powerful in their courts and homes. As Mozart’s influence grew, his compositions began to assume a larger role in intellectual life. By the time of the French Revolution, music had increasingly become a reflection of the composer’s self-conscious mind, rather than a celebration of God or patron. The confluence between musical aesthetics and the philosophical concept of self-consciousness manifests itself as a distinctly Romantic phenomenon in H¨olderlin’s poetry and prose, the subject of the second chapter, “H¨olderlin’s Deutscher Gesang and the Music of Poetic Self-Consciousness.” H¨olderlin remains an enigmatic figure for both philosophy and poetry, having published little during his lifetime, mainly because he spent his last forty years almost completely incapacitated by madness. His contributions to philosophy have only recently come to light in scholarship by Warminski and Henrich, and his fragmentary essays on poetry, especially “Wechsel der T¨one,” remain little understood. I will argue that this essay, the title of which can be translated as “Changing of Tones,” or “Modulation,” proposes a theory of poetry based on musical form, and that aspects of this theory led to specific metrical and thematic decisions in the composition of many of his poems, including “Dichterberuf,” “Patmos,” “Wie wenn am Feiertage . . .” and “Brod und Wein.” For H¨olderlin, music becomes a crucial site for mediation between the theory and practice of poetry, as well as between Greece and Hesperia, and between the divine and the human. These binary oppositions consistently return to issues of temporality and memory, revealing a close connection between H¨olderlin’s theory of poetic consciousness and musical form. Similarly, the temporal and teleological aspects of music play a surprisingly important role in Hegel’s philosophy. In the third chapter, “Hegel’s Aesthetic Theory: Self-Consciousness and Musical Material,” I examine how the relatively unexplored chapter on music in the Lectures on Aesthetics

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contains a subtle yet crucial link between self-consciousness and sensory apprehension through the material of sound. In addition, the cultural and historical context of the music chapter indicates that Hegel was responding to contemporaneous statements on the importance of music by E. T. A. Hoffmann, among others. Far from being the isolated comments of an amateur (as Hegel uncharacteristically calls himself), the music chapter contains the traces of a continuing and influential discussion of the relevance of music to philosophy. This discussion, in one form or another, even reached Wordsworth, who far preferred the sounds of nature to those of concert hall. Nevertheless, his views of music have suffered surprising neglect, despite their importance at significant moments in both his prose and his poetry. In the fourth chapter, “Nature, Music, and the Imagination in Wordsworth’s Poetry,” I investigate his use of metaphors of music in The Prelude, “On the Power of Sound,” and other poems, as a reflection of his attitude toward poetic form and metrical structure and the relationship between natural and communicative sound. Like Hegel, Wordsworth employed music as a structural metaphor for the dialectical workings of the mind and the differentiation between poetic and natural sound. Unlike Hegel, he continued to hear music in natural sound, complementing the visionary with the musical in his construction of the imagination. Finally, this account of the relationship between self-consciousness and music requires an investigation of the extent of its manifestation in actual musical composition. In the fifth chapter, “Beethoven and Musical SelfConsciousness,” I examine the basis for the attitudes toward music demonstrated in the previous chapters and determine the relationship between actual musical practice and philosophers’ and poets’ ideas of it. Among the most important issues is the question of meaning in absolute music. Does a work of instrumental music, such as a symphony or a string quartet, have a demonstrable, extra-musical meaning? I argue that it does and that the late works of Beethoven, especially String Quartet No. 13 in B ♭ major, op. 130/133, contain clear, audible, and provable indications of self-conscious reflection in musical form. The consequences of these interpretations become the subject of the afterword, “The Persistence of Sound.” The concept of self-consciousness, the category of the aesthetic, and actual manifestations of aesthetically ordered sound in Romantic poetry and music, I argue, are parts of a continuous matrix of understanding that emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century and persist at the turn of the twenty-first. Above all, selfconsciousness and music developed at this moment in the history of ideas

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and artistic practice as mirror images of the dialectical process of becoming an autonomous being. Moreover, they depend on each other, and we, even in this skeptical era, depend on them for a remarkable number of fundamental principles. Although we may repeatedly call into question the conditions and circumstances that brought these ideas into being, few composers, poets, or artists of any kind create without an idea that they are somehow, to some degree, constructing something of themselves into their work. Similarly, even the most socially conscious participants in civic life acknowledge that on some level, the “we” of any movement begins with the recognition of an “I.” That self can only come to consciousness through an articulate voice, and the “sound of what is secret,” as Wallace Stevens says, is the sound of each individual voice, saying “I am I” to each of us. It is a sound that keeps speaking, and when it speaks, we hear the music of Beethoven.

chapter 1

Self-Consciousness and Music in the Late Enlightenment

How can I say I! without self-consciousness? – Friedrich H¨olderlin, “Judgment and Being”

No other philosophical concept so clearly defines the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of Romanticism as self-consciousness, the process by which the self becomes aware of its status as a thinking, knowing entity, and the precondition, according to the Idealists and Romantics, for all knowledge. In a limited sense, the concept goes much farther back into the history of philosophy, to Plato or even Parmenides, and one could even make a case for the presence of poetic or musical self-consciousness in the Homeric epics. However, by the seventeenth century, Descartes appeared to have made the definitive statement about self-consciousness with the cogito, the well-known “I think therefore I am” argument of the Meditations on First Philosophy. Enlightenment philosophical investigations after Descartes generally turned outward, toward the systematic acquisition and organization of all possible knowledge about the world, following Newton’s and Leibniz’s mathematical models of understanding, the alphabetical tendencies of Voltaire, Diderot, and the Philosophes, or the British empiricists’ distrust of metaphysics. Immanuel Kant, at the time an obscure professor at the University of K¨onigsberg, returned to the problem with the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 by focusing his considerable analytic power on knowledge itself and separating it into two central categories: a priori knowledge, that which is known prior to experience, and a posteriori knowledge, that which is known as a result of experience. From this extremely dense and arcane examination of a priori knowledge, Kant deduced that consciousness, as a necessary precondition for any cognition, began with the self-awareness of the subject: the “I” that thinks. In the same year – 1781 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, no longer content with his position as the court composer to the prince-archbishop of Salzburg, asked to be released from the archbishop’s service while in Vienna. 1

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Self-Consciousness and Music in the Late Enlightenment

Mozart, at twenty-five no longer a child prodigy, soon acquired students, gave concerts, and wrote an opera and a symphony for both public performance and publication. For the next five years, Mozart would continue to write at an extraordinary rate, making a good living (contrary to legend) as a public performer of instrumental music, with revenues from sheet music publication as well as from commissions and performances. Kant’s publication of the first critique and Mozart’s release from the prince-archbishop’s service have no direct connection to each other, yet they represent the beginning of a new era. Soon, philosophers would follow Kant toward the creation of a renewed, more complex, and stronger version of the individual consciousness as a motivating force, generating a belief in the power of the self-conscious, independent mind that persists even in these modern and postmodern times. Following Kant, the Idealist philosophers, especially Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, claimed self-consciousness as the center of their philosophical systems and the basis for all other knowledge; in different ways and to varying degrees, they also claimed that the self-conscious subject gives order to the world. Meanwhile, Beethoven, acutely aware of Mozart’s accomplishments, created a powerful persona of himself as composer-hero, leading to a form of self-consciousness in music. H¨olderlin and Wordsworth also turned inward to their poetry, describing in deeply philosophical terms the poet’s vocation and position in history and developing a new self-consciousness in poetry. What connects these events, and can criticism articulate a meaningful and useful description of this connection? Marshall Brown’s answer to this question takes the same starting point, the role of consciousness in Kant and Mozart. According to Brown, at every period in history a subterranean network of constraints governs the organization of human thought. Different fields develop and change in parallel not because they affect one another but because the infrastructures of mental activity affect all of them. In this respect, the relationship of music and philosophy is no different from the relationship of literature and philosophy. The infrastructure is the precondition of thought and is by definition unconscious and unarticulated. Because it lies outside the limits of the individual disciplines, it cannot really be formulated within any of them. Hence arises the necessity of comparative study.1

Brown’s recognition of the necessity of studies like this one is gratifying, as is his desire to examine the “intellectual infrastructures” of the eighteenth century without using political, economic, or social history as an ultimate cause. However, the mutual illumination he seeks between music and philosophy, and between music and literature, does not necessarily

Self-Consciousness and Music in the Late Enlightenment

3

require a concept of infrastructure, conceptual or otherwise. Rather, the relationships among music, philosophy, and literature, some direct, some mediated, take place in historical time as part of an entire matrix of communicative structures that is far from subterranean. These structures do not precondition the creation of philosophy, poetry, or music; they are the result of reciprocating relationships among these individual modes of discourse. I intend, therefore, to explore the relationship between self-consciousness and music in poetry, music, and philosophy as a series of exchanges in form, structure, material, and metaphor in the works of four central figures: H¨olderlin, Hegel, Wordsworth, and Beethoven. These exchanges all took place in the early Romantic period, which I define (somewhat arbitrarily) as the years immediately following the publication of Kant’s critiques to the end of the first flourishing of Romanticism, that is, from about 1795, when Schelling, H¨olderlin, and Hegel worked together on philosophical projects, to 1831, when Hegel died in Berlin. This time also spans virtually the entire productive lives of H¨olderlin, Wordsworth, and Beethoven, as well as nearly all the major English Romantic poets, Schubert, Schopenhauer, and a number of other luminaries. I choose these four as the subject of close examination because they had a lasting and widespread effect on culture and because their works so clearly demonstrate the various manifestations of self-consciousness. I use the word “manifestation” cautiously, because the concept of selfconsciousness already contains a complex relationship between abstract idea and concrete actualization. Self-consciousness, as a philosophical concept, begins with the recognition of the boundary between the self and the nonself, and recognition of the subject as an active force in the world, thereby already inscribing the issue of interiority and exteriority in its own definition. During that progression, the self must confront the limits of its domain, the point at which pure self-consciousness ends and consciousness of an other – or an external world – begins. That external element must have material substance, be real, not imagined, so that the self can recognize it as something other than mere thought. This moment, in which the self recognizes its own existence through juxtaposition with the material nonself, constitutes an aesthetic moment, a crucial and highly debated concept in Idealist epistemology. I argue that for the Romantics, the category of the aesthetic emerges after pure sensation but before cognition and defines the conceptual space necessary for Romantic theories of absolute music (music without any descriptive program); consequently, absolute music became the paradigmatic art of the aesthetic itself.

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Self-Consciousness and Music in the Late Enlightenment

Before I begin exploring the connections between self-consciousness, aesthetics, and music, I must acknowledge some of the difficulties and limitations of comparative study. Besides the obvious problem of the overlapping and often misleading terminology in different fields of humanistic study (the word “absolute,” for instance, has distinct yet related meanings in musicology and philosophy), the various methodologies for each field depend on long-standing traditions of interpretation that do not transfer easily, if at all, from one field to another. As Scott Burnham has amply demonstrated in his work on Beethoven,2 we do not hear a Beethoven symphony without also hearing, directly or indirectly, a two-hundred-year tradition of interpretation of that symphony. Likewise, the aggregate image of what commentators from Marx to Koj`eve to Lukacs to Adorno have said about Hegel inevitably looms over any encounter with his texts, as do the corresponding images of H¨olderlin and Wordsworth created by their interpreters. These traditions form an inevitable part of our understanding, yet they have a tendency to limit our discourse to clearly defined areas. Any comparative study, therefore, must demonstrate a heightened awareness of both these disciplinary boundaries and interpretive traditions and develop, to some extent, a common critical language. Fortunately, this language already exists in the complex critical texts by some important participants in Romantic intellectual life, including the prose works of H¨olderlin, the music criticism of E. T. A. Hoffmann and A. B. Marx, and the aesthetic writings of Hegel. My objective is to add to our understanding of these works the critical terms and ideas held by their creators and their contemporaries and to describe how these ideas continue to affect our understanding of early Romanticism. Moreover, almost everyone discussed these matters openly and frequently, rarely denying themselves the pleasure of a debate on any of these matters on the grounds of too little expertise. An accurate picture of the circumstances in which a particular work of music, poetry, or philosophy originated must therefore take into account the prevalence of these interdisciplinary discussions in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century life. Certainly, as Harold Bloom, among many others, has said, poetry begets poetry, music begets music, and philosophy begets philosophy; the fifth chapter of this study in particular investigates how Beethoven’s awareness of his position within Viennese classicism influenced the formal structure of his late works. Artistic creations that philosophers read, see, and hear often contain the conceptual structures that they make explicit in their essays and lectures. Hegel’s philosophy, as I intend to show, depends in crucial moments on a central metaphor of music, as does H¨olderlin’s poetry. Understanding how

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this metaphor works will involve finding out what music really was, and what people thought it was, at the time this metaphor came into currency. The relationship between Idealist philosophy and Romantic art therefore does not devolve into a series of cause-and-effect sequences of influence; rather, it forms a dialectical matrix of reciprocation between abstract ideas and concrete works. Although the relationship I describe between self-consciousness and music appears most prominently during the early Romantic era, a brief examination of the currents in philosophy and music of the late Enlightenment helps explain the sudden introspective turn evident in virtually every field of cultural activity in the early Romantic period. In particular, Kant’s development of a consistent philosophical system connecting selfconsciousness to aesthetics began the Idealist school at almost the same moment that Mozart’s extraordinary genius and curiously ambivalent attitude toward Enlightenment principles led to sweeping changes in musical culture. These separate developments in philosophy and music converged on a common set of problems concerning the relationship between the self and music that would later become extraordinarily important in Romantic aesthetics. I begin with Kant, whose epistemological developments continue to reverberate through both philosophy and criticism; I then describe how his immediate followers, Fichte, Schiller, and Schelling, continued on the path toward Idealism. Finally, I discuss, extremely briefly, the profound changes Mozart brought to Enlightenment music aesthetics and their relation of Idealism. kant, self-consciousness, and aesthetics As Andrew Brook has astutely pointed out, Kant did not articulate a specific position with regard to the two concepts that later achieved central importance in Idealist philosophy, Bewußtsein and Selbstbewußtsein, “consciousness” and “self-consciousness” and may have even regarded them as unproblematic.3 If he did, he was clearly mistaken – no other Kantian concept, not even the categorical imperative, has created as much continuing discussion, with many disputes and few resolutions. However, Kant more probably considered the problem of self-consciousness secondary to his greatest concern: the transcendental deduction, Kant’s proof of the means by which the mind categorizes knowledge. Kant found this so difficult to describe that he entirely rewrote his explanation of it for the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Although Kant claims in the preface to the second edition that the revised version merely clarifies the principles

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outlined in the first edition, both versions are routinely reprinted and studied. Briefly, Kant’s epistemological position is as follows. A priori knowledge enables the subject to acquire the necessary conceptual structure to gain its counterpart: a posteriori knowledge. No amount of internal thought can determine the weather outside as much as a glance out the window can, nor can even the deepest thought probe the activities and qualities of things the mind itself did not invent without experience of them, yet understanding what one sees requires a preexisting ability to categorize those perceptions. A posteriori knowledge therefore results from the interaction of the mind and sensory information, allowing the subject to understand, manipulate, categorize, and describe the world. From this distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge, one can deduce the existence of natural faculties, a set of innate abilities to categorize perceptions into classes, such as quantity, shape, and size. The proof of the existence of these a priori categories is a deduction, because it follows from a series of logical propositions, as opposed to an induction, which would be inferred from a set of concrete data. Likewise, this deduction is transcendental because of the commonality of human experience; the fact that all people make these categorical distinctions the same way demonstrates that the categories are universal. Kant’s version of the subject (the “I that thinks”), which possesses these faculties and combines perceptions into cognitions, receives several overlapping names, including “the synthetic unity of apperception.” A concise explanation of the term appears in the second edition of the first critique, in §17 of the Transcendental Logic: The supreme principle for the possibility of all intuition in reference to understanding is that everything manifold in intuition is subject to conditions of the original synthetic unity of apperception. . . . They are subject to [this] principle insofar as they must be capable of being combined in one consciousness. For without that combination, nothing can be thought or cognized through such presentations, because the given presentations do then not have in common the act of apperception, I think, and thus would not be collated in one self-consciousness.4

Kant makes several subtle distinctions in this paragraph, mainly in response to Hume’s devastating claim that the subject is merely a convenient fiction: the name given to a bundle of nerves. First, Kant distinguishes mere empirical apperception, the singular experience of an individual on realizing that he or she exists and is conscious of something, from transcendental apperception, the knowledge that this apperception exists over time and for everyone. Kant then determines the existence of the transcendental

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aesthetic, the knowledge that perceptions occur and are organized according to a priori categories. Both apperception (intuitive awareness of the self ) and perception (what one receives as a result of the cognitive faculties) combine in the intuition of a singular self-consciousness, which collates (in German zusammenfassen, which also means “collect”) apperception and perception into a full, conscious knowledge of the self and its relation to the external world. This ability to combine makes self-consciousness a synthetic unity, that is, an understanding made from the synthesis of perception and apperception. As Brook explains, Kant’s transcendental deduction divides the process of making the transcendental deduction into three distinct elements: encountering the object of one’s perception, recognizing the experience of perceiving, and becoming aware of the self as an entity independent from the experience of a particular perception. Brook refers to the awareness of the last element as “apperceptive self-awareness,” to distinguish it from empirical self-awareness, the awareness of the self derived from the mere consciousness of a singular experience. In other words, apperceptive self-awareness represents the continuous self-knowledge of the subject over time, whereas empirical self-awareness merely allows the subject to intuit its existence at a particular moment through a particular experience.5 Kant’s description of the synthetic unity of apperception therefore does not mean that self-consciousness merely arranges the presentations given to it by several faculties (as Hume claims); it cognizes those presentations into knowledge about them, and from this acquisition of knowledge over time, it deduces a continuous self. This description of self-consciousness has greater efficacy than Descartes’s and Hume’s previous versions. It clarifies the relation between objects of perception and the conscious subject by means of a mediating term, Vorstellungen, or “presentations,” thereby separating the physical problems of sensation (how sensory information is acquired, the material characteristics of objects, etc.) from the metaphysical problems of perception, cognition, and the self. Knowledge about an object in this system therefore contains three elements: the sensory encounter with an object, the formation of a presentation of that object by means of the faculties, and the recognition of that presentation by the conscious self. The object, or “thing-in-itself,” becomes, in a strict sense, unknowable; we can only know about things through presentations, which are necessarily different from the things themselves. What are the consequences of this idea for the understanding of art? In the first critique, Kant has relatively little to say about it, being primarily

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concerned with perceptions in general and the field of epistemology as a whole. Nevertheless, a possible starting point for Kant’s third critique emerges in a footnote to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Here, Kant finds fault with the use of the word “aesthetics” to mean the philosophical investigation of the principles of art: The Germans are the only people who have come to use the word aesthetic[s] to designate what others call the critique of taste. They are doing so on the basis of a false hope conceived by that superb analyst, Baumgarten: he hoped to bring our critical judging of the beautiful under rational principles, and to raise the rules for such judging to the level of a science. Yet that endeavor is futile. For, as regards their principle sources, those rules or criteria are merely empirical. Hence, they can never serve as determinate a priori laws. . . . Because of this it is advisable to follow either of two alternatives. One of these is to let this new name aesthetic[s] become extinct again, and to reserve the name aesthetic for the doctrine that is true science. . . . The other alternative would be for the new aesthetic[s] to share the name with speculative philosophy; we would then take the name partly in its transcendental sense, and partly in the psychological meaning.6

Kant refers to Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, and objects to his empirical approach for determining the principles of art because its method of categorization is arbitrary. Kant claims that by proceeding from empirical, rather than a priori, principles, Baumgarten has used a limited data set and drawn conclusions inductively, resulting in an inherently weak system. He also perceives a terminological problem in Baumgarten’s work. By using the ¨ word Asthetik to signify the principles governing art, Baumgarten narrows the meaning of the word considerably; for Kant, it should mean something more like “sensibility.” Here, Kant wants to restore that meaning to the extent that he can use the term to describe raw, precognitive sensory information. However, these overlapping meanings of the word “aesthetic” reveal the dilemma that Kant attempts to resolve in the third critique. Observations of aesthetic objects, like observations of any other object, result in presentations, making aesthetics (in the artistic rather than the general sense) into the relation between the observing subject and the presentations of aesthetic objects rather than the relation between the subject and the objects themselves. However, aesthetic objects defy, on certain levels, the processes of identification and categorization Kant had assumed to be true of objects in general in the first critique: aesthetic objects resist assimilation to a determined set of relations because the experience of the aesthetic, by definition, begins and ends with the initial sensation caused by these objects. In other words, as aesthetic objects rather than objects of use, the normal set of

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relations is somehow suspended or diverted, remaining in the area of pure sensibility, that is, the area of the aesthetic in Kant’s original sense. Kant recognized the need to describe the consequences of his epistemological theories in more detail, first publishing the Critique of Practical Reason in 1786 to establish an a priori system of ethics and completing the series with the Critique of Judgment in 1790. In the Critique of Judgment, also known as the third critique, Kant addresses the problem of aesthetics in detail by dividing the overall faculty of judgment into two types: aesthetic and teleological. Aesthetic judgment enables us to experience the beautiful and the sublime in art; teleological judgment enables us to perceive the purposeful design of nature. Aesthetic objects, in Kant’s well-known words, are “purposeful without purpose,” revealing intention in design, yet remaining without practical utility, whereas nature’s objects serve particular functions within God’s plan for the universe. The point of this distinction between artificial and natural objects is to distinguish the conceptual basis for artistic beauty from the enjoyment of natural beauty, thereby placing artistic beauty clearly within the human sphere and giving us hope of discovering its principles. According to the preface of the Critique of Judgment, the faculty of judgment, like reason and ethics, should be founded on a priori principles and bridges the gap between understanding (pure reason) and desire (practical reason), the areas of mental activity described the first two critiques.7 In other words, judgment must be founded on principles that are neither learned by empirical means nor subjugated to some other faculty. Ultimately, we do not create judgments according to custom, nor do we create them because it is reasonable for us to do so in one way or another. We create judgments independently of reason or desire or else we create them falsely, that is, we substitute conclusions we have reached by other methods for true judgments. To describe these true judgments in the third critique, Kant uses the ¨ adjective form of the word Asthetik, a¨ sthetische, in Baumgarten’s sense, to mean judgments pertaining to aesthetic objects, especially in the section titled “Deduktion der reinen a¨sthetischen Urteile,” “Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgment.”8 Although Kant’s reinstatement of the meaning of ¨ Asthetik that he intended to dismiss, or at least qualify, in the Critique of Pure Reason may seem like a reversal of his position on the term’s meaning, this section of the third critique actually represents a new direction in his thought. His use of the word combines both meanings and places the category of aesthetic judgment in a privileged area before cognition to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the universality of aesthetic judgment, that is, the general agreement on what is beautiful, with the

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impossibility of proving aesthetic judgments by means of deduction from the a priori principles in the first critique. This contradiction justifies the deduction of a separate, a priori faculty of judgment: But a feeling of pleasure (or displeasure) and of satisfaction can be combined with a perception, which accompanies the representation of the object and serves in place of its predicate; thus, an aesthetic judgment, which is not a cognitive judgment, can originate. Such a judgment, if it is not a mere judgment of feeling but a formal judgment of reflection, in which everyone senses this satisfaction to be necessary, must have an a priori principle as its basis, which in any case may be a merely subjective principle (if an objective principle is impossible for judgments of this kind), but also as such requires a deduction, so that we may understand how an aesthetic judgment could make a claim of necessity.9

At the center of this difficult passage lies the heart of Kant’s argument for a separate faculty of aesthetic judgment: judgments that are both objective (in the sense of being universally accepted) and subjective (in the sense of being empirically unprovable) must originate in some faculty between the necessity of logic and the freedom of the individual. If aesthetic judgments were entirely objective, their creation would be available to examination by reason; if they were entirely a matter of individual freedom, they would be idiosyncratic and completely dependent on individual preferences. Neither is the case; thus, we possess a separate, a priori faculty of judgment. Aesthetic judgment occupies a position somewhere between a priori and a posteriori knowledge, as both the result of experience with the external world and part of an innate faculty. An encounter with an aesthetic object does not involve the sheer inventions of the perceiver’s mind but a presentation of something external to it, the result of an actual experience. On the other hand, the aesthetic object does not perform any function for the perceiver other than merely to be perceived; the perceiver does not categorize it further in terms of function. Because works of fine art do not do anything except exist as objects of perception, their presentations do not progress further into analysis by the faculties for qualities unrelated to the perception already experienced. When looking at a painting, for instance, we do not think about how much it weighs, whether we can lift it by ourselves, whether it will fit on the wall over the couch, and so on as part of our aesthetic contemplation of the painting – examining it for practical purposes, or even for physical characteristics, such as weight or dimension, unrelated to its appearance as a painting remains superfluous to its role as an aesthetic object. As art, we judge the painting in terms of its beauty, and nothing else.

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This conclusion, that aesthetic judgments are made a priori, seems almost contradictory. A priori concepts are by definition theoretical, yet the idea of an aesthetic object depends on an encounter with a real object. In this area, according to Jacques Derrida, “we are plunging into a place that is neither theoretical nor practical or else both theoretical and practical.”10 This place, the category of the aesthetic, rests on the crucial distinction between the idea of beauty as something inherent in the object and the idea of aesthetic judgment as a separate category of thought having to do with the presentation (Vorstellung) of the object, rather than with the object itself. Frances Ferguson summarizes the importance of this distinction succinctly: Aesthetic objects are not in and of themselves different from objects of cognition; the aesthetic domain contains no object that cannot be shared, as material, with the understanding or the reason. Rather, aesthetic objects are constituted not merely by a shift from seeing them in terms of properties to seeing them in terms of formal functions. It is that this formality can appear as an imitation of empirical objects, the empty or superfluous imitation of the look of function.11

The element of the aesthetic inheres in the object itself only to the degree that it contains the formal elements of an aesthetic object; whether it counts as an aesthetic object depends entirely on what faculty the conscious subject brings to bear on the presentation, or image, it causes. In addition, by describing imitation as a mere subclass of the overall formal structure of beauty, Kant encompasses both mimesis (the deliberate imitation of nature in art) and natural beauty (the unintentional imitation of art in nature) without compromising his overall position. This formalist conception of art thereby releases the aesthetic object from its mimetic function – the object does not necessarily imitate anything but instead fulfills a set of formal criteria for beauty. By moving away from mimesis and toward formalism, Kant can include both the beautiful, the property of objects that provide satisfaction without fulfilling a specific purpose, and the sublime, the property of objects that overwhelm the senses or the understanding in his system, because the experience of the aesthetic has been relieved of the burden of comprehending the object as well. This broad, formalist conception of the aesthetic translates into the practice of individual art forms with some difficulty. For the visual arts, a renewed focus on the experience of vision rather than the reality of appearance becomes possible, as many critics have noted. However, what Kant himself has to say about music reveals surprisingly little of importance and is somewhat disappointing. Kant’s problem with music lies in the overwhelmingly visual orientation of his idea of the aesthetic object. To cite

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one of many examples, the German word for “representation,” Vorstellung, also means “image,” and it is often translated that way, even in its specialized Kantian context. In addition, it comes from the reflexive verb sich vorstellen, “to imagine,” or, more literally, “to place in front of oneself.” These visual connotations create a number of problems for Kant when applied to music, and the dominance of visual metaphors may be a central reason that music, in Kant’s estimation, did not hold first rank among the arts. Like Hegel more than thirty years later, Kant reserved that position for poetry because it could express both abstract concepts and concrete images. Music, for Kant, is merely a decorative art, a poor imitation of vague emotional content. In addition, music lacks specificity in its concepts and is therefore an “art of the beautiful play of emotions”: The arts of the beautiful play of the emotions (which are stimulated from without), and must be likewise universally communicated, cannot be anything other than the proportion of the different levels of mood (tension) of the sense to which the emotion belongs, that is which concerns the tone itself; and in this far-reaching sense of the word, they can be divided into the artistic play of the emotions of hearing and of sight, that is, music and the art of color.12

Edward Lippmann’s response to Kant on music balances his recognition of its obvious problems with an acknowledgment of the impact of Kant’s overall aesthetic theory on music as a whole: Imitation [for Kant] plays a role that is more essential than expression, for music imitates the tonal modulation of speech. On the other hand, Kant’s view of the play of tonal sensations as a condition for musical beauty suggests a formalist ingredient of aesthetics that belongs to the future. . . . Kant conceives music on its own terms, as absolute rather than vocal. . . . Kant’s conception of music . . . was in any event found to be inadequate to the nature of the art, for it became increasingly obvious with every year that passed that instrumental music was a fine art in its own right and that its beauty was not lessened by pleasure in tonal sonority but rather that both its beauty and its significance were deepened by their sensuous element. The gradual growth of this awareness is a fascinating chapter in the history of aesthetic consciousness; there is no doubt that the low esteem in which Kant held instrumental music had a positive value – because of its inadequacy – in bringing musical aesthetics to fruition.13

The central problem with Kant’s account lies in his failure to consider the disparity between the technical study of musical form (the mathematical ratios between intervals, harmony, counterpoint, and meter) and its emotional effect. To explain this important dilemma in eighteenth-century music aesthetics, Kant must resort to an analogy with color that Rousseau had already superseded.14 In addition, Kant fails to explain how music can

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affect the emotions without representing an object of emotional value to the listener; colors in themselves may vary from the drab to the bright, but they do not carry the emotional power of a musical composition or, for that matter, a finished painting. Finally, Kant admits that music cannot be categorized and differentiated by human perception but must be perceived as a single entity. As Kant himself points out, no one can count vibrations per second, nor can many people identify keys and individual notes as they listen, yet almost everyone who listens to music claims to understand it. Moreover, Carl Dahlhaus has observed that Kant’s understanding of music contains two significant and glaring contradictions, even on Kantian terms. Even as Kant creates a formalist aesthetics for art in general, he relegates music to one of the formless “agreeable” arts, as opposed to the superior, formal “beautiful” arts. Kant views music solely in its mathematical, or harmonic aspect, despite the obvious fact that music also has a rhythmic and metrical dimension. Why not, Dahlhaus asks, create an aesthetics of music in accordance with the transcendental aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant clearly explains that representations must be continuous over time?15 Peter Kivy asks similar questions in an essay aptly titled “Kant and the Affektenlehre: What He Said, and What I Wish He Said,” adding somewhat wistfully: It would have been so much more elegant and plausible for Kant to have argued that we recognize emotions as properties of musical form and structure, with the aesthetic ideas following quite naturally and directly from that recognition.16

Kant, for reasons that neither Kivy nor I can adequately explain, chose instead to maintain a theory of music more consistent with past theories than with his own innovations in aesthetics. Ignorance of the workings of music may have played a role, but in my judgment, the limitations of human understanding and experience, even for someone of Kant’s enormous intellect, provide as plausible an explanation as we are likely to find. Nevertheless, different versions of a better-informed and more consistent aesthetics of music based on Kant’s overall aesthetic program and rooted in formalism would emerge in the next few years, as Lippmann implies in the earlier citation. Until the late Enlightenment, treatises on music theory generally followed either extremely practical or nearly theological lines of reasoning, consisting of either technical information about composition for practicing composers or vague ideas of correspondence between music, numerology, emotion, and the harmony of the spheres. With Kant, the formalist conception of aesthetics in general provided both philosophers

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and composers with an idea of art that did not require specific content but only beautiful form, thereby replacing mimesis with formalism as the primary concept of beauty. The vagueness with which music allegedly portrayed emotion could be forgotten and replaced by an appreciation for the range and variety of formal beauty in music, especially when played by instruments alone. Thus, Kant had created the necessary conditions for three essential elements of early Romanticism: the turn toward self-consciousness, the elevation of the category of the aesthetic, and the formalist conception of artistic beauty. All three elements are inextricably linked through Kant’s critiques; the final element would contribute to new developments in music aesthetics that Kant clearly had not anticipated. Likewise, new investigations of self-consciousness would carry Kant’s ideas further than he is likely to have considered possible. fichte, schiller, schelling, and the systemprogramm fragment: the origins of romantic self-consciousness Kant’s critiques had an immediate and widespread effect on philosophical projects throughout Europe, provoking a broad range of ethical, philosophical, and aesthetic programs. For the group of Kant’s followers gathered in Jena during the late 1790s, which included Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, H¨olderlin, and Hegel, the first step in the creation of a Kantian system was to remedy Kant’s failure to describe the precise nature of the subject in the process of self-consciousness. Kant had declared the ultimate comprehension of self-consciousness, as the thing-in-itself, beyond the bounds of human understanding; his only explanation of it, beyond deducing its existence, was that it exists out of spontaneity. The subjective self cannot be conscious of anything before it becomes conscious of itself, that is, selfconscious, yet the act of becoming conscious of itself requires it to have already constituted itself as the object of its consciousness, resulting in a paradox. Likewise, its ontological status as the subject comes into question the moment it becomes objectified by this consciousness – a subject is not a subject when it has become an object. The subject must gain both knowledge of itself and consciousness of its own being without changing its essential nature. In other words, there is no subject without self-consciousness, yet the presupposition of self-consciousness compromises the ontological status of the subject – if it is an object of knowledge, even for itself, then it can no longer be a pure subject. On the other hand, if the subject exists only as a pure “spontaneity,” then it cannot become an object of knowledge,

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because it cannot be described according to a rational system of causes and origins, but only by feeling. Fichte, as Dieter Henrich17 and Robert Pippin, among others, have established, resolves this dilemma by altering the concept of subject from that of an entity to that of an activity, or Tathandlung, a “deed-action.” Pippin’s brief summary of this development correctly emphasizes Fichte’s commitment to the concept of the Tathandlung and the Idealist enterprise: “The intellect [according to Fichte], for idealism, is an act and absolutely nothing more; we should not even call it an active something, for this expression refers to something subsistent in which activity inheres.”18 The problem with Kant’s account of subjectivity and self-consciousness is not that he describes the process incorrectly, but that by simply naming selfconsciousness as a particular element in the process of cognition, rather than an action, he obscures its true nature by objectifying it. Separating self-consciousness from consciousness is like separating a wave from the water that constitutes it; it is mistaking an organized activity (an activity both complete and continuing, both Tat and Handlung) for a discrete object in itself. Furthermore, Fichte claims that consciousness and selfconsciousness, as aspects of essentially the same ich, are simply self-positing and should be defined as such.19 However, if the self-conscious subject is an activity, rather than an object, how does this activity manifest itself, and is the physical subject separate from the metaphysical subject? According to G¨unther Z¨oller, Fichte’s concept of the subject does not have a material existence, because “the intellectual acts” of self-positing “are not to be thought of as empiricalpsychological events but as the structural conditions that govern all mental life.”20 The activity of self-positing that generates self-consciousness therefore has no empirical preconditions and creates itself absolutely as intellectual intuition. To manifest itself, the metaphysical self therefore requires a material object against which it can juxtapose its status as the subject. Fichte describes the activity of self-consciousness as a thinking-in-opposition: It [the “I”] would think of itself in opposition to an external object. It does not notice as the thinker [das Denkende] of the object that it is the thinker of the object, but disappears in the object. However, it easily and clearly finds that the thinker and what is thought [das Gedachte] are different. They are differentiated by means of the following: in the presentation [Vorstellung] of my “I,” the thinker and what is thought are one and the same – in the concept of the “I.” I am the thinker and what is thought. In the other case, the act goes outside of me; in this case the act goes back onto myself.21

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Two central insights in this passage provide the basis for the next step toward the Idealist reconfiguration of self-consciousness. First, the self, for Fichte, posits itself intuitively, yet to complete the process of self-creation, it must differentiate itself in the epistemological process; it perceives an object, realizes that in perceiving it is thinking, and notices that it does the thinking and that the object does not, thus distinguishing the presentation of the self from the presentation of the nonself, the object. Self-consciousness has therefore been redefined as a continuous process of opposition and sublation, rather than a state or an entity, an insight Hegel will later expand into the long journey of the self in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Second, selfconsciousness arises through an observable characteristic of the thinking self but only through negation – it is defined by what the presentation of the external object does not do (that is, think) and by the observation that the self is distinct from the external object, now called the “not-I.” Fichte’s solution to the problem of self-consciousness therefore depends on continuously renewing the moment of aesthetic judgment in Kant’s Critique of Judgment through opposition, or entgegensetzen, positing by juxtaposition. The moment of encounter with a material object also took on extraordinary importance for another member of the Jena group, Friedrich Schiller, but in a different way. Immediately following Fichte’s Wissenschaftlehre ¨ in 1795, Schiller published On Aesthetic Education (Uber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen), which outlines a radical concept of moral and intellectual development through encounters with fine art. For Schiller, “art is the daughter of freedom”22 allowing the unification of desire and obligation. In contrast to Fichte, whose initial objective in the Wissenschaftlehre was to extend Kant’s inquiry deeper into metaphysics and create what Z¨oller aptly calls a “metaphilosophy of philosophical knowledge,”23 Schiller uses the a priori principles outlined in Kant’s critiques, especially the second and third, as the basis for a practical course in spiritual development. In other words, rather than complete Kant’s critiques as a systematic philosophy, Schiller enacts them instead, overturning long-held principles of moral development and aesthetics and inviting his readers to join him in the search for a better, truer understanding of morality and beauty, unencumbered by the need for utility. Utility, of course, is what distinguishes useful objects from aesthetic objects in Kant’s third critique, a distinction that for Kant simply differentiated one category of understanding from another. Schiller, on the other hand, opposes the value placed on utility during the Enlightenment by identifying it as a powerful and negative moral force:

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But at the present time material needs reign supreme and bend a degraded humanity beneath their tyrannical yoke. Utility is the great idol of our age, to which all powers are in thrall and to which all talent must pay homage. . . . The spirit of philosophical inquiry itself is wresting from the imagination one province after another, and the frontiers of art contract the more the boundaries of science expand.24

Freedom, for Schiller, begins with the freedom of the imagination (Einbildung), the internal capacity of humans to represent things to themselves without reference to the external world. As concrete representations of the imagination, artworks set the mind free and as such are reflections of the mind rather than imitations of anything external to it. By making aesthetics prior to practical reason, Schiller essentially reverses the order of the second and third critiques, creating a concept of moral choice dependent on freedom (as Kant does in the second critique) but accessible only through artistic beauty, stating explicitly that “it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.”25 Schiller is careful to distinguish this broader concept of the imagination, Einbildung, from Vorstellung, because of its etymological relation to Bildung, the development of character made possible by this program of aesthetic education.26 Schiller’s declaration of beauty as the ultimate principle also strengthens the formalist claims of Kant’s third critique considerably and enables Schiller to develop his own theories of beauty even further. Abandoning mimetic theories altogether, Schiller develops the tripartite concept of the Spieltrieb, or play drive, which is the combination of the Formtrieb, or form drive, and the Stofftrieb, or material drive.27 Beauty, therefore, embodies the freedom of play in the formal configuration of actual material and provides aesthetic satisfaction through the resolution of two opposing forces: material reality and formal necessity. The balance between the material and the formal varies with the particular material of each individual art, thereby creating a hierarchy among them; Schiller lists the arts according to the level on which each engages its formal and material elements. In contrast to Kant’s view of the individual arts, music holds an especially honored position here: Music, at its most sublime, must become sheer form and affect us with the serene power of antiquity. The plastic arts, at their most perfect, must become music and move us by the immediacy of their sensuous presence. Poetry, when most fully developed, must grip us powerfully as music does, but at the same time, like the plastic arts, surround us with serene clarity. This, precisely, is the mark of perfect style in each and every art: that it is able to remove the specific limitations of the art in question without thereby destroying its specific qualities and through a wise use of its individual peculiarities, is able to confer upon it a more general character.28

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Schiller’s idea of “perfect style” does not mean that a particular work of art must be absolutely perfect but that a fully realized work may transcend its material nature. When fully realized, music becomes “sheer form,” rather than an imitation of emotion or any other content. Other art forms, in turn, must transcend the limitations of their specific material nature, approaching the near perfect formality of music while maintaining a connection to the sensuous material of each particular art form. In this respect, Schiller has departed completely from Kant’s view of music as the play of the emotions, claiming instead that emotional response to music is not due to deliberate manipulation by the composer or performer but to the recognition of formal beauty by the listener.29 The music itself represents the composer’s and performer’s na¨ıve understanding of formal beauty, whereas its effect represents the listener’s sentimental response, just as Greek sculpture represents the na¨ıve understanding of its creators, whereas its effect on modern viewers also represents a sentimental response. To some degree, Fichte and Schiller have been working toward the same synthesis of Kant’s three critiques from opposite directions. Fichte begins with the first critique (the development of self-consciousness through pure reason and a priori principles), combining it with elements of the second (the development of morals through the concept of freedom), yet does not fully address the issues of the third. Schiller begins with the third (aesthetics) to develop a program for enacting the second (ethics), yet for the most part sets aside the epistemological problems of the first. Nevertheless, the elements missing from Fichte’s and Schiller’s systems are implicit in their conclusions. Fichte’s version of self-consciousness depends on a moment of opposition between the self and the nonself virtually identical to the aesthetic moment in that it requires the presentation of a material object and precedes the formation of concepts about the object. Likewise, Schiller’s concept of education is the development of an individual self from the presentation of an aesthetic object and a similar juxtaposition of material object and ideal thought. Essentially, Fichte’s system lacks an aesthetic dimension; Schiller’s lacks an adequate theory of self-consciousness. Their disciples would attempt to make up for these deficiencies. For the younger followers of Fichte in Jena, philosophical and aesthetic concerns came to an unprecedented juncture. Even before Hegel’s arrival in Jena in 1801, Schelling, Hegel, and H¨olderlin, the T¨ubinger Freunde who had studied together at the T¨ubinger Stift, came under Fichte’s influence and began an extraordinary collaboration. Dieter Henrich’s description of these formative years in the history of Idealism is both illuminating and succinct:

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Early in 1795, little more than a year after the theological exam, H¨olderlin formulated his own philosophical position at the University of Jena, under Fichte’s influence and simultaneously in opposition to him. This position brought Hegel, two years later and in a renewed conversation among friends in Frankfurt, to a decisive turning point in his thought. Schelling, who had entered the theological seminary at fifteen in 1790, had already begun his post-Kantian development with two publications before his exams, as the absolutely the first author, as he himself wrote to Hegel, to greet “Fichte, the new hero in the land of truth.”30

The strength of this belief would lead Schelling to create a complete system based on Kantian and Fichtean principles, with self-consciousness as its first principle. Although Schelling’s decision to place self-consciousness at the center of his system strongly resembles Fichte’s position, Schelling finds a slightly different yet important solution to the problem of the objectification of the subject. Rather than use Fichte’s solution of introducing a process of object-negation into the act of self-consciousness, Schelling proposes a series of deductions leading to a concept of self-consciousness based on intellectual intuition. Schelling begins by observing that every consideration of the subjectobject relation necessarily involves a concept of this relation that itself becomes an object, thus positing another subject removed from the first subject-object relation. This subject, in turn, creates a subject-object relation that posits yet another subject, until an absolute, unconditioned concept provides a standpoint for a subject that does not continue this process ad infinitum. This concept, “the point . . . where subject and object are an unmediated unity,”31 is the subject-object, or self-consciousness. Through this concept of the absolute subject, Schelling manages to resolve a number of issues, including the relation between thought and identity: Self-consciousness is an act, but through every act something takes place for us. – Every thought is an act, and every particular thought is a particular act; but through every thought a particular concept arises in us. The concept is nothing else but the act of thinking itself, and abstracted from this act it is nothing. Through the act of self-consciousness a concept must likewise arise for us, and that is nothing else but the concept of the I. In that I become an object through self-consciousness, the concept of the I arises for me, and conversely, the concept of the I is only the concept of the self becoming an object.32

Schelling has escaped the inherent reflexivity of Fichte’s self-positing subject by introducing the concept of the unconditioned, absolute act of self-consciousness as the irreducible subject-object. In this formulation, the circularity of self-objectification is resolved by describing the act of self-consciousness not as a reflexive self-recognition but as the continuous

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Self-Consciousness and Music in the Late Enlightenment

process of becoming an object, the Selbstobjektwerden. Schelling’s version of the subject avoids objectification by never arriving at the point of having become an object; the act of self-consciousness is itself the continual but never fully realized act of attempting to objectify the self, a Selbstobjektwerden, or “self-object-becoming” that never arrives at the point of being a Selbstobjektgeworden, or “self-object-become.” Because knowledge of the “I” is absolute, it must produce itself through intuition, what Schelling terms intuition itself, or intellectual intuition (intellektuelle Anschauung). Here, Schelling closely follows Kant and Fichte, for whom the concept represented the spontaneous generative activity of the self. For Kant, intellectual intuition represented the limits of determinate knowledge; for Fichte, it required a positing of an opposite. For Schelling, intellectual intuition has the same status in philosophy that the intuition of space does in geometry; all other concepts are merely limited cases of the absolute, intuitively postulated principle that makes a comprehensible system possible.33 As Werner Marx points out, for Hegel and Fichte as well as for Schelling (at this point in his career), the dimension of intellectual intuition and self-consciousness is free, in the sense that it depends solely on the subject, and not on objects.34 Despite the freedom of the subject, Schelling asserts an essential role for aesthetic objects in determining whether intellectual intuition is transcendental, that is, whether it is a necessary element of all cogntion that cannot be proved empiricially. To do so, he addresses not only the objects themselves but their origin – aesthetic objects, he observes, are not merely objects of a particular kind of perception but also deliberately created by artists for aesthetic apprehension. They therefore participate both in freedom, because they result from an artist’s imagination, and in necessity, because they are physical objects. No material, no matter how skillfully worked by an artist, can avoid possessing charateristics that are simply inherent in the physical material itself – stone is always stone, and paint is always paint. For Schelling, this aspect of aesthetic objects represented an important connection between the metaphysical self and the physical reality of nature, the unity of conscious and unconscious elements.35 Only art can provide evidence that intellectual intuition, the concept on which self-consciousness depends, is not mere self-deception: How can it be posited without doubt, that it [intellectual intuition] is not founded on a merely subjective deception, if there is no general and universally acknowledged objectivity of that intuition? This generally acknowledged and undeniable

Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, and the Systemprogramm Fragment

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objectivity of intellectual intuition is art itself. Aesthetic intuition is thus precisely intellectual intuition [having] become objective.36

For this reason, art is the “organon” of Schelling’s system, its unifying principle, as it is for Schiller, who claims that art heals the fracture between the opposing impulses of human nature. Art unites the purely subjective and metaphysical with the purely natural and physical and renders it in concrete material. Intellectual intuition and aesthetic intuition both depend on each other and mirror each other. We need aesthetic intuition to know that intellectual intuition adheres to the description Schelling gives it, and we need intellectual intuition to understand art as art. The connection between aesthetics and self-consciousness becomes even clearer in Schelling’s lectures on art, presented publicly in 1802 and 1803, then repeated in 1804 and 1805 at Jena, but only published in their entirety in 1859, five years after Schelling’s death. The overall theory of art explicated in the Philosophie der Kunst generally agrees with that of the System des transzendentalen Idealismus but contains far more detail about the individual arts. In particular, music plays an extraordinarily important role with regard to his theory of self-consciousness: The necessary form of music is succession, for time is regarded as the general form of the imagination of the infinite in the finite, in so far as it is abstracted from the real. The principle of time in the subject is self-consciousness, which is precisely the imagination of the unity of consciousness into multiplicity in the ideal. From this we can grasp the close relationship of the sense of hearing in general, and of music and speech in particular, with self-consciousness. – We can also understand provisionally, until we have indicated a still higher meaning, the arithmetic side of music.37

Although Schelling’s normally clear prose style seems to have abandoned him here (as is the case with many posthumous works), Schelling has drawn together the strands of many theories into a central point about music. Because music is sound, which does not visibly inhere in a substance and takes place over time (unlike painting, sculpture, and literature), it more closely represents the activity of apprehending an art work. Just as in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the synthetic unity of apprehension must occur over time, music must occur over time – no conventional work of music consists of a single note, and many notes in succession, assembled under strict formal rules, are needed to make the whole comprehensible as a complete work of music. In addition, Renaissance and early modern accounts of the effects of music, many of which continued to have influence in Schelling’s

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Self-Consciousness and Music in the Late Enlightenment

time, connect the infinitely large harmony of the spheres with musical harmony through the mysterious relationship between mathematics and music discovered by Pythagoras. Schelling extends this metaphor of macroand microcosm into metaphysics to create a series of parallel structures among self-consciousness, music, mathematics, and cosmology. Although Schelling’s lectures on art were later than the period under consideration at the moment (the 1790s), he had an enormous influence on his colleagues at Jena, and his later lectures represent a logical development from his earlier writings in the System des transcendentalen Idealismus connecting self-consciousness and the category of the aesthetic to actual aesthetic encounters and music. Schelling’s overall position in the history of philosophy remains under dispute, but a curious document known as “Das a¨lteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus” provides a possible common starting point for Hegel, H¨olderlin, and Schelling, prefiguring not only the direction that Schelling would take in lectures on art but also the increasingly important role of the aesthetic in both H¨olderin’s and Hegel’s works. This document, found among Hegel’s papers, has been attributed, variously to Hegel, Schelling, and H¨olderlin, as well as to all three in collaboration.38 Although there is no consensus regarding its authorship,39 it is certainly in Hegel’s handwriting, and its style and content are sufficiently different from Hegel’s other writings of the period (between the summer of 1796 and early 1797) to convince most scholars that it is at least a collaboration between Hegel and one or both of his friends, if not Hegel’s copy of Schelling’s or H¨olderlin’s work.40 The fragment attempts to synthesize several elements of Idealist philosophy – epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics – into a manifesto in which beauty and freedom resolve the dilemma of spontaneous self-consciousness. It describes itself as an exceptionally all-encompassing ethics based on an idea of a free, self-postulating, self-conscious being. The means of this self-postulation is the presentation of an image of the self: The first idea is naturally the presentation of myself, as an absolutely free being. An entire world enters as well with the free, self-conscious being – out of nothing – the only true and conceivable creation from nothing.41

The subject in this case is not an already existing consciousness that attempts to observe or contemplate itself; it constitutes itself from the beginning as an absolutely free, self-conscious being through an act of the imagination, thereby solving Kant’s dilemma by reversing the order of conceptual events. Self-consciousness does not come from the act of an already created subject; it is inherent in the idea of the subject itself, which posits itself purely

Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, and the Systemprogramm Fragment

23

through imagination. As a “first idea,” this act precedes all other deductions of a priori knowledge, and as a self-generating presentation, it constitutes a form of aesthetic intuition. The desire for a unifying principle in the conclusion makes Schelling’s role, either as precursor or contributor, abundantly clear, and prefigures the direction that he will take in the Philosophie der Kunst, as well as some of the more important ideas of Hegel and H¨olderlin concerning aesthetics: Finally, the idea that unites all, the idea of beauty, the word taken in its higher, platonic sense. I am now convinced, that the highest act of reason, which encompasses all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are only related in beauty. The philosopher must have as much power as the poet.42

That the idea of beauty should be taken “in its higher, platonic sense” makes the unambiguous point that the author (or authors) of the document recognizes the extent to which it embraces pure Idealism, where the understanding of the external world depends as much on the conceptual structure with which the subject perceives it as on the actual world itself. The valorization of the aesthetic judgment of beauty as the “highest act of reason” does not merely mean that art is a superior mode of discourse to philosophy, but that the intuition of self-consciousness is actually based on the free choice of beauty (echoing, and in a sense, completing Schiller’s project in the Aesthetic Education43 ). We organize our perceptions and our conclusions about everything, from pure logic to practical ethics, because we choose to create our idea of the world according to an ideal. Because this ideal precedes all other aspects of judgment, it can only be chosen for aesthetic reasons. Consequently, the philosopher must possess as much ability to judge the beautiful as the poet, because beauty, alone among all the reasons a philosopher can choose to articulate one system over another (such as truth and goodness, for example), can encompass these other qualities as the results of an already postulated aesthetic choice. The Systemprogramm fragment, more even than Schelling’s later Philosophie der Kunst, breaks new ground in both the exploration of subjectivity and aesthetics. By making the self-positing act of self-consciousness not merely parallel to aesthetic intuition but identical to it, the document has potentially moved the concept of self-consciousness from the discourse of metaphysics and placed it entirely within aesthetics, leaving open the possibility that art could better express, demonstrate, or manifest the concept than philosophy. This fragment therefore represents the beginning of philosophical investigations in self-consciousness as aesthetic investigations. Andrew Bowie, whose contribution to the understanding of the

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Self-Consciousness and Music in the Late Enlightenment

relationship between the two areas is considerable, summarizes the importance placed on the aesthetic object by the Systemprogramm fragment well: Because the aesthetic product still remains, qua created object, in the realm of intuition, it is able to point to why the world of the senses is not radically separate from the intelligible world. What makes the work a work of art which gives aesthetic pleasure depends upon our free judgment, which is independent of interest. Without the object, though, we would have no real access to our freedom. In the terms of the SP [“Systemprogramm”] we have this access via the work of art, which gives us a sensuous image of freedom.44

This idea of art is consistent with Kantian aesthetics in which the work of art arouses pleasure without interest, yet goes far beyond it. The disinterested apprehension of beauty is the only means of uniting our perceptions with the conceptual framework required to make it intelligible. The Systemprogramm fragment solves the problem of Kantian synthesis by connecting a priori and a posteriori knowledge through an intuitive aesthetic sense, which provides the essential mental framework to make the external world correspond to the internal workings of the mind, and vice versa. In a sense, the Systemprogramm fragment constitutes both a philosophical and a literary document, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have observed, because it claims the absolute to be literary, that is, Dichtkunst or the art of poetry, yet is not itself a work of poetry.45 By positing the aesthetic discourse of poetry as the basis for philosophy, the author of the fragment has made the discourse of philosophy itself part of poetry. mozart and the transformation of enlightenment musical aesthetics Just as Kant, above all others, was the origin of the move of metaphysics toward aesthetics, so Mozart was the origin of the movement of music toward an elevated status as the highest of the arts. The Mozart legend grew suddenly with his death in 1791 at the age of thirty-five, a year after the publication of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and at the beginning of this remarkably productive (and cooperative) period among the Idealists. At this time, the public conception of Mozart acquired a strange dual nature that mirrored the composer’s own ambivalence toward the prevailing attitudes of his contemporaries. For some critics, Mozart was the quintessential Enlightenment composer, eminently reasonable, demonstrating a cool, mathematical perfection in everything he wrote. For others, Mozart was the proto-Romantic genius, erratic, uncontrollable, and destined to an early,

Mozart and the Transformation of Enlightenment Musical Aesthetics 25 impoverished end. I argue that Mozart was both and neither – rather, he embodies, in both his life and his compositions, the Enlightenment belief in the power of the rational mind and the beginning of the Romantic desire to overthrow traditional power relations in favor of the free, self-conscious intellect. He belongs to a transitional period in the late Enlightenment, when composers, who formerly tended to work for a single church or noble patron, began to write and perform for a wider and more diverse audience and became independent contributors to intellectual life. As a socially neutral public sphere arose, artists experienced a new independence, which by the early nineteenth century fomented the creation of the composerhero myth so strongly associated with Beethoven and the Romantic era. Mozart’s music, in both the process of its composition and in its reception, reveals that late Enlightenment and early Idealist ideas of freedom and self-consciousness through artistic creation were not mere abstractions, but manifested themselves in actual practice, eventually leading to what Jim Samson calls “the project of autonomy” in nineteenth-century music.46 This self-conscious musical style did not arise, however, purely from philosophical convictions (few things do) but from a series of compositional decisions made in response to changing conditions in the social and intellectual context of music. As I mentioned earlier, Mozart finally received his release from the service of the prince-archbishop of Salzburg in 1781, although his father’s secure position as Kapellmeister had enabled him to earn a steady income from both secular and religious assignments. Mozart’s family, although far from poor, was concerned about money, and Mozart had no assurance of similarly reliable assignments in Vienna. In a letter to Abb´e Bullinger of 1778, three years before he finally left, Mozart explains his reasons for wanting to leave Salzburg despite the uncertainty of making a living elsewhere: In the first place, professional musicians there are not held in much consideration; and, secondly, one hears nothing, there is no theatre, no opera; and even if they really wanted one, who is there to sing? For the last five or six years the Salzburg orchestra has always been rich in what is useless and superfluous, but very poor in what is necessary, and absolutely destitute of what is indispensable.47

Having been one of the foremost prodigies in the history of music, Mozart knew what it was like to be adored by kings and queens and that he was a better musician and composer than anyone in the world. Salzburg was a dull outpost; Vienna was the center of the musical world, a cosmopolitan city with a steady flow of composers, musicians, and patrons from all parts of Europe, and a wealthy, enlightened, music-loving emperor, Josef II.

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Self-Consciousness and Music in the Late Enlightenment

This city would give him the resources and audience he craved, and many opportunities to demonstrate the full range of his abilities. In addition, Mozart indicates the extent to which his subservient role bothered him – Mozart clearly believes that in Vienna, more consideration and independence would come his way. Although Mozart did have many opportunities in Vienna, he nevertheless did not find steady patronage; Salieri and Haydn already occupied the most desirable positions. Instead, Mozart forged an independent career as a public composer. Between his arrival in 1781 and his decision in 1786 to devote himself to opera composition, Mozart produced a remarkable number of works, either for his own performance or for small commissions and publication. In particular, Mozart focused on developing his public persona through the piano concerto and succeeding thus to become a fashionable composer, creating a number of works that remain unchallenged models for the genre. Instrumental musical forms, almost by definition, resist extramusical interpretation; the concerto nevertheless unavoidably represents the relationship between the individual talent and society at large – in a concerto, a soloist must both cooperate with an orchestra and differentiate himself from it. As both the composer of these concertos and their soloist, Mozart – and Beethoven after him – represented the apotheosis of a particular musical style. According to John Rink, A distinct compositional style evolved at this time in the music of the composerpianists; known as the stile brillante, it thrived on an opposition between bravura display and lyrical thematicism (often operatic in inspiration), normally manifested in a highly sectional construction leading to the peak of virtuosity at the end.48

This style clearly contained parallel dialectical structures through which the identity of the individual composer-soloist asserted himself, balancing not only the opposition between soloist and orchestra but also between the virtuosity of the performer for its own sake (“bravura display”) and the composer and conductor’s ability to control the work as a whole. Similarly, Lydia Goehr has argued for consideration of the social relationship of the composer and performer as part of its interpretive framework: If . . . we were to take seriously the idea that music is composed by composers in order to be performed by performers and heard by audiences, we would soon move our interest away from a narrowly formalist concern with works and the question of their formed content and fix it more on the matter of people engaging with music as either an individual or societal assertion of their freedom – their subjective freedom, as I shall often put it, to be musical.49

Mozart and the Transformation of Enlightenment Musical Aesthetics 27 The social situation of these concertos, therefore, should provide a suitable framework for their interpretation according to the terms already being developed by the Idealists to describe the metaphysical situation of artistic endeavors overall. Here, Mozart’s progress in the direction of autonomy is abundantly clear. Mozart was both soloist and conductor, using hand signals rather than the continuo part to keep time.50 Under these circumstances, his control over the performance is nearly absolute – he writes the work, arranges the performance time, place, and audience, conducts the orchestra and plays the solo part. He has emerged from the shadow of service to the prince-archbishop to assert his freedom as a composer and performer, presenting musical material almost totally under his control. For Mozart’s audience, the concerto performance allows them to encounter what theorists of their time would describe as an absolute, unmediated experience of the aesthetic. For Mozart himself, the performance allows him to demonstrate the relationship between the consciousness of the world’s most talented composer and the musical material itself. The stark difference between the social conditions of a hired artisan and a free artist results in a perceivable difference not merely in the attitude of audience and composer but in compositional style. For instance, his Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K.488, one of fifteen written between 1782 and 1786, represents a final stage in his transformation of the genre. Charles Rosen has written a detailed analysis of this concerto’s striking innovations, revealing a number of occasions where Mozart substitutes simplicity for mere virtuosity. As Rosen observes, in the second movement, The structure of the melody may be two regular parallels, but its beauty and its passionate melancholy lie in the irregularity of rhythm and variety of phrasing which reveal every possible expressive facet of the two simple descending lines.51

Significantly, Mozart has chosen in this piano concerto, as well as in others he wrote after moving to Vienna, to develop simple melodic material in complex and innovative ways, rather than give in to the temptation to perform technically difficult (yet harmonically simple) material for the sake of his own reputation as a performer. According to Maynard Solomon, Mozart “resented being regarded as a performer, a Musikus as opposed to a Komponist or Kapellmeister . . . and he wanted to free himself from the imperative to ‘perform’ that had been impressed on him so long ago.”52 To put the beauty and complexity of the composition ahead of the demonstration of the performer’s skill is to assert this freedom. Here, Mozart has made a deliberate decision to represent himself in this form not as an extraordinarily gifted performer within existing social structures but instead to present a

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musical art work in which his mastery as a composer takes precedence. He had already experienced admiration for his performing ability as a child, resulting in widespread acclaim, yet without changing his social status. By completely controlling the conditions of performance, he has redefined his relation to society as a whole. Mozart provides further evidence of his emerging intellectual independence in his later operas. Unlike, for instance, the early La finta giardiniera (first performed early in 1775, when Mozart was eighteen), where the plot and music achieve a perfect, symmetrical resolution at the end, Le nozze di Figaro contains many subtle changes in the classic Enlightenment-era opera buffa pattern, subverting social conventions even at the apparent resolution of the conflict. Even choosing Beaumarchais’s second play in the Figaro trilogy as the basis for the libretto was risky, as both he and da Ponte knew, and represented a number of technical challenges. Da Ponte’s words on the subject are surprisingly (considering his scandalous reputation) frank: the opera will not be one of the shortest to have been exhibited in our theatre for which we hope sufficient of excuses the variety of threads from which is woven the action of this drama, the vastness and size of the same, the multiplicity of musical pieces which had to be made in order not to keep the actors excessively idle, in order to reduce the boredom and monotony of the long recitatives, in order to express on occasion with diverse colour the diverse passions which there stand forth, and our desire particularly to offer a virtually new kind of spectacle to a public of such refined taste, and such informed judgment.53

Here, da Ponte reveals that his and Mozart’s intention is not merely to create a better opera than anyone had created before but an entirely different kind of opera, in which greater dramatic and musical complexity would expand public taste. He nevertheless also acknowledges the difficulties involved in managing such a production: singers may not be “excessively idle,” and the long recitatives necessary to connect the plot must be tempered with a variety of more interesting musical forms. The subversive nature of the opera, as well as the role that the music itself would play in dramatizing the subversion, reveals itself in the opening scene. As the curtain rises, Figaro counts off the measurements necessary for fitting a bed in his new room, while Susanna admires how she looks in the new hat she has made. Mozart shows Figaro and Susanna to be more than obedient servants; they are hardworking, independent members of the new bourgeois class of traders, bankers, craftsmen, and merchants who were gaining power and significance in European society. For Mozart the Freemason, Figaro and Susanna are precisely the kind of people who should acquire power and self-confidence. In addition, Figaro is counting, using

Mozart and the Transformation of Enlightenment Musical Aesthetics 29 mathematical measurements for practical use. The Enlightenment had witnessed an explosion of mathematical knowledge unparalleled since Ancient Greece; Mozart’s lodge, Zur Wohlt¨atigkeit, like other Masonic lodges of the time, ascribed mystical power to numbers and considered them emblematic of the power of the rational mind. Meanwhile, the orchestral accompaniment to Figaro’s counting both anticipates and echoes the numbers as he says them, the music acting not merely as support for his vocal line but as an equal partner in his enterprise. As the scene continues, Figaro learns of the count’s plan to seduce Susanna and invokes the first of many musical metaphors in the famous cavatina, “Se vuol ballare, Signor Contino,” “If you want to dance, count, I’ll play for you.”54 Directing the action of the opera means taking charge of the music, and making the servant the master of the situation. Figaro has suddenly become self-aware, paralleling Mozart’s attitude toward his relationship with noble patronage. Through Figaro, Mozart reveals an increasing sense among the intellectuals of Enlightenment Europe that they, and not those appointed by feudal tradition, are the rightful guardians of civil society and the leaders in the improvement of humanity through increased secular knowledge. Music has given Mozart control of his art, allowing him to overcome censorship and the need to obey a particular noble; the opera would soon make him the toast of both Vienna and Prague. Similar instances of music enabling someone to assert control over a complex social situation abound not only in Figaro but also in Don Giovanni, with a significant innovation in musical style accompanying each musical metaphor in the libretto. For example, in the dance scene of the finale of Act I in Don Giovanni, as the other party guests dance a minuet in three-quarter time to one onstage orchestra, Don Giovanni begins to dance a contredance in two-quarter time with Zerlina to another. The pit orchestra also plays, the characters sing dialogue in several conversations, yet every element fits together perfectly. The two onstage orchestras run off when Zerlina cries for help – once the sound of her cry overwhelms the dance tunes, Don Giovanni’s control over them ends, as does this strange moment where Don Giovanni dances to one beat and everyone else dances to another. In this case, the abusive nobleman uses music for his own ends, then loses control when Zerlina’s cries break through his carefully orchestrated and choreographed plan. Similarly, when the statue arrives at the door at the end of the opera, the sound of his knock and Leporello’s inarticulate cries of “ta-ta-ta” end Don Giovanni’s control over the situation. Moreover, the particular sounds that take control from Don Giovanni are nonverbal – screams, knocks, and “ta-ta-ta” – and his fatal mistake is to discount the possibility that a work of art, the statue, could possess

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consciousness, volition, and the capacity for retribution. Just as the commendatore’s statue is not an empty stone image, the pure sound of instrumental music is not an empty representation of emotion, as Kant and earlier philosophers had described it. At crucial moments in Don Giovanni, the material of music itself, pure sound, takes control and punishes his abuses. In other words, Mozart has given a form of class consciousness, then selfconsciousness, to the musical material, connecting the moment in which a viewer confronts a statue – the paradigmatic moment of the aesthetic – with self-conscious reflection and musical material. the beginning of romantic musical self-consciousness After Mozart and Kant, theoretical, metaphorical and actual music converge to create the complex, reciprocating matrix of ideas known as Romantic self-consciousness. For Friedrich H¨olderlin, whose importance as a poet was severely underestimated until the turn of the twentieth century and whose importance as a philosopher is only now being realized,55 poetry becomes Deutscher Gesang: the reflection of the melopoesis of the Greeks and the representation of his autonomy as a self-conscious being. Hegel, somewhat later, incorporates his idea of self-consciousness into a philosophical system encompassing everything from nature to aesthetics to philosophy and religion. I argue in the chapter on Hegel (as does Andrew Bowie, in a different way56 ) that an intuitive aesthetic element based on music remains an inescapable element in Hegel’s idea of self-consciousness, one that Hegel unsuccessfully attempts to repress. Furthermore, music becomes the epitome of this element because of its inherently nonrepresentational character. The union of words and music in song, although a central trope for H¨olderlin, represents an insoluble dilemma for Hegel, who nevertheless resorts to the metaphor of music at crucial moments in his discussions of self-consciousness. The development of this relationship between self-consciousness and music spans about thirty years, from the writing of the Systemprogramm fragment in 1796 or 1797 to the late 1820s. In 1797, neither Hegel nor H¨olderlin had made their mark; Beethoven was still a relatively unknown composer; another year would pass before Wordsworth and Coleridge published the Lyrical Ballads. By 1827, the year of Beethoven’s death, Hegel had become a prominent professor at the University of Berlin and had given his lectures on aesthetics several times; Wordsworth had become well known but was far past his prime as a poet; H¨olderlin was confined to a tower overlooking the Neckar as a madman. Although Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony

The Beginning of Romantic Musical Self-Consciousness

31

had been widely performed, the late string quartets would remain relatively obscure for another seventy-five years. Meanwhile, Kant’s influence had extended throughout Europe, including Vienna, where he came to Beethoven’s attention.57 The early Romantic era is well known for its turn toward the aesthetic and the valorization of absolute instrumental music as a paradigmatic art; what is less clearly established is that these two phenomena are actually facets of a larger conceptual structure. During this time, music underwent a radical transformation unmatched by any other in the history of the arts since the Renaissance. Although the emergence of a more varied public certainly created the conditions in which composers could assert their artistic identities more freely than before, social and political forces alone do not explain this musical revolution adequately. Three composers of unprecedented talent succeeded each other in a city that could give them patronage (with few restrictions on their creations), welltrained musicians, and a large, sophisticated audience. Before Viennese classicism, even the best of musical art played a role in intellectual and social life not much more significant than decoration in architecture – musical works served God, nobility, and royalty by glorifying them, not the composers themselves. By the 1820s, composers had come to represent autonomous genius. Many arguments about the idea of the genius and the social construct of the artist as hero have illuminated this moment in cultural history, but nothing would have been constructed – socially or otherwise – without some basis in real musical ability. Viennese classicism has had as profound and enduring effect on western culture as Italian Renaissance painting. The link between Renaissance humanism and the art of Leonardo and Michelangelo is not explicit, but it is certainly undeniable; so, too, is that between Idealist philosophy and Romantic music and poetry. Just as the main achievement of Viennese classicism, sonata form, shares many characteristics of the philosophical structures of Hegelian dialectic – the primacy of teleology, contrasting binary terms leading to a transcendent synthesis, and greater organized length – so do Michelangelo’s paintings and sculpture, with their attention to human scale and proportion and idealized classical form, mirror the focus on humanity and neoclassical models of Renaissance philosophy. I have already described, however briefly, the continuing influence of Kant’s metaphysics; that the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony remain the most recognizable motif in music history hardly needs mentioning. I explore how and why the idea of self-consciousness came to such prominence simultaneously in both philosophy and music and how poetic discourse mediated between the two.

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This exploration begins with Friedrich H¨olderlin, almost unknown during the relatively short life he led before going insane, yet now considered an important poet and philosopher. Chapter Two, “H¨olderlin’s Deutscher Gesang and the Music of Poetic Self-consciousness” traces several connections between philosophy and artistic creation through the essays, letters, and poems of Friedrich H¨olderlin, a friend and classmate of Hegel and Schelling at the T¨ubingen Theological Seminary. The philosophical fragments, written at or about the time of the Systemprogramm fragment but undoubtedly by H¨olderlin, show his gradual movement away from prose and towards poetry as his main form of expression. Poetry, for H¨olderlin, provides the means of connecting the human and the divine, as well as the Hesperian (that is, Western or Germanic) present with the Greek past. For all these mediations, H¨olderlin requires a series of complex musical metaphors based on an idealized view of the Pindaric tradition reflecting a longing for transcendence inherent in Romantic aesthetics.

chapter 2

H¨olderlin’s Deutscher Gesang and the Music of Poetic Self-Consciousness

I should forget only her song, only these notes of the soul should never return in my unending dreams. The proudly sailing swan remains unknown, when it sits on the bank slumbering. Only when she sang could you recognize the loving, silent one, who so reluctantly made herself understood in words. – H¨olderlin, Hyperion

In the early Idealist accounts of self-consciousness explored in the previous chapter, the subject generally recognizes its existence by defining itself against various kinds of object. However, theoretical explanations of subjectivity do not themselves generate self-conscious entities; the actual, practical experience of the self remains elusive. In Kant’s version of subjectivity, self-consciousness emerges from intellectual intuition, a prereflective sense of the self’s existence as the subject of different experiences over time; the construction of the subject is therefore a synthetic act, realized through transcendental deduction. However, this formulation contains a surprisingly unmotivated version of the self, with no clear account of its origin. In Fichte’s answer to this dilemma, the self posits itself through its opposition to a material object, a nonself he calls the Nicht-ich, and becomes self-conscious by differentiating the Ich from the Nicht-ich and declaring “I am I.” Still, Fichte’s explanation of self-consciousness relies on a potentially solipsistic moment and does not sufficiently address the ultimate cause of the process. In response, the Systemprogramm fragment provides the motivation for this critical moment by describing the process as a free, aesthetic choice to become self-conscious, the result of a desire for beauty – a longing for order in the material that also seems to lack sufficient grounds for its existence. Similarly, Schelling describes the act of self-positing through an aesthetic encounter with the self, the unification of subject and object 33

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through a continuous process of the self becoming its own object, combining the self-positing aspects of Fichte’s version with the desire for order in the Systemprogramm fragment, yet not entirely resolving the difficulties of either. In different ways and to varying degrees, these accounts rely on the category of the aesthetic to mediate the encounter between subject and object, either as the experience of precognitive sensation in general or as an encounter with beauty in particular. However, the relationship between these two versions of the aesthetic remains unclear, as does the overall relationship between theoretical descriptions of self-consciousness and the actual experience of the thinking self. Theoretical descriptions of the self that rely on a purely abstract idea of the aesthetic leave the practical experience of selfhood relatively unexamined. Likewise, purely Kantian, formalist views of art do not provide a sufficient, or useful, account of the relationship between the self and the creative process. In other words, at this point in intellectual history, the aesthetic has become the focal point for both philosophical and artistic development. The next chapter in the history of Idealist philosophy is therefore also the next chapter in the history of Romantic art and would be written by a figure long underestimated in both philosophy and poetry: Friedrich H¨olderlin. H¨olderlin published few of his literary works and none of his philosophical texts during his lifetime; he nevertheless provided one of the most interesting and influential accounts of the connection between aesthetics and metaphysics. A fragmentary essay known as “Urtheil und Seyn,” set the stage for a complex set of transitions – first from metaphysics to aesthetics, then from poetics to poetry – in which musical form plays a critical role in reconciling philosophy with poetry, and the theoretical with the practical. The essay was probably written as an immediate response to Fichte’s Jena lectures in 1794 or 1795 and represents the beginning of H¨olderlin’s turn toward poetry. In making the difficult transformation from philosopher to poet, H¨olderlin establishes the vital connection between self-consciousness and the material world of art and life; he constitutes himself as a poet through the act of creation, and constitutes a musical-poetic voice, or Gesang, within the text of the poem. Close readings of the essays “Urtheil und Seyn,” (“Judgment and Being”) and “Wechsel der T¨one,” (“Change of Tone”) and several of H¨olderlin’s later poems reveals that H¨olderlin’s ideal of a unified poetry and music reflects a synthesis of subject and object in poetry that resolves the questions brought up in what we may call his

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“poetological” writings, following the practice of the Schlegel brothers, although H¨olderlin probably did not use this term himself.1 In a series of metaphors positing and resolving the dialectical oppositions between musical sound and poetic text, human existence and divine transcendence, and ancient Greece and modern Hesperia (H¨olderlin’s term for the European West), H¨olderlin addresses the central problem of Idealist philosophy: the fission between the abstractions of philosophy and the materiality of existence. H¨olderlin’s resolution of this division consists in the concrete realization of the self in the music of poetry, seen as a material manifestation of the existence of the divine in the human, and of being in aesthetic judgment. “urtheil und seyn”: existence in poetry Between 1794 and 1800, H¨olderlin wrote a series of short, unpublished essays on philosophy and poetry – many of which exist only as fragments – as well as many letters addressing those topics. Several excellent studies (in particular those by Kurz,2 Henrich,3 and Frank4 ) examine the concept of self-consciousness in H¨olderlin’s early philosophical writings, establishing his importance as a contributor to the circle of philosophers gathered in Jena during the late 1790s, which included his comrades at the T¨ubinger Stift, Hegel and Schelling. During this time, H¨olderlin wrote his most famous, and probably earliest, attempt to confront the problem of subjectivity: the fragmentary essay known as “Urtheil und Seyn.” This fragment, written on the flyleaf of a book between May 1794 and April 1795, represents a remarkably early critique of Fichte, and, as Dieter Henrich has observed, a new direction in the history of Idealist thought.5 In particular, the essay confronts two major issues: the subject-object division of being and the difference between the theoretical, philosophical “I” and the practical, individual “I.” To address the first issue, H¨olderlin creates a spurious etymology of the word “Urtheil,” “judgment”: Judgment. in the highest and strictest sense is the original separation of object and subject which are most deeply united in intellectual intuition, that separation through which alone object and subject become possible, the arche-separation. In the concept of separation, there lies already the concept of the oppositional relationship of object and subject to each other, and the necessary presupposition of a whole, of which object and subject form the parts. “I am I” is the most suitable example for this concept of judgment as theoretical separation, for in practical judgment it opposes the not-I, not itself.6

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The etymology of “Urtheil” (“Urteil” in modern spelling) H¨olderlin creates for this occasion immediately sets two major, recognizable concepts in Idealist thought in conflict with each other. The first, Kant’s concept of judgment as the pre-cognitive moment of sensory awareness, presupposes the presence of a subject, yet the second, Fichte’s self-positing and selfconscious subject, presupposes an act of judgment that separates the “I” from the “not-I,” thereby bringing the subject into existence. Fichte’s “I am I” can therefore only posit itself theoretically, because the faculty of judgment required for its existence requires a pre-existing practical self. H¨olderlin’s division of “Urtheil” into “Ur-theil,” that is, his analysis of judgment as the original or archeseparation of subject and object, therefore makes Fichte’s version of self-consciousness paradoxical. The declaration of “I am I” requires judgment to give it an “I” and a “not-I,” yet the faculty of judgment requires an “I” to possess it. The theoretical subject cannot posit both the existence of the practical subject and the subject-object relation, because the ability to posit anything requires a practical subject with the faculty of judgment to do any positing at all. Neither judgment nor selfconsciousness can take place without an existing framework consisting of a practical subject, a material object, and a process of self-reflection, all of which presuppose being, which H¨olderlin discusses on the other side of the flyleaf. The side entitled “Seyn,” “Being,” which Beißner assumes to be its second part (a highly contested issue7 ), attempts to explain the relationship between Fichte’s absolute “I” and the practical “I” through the concept of intellectual intuition, the concept Kant used as the basis for his version of self-consciousness. In H¨olderlin’s view, being in itself, a unified being, exists only prior to the subject-object division, as in the case of Kant’s intellectual intuition but not in Fichte’s absolute “I.” Because the absolute, self-positing “I” must reflect both on the “not-I” and the “I,” it is merely an “I,” able to posit itself as a subject but unable to posit the totality of existence preceding the separation of subject and object. The theoretical “I” that posits its own existence by saying “I am I” cannot therefore posit the already presupposed practical self as a means of achieving self-consciousness. Consequently, H¨olderlin asks how self-consciousness is possible at all: How can I say: I! without self-consciousness? But how is self-consciousness possible? By this means, in opposing myself with myself, I separate myself from myself, but regardless of this separation of myself in opposition, I recognize myself as the same. But to what extent the same? I can, I must ask this way; for in another respect it opposes itself. Therefore, identity is not a unity of object and subject that would merely take place, therefore identity is not equivalent to absolute being.8

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“Opposing myself with myself” in this context means creating not only the fact of self-reflection through opposition but also positing the elements of the opposition itself. In H¨olderlin’s view, the self posits an objectified version of itself in opposition to the subjective self, creating self-consciousness through the difference between the subjective self and the self-as-object, that is, between the practical “I” that performs the actions of the subject and the theoretical “I” that is the object of this philosophical inquiry. Fichtean self-consciousness would therefore require the “I” to posit both the subject and the unity of subject and object simultaneously, unifying subject and object through the act of self-positing, yet separating them through judgment, the Urteil of the other side of the flyleaf. As Dieter Henrich observes, H¨olderlin has concluded that neither the practical nor the theoretical “I” can simply create being: For H¨olderlin, whose theme, along with Plato and Schiller, was the possibility of unification, the reason he gives in “Judgment and Being” could easily become compelling: one must conceive, prior to the distinction between subject and object that constitutes all consciousness, a whole that always remains unknowable.9

Despite its remarkable insights, “Urtheil und Seyn” remains a fragmentary, unfinished project, and H¨olderlin’s subsequent career in philosophy does not reveal anything that supersedes it, even if he is the actual author of the Systemprogramm fragment written two years later. Although H¨olderlin enjoyed moderate success in both publication and social life, he left Jena shortly after composing this fragment, in May or June of 1795, for reasons that remain unclear. He moved to Frankfurt, a city he hated, and expressed considerable regret for having left Jena.10 While visiting his mother in N¨urtingen in September of 1795, he wrote to Schiller about working on the problem further: I intend to develop the idea of an unending progress of philosophy, I intend to show that the undiminished demand that must be made on every system, the unification of subject and object in an absolute – I or whatever one wants to call it – is indeed aesthetically, in intellectual intuition, or at least theoretically possible, but only through an infinite approximation, like the approximation of a square in a circle, and that in order to realize such a system of thought, immortality is just as necessary as it is for a system of behavior. I believe I am able to prove by this means the extent to which the skeptics are correct, and the extent to which they are incorrect.11

Although H¨olderlin had mentioned a philosophical project in several other letters, including one to his friend Niethammer where he mentions an idea for “Neue Briefe u¨ ber a¨sthetische Erziehung,”12 no trace of a formal

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version of this system remains, unless, of course, he is referring to “Urtheil und Seyn” itself or the Systemprogramm fragment; no definitive evidence for either conclusion has emerged. The description of this project in this letter nevertheless makes an interesting comparison between any possible account of subjectivity and the well-known mathematical problem of squaring the circle, that is, finding a method for precisely replicating the area of a given circle in the form of square, using only a straightedge and compass. Although conclusive proof that this task is impossible would not arrive until 1882,13 Leibniz’s and Newton’s calculus had already established that only an increasingly accurate approximation could be achieved by the methods available to mathematicians in 1795; the problem is therefore emblematic of both an infinitely receding goal (using current methods) and a problem that might be solved through an innovative approach. In addition, H¨olderlin states somewhat cryptically that “immortality” would be as necessary for solving the problem as it would for a “system of behavior.” Does H¨olderlin mean that the task would require immortality to complete, or does he mean that a concept of immortality would be necessary for such a system? The letter supports either reading, but I find it more likely that H¨olderlin has returned to Descartes’ proof of the immortality of the soul by dividing consciousness or the mind from the body in the Meditations on First Philosophy.14 In that case, H¨olderlin’s solution to the unification of subject and object, as he admits in the letter, is only theoretically possible unless it occurs “aesthetically, in intellectual intuition,” as he had described it in “Urtheil und Seyn.” Moreover, the possibility that his friends would help him realize – and publish – this system diminished rapidly. Other letters from the period indicate that H¨olderlin had broken with the entire Jena group for either personal or philosophical reasons; he would not attempt to renew his friendship with Schelling until years later.15 Schelling’s solution to the problem of self-consciousness, as I indicated in the first chapter, was indeed an approximation based on an infinite regression; if H¨olderlin was aware of this solution, the letter seems to indicate that he found it inadequate. Whether H¨olderlin abandoned his philosophical project due to his own circumstances, the general dissolution of the Jena circle, or a discouragement with the possibilities of philosophy, he did not continue working directly on philosophical prose. Continuing this approach would correspond roughly to an attempt to square the circle using calculus – an infinite task, already tried many times. Another discourse entirely would be the only hope of solving the problem; for this reason, he began his famous turn toward poetry.

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Turning to poetry, therefore, did not mean abandoning the problem of being; on the contrary, poetry, particularly for H¨olderlin, provides an entirely different and more congruous approach to the problem. The difference between philosophy and poetry is their mode of being in itself, and the history of modern H¨olderlin criticism provides ample demonstrations of this fact. In “H¨olderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung” (“H¨olderlin and the Essence of Poetry”), Martin Heidegger declares H¨olderlin to be the “Dichter des Dichters,” the “poet of the poet” who defines and creates poetic existence.16 Although Heidegger uses his readings of H¨olderlin’s poetry to support his own philosophical system (Adorno17 and de Man,18 among others, have made this abundantly clear), he nevertheless provides valuable insight into the status of the poet in H¨olderlin’s poetry: The poet himself stands between the former – the Gods, and the latter – the people. But alone and first in this Between it is decided, who the human being should be, and where he should settle his being. “Humanity lives poetically on this earth.” Without interruption and with increasing certainty, from the fullness of the surging images and more and more simply, H¨olderlin has consecrated this in-between realm with his poetic word.19

Despite the dubious textual evidence Heidegger himself cites in his essays on H¨olderlin,20 H¨olderlin’s more certain texts support Heidegger’s overall claims. Here, Heidegger poses the question of the ontology of the poet in terms of the poet’s metaphysical location, “where he settles his being,” a place between a series of related oppositional terms and outside of human society. H¨olderlin’s poetry abounds with references to figures who are also outsiders and mediators, including Christ, Bacchus, and Rousseau. Heidegger correctly describes them as “Hinausgeworfener,” “thrown-out ones,” exiles who create their own context and identity in a Zwischenbereich, an area of between-ness. As a poet, H¨olderlin stands between many worlds, but his poetry creates a particular ontological space. The poem itself is the Zwischenbereich, as Paul de Man’s commentary on Heidegger’s interpretation of H¨olderlin makes clear: Each poem, or every work seen as a whole, is a particular version of the understanding that a poetic consciousness possesses of its own specific and autonomous intent – or, to put it differently, each work asks the question of its own mode of being, and it is the task of the interpreter not to answer this question but to make explicit in what manner and with what degree of awareness the question is asked. The intent of poetic language is certainly not directed toward empirical insight, nor is it transcendental in the sense that it leads to a closer contact with being in

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general; its intent is ontological, that is, directed toward an awareness of its own particular being.21

The vital distinction between poetry and other modes of discourse – especially philosophy – is in the self-awareness of poetic language as poetic language, “its awareness of its own particular being.” This statement does not reflect a mythologized valorization of poetry in general, nor does it intend to indicate that H¨olderlin’s poetry contains some mystical quality; rather, it simply means that in H¨olderlin’s poetry, the poem’s formal elements – rhythm, meter, trope, modality, diction and so forth – and the indications of its status as poetry in the poem’s content create a form of poetic self-consciousness by reflecting on the conditions of the poem’s existence. In other words, the philosophical act of saying “I am I” becomes both a theoretical and a practical statement when performed in poetic discourse because the material of poetry is, in fact, language, and a declaration of a poem’s existence as poetry has both theoretical and practical results: the poem gains its own existence as poetic language through poetic language. ¨ “wechsel der t one”: the music of poetic language Despite its brief and cryptic nature, “Wechsel der T¨one” [“Exchange of Tones”] (StA IV, 1, pp. 238–40), illuminates the connection between H¨olderlin’s theoretical writings and his poetic practice more, perhaps, than any other of the poetological essays. According to Lawrence Ryan, the essay represents the cornerstone of a full-fledged poetic doctrine when considered in the context of the poetological essays, although even this distinguished scholar admits that “Wechsel der T¨one” is still not completely understood.22 More recently, Cyrus Hamlin’s assessment of the text has revealed its clear affinity with both poems and essays by Schiller published in Die Horen.23 In my view, another text published in Die Horen in 1795, Christian Gottfried ¨ K¨orner’s Uber Charakterdarstellung in der Musik (On the Representation of Character in Music), also influenced H¨olderlin’s creation of “Wechsel der T¨one” to an equal or even greater degree. H¨olderlin undoubtedly read K¨orner’s essay when it appeared in the same issue as Schiller’s Aesthetic Education; K¨orner, as both a serious intellectual and Schiller’s patron, would certainly have merited H¨olderlin’s attention. K¨orner’s essay provides an essential link between the formal and the affective elements of musical composition, using both general principles and terminology that closely parallel those in “Wechsel der T¨one.” In addition, K¨orner’s essay gives H¨olderlin a paradigmatic solution to the problem of connecting the theoretical with

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the practical, in both philosophical and poetic terms. Music, for K¨orner, can provide a direct connection between the purely material and the purely formal, potentially bypassing any specifically symbolic stage. K¨orner, an accomplished composer and musician as well as a wealthy lawyer, wrote his essay on music aesthetics in response to what he thought were mistaken Enlightenment ideas about the subject, particularly, Kant’s assertion that music is merely an agreeable succession of vaguely portrayed emotions. He argues that, on the contrary, an excellent musical work requires unity, as does any other great work of art, and that the unity of a musical work should be considered the representation of character, or ethos.24 H¨olderlin’s “Wechsel der T¨one” likewise identifies T¨one, that is, “tones” or “keys” as the overall unifying elements of poetic composition and categorizes them as naiv, heroisch, or idealisch, terms that describe overall character rather than specific emotional states. The rhetorical questions at the beginning of “Wechsel der T¨one,” seen in light of K¨orner’s essay, contain an unmistakable analogy between musical composition and poetic composition, borrowing several important musicological concepts and terms: Does the ideal catastrophe not resolve itself into the heroic in that the natural tonic key becomes an opposite? Does the natural catastrophe not resolve itself into the ideal in that the heroic tonic key becomes an opposite? Does the heroic catastrophe not resolve itself into the natural in that the ideal tonic key becomes an opposite?25 The terms of the T¨one – naive, heroic, and ideal – also represent the relation between aesthetic material and abstract thought that H¨olderlin could not resolve in “Urtheil und Seyn.” The series of catastrophes in the opening rhetorical questions represent the collapse of each dialectical opposition into a third term, in each case demonstrating that the resolution of any opposition is not a perfect synthesis, but a catastrophic collapse of the dialectical structure. In other words, an epic poem follows the course of a ideal hero realizing his heroism in action, thereby ending the occasion for heroism; a tragic poem follows the course of a na¨ıve hero into the catastrophe of death through an increased consciousness of his own na¨ıvet´e; a lyric poem reflects on itself, resolving into a na¨ıve and idealized moment but isolating itself from the world of action. Moreover, Aufl¨osen, the main verb in all these questions, has a specific musicological meaning when it takes the preposition in – it describes the resolution of a dissonance into a consonance characteristic of a cadence, the

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dominant-tonic chord progression that defines a key. The word Anfangston refers to the overall key of a musical work, the tonal area in which a traditional, sonata form composition begins and ends. Sonata form also generally requires a modulation (in German, Tonartwechsel) to a contrasting key, usually based on the dominant chord (the key of G major, for instance, for a work beginning in C major), creating a large-scale key structure that mirrors the small-scale cadence that defines the key, the structure also known as the tonic-dominant axis. H¨olderlin’s “Wechsel der T¨one” therefore attempts to emulate in poetry the structural characteristics of musical Tonartwechsel, that is, how tonal music defines its key center through the assertion of an opposing key. H¨olderlin’s purpose in adopting this musical terminology is twofold. First, its use enables him to create a formalized poetics resembling that of musical composition, thereby following Schiller’s admonition in the ¨ Asthetische Erziehung that all great art should try to approach the condition of music through sheer form. Second, it provides him with a way to approach the problem of being according to K¨orner’s musicological principles. In one passage, K¨orner claims that the cadence does not necessarily indicate a specific object or emotion but contains a formal direction that can actually represent existence as a whole: Music, too, has a specific aim – that of regaining the home tonic. The ear’s satisfaction increases or diminishes to the extent that the musical progression approaches or moves away from it. This objective towards which music moves does not, however, symbolise anything in the visible world. It symbolises the unknown something which can be imagined as an individual object, as the sum of many objects, or as the external world in its entirety.26

The word K¨orner uses for the tonic key, Hauptton, is nearly identical in meaning to H¨olderlin’s Anfangston; the sensation of reaching this goal, that is, resolving the cadence, both gives the listener pleasure, and provides music with its formal beauty. In addition, music indicates or symbolizes (andeuten) an “unknown something” that can be imagined as an individual object, a group of objects, or the entire external world. A poetics based on K¨orner’s concept of musical form could therefore resolve the problem of abstraction by replacing a linguistically based hermeneutic of symbolic representation with a musically based hermeneutic of formal beauty. H¨olderlin therefore changes musical modulation, Tonartwechsel, into poetic modulation, Wechsel der T¨one, a calculated succession of characteristic poetic modes. The rest of the essay confirms his intention to create a formal dialectical structure similar to that of music in poetry, in which

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traditional genres – epic, tragic, and lyric – serve as the counterparts to the T¨one: Indeed for the epic poem. The tragic poem goes about a key further, the lyric uses this key as an opposite and returns in this way, in every style, back to its beginning key or: The epic poem ends with its original opposite, the tragic with the key of its catastrophe, the lyric with itself, so that the lyric end is a na¨ıve-ideal [end], the tragic is a na¨ıve-heroic [end], the epic is an ideal-heroic [end].27

Like classical harmony, the modalities of poetry in this scheme have contrasting opposites against which they define themselves and find resolution. In both musical composition and H¨olderlin’s poetic scheme, a work begins by stating a theme in a certain key, modulates to another key for a contrasting theme, then modulates back to the first key. An intermediate tonality common to both mediates between contrasting keys, allowing polar opposites to find resolution. By associating the purely formal structure of instrumental music with these modalities, H¨olderlin replaces the triadic structure of Pindaric ode – strophe, antistrophe, epode – with a modern version that can assimilate and synthesize his own style and provide a connection between formal structure and thematic content. The poetic modulations H¨olderlin describes, however briefly, in “Wechsel der T¨one” outline precisely the same kind of abstract rules of composition for poetry that the rules of harmony would for musical composition – the abstract principles which govern particular aesthetic choices and allow a conceptual scheme to be realized in the work. A concept of musical form therefore links the abstract principles of poetry to their concrete realization in poetry. The question remains, however, of the extent to which H¨olderlin put this theory into practice. I believe that the third element of H¨olderlin’s project, the body of poetic works, reveals how poetic theory and practical poetics become the aesthetic material of poetry. In addition, a letter to a friend describing the modern poet’s relation to the tradition of Greek poetry confirms H¨olderlin’s commitment to continuing his project. In a certain sense, the result of H¨olderlin’s efforts brought him far closer than his contemporaries to solving the problem of self-consciousness that had vexed them for so long. divine self-positing: “dichterberuf” and ¨ the first letter to b ohlendorff Although H¨olderlin actually annotated one poem, “Diotima,” with abbreviations for “na¨ıve,” “heroic,” and “ideal,” he does not seem to have

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employed the “Wechsel der T¨one” as an overt template for his poetic projects.28 They nevertheless correspond to the “keys” of the poem, identifying specific sections as such and following a compositional theory. These terms are almost certainly analogous to key succession, thus showing an active interest in this correspondence, almost as if a poem had a key. Clearly, H¨olderlin did follow the general outlines of the theory when writing poetry, that is, he established a series of modulations and oppositions in his poems according to a musical model. Two texts, the poem “Dichterberuf,” “The Poet’s Vocation,” composed in the summer of 1800, and a letter he wrote to a fellow poet, Casimir Ulrich B¨ohlendorff in December of 1801, relate directly to question of becoming a poet. They reveal how H¨olderlin balanced the dialectical opposition between the idealized, holy vocation of poetry inherited from the Greeks and the base influence of modern life and how the poet aspired to a new kind of German song, the voice of Hesperia. The earlier text, “Dichterberuf,” begins by invoking Bacchus, asking him to “give us laws, and give us life.” “Laws and life” are a curious combination of requests, especially when asked of Bacchus, the demigod of wine, whose invocation normally releases one from restrictions and inhibitions. The apparent contradiction continues when H¨olderlin makes an important distinction between poetry and other occupations: Nicht, was wohl sonst des Menschen Geschik und Sorg’ Im Haus und unter offenem Himmel ist, Wenn edler, denn das Wild, der Mann sich Wehret und n¨ahrt! denn es gilt ein anders, Zu Sorg’ und Dienst den Dichtenden anvertraut! Der H¨ochste, der ists, dem wir geeignet sind, Daß n¨aher, immerneu besungen Ihn die befreundete Brust vernehme. (StA II, 1, p. 46)

Not that which else is human kind’s care and skill Both in the house and under the open sky When, nobler than wild beasts, men work to Fend, to provide for themselves – to poets A different task and calling has been assigned. The Highest, he it is whom alone we serve, So that more closely, ever newly Sung, he will meet with a friendly echo.29

Here, poets rise above basic material needs, fulfilling a fundamentally different role in the world from that of animals, who know no law but survival, and from that of human beings, who work on a more civilized level. Poets,

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like priests, have a fundamentally different task: they serve “the Highest” and have been entrusted with a sacred mission to sing the praises of the divine “ever newly,” yet as part of a tradition. Curiously, H¨olderlin chooses to categorize poets as a group and to call himself one of them implicitly through the pronoun wir (“we”), rather than name himself a poet directly; John Jay Baker has correctly observed that “Dichterberuf” uses every pronoun except Ich (“I”), indicating a powerful urge toward self-negation.30 However, as Guido Schmidlin observes, the question of creating oneself as a poet cannot be dismissed so easily: “Who calls the poet? Does he call himself or does he have a ‘higher’ call to do his work? H¨olderlin poses this question, in that he writes poetry.”31 In “Dichterberuf,” the divinely inspired call to write poetry cannot come from the poet alone, yet the poet himself must respond appropriately not by mere self-praise but by writing actual poetry, rather than merely posturing. The poem goes even further, warning against the degeneration of poetry into a mere craft by distinguishing divinely inspired poets and those whose skill lies in mere imitation. The difference lies in their relationship with their Greek predecessors: Und darum hast du, Dichter! des Orients Propheten und den Griechensang und Neulich die Donner geh¨ort, damit du Den Geist zu Diensten brauchst und die Gegenwart Des Guten u¨ bereilst, in Spott . . . (StA II, 1, p. 47)

And for that only, poet, you heard the East’s Great prophets, heard Greek song, and lately Heard divine thunder ring out – to make a Vile trade of it, exploiting the Spirit, presume On his kind presence, mocking him . . . 32

Writing poetry well means creating not for material gain but in remembrance of Greek song and Eastern prophecy; it requires the poet to receive inspiration in his own time, even as he remembers the past. The absence of the gods in these times makes the obligation to remember all the more acute, as the paradoxical final lines indicate: “Und keiner Waffen Brauchts und keiner / Listen, so lange, bis Gottes Fehl hilft,” “And needs no weapon and no wile till / God’s being missed in the end will help him.”33 Divine absence helps him by allowing him to realize his purpose as the representative of the divine principle – the poet’s vocation would not be nearly so essential if the divine being were actually present.

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In practical terms, how does a poet mediate between the absence of the divine and its presence in poetry? How, precisely, can a German poet of the nineteenth century simultaneously invoke the Greek tradition and lament the absence of the immanent encounters with the divine that the Greeks enjoyed? The Romantic lament that the Greeks were closer to divine inspiration is familiar to us from any number of poets; for H¨olderlin, the difference between the poets of the present in Western Europe (“Hesperia”) and the Greeks was not merely a thematic occasion for a particular kind of sentimental poetry – it was the essence of his self-identity as a poet. In the first of two letters to his friend and fellow poet Casimir Ulrich B¨ohlendorff, he explained these principles as both spiritual and practical matters. The crucial passage discusses exactly what we, the Hesperians, need to learn of the poet’s craft and how that can be learned from ancient models: We learn nothing with more difficulty than to use freely that which is national. And I believe that clarity of representation was originally as natural to us as the fire from heaven was to the Greeks. They therefore are easily surpassed in beautiful passion, which you have also taken on yourself, than in Homeric presence of spirit and the gift of representation. It sounds paradoxical. But I assert once again, and I submit freely for your examination and use, that what is actually of one’s own nationality will always be less advantageous in spiritual development. Therefore, the Greeks are less masters of holy pathos because it was inborn for them, while on the other hand, they have a greater advantage in the gift of representation from Homer onward, because this extraordinary person was soulful enough to capture Western Junonian sobriety for his realm of Apollo and to learn so truly that which was foreign to him. For us it’s reversed. For this reason, it’s also so dangerous to abstract the rules of art solely and only from Greek splendor.34

This letter has been examined many times and in great detail because it contains two extraordinarily important elements for understanding H¨olderlin: a clear, practical poetics and a dialectical examination of the relationship the poet bears to his Greek predecessors. At first glance, it appears to be a remarkably straightforward statement of H¨olderlin’s compositional principles; a closer examination reveals a far more ambiguous document. Fortunately, three of H¨olderlin’s greatest critics have given us a series of insightful readings: Peter Szondi,35 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,36 and Andrzej Warminski.37 All these readings reveal an inherent problem in the Greece-Hesperia opposition described in the first letter to B¨ohlendorff that closely resembles a difficulty with reflective models of self-consciousness: the dialectical relation between the self and the other does not yield a

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symmetrical set of binary oppositions, and therefore does not necessarily reveal the grounds on which it has been posited. More specifically, das Eigene, that which is one’s own, and das Fremde, that which is foreign, the primary categorical oppositions in this letter, create what appears at first to be a kind of mirror image, but on closer examination reveals a difficult instability. Die Klarheit der Darstellung, clarity of representation, is natural to Hesperians; das Feuer von Himmel, the fire from heaven, is natural to Greeks. These characteristics, “our own,” are held inwardly, with little outward demonstration. That which is foreign, on the other hand, becomes the most visible aspect of each group’s art: the Greeks demonstrate “Junonian sobriety,” whereas Hesperians demonstrate “holy pathos.” These characteristics manifest themselves outwardly precisely because they do not come easily or naturally to each group – what requires the most effort to master becomes most prominent. In H¨olderlin’s view, Homer, the greatest poet among the Greeks and fiery by nature, produced great poetry by expressing the cool sobriety foreign to him, whereas we – the Hesperians – produce great works by expressing the passion that Greeks possessed naturally. According to Peter Szondi, H¨olderlin uses this scheme to overcome the obligation to imitate Greek models perceived by Neoclassicists while still learning from them.38 As both Lacoue-Labarthe39 and Warminski40 point out, Szondi’s reading of the text reflects a fundamentally Hegelian bias: the Hesperian poetic self struggles for recognition from its Greek other in much the same way that the master and slave struggle in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Warminski, however, sees ways in which H¨olderlin’s dialectical scheme does not correspond precisely to Hegel’s: it is clear that a dialectical mediation of that which is our own and that which is foreign, das Eigene and das Fremde – in short, a representation of das Eigene as das Fremde (“our own origin as a foreign one”) – is possible only as long as we do not read these words in H¨olderlin’s sense but transform them, translate them, as it were, into a Hegelian sense: that is, in order for us to recognize our origin, das Eigene, we must translate H¨olderlin’s das Fremde into Hegelian das Fremde, a foreignness that is not our own (but is natural, their own, for the Greeks), into a foreignness that belongs to us, in short, we must translate that which is radically foreign into that which is foreign for us (i.e., not really foreign but our own – das Fremde into das Eigene).41

In other words, what can be known of the Greeks can only be understood by making the das Eigene and das Fremde dialectic serve as a determinate negation, an opposition with a specific understanding already inherent in the terms of the opposition, when the opposition itself – from our position relative to the Greeks – tells us very little, if anything at all. The

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effort to reverse this opposition to understand ourselves by seeing our own nature in what was foreign to the Greeks depends on knowing precisely what is our own and what is foreign to us in advance. As in the case of the self-positing “I,” the term necessary for reading the dialectic only emerges after the reading has already taken place and somehow grounded itself in the particular. The terms cannot be resolved in theory; only poetic, rather than philosophical, discourse provides the necessary grounds for knowledge either of ourselves or of our Greek predecessors. One cannot, as H¨olderlin himself recognized, “abstract the rules of art solely and only from Greek splendor”; the rules remain too abstract, too alienated from the material nature of poetic language and from the particular circumstances of history, audience, and place. Poetry, like music, requires the concrete dimensions of time and sound, as well as a literal connection to reality. As Paul de Man mentions in the otherwise extremely theoretical essay, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”: Thus it would be difficult to assert that in the poems of H¨olderlin, the island Patmos, the river Rhine, or, more generally, the landscapes and places that are described in the beginnings of the poems would be symbolic landscapes or entities that represent, as by analogy, the spiritual truths that appear in the more abstract parts of the text. To state this would be to misjudge the literality of these passages, to ignore that they derive their considerable poetic authority from the fact that they are not synechdoches designating a totality of which they are a part, but are themselves already this totality.42

Poetry distinguishes itself from philosophy not merely through its use of metaphorical language but also through its presentation of various kinds of objects merely as themselves – poems contain literal landscapes, encompass actual totalities, and constitute themselves as real poems in metrical and temporal dimensions. The resolution of the Greece-Hesperia dialectic is not further abstraction but the poetry itself: actual poetry, written in a particular time and place, modern Hesperia or Germany. H¨olderlin’s Greece-Hesperia dialectic therefore does not necessarily lose its meaning in an endless series of unstable binary terms if read against the background of the unavoidable constraints of historical and material circumstance. A poet does not become a poet only in theory but when his or her poetry is realized as the concrete manifestation of words and sounds. The poet’s vocation, therefore, is to follow the triadic na¨ıve-heroic-idealistic scheme outlined in “Wechsel der T¨one” in the process of composition and in the construction of his or her own identity. The Hesperian poet begins by recognizing that the naivet´e of Greek poetry reveals their fiery nature, yet

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cannot be shared at this historical and cultural distance. He or she therefore must undergo a heroic act of self-positing with respect to that difference and create an idealistic vision of this transformation in poetry. For the historical H¨olderlin, the move from philosophy to poetry also seems to have followed this triadic pattern as he moved from philosophical to poetological prose and then began writing larger and more complex poems about this act of self-creation in sound. The nature of this vision becomes even clearer in three of H¨olderlin’s greatest compositions, where his creates his deutscher Gesang. “brod und wein,” “patmos,” and “wie wenn am feiertage”: the divine origin of deutscher gesang H¨olderlin has already confirmed that the self cannot merely posit itself through theory and that mere imitation cannot make anyone a poet. Instead, poets must create themselves through a combination of selfdetermination and divine blessing. Where, then, does the self find its origin? If the self of a poet must come from poetry, how does the poetry come into being? “Dichterberuf ” provides us with a mythology of divine inspiration, but leaves the issue of poetic creation relatively untouched. Fortunately, three major poems, “Brod und Wein,” “Patmos,” and “Wie wenn am Feiertage” explore the origins of poetry and the creation of H¨olderlin’s idealized Hesperian music, deutscher Gesang, on both metaphorical and surprisingly literal levels. All three reveal a specific model of poetry as a song for a particular place and time – nineteenth-century Germany – created both in imitation of Greek forms and in contrast to the immanence of the divine in Greek religious experience. H¨olderlin’s deutscher Gesang, therefore, embodies the tension between Greek ideals and Hesperian longing by enacting the process of historical self-awareness. H¨olderlin’s imitation of Greek models occurs on the most concrete level, in form; his adaptation of Greek meter in “Brod und Wein” remains one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of the German language. This poem, one of H¨olderlin’s finest and most famous, follows a strict triadic metrical pattern in close imitation of Pindar: eighteen lines of hexameter in nine strophes in clear groups of three; the strophes themselves contain three groups of three distichs. The first stanza opens with an image of a town at night, as its citizens return from their labors to rest: Rings um ruhet die Stadt; still wird die erleuchtete Gasse, Und, mit Fakeln geschm¨uckt, rauschen die Wagen hinweg.

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H¨olderlin’s Deutscher Gesang Satt gehn heim von Freuden des Tags zu ruhen die Menchen, Und Gewinn und Verlust w¨aget ein sinniges Haupt Wohlzufrieden zu Haus; leer steht von Trauben und Blumen, Und von Werken der Hand ruht der gesch¨aftige Markt. Aber das Saitenspiel t¨ont fern aus G¨arten; vieleicht, daß Dort ein Liebendes spielt oder ein einsamer Mann Ferner Freunde gedenkt und der Jugendzeit . . . (StA II, p. 90)

Round us the town is at rest; the street, in pale lamplight, grows quiet And, their torches ablaze, coaches rush through and away. People go home to rest, replete with the day and its pleasures, There to weigh up in their heads, pensive, the gain and the loss, Finding the balance good; stripped bare now of grapes and of flowers, As of their hand-made goods, quiet the market stalls lie. But faint music of strings comes drifting from gardens; it could be Someone in love who plays there, could be a man all alone Thinking of distant friends, the days of his youth . . . 43

Here, as in “Dichterberuf,” poetry can only enter when commerce has ceased; the strings of the lyre sound only when the citizens have an opportunity for reflection. They may be in love or thinking about the past, but these thoughts only come when they have resolved their business matters. H¨olderlin consistently uses the bard-figure as an emblem of the poet (linking the two most notably in “An die Parzen”) and places him at a distance from ordinary life. In addition, the movement from daily activities to night thoughts begins a series of movements throughout the poem – continuing modulations of tone and theme described in “Wechsel der T¨one,” in both small-scale and large-scale patterns. The second strophe begins with a personification of night, moving from the mundane cares of the city to the mysterious workings of divine blessing. H¨olderlin does not name the personified “Night” specifically until just after these lines, but Michael Hamburger is justified in including the name earlier in the translation, for the identity of the entity being praised is clear: Wunderbar is die Gunst der Hocherhabnen und niemand Weiß von wannen und was einem geschiehet von ihr. So bewegt sie die Welt und die hoffende Seele der Menschen, Selbst kein Weiser versteht, was sie bereitet, denn so Will es der oberste Gott, der sehr dich liebet, und darum Ist noch lieber, wie sie, dir der besonnene Tag. (StA II, 1, p. 90)

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Marvellous is her favour, Night’s, the exalted, and no one Knows what it is or whence comes all she does and bestows. So she works on the world and works on our souls ever hoping, Not even wise men can tell what is her purpose, for so God, the Highest, has willed, who very much loves you, and therefore Dearer even than Night reasoning Day is to you.44

Night moves the world and our souls, despite humanity’s preference for “reasoning day.” The gifts Night bestows on humanity are difficult to identify – inspiration cannot be quantified or assigned a specific purpose. Moreover, Night gives us creativity, “the on-rushing word” (“das st¨omende Wort” StA, II, 91), that the day’s cares cannot. The poem has moved from rest to celebration, from reflection to action, through various kinds of speech act – dedicating, granting, and blessing – to which the poet responds with songs of both the celebration of “a more daring life” and “holy remembrance” (StA, II, p. 91). The distinction between the present and the past reveals a clear consciousness of the difference – H¨olderlin is by no means pretending to be a Greek poet when he imitates Greek meter and invokes the names of Greek places. Instead, he is defining his relationship with the Greek past in hopes of regaining what he can of their spirit. The third stanza of the poem contains nearly all the terms used in the first letter to B¨ohlendorff to explain this relationship. A “divine fire” drives us onward to celebrate day and night; we “seek what is ours” no matter how far it may be. Despite our distance from Greece in both time and space, a “measure” remains for us always (StA, II, p. 91). After urging modern poets to make the spiritual journey to Greece, the stanza ends with a telling line: “Thence has come and back there points the god who’s to come,” “Dorther kommt und zur¨uk deutet der kommende Gott.”45 The absent god is coming from Greece to Hesperia, yet pointing back toward the magnificence of the past. As in the B¨ohlendorff letter, the poet here defines himself through both a connection to Greece and in opposition to it, recognizing the familiar and the foreign at once. The fourth strophe begins with an insistent question and a description of ancient Greece as a series of metaphors that turn its geographical features into a house for the gods: Seeliges Griechenland! du Haus der Himmlischen alle, Also ist wahr, was einst wir in der Jugendgeh¨ort? Festlicher Saal! der Boden ist Meer! und Tische die Berge, Wahrlich zu einzigem Brauche vor Alters gebaut! (StA, II, pp. 91–2)

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H¨olderlin’s Deutscher Gesang Happy land of the Greeks, you house of them all, of the Heavenly, So it is true what we heard then, in the days of your youth? Festive hall, whose floor is ocean, whose tables are mountains, Truly, in time out of mind built for a purpose unique!46

The Greek past looms large in the poet’s imagination, becoming a place of titanic proportions, but the question, “So is it true . . . ?” seems almost juvenile – a longing for reassurance that the stories we were told as children are indeed true, because we wish to recapture not only the magnificence of a lost past, but the idealism and happiness of youth. Indeed, the tables and chairs did seem larger when we were children, and H¨olderlin has projected this childlike sense of wonder onto ancient times, conflating the youth of Western civilization with his childhood. The strophe nevertheless continues with a series of questions that introduce doubt and hint at disappointment, asking where the thrones, the nectar, and the temples have gone. The answer is clear: the land has endured, but the human institutions that celebrated the gods’ natural wonders lie in ruins. The poetry of the past is over, despite its glories, and the ceremonies and traditions that keep a culture alive have long since ceased. The present requires new inspiration, which the rest of the stanza provides in a startling echo of the Pentecost: Vater Aether! so riefs und flog von Zunge zu Zunge Tausendfach, es ertrug keiner das leben allein; Ausgetheilet erfreut solch Gut und getauschet, mit Fremden, Wirds ein Jubel, es w¨achst schlafend des Wortes Gewalt Vater! heiter! und hallt, so weit es gehet, das uralt Zeichen, von Eltern geerbt, treffend und schaffendhinab. Denn so kehren die Himmlischen ein, tiefsch¨utternd gelangt so Aus den Schatten herab unter die Menschen ihr Tag. (StA II, 1, p. 92)

Father Aether! One cried, and tongue after tongue took it up then, Thousands, no man could bear life so intense on his own; Shared, such wealth gives delight and later, when bartered with strangers, Turns to rapture; the word gather new strength when asleep: Father! Clear light! and long resounding it travels, the ancient Sign handed down, and far, striking, creating, rings out. So do the Heavenly enter, shaking the deepest foundations Only so from the gloom down to mankind comes their Day.47

The triadic structure of the strophe as a whole reveals a curious transformation, with each part superimposing corresponding sets of images. In the first

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part, a childlike perception of divinity perceives the sublime elements of nature as mere furnishings for the gods. As the poet’s perspective matures, he asks where all the wonders of that time, real and mythological, have gone, repeating “where?” with an increasing sense of loss and anxiety. Finally, “the ancient sign,” “das uralt Zeichen,”receives a renewed strength as a cry of “Father Aether!” passes from celebrant to celebrant. When the word becomes fully voiced sound, the sign becomes a reality, and the divine spirit arrives. The curious phrase “Father Aether!” contains a number of meanings and resists easy interpretation, but the poem’s emphasis on a return to a prescientific era while “reasoning day” sleeps gives us an important clue. The scientific age in which we and H¨olderlin live (but the ancient Greeks did not) arose from the work of a number of pioneering scientists and philosophers, including Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, but Robert Boyle’s experiments with a vacuum pump late in the seventeenth century had the distinction of both establishing the experimental method and declaring that aether, or ether, the substance purported to be above the atmosphere, did not exist.48 The cry therefore represents a desire to create a necessary connection between celestial bodies and people on earth, made in defiance of the negative logic of empiricism, which would exclude the existence of anything divine, or at the very least, any connection between day-to-day human existence and divine principles.49 Nothing can be created, and no communion with the divine can be established, without a positive assertion of faith in the connection between the human and the divine, a connection that can only be made in the language of song and poetry. This creative language is precisely the “ancient sign” that has gained power through its absence and goes out “striking and creating” (treffend und schaffend). The Heavenly ones can only return when “reasoning day” has ended and other modes of thought and language allow them. The fifth strophe follows with the narrative of this return, a scene of surprising na¨ıvet´e. The strophe, in present tense, at first speaks of only one divine being, a Halbgott who resembles Christ as well as Bacchus; the title, “Brod und Wein,” possesses the same double meaning, with Christ as the bread of life and Bacchus the wine god combined in the bread and wine of the sacrament of communion. The description of an encounter between the Heavenly ones and humanity has its origins in Pindar but demonstrates a clear consciousness of the difference between ancient and modern times – it has been so long since their last encounter that the demigod has trouble recognizing them. Likewise, the “children of God” do

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not immediately recognize his benevolence as they are allowed to approach in a scene echoing Christ’s injunction to allow children to come to him in Matthew 19:13: Unempfunden kommen sie erst, es streben entgegen Ihnen die Kinder, zu hell kommet, zu blendend das Gl¨uk, Und es scheut sie der Mensch, kaum weiß zu sagen ein Halbgott, Wer mit Nahmen sie sind, die mit den Gaaben ihm nahn. Aber der Muth von ihnen ist groß, es f¨ullen das Herz ihm Ihre Freuden und kaum weiß er zu brauchen das Gut, Schafft, verschwendet und fast ward ihm Unheiliges heilig, Das er mit seegnender hand th¨orig und g¨utig ber¨uhrt. (StA II, p. 92)

Unperceived at first they come, and only the children Surge towards them, too bright, dazzling, this joy enters in, So that men are afraid, a demigod hardly can tell yet Who they are, and name those who approach him with gifts. Yet their courage is great, his heart soon is full of their gladness And he hardly knows what’s to be done with such wealth, Busily runs and wastes it, almost regarding as sacred Trash which his blessing hand foolishly, kindly has touched.50

The scene creates a deliberate contrast with established religious ceremonies, showing a chaotic encounter in which the celebrants cannot yet tell the sacred from the profane. This event does not commemorate; it is the event to be commemorated in itself and therefore has an awkward newness about it. Valuable gifts are wasted; the names of the celebrants remain a mystery to the demigod. Even the fact that an important event is occurring remains relatively unclear; no announcement or fanfare precedes it, and the participants arrive almost without the knowledge of the divine being they have come to celebrate. Poetry, the medium of commemoration and remembrance, therefore necessarily celebrates divine encounters belatedly and at a considerable remove. It records names that were unknown at the time; it describes the events and explains their meaning. Unfortunately, it cannot eliminate this temporal displacement; we cannot enjoy the divine beings themselves and the divine remembrance of poetry simultaneously: M¨oglichst dulden die Himmlischen diß; dann aber in Wahrheit Kommen sie selbst und gewohnt werden die Menschen des Gl¨uks Und des Tags und zu schaun die Offenbaren, das Antliz Derer, welche, schon l¨angst Eines und Alles genannt, Tief die verschwiegene Brust mit freier Gen¨uge gef¨ullet,

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Und zuerst und allein alls Verlangen begl¨ukt; So ist der Mensch; wenn da ist das Gut, and es sorget mit Gaaben Selber ein Gott f¨ur ihn, kennet und sieht er es nicht. Tragen muß er, zuvor; nun aber nennt er sein Liebstes, Nun, nun m¨ussen daf¨ur Worte, wie Blumen, entstehn. (StA II, 1, pp. 92–9)

This, while they can, the Heavenly bear with; but then they appear in Truth, in person, and now men grow accustomed to joy, And to Day, and the sight of godhead revealed, and their faces – One and All long ago, once and for all, they were named – Who with free self-content had deeply suffused silent bosoms, From the first and alone satisfied every desire. Such is man; when the wealth is there, and no less than a god in Person tends him with gifts, blind he remains, unaware. First he must suffer; but now he names his most treasured possession, Now for it words like flowers leaping alive he must find.51

H¨olderlin deliberately delays identifying the heavenly ones himself until the middle of the strophe as a way of recreating this belated realization because the value of direct contact with these divine beings can only be recognized in retrospect. What humanity thought to be of the most value at the time, the gifts from the gods, leaves those present blind to the greatest gift of all: the encounter itself. Even the act of naming, so important in the previous strophe, has become secondary, a repetition of what previous generations have done long ago. More important than the desire to name is the impulse to create a language for the absolute and to strive toward communion with it. This desire alone can almost make the unholy holy, because the god admires the courage of the act more than its result. Only later can words for these events emerge, emerging “like flowers,” long after the seeds of this holy encounter have been sown. This simile in the last line of the stanza, “Nun, nun m¨ussen daf¨ur Worte, wie Blumen, entstehn,” deserves further examination not merely because it contains one of the most famous images of the poem, but also because it speaks most directly to the way that poetry emerges between the na¨ıve and heroic phases the poem describes. As Paul de Man points out, the simile, which can be more literally rendered as “Now, now must words for it, like flowers, emerge,” conflates the human agency of the poet with that of nature, almost as if poetry could originate itself naturally and “become present as a natural emanation of a transcendental principle, as an epiphany.”52 Certainly, the poet, who has not forgotten his role in this large-scale cycle of history, chooses this moment to project his own

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creative process onto nature, thereby establishing a place for himself in the divinely created scheme of history. The imperative urgency of “now, now” enables him to posit his own self-creating identity as a poet while nevertheless explaining the origins of poetry as part of a genuinely natural process. In doing so, he solves the problem of the distance between practical and theoretical self-consciousness, creating a biological explanation (poetry emerging from nature) for his subjective self. In other words, he maintains the Fichtean principle of self-origination by saying “I am I, the poet,” while simultaneously acknowledging that his poetry does not emerge from absolutely nothing but from a natural being whose role in history has been determined for him by circumstance or divine providence. Despite this confidence in the power of poetic self-origination, the seventh strophe signals a strange crisis of confidence. So far, metaphors for poetic creation and the power of song as deed have generally been put in positive terms, but here the poet states that poetry may well be impossible at this moment in history: Aber Freund! wir kommen zu sp¨at. Zwar leben die G¨otter, Aber u¨ ber dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt. Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten, Ob wir leben, so sehr schonen die Himmlischen uns. . . . Donnernd kommen sie drauf. Indessen d¨unket mir o¨ fters Besser zu schlafen, wie so ohne Genossen zu seyn, So zu harren und was zu thun indeß und zu sagen, Weiß ich nicht und wozu Dichter in d¨urftiger Zeit? Aber sie sind, sagst du, wie des Weingotts heilige Priester, Welche von Lande zu Land zogen in heiliger Nacht. (StA II, 1, pp. 93–4)

But, my friend, we have come too late. Though the gods are living, Over our heads they live, up in a different world. Endlessly there they act and, such is their kind wish to spare us, Little they seem to care whether we live or do not. . . . Thundering then they come. But meanwhile too often I think it’s Better to sleep than to be friendless as we are, alone, Always waiting, and what to do or to say in the meantime I don’t know, and who wants poets at all in lean years? But they are, you say, like those holy ones, priests of the wine-god Who in holy Night roamed from one place to the next.53

H¨olderlin’s friend (presumably Wilhelm Heinse, to whom the poem is dedicated) is a fellow poet and sympathetic listener; Coleridge fulfills a similar role in Wordsworth’s Prelude. The overt expression of belatedness, “we come too late,” (“wir kommen zu sp¨at”) introduces a complex series

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of statements regarding the relation between his own time and ancient Greece, or, on a more general level, the poet and tradition. The gods are indeed alive in another world, that is, living through tradition (poetry), yet the relationship between them and mortals may be one-sided; the poet cares about them, but do they care about him? The phrase “so sehr schonen die Himmlischen uns,” translated as “such is their kind wish to spare us,” but more literally, “so much do the Heavenly Ones care for us” presents a difficult ambiguity. Is it meant ironically, or do the gods provide their care by means which mere mortals cannot discern? The next lines imply that human inadequacy, not divine indifference, keeps them out of contact. The effect of these lean times is to make men stronger, enabling new heroes to arise and intitiate a new era of contact between the divine and the human. While the age of heroes has passed, it will return, yet H¨olderlin feels that we have arrived too late rather than too early. This poetry, therefore, is the dream of those times, past or present, and the task of the poet is to overcome historical time, to bring the gods to these needy times through their representation in poetry. In this way, poetry almost becomes more than representation, and the poet’s dream a kind of reality; the poetry mediates between the gods and mortals in these times, becoming a heroic act in itself and preparing for the transition to the ideal. The poet attempts to become both priest and hero, and the poem both deed and representation of a deed, but for now, that union may be unattainable. Yet, as H¨olderlin says, “wozu Dichter in d¨urftiger Zeit?” What, indeed, are poets for in these needful times? This famous line asks us to consider what has changed to make this idealized form of poetry so impossible to realize. To some extent, the problem is that in this age, our poetry lacks real music. In ancient Greece, no difference existed between poetry and music; Homeric bards created both with voice and lyre. Pindar, whom H¨olderlin admired greatly and used as a model, wrote both the words and the music for his compositions; what we read of his poetry today bears the same relation to his original compositions as a libretto does to the performance of an opera. The poet of “Dichterberuf” speaks of poetry “immerneu besungen”; in these needy times, singing must wait until a full communion with the gods is possible. The poetry of these times is a dream of the eventual performance of poetry, the enactment of poetry which will do something. As mere writing on paper and enclosed in mute books, poetry does nothing but cause private thought in a single reader – and some seven types of ambiguity. The recitation of poetry reaches the gods’ ears, becomes a blessing, a celebration – in other words, its performance becomes, in J. L. Austin’s words, “a performative utterance,” a statement that is itself an action.54 As the metrical element of poetry, its sound and

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rhythm, restores the lost music of the Greeks, its lexical sense recreates their blessed condition, when they communed with the gods. H¨olderlin’s words in the last strophe of “Brod und Wein” therefore function as a kind of prophecy: Was der Alten Gesang von Kindern Gottes geweissagt, Siehe! wir sind es, wir; Frucht von Hesperien ists! Wunderbar und genau ists als an Menschen erf¨ullet, Glaube, wer es gepr¨uft! aber so vieles geschieht, Keines wirket, denn wir sind herzlos, Schatten, bis unser Vater Aether erkannt jeden und allen geh¨ort. Aber indessen kommt als Fakelschwinger des H¨ochsten Sohn, der Syrier, unter die Schatten herab. Seelige Weise sehns; ein L¨acheln aus der gefangnen Seele leuchtet, dem Licht thauet ihr Auge noch auf. Sanfter tr¨aumet und schl¨aft in Armen der Erde der Titan, Selbst der neidische, selbst Cerberus trinket und schl¨aft. (StA II, 1, p. 95)

What of the children of God was foretold in the songs of the ancients, Look, we are it, ourselves; fruit of Hesperia it is! Strictly it has come true, fulfilled as in men by a marvel, Let those who have seen it believe! Much, however, occurs, Nothing succeeds, because we are heartless, mere shadows until our Father Aether, made known, recognized, fathers us all. Meanwhile, though to us shadows comes the Son of the Highest, Comes the Syrian and down into our gloom bears his torch. Blissful, the wise men see it; in souls that were captive there gleams a Smile, and their eyes shall yet thaw in response to the light. Dreams more gentle and sleep in the arms of Earth lull the Titan, Even that envious one, Cerberus, drinks and lies down.55

The poets of Hesperia are those who come to fulfill the prophecy of the “old songs,” the fruit of a particular time and place. However, these songs, their predictions, and the entire cycle of history that encompasses them are H¨olderlin’s own creation; the fictional Father Aether’s ability to give living flesh and hearts to the shadows of German poetry is really a reflection of H¨olderlin’s own poetic power, generated by faith in divine inspiration. At the center of “Brod und Wein” is a clear and distinct vision of the poet: an autonomous subject who has acquired self-consciousness through poetry and whose words allow this self-consciousness to have real existence when poetry once again becomes song. When night falls, ending the reasoning day and allowing song to replace other, more rational modes of discourse, the terrible guardian of the border between the living and the dead, Cerberus,

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sleeps, and allows us to commune with the Greeks, however briefly. As in other moments in H¨olderlin’s poetry where words, signs, and songs are invoked, H¨olderlin solves the problem of being by ascribing the power of self-origination to his melopoetic language, that is, language that is both sign and sound, at once linguistic and material. The opening lines of “Patmos” likewise reveal H¨olderlin’s attempt to span the distance between ancient Greece and our own needful times, where an additional dialectical opposition between danger and salvation emerges: Nah ist Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. Wo aber Gefahr ist, w¨achst Das Rettende auch. Im Finstern wohnen Die Adler und furchtlos gehn Die S¨ohne der Alpen u¨ ber den Abgrund weg Auf leichtgebaueten Br¨uken. Drum, da geh¨auft sind rings Die Gipfel der Zeit, und die Liebsten Nah wohnen, ermattend auf Getrenntesten Bergen, So gieb unschuldig Wasser, O Fittige gieb uns, treuesten Sinns Hin¨uberzugehn und wiederzukehren. So sprach ich . . . (StA II, 1, p. 165)

Near is And difficult to grasp, the God. But where danger threatens That which saves from also grows. In gloomy places dwell The eagles, and fearless over The chasm walk the sons of the Alps On bridges lightly built. Therefore, since round about Are heaped the summits of Time And the most loved live near, growing faint On mountains most separate, Give us innocent water, O pinions give us, with minds most faithful To cross over and return. So I spoke . . . 56

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The “peaks of time” embody a transformation of chronological distance to geographical distance, which in “Patmos” takes on particular significance because of the position of the island of Patmos between Europe and Asia and its role as both in the Greek world and in the beginning of Christianity. The last two lines of the first strophe, “O pinions give us . . . /To cross over and return,” reinforce the identification of the poet’s vocation and the crossing of this distance between ourselves, in these times, and the gods, in the mythological past. The gods are indeed near, not hopelessly lost in the past or in heaven, and the abyss between them can be crossed. The phrase schwer zu fassen, “difficult to grasp,” plays on the literal and figurative meanings of the word fassen; it is both “to grasp,” meaning “to touch” and thereby “to determine the concrete reality of an object,” and “to understand,” a term usually applied to things that can never be touched in reality. In this case, both normally mutually exclusive meanings of fassen become exactly the opposite; the word is meant in both senses simultaneously: the gods are both difficult to understand and to touch. What connects these issues of abstract and concrete is the subtext of “Patmos,” the place the island itself has in the history of Christianity as the island on which John received the Revelation. Patmos itself is the concrete element of John’s text (“I, John . . . was on an island called Patmos . . .”; Revelation 1:9), the literal basis for a text for which reading involves the conversion of figurative events into literal history, that of the end of the world. To grasp the meaning of Revelation, that is, to comprehend its abstract and literal meanings simultaneously, is indeed to fly over an abyss, into which the world of reality falls at the end of time, when the literal end of the world and its figurative prophecy in Revelation become the same thing.57 In view of this radical collapse in the distinction between literal and figurative, several complex questions concerning the problem of selfconsciousness arise. What effect does the beginning of the next strophe (So sprach ich) have on the rhetorical status of the first strophe? If the dream described in “Brod und Wein” and the “lightly built bridges” of line seven of “Patmos” are metaphors for an idealized poetry, what is the status of self-consciousness in a poem in which this activity itself is described? Karlheinz Stierle perceives this moment between invocation and quotation in “Patmos” as a release from “isolation and separation, which is the law of the historical moment”58 and interprets this as another of a series of motions from far to near. In this instance, the difference between chronological distance and geographic distance is one of rhetorical level, whether

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one takes “far” and “near” as geographic distance (between Greece and Western Europe) or as chronological distance (between the fifth century b.c.e. and the nineteenth century c.e.). In both cases, the poet is a figure of mediation, and poetry an act of crossing. This paradox of divine will and self-determination becomes even more vivid in relation to his theory of poetic language, which H¨olderlin addresses in one of his most difficult passages, the last strophe of “Patmos”: Zu lang, zu lang schon ist Die Ehre der Himmlischen unsichtbar. Denn fast die Finger m¨ussen sie Uns f¨uhren und schm¨alich Entreißt das Herz uns eine Gewalt. Denn Opfer will der Himmlischen jedes, Wenn aber eines vers¨aumt ward, Nie hat es Gutes gebracht. Wir haben gedienet der Mutter Erd’ Und haben j¨ungst dem Sonnenlichte gedient, Unwissend, der Vater aber liebt, Der u¨ ber allen waltet, Am meisten, daß gepfleget werde Der veste Buchstab, und bestehendes gut Gedeutet. Dem folgt deutscher Gesang. (StA II, 1, pp. 171–2)

Too long, too long now The honour of the Heavenly has been invisible. For almost they must guide Our fingers, and shamefully A power is wresting our hearts from us. For every one of the Heavenly wants sacrifices, and When one of these was omitted No good ever came of it. We have served Mother Earth And lately have served the sunlight, Unwittingly, but what the Father Who reigns over all loves most Is that the solid letter Be given scrupulous care, and the existing Be well interpreted. This German song observes.59

Poetry requires sacrifice, yet nothing can be omitted; the poetry of this age must be all-encompassing, preserving the world of the Greeks yet aware of the present. A mysterious force tears at the poet’s heart; the difficulty

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of his task is so great that the divine must almost lead his fingers. Still, the word “almost” (fast) leaves open the role of the individual will in the process. The poet, one of many included in the “we” in the second half of the strophe, suffers precisely because his poetry must come from his own self-consciousness. The highest service of the divine involves caring for the “firm letter,” Der veste Buchstab, of the belated age of written preservation of what has previously been sung; it encompasses both the universe as it really is, and the principles behind it indicated in the greatest poetry already existing. The final words of the poem attest to the success of the poet’s mission; “This German song observes” (“Dem folgt deutscher Gesang”) confirms that the German poetry follows the example of the Greeks and sings in its own language. H¨olderlin’s faithfulness to this poetic program, despite its inherent difficulties, reveals itself in “Wie wenn am Feiertage . . .” (“As on a Holiday . . .”), a fragmentary poem that begins as a strict metrical imitation of Pindaric odes,60 but breaks off suddenly in several exclamations of distress. However, this fragment provides an interesting and unusual moment of perspective on the poet’s accomplishments. Unlike “Friedensfeier” or “Brod und Wein,” “Wie wenn am Feiertage . . .” does not itself celebrate a moment or event but provides a metaphorical distance from the act of celebration through an extended and balanced simile, where the first stanza begins with the word wie, (“as”) and the second stanza follows with the corresponding so: Wie wenn am Feiertage, das Feld zu sehn Ein Landmann geht, des Morgens, wenn Aus heißer Nacht die k¨uhlenden Blize fielen Die ganze Zeit und fern noch t¨onet der Donner . . . So stehn sie unter g¨unstiger Witterung Sie die kein Meister allein, die wunderbar Allgegenw¨artig erzieht in leichtem Umfangen Die m¨achtige, die g¨ottlichsch¨one Natur. (StA II, 1, p. 118)

As on a holiday, to see the field A countryman goes out, at morning, when Out of hot night the cooling flashes had fallen For hours on end, and thunder still rumbles afar . . . So now in favourable weather they stand Whom no mere master teaches, but in A light embrace, miraculously omnipresent, God-like in power and beauty, Nature brings up.61

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The two stanzas juxtapose the cultivator, a human agent, with the weather, a natural force, to establish a dialectical opposition between humanity and nature based on mutual benefit. The Landmann, a farmer, observes his fields the day after a storm, noting how order has been restored, enabling new seeds to sprout, following a natural process that he has nonetheless assisted and organized. The Feiertag is a day of contemplation and rest for the farmer as natural processes take over, creating new life from his labor. The poem contains abundant references to images of change upheaval that H¨olderlin used in other poems, yet in this instance, these entities have come to some kind of resolution. The lightning is already past, not striking in the present (as it does in “Dichterberuf”); the grapes are still on the vine, not yet transformed into wine to be drunk in celebration (as in “Brod und Wein”); the river has returned to its banks, no longer overflowing in confusion (as in “Der Rhein”). Like the Landmann, the poet can rest from normal duties and contemplate his accomplishments, which have been transformed from moments of action, creation, and performance into a natural landscape. The poet, like the farmer, mediates natural and artificial processes, wisely knowing when to intervene or to rest. The pronoun “they” (Sie) who “seem to be alone” refers to the new plants of the farmer’s land, both objects of the farmer’s cultivation and natural, living beings. Poetry, like farming, requires alternating times of dormancy and growth, along with a reliance on natural processes of renewal. This celebration of spring returns with a new dawn, and the poet’s sudden exclamation abruptly changes the poem’s tone, completing the triadic structure by uniting the poet’s efforts with nature’s: Jetz aber tagts! Ich harrt und sah es kommen, Und was ich sah, das Heilige sei mein Wort. Denn sie, sie selbst, die a¨lter denn die Zeiten Und u¨ ber die G¨otter des Abends und Orients ist, Die Natur ist jezt mit Waffenklang erwacht, Und hoch vom Aether bis zum Abgrund nieder Nach vestem Geseze, wie einst, aus heiligem Chaos gezeugt, F¨uhlt neu die Begeisterung sich, Die Allerschaffende wieder. (StA II, 1, p. 118)

But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come, And what I saw, the hallowed, my word shall convey, For she, she herself, who is older than the ages And higher than the gods of Orient and Occident,

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Here, a broad and continuous view of the universe, from its highest to its lowest levels, reveals everything to be in its proper place after the chaos of the storm the night before. H¨olderlin uses a rare Ich to insert his activity into the poem, along with an odd shift to the subjunctive, “Und was ich sah, das Heilige sei mein Wort,” (“And what I saw, the hallowed, my word shall convey”). Hamburger’s translation of the subjunctive of sein, sei, (“to be”) does not adequately emphasize the force of the poet’s statement – his vision has made him capable of making his word holy merely by uttering it. All renewal here is self-renewal, the poetic version of the Fichtean “I am I,” a creation of the self-as-poet through the performative statement. This poetic inspiration is not only holy, but also heroic, as the poem changes tone once again toward the heroic in the fourth strophe with another extended simile: Und wie im Aug’ ein Feuer dem Manne gl¨anzt, Wenn hohes er entwarf; so ist Von neuem an dem Zeichen, den Thaten der Welt jezt Ein Feuer angez¨undet in Seelen der Dichter. (StA II, 1, p. 119)

And as a fire gleams in the eye of that man Who has conceived a lofty design, Once more by the tokens, the deeds of the world now A fire has been lit in the souls of the poets.63

A revealing chiasmus occurs in the course of the simile: the fire in the eye of the hero becomes a fire in the souls of the poets. Usually, poets have visions of fire, whereas heroes have fire in the soul; the association between vision and poetic creation as well as that between fiery spirits and heroic action is well established in tradition. Moreover, two terms are used in apposition which normally appear as opposites: dem Zeichen and den Thaten, the sign and the deeds. Together, these reversals indicate that language and action are somehow interchangeable. Renate B¨oschenstein-Sch¨afer has examined a similar collapsing of the distinction between sign and deed in several of H¨olderlin’s late fragments and correctly concludes that making these elements interchangeable is an essential part of H¨olderlin’s poetics – that is, what is usually considered the domain of empirical reality becomes

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a system of signification, and poetic language gains both a physical and historical reality.64 In a sense, H¨olderlin takes Goethe’s famous rewriting of the beginning of the Gospel of St. John in Faust one step further – he not only substitutes Tat for Wort, but also does the reverse as well, making words into deeds. The next two stanzas describe how song springs forth as “thoughts of the communal spirit” (“Des gemeinsamen Geistes Gendanken” StA, II, 1, p. 119), the result of a joyous union of gods and men, as when Bacchus was born from the lightning that struck Semele. However, H¨olderlin cannot sustain this joyous assertion of divine order for long; the poem breaks off in sudden despair soon after these lines with the words “Weh mir!,” “My shame!” Perfect order in poetry is perhaps too large a task for H¨olderlin, as is such a large perspective on the universal order. In either real or metaphorical terms, the burden of following Pindar’s meter and describing the position of the poet in the universe and in history became overwhelming. H¨olderlin must break off because, as he asserts in so many other poems, he is too late, it is winter, and it is the wrong time in the cycle of history. The last stanzas of the poem indicate an overwhelming crisis occurring at precisely the moment the poet comes closest to divine inspiriation: Doch uns geb¨uhrt es, unter Gottes Gewittern, Ihr Dichter! mit entbl¨oßtem Haupte zu stehen Des Vaters Stral, ihn selbst, mit eigner Hand Zu fassen und dem Volk ins Lied Geh¨ullt die himmlische Gaabe zu reichen. Denn sind nur reinen Herzens, Wie Kinder, wir, sind schuldlos unsere H¨ande, Des Vaters Stral, der reine versengt es nicht Und tief ersch¨uttert, die Leiden des St¨arkeren, Mitleidend, bleibt in den hochherst¨urzenden St¨urmen Des Gottes wenn er nahet, das Herz doch fest Doch weh mir! wenn von Weh mir! (StA II, 1, pp. 119–20)

Yet, fellow poets, us it behooves to stand Bare-headed beneath God’s thunderstorms, To grasp the Father’s ray, no less, with out own two hands And, wrapping in song the heavenly gift, To offer it to the people. For if only we are pure in heart, Like children, and our hands are guiltless,

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The Father’s ray, the pure, will not sear our hearts And, deeply convulsed, and sharing his sufferings Who is stronger than we are, yet in the far-flung down-rushing storms of The God, when he draws near, will the heart stand fast. But, oh, my shame! when of My shame!65

Although the drama of this abrupt break is striking, few commentators discuss it.66 After what has been a measured series of transitions from general descriptions of the process of becoming a poet to a personal history of that process, the poem abruptly leaps to an unprecedented rhetorical level that has not appeared before, that of the cry of pain. The effect is even more startling in the contrast that this outburst makes with the metric imitation of Pindar of the preceding verses. Interpretation of this strange moment presents several textual difficulties as well. Like the vast majority of H¨olderlin’s poems, “Wie wenn am Feiertage . . . ” was never published during his lifetime, and its manuscript cannot be considered fair copy. One one hand, it is undisputedly a fragment – a second abrupt break at the end of the text, several indications from a prose sketch, as well as the interruption of the formal structure provide overwhelming evidence that H¨olderlin intended to write more than he did here.67 On the other hand, whatever fragments remain are nevertheless part of the text, and subject to interpretation. The final lines show a surprising consciousness of the poet’s difficulties, and indicate that every word may indeed count: Und sag ich gleich, Ich sei genaht, die Himmlischen zu schauen, Sie selbst, sie werfen mich tief unter die Lebenden Den falscher Priester, ins Dunkel, daß ich Das warnende Lied den Gelehringen singe. Dort (StA II, 1, p. 120)

And let me say at once That I approached to see the Heavenly, And they themselves cast me down, deep down Below the living, into the dark cast down The false priest that I am, to sing, For those who have ears to hear, the warning song. There68

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The last strophe, relating the punishment of the poet for attempting to come too close to divinity, serves as an explanation for the cry of “Weh mir!” which, as well as the line “Und sag ich gleich,” essentially makes the earlier stanzas a kind of quotation, forcing the reader to reconsider the status and time frame of the previous lines, as well as the location of the speaker. This sudden chronological and temporal removal, similar to that of “Patmos,” transforms the entire poem into “das warnende Lied,” which breaks off with the word which explains the poet’s loss of voice, “there” (Dort). The poet’s location in both time and space, here in the fallen Hesperian world, determines his fate as a poet, whether he succeeds or fails. H¨olderlin has constructed a system in which the poet’s vocation, poetic language, and finally poetry itself manifest themselves as a combination of self-consciousness and divine will. H¨olderlin’s insistence that what he has become was not determined by him, but for him, disguises his role as the originator of the poetic world he creates, and reveals that his words originate not in the natural world but in his mind as the perception of this role as the mediator between the Greeks and the Hesperians, and the gods and mankind. In song, this idea becomes reality: the word becomes deed. Whether the poet celebrates in triumph or falls into an abyss, he has created his own self-consciousness in song, leaving behind the strictures of philosophy, free to commune with the divine, or fall into despair.

chapter 3

Hegel’s Aesthetic Theory: Self-Consciousness and Musical Material

Music performs on the clavichord within us which is our own inmost being. – J. G. Herder1

In March of 1830, the year before his death, G. W. F. Hegel, by then the rector of the University of Berlin and a celebrated philosopher, met Princess Marianne of Hesse-Homburg, the wife of the crown prince of Prussia. The princess was the daughter of the Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg, for whom H¨olderlin had written “Patmos.” In her diary, Princess Marianne records that she asked Hegel about Isaac von Sinclair, a friend to both Hegel and H¨olderlin from their T¨ubingen days, and received a curious response: “At that point, he [Hegel] began to speak of H¨olderlin, whom the world has forgotten. . . . A whole lost past went through me.”2 The T¨ubinger Freunde had long dispersed and Hegel had essentially given up on H¨olderlin as hopelessly mad in 1803 when Schelling wrote to him about their friend’s worsening condition.3 Suddenly, the mention of a friend’s name brought H¨olderlin to Hegel’s mind, along with the plans they had made long ago in Jena, Frankfurt, and Homburg. The “lost past” mentioned by Princess Marianne refers to the time immediately after the French Revolution that had raised fleeting hopes for reform before Napoleon ravaged Europe and released the forces that would control European politics for the rest of the nineteenth century. It also refers to the period in Hegel’s life when a project like the one described in the Systemprogramm fragment seemed worth considering and even possible. Princess Marianne’s question did not elicit remembrances of Sinclair himself but of H¨olderlin, whom the world had indeed forgotten, but Hegel, clearly, had not. This incident represents in microcosm the project Hegel had been continuing for over a decade: the assimilation of aesthetics into his overall philosophy. In 1818, while still at Heidelberg, Hegel gave his first series of lectures on aesthetics and later delivered revised and expanded versions of 68

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the course at Berlin in 1820–1, 1823, 1826, and 1828–9. By the end, attendance at Hegel’s aesthetic lectures became almost mandatory for anyone interested in culture; many observers even preserved their notes for posterity.4 In a sense, Hegel’s Berlin lectures represented an attempt to accomplish the promise of the Systemprogramm fragment in mature form. What had begun as a new and final system of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics summed up in a few pages – no matter who had really composed the document – had become a life-long project of organizing human knowledge within the intellectual framework of philosophy and the institutional framework of the university. Hegel had essentially replaced the revolutionary stance of the Systemprogramm fragment and its bold ambition to create a “new mythology” with an understanding of all previous knowledge as part of the gradual realization of truth over time. As Hegel turned more frequently toward the arts, both for his own edification and as the subject of his lectures, he saw his philosophical principles demonstrated in them and articulated their position within his system in increasingly detailed terms. Although the results of this extraordinary project were not always felicitious,5 Hegel’s aesthetic theory remains one of the most enduring applications of his speculative philosophy to actual objects, regarding both continuing interest and contemporary relevance. In particular, his views of music depend on a concept of musical meaning as a manifestation of self-consciousness. Later, however, he went on to deny music’s ability to represent self-consciousness, so that philosophy, rather than art, could maintain its primary position within his overall system. Reconciling the theoretical aspect of Hegel’s views on aesthetics with his practice of aesthetic judgment and interpretation has not been an easy task for scholars. Anne-Marie Gethmann-Siefert’s recent assessment shows many devoted Hegelians at a loss in their attempt to derive a coherent position encompassing Hegel’s theoretical claims and his actual encounters with the artistic world.6 By comparing the printed edition of the aesthetic lectures with the notes of those who actually attended, she has come to the conclusion that the editor of the best-known printed version, H. G. Hotho, added many – if not all – of the examples and particular aesthetic judgments in the text.7 Moreover, the most famous statement in the lectures, “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past,”8 seems oddly nostalgic and pessimistic in a system that generally views culture as progressive. Even Hegel’s most devoted students at the time found this claim difficult to accept, provoking many notorious misunderstandings.9 Like Hegel himself, the lectures on aesthetics contain many contradictions, not all of which can, or even should, be resolved.

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A completely coherent Hegel would undoubtedly be an idealized fiction; a completely incoherent or disingenuous version of the philosopher – or his editor, for that matter – would probably be a misrepresentation as well. Here, I plan to continue tracing the connection between Idealist versions of self-consciousness and the aesthetics of music and poetry. Doing so involves examining precisely where and how Hegel varied from his predecessors on both self-consciousness and aesthetics and restoring the context of his aesthetic theory and artistic judgments, however compromised by editorial interference. I argue that Hegel’s views of poetry and music, as key elements in his general aesthetic theory, reflect an attempt to reconcile the Romantic accounts of aesthetic experience current in 1820s Berlin with the manifestation of self-consciousness that he had so diligently described in his philosophy. However, any discussion of the relationship between these two major elements in Hegel’s thought must begin with an examination of the reliability and context of the most disputed text, Hotho’s version of the Lectures on Aesthetics and its relationship with the more recently published transcription of the 1823 lectures. hegel’s aesthetic lectures: origin and context Few works of philosophical aesthetics approach the scale and ambition of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, which takes both a systematic and historical approach to its subject. The text explains the existence and history of art according to two central principles: that an artwork is the external particularization of the idea of beauty for sensuous apprehension and that the creation and contemplation of art is an act of self-reflection by means of the sensuous material of the artwork. Hegel’s proof and explication of these principles encompass the historical development of artistic modes, as well as detailed descriptions of different media, with examples ranging from the sculpture of ancient Egypt and Greece to the poems of Goethe and Schiller. A study of a philosophical work of this large a scope would be daunting enough even if one could be absolutely sure of the text. The Lectures on Aesthetics, edited by a H. G. Hotho, a devoted student, rather than by Hegel himself, is not a single written treatise but a transcription of oral lectures delivered in various university courses over several years. Despite their piecemeal origin, the lectures are remarkably coherent; their consistency and symmetry have even been cited as reasons to doubt their authenticity as Hegel’s own work. Until recently, most readers have believed Hotho’s claim that he provided a faithful transcription of Hegel’s

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own words.10 However, Anne-Marie Gethmann-Siefert has matched her continuing efforts to examine the validity of Hotho’s text, as noted earlier, with her determination to collect and publish versions of the lectures based on other sources. Her recent publication of Hotho’s transcript of the 1823 Berlin lectures reveals many parallels with the more questionable but far more complete version Hotho originally published, especially on the most controversial points. Nevertheless, the text of the Lectures on Aesthetics, as originally published and reprinted in the collected works of Hegel since Hotho’s first edition of 1835, represents more than the vaguely filtered, and perhaps adulterated, views of the philosopher. The work has a long history of its own that inevitably contributes to our understanding of it. However compromised it may be, this edition represents what has been considered Hegel’s thoughts for almost two centuries and as Stephen Bungay notes, will remain “an important historical document in its own right,” no matter how discredited.11 It is also indicative of what a group of devoted and knowledgeable students – not just Hotho – understood as Hegel’s views, rigorously and systematically applied to their cultural surroundings. Many who had attended the same lectures would be in a position to reveal any variation from at least the spirit, if not the letter, of Hegel’s words. Moreover, many more readers of Hotho’s edition already knew other works by Hegel well and would also recognize variations in style and thought. I therefore treat the text, with certain reservations, as both indicative of a particular development in the history of philosophy and aesthetic thought and as representative of a cultural moment. Comparisons of the more recent reconstruction of Hegel’s 1823 lectures will undoubtedly create a more secure understanding of what parts of the Lectures on Aesthetics are truly Hegel’s words and thoughts. I consider striving for authenticity in this regard to be of secondary importance to the examination of Hegelian thought on aesthetics overall. hegelian self-consciousness and art Hegel had addressed the problem of art and the category of the aesthetic long before he began lecturing on them, but the connection between his highly developed positions on art in the Berlin lectures and his earlier writings on metaphysics does not become clear unless examined in the context of Hegel’s predecessors. Self-consciousness, as I explained in the introductory chapter, was the central issue of Idealist philosophy, yet no description of the concept had yet presented itself as entirely adequate until

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Hegel published The Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807. Despite Schelling’s claims,12 Hegel’s theory of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology represents a significant departure from all previous theories and solves some of the recurring problems in the works of his predecessors. When Hegel began work on the Phenomenology early in the nineteenth century, theories of self-consciousness had reached an impasse between theory and practice, or, as H¨olderlin formulated it, between judgment and being. (It is unlikely that Hegel read H¨olderlin’s fragmentary essay.) Schelling’s solution to the infinitely regressive series of positing self-consciousness to have experience yet needing experience to posit self-consciousness, was the Selbstobjektwerden, the “self-becoming-object.” However, this abstract entity does not seem to correspond to any real, intuitive experience of self-consciousness and does not necessarily resolve the problem of infinite regression: the point at which one posits the Selbstobjektwerden is ultimately arbitrary. Hegel’s solution, as described in the Phenomenology, requires a different kind of logic; he consequently defines the discourse of philosophy somewhat differently from that of his predecessors. Kant’s main works take the form of Kritik, that is, critical commentary on processes external to the works themselves; Fichte’s Wissenschaftlehre is, ostensibly, a science of knowing – a method; Schelling’s philosophy is clearly named a system. Hegel calls his work a “phenomenology,” simultaneously a description of a process that actually took place as a phenomenon, and a logical examination of the workings of that process. By coining this term, Hegel describes the process of coming to self-consciousness as both historical and retrospective: both the narrative of becoming self-conscious and the understanding of one’s own consciousness emerge from knowing that history. By specifically addressing the problem of self-consciousness in the form of a phenomenology, Hegel confronts the division between theory and practice directly. Self-consciousness is not a theoretical construct that somehow leaps into the practice of individuals and then into humanity as a whole; it is the practice of becoming self-conscious and understanding oneself as such. According to Hegel, this process of becoming self-conscious follows a familiar progression: it begins with mere “consciousness” (the initial awareness of the perception of an external object, or sense-certainty) followed by a complex manifestation of self-consciousness itself, which develops out of the knowledge of one’s own existence. Kant and Fichte had examined the moment of sense-certainty extensively but had not extended their theories of self-consciousness into the social realm, as Hegel does in the famous “Lordship and Bondage” section of the Phenomenology. As Andrzej

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Warminski astutely observes, Hegel does not see sense-certainty as a simple or definite beginning of self-consciousness. Sense-certainty is not merely an epistemological moment but instead the particular moment in ontology that becomes a central issue in the act of defining “sense-certainty” itself: If the answer to the question “What is sense-certainty?” reads “Sense-certainty is (its own) history,” this answer calls for a double reading – by us and by sensecertainty – and a rewriting of both question and answer. In spite of (or rather because of ) its rhetoric of being and nothing (nichts anders als . . . nichts anders als), which echoes the first sentence, this answer forces us to reread Being – the “is,” the copula – and thus the truth of sense-certainty. That is, Being – as object and as subject – has turned out to be the name . . . of an empty abstraction . . . which, in order not to mean nothing, to distinguish itself from nothing, has to be thought as mediated, as having and being a history.13

Just as H¨olderlin rightly asked, “How can I say I! without self-consciousness?” Hegel implicitly asks, “How can I say what sense-certainty ‘is’ – without knowing what ‘is’ means and how it operates?” Furthermore, knowing the meaning of “is” or “being” requires knowing its history, that is, the history of asking the question and the understanding that existence takes place in the dimension of time. (Sense-certainty is not certain until the terms of the “I” and “not-I” have been confirmed by the self-conscious “I,” as I discussed earlier.) Hegel therefore turns Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception, the deduction of the self as having continuous experiences over time, into a recursive cycle of sensation, self-consciousness, and retrospective perception. The “I” is always in the process of becoming a self-conscious “I” by synthesizing different kinds of experience, but the experiences are only distinguishable after the “I” has acquired self-consciousness. Therefore, the problem of being, as mere existence of the subject and the object, is not the differentiation between being and not-being but the triadic relation of being, not-being, and becoming. This pattern of positing, negation, and sublation, or Aufhebung, appears constantly in Hegel’s writings, in both his larger works and as a logical principle in his overall philosophy. Although Schelling perceived the traces of the Selbstobjektwerden in this pattern, the progression of Geist, Hegel’s name for the collective and individual spirit that comes to self-consciousness and absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology (usually rendered in English as “Sprit”), takes a progressive rather than a regressive path, in contrast to the Selbstobjektwerden. As Hegel made even clearer in the Science of Logic of 1812–16, this version of self-consciousness, in contrast to that of his predecessors, satisfies both its

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logical and ontological demands by accounting for the both the inference of self-consciousness and the existence of the subject.14 Hegel’s assertion that a universal Spirit comes to self-consciousness in the actual world, uniting the theory and practice of self-consciousness, remains perhaps the single greatest source of misunderstanding in his works. Many sophisticated critics and philosophers have fallen into the trap of creating a purely anthropological or psychological version of this theory, treating the Phenomenology as an account, however farfetched, of the workings of individual consciousness; perhaps an equal number of critics have treated it as a purely cultural description or taken Hegel’s claims to signify a strange kind of pantheism. However, Hegel himself tells his readers how the Phenomenology manages to be both and neither, explaining the necessity of the text’s particular task: The task of leading the individual from his uneducated standpoint to knowledge had to be seen in its universal sense, just as it was the universal individual, selfconscious Spirit, whose formative education had to be studied. As regards the relation between them, every moment, as it gains concrete form and a shape of its own, displays itself in the universal individual.15

To mistake the Phenomenology for a purely theoretical, psychological, or historical-cultural text means more than missing one of its aspects; it means missing the point entirely: self-consciousness is itself the history of Spirit becoming self-conscious and actual. Hegel makes a useful analogy to illustrate this essential point a few sentences later: Thus, as far as factual information is concerned, we find that what in former ages engaged the attention of men of mature mind, has been reduced to the level of facts, exercises, and even games for children; and, in the child’s progress through school, we shall recognize the history of the cultural development of the world traced, as it were, in a silhouette. . . . In this respect, formative education, regarded from the side of the individual, consists in his acquiring what thus lies at hand, devouring his inorganic nature, and taking possession of it for himself. But, regarded from the side of universal Spirit as substance, this is nothing but its own acquisition of self-consciousness, the bringing-about of its own becoming and reflection into itself.16

The acquisition of purely factual knowledge followed by self-reflection forms the self-conscious character of the individual, and represents part of the overall development of civilization as it, too, becomes increasingly self-conscious in the course of history. No meaningful distinction exists between the theoretical and practical sides of Hegel’s description of selfconsciousness. Self-consciousness cannot occur merely as the positing of

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an individual self in an encounter with an individual object, because this encounter can only yield self-consciousness for that entity as part of a larger whole that includes all conscious individuals. Hegel asserts that a theoretical description of self-consciousness cannot make sense as theory; no adequate description of self-consciousness can exist without the subject-object distinction, and no object functions as such unless it is an actual, practical object. Hegel thereby reverses the priority of the concepts that Schelling had described – in Hegel’s version of self-consciousness, the subject does not become an object to provide the system with an absolute standpoint of knowledge, but instead, the object in the theoretical subject-object relation becomes a real, practical object, enabling the theoretical subject to enter the historical world. The path of Spirit toward Absolute Knowledge in the course of the Phenomenology thus leads through many external relations, driven by desire to a combined “art-religion” immediately prior to absolute knowledge, which exerts a strong influence on the later lectures on aesthetics, as Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert has stated succinctly: The “Phenomenology,” which develops the spirit-concept as the way of individual historical knowledge to absolute knowledge, therefore orders art and religion as the objective and subjective sides of the grasping of the absolute, that is, the appearance and the imagination, clearly of philosophy, under absolute knowledge.17

Art, the objective side of the path toward Absolute Knowledge (literally, the “grasping” [Erfassung] of the absolute), demonstrates spiritual development through specific, concrete manifestations in works of art. Because they are enduring products of human consciousness, art objects provide a picture of this development not necessarily accessible through the remote and often accidental patterns of the “slaughter-bench of history” or the subjective complexities of theology. In this way, aesthetics, for Hegel, represents more than a temporary departure from the serious business of writing philosophy: it is the concrete, sensuous representation of absolute knowledge. The conjoining of art and religion as two sides of the progress of Spirit explains, to some degree, Hegel’s puzzling statement about the end of art, which appears not only in the Lectures on Aesthetics but also in the transcription of the 1823 lectures and in reports of contemporaries.18 The “end of art thesis,” as it is frequently called, does not mean that all artistic endeavors would abruptly come to an end in the late 1820s; it simply means that the high point of the significance of art for humanity had already been reached in classical times, when art and religion were part of the same spiritual experience. As Hegel says in the 1823 lectures, in classical

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sculpture, “It [sculpture] exhibits the divine shape itself. The god inhabits its externality in silent, holy, rigid calm.”19 Art, for us, is a thing of the past not because it no longer exists but because our experience of it is merely a diminished, belated echo of what the Greeks experienced when viewing, for instance, the statue of Athena in the Parthenon. Sculpture, as Hegel says several times, was the consummate medium for classical times; the Romantic era, which he defined as anything postclassical, that is, the era of Christianity, must turn inward now that God has appeared in human form: Since therefore the actual individual man is the appearance of God, art now wins for the first time the higher right of turning the human form, and the mode of externality in general, into an expression of the Absolute, although the new task of art can only consist in bringing before contemplation in this human form not the immersion of the inner in external corporeality but, conversely, the withdrawal of the inner into itself, the spiritual consciousness of God in the individual.20

The particular artistic media suited to bringing “the withdrawal of the inner into itself” are painting, music, and poetry. Painting collapses threedimensions into two through linear perspective, providing the illusion of depth rather than the immanence of the divine figure itself, as classical sculpture did. Similarly, music and poetry cannot represent an object by occupying precisely the same physical space and visual appearance; their material existence as word and sound invariably involve some kind of abstraction. Models of representation in these forms invariably involve moving away from the classical principles and into what Hegel calls the “symbolic art form.” music and the hegelian forms of art Early in the Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel has some puzzling reservations about the suitability of music for the expression of serious content. In an abstract discussion of the relation between content and its manifestation in the artwork, he attempts to explain why some art forms seem to require more maturity of their creators than others: Of course, in this respect, one art needs more than another the consciousness and knowledge of such content. Music, for example, which is concerned only with the completely indeterminate movement of the inner spirit and with sounds as if they were feeling without thought, needs to have little or no spiritual material present in consciousness. Therefore musical talent announces itself very early in youth, when the head is empty and the heart little moved, and it may sometimes attain a

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very considerable height before spirit and life have experience of themselves. Often enough, after all, we have seen very great virtuosity in musical composition and performance accompanied by remarkable barrenness of spirit and character.21

T. M. Knox believes that Hegel may be alluding to Mozart,22 whose unique combination of scatological humor and extraordinary talent was already a legend in 1820s Berlin. (Mendelssohn, a well-known prodigy who attended many of the lectures on aesthetics, is another possibility.) However, this passage does more than explain away a troublesome counterexample to an earlier statement on the depth of spirit needed to produce great art. In the sentence in which he claims that music is an example of those art forms that require less maturity, Hegel provides a short description of the way music works: “Music, for example, which is concerned only with the completely indeterminate movement of the inner spirit and with sounds as if they were feeling without thought.” According to Hegel, music does not necessarily need “spiritual material in consciousness” yet reflects the movement of the inner spirit. In an attempt to connect the paradoxical fact of immature prodigies like Mozart with the nonrepresentational aspect of music, Hegel compromises an essential element of his general theory of art: the determinate nature of the art work. Despite the parenthetical “for example,” music is the only art form that receives this symmetrical exemption from the requirements of other art forms – it needs neither maturity of spirit on the part of the composer nor does its realization need to be more than “an indeterminate movement of the spiritual inner.” Exactly how far removed this description of music is from Hegel’s view of the artwork in general becomes clear a few pages later, when he emphasizes the sensuous aspects of art: Thereby the sensuous aspect of a work of art, in comparison with the immediate existence of things in nature, is elevated to a pure appearance, and the work of art stands in the middle between immediate sensuousness and ideal thought. It is not yet pure thought, but, despite its sensuousness, is no longer a purely material existent either, like stones, plants, and organic life; on the contrary, the sensuous in the work of art is itself something ideal, but which, not being ideal as thought is ideal, is still at the same time there externally as a thing.23

In distinguishing art objects from natural objects while maintaining the essentially sensuous character of art, Hegel has created an ontological area for art between thought and the purely external existence of natural objects, “in the middle.” The art object is neither a mere “thing” nor is it thought itself, but instead it is an object whose existence lies in pure appearance: it must simultaneously consist of thought and materiality. The problem

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with the musical art object is that it cannot be contemplated as a material object with definite content the way paintings, sculpture, and poetry can. Because music affects our innermost subjectivity directly, it does not have a clear location for its sensuous existence, yet it is not thought – the precise nature of the existence of music, as well as its position in Hegel’s system, remains unknown. If music is essentially movement (rather than an object) and Hegel’s aesthetic theory depends on the notion of an art object with a determinate existence then music will be difficult to include in the system. However, Hegel’s determination to provide a comprehensive view of the arts precludes omitting a troublesome artistic medium and requires another solution for the systematic categorization for the arts. Hegel’s approach combines formal and historical categories in the “forms of art” (Kunstformen), which he divides into Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic. The forms of art represent the modalities of representation used by particular cultures and historical epochs; in each, the individual characteristics of different artistic media are more and less suitable. Architecture, for example, suited the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Persia, and India, because their art followed the Symbolic mode; ancient Greece and Rome found sculpture suitable for their Classical mode. Music, on the other hand is a “Romantic” art, as are painting and poetry, because it is better suited to the sublime, unknowable, yet human God of Christianity than the immanent gods of classical antiquity. Hegel needs the intermediary concept of the forms of art to prevent traditional period divisions, such as those originally outlined by Winckelmann, from obscuring what Hegel considers the more important relationships between form and content as they relate to the emergence of the idea of beauty: Thus the forms of art are nothing but the different relations of meaning and shape, relations which proceed from the Idea itself and therefore provide the true basis for the division of this sphere. For division must always be implicit in the concept, the particularization and division of which is in question.24

The forms of art themselves are the relationships between the overall idea of beauty (often called the “Idea”) and its realization in the artwork and are therefore the proper divisions for the classification of art.25 The correspondence of the various forms of art to particular historical epochs is only the indirect consequence of the tendency of artists in particular times to work in a particular style. Hegel describes these relationships between content (Inhalt) and particularization (Besonderung) as essentially epistemological

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in nature, that is, as a conceptual framework in which the content of the artwork is apprehended by the perceiver. This method of classification enables the system to accommodate the anomalies of a particular art work while remaining entirely consistent with the assertion (implicit in the introduction to the Lectures on Aesthetics) that one overall concept of art serves for all art forms. In other words, what accounts for the infinite variety of particular art works is not that the overall idea of art changes over time but that history transforms both its content and its epistemological relation to its perceivers. The suitability of one medium over another for the particularization of the Idea in the art work changes according to differences in historical epochs and in cultures. Therefore, the difficulties that previous philosophers and art historians have had in connecting the various phases of political history with the currents of artistic history are actually the result of their failure to recognize the intermediate term of the form of art. A functional aesthetics, in Hegel’s view, requires a secondary theoretical structure along epistemological lines and must address the specific historical problems of an individual art (in this case, music) at a level once removed from political and social history and from the medium itself. Hegel’s belief that the forms of art constitute a necessary intermediary term between works of art and their historical context has acquired a number of skeptics. Konrad Sch¨uttauf is among those who believe that Hegel has erred in placing aesthetic and generic theory before artistic practice, “as if ‘art’ would already exist before its genres and could ‘do’ something.”26 In other words, Sch¨uttauf claims that Hegel has improperly ascribed the ability to think and act to an abstract concept of art, when in reality, artistic practice precedes all theorizing about it. This objection bears an unmistakable resemblance to Marx’s critique of Hegel’s view of history. Marx famously criticized Hegel for building his system from the air of Spirit downward to the ground of reality, instead of beginning with the ground of social and historical materialism and building his theories on this (presumably solid) foundation. Although I do not contend with Marx here, I believe Sch¨uttauf has misunderstood Hegel in this respect. No artist begins a work of art without at least an implicit idea of the role that this particular artwork will fulfill, and what function works of art have in general. Other factors (biographical, historical, or economic) may affect the creation of an artwork to varying degrees, but without an artist who possesses an idea of art, artworks do not spontaneously come into being. The same may or may not be the case for history, but art, as defined in the Lectures on Aesthetics,

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requires deliberate agency. Hegel carefully excludes natural beauty from his aesthetic system for exactly this reason.27 Moreover, the charge that Hegel begins with a theory and gathers evidence selectively to prove it may merely be a misunderstanding of Hegel’s method of argumentation. In several works, including the History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History, Hegel organizes his argument lemmatically, that is, by stating his thesis and several intermediate conclusions at the outset and following them with inferences made from available information.28 In addition, Hegel considers his views on aesthetics to be the logical extension of Kant’s Critique of Judgment rather than an entirely new system; his arguments therefore have a basis both in themselves and as part of the philosophical tradition. In particular, Hegel refers to Kant’s works as a “transition” from older philosophy to a new science of knowledge because of Kant’s achievements in creating a practical epistemology and an aesthetic theory, both based on a priori principles. Hegel’s own efforts are therefore the next step in the historical process of developing a more accurate and complete conception of art: I will therefore touch briefly on the history of this transition which I have in mind, partly for the sake of the history itself, partly because in this way there are more closely indicated the views which are important and on which as a foundation we will build further. This foundation in its most general character consists in recognizing that the beauty of art is one of the means which dissolve and reduce to unity the above-mentioned opposition and contradiction between the abstractly self-concentrated spirit and nature – both the nature of external phenomena and that of inner subjective feeling and emotion.29

¨ Hegel therefore bases his conclusions in the Asthetik both on his observations of particular works of art and on the conclusions of philosophical predecessors. Beauty, for Kant, resides in the formal characteristics of the work and in the subjective apprehension of the work by the perceiver, yet Hegel finds Kant’s views of aesthetics, like his metaphysics, inadequate to the task of reconciling the subjective self with the objective world.30 Hegel manages this task by using the same principle that he had previously employed in the description of self-consciousness, the concept of historical progression. Placing himself (or rather, the text or lecture series) in historical context as the endpoint in the progression from concept to actualization reinforces his argument by creating a role for it in the history of aesthetics that parallels the course of self-consciousness. Hegel’s praise of Kant nevertheless introduces the question of the necessity of his own addition to the history of aesthetic theory, previously

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considered in Hegel’s works as merely a penultimate stage on the way to philosophy and absolute knowledge. The answer to this question, fundamental to any understanding of the Lectures on Aesthetics, becomes clear in a brief passage on the higher purpose of his philosophy of art from the introduction: In this point of higher truth, as the spirituality which the artistic formation has achieved in conformity with the Concept of spirit, there lies the basis for the division of the philosophy of art. For, before reaching the true Concept of its absolute essence, the spirit has to go through a course of stages, a series grounded in this Concept itself; and to this course of the content which the spirit gives to itself there corresponds a course, immediately connected therewith, of configurations of art, in the form of which the spirit, as artist, gives itself a consciousness of itself.31

By turning Spirit into the artist, Hegel has given the Lectures on Aesthetics the same structure as the Phenomenology or the Philosophy of History; in other words, the Lectures on Aesthetics become a narrative account of Spirit realizing itself in the world through its progress toward self-consciousness. As Spirit reaches a higher level of consciousness, the content of art comes to a higher level with it, which in turn determines the mode of presentation and consequently the concrete manifestations of art in the individual works. Because Spirit is the motivating force behind both history and art, both fields are immediately and inextricably connected to the realization of self-consciousness. Through this description of artistic development, Hegel manages to combine elements of Schiller’s Aesthetic Education and the periodization of Winckelmann’s theory of art history. Artistic development corresponds to the general course of the history of civilization, as well as to the development of the individual; Hegel’s theory thereby accounts for both individual and collective education. The use of the “forms of art” concept as an intermediary term between individual works of art and the course of cultural history also insulates Hegel’s aesthetic theory, to some extent, from the vagaries of individual taste, a problem he considered a terrible weakness in the writings of the Schlegel brothers.32 More important, Hegel associates historical epochs with characteristic modes of representation in a way that takes into account changing religious and spiritual ideals. As I mentioned earlier, the three distinct forms of art correspond to three historical eras: Symbolic (Egyptian and Oriental art), Classical (Greek and Roman art), and Romantic (Christian era art). Defining artistic creations solely in terms of historical development would obscure the enormous conceptual changes evident in the works and the varying suitability of particular media for each mode;

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defining them purely in terms of the particular media would obscure the historical dimension. Both elements of art, the history and the medium, must be brought together in a third term for art to be fully intelligible. As Stephen Bungay observes, Hegel did not create his aesthetic lectures because we need another history of art, but “because we no longer know what we are doing when we look at paintings, read poems, or listen to music.”33 The Lectures on Aesthetics is neither a handbook of artistic creation nor a history of art; it is a philosophy of art or, more precisely, the enactment of Spirit coming to self-consciousness in art, that is, a phenomenology of art. In the lectures on music, Hegel discusses the inherent subjectivity of the medium and the difference between the kinds of fulfillment received from other arts and that received from music: The fulfillment [from other arts] is always differentiated from my self. The fulfillment is in its nature external, spatial and thereby always differentiated from the interiority of the “I.” But in music this differentiation falls away. The “I” is no longer differentiated from the sensuous itself, the notes go forth in my deepest interior. The inmost subjectivity itself is enlisted and set in motion. This is therefore exactly what really makes up the power of [musical] notes.34

However, the text also includes, in outline form, a list of the physical characteristics of music added later in the corner of the manuscript on two separate pages, including lists of both the structural elements of music (rhythm, harmony, melody, etc.) and several more abstract – and distinctly Hegelian – concepts regarding the aesthetics of music.35 Whether these added outlines are Hegel’s own words or notes from Hotho’s later research is impossible to determine with absolute certainty; however, their resemblance to the overall structure of the music chapter of the Lectures on Aesthetics is unmistakable. In light of Hotho’s own admission that his contribution to the text was to add structure,36 the probable genesis of the more mundane parts of the music chapter in the Lectures on Aesthetics begins to appear – Hotho has most likely taken Hegel’s distinctly theoretical statements and attempted to link them to the physical characteristics of music, preserving the encyclopedic spirit of the enterprise. In contrast, the central principle described in this strange passage remains: Hegel claims that music is a special case among the arts because it does not possess the exteriority that is the central characteristic of artworks in other media. Hegel consistently asserts that music, although undeniably an art form, has no particular Dasein, and therefore bypasses the normal process of sensuous apprehension of an art object, in which the essential differentiation between the self and the object occurs. Music goes directly to the self, setting the “inmost subjectivity” in motion, without allowing the

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self to distinguish the musical artwork as something exterior to itself. This anomalous characteristic throws several essential claims of Hegel’s aesthetic theory into doubt. If music has no particular existence, it has no place in which form and content can come together to present the idea of beauty; if an encounter with music bypasses the moment in which the self divines the content of the concrete form, then the form versus content distinction does not hold in this case. In fact, Hegel seems to be vacillating between a theory of music which asserts that music has no content (because it can be played well by immature prodigies) and that it has no form (because it seems to have no exteriority). At this point, Hegel could reasonably be expected to leave music aside, or to declare it an exception to the rule of art. However, when discussing the relation between form and content in the Romantic form of art, he places music at its center: Therefore if we sum up in one word this relation of content and form in romantic art wherever this relation is preserved in its own special character, we may say that, precisely because the ever expanded universality and the restlessly active depths of the heart are the principle here, the keynote of romantic art is musical and, if we make the content of this idea determinate, lyrical. For romantic art the lyric is as it were the elementary fundamental characteristic, a note which epic and drama strike too and which wafts even round works of visual art as a universal fragrance of soul, because here spirit and heart strive to speak, through every one of their productions, to the spirit and the heart.37

This passage summarizes Hegel’s description of the relationship between content and the means of representation in the Romantic art form, the form appropriate to our own post-classical era. The word Grundton, which T. M. Knox translates as “key note,” more specifically refers to the tonic note of a particular key, the fundamental tonality of any work of music. Basically, Hegel uses music as a metonymy for the entire field of the Romantic art because it provides such a clear example of both its strengths and its weaknesses. As music, Romantic art communicates great depth of feeling directly to the soul. Here, music is clearly no longer an exception to the rules of art but a paradigmatic case for Romantic forms of art in general, whose indeterminacy, like a fragrance, clings to works of Romantic visual art as well. Because Spirit has progressed from the anthropomorphic pantheon of classical times to the sublime, internalized conception of God in the Christian era, the concrete manifestation of the ideal in the work of art is no longer possible; less determinate works of art must take the place of their Classical predecessors. However, Hegel must choose between the pure subjectivity of

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music and the variable subjectivity of poetry for the Romantic art that most closely approaches the condition of philosophy. music and subjectivity In the section of the Lectures on Aesthetics called “The System of the Individual Arts,” Hegel presents his consideration of particular artistic media almost as an afterthought. The forms of art receive far more explanation, and textual evidence indicates that Hegel did not add this section to his aesthetic lectures until the last time he delivered them, in 1829.38 However, the chapter on music contains a significant attempt – perhaps embellished by Hotho – to explain the connection between the physics of sound and the power of the musical artwork, an issue that had eluded successful explanation for many centuries and is still somewhat mysterious. Hegel begins by dividing the process of hearing into two different senses, das Geh¨or and das Ohr, literally “hearing” and “the ear.” “Hearing” refers to the subjective understanding of sound: Now, with sound, music relinquishes the element of an external form and a perceptible visibility and therefore needs for the treatment of its productions another subjective organ, namely hearing which, like sight, is one of the theoretical and not practical senses, and it is still more ideal than sight.39

“The ear,” on the other hand, represents the mental faculty of hearing, the intellectual process of perceiving the practical sensations received by the body’s actual ear: The ear, on the contrary, without itself turning to a practical relation to objects, listens to the result of the inner vibration of the body through which what comes before us is no longer the peaceful and material shape but the first and more ideal breath of the soul. Further, since the negativity into which the vibrating material enters here is on one side the cancelling of the spatial situation, a cancellation cancelled again by the reaction of the body, therefore the expression of this double negation, i.e. sound, is an externality which in its coming-to-be is annihilated again by its very existence, and it vanishes of itself. Owing to this double negation of externality, implicit in the principle of sound, inner subjectivity corresponds to it because the resounding, which in and by itself is something more ideal than independently really subsistent corporeality, gives up this more ideal existence also and therefore becomes a mode of expression adequate to the inner life.40

This passage deals with Ton, basic musical sound itself, and is closely based on Hegel’s more general discussion of the distinction between Ton, musical sound, and Klang, sound in general, in the Encyclopedia.41 The self-negation

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of Ton has two meanings: it indicates the limited and controlled duration of musical sound, and it describes the back-and-forth motion of physical vibration, where a movement in one direction is immediately countered by a movement in another. Hegel derives this “doubled negation of externality” from his concept of the physical nature of sound and a separate, external sense of hearing, not from any particular encounter with music, momentarily leaving aside the more difficult discussion of what the mind makes of this sound in the ear. Clearly, Hegel is aware of Kant’s assessment of music as “the beautiful play of the emotions,” yet he is unwilling to support that position without reservation. Instead, Hegel has used the distinction between music in itself, that is, music as initially apprehended by the ear, and music as representation, music perceived and understood by hearing. The point of this distinction, as well as the long digression into the physics of music, is twofold. First, it reclaims a form-content distinction for music by dividing the process of listening into external, sensory apprehension and internal perception. Second, it restores the possibility of an intellectual content for music by refusing to accept music as merely a kind of emotional painting. Music, for Hegel, is therefore neither purely formal nor purely emotional – it contains a Hegelian sublation of its two central characteristics in the manifestation of the musical work. In addition, it improves on Kant’s description of music as “the art of the beautiful play of emotions” by explicitly examining the physical basis for music and explaining, however tentatively, the relationship between the physical and the emotional in music. Hegel makes a similar point in the Encyclopedia in a discussion of the mathematical basis of harmony, a subject that had been the source of mystical speculation since Pythagoras: Harmony concerns the felicity of consonances and one of the unities felt in differences, like symmetry in architecture. Enchanting harmony and melody, those which speak to feeling and sorrow, are said to depend on abstract numbers? That seems remarkable, even miraculous.42

Hegel goes on to state that the mathematical relations present in harmony contribute to the beauty of music, along with meter, rhythm, and melody, which also have mathematically defined characteristics. More important, Hegel argues that the basis for musical beauty does not reside in emotional content but on the “unity felt in difference,” a basic positive-negative relation that, like the similar passage on hearing in the Lectures on Aesthetics, refers to music’s physical nature, that is, the back and forth of vibration.

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If Hegel is depending on music to be a paradigmatic art form that enables him to justify elements of his system outside the field of aesthetics, he must explain music in its entirety, from the concrete physical production of sound to the abstract apprehension of inner subjectivity. In this way, Hegel manages to resolve an apparent contradiction – the incorporeal nature of music allows him to have an art object within his system that eliminates the intermediary sensuous nature of a spatial object, while his purely physical explanation of the element of sound and its effects as music allows him to demystify this same incorporeality. Hegel’s focus on the physical characteristics of music and deliberate avoidance of music as a communicative or symbolic system nevertheless seem almost perverse or deliberately obtuse. Is it so difficult to hear and understand music that its effects must be explained as a kind of physical reaction? Again, the problem of finding the location of the existence of music seems to send Hegel in two directions at once. The effects of music are closely tied to its physical characteristics, yet its content is extremely vague, perhaps too much so. Soon after describing the self-negating nature of music, Hegel explains the deficiencies of the medium for communicating content: On this account what alone is fitted for expression in music is the object-free inner life, abstract subjectivity as such. This is our entirely empty self, the self without any further content. Consequently the chief task of music consists in making resound, not the objective world itself, but, on the contrary, the manner in which the inmost self is moved to the depths of its personality and conscious soul.43

Music is either too much itself, that is, just vibration in the ear, or it is too much within us, “abstract subjectivity as such.” Music communicates directly with the “completely objectless inner”: the self without reference to the external world, the solipsistic, abstract “I am I.” In Andrew Bowie’s view, the Lectures on Aesthetics reveals a critical fault at this point; Hegel cannot incorporate an element of subjectivity that does not ultimately have its articulation in language.44 Hegel’s concept of artistic content depends too much on its linguistic expression; he therefore fails to account for the content of absolute instrumental music, of music as such, because he cannot find words for it. Although Bowie has correctly pointed out this flaw in Hegel’s theory of music, I believe it should be considered in the context of the historical circumstances of the aesthetic lectures, which included an increasingly significant debate over precisely this point: the nature of instrumental music, which began to be called “absolute music” at about this time.

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the problem of absolute music Commentators have often given up on the music chapter, taking Hegel at his word when he admits he does not know much about music,45 because his aesthetic judgments seem so contrary to the spirit of the 1820s, when Viennese Classicism and Romanticism had raised works of absolute music, that is, instrumental music with no specific descriptive program, to new heights in artistic and intellectual life. Stephen Bungay says that “one always feels that Hegel was not at home with music,”46 while T. M. Knox, a determined advocate of Hegel’s continued relevance, admits that Hegel “may be at sea when he comes to deal with instrumental music,”47 and calls Hegel’s admission of limited knowledge of music “a relief.”48 This show of emotion in two ordinarily solemn commentators reveals the nature of their difficulty – one of defeated expectations. After the long theoretical discussions I have just pursued concerning the “completely objectless inner” of music and the remarkable flourishing of instrumental forms at the turn of the nineteenth century, one might reasonably expect Hegel to valorize some of the great achievements of his age – for instance, the symphonies and concertos of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven – and to recognize the increasing theoretical importance of absolute music in aesthetics. Instead, Hegel asserts that vocal music is inherently superior to instrumental music for the expression of inner spiritual life and that absolute music can easily descend into a display of purely technical skill: For music takes as its subject-matter the subjective inner life itself, with the aim of presenting itself, not as an external shape or as an objectively existing work, but as that inner life; consequently its expression must be the direct communication of a living individual who has put into it the entirety of his own inner life. This is most clearly the case in the song of the human voice, but it is relatively true also of instrumental music which can be performed only by practicing artists with the living skill both spiritual and technical. It is only this subjective aspect in the actual production of a musical work that completes in music the significance of the subjective; but the performance may go so far in this subjective direction that the subjective side may be isolated as a one-sided extreme, with the result that subjective virtuosity in the production may as such be made the sole centre and content of the enjoyment.49

After Hegel has stated that music has “the subjective life itself” as its subject matter, why does the virtuosity of the instrumental performer lead to a “one-sided extreme”? Even for as cautious and deliberate a lecturer as Hegel, this warning against asserting the value of absolute music seems excessive, as if he had to prevent such arguments from occurring. After examining

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the particular debates about music that Hegel would have encountered in Berlin in the 1820s, Carl Dahlhaus concludes that Hegel’s stance against instrumental music was intimately connected to a widespread debate over the value of Beethoven’s instrumental music versus Rossini’s operas. Moreover, Dahlhaus asserts that “Hegel’s theory of instrumental music is a hidden reply to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Beethoven review, which had appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeiting in 1810 and was later reprinted by Hoffmann in the first volume of the Phantasiest¨ucke.”50 Hoffmann’s famous essay, which identifies music as the most romantic of arts and Beethoven the most romantic of composers, essentially claims that pure instrumental music is the highest manifestation of the romantic sublime.51 According to Dahlhaus, this essay was well known in German-speaking countries in the early nineteenth century, in which it could hardly have escaped Hegel’s notice. The memoirs of A. B. Marx, a noted theorist and editor of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, likewise confirm that Hoffmann’s Phantasiest¨ucke had caused a sensation throughout Berlin and that Hoffmann’s opinions on music were held in high esteem.52 Moreover, ¨ Hegel refers to Hoffmann by name earlier in the Asthetik as the author of “repugnant dissonances” and works that express “a sickness of spirit” due to their excessive reference to supernatural matters.53 In contrast, Hegel takes particular care throughout the Lectures on Aesthetics to demystify art and to connect every aspect of artistic creation and reception into his philosophical system as a whole. Hoffmann’s extraordinarily influential essay was probably what Hegel wanted to see least: a mystification and valorization of the aesthetic experience of music that would detach artistic endeavors from the rigorous logic of philosophy, along with a detailed musical analysis far more sophisticated than any Hegel could produce. To counter it, Hegel must explain music’s particular power and effect from its physical manifestation onward, position it within his system, and prove decisively that vocal or program music can even be superior to absolute music, completely inverting Hoffmann’s claim and reestablishing an intelligible content for music. Seen in this context, Hegel’s claims and judgments in the music chapter begin to make more sense, as does his failure to mention the name of the composer at the center of this controversy: Beethoven. According to Dahlhaus, at the time of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, a debate over the relative merits of Beethoven versus Rossini was raging throughout Berlin;54 as a well-informed intellectual, Hegel could hardly have avoided hearing about it. Robin Wallace’s research into the reception of Beethoven’s work during his lifetime also clearly demonstrates the extraordinary

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influence Beethoven exerted on musical aesthetic debates even before 1810, the year Hoffmann’s review appeared.55 Although the course of music history has judged Beethoven differently, even sympathetic experts of the time often considered Beethoven’s music too experimental,56 whereas Rossini’s melodies, then as now, were widely accepted as clever and enjoyable. In a lecture hall in the 1820s, Hegel’s audience would certainly understand that he meant to take Rossini’s side, mentioning him several times elsewhere in the Lectures on Aesthetics, and that his omission of Beethoven was deliberate. His audience likewise probably understood his criticism of “empty technicality” as a reference to Beethoven and his praise of melody and aria form as a reference to Rossini and other Italian opera composers. Hegel also makes a veiled reference to unknown holders of a “tasteless opinion” immediately after asserting that music must have a content: Therefore we may not cherish a tasteless opinion about the all-powerfulness of music as such, a topic on which ancient writers, profane an sacred alike, have told so many fabulous stories.57

Although Hegel continues with a recounting of the Orpheus myth, the fall of Jericho, and several other legends of the magical power of music, the target of his scornful criticism is probably Hoffmann, who wrote of a “wonderful, infinite spirit-kingdom” to which music gave access.58 To maintain the systematic discipline of his overall project, Hegel cannot allow Hoffmann to create another world for music in particular, nor valorize music among the other arts at the expense of the theoretical basis for art Hegel has so carefully constructed. For Hegel, Hoffmann’s “spirit-kingdom” is a mythological explanation improperly invoked in the middle of a serious work of musical analysis. Hoffmann’s opinion is rendered even more tasteless when juxtaposed with the specific and concrete musical analysis he includes in the essay; a layperson might be allowed to resort to grandiose metaphors, but an expert should know better. Hegel’s discussion of instrumental music also includes an overt mention of the difference between lay and expert opinion, with Hegel again choosing sides in an apparent debate: What the layman likes most in music is the intelligible expression of feelings and ideas, something tangible, a topic, and therefore turns in preference to music as an accompaniment: whereas the expert who has at his fingers’ ends the inner musical relations between notes and instruments, loves instrumental music in its artistic use of harmonies and melodious interactings and changing forms; he is entirely satisfied by the music itself and he has the closer interest of comparing what he

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has heard with the rules and laws that are familiar to him so that he can fully criticize and enjoy the composition, although here the inventive genius of the artist may often perplex the expert who is not accustomed to precisely this or that development, modulation, etc.59

Despite having attended many concerts and opera performances, Hegel considers himself a layman with corresponding tastes and opinions; he has already expressed his preference for vocal and program music, as well as his lack of expertise. In contrast, the expert, “for whom the inner musical relationships of notes and instruments are accessible,” must not only be a connoisseur of music but also someone with virtually professional knowledge, that is, a musician or composer like Hoffmann. Although Hegel appears to make a slight concession to Hoffmann’s expertise and the popularity of his ideas, Hegel is still unwilling to admit that the correct aesthetic response to music is not what he and the lay audience experience. Nowhere else in the Lectures on Aesthetics does Hegel draw such a distinction between the layman and the expert, nor does he declare himself on the side of those less learned in a subject at any other point. The lay response determines the role of music within the system because Hegel must find a way to remove the apparent formlessness and solipsism of music from his understanding of its effects. If what experts experience when listening to instrumental music were merely an intensified or more refined version of the lay experience, then music – and by extension, the experience of the aesthetic – would be radically separate from other kinds of mental activity, including encounters with religion and philosophy. Had Hegel agreed with Hoffmann regarding the sublime power of music, he could not make any philosophical claims about music or any of the other arts, nor could his painstakingly constructed relation between form and content continue to hold. The experience of art in general would follow music into Hoffmann’s spirit-kingdom, leaving the actualization of Spirit an artifact of a rational (and rationalizing) age, a relic of Enlightenment attempts to catalog and categorize. Hegel precludes this possibility by replacing Hoffmann’s “tasteless” valorization of music and invention of a Spirit with his own explanation of the effects of music and a different candidate for the most Romantic art: poetry. poetry and music At the beginning of the chapter on poetry, Hegel outlines the relationship between the two arts in terms of form and content and explains what he

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means by spiritual content in a way that clearly distinguishes his position from any of Hoffmann’s extravagant claims: But the spiritual content, by essentially belonging to the inner life of consciousness, has at the same time an existence alien to that life in the pure element of external appearance and in the vision to which the external shape is offered. Art must withdraw from this foreign element in order to enshrine its conceptions in a sphere of an explicitly inner and ideal kind in respect alike of the material used and the manner of expression. This was the forward step which we saw music taking, in that it made the inner life as such, and subjective feeling, something for apprehension by the inner life, not in visible shapes, but in the figurations of inwardly reverberating sound. But in this way it went to the other extreme, to an undeveloped concentration of feeling, the content of which found once again only a purely symbolic expression in notes.60

“The mere element of outward appearance,” a constituent element of the visual arts, has been left behind by both music and poetry. This withdrawal from the sensuous, along with its corresponding apprehension of inner life, is a step forward, progress made toward a more ideal art form. However, unlike music, poetry has the ability to connect the subjective with the objective sides of art; that is, it can be as abstract or as concrete as the poet requires and provide more continuity between abstract inner life and the concrete world of appearance than any other art form. Poetry shares the medium of sound with music, yet does not suffer from the lack of explicit content that absolute music does. In other words, music is either hopelessly subjective (in the case of absolute music) or compromised by recourse to another art (poetry, in the form of lyrics, or an accompanying narrative description); poetry is neither. However, the motivation for this distinction between poetry and music runs deeper than the desire to refute Hoffmann’s claims about music. The passage bears a strong resemblance to a section of The Phenomenology of Spirit. Virtually the same withdrawal from sensuous appearance occurs when Spirit makes the transition from sense-certainty to self-consciousness in the chapter on Stoicism, Skepticism, and Unhappy Consciousness: This thinking consciousness as determined in the form of abstract freedom is thus only the incomplete negation of otherness. Withdrawn from existence only into itself, it has not there achieved its consummation as absolute negation of that existence. The content, it is true, only counts as thought, but also as thought that is determinate and at the same time determinateness as such.61

Music and unhappy consciousness (specifically, the unhappy consciousness of Stoicism) suffer from a kind of solipsism, where the content has no

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relation to anything outside of itself. The thought of unhappy consciousness is only thought; absolute music is only music. Both can only find “a merely self-replicating symbolic expression,” that is, an expression that can only refer once again to its own symbolic representation. Thought as pure thought, or music as pure music, is a closed system; one may study and analyze the relations between elements of these systems to a fine degree and be able to represent the results by means of symbols, but they will not relate to anything outside the system without recourse to an external means of articulation. Both music and unhappy consciousness lack an external object, a true other, which would enable them to escape the isolation of their own self-negation. They merely withdraw into themselves and are only the “incomplete negation of the being of the other,” in that their withdrawal does not negate the other, but themselves instead. The “being as other” is an existence that is wholly other, not mere negation of the self; unfortunately, music does not allow such a being to find an adequate representation within its system. The inadequacy of music, as well as the unhappiness of unhappy consciousness, stems from its lack of grounding in the nonmusical, nonartistic, exterior world. The parallel dilemmas of music and unhappy consciousness demonstrate more than a recurring pattern in Hegel’s writing. Rather, they are indicative of a recurring epistemological question: how does an art form (or any form of consciousness) confront the world outside of itself, if this is even possible? In other words, how does any art object express its content without being trapped in a mere symbolic representation of itself? In this regard, Hegel once again holds up poetry as the highest form of art: Poetry, the art of speech, is the third term, the totality, which unites in itself, within the province of the spiritual inner life and on a higher level, the two extremes, i.e., the visual arts and music. For, on the one hand, poetry, like music, contains that principle of the self-apprehension of the inner life as inner, which architecture, sculpture, and painting lack; while, on the other hand, in the very field of inner ideas, perceptions, and feelings it broadens out into an objective world which does not altogether lose the determinate character of sculpture and painting. Finally, poetry is more capable than any other art of completely unfolding the totality of an event, a successive series and the changes of the heart’s movements, passions, ideas, and the complete course of an action.62

Calling poetry the “third term” positions this explanation clearly within Hegel’s tertiary logical schemes. Poetry is the “speaking art,” combining the concrete, representational qualities of the visual arts with the inner, spiritual qualities of music through language. Poetry is simultaneously capable of the “self-perception of the Inner as Inner” and the expression of inner

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imagination, experience, and feeling in an objective world. According to Hegel, poetry can also present sequential events more completely than any other art form, even if these events are inner emotions. Although music shares the dimension of time with poetry, music lacks the ability to particularize its content that poetry has. The higher level occupied by poetry stems from its ability to reconcile the inner with the outer, the world of thought, emotion, and imagination with the objective world of sensuous appearance. The particular medium that gives poetry this ability to recognize the Inner as Inner and manifest it in the exterior world is, naturally, language, the flexibility of which also enables it to be the means of expression in philosophy and theology as well. The particular problems of language and its referentiality have been debated endlessly, both before and after Hegel, and I cannot confront all of them here. For now, I note that Hegel considered language both an adequate means of expressing abstractions and describing concrete objects, as well as capable of providing continuity between the two. For Hegel, language is the fundamental material of thought; he makes little distinction between consciousness and its verbal representation. Although Hegel did not anticipate the explorations of the problem of language by those who followed him, this particular claim for language represents a notable problem in his reasoning because it confines the idea of content to terms that are translatable into language. Hegel considers the relation of content to the artistic means of expression to be one of suitability,63 yet he does not admit the possibility that a musical idea, or, for that matter, a visual idea, could be an idea in and of itself, worthy of being named content. Because Hegel’s idea of content is essentially an extrinsic one, art must in all cases be made to speak, and the “speaking art” of poetry must therefore be the best of all. Once art speaks, it becomes translatable into the terms of philosophy and theology. What is not translatable in art is therefore of less value; yet this untranslatable element makes art into something other than theology or philosophy. Art as art, whether as the experience of formal beauty or the pleasure derived from the experience of an idea in sensuous form, becomes secondary in this scheme. This limitation would undoubtedly have given Hegel problems with abstract painting, which he did not live to see and the content of which is no more or less than the exploration of space, form, and color. In the case of music, however, abstraction had long since arrived during Hegel’s lifetime, and his inability to perceive content in absolute music clearly prevented him from writing about it adequately. Absolute music may be moving or cerebral and the experience of listening emotional or intellectual, but it

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undeniably has content and attempts to identify the content of art that cannot be expressed linguistically have inevitably returned to the concept of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, as much as Hegel might want to deny it, makes steady and subtle appearances in Hegel’s scheme. For instance, Hegel makes a reference to the abstract, purely musical ideas that occur in the process of performance and improvisation: Here the bravura of the virtuoso is in its right place, while genius is not restricted to the mere execution of what is given but has a wider scope so that the executant artist himself composes in his interpretation, fills in gaps, deepens what is superficial, ensouls what is soulless and in this way appears as downright independent and productive.64

Hegel emphasizes the word “artist,” indicating that, in his view, the performer is also an artist and that the duty of a good performer is to deliver a version of the work that contains more than the “mere execution” of the piece. As Adolf Nowak has pointed out, Hegel fails to see the further implications of the mediation between composer and performer for his ideas about the nature of music in general.65 He calls the improvisation brought to the performance by a good opera singer, for instance, nothing more than mere room to play.66 The performer therefore ranges between his or her role as an artist and that of a thoughtless vehicle for emotion, whose “soul . . . gives itself over to its outpouring.”67 When lost in the music this way, the performer and the audience have nearly the same experience – the music moves them both. The terms which we are accustomed to using in descriptions of performances demonstrate the same ambiguity; the performer is an “artist,” yet his performance is not an artwork in itself, but an “interpretation” of one. Hegel makes it clear that without the artistry of the performer, a work of music is flat, empty, and soulless, yet he does not give the performer the status of a true artist, someone who creates as well as mediates. The dilemma of the musical performer provides us with an apt emblem for Hegel’s problems with music and their relationship with selfconsciousness. The performer realizes the idea of music in performance, yet the work endures only as long as the performance lasts. The work vanishes as it becomes fully realized; the idea of the work becomes actual in performance, yet ceases to exist upon completion. The performer realizes the idea of the work yet cannot fully articulate the idea except through the performance itself. Self-consciousness, in the practical terms of the individual, follows a similar pattern. Individual consciousness inevitably contains

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elements of the unhappy consciousness, isolated and self-negating, yet it participates in the collective consciousness of Sprit, whose fully selfconscious manifestation will result in absolute knowledge. Poetry transcends the condition of the musical work by participating in both the abstract and the concrete but also remains closely allied with music. Poetry has metrical form and exists both as concrete realization (the work on paper) and in performance (the recitation). However, Hegel does not claim the status of highest art for all literature – poetry (epic, dramatic, and lyric) alone occupies this position. What distinguishes poetry from prose literary forms is its untranslatability – a translation (or paraphrase, for that matter) of a poem is not the poem itself in a way that a paraphrase of a prose work is not. The material of art – here, language as both sign and sound – remains necessary, as Hegel explains in the 1823 lectures: The content of the speaking art, the particular structure into which the subjective element is transposed, is the imagination, the content of the speaking art [is] the entire realm of the imagination, the spiritual existing of itself, that in one element is that to which Spirit itself belongs. In that the sound preserves such a fulfillment, it is reduced to a mere means, [it] is only a sign and becomes a word, and this expression is therefore different from content itself.68

In poetry, language exists as material sound, then becomes mere sign, as the content of poetry, its imaginative elements, causes its listeners to forget the sensuous manifestation of the work and lose themselves in the realm of the imagination. Nevertheless, the expression remains, “different from content itself,” that is, as expression, the sensuous manifestation of the work. Most significantly, Hegel refers to poetry as “the speaking art,” which remains art but must speak. Music remains on the verge of speech, either as emotional content or pure sound but does not make the same crossing from material to sign that characterizes poetry. Spirit is indeed the artist of the history of culture, and as Spirit realizes itself in the world, becoming self-conscious and articulate, it follows the process of moving from music to poetry, striving toward articulation in sound. However, in both music and poetry, the beauty of ordered sound, either in the mathematical symmetry of musical notes or in the rhythm and rhyme of poetic versification, continues to be an essential element in the process of becoming self-conscious. This process does not exist without all its elements intact. Like the Other that Spirit requires for the recognition of its own self-consciousness, the content of art requires that which is not content, yet is art. The aesthetic, the category that Hegel at times seems to be leaving behind on Spirit’s path toward religion and philosophy, reappears and reasserts itself as the

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formal beauty of ordered material. Art contains an element that cannot be articulated other than by means of the art object itself, which Hegel recognizes in both music and poetry, yet toward which he demonstrates some ambivalence. Ironically, music, the art form Hegel claims to understand the least, becomes emblematic for his idea of art as a whole, and even for the process of coming to self-consciousness that was the basis for his entire philosophical system.

chapter 4

Nature, Music, and the Imagination in Wordsworth’s Poetry

Of course the work of art presents itself to sensuous apprehension. It is there for sensuous feeling, external or internal, for sensuous intuition and ideas, just as nature is, whether the external nature that surrounds us, or our own sensitive nature within. After all, a speech, for example, may be addressed to sensuous ideas and feelings. But nevertheless the work of art, as a sensuous object, is not merely for sensuous apprehension; its standing is of such a kind that, though sensuous, it is essentially at the same time for spiritual apprehension; the spirit is meant to be affected by it and to find some satisfaction in it. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art 1

Hegel’s distinction between the sensuous and the spiritual apprehension of art, like many of his ideas, continues to cast a shadow on literary criticism. His dismissal of “a speech, for example” as something other than art (despite the possibility that a speech might make occasional use of “sensuous ideas and feelings”) complicates the status of poetry by requiring it, as a true art form, to exist at once a material object and also as intentional, communicative discourse. As the previous chapter explained at some length, Hegel also points out that this dual existence in both the sensuous and spiritual realms is precisely what constitutes an object as art, separating artistic from natural beauty.2 Kant had already distinguished between artistic and natural beauty in the Kritik der Urteilskraft, but Hegel goes beyond Kant’s formal concept of artistic beauty by asserting the need for a spiritual element in art, an element missing from purely instrumental music, but present in poetry. In contemporary criticism of English Romantic poetry, the tension between the sensuous and the spiritual remains at issue, although the terms have shifted considerably. Like Hegel, recent critics have endeavored to understand poetry as something connected to spiritual life, if the word “spiritual” can be broadened from meaning purely religious and philosophical thought to encompass the entire range of deeply felt ethical, political, and social concerns. However, these efforts to understand Romantic poetry 97

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as part of Romantic ideology (in Jerome McGann’s apt phrase3 ) have subordinated the sensuous apprehension of the poem – the immediate encounter with its sound, diction, metaphors, and images – to its spiritual apprehension, or more specifically, the consequences of that apprehension for its historical significance. However, the historically and socially determined criteria that make us value one poem over another, long after their original authors, audiences, and publishers have vanished, do not reside entirely in politics and ideology but also in the particular experience of an individual work and its way of transforming the sensuous into the spiritual. Karl Kroeber’s analogy with visual art is illuminating: Although painting and sculpture frequently – I would say usually – serve nonaesthetic purposes, serve that is, practical physical, intellectual, spiritual, and ideological needs, they are also to a degree self-sufficient. This becomes obvious whenever a great work survives beyond knowledge of its original “place” and “practical” functions.4

The poem, in itself, is still what it is, a text that consists of those words, signifying those sounds, and no others, a material object of ink, paper, word, and sound, subject to various forces and appearing under various circumstances but still a particular material object designed to elicit a response from those who encounter it. An encounter with the poem, whether as written text or as spoken performance, produces an identifiable phenomenon, the experience of the particular poem as a material object. A poem therefore cannot be reduced entirely to the status of historical artifact or economic commodity because to do so would eliminate its difference from all other poems produced or consumed under similar conditions and would obscure the most significant characteristic of any artwork: the experience of the aesthetic as an encounter with sensuous material. So far, I have attempted to describe how the Idealists, especially H¨olderlin and Hegel, understood this experience of the aesthetic as a critical element in self-consciousness, and how both metaphors of music and imitations of actual musical structures represented this concept in the discourses of philosophy and poetry. William Wordsworth, who knew little of German philosophy and less of music, nevertheless shows the pervasiveness of the musical aesthetics in poetry during the Romantic period, revealing that the link between poetry and music went beyond the borders of the Germanspeaking world. Although Wordsworth lacked the specifically philosophical (or poetological) project of the kind that H¨olderlin pursued, he nevertheless understood the materiality of poetry through metaphors of music, and his descriptions of listening to music represent self-consciousness through

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metaphors based on the phenomenal encounter of the listener’s mind with sound. Despite his relatively distant relationship with the world of German Idealism and high musical culture, Wordsworth makes many important references to poetry’s resistance to lexical comprehension that demonstrate his understanding of the connection between poetic meter and music aesthetics. In particular, Wordsworth’s concept of the metrical element of poetry is closely allied with the idea of absolute music emerging at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For Wordsworth, meter and music provide the material resistance to understanding that defines self-consciousness through opposition to the self, a resistance that depends on the twofold nature – sensuous and spiritual – of the aesthetic. The relationship between the sensuous and the spiritual sides of poetry, that is, the connection between the material object of the poem and the phenomenal experience of its apprehension, has received surprisingly little examination in modern criticism. However, Paul de Man’s essays “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant”5 and “Hypogram and Inscription”6 are rare exceptions. De Man demonstrates that the fundamental division between the material text (“the only thing we have,” as he reminds us7 ) and the reader’s phenomenal apprehension of it represents a labyrinthine metaphorical structure that undermines the same binary opposition. De Man also asserts that the formal structure of poetry contains another element of phenomenality omitted in semiotic accounts of text and speech: “the suspension of meaning that defines literary form”8 – in other words, the disjunction between the signifying system of poetic form and its lexical meaning, which necessarily creates a resistance to understanding that would not occur in, for instance, ordinary discursive speech (to use Hegel’s example). To what extent does this theoretical issue of the ontology of literature affect the interpretation of Wordsworth’s poetry? At crucial moments in his writings, including the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” “The Solitary Reaper,” several episodes in The Prelude, and “On the Power of Sound,” Wordsworth both acknowledges and revisits this suspension of meaning through metaphors of music. He also acknowledges the difference between the phenomenal and material elements of poetry at these moments, representing them as a disjunction between understanding sound as language and its apprehension as either man-made music or natural sound. Wordsworth also juxtaposes the permanence of writing and inscription with the impermanence of sound, provisionally resolving the conflict between static materiality and temporal phenomenality in the contested site of the aesthetic. In particular, Wordsworth’s treatment of poetic meter at these moments

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reveals that the immanent experience of music as ordered, aesthetic sound bridges the gap between the linguistic and textual material of poetry and the aesthetic experience. For Wordsworth, the sound of poetry, like the imagination, contains its own power to present itself to human consciousness as intentional and communicative discourse, enabling auditory revelations equaling those of the visionary spots of time. In addition, sound represents the untranslatable, immediate presence of aesthetic material, the quality of poetry that cannot be anything other than the poem itself, a quality mirroring the role of the aesthetic in contemporaneous ideas of absolute music. However, the issue of materiality extends beyond the particular question of sound and music in Wordsworth to the general issue of the ontology of poetry, which several prominent critics have recently addressed in depth. In his work on poetics, Paul Fry calls attention to a gesture he calls “the ostensive moment,” that is, the moment in which poetry indicates directly through demonstration (for example, when a poet uses onomatopoeia, and the poem contains the “buzz” or “snap” being described), rather than through metaphor or allusion, becoming “language viewed strictly as pure sound and as graphic trace.”9 Karl Kroeber10 and Jonathan Bate,11 in contrast, demonstrate that the English Romantic poets’ view of nature did not merely serve as a mask for ideology, history, or alterity but to a far greater extent represented a sophisticated understanding of nature as material reality and a complex, dynamic system operating both in conjunction with human society and apart from it. These new directions in ecological criticism indicate a distinct departure from the understanding of poetry as a closed discursive system, suggesting instead a consideration of poets, poetry, and language with a dynamic relation to a real world of sounds, rocks, trees, and ecosystems. Although they approach poetry from different directions, Fry, Kroeber, and Bate address the relationship between poetry and the material as a genuine issue, rather than as the product of an ideological blindness. This chapter, and indeed, this entire book, follows a similar methodology: the consideration of musical structures as both metaphors and as real sound, the material of both music and poetry. I argue here that references to music in Wordsworth’s poetry carry a double significance with regard to materiality; they are at once a self-reflexive consideration of the poetic material itself, the real sound of the words of which the poem consists, and a meditation on the actual world of aesthetic and natural sound. In particular, allusions to human-made music in Wordsworth reflect an awareness of the issues surrounding absolute music, whose overall theoretical basis requires more explanation.

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The issue of absolute music, which has dominated musicological debate for at least two hundred years, separates into three more or less distinct positions. According to Carl Dahlhaus,12 the formalists (in the tradition of Kant, Hanslick, and Stravinsky) maintain that absolute music has no content and derives its beauty from pure form. Other more moderate theorists claimed that while absolute music has no directly referential content, it does follow an emotional program, often too subtle and complex for linguistic description, or as Christian Gottfried K¨orner believed, a program based on moral character, or ethos.13 The theories are essentially more sophisticated versions of the eighteenth-century doctrine of the Affektenlehre, in which musical forms, keys, and tonal colors were catalogued according to their emotional effect. Finally, many later Romantics, such as Hoffmann, Nietzsche, Liszt, and Wagner, found hidden programs in absolute music and often created highly conjectural programs for well-known works. Although none of these schools of thought ever came to a consensus on how listeners understood the content of music, they were all certain that music communicated something, even if only a concept of formal beauty, and that the experience of listening involved receiving this communication in some form. Contemporary musicology has not reached a consensus either, and the limitations of all these approaches has become even more apparent over time. Formalism in music theory, like its counterparts in literary criticism, cannot seem to account for the essential difference between the work itself and a theoretical description of the work and tends to label aesthetic response to the sophisticated structures it uncovers as purely subjective impressions. The concept of emotional meaning in musical structure, even in Leonard B. Meyer’s compelling description of it as sequences of tension, delay, and release,14 does not sufficiently take into account differences in musical or historical context. Similarly, claims for hidden programs offered by historicist, feminist, and Marxist musicologists not only frequently run aground on contradictory historical information about the composer’s methods and intentions but also tend toward anachronism, reflecting current concerns instead of qualities intrinsic to the musical works themselves or relevant to the circumstances in which they were composed. Even the rigorous arguments made by Rose Rosengard Subotnik15 and Susan McCleary16 do not entirely justify the specificity with which they identify particular musical structures with highly specific concepts of gender or class conflict. No matter how much a structural resemblance seems to establish a concrete connection between musical and social forms, an equally compelling resemblance between tonal music and some other

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oppositional concept presents itself. As Karl Kroeber points out in another context, these concerns may not be relevant to the Romantic era (or, for that matter, of the Enlightenment) as to the rigidly binary terms of contemporary politics.17 Nevertheless, music undeniably conveys something besides pure abstraction that listeners know, feel, and sense but cannot often defend. Lawrence Kramer, a scholar of both literature and music, has suggested a possible solution to this problem. Music, in his view, does not consist of two distinct and inflexible categories of formal structure and denotative, emotional, or nonexistent content. Instead, it consists of a series of “structural tropes,” that is, formal units, either large or small scale, that connect compositional choices to both their historical context and any existing structure of meaning attached to that musical form.18 In practical terms, a structural trope allows the interpreter to bridge the gap between the internal workings of a composition and its possible meaning by determining what it meant to use a particular formal element for that composer and the intended audience. Musical sound, like language, can have meaning defined according to convention, even if that meaning exists only as an untranslatable connotation rather than a clearly identifiable denotation. For instance, the offstage horn sounded in the second act of Beethoven’s Fidelio has a specific, denotative meaning for which the libretto has prepared both the characters and the audience; everyone has already been told that a horn will sound when Don Fernando, the minister, arrives to save Florestan. However, absolute music also contains reliable connotative effects, which can be perceived even when the audience has not been prepared to understand their meaning. To given another example, when the final cadence of a chorale or instrumental work resolves upward, or resolves to a major key when the work is in minor (as in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, as well as many hymns), listeners frequently report an effect of exaltation although no specific meaning for that moment has been indicated by any external signal. This effect defies translation into more specific language, even though it occurs at a particular moment and under identifiable, repeatable conditions according to well-known compositional techniques. For the Romantic poets, poetic meter performs a similar function as the purely formal element of poetry – it can either provide clear, denotative meaning, or it can carry follow well-known techniques for conveying a connotative meaning or effect. This element, long considered a matter of mysterious genius, talent, and poetic inspiration, follows patterns of compositional practice, convention, and deliberate effect and carries

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with it patterns of implicit connotation similar to those perceived in absolute music. John Hollander’s explanation of the meaning and function of Romantic verse form supports this analogy: The stylistic choices [of Romantic verse form] (which I am calling metrical, rather than rhythmic) occur at a different level of decision-making from those of mysterious choices which must occur in actual composition. . . . The metrical choice provides a basic schematic fabric of contingencies governing the range of expressive effect. But it also establishes a kind of frame around the work as a whole. Like a title, it indicates how it is to be taken, what sort of thing the poem is supposed to be, and, perhaps, taken in historical context, what the poet thought he was doing by calling his curious bit of language a poem at all.19

The poet’s decision to use a particular verse form does not necessarily affect the poem’s content directly, but the choice of metrical form is far from arbitrary. A poet chooses meter in a specific historical context that creates a “contract” (the legal term is Wordsworth’s, from the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads”20 ) between the reader and the poet. Each reader expects a poem to do certain things according to the artistic context of its composition; no poet may vary from these expectations (his end of the contract) without justification. However, when an innovative aspect of the poem varies this contract, it creates a new set of conditions by which readers will judge the next set of poetic agreements. In time, these innovations alter the previous set of conventions; what was once variation now becomes convention, and what was once convention becomes somehow “natural” (that is, intrinsic) to the genre. Hollander argues correctly that uncovering these moments of formal transformation provides an excellent starting point for scholarly investigation and reveals much about the terms of this implicit contract.21 Wordsworth most famous work on poetics, the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” not only demonstrates his concerns about these contractual conditions but also his conception of their meaning. Despite worries about money and criticism from his friends, he insisted on writing the theoretical “Preface” for the 1800 edition, expanding it for the 1802 edition, and reprinting it in his first collected works.22 Although Wordsworth possessed an unshakable belief in his own importance as a poet, he was concerned that his readers might accuse him of breaking the unspoken agreement of comprehensibility between the poet and his readers. His attempt to deflect criticism for “prosaisms,” places where poetry, despite adherence to a metrical scheme, becomes too much like prose, demonstrates this anxiety most

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clearly. After citing an instance of this potential difficulty in a poem by Thomas Gray, whom he assumes to be above reproach, he explains why his own poetry also avoids being too prosaic: If it be affirmed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of themselves constitute a distinction which overturns what I have been saying on the strict affinity of metrical language with that of Prose, and paves the way for other artificial distinctions which the mind voluntarily admits, I answer that the language of such Poetry as I am recommending is, as far as possible, a selection of the language really spoken by men; that this selection, wherever it is made with true taste and feeling, will of itself form a distinction far greater than at first would be imagined, and will entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life; and, if metre be superadded thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude will be produced altogether sufficient for the gratification of a rational mind. What other distinction would we have? Whence is it to come? And where is it to exist?23

Wordsworth wrote this passage before he encountered any public reaction to the poems and kept it in the second edition over Coleridge’s strenuous objections; clearly he believed a defense of his poetry as poetry, that is, as metrical utterance, was essential. Fortunately for us, this defense of his practice provides a precise description of this moment in the history of poetics and what he perceived as its next phase. Although twenty-first-century standards for versification allow almost anything to call itself poetry, in Wordsworth’s time he needed to defend himself against the charge of being “a man ignorant of his own profession”24 (later echoed by Byron) by clearly justifying any difference from the normal (and unspoken) expectations of a reader in 1800. Implicit in Wordsworth’s justification of the use of the language of ordinary people are the assumptions that poetry formerly had nothing to do with ordinary people and that their language by itself was not in the least poetic. For Wordsworth, poetry is not merely “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”25 (as many believe) but a combination of poetic craft and carefully chosen language. To make the lives and the language of ordinary people poetic, someone with skill and taste must do the work of transforming these utterances into poetry through meter. This transformation results from two distinct processes: the selection of the poem’s subject and language and the versification of that raw material. Only a poet with “true taste and feeling” has the skill required to manipulate the material of language as sound, in much the same way a sculptor manipulates the material of stone. The three rhetorical questions Wordsworth asks at the end of the passage (“What other distinction would we have? Whence is it to come? And where is it to exist?”) carry a tone of

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impatience that reveals his desire to disabuse readers of the notion that a poetic sensibility alone is sufficient for the creation of great works. Likewise, the mere choice to work in a poetic idiom does not create a sufficient distinction between prosaic and poetic subjects; to transform prose into poetry, the poet must completely rework the language according to both taste and skill. Language, both of ordinary and extraordinary people, is everywhere, but good poetry does not come from mere quotation, whether of common talk or high style; it comes from the combination of taste and the “metre superadded thereto.” If meter is merely “superadded,” does it really carry any significance for the reader beyond indicating that the text is a poem? Later on in the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth describes the function of poetic meter in overtly musical terms, with a straightforward statement on the connection between a poem’s metrical elements and its resistance to interpretation as a form of aesthetic pleasure: Now the music of harmonious metrical language, the sense of difficulty overcome and the blind association of pleasure which has been previously received from works of rhyme or metre of the same or similar construction, and indistinct perception perpetually renewed of language closely resembling that of real life and yet in the circumstance of metre, imperceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight, which will always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the passions.26

Although this text is twenty years older and in a different language, it shows a remarkable affinity with Hegel’s statement on the artwork that began this chapter. For Wordsworth, his poetry does resist easy comprehension because of the complexity and difficulty of its language – he has deliberately taken his materials from “the language of ordinary men” rather than high poetic diction – but because of precisely those elements that distinguish poetry from prose, “harmonious metrical language.” Because his diction no longer presents such difficulty, the sound of the poem must provide the resistance that results in the “sense of difficulty overcome.” Moreover, the metrical elements of a poem contribute to its emotional content, either through associations with other poems or emotional states. Poetic meter connects the newly created poem with the reader’s previous experience of the pleasure of poetry, at once positioning the poem within the tradition and recalling the pleasure associated with other poems as a pleasure of form – the association with other poems does not derive its pleasure from allusion, but from meter. The “complex feeling of delight” that poetry evokes stems from the combination of sensuous and spiritual pleasures in one experience.

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Likewise, Brendan O’Donnell’s thorough analysis of Wordsworth’s versification confirms Wordsworth’s belief that the metrical elements of poetry represented a fully independent mode of signification that worked in concert with the poem’s overt meaning: Wordsworth offers a great deal of evidence in his critical prose, letters, and conversations of his concern with these [metrical] elements of his art. And his poems everywhere demonstrate that he habitually regarded the complex patterning of rhythmic and sonic elements within the context of conventional use to be a deeply vital and constitutive element of meaning.27

O’Donnell’s assertion that Wordsworth considered meter “a constitutive element of meaning” deserves emphasis; meter defines poetry as poetry, signifying its status and its existence in the material world. Wordsworth’s phrase for poetic sound, “the music of harmonious metrical language,” is more than an apt metaphor for good metrical practice; it a conception of a separate and significant art of ordered sound, not merely as part of poetic discourse but a symbolic system in its own right, possessing a similar combination of nonspecificity and signifying power to that of absolute music. Another astute critic, David Haney, has made remarkable progress relating Wordsworth’s already well-known metaphors of vision to the relatively unexplored problem of voice. In doing so, Haney has uncovered a set of binary oppositions that may well change current literary theory significantly. As Haney observes (with reference to W. J. T. Mitchell), If “ear” and “eye” thus become “figures of difference between words and images” (Mitchell 119), articulate language is the spoken and heard other of the image, not as in the Derridean model used by Jacobus and Kneale, the written and seen other of the voice.28

The key word here is “articulate”: the word that distinguishes sound as comprehensible language from sound as pure sensory experience, a central issue both in poetics and in the concept of absolute music. As I intend to show here, Wordsworth frequently confronts the problem of the degree to which the sound he hears is, or should be, comprehensible, and he often struggles in his efforts to understand. At times, as Brian Bartlett29 and Jeffrey Robinson30 have shown, Wordsworth hears a musical voice in natural sound; at others, the sound of nature is utterly alien to him. However, when Wordsworth describes the sound of song in “The Solitary Reaper,” he discovers that his inability to understand Gaelic, the language of the reaper’s song, has rendered it a kind of absolute music.

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song and articulate meaning: “the solitary reaper” Although Wordsworth shows a great deal of concern in the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” that his poetry would be too innovative for his audience, not many years afterward, he found himself attacked for not being innovative enough. The Poems, in Two Volumes of 1807, in which “The Solitary Reaper” appears, received much negative criticism for adhering too closely to traditional forms; Byron even called them “namby-pamby.”31 To some extent, Wordsworth had created an expectation of innovation. The consensus of his time (perhaps echoed by some critics in the twentieth century) was that his efforts toward simplicity had gone too far, leaving the poems with both form and content too ordinary for the sophisticated audience he had developed in his earlier works. The first stanza of “The Solitary Reaper” demonstrates the quality of simplicity clearly: Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary Highland lass! Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pass! Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain; O listen! for the Vale profound Is overflowing with the sound.32

Rhyming couplets, tetrameter, and a rustic scene – Wordsworth has nearly reached the point of clich´e. Nevertheless, this poem raises some difficult questions. “Behold her,” “Stop here,” and “O listen” are bold commands; to whom are they addressed, and in what context? Wordsworth names no “friend” or “gentle reader” in the poem, nor does he indicate that anyone but the speaker can heed these commands. Geoffrey Hartman reads these apostrophes as a variation on epitaphs that ask the passing traveler to stop and consider his mortality through the brief cautionary tale of the person buried beneath the tombstone; this pause in the journey establishes a moment of self-conscious reflection.33 Certainly, death lies behind the reaper’s “melancholy strain” and these reflections on the Scottish landscape; his brother had died in the time between the journey to Scotland and the composition of the poem.34 The poem that precedes it in the collection, “Rob Roy’s Grave,” also overtly uses the epitaphic mode. Nevertheless, this moment of self-consciousness and self-recognition is a song and commands to stop and listen follow the traditional rhetorical mode of the balladeer as well as that of the tombstone.

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In addition, the speaker’s rhetorical stance, speaking poetry to himself and for himself, parallels the reaper’s solitary song. The singer works as she sings; the poet speaks in the middle of his tour of Scotland. His song keeps him moving in his journey of grief, just as a melancholy work song keeps the reaper to her task. The command “Stop here, or gently pass” comes after the image has been presented, and “O listen” after her song has been heard clearly enough to perceive its melancholy. The speaker must insist on stopping and listening rather than continuing his parallel action of traveling through Scotland, lost in melancholy thoughts. The reaper has taken over the traveler’s hard work of moving and mourning for a time, giving him a respite in which to consider the scene before him. The second stanza emphasizes this respite by comparisons to birdsong heard by travelers through desert and ocean, with a clear reference to the difficulty of assigning denotative reference to musical and natural sound: No Nightingale did ever chaunt More welcome notes to weary bands Of travellers in some shady haunt, Among Arabian sands: A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird, Breaking the silence of the seas Among the furthest Hebrides.

The stanza spans the widest extremes possible, from the nightingale in the Arabian desert to the cuckoo in the Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. In both cases, the birds do not produce articulate words but natural cries that acquire meaning through the poet’s interpretation of their context.35 To the travelers in the desert, the song indicates that they have arrived at an oasis. To the listener in the Hebrides, not far from where Wordsworth traveled on his tour, it carries the double message that land is near or that spring has come. This ambiguity reflects Wordsworth’s desire to find a spring of hope after a long winter of mourning as well; travel and time have long been known to ease sorrow. Although both bird songs communicate welcome news to their listeners, neither is a message in words; they are merely sounds that accompany welcome natural events. In this respect, the reaper’s song is also a natural sound, the result of a seasonal change in a particular place. That he finds relief in her voice results from his own condition, not her intent. This relief may even depend on her solitude; neither audience nor any social dynamic disturbs the scene, reassuring him that natural

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order – the seasons, the harvest, life and death – continues regardless of personal sorrow, and that he can still find refuge within it. Nevertheless, the reaper sings real words in a human language, although the poet cannot understand her. The opening question of the next stanza allows her song to rejoin human discourse, while maintaining its association with the sounds of the natural world: Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago: Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of today? Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again?

The desire for translation reveals an assumption of potential intelligibility; “the plaintive numbers” follow a metrical pattern recognizable as a ballad form. “The battles long ago” could easily be Rob Roy’s or another Scottish hero’s – by raising this possibility, Wordsworth connects the song to folk poetic tradition and to history, yet does not definitively explain how. Although the comparison to birdsong in the second stanza may appear to dehumanize her by making her into a kind of bird, (or, as one critic suggests, to rape her36 ), this consideration of her as a potential bard reasserts her humanity and her participation in culture. Her song remains unintelligible because of the poet’s linguistic inadequacy, not because of his desire to reduce her to the condition of an animal or to overpower her. Indeed, if Wordsworth blurs the distinction between human and animal, he does so by anthropomorphizing birds and other parts of nature (as in “To a Cuckoo” in the same volume) rather than by dehumanizing the reaper. The reaper is both part of the natural landscape and clearly human; by keeping the denotative content of her song at a distance, Wordsworth emphasizes the connection between the sensuous enjoyment of the natural landscape and that of musical material. The final stanza confirms the reaper’s status as a human maker of music and gives the speaker hope and pleasure in this suspension of meaning in the aesthetic. It also demonstrates an avoidance of narrative closure that adds to its power: Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang As if her song could have no ending; I saw her singing at her work,

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The speaker reiterates her essential humanity by calling attention to her role in the work of agriculture. From the perspective of the speaker, her song has become absolute music, pure sound free from the constraints of denotation and narrative. Far from becoming a subjugated or dehumanized figure, the reaper instead becomes an emblem for what Wordsworth seeks on his tour in Scotland: solace and a renewed covenant between humanity and nature. A single human life is linear and finite, yet nature is cyclical and infinite; solace comes from his understanding of the connection between the two. Just as the reaper harvests grain in the fall and plants again in the spring, so does nature end the lives of human beings while providing for their renewal. The reaper sings as she works, creating art that will outlast her particular circumstances and go beyond the basic human necessity of gathering food. Solace lies in the expression of this truth in song, which can last as part of human civilization long after the death of its creator. What the speaker can bear in his heart “long after it was heard no more” can be borne as a song of the imagination by others who read “The Solitary Reaper.” The moment described by “The Solitary Reaper” has therefore become a “spot of time,” a moment in which an ordinary scene carries a restorative power, as Wordsworth describes in Book XII of The Prelude (208–25). Paul Fry has correctly reclaimed these moments in Wordsworth’s poetry as suspensions of history, rather than deliberate obfuscations of it. As Fry states, there are many “spots of time” in Wordsworth’s Prelude, each with its unique spatio-temporal context, yet their main characteristic is not their historicality but their repeated and repeatable identity as moments in which the semantic underdetermination of feeling stands revealed.37

Wordsworth’s deliberate conflation of the terms of time and space, “spot” and “time,” indicates the degree to which he wishes to separate these moments from the linear chronological progression of historical time, not as a way to deny social and political history but to free himself from the agony of personal history. This moment restores him precisely because it releases him from the narrative of his own loss, giving him instead a moment of pure experience, the experience of pure sound, absolute music. That this “spot of time” is predicated on an experience of music emphasizes the

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apparent paradox of a spatial understanding of a temporal moment. Music is sound in the element of time, a self-constituting discourse in which the notes, whether sounding simultaneously in harmony or in melodic sequence, must follow each other to exist as music and must therefore disappear as the music plays. A singer who “sang / As if her song could have no ending” has suspended time and transformed the ephemeral experience of music into a permanent aesthetic object in the memory of the listener. Likewise, the natural setting also directs the listener toward an experience of nature as sensuous material. As Hegel states in the citation that began this chapter, the work of art “is there for sensuous feeling . . . just as nature is, whether the external nature that surrounds us, or our own sensitive nature within.” The work of art presents itself for the senses, for the apprehension of the moment, not as a historically or symbolically determined set of social constructs but as a material object. Like art, nature has an immediate material presence; agriculture, as the manipulation of nature for the continued physical existence of humanity, represents its acknowledgment. In harvesting, the reaper participates in the fundamental connection between humanity and nature, the cultivation of plants for human sustenance. In singing, she participates in the fundamentally human activity of providing art for the pleasure of the senses. The material of artistic expression therefore does more than merely transmit a message from artist to audience. For aesthetic experience to have its effect, the perceiver must see, hear, or feel something; otherwise, the essential connection to material existence reinforced and reclaimed by art disappears. Works of art, as material objects, confirm the self-awareness of the viewer or listener by restoring the vital distinction between the self and the nonself through the senses. The artwork presents itself for sensuous apprehension; it exists in itself and as a phenomenon. The formal characteristics of a poem do not merely exist as communicative structures; they enable the poem to maintain what Walter Benjamin calls the “authority of the object,”38 the material substance that makes a poem a particular work of art and no other. In the case of “The Solitary Reaper,” Wordsworth chooses a traditional verse form as a communicative structure for his poem then meditates on the essence of purely formal apprehension of song, stating, in effect, that his poetry should be understood as both metrical and lexical utterance. Wordsworth’s choice of a verse form so close to the traditional ballad form as to approach clich´e now seems far less “namby-pamby” than Byron believed. The form, as an echo of the ballad form the reaper uses, reminds us of the pleasures of simpler poetry and its capacity to provide solace. Its verse form therefore becomes a structural trope (to borrow Kramer’s term)

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for the experience of hearing the reaper’s song, the phenomenality of music. Likewise, Wordsworth’s poem about the experience of hearing her song relieves sorrow through the immediacy of experience. The pleasure of sensuous apprehension denies sorrow its place in the linear narrative of a particular biography and generalizes it as part of human existence in the natural world, enabling an understanding of it apart from the slaughter bench of history. Similarly, criticism that can account for both history and the desire to suspend it momentarily in the pleasure of sensuous material, as well as both the materiality of the artwork and the phenomenality of the aesthetic experience, as “The Solitary Reaper” does in poetic terms, will best describe the ordered sound of Wordsworth’s poetry. However, “The Solitary Reaper” describes merely one moment; the complexities of the poet’s understanding of sound in poetry find a more detailed expression in The Prelude. natural music in the prelude Like many long poems, The Prelude begins with an invocation to the muse that both situates the poem in the tradition and asserts its independence from it. The beginning of the poem confirms that it will be of sufficient length and depth to participate in the epic tradition, while also revealing its two extraordinary departures from that tradition. First, the poem’s subject, clearly enough, will not be great wars or the justification of God’s ways to man, but the story of how the poet became who he is. In a letter to Sir George Beaumont, Wordsworth even admitted that it was “an alarming length! and a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself.”39 Nearly as surprising as the poem’s subject is its muse. In the first line of this poem, “O, there is blessing in this gentle breeze . . . ” (I, 1)40 the poet asks the muse for blessing, much as his predecessors did, but the muse here is nature itself; he needs no other inspiration than an ordinary puff of wind. Soon afterward, Wordsworth describes a state of peaceful, productive coexistence for nature, poetry, and music in these lines: For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven Was blowing on my body, felt within A correspondent breeze, that gently moved With quickening virtue, but is now become A tempest, a redundant energy, Vexing its own creation . . .

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Thus, O Friend! did I, not used to make A present joy the matter of a song, Pour forth that day my soul in measured strains That would not be forgotten, and are here Recorded (I, 33–8, 46–50)

The poet feels a breeze, both within and without, and makes “a song . . . in measured strains” for a specific audience, his friend Coleridge. At the moment of composition itself, the inner breeze of inspiration has become a “tempest,” a natural force, which makes “present joy” a “the matter of a song.” Curiously, the text contains a sudden shift in narrative chronology; the phrase “Thus . . . did I . . . / Pour forth that day” reveals that he is not describing the act of composition itself but the memory of that act. In the recalled moment, poetic inspiration comes from the inner response to the outer, natural breeze, but from the later perspective of the next lines, the act of creation requires him to write “measured strains.” The process of composition described here, as in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” involves an initial moment of inspiration, in which the poet finds the material for his poem and the crafting of that material into metrical form. However, The Prelude dramatizes the process of poetic transformation through memory by means of this self-quotation, elaborating the process of creating poetry through “emotion recollected in tranquility,” in the famous phrase from the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” The process of recollection and composition is far from simple; here, Wordsworth intertwines the recollection of an emotional state and the memory of a sound in a deceptively complex doubling of poetic voice: My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind’s Internal echo of the imperfect sound; To both I listened, drawing from them both A cheerful confidence in things to come. (I, 55–9)

The Idealist formula of the creation of self-consciousness through opposition to an external other often depends on a metaphor of touch or vision; here, the sound of “my own voice” and the “internal echo of the imperfect sound” reinforce each other, providing the poet with a clear sense of self and “confidence in things to come.” A real echo is an actual sound, a distorted reflection from a sufficient distance to delay the sound’s return so it can be differentiated from the initial sound; here, “the mind’s internal echo” makes the sensory opposition of self-consciousness a purely imaginary event, a

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self-positing poetic voice delayed by memory. “My own voice” is the sound of the here and now, the present sensation of one’s own ability to create. Between the voice of the present and the internal echo of recollection, the poet draws confidence from the knowledge that this process will lead to greater self-consciousness; he will have constructed his self through the echo of his own voice as it is preserved in poetry. Wordsworth introduces the process by which he will construct this selfconsciousness with an important simile: Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society. How strange that all The terrors, pains, and early miseries, Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused Within my mind, should e’er have bourne a part, And that a needful part, in making up The calm existence that is mine when I Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end! (I, 340–50)

The 1805 version of the first two lines of this excerpt is even plainer: “The mind of man is framed even like the breath / And harmony of music” (1805, I, 351–2). We are mere material, dust, yet mysteriously, something immortal and conscious can emerge from this dust, the way the mere sound of a single note gains significance when in harmony with others. Like chords in music, events in life take their meaning from the imaginative structure imposed on them in an artistic design; they are, and are not, “as the mind answers to them,” that is, they have meaning both in themselves and within a deliberately designed scheme. For Wordsworth, the emotion and vision of a moment resembles harmony in music because poetry, like music, takes the flash of inspiration and turns it into the material of ordered sound in time. Memories of difficulty and unhappiness even contribute to the harmonious whole as a “needful part” of the state of mind that poetry can create, just as dissonance in music creates the possibility of resolution. However, Wordsworth remains painfully aware that he cannot become a poet merely by feeling nature’s breeze and that his poetic voice depends on a great deal of growth and development. He recognizes that despite his affinity with nature, his voice must be separate from it and that he must balance the competing demands of nature, humanity, imagination, and self. As several episodes later in The Prelude show, Wordsworth must learn

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to mediate these forces through the sound of poetry, which has physical reality yet is not natural, which communicates to other humans but is the voice of the self. When he enters a world of pure imagination in the “Dream of the Arab” of Book V, an apocalypse threatens; when he tries to become one with nature in the “Boy of Winander” episode (also in Book V), an abyss of silence and death opens up underneath him. Finally, when he strays too far from nature in the city, as in “The Blind Beggar” episode of Book VII, he loses his voice in a pathetic and horrifying vision. Only at the end of The Prelude does he discover the way to find his own voice and self among these forces. text, voice, and imagination: “the dream of the arab” The section of Book V known as “The Dream of the Arab,” one of the most puzzling episodes in the Prelude, contains a surprisingly direct acknowledgment of the poet’s difficulty in creating a work of lasting value in an impermanent world. As the episode begins, the poet expresses sorrow to an unnamed friend that the great thoughts enshrined in books should be preserved by such frail materials as paper, glue, and leather. The mysterious and anomalous friend (Wordsworth rarely mentions any audience in The Prelude besides Coleridge) remains silent as the poet tells him of a dream: Whereupon I told, That once in the stillness of a summer’s noon, While I was seated in a rocky cave By the seaside, perusing, so it chanced, The famous history of the errant knight Recorded by Cervantes, these same thoughts Beset me, and to height unusual rose, While listlessly I sate, and, having closed The book, had turned my eyes toward the wide sea. On poetry and geometric truth, And their high privilege of lasting life, From all internal injury exempt, I mused, upon these chiefly: and at length, My senses yielding to the sultry air, Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream. (V, 56–70)

In earlier versions of the text, the dream actually belongs to the friend, and the poet is the audience; Wordsworth simply changed “he” to “I” in most instances to create the reversal of roles. However, once Wordsworth has

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made it his own dream, the friend no longer fulfills much of a purpose in the narrative; why keep him in the poem at all? Jane Worthington Smyser has provided the most plausible explanation for the change and has also found the source of the dream itself in the works of Descartes.41 Smyser suggests that by the time the passage had been edited and rewritten several times, the dream had become more Wordsworthian than Cartesian, prompting him to acknowledge complete ownership of it; the friend remains in the 1850 version as an “awkward vestige” of its borrowed origin.42 As both the author of the cogito theory of self-consciousness and the founder of an entire field of geometry, Descartes’s hidden presence in the episode looms large; moreover, his method of excluding all received knowledge and relying only on what his mind can generate a priori, described in the Discourse on Method, makes him an apt emblem for Wordsworth’s isolated dreammeditations. The friend not only leaves us with a covert figure for Descartes but also remains an essential element of the elaborate series of narrative frames present in this episode. Wordsworth rarely used the device of creating “stories within stories” in other circumstances yet finds it necessary here to reinforce the episode’s meta-literary and purely imaginary aspects. Having begun with a meditation on the fragility of the physical frame of books, Wordsworth creates a delicate metaphorical frame for this story to emphasize the tenuous relationship between the material and the spiritual existence of literature. The frame has three clear layers of memory and narration; it is a story (remembered to the friend) of a dream (remembered upon awakening) within another story (remembered while writing) of a discussion with a friend (Coleridge). By removing the story so far from its origins, these narrative frames demonstrate how the external circumstances of a work, whether physical or narrative, do not alter the value or durability of its ideas in themselves. Books of real worth are “From all internal injury exempt”; they cannot be diminished or destroyed by changes in circumstances and remain valuable forever. Like the story itself, no matter how far removed from direct narration or how often recalled, books carry their own internal truths. The dream itself begins with allusions to several other literary works with elaborate narrative frames: I saw before me stretched a boundless plain Of sandy wilderness, all black and void, And as I looked around, distress and fear Came creeping over me, when at my side, Close at my side, an uncouth shape appeared Upon a dromedary, mounted high.

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He seemed an Arab of the Bedouin tribes: A lance he bore, and underneath one arm A stone, and in the opposite hand, a shell Of a surpassing brightness. (V, 72–80)

Like Dante in the Inferno, the poet finds himself lost in a wilderness until someone appears at his side, and he feels a similar religious and cultural distance from his guide; both the Arab and Dante’s guide, Virgil, are strange apparitions (“an uncouth shape”) and non-Christians. The Arab also rides a camel and carries strange, magical objects, as if he were from the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights. The Tales (known in Wordsworth’s time as Arabian Nights Entertainments, or The Thousand and One Nights) also have a characteristic series of narrative frames in which the overall story is suspended while Scheherazade (the heroine) tells a story to delay her execution, which inevitably contains a character who tells another story, followed by another, and so on. The Arab at the center of this elaborately framed story will guide Wordsworth through this strange underworld of dreams, carrying the legacy of both past literary achievements and popular literature. Significantly, the episode links oral and written literary culture through the figure of the Arab. The Tales are themselves written representations of an oral folktales, and the hero’s visit to the underworld is a standard part of the Western epic tradition in which the present hero consults characters from previous epics for advice and guidance. In these episodes, the dead texts of ancient works are made to speak, essentially acknowledging the tradition and providing a model for what can be learned from poetry. Here in the Prelude, the Arab does not reveal his identity immediately, and the poet asks what the Arab is carrying. The answer contains many ambiguous and antithetical objects, the kind that appear only in dreams: the Arab told me that the stone Was ‘Euclid’s Elements’; and ‘This’, said he, ‘Is something of more worth’; and at the word Stretched forth the shell, so beautiful in shape, In colour so resplendent, with command That I should hold it to my ear. I did so, And heard that instant in an unknown tongue, Which I understood, articulate sounds, A loud prophetic blast of harmony; An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold Destruction to the children of the earth By deluge, now at hand. (V, 86–98)

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The objects are clearly what Freud would call “dream-material,” objects taken from waking life that later become part of a dream. The stone, as the Arab tells him bluntly, is Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, which the poet had been reading before falling asleep. The other object, harder to identify at first, is “something of more worth”: a shell that is also an ode foretelling the Apocalypse. These strange objects are at once products of nature, a shell and a stone, and artificial products of the human mind. The Arab claims that the shell is “of more worth” because it possesses both beauty and truth and connects the real world of nature and experience with the artificial world of language and music. The shell also extends the reach of poetry to a miraculous extent. Breaking the confines of a particular language, it speaks in an “unknown tongue, / Which I understood.” It has achieved Schiller’s impossible aspiration to become music, “a loud prophetic blast of harmony,” yet it speaks in “articulate sounds,” at once the pure, formal sound of absolute music and denotative language. Events soon confirm the truth told by the shell and reveal that the Arab’s mission is not to guide the poet out of the wilderness but to preserve these books: No sooner ceased The song, than the Arab with calm look declared That all would come to pass of which the voice Had given forewarning, and that he himself Was going then to bury those two books: The one that held acquaintance with the stars, And wedded soul to soul in purest bond Of reason, undisturbed by space or time; The other that was a god, yea many gods, Had voices more than all the winds, with power To exhilarate the spirit, and to soothe, Through every clime, the heart of human kind. (V, 98–109)

These absolute, idealized books do not even need readers; they are still valuable when buried. They are also represented as two separate books because the pure reason of geometry cannot be preserved in the same book with voices “with power / To exhilarate the spirit.” In a previous era (most visibly during the Renaissance), the rules of mathematics, music, and poetic meter were all considered different aspects of one universal order, but for Wordsworth, geometric and poetic truth represent two sides of a large division in human thought. Geometry is a priori reason itself: a single, unified hierarchy of pure logic. Poetry, on the other hand, is diverse and enigmatic,

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combining the power of a priori reason with the lessons of a posteriori experience to create a pantheon that can both inspire and give solace. Significantly, the shell/book speaks of its own accord, the way a shell appears to produce the sound of the ocean and maintains its simultaneous existence as both a natural and an artificial object, a condition that can only exist in dreams. The poet notices the strangeness of this impossible condition upon retelling the story, but not within the dream itself: While this was uttering, strange as it may seem, I wondered not, although I plainly saw The one to be a stone, the other a shell; Nor doubted once but that they both were books, Having a perfect faith in all that passed. (V, 110–14)

The strangeness here derives from both the uncanny nature of dream symbolism and that of poetic language. Things are, and are not, what they appear; they are simultaneously that which they represent and that which interpretation makes of them. The structure of poetic language therefore parallels that of the sound of a shell. A shell in itself makes no sound; what one hears when the shell is pressed to the ear, according to Hollander, is background noise of a certain texture and frequency, audible only because the shell simultaneously reflects this sound and blocks out the other, usually more prominent noises of the outside world.43 The sound of a shell also makes a natural analogy with the mimetic and symbolic modes of poetic discourse. Just as the sound of the shell resembles the sound of the ocean, so do the rhythmic and onomatopoetic associations of poetic language resemble their objects. Likewise, the association between the object and its origin makes an inevitable symbolic or synechdochal connection. The shell/book therefore represents an imaginary, idealized poem that transcends the limitations of ordinary poetic discourse on every level. It is articulate, yet musical; its language is wholly removed from ordinary speech, yet comprehensible; its metaphors and images are purely symbolic, yet entirely credible, giving the poet “a perfect faith in all that passed.” The book reads itself and has a devoted follower dedicated to preserving it against apocalyptic destruction, which the book miraculously predicts as it occurs. Like the book of Revelation, the shell/book foretells the end of time, when signs become reality, and the distinction between symbol and referent collapses as all prophecies are fulfilled. The shell/book both reads and interprets itself, eliminating the resistance of poetic language entirely. Furthermore, the shell/book maintains a perfect connection between language

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and referent; the flood it predicts is within sight. Finally, the shell/book achieves all these impossible literary ideals so easily that it seems to be both a work of natural and artistic beauty, collapsing Kant’s distinctions. The impossibility of achieving this kind of perfection becomes clear as the poet notices that the Arab, too, has a double identity, based on a literary character: Lance in rest, He rode, I keeping pace with him; and now He, to my fancy, had become the knight Whose tale Cervantes tells; yet not the knight, But was an Arab of the desert too; Of these he was neither, and was both at once. (V, 120–5)

People and objects found in dreams are well known to possess double identities; they enable the dreamer to make symbolic connections hidden in the subconscious during waking hours. Of course, the character of Don Quixote also had two identities, one as a minor nobleman fond of chivalric romance novels, the other as a character within them, a knight, and the central theme of this novel (which the poet had been reading just before he fell asleep) is the distance between literary ideals and ordinary reality. As long as the mysterious dream-figure remains an Arab, he presents the possibility that a story can last forever, endlessly told and retold, printed and reprinted, like an Arabian Tale; when the Arab becomes Don Quixote, the poet realizes that the quest for permanence may be a self-aggrandizing delusion. Until this point, the poet has believed everything the Arab has said and trusted that the Arab will succeed in his mission to preserve the books; as the waters rush forward, the poet begins to fear that this is all a hopeless fantasy and sees a flood approach that will destroy him and his poetry. Like Lot’s wife, the poet looks back and is left behind, lost to the Arab and his mission. His countenance, meanwhile, grew more disturbed; And, looking backwards when he looked, mine eyes Saw, over half the wilderness diffused, A bed of glittering light: I asked the cause: ‘It is’, said he, ‘the waters of the deep Gathering upon us’; quickening then the pace Of the unwieldy creature he bestrode, He left me: I called after him aloud. (V, 126–33)

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Interpretations of this passage vary widely because so many of its elements have already been identified within the poem as having multiple meanings. Alan Liu argues that the shell is the death of history by lyric poetry,44 whereas Andrzej Warminski identifies both an “Apocalypse of Nature” and an “Apocalypse of Books” in the episode.45 Harold Bloom sees the Arab’s quest as an attempt “to save Imagination from the abyss of desert and ocean, man’s solitary isolation from and utter absorption into Nature.”46 According to Geoffrey Hartman, the dream is sent by Imagination itself; furthermore, He [the poet] pursues the hope that man’s mind may be saved though radically involved in nature: yet the flood growing in pursuit denies that chance of salvation for a more terrible one. The flood is Wordsworth’s recognition of a power in him (imagination) which implies and even prophesies nature’s death.47

In my view, the flood of the imagination overwhelms the poet here precisely because the entire episode is so far removed from direct experience. All natural objects in this episode turn out to be symbols, books, or references to literature; everything else, including the setting, the characters, the events, and the dialogue, comes from the imagination. A poet who has based his poetics on encounters with nature, the language of ordinary people, and has “at all times endeavoured to look steadily at . . . [his] subject”48 cannot help feeling lost and overwhelmed in a purely imaginative setting, without nature or human contact to restore his sense of reality and self. To rely solely on the imagination would be to fall, like Don Quixote, into a solipsistic delusion. However, the degree of self-delusion necessary to sustain the Arab’s quest, or to go along with it, remains beyond this poet’s powers; he therefore cannot catch the Arab-Quixote. As the flood approaches, he must wake from the terrors of the dream to those of reality: He heeded not; but, with his twofold charge Still in his grasp, before me, full in view, Went hurrying o’er the illimitable waste, With the fleet waters of a drowning world In chase of him; whereat I waked in terror, And saw the sea before me, and the book, In which I had been reading, at my side. (V, 134–40)

Caught in an unresolvable conflict in the guise of an Apocalyptic flood, the poet can dream no longer and wakes to find the last bit of dreammaterial, the sea, beside him. In the dream, the flood is pure Imagination,

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yet in waking reality, it is nature itself; this sudden reversal gives the episode an appropriately antithetical coda. An episode that began with a wish to save books from nature has ultimately been transformed into a wish to save nature from the imagination. Which side in the conflict of nature and imagination needs saving from the other depends ultimately on which of the two dominates the particular mode in which the poet is writing; imagination clearly rules the world of dreams, whereas nature reigns absolutely over all that is not of human artifice. In poetry, these two powers strive endlessly for supremacy, yet neither can exist without the other. When imagination rules, an anarchical world of double meanings eventually gives way to Apocalypse; when nature rules (as we shall see in “The Boy of Winander”), the human voice is silenced, and the poet’s ability to encounter nature directly dies. Poetry, in the form of a strange seashell book, gives him the only way to mediate these dangerous forces, and its harmony makes an unknown language intelligible. Unfortunately, the seashell only exists in a dream, and the threat from nature is very real. natural sound and childhood death: “the boy of winander” Nature possesses great restorative power, but can nature alone make Wordsworth a poet? One of the most famous passages in the Prelude, known as “The Boy of Winander,” explains the dangers of believing that inspiration from nature alone will suffice and explains how Wordsworth learned the difference between natural sound and articulated speech, as well as the relationship between nature and music through pain and loss. The first part of this passage, a first-person narrative when originally drafted,49 recalls a peculiar exchange between a boy and some owls: There was a Boy: ye knew him well, ye cliffs And islands of Winander! – many a time At evening, when the earliest stars began To move along the edges of the hills, Rising or setting, would he stand alone Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake, And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, That they might answer him; . . . (V, 364–74)

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The Boy hoots through his hands “as through an instrument,” as if he had made artificial sound with a tool manufactured for that purpose, yet he imitates a natural sound. He is surrounded by nature but hardly engaged in a natural activity; he alters his environment, although only subtly and temporarily, by entering into a peculiar dialogue of artificial boy-hootings and real owl-hootings. Not content merely to observe nature, the Boy wishes to engage it directly in conversation and become part of the natural world. His sounds, however, remain “mimic hootings,” imitations of animal sound directed at silent owls in hopes of a response. He has nothing to say to the owls, nor do the owls say anything intelligible to him; he is simply enjoying the sound without finding any specific meaning in it. The Boy can only sustain the exchange of artificial and natural hoots for a short time. The owls suddenly stop responding, and he abruptly becomes aware of the unbridgeable distance between himself and the owls, the human and the natural: and they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, with quivering peals, And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud, Redoubled and redoubled, concourse wild Of jocund din; and, when a lengthened pause Of silence came and baffled his best skill, Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind, With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake. (V, 374–88)

At first, the hoots “double and redouble,” echoing through the landscape, but the owls stop hooting, having “baffled his best skill.” At this moment, “A gentle shock of mild surprise” strikes the Boy, leading to what Geoffrey Hartman recognizes as “a crisis of self-recognition – the shock of selfconsciousness”50 that results from the realization that he cannot really hoot, that is, actually have a communicative exchange with owls, only imitate them. The Boy has made a sound, heard a response and its echo, but he must acknowledge that he remains fundamentally separate from the natural landscape and its representatives, the owls. As in “The Solitary Reaper,”

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the material of sound and the suspension of lexical understanding lead to a moment of self-recognition, where, like the reaper’s song, “the voice / Of mountain torrents” “is “carried far into his heart,” asserting the priority of sound over vision. The reason sound takes such priority in this passage has to do with the varying kinds of language and signification present in this passage, as Andrzej Warminski has observed. For Warminski, Boy-hooting is articulate sound: a “disfigurement of nature” that constitutes the Boy as a subject. On the other hand, owl-hooting is merely owl-hooting: natural sound without meaning. The difference in rhetorical status between Boy-hooting and owl-hooting reveals an aporia in their linguistic exchange; as Warminski says, “The gap between the Boy and Nature is the gap between semantics and syntax.”51 In other words, the Boy attempts either to achieve communication with the owls (transforming their natural sounds into articulate speech) or to become owlish himself in successful imitation (transforming his articulate speech into natural sound). The owls’ sudden silence indicates that the Boy has failed to create a successful linguistic exchange with the owls, and that this strange dialogue of hooting is neither communication nor imitation, but a breakdown of both language and sound somewhere between the two. In my view, this episode reveals the inevitable consequence of the Boy’s attempt to be simultaneously part of nature and a self-conscious subject. The problem is not that the Boy is too human and the owls are too natural, but rather the contrary; the Boy is too natural, at this moment behaving like an animal in the woods, and the owls are too conscious, not an echo but living creatures responding to what they think is one of their own kind. The shock of self-consciousness, the silence that occurs when the exchange breaks down, stems from the realization on the part of both the Boy and the owls that the hooting has been falsified; the Boy may hoot, but he has no idea what he is saying, or whether owls actually say anything at all when they hoot. The owls, meanwhile, remain unknowable, for the boy and for us – no human being knows what owls mean by their hooting, and neither we nor the boy can resolve the status of owl-hooting. The Boy’s hooting is not speech but hooting for the sheer pleasure of hooting, purposeful hoots without purpose, hooting as purely formal sound. The shock of selfconsciousness arrives when the owls interpret the Boy’s aesthetic hooting as a fraudulent claim to being an owl, essentially reversing the relation between human and natural in that moment of silence and reasserting the distinction between their two worlds. This sudden confrontation of the limits of the self and the real opposition of the other emerges only when

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the Boy’s sound extends into the natural world, returns to him as echo and imitation, and then abruptly stops, creating a moment of reflection. As in “The Solitary Reaper,” death lurks behind the exchange with nature, revealing that the innocent state of boyhood cannot survive the shock of self-consciousness, either literally or figuratively: This Boy was taken from his mates, and died In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old. Fair is the spot, most beautiful the vale, Where he was born; the churchyard hangs Upon a slope above the village school, And through that churchyard when my way has led On summer evenings, I believe that there A long half-hour together I have stood Mute, looking at the grave in which he lies! (V, 389–98)

Wordsworth’s transformation of the passage from a first-person narrative to the story of a dead, unnamed Boy between the first manuscript and its inclusion in the 1850 version of The Prelude does not merely add poignancy to the scene but also reveals the untenable position he occupied between the human and natural worlds. Neither a natural animal nor a mature consciousness, the Boy dies because the conditions necessary for his existence have ended. For the poet Wordsworth to exist, Wordsworth’s childhood, in the person of the Boy, must die; his death is a loss both of innocence and of self-deception. The fate of the Boy is sealed when the first silence occurs, when his disfigurement of nature becomes clear to himself and to the owls, breaking down not only the hooting dialogue but also the idea that it was ever really a dialogue at all. No longer innocent (in the sense of unknowing as well as guiltless) and alienated from nature, the Boy suddenly becomes self-conscious and is therefore no longer a boy. There can be no “Man of Winander”; we already have one in Wordsworth, and the Boy has no other name. If Wordsworth has so ruthlessly cleared the way for his later voice by silencing his earlier one in the person of the Boy, why does he stand mute? Paul de Man has an answer: The boy’s surprise at standing perplexed before the sudden silence of nature was an anticipatory announcement of his death, a movement of his consciousness passing beyond the deceptive constancy of a world of correspondences into a world in which our mind knows itself to be in an endlessly precarious state of suspension: above an earth, the stability of which it cannot participate in, and beneath a heaven

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that has rejected it. The only hope is that the precariousness will be full and wholly understood through the mediation of poetic language.52

In the 1805 version of the Prelude, the lines about the sudden silence of the owls read, “And when it chanced, / That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill” (1805, V, 404–5). Death, the unavoidable end of human life in a natural world, lies in the mocking silence of the owls, reversing the process of coming to self-consciousness. Similarly, in Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems, the once-conscious and alive Lucy becomes a natural object when she dies; she is “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees.”53 Neither Wordsworth nor the Boy can choose his position within the natural scheme, because each must remain human while living and become natural when dead. The recognition of mortality and of selfconsciousness in the second silence parallels that of the first silence; it contains the same moment of perplexity, the same shock at the loss of a set of correspondences between Boy and owl, poet and Nature, and the same vertigo at the sudden opening of the abyss. In the first silence, the Boy hears “the voice of mountain torrents,” in the second, the poet sees the churchyard and school. Both moments of listening are among the visionary moments in which Wordsworth trusts for restorative power, yet here, anxiety overcomes any possibility of restoration. This episode differs from, for instance, the visionary moment in Book VI known as the Simplon Pass episode, where Imagination “rose from the mind’s abyss / Like an unfathered vapour” (VI, 594–5) because nothing rises from this abyss. When one creates harmonious, ordered sound, a product of the mind, and hears it reflected, one becomes a self-conscious poet; when one extends mimics the sounds of the natural world and expects to become natural in return, the reward is silence and death. The silence of the text, however, is another matter entirely. textual silence: “the blind beggar” Must poetry be sound, and can the self-conscious mind emerge from a silent form of discourse, from text as pure text? For Wordsworth, not being read aloud is not being read at all and will lead to an impoverished, sad end, with both the poet and his work ignored and lost among the multitudes of the city. We have seen the abyss that opens when the boy tries to become part of nature; in the episode known as “The Blind Beggar” in Book VII, Wordsworth looks into another abyss, the fate of the poet who wanders too far from nature and voice and becomes lost in the city and the culture of print.

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Wordsworth uses an extended simile with classical overtones to begin the episode: As the black storm upon the mountain top Sets off the sunbeam in the valley, so That huge fermenting mass of human-kind Serves as a solemn back-ground, or relief, To single forms and objects, whence they draw, For feeling and contemplative regard, More than inherent liveliness and power. (VII, 619–25)

The lines quoted here show that they are the work of the late Wordsworth, formal and cautious, following the structure of a traditional Homeric simile, “As . . . , so.” According to the editors of the Norton/Cornell edition of The Prelude, these lines were among the last Wordsworth wrote for the work, added during revisions between 1839 and 1850.54 For most of the forty-five years between the 1805 and the 1850 manuscripts, this large simile was not in the poem at all, yet Wordsworth’s last and most radical rewriting was devoted to including it. Wordsworth wrote this passage late in his career, when he had become increasingly aware of how his powers had faded, and it reflects his growing concern that the excesses of his youthful style might be considered too extreme for posterity. The simile therefore serves a double purpose; it both demonstrates his technical skill within a classical formula and justifies his choice of subject matter. The subject of the simile itself, however, does not follow any classical model by referring to a concrete object, but instead enters the abstract world of poetics. It does not compare a storm cloud and sunbeam to a particular thing but to a general class of “single forms and objects” for which the power to elicit feeling and thought is enhanced by their contrast to the general tide of humanity. The particular object of this type that Wordsworth has in mind, the beggar, does not arrive in the poem until much later. Here, the simile describes the origin of the visionary object and an artistic process of contrast and relief, rather than the object itself. In effect, these lines justify the choice of subject by alluding to a traditional poetic style, calling unusual attention not only to the object itself but also to the process of poetic composition. Wordsworth needs this justification because in this instance, he does not find his visionary object in nature but in the city, where he found asserting his independence and writing poetry much more difficult. The next passage

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shows him in a desperate search for something or someone intelligible in the streets of London: How oft, amid those overflowing streets, Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said Unto myself, “The face of every one That passes by me is a mystery!” Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed By thoughts of what and whither, when and how, Until the shapes before my eyes became A second-sight procession, such as glides Over still mountains, or appears in dreams (VII, 625–34)

“What and whither, when and how” – the poet finds himself at a loss when confronted by so many people about whom he knows nothing but their current appearance; he is overwhelmed by their sheer numbers and by the utter lack of any context or natural landscape. In the “second-sight procession,” he recognizes something familiar, yet nothing he can identify clearly – the uncanny feeling of unconscious recognition. These strangers, simultaneously disturbingly familiar and utterly alien, form a murky backdrop for the sudden appearance of the visionary character of the beggar, whom the poet recognizes with painful clarity as a version of himself. The shock of this self-recognition causes him to have an almost physical reaction: And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond The reach of common indication, lost Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare) Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face, Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest Wearing a written paper, to explain His story, whence he came, and who he was. (VII, 635–42)

The process of selection has been reversed; he does not choose this subject, he is “smitten” by it. Although “a sight not rare,” this Beggar stands out sharply because he has written “what and whither, when and how” plainly across his chest, and the story cannot be a happy one. The Prelude, like the beggar’s sign, explains Wordsworth’s story, “whence he came, and who he was”; the violence of this sight therefore lies in the horrible caricature it makes of the poet himself. Having begun with lofty ambitions and writing

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in the style of the blind epic poets, Homer and Milton, the poet suddenly confronts a vision of himself sharing the blindness of his great predecessors, with no achievement but a pathetic version of the Prelude pinned to his chest. By the time of the final revisions of this poem, it had become clear to Wordsworth that he would never write The Recluse, and that this story of his youth and development, originally planned as a mere preface to his greatest work, would be his longest and most ambitious poem. For Wordsworth, who never made an independent living from his poetry, depending initially on an annuity from a friend and finally a government pension, the beggar shows him the worst of what he thought of himself. The horror of self-recognition turns the poet’s thoughts inward, forcing him to accept his fate as a poet who must tell the story of his own selfconsciousness: Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round As with the might of waters; an apt type This label seemed of the utmost we can know, Both of ourselves and of the universe; And, on the shape of that unmoving man, His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed, As if admonished from another world. (VII, 643–9)

The familiar dialectic of blindness and insight, of sight as vision and sight as understanding, reminds the poet that what he seeks can only be found by looking into himself, instead of on the faces of the city dwellers. The Blind Beggar is a blunt and traditional symbol; he is Tiresias, who sees the truth that Oedipus does not, and St. Paul, who must be blinded by a light from heaven to receive divine revelation. In the midst of a search for subtle answers in the outside world, the appearance of so obvious an emblem of the poet’s condition reproaches him for both faulty observation and hubris. The piece of paper pinned to the Beggar’s chest is not only “the utmost we can know,” but also all a poet can do with his life and ambition. The Beggar, although unaware of the poet, nevertheless reminds him of the cruel reality of the poet’s vocation. Whether a poet laureate or a blind beggar, a poet lives by telling his own story, in the hope that whoever reads it will be moved to give him money. No more lofty possibility is offered; the paper is “the utmost,” and all poetry merely more and less successful versions of the same crude note. Most significantly, the Beggar has neither sight nor voice, rendering him unable to describe anything but his own

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life and utterly dependent on a single piece of paper. He has become the ultimate city poet, a writer focused entirely on himself and immersed in the world of urban print culture, with no connection to the sound of the human voice or the beauty of well-crafted verse read aloud. Here, the roar of the multitude drowns out individual voices, leaving him unable even to ask for alms except through a paper notice. For Wordsworth, text without voice becomes poetry at its most impoverished, and he must avoid the fate of the silent city poet at all costs. conclusions: “on the power of sound” and the prelude Can Wordsworth save himself from silence by addressing the question of music directly? In one poem, “The Power of Music,” he both addresses and evades the question by focusing on a street performer as a kind of visionary character; the result is a less satisfactory version of “Resolution and Independence.” He also arrived at a kind of answer in “On the Power of Sound,” a poem first published in the collection Yarrow Revisited in 1835, and probably composed in 1828 or 1829.55 According to a letter he wrote to Alexander Dyce, he believed “On the Power of Sound” to be the equal of any of his works, and deliberately included it in the section titled “Poems of the Imagination.”56 It begins with an “argument,” that is, a summary and explication of the poem, a device Wordsworth rarely used, despite numerous complaints that his poems were hard to understand: The Ear addressed, as occupied by a spiritual functionary, in communion with sounds, individual, or combined in studied harmony. – Sources and effects of those sounds (to the close of the 6th Stanza). – The power of music, whence proceeding, exemplified in the idiot. – Origin of music, and its effect in early ages – how produced (to the middle of the 10th Stanza). – The mind recalled to sounds acting casually and severally. – Wish uttered (11th Stanza) that these could be united into a scheme or system for moral interests and intellectual contemplation. – (Stanza 12th). The Pythagorean theory of numbers and music, with their supposed power over the motions of the universe – imaginations constant with such a theory. – Wish expressed (in 11th Stanza) realised, in some degree, by the representation of all sounds under the form of thanksgiving to the Creator. – (Last Stanza) the destruction of earth and the planetary system – the survival of audible harmony, and its support in the Divine Nature, as revealed in Holy Writ.57

The abstract contains a surprisingly large number of references to contemporaneous musicological issues, in equally surprising detail, including parenthetical notes connecting the concepts to particular stanzas. He begins

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with a reference to the physical faculty of hearing, “the Ear,” and tries to connect the physical manifestation of sound and hearing to the aesthetic effects of music through historical, mathematical, and, finally, cosmological principles. The abstract also has a generally philosophical tone; the idiot, as someone who can appreciate music despite mental defects that would prevent him from enjoying visual art or literature to the same degree, establishes almost experimentally that music has a direct effect on the emotions. He then examines the “origin of music, and its effect in early ages,” following the historicizing tendency of many nineteenth-century philosophers, and expresses a wish for a unified system that would explain how music fits into the system of the arts. (Wordsworth was unable to have read Hegel’s not yet transcribed or translated Lectures on Aesthetics in 1828.) After a consideration of outdated Pythagorean theories of the connection between music and the harmony of the spheres through mathematics, the argument turns toward theological explanations, representing music in all its forms as a means of praising God and partaking, in small measure, of the eventual call of trumpets that will end the world. Both the argument and the poem as a whole, in my view, seem forced, as if the reconciliation of these different versions of music’s causes and effects did not easily fit into a medium-length poem, and as if the theological explanation that ends the poem were simply a kind of theoretical deus ex machina, or “God term,” used as a last resort to resolve an intractable conflict. Stylistic and metrical elements in the first stanza also reflect these contradictions: Thy functions are etherial, As if within thee dwelt a glancing Mind, Organ of Vision! And a Spirit aerial Informs the cell of hearing, dark and blind; Intricate labyrinth, more dread for thought To enter than oracular cave; Strict passage, through which sighs are brought, And whispers, for the heart, their slave; And shrieks, that revel in abuse Of shivering flesh; and warbled air, Whose piercing sweetness can unloose The chains of frenzy, or entice a smile Into the ambush of despair; Hosannas pealing down the long-drawn aisle, And requiems answered by the pulse that beats Devoutly, in life’s last retreats! PS (I, 1–32)

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According to the argument, this stanza addresses “the Ear,” although the stanza itself does not use this term, using instead a complicated metaphor for the ear’s anatomy, the “intricate labyrinth” and “oracular cave” of the ear canal and cochlea. The stanza then praises its ability to communicate both the most primitive and most exalted of human emotions, from “shrieks” to “Hosannas,” directly to the heart. The meter is strict tetrameter, beginning with alternating couplets, and ending with an interlocking variation and a heroic pair following an ABACBCDD rhyme scheme beginning with the ninth line. The poem also contains a double rhyme (“etherial” and “aerial”) and almost excessive precision on all other rhymes (for instance, “smile” and “aisle”), giving it a slightly comic tone that nearly contradicts the seriousness with which it treats its subject. Similarly, the number and variety of different images packed into a single stanza make it difficult for the reader to settle on the poem’s overall tone and direction. It is as if Wordsworth could not entirely abandon his visually oriented terminology in favor of a real consideration of the ear’s capabilities, leading to tangled imagery; the phrase “Organ of Vision!” invokes the figurative meaning of “vision” precisely when its literal meaning would conflict with the stanza’s purpose. The beginning of the third stanza contains a similar conflation of visual and sonic metaphors: Ye voices, and ye Shadows, And Images of voice – to hound and horn From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows Flung back, and, in the sky’s blue caves, reborn, On with your pastime! Till the church-tower bells A greeting give of measured glee; And milder echoes from their cells Repeat the bridal symphony. (III, 33–48)

Here, the poem comes closer to what Wordsworth has been trying to achieve: a connection between the qualities of natural sound and the clearly artistic effects of music. The stanza begins with abstractions – “Ye voices, and ye Shadows, / And Images of voice” – and follows them with natural scenes and an instance of music at its most denotative: the hunter’s horn. Then, church bells call back the hunters in “measured glee,” with Wordsworth’s italics making the unmistakable point that humanity has controlled sound to serve religious and social purposes. Wordsworth’s understanding of music in 1828 reflects many of the concerns of his later career

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that represented a reversal of his views earlier in life. The impulse to express transcendent experience in secular terms, as he did in his earlier poetry, has been replaced by more conventional piety, experienced in the community of the church, rather than in the solitude of nature. In addition, both the first stanza and this selection from the third indicate a retreat toward traditional religion as the poet grows older, a desire to settle down to married life and its “milder echoes” of wedding bells and, later, to find solace in the requiems “of life’s last retreats.” Music in this poem is therefore a civilizing force, organizing and socializing the wild, emotional impulses from which it originated, calling back the hunt to the conventions of a settled society. The final stanza recalls the apocalypse of “The Dream of the Arab” but provides a far more traditional account of the music heard at the end of time and omits the poet’s ambition to create a lasting work entirely: A Voice to Light gave Being; To Time, and Man his earth-born Chronicler; A Voice shall finish doubt and dim foreseeing, And sweep away life’s visionary stir; The Trumpet (we, intoxicate with pride, Arm at its blast for deadly wars) To archangelic lips applied, The grave shall open, quench the stars. O Silence! Are Man’s noisy years No more than moments of thy life? Is Harmony, blest Queen of smiles and tears, With her smooth tones and discords just, Tempered into rapturous strife, Thy destined Bond-slave? No! though Earth be dust And vanish, though the Heavens dissolve, her stay Is in the WORD, that shall not pass away. (XIV, 209–25)

The world begins and ends with the sound of a voice, and Wordsworth alludes the Gospel of St. John in asserting the primacy of the Divine Word over silence. No longer does he concern himself with the durability of his own works, as he did in “The Dream of the Arab”; instead, he hears the trumpets of the Second Coming, blown by angels, not by poets. The Voice of God that “shall sweep away life’s visionary stir” has clearly superseded his own visionary gleam and the transcendence of nature. The poet no longer dwells on the inevitable end of earthly life or on the restorative power of the seasons but prefers to think of last things and to trust in a clearly traditional, biblical God.

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What has happened to the Wordsworth who found solace in nature and whose visionary moments were far more that a mere “stir”? The conservative, pious Wordsworth of his later years disappointed many admirers of his earlier works, including Byron and Shelley, who lamented both his change in politics and his turn away from nature and toward traditional religion. As early as 1816, Shelley lamented in “To Wordsworth” that “thou leavest me to grieve, / Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.”58 However, the balance between nature, the imagination, and sound that Wordsworth had sought earlier in his career still resided in the last books of The Prelude (largely complete in 1805), where he found a far more satisfactory answer to the question of music. In Book XII, after listening to sounds of wind, streams, and waves, and then finally to the silence of the groves, Wordsworth exclaims, Oh! that I had a music and voice Harmonious as your own, that I might tell What ye have done for me. The morning shines, Nor heedeth Man’s perverseness; Spring returns, – I saw the Spring return, and could rejoice . . . (XII, 29–33)

Here, Wordsworth turns natural sound into the voice and music of nature, and finds his ability to rejoice restored by a change in season. As in “The Solitary Reaper,” the poet finds that nature’s sounds have order and meaning, as do the seasons, and that his ability to find joy returns with this realization. Wordsworth’s desire to answer in kind, in the joyful song of poetic expression, shows that the restorative beauty of these sounds does not lie in any denotative content – they tell him no stories, and use no words – but in their contextual significance, as natural sounds associated with the seasons. Like the nightingale in “The Solitary Reaper, these sounds tell him that spring comes and that natural cycles still exist, gloriously independent of humanity. Here, he has hope for his own voice, separate from nature, yet restored by it. His final coming to consciousness as a poet takes place in the last book of The Prelude, where he contemplates the completed poem and the course of his own life up to that point: I said unto the life which I had lived, Where art thou? Hear I not a voice from thee Which ‘tis reproach to hear? Anon I rose As if on wings, and saw beneath me stretched Vast prospect of the world which I had been

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And was; and hence this Song, which like a lark I have protracted, in the unwearied heavens Singing, and often with more plaintive voice To earth attempered and her deep-drawn sighs, Yet centring all in love, and in the end All gratulant, if rightly understood. (XIV, 379–89)

Wordsworth’s self-conscious reflection comes from the echo of his own voice in song, the personification of his own life, as represented in The Prelude itself, a life that he can question directly and the reproaches of which he can answer. He has become the poet he imagined himself to be in Book I by becoming a poet of nature, a lark, whose flight takes him over a temporal landscape of his own self-formation. He has also transformed the story of the growth of his mind into a landscape, a continuous and expanding “spot of time” that he can view from his place in the heavens. His song is nevertheless still grounded in nature and reality, “To earth attempered,” partaking of both the sensuous earth and the spiritual heaven. The reproach he hears may come later in life, as disappointment and caution overtake him, but now, he flies between nature and the imagination and sings a joyful song.

chapter 5

Beethoven and Musical Self-Consciousness

People talk so much about music and they say so little. I am absolutely certain that words are not adequate to it, and if ever I found that they were, I should eventually give up composition. – Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy1

Mendelssohn’s low opinion of talk about music, a common sentiment among composers, musicians, and music lovers, did not prevent him from continuing to engage in it. He not only composed many brilliant works, and performed many more, he also attended Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics and read widely on music, art, and literature. He was a close friend of Adolf Bernhard Marx, the editor of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, a leading journal of music reviews and essays on music, and as both an active composer and a member of Berlin society, Mendelssohn had an excellent working knowledge of current debates in the philosophy of music. People in early-nineteenth-century Europe did, indeed, talk about music a lot, and the same issue came up repeatedly: does all this talk really have anything to do with the actual composition, performance, and experience of music? I believe that it does. Listeners from E. T. A. Hoffmann to the present have frequently reported the singular affective power of Beethoven’s music and attributed some form of self-consciousness to it as well,2 but describing the relationship between this perceived content and Beethoven’s compositional technique runs directly counter to the persistent view, expressed by Mendelssohn, Schiller, Hegel, Wordsworth, and many others, that music represents precisely the antidiscursive element contained in all art forms: the aesthetic. I argue that this contradictory impulse – to claim that words are inadequate to music, then to describe the experience of music in many words – resulted from both the intellectual atmosphere of the era and Beethoven’s deliberate compositional strategies, which led to the formation of an idea of music as the highest expression of Romantic self-consciousness. 136

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Although Schiller – and other early Romantics, as Beate Julia Perrey has cogently argued3 – had begun the project of raising the status of music years earlier, its elevation to the position as the consummate Romantic art form nevertheless represents an extraordinary event in music history: the precise moment of convergence between instrumental composition and aesthetic theory that transformed musical works from pleasant arrangements of sound to exalted representations of genius. Beethoven, the most influential among the many significant composers of the time, led the way through this transformation by moving from Viennese classicism, the style he shared with Haydn and Mozart, into two subsequent stylistic phases, the heroic and late styles. In his heroic-style compositions, Beethoven provided audiences with a way of perceiving a coherent, heroic personality in instrumental music; in his late style, he created an occasion for self-conscious reflection on musical representations of inner life. The late works therefore both continue the heroic era project of positing a conscious self through music and reflect on this act, creating a metaphor for self-consciousness in the composer’s act of creating music similar to that seen in Romantic poetry, especially that of H¨olderlin and Wordsworth. The difficulty commentators have had so far in establishing specific connections between self-consciousness and Beethoven’s music results from the composer’s decision to write his heroic period symphonic works in a way that would create suggestive, but not entirely specific, responses. Beethoven’s heroic period music is often an essay on sonata form and structure, demonstrating his fundamental concern with compositional technique, especially the kinetic power of motives, their harmonic/structural implications, and other formal problems. His compositional decisions therefore branch into two distinct paths: programmatic and formal – his music not only described external circumstances but also the inner workings of the music itself. Despite some reliance on gestures and tonal colorations derived from opera in his symphonic writing, he generally avoided giving his instrumental works detailed programmatic labels, a tendency that invited speculation on their meaning but precluded easy resolution to the question of what, precisely, a work meant. Early attempts to create definitive programmatic descriptions of Beethoven’s instrumental music were often based on the assumption of the existence of a hidden dramatic program, usually a narrative of emotional states, known only to Beethoven and perceived (falsely) as the fundamental structural principle of his instrumental works.4 Any number of these narrative descriptions could fit a given piece; arbitrarily choosing a particular one as the proper interpretation often gives the narrative internal consistency (that is, a set of specific characters and

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events forming a coherent story) at the expense of demonstrable connections to the music. An apt illustration of this problem appears in E. M. Forster’s early twentieth-century novel Howards End, when one character, Helen, asks others listening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to “look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back” to general mystification; Helen thinks she knows exactly what the symphony “meant,” but no one else has heard any goblins at all.5 Of course, Helen is neither wrong nor right; the real story behind the Fifth Symphony does not exist, but her story fits the music as well as any other. As far as most scholars have been able to tell, the vast majority of Beethoven’s instrumental works were not based on any external program, and even when he used overtly programmatic titles, he tended to structure the work according to the formal conventions of a particular genre, rather than an extra-musical narrative. As Maynard Solomon observes, even in the case of a well-known descriptive work, Beethoven follows formal, rather than programmatic principles for the work’s structure: As many have observed, in composing the Pastoral Symphony [No. 6 in F major, Opus 68] Beethoven was not anticipating Romantic program music but rather was continuing in the Baroque pastoral tradition, as manifested in many works by Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and more particularly in Haydn’s two oratorios.6

The pastoral description in Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6 has no particular structural property to associate it with nature, and its denotative programmatic effects were already part of a well-established musical language, the idiom of pastoral music. Obvious imitative effects of storms in the bass and percussion or birds in the wind instruments are only the textural surface of the Pastoral Symphony; its internal structure is dictated primarily by formal musical concepts of coherence and balance. All Beethoven’s other symphonies (except the Ninth) lack any clear connection to a traditional descriptive idiom, yet share many of the Sixth’s characteristics, making it more an instance of the rule than an exception. Nevertheless, few listeners can resist attempting to put the immediate experience of Beethoven’s music into words and many have chosen philosophical, rather than literary, language for that purpose. Although several observers have noted the dialectical structure of classical tonal music,7 it does not necessarily follow that musical interpretation will produce a unique corresponding philosophical discourse any more than attempts to discover hidden emotional or dramatic programs produce a valid literary analogue. Attempts to translate absolute music into philosophical argument through structural analysis often founder on the same fundamental ambiguity – an

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interpretation based on structure alone would fit any work written with a similar set of compositional principles. Bridging the wide gulf between technical description and musical experience therefore requires maintaining a delicate balance between the generality of abstraction and the specificity of musical analysis. As Carl Dahlhaus observes in an essay on Beethoven, The meaning of a piece of music does not “consist” in its extramusical substrate; rather it emerges from the relation between the extramusical substrate and its musical formulation. Nevertheless, in romantic music, it is not inappropriate to attach mottos, captions, or programs to the underlying moods, characters, or subjects – in a manner of speaking, naming them by name. This underscores the point that the elements of content are more essential to the [romantic] music than is the case with Beethoven, and this for reasons which have to do with the relation between theme and form. In the romantic period, the individuality of a piece of music . . . was imparted primarily by the themes and motives as such rather than by the formal process they set in motion. And the fact that the paramount aesthetic factor is the musical idea per se means that the substrate of the contents is subject to less far-reaching transformations than is the case with Beethoven, where the “poetic idea” is focused in the formal process.8

The programmatic, or “extramusical” names given to certain sections of Romantic era works make perfect sense if the composers worked from a programmatic schema, as many Romantics did, following what they falsely believed to be Beethoven’s precedent. These programs, however, do not apply to Beethoven’s compositions in the same way, and even when he uses programmatic labels, they can actually be misleading. Dahlhaus therefore suggests a challenging but ultimately helpful solution. The content of a musical work, in his view, exists in the relation between these extramusical elements and the formal characteristics of the work associated with them, not in the programmatic elements alone. A valid interpretation of a musical work, like that of a poem or a painting, describes the relationship between the work and its effects and does not consist solely in a narrative or argument separate from the work, even when the composer has provided it. In Beethoven’s works, the essence of the heroic style consists of the extensive, dramatic transformation of simple thematic material, rather than in the presence of an extramusical program, whether real or imagined. Although Beethoven’s music generated such powerful subjective impressions among its nineteenth-century listeners that even technically skilled composers, such as Liszt and Wagner, were convinced that they contained hidden extramusical programs, critics should avoid the temptation of searching for a programmatic key to unlock the secret of its power.

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Still, the “extra-musical substrate,” as Dahlhaus calls it, although not constitutive of the musical art work in itself, should be taken into consideration because it remains the most defensible link between a composition and its interpretation. Like any other organized system, music can be assigned meaning by convention; the extramusical elements of a work, from the labels added by titles and programs, to the traditional associations created by march time, drum rolls, horn calls, or dance forms, constitute the interpretive matrix between the music and its listeners. Criticism, no matter how solidly based on formal analysis, must nevertheless include some reconstructive history of musical reception, that is, the history of this interpretive connection. Music is, after all, a system of signification, the meaning of which for its composer and its listeners alike is constructed within the language and idioms of a long-standing tradition of musical communication and social contexts. However unlocalized its meaning may be, a musical composition nevertheless involves the systematic and meaningful manipulation of established patterns. Philosophical concepts, like those in any other discourse, also tend to follow established patterns as part of the general intellectual current of an era. If these patterns reveal a correspondence between the philosophy and music of a particular time, then it remains the critic’s task to explain its existence.9 In other words, a valid philosophical interpretation of a musical work must have some demonstrable historical relation to the work’s contemporaneous intellectual and musical climate and significantly distinguish itself from that of other works. Fulfilling these conditions does not necessarily mean establishing precisely what the composer had in mind while creating the work; critics in many fields have interpreted works in ways that their creators would not have been able to articulate, or might even have rejected, yet they nonetheless represent valid approaches. The point is merely to avoid unwarranted, superfluous elements, such as the appearance of goblins in Helen’s interpretation of the Fifth Symphony. On the other hand, one should also prevent the opposite problem: unwarranted vagueness. In Beethoven’s case, sufficient information exists to draw effective conclusions, beginning with his education and historical context. beethoven’s intellectual life Although Beethoven’s music has had an extraordinary influence on many artists and intellectuals working outside music, the extent to which nonmusical pursuits affected his works remains a subject that commentators approach with some reluctance. With a few notable exceptions, most

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scholars hesitate to ascribe philosophical impulses to Beethoven’s compositional practice, choosing instead to focus on the influence of other composers or on immediate economic and social conditions, if they approach the subject of influence at all. For example, when Nicholas Marston summarizes the complex changes in music aesthetics at the turn of the nineteenth century in The Beethoven Compendium, he feels it necessary to add, “That Beethoven was aware of these shifting theoretical positions is doubtful.”10 Later in the same volume, Barry Cooper points out that while Beethoven admired Kant, relatively little evidence exists that Beethoven followed the complexities of philosophy carefully.11 The aesthetic and philosophical climate in which Beethoven lived, therefore, has become a kind of “deep background,” that is, important enough to know but not reliable enough to use. The current aversion to making these kinds of connections may well have to do with the political corruption of Beethoven scholarship in Germany during the 1930s. In particular, Arnold Schering’s complex arguments concerning Beethoven’s musical symbolism, including the claim that Beethoven identified Kantian attraction and repulsion – the Widerstrebender and Bittender impulses – with thematic contrasts, may have been abandoned unjustly.12 Still, the concrete facts of his education, his pursuits, and his contact with other luminaries provide a starting point for this investigation but no easy answers. His formal education ended with elementary school13 ; he was known to read widely, but was not an especially active participant in anything not directly related to music.14 He loved poetry, and a famous (and perhaps embellished) account of his meeting with Goethe reveals him making a wish for artistic solidarity, thus displaying Beethoven’s acute desire for recognition as a fellow artist, calling the older, well-known author the only person who could understand him.15 His letters and conversation books contain references to philosophy and literature, but very little besides the mention of Kant described earlier reveals any special connection between his music and the other arts. Moreover, his deafness, which manifested itself as early as 1801 or 1802, isolated him socially, although he had a number of close, loyal friends.16 Nevertheless, Beethoven had an active cultural life and gave every indication that he had understood his own significance within it long before he had achieved fame. A brief examination of Beethoven’s early musical education and career reveals that while still in Bonn, the young composer already clearly identified with the emerging philosophical concept of the self-determining, self-conscious genius. Leon Plantinga has recently demonstrated how even as a teenager, Beethoven felt a conflict within his musical identity that

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influenced his development of the independent, self-reliant personality he would possess as an adult. Officially, he performed his duties as an organist for the elector of Bonn, a minor Catholic ruler in western Germany, assisting his father, a musician and singer, in the court where his grandfather and namesake had also served for forty years and been Kappellmeister for twelve.17 For the most part, these duties were confined to church and court performances, for which he wore official livery,18 attire that Mozart had also resented while in the service of the prince-archbishop of Salzburg.19 His father actively discouraged any ambition to compose or perform independently, although he did have a good teacher, Christian Gottlob Neefe, who introduced him to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, from which he learned a great deal about keyboard composition.20 Despite having received considerably less encouragement and reward for his efforts than, for instance, either Haydn or Mozart had received in their early careers, he developed into a brilliant soloist and composer, and according to Plantinga, “apparently pursued his real career mainly in his spare time; this was surely the case in his cultivation – as composer and player – of the concerto.”21 In other words, Beethoven chose the same path toward independence and creative freedom that Mozart had chosen as a young adult, and managed to do so despite an abusive father and an even more dependent family than Mozart had possessed. In addition, Beethoven would go on to create a name for himself in Vienna by precisely this means. Beethoven’s initial efforts to succeed as a composer and performer in Vienna therefore represented a determination not just to become financially independent but also to follow Mozart in this direction.22 If the frustrations he experienced in Bonn were not enough to drive Beethoven in the direction of a forceful assertion of his personality in music, his deafness would provide an even more daunting obstacle to overcome, with correspondingly significant effects on his outlook and compositional style. The Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, a letter Beethoven wrote (but never sent) to his brothers Carl and Johann, provides a vivid picture of what deafness meant to the composer and how it changed his ambitions and selfimage. Alternating wildly between determination and despair, Beethoven claims that “Only my art held me back” from committing suicide but adds, “With joy I hasten towards death.” He also makes numerous references to his last wishes and to the disposition of the Heiligenstadt Testament itself, which he wanted to make public after his demise.23 In the midst of lamenting the loss of his hearing, he reconciles himself to his fate, saying “Forced to become a philosopher already in my 28th year, it is not easy, and for the artist harder than for anyone else.” He had indeed prepared

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himself to become a kind of philosophical composer, since he could no longer perform, yet had no other real career options available to him. Without the ability to promote his works and supplement his income with performance, he would have to build and maintain an extraordinary reputation through composition alone, a task no major composer had ever accomplished before. He would answer this challenge soon after writing this letter in what became known as his “heroic style,” creating an indelible connection between the perceived content of the music and the personal obstacles he faced in writing it. the heroic style (1803–12) Few musicologists are completely satisfied with the term “heroic style” or the three-period division of Beethoven’s career (“early,” “heroic,” and “late”) in general, but the terms nevertheless remain fundamentally valid and useful. As Kerman and Tyson state in Grove, This schema has been attacked, not without reason, as simplistic and suspiciously consonant with evolutionary preconceptions. Yet it refuses to die, because in spite of all it obviously does accommodate the bluntest style distinctions to be observed in Beethoven’s output, and also because the breaks between the periods correspond with the major turning points in Beethoven’s biography.24

These divisions oversimplify by creating a definitive correspondence between biographically defined periods and stylistic changes, despite the inevitable problems – and perhaps even false connections – this approach would entail. For instance, the early Symphony no. 1 (op. 21, composed in 1799–1800) has what can be called heroic elements (far sharper dynamic contrasts than most other classical-era symphonies, for example), although it is clearly closer in style to Mozart’s and Haydn’s later symphonies than to Beethoven’s own Symphony No. 3, (op. 55, from 1803), the work most commonly cited as having begun the heroic period. Similarly, Symphony no. 8 (op. 93, from 1812) has a somewhat more classical and less heroic feel to it than the five heroic-style symphonies that preceded it, despite the fact that it is the latest of the heroic period symphonies. At the other end of the scale, the Galitzin String Quartets (opp. 127, 132, and 130/133, all composed in 1826–7) provide the most vivid examples of the “late style,” yet the String Quartet in F (op. 135, from 1827), his last complete work, seems far more classical than the Galitzin Quartets written just before it. Beethoven, like many great composers, artists, and writers, occasionally anticipated future stylistic developments and reverted to those of an earlier period.

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Stylistic change is rarely consistently progressive for any composer, and Beethoven made no particular effort to adhere to a fixed set of principles or to change his practices systematically. Nevertheless, these exceptions prove the rule – the mere fact that they are all immediately recognizable as anomalies demonstrates how identifiable the period distinctions actually are. Beethoven showed on several occasions that he could create a successful work in a previously abandoned style (such as those listed earlier), but he could also fail miserably, at least in artistic terms, by attempting to revive a style he had clearly left behind. For instance, Beethoven composed Wellingtons Sieg (op. 91), also known as the Battle Symphony, in 1813, during a period of disillusion and crisis; the result is a disastrously bad pastiche of the heroic style that approaches self-parody. Charles Rosen blames many of its deficiencies on M¨alzel, Beethoven’s collaborator and the inventor of the panharmonicon, the mechanical device for which it was originally written, but Beethoven still put his name to it and is responsible for it.25 Although Nicolas Cook makes a good case for Wellingtons Sieg as belonging to different mode of composition altogether, and therefore receiving retrospective condemnation for ideological, rather than qualitative, reasons,26 Beethoven had clearly reached the limit of the heroic style at this time and avoided large-scale orchestral composition for eleven years, until the composition of the Ninth Symphony. That magnificent work, although full of heroically grand ambitions and high ideals, nevertheless contains many more characteristics of the late style, including an increased emphasis on melody and counterpoint, subtler variations in tonal color and harmony, and a wider range of modulations. (These characteristics are discussed in greater detail later in the chapter.) Although thinking of Beethoven’s works in terms of three stylistic periods can lead to misleading oversimplifications, they also contain an undeniable element of truth about fundamental shifts in his compositional practice. Clearly, the heroic style has definite boundaries, both in its reception and in its formal characteristics. Although no one would use the term “heroic style” until after his death,27 Beethoven would not have felt the demand for a tribute to the duke of Wellington corresponding to the implicit glorification of Napoleon in Symphony no. 3 (Beethoven had famously scratched out his name in the dedication) unless audiences expected the portrayal of a heroic persona in a symphonic work. Symphony no. 3, the first work in this style, from 1803, is fundamentally different from all that came before it, with an extraordinarily long development, sudden dynamic changes, sharp contrasts, and unusually forceful harmonic direction. Still, the symphony does not completely sever its ties to the past; instead, it connects

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established practices to future musical innovations. The first movement, although absolutely novel in the length and complexity of the development, nevertheless remains within the boundaries of classical sonata-allegro form. Moreover, as Michael Broyles argues, the symphony as a whole links the two extremes of classical form with a sonata-allegro first movement and a theme-and-variations fourth movement.28 As a result, the work contains a sharply illuminated tension between closed- and an open-ended formal structure, as well as an implicit conflict between program music, characterized by the recognizable military and dance elements, as well as the dramatic tonal and dynamic contrasts and the emerging concept of absolute music, illustrated by the first movement’s lengthy and complex development section. Similarly, the Fifth Symphony, written four years later, became the most recognizable work of music in history precisely because Beethoven again managed to synthesize the diametrically opposed elements of the heroic style – dramatically affective contrasts and classical form – using the idiom already established in Symphony no. 3. The effect the heroic style had on its first audiences soon found expression in critical writing. Not long after Hoffmann’s famous review of the Fifth Symphony, critics and theorists began developing more sophisticated means of addressing the issues associated with it. The high point of this trend may have been reached in 1824, when Adolf Bernhard Marx began publishing the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and devoted many articles to explaining Beethoven’s extraordinary significance for music history. Later, A. B. Marx would declare that Beethoven had achieved a clarity and unity in the Eroica Symphony, which elevated music from the sphere of undifferentiated feeling to that of “brighter and more certain consciousness” [“die Sph¨are des hellern und bestimmtern Bewusstseins”],29 confirming – in clearly Hegelian terms – the change in music aesthetics created by the heroic style. A. B. Marx also presented a much more sophisticated discussion of content in the heroic style, abandoning the idea of a hidden narrative program in favor of an idea of musical beauty beyond and above the possibility of articulate expression.30 The effect of the increased philosophical complexity of the ideas associated with Beethoven’s music was subtle, yet significant. According to Dahlhaus, this shift from a narrative concept of musical content to an idea of an “absolute” gradually transformed the reception of Beethoven’s works to the extent that by 1870, the late quartets had replaced the symphonies as the paradigmatic case of absolute music.31 Even today, self-consciousness (as it is represented by various psychological terms) is attributed to the late Beethoven quartets almost as a matter of course.32 By establishing the

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interpretation that would convince audiences and critics that the heroic style represented a narrative of transcendence, Beethoven (with the assistance of A. B. Marx and critics like him) prepared the way for the acceptance of a philosophical idea of content for the late style. In addition, the extent of A. B. Marx’s influence on Beethoven reception cannot be confined to the philosophical realm. He was not only an extremely philosophically minded music critic but also one of the most influential technical musicologists of the nineteenth century. Along with Antonin Reicha and Carl Czerny, A. B. Marx created what has become the standard definition of classical sonata form in Die Lehre der musikalischen Komposition,33 using Beethoven’s works as his principal models of good composition.34 His division of the sonata into exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda remains the normative model of formal analysis for classical era music. Using this traditional model on Beethoven’s works without some critical and historical examination would therefore contain a degree of tautology; A. B. Marx’s prescriptive account of sonata form (now taken almost as a truism35 ) invariably fits the works from which it was derived in the first place. This extraordinarily influential concept of sonata form nevertheless emerged from the consensus of listeners during Beethoven’s lifetime, and the extent of its influence indicates that it rang true for knowledgeable nineteenth-century listeners. The question remains: how did listeners come to construe the particular meaning of these middle period works as the embodiment of a heroic persona, and why was this way of understanding the heroic style so immediately pervasive? According to Scott Burnham, the formal characteristics of the two most influential heroic style symphonies, no. 3 and no. 5, meshed with the expectations of early nineteenth-century listeners to form a powerful connection between Beethoven’s compositional style and the concept of the Romantic hero at exactly the right moment for its reception. Burnham correctly concludes that this connection functions on both small- and largescale levels: Conspicuous dramatic features in the music must be heard to issue from the past to be decisive for the future; they must inspire an intense degree of involvement in a recognizable yet experientially individual temporal process. This is why Beethoven’s internalization of classical syntax and phraseology may be seen as paramount: he is thus provided with a style stable enough in its sense of both local and global balance to assimilate and project a highly dramatic sense of temporality.36

In short, Burnham argues that the perception of heroic character in Beethoven’s symphonies stems from an inherent progressive temporal

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development both within the work and in the work’s relation to the musical tradition. In other words, a heroic period work (here, Symphony no. 3) presents a kind of Bildungsroman in music; it develops a thematic element (as a metaphor for the self ) with an increasingly complex and teleological harmonic treatment, creating the sensation of the self striving toward a transcendent destiny. Likewise, the heroic style symphony as a whole follows the general pattern of other classical era works yet threatens to break free of its constraints, creating a sense of a progress and transcendence in large-scale historical terms – the work gives audiences the impression that music history is progressing as they listen. Early-nineteenth-century audiences heard a boldly stated theme developed in more ways, and in more exalted musical language, than they had ever heard before and perceived in the work’s social and historical context the apotheosis of the composer-genius heroically transcending the limitations of his circumstances. What they knew about Beethoven and what they heard in the music formed a mutually reinforcing impression of precisely what the philosophical currents of the time led them to expect: the assertion of heroic character. However, Burnham’s extremely sophisticated account of the musical hermeneutics of Beethoven’s heroic style does not correspond precisely to the particular philosophical position he claims for it. After several chapters of musical analysis, Burnham draws an extremely close analogy between the Third Symphony and the self-conscious subject in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: In Beethoven’s heroic style, both urges [the urge to be subsumed in a greater organic whole and the urge to be passionately self-assertive] are satisfied: the passionately individual is made to sound as a larger organic universality. This is because the passionately individual self, which is heard to be projected by the music, is all there is: one does not hear a world order against which a hero defines himself – one hears only the hero, the self, fighting against its own element. Thus the “superclosure” effect of the “organically unified musical masterpiece”: there is no world beyond the piece, no fading horizon, no vanishing point of perspective. . . . The feeling provoked by this music is one of transcendent individuality, of merger with a higher world order in the name of Self. This effect is identical to that enunciated in the Idealist trajectory of Hegel’s phenomenology, with one overwhelmingly important exception: Beethoven’s music is heard and experienced; it is a concretion with a degree of compression and concentration that Hegel’s philosophy could never hope to reach.37

Burnham bases this persuasive account of the heroic style and its meaning on a great deal of careful research, yet the self he describes here as creating

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an “effect . . . identical to that enunciated in the Idealist trajectory of Hegel’s phenomenology” does not so much resemble Hegel’s self-conscious subject as it does Fichte’s “I am I,” particularly in light of the “overwhelmingly important exception” of music’s physical existence he cites as the central point of difference between the heroic symphony and the self-conscious subject. The subject in the Phenomenology, as well as in Hegel’s works on history and aesthetics, depends on a continuous and recursive interaction with the objective world; the Hegelian self is far from solipsistic, as “the great ‘I’” (“der große Ich”) in Fichte’s philosophy is. On the contrary, Hegel’s version of the self begins with sense-certainty, then develops self-consciousness through a confrontation with another consciousness, followed by a return to the material encounter of sense-certainty through reflection. The term “phenomenology” itself refers to a theory of knowledge based on the relation between the subject and external reality; Hegel used the word in the title of his most important work to assert that self-consciousness depended on phenomenal experience, and could not be achieved by the subjective self alone. As I have argued elsewhere, both H¨olderlin’s and Hegel’s versions of self-consciousness represent largely successful attempts to overcome the problem of absolute self-sufficiency and self-containment in Idealist subjectivity through encounters with the material aesthetic as the extreme case of the phenomenon.38 Hegel’s theory of self-consciousness is therefore not a precise match with the version of subjectivity implicit in Beethoven’s heroic style but rather a later alternative to it. However, the parallel between Beethoven’s compositional style and Idealist philosophy is still worth pursuing, but on a slightly different scale. I would argue that this parallel occurs not between Beethoven’s heroic period music and Hegel’s Ph¨anomenologie, but between the larger-scale shift from the heroic period to the late style and the changes in Idealist subjectivity that occurred between Fichte and Hegel. Just as Hegel’s Ph¨anomenologie corrected the solipsistic deficiencies of previous models of self-consciousness, so do Beethoven’s most characteristic late works contain variations in form, harmony, and genre that reveal a critique, or even a meta-critique, of the heroic period designed to overcome its self-sufficiency. the late style (1813–27) Although the term “late style” does not provide as readily understandable a characterization as the term “heroic style,” this period has acquired a particular philosophical significance due, in part, to the remarkable attention given to it by Adorno, Dahlhaus, and Subotnik, among others. Dahlhaus defines the “late work” not only as a way of designating Beethoven’s

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compositions after 1812 but also as a means of describing how the late style actually undermines the process of stylistic and chronological characterization: The sense of “timelessness” that emanates from late works is profoundly different from that attributed to “classic” works. When its aesthetic validity matures in the later existence which is its true life, the classic work seems to be detached from the age in which it was written, and the historical conditions in which it came into being fall away from it. It is characteristic of a late work, on the other hand, that already, while it is still new, it is inwardly alien to the age to which it outwardly belongs. It is not in its aesthetic survival alone, but even in its historical origins, too, that a gulf separates it from the age that gives it a date.39

A late work, in this sense, fulfills the composer’s desire for completion of his life’s work; it looks back toward the composer’s past and forward toward the future of musical composition after the composer’s death, contributing to an odd sense of timelessness because of a lack of stylistic specificity in late period works which makes them both a summation of the composer’s career and a reflection of his understanding of music history. The defining characteristic of the late style, therefore, is actually a meta-characteristic – it defines itself by defying easy chronological characterization. To what extent do the concrete musical elements of Beethoven’s late works justify this designation, and to what degree can the “late style” be termed a conscious, coherent set of compositional decisions? Biographical information does not give much assistance in answering these questions. Although Beethoven went through a period of relative inactivity between 1812 and 1816, no evidence of overt plans to a make a major stylistic shift has come to light. Nevertheless, the works themselves tell a different and abundantly clear story. The overall character of the late works reveals unambiguously that Beethoven abandoned the heroic style process of developing a short, bold motif in dramatic ways and began instead to focus on melody, demonstrating a new emphasis on lyricism, as well as an increased interest in counterpoint, especially the fugue.40 In general, the personal, political, and philosophical crises of the years between 1812 and 1816 had driven Beethoven to concentrate on what he had perceived to be the weakest aspects of his composition, melody and counterpoint, and make them the central elements of his new style. Although Martin Cooper believes that “[n]othing was further from Beethoven’s whole attitude toward his art than a conscious search for originality, the deliberate adoption of a ‘new style,’”41 we nevertheless cannot avoid observing that the late works differ so significantly from those he had written before that Beethoven must have made a number of conscious decisions to change his compositional practice. Whatever its

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origin, the real stylistic difference between Beethoven’s heroic and late styles does not lie so much in the emergence of any particular set of techniques but in the ways these works relate to others of the past, both to Beethoven’s own previous efforts and to those of Haydn, Mozart, Bach, and Handel. When Beethoven began incorporating, for instance, a far greater number of fugues into his compositions than he had before, it did not mean that he had suddenly realized the potential of the form in isolation. Instead, he had begun reappropriating the older form because he had rediscovered the possibilities that his Baroque predecessors found in the fugue, as well as new affinities for their music. Beethoven’s late style therefore consists of a complex set of connections between his philosophical understanding of musical form and his consciousness of music history, and not only in terms of the aging composer’s relationship to the heroes of his youth. He also had to consider the composer he once was – the late style, to a great degree, is Beethoven’s reflection on his own past. Adorno, the most influential philosopher and critic on this topic, perceives Beethoven’s late style as a deliberate attempt to destroy the idea of autonomous subjectivity the composer asserted so clearly in the heroic period and that Beethoven’s late style even prefigures the overall direction of history since that time: The force of subjectivity in the late works is the rising gesture, with which it abandons the works. It explodes them, not to express itself, but to cast off expressionlessly the appearance of art. It leaves behind the ruins of the works and communicates, as if with ciphers, only by means of the empty spaces, from which it broke out. Touched by death, the masterful hand releases the material which previously formed it; the rips and cracks in it, witness of the final powerlessness of the “I” before existence, are its final work.42

Rose Rosengard Subotnik views the essay that contains this passage, as well as Adorno’s other writings on Beethoven, as indicative of Adorno’s overall claim that with the late style, Beethoven had destroyed the concept of the autonomous, free, and self-determining self he created in the heroic period by means of his late-period acknowledgment of the material: In the second-period style, according to Adorno, conventions were generally swept away or engulfed by the individualized, subjective flow of development. But the third-period subject, Adorno suggests, sees through its won developmental omnipotence as nothing but an arbitrary, externally derived convention; and the explicit return to prominence in the third-period style of the convention proper constitutes clear evidence for Adorno that the subject has entered into, and therefore abdicated to, a collective invention, into the individual artistic fantasy, instead allowing “bald,” recurring conventions to break apart the smooth harmony of

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the artistic fac¸ade. It has also declared its impotence before all objective reality, nature as well as society, and thus defined itself by acknowledging indirectly its own death.43

Adorno’s understanding of the historical meaning of Beethoven’s late style continues to have an extraordinary influence on musicology despite the relative obscurity of his Beethoven commentaries, which were only recently collected in German and translated into English. What he accomplished, as Subotnik states succinctly, was “to expand the human significance of music”44 by connecting it to other spheres of thought and activity, even if his overwhelming pessimism has prevented others following in his wake. In particular, Adorno confirms the existence of the connection between Beethoven’s heroic style and Idealist subjectivity, but, like Burnham, tends to equate the idea of self-consciousness presented in Beethoven’s heroic style with that of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Unlike Burnham, Adorno sees nothing that would exempt Beethoven’s heroic style works from the problem of solipsism and claims that the concept of Absolute Knowledge in the last chapter of the Phenomenology has the same effect of enclosing the whole as the coda in a heroic-style Beethoven symphony.45 The late style, for Adorno, shatters this solipsism, and with it both Beethoven’s and Hegel’s notions of the heroic, self-conscious subject. However, the evidence of the Ninth Symphony contradicts this view in clear, triumphant terms. This late period work contains such a strong association with individual freedom and the autonomy of the self that Leonard Bernstein felt he could change the word Freude (“joy”) to Freiheit (“freedom”) in the last movement for a performance celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall.46 Adorno even recognized the problem of the Ninth Symphony for his claims about the late style, saying that he considered the work a “reconstruction of the classical Beethoven (with the exception of certain parts of the final movement and above all, the trios in the third).”47 As I have said before, Beethoven certainly had the capacity to revert to an earlier style at times (as he did in op. 117, the K¨onig Stephan, and op. 124, The Consecration of the House); the ability to revive the heroic style had nevertheless eluded him completely in Wellingtons Sieg (op. 91). The Ninth Symphony would therefore require not just a reversion to earlier principles but a complete rethinking of them. To imagine it as merely another attempt to create another heroic style symphony would require us to stretch the definition of that term almost beyond recognition; clearly Beethoven has changed his symphonic writing in many ways and has become even more ambitious in terms of length and complexity.

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Furthermore, the symphony has an obvious programmatic element unseen before in his instrumental music – the use of a text. This particular text, a slight variation of Schiller’s “An die Freude,” is actually contrary to the spirit of the heroic period in many ways. The self portrayed in the heroic style is, above all, both independent and earnest; both Schiller’s poem and the Ninth Symphony celebrate brotherhood and joy, and sometimes even turn to humor to deflate the claims of the individual ego. The Turkish march in the last movement, for example, can easily be read as a parody of military grandeur and an antidote to the celebration of the savage heroism of Napoleon and Wellington. As their battles faded into history in the 1820s, Austrian audiences would be more and more likely to regard heroic tales of the Napoleonic wars with some of the same skeptical distance that the previous generation had reserved for those told by the veterans of the wars against the Ottoman Empire. (Rudolf Raspe’s M¨unchausen tales, for instance, are well-known parodies of stories told by an actual Hessian nobleman who fought for Russia in the Turkish wars.48 ) Lawrence Kramer argues that on the contrary, the Turkish march represents the absorption of non-Western cultures into “a grand progressive synthesis of diverse world-historical Spirits,”49 following a pattern similar to the one outlined in Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Although this contention clearly parallels my own claims to some extent, I would nevertheless argue that appearance of the Turkish march is more likely part of an ironic reflection on individual military glory and that the aspects of the Ninth Symphony most susceptible to Hegelian interpretation are more specifically compositional in nature, leading to a more complex interpretation of the work as a whole. As Dahlhaus correctly points out, late style works tend to be elusive in terms of their association with particular time periods – the Ninth Symphony therefore does not so much reconstruct the heroic style, as Adorno claims50 ; instead, it uses elements of the heroic style only to transcend them. Berthold Hoeckner also notes that Adorno’s understanding of the heroic style depends on a notion of its self-contained integrity as nearly transcending time – as if an entire symphony were a single moment.51 To miss the Ninth’s many indications that Beethoven has left the heroic style behind – and with it, the notion of a specific historical and national association – is to miss its ironic stance toward the past and its essentially diachronic, reflective nature, as well as its celebration of brotherhood over the individual. On a more concrete level, the Ninth Symphony also has many formal characteristics that justify its inclusion in the late style. The emphasis on melody so often cited as the central difference between the heroic and late style appears in every movement, and its many sudden tempo and textural

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changes represents a kind of critical perspective on the most characteristic heroic style gestures. At the beginning of the first movement, a bold, cadential motif suddenly becomes far more melodic; the brash, chaotic opening of the fourth movement is suddenly interrupted by a human voice calling all to universal brotherhood. Everything about the Ninth Symphony seems to oppose and then transcend the self-sufficiency that the heroic style held out as glorious; the clash of individual egos constantly gives way to joy and brotherhood. The Ninth, in many ways, is also music about music, a symphony that alters our understanding of previous symphonies. Maynard Solomon argues that the chorale finale, in particular, represents “a drive for denotation” that “is itself a prime symbol of the impulse to enlarge meaning.”52 In other words, Beethoven’s famous use of the chorale to end the Ninth Symphony, far from being a break from the musical language he had developed over his career, instead links his present (“late-style”) compositional practices with his well-established and more readily comprehensible heroic style. As Solomon argues later in the same essay, “Ultimately, the coercive and subversive implications of the Ninth Symphony may be inseparable, perhaps because Beethoven’s futuristic impulse – to create things that had never before existed – warred with his yearning to belong to tradition.”53 Even Esteban Buch, whose extensive research into the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chorales has yielded intriguing comparisons between the “Ode to Joy” and patriotic anthems by Handel and Haydn, admits that the end of the Ninth Symphony leaves its listeners in an ambiguous position with regard to political meaning: If the same melody can hymn universal joy and also honor the emperor Francis, we must either believe, with Metternich, that the emperor was the guarantor of universal joy, or we must assume a continuity between the musical rhetoric of the Revolution and that of the Restoration – a continuity that, when added to the nonreferential nature of the actual sounds themselves, sums up all the ideological ambiguities of Beethoven’s music.54

We cannot praise the Revolution and the emperor simultaneously without contradiction, unless we hear the sound of something else entirely in the Ninth – the positing of a continuous self-conscious identity that both confronts and transcends the political meanings of those diametrically opposed moments. The tension between tradition and innovation apparent in the formal elements of the symphony – a key characteristic of the late style in general – therefore reveals itself to be a representation of the composer’s struggle to posit his own identity in relation to time, paralleling the philosophical path of self-consciousness. The question of whether Beethoven’s concept of the self retains its coherence in other

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late-style works, or whether this tension pulls it apart, remains unresolved. I make the case for coherence through one of the Galitzin Quartets, no. 13 in B ♭, op. 130/133. opus 130/133, string quartet no. 13 in b ♭: first movement The Galitzin Quartets, opp. 127, 132, and 130/133 (named for Prince Boris Nicholas Galitzin, who commissioned them) occupy an especially suggestive place in the Beethoven canon. They are very nearly Beethoven’s last complete works – only the op. 135 String Quartet in F major is later – and the alternate finale for op. 130 is Beethoven’s final completed movement. Opus 130, along with its original finale, op. 133 (Große Fuge) therefore presents an especially clear instance of the late style, although not all critics associate the Galitzin Quartets with clarity. Daniel Chua argues that these quartets, as a group, “are pieces that posit themselves against their own history and are critically honed against the style they recall” and that the various attempts to interpret them systematically are undermined by the nature of the music itself.55 I argue that, on the contrary, op. 130/133 represents one of Beethoven’s most successful attempts to represent the selfconscious mind in its most highly developed form. Chua is correct to say that “[t]his is music about music,”56 but the evident self-reflective nature of the work, far from undermining its artistic unity, synthesizes its dialectal tensions – primarily those between tradition and innovation and between form and affect – into a coherent whole. The formal characteristics of op. 130/133, even more than those of the Ninth Symphony, at once establish it as part of the classical tradition and enable the work to transcend the limitations of classicism. In doing so, op. 130/133 fulfills its promise as a metaphor for self-consciousness by maintaining the work’s intelligibility in the language of classical tonality while expanding the range of musical language far beyond the principles of symmetry and closure implicit in the classical style. Even referring to elements of musical form as “dialectical” means taking a stand in a heated debate about the nature of Western tonal music and its meaning for both the nineteenth century and today, and the issue of musical meaning must be addressed in terms of compositional structure again before this kind of interpretation proceeds. Does compositional structure, specifically the sonata-allegro form, have denotative meaning, and if so, did early nineteenth-century audiences recognize it as such? Clearly, audiences had become accustomed to the form by 1825 and had considerable experience understanding it in purely musical terms. According to Charles

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Rosen, sonata-allegro form came to dominate all other instrumental forms at the beginning of Haydn’s career and was the main form of musical discourse by 1750. Although late eighteenth-century sonata-allegro form never became the set of fixed principles nineteenth-century theorists purported it to be, several factors in sonata form enabled educated audiences to comprehend larger and more complex musical structures than had previously been possible.57 As Rosen states, The advantage of the sonata forms over earlier musical forms might be termed a dramatized clarity: sonata forms open with a clearly defined opposition (the definition is the essence of the form) which is intensified and then symmetrically resolved.58

The language of eighteenth-century classical tonal music is unavoidably dialectical: a binary system fundamentally constituted by the establishment of the key with tonic and dominant chords. This harmonic pair serves as both microcosm and macrocosm to the formal structure of the sonata; the tonic-dominant axis functions not only as part of the small-scale harmonic grammar (individual successive chords) but also as the structure of a sonataallegro movement as a whole. A sonata-allegro movement therefore usually contains a modulation to the dominant key and then goes back to the main key for resolution. Variations from the tonic-dominant-tonic pattern in the sequence of modulations follow the same rules as did chordal substitution in small-scale harmonic structures, and require the same kinds of resolution. Any departure from this structure would have disturbed an eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century audience in a way that is hard to imagine with our fragmented postmodern sensibility. Either consciously or unconsciously, an early-nineteenth-century listener expected to hear the dialectical symmetry of classical sonata form and would notice its absence.59 The beauty of a sonata-allegro movement lay in the skill and originality with which the composer fulfilled these expectations while varying the means by which he did so. Although sonata-allegro form continued to dominate musical discourse throughout this period, the fortunes of the string quartet both rose and fell at the turn of the nineteenth century. According to Paul Griffiths, by 1809 and 1810, the years in which Beethoven wrote two of his “middle-period” quartets (op. 74 in E ♭ major and op. 95 in F minor), the string quartet had degenerated from a primary division of serious music to “hardly more than a branch of the concerto.”60 What had turned the vast majority of string quartets into this “flood of fripperies” was, paradoxically, the decline of amateurism and the rise of the virtuoso player.61 From its beginnings in the 1750s to the early 1790s, the Viennese string quartet was distinguished by

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its seriousness and the careful balance of its instrumentation, characteristics markedly different from the quatuor concertant and brillant that preceded it. It began as a salon piece in which four amateur players of passable skill could engage themselves in high musical art; through widespread distribution of sheet music, it became a primary means by which composers separated by great distances communicated ideas to one another.62 Later on, as popular virtuoso performers toured more widely, more and more string quartets were written in order to be an exhibition of one player’s skill rather than to be a balanced musical conversation between equals, resulting in a resurgence of the brillant style. Biographies of Haydn appearing in 1810 praise him as the originator of the quartet as a means of working out complex thematic material, yet already contain clear signals that musical style has moved on.63 By the time Beethoven began work on the late quartets in 1825, the only other composer writing string quartets of high quality was Schubert, of whom Beethoven was completely unaware. In short, Beethoven was working in a both a genre that had already reached a saturation point and had been chosen for him by a patron, yet he would expand the language of classical tonality with it, breaking new ground in form and harmony. Still, his choice of the string quartet genre for an entire cycle of works after the monumental achievement of Symphony no. 9 in D minor is far less problematic than it may seem; in fact, the genre enabled him to accomplish two major artistic objectives. First, it allowed him to reenter a mode of discourse shared by the two greatest composers he encountered during his lifetime, Haydn and Mozart, and the history of the musical relationship between the other two major figures in Viennese classicism underscores the importance of the quartet for demonstrating this kind of solidarity. Mozart dedicated six quartets to Haydn; those Haydn composed after Mozart’s death show a similar sense of indebtedness to Mozart. Second, Beethoven’s decision to return to chamber music after so many large and magnificent symphonies demonstrated a desire to be known not only as the composer of grand statements but as a true innovator capable of rewriting the rules of composition in its most basic form: fourpart writing. By putting himself so clearly in the company of Haydn and Mozart at this late point in his career (the end, although he may not have known it), Beethoven would put every innovation in structure and harmony in stark relief. Moreover, the decision to write the Galitzin Quartets stemmed from a confluence of arbitrary circumstance (a commission) and an inner drive toward quartet composition less easily explained. Prince Nicolas Boris Galitzin’s request for a series of string quartets came in a letter dated

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November 9, 182264 ; however, experts on Beethoven’s notebooks, among them Joseph Kerman, generally agree that he was already working out some ideas for string quartets before the letter arrived.65 Although op. 130/133 was the last quartet required to complete Prince Galitzin’s commission, Beethoven wrote two more quartets, op. 131 in C ♯ minor and op. 135 in F major, and wrote a new finale for op. 130 at the request of his publisher. Beethoven was in poor health in 1826 and 1827 and may well have known that everything he wrote at this time would benefit posterity more than himself.66 Reports from witnesses make it highly probable that Beethoven thought of the three Galitzin Quartets as a single compositional unit67 ; presumably, his ambitions for these works included working out some larger problem than merely fulfilling his commission. In addition, Beethoven’s deafness had left him profoundly isolated from Viennese musical society. Whatever he intended to accomplish with these quartets, it was undoubtedly something besides creating a public sensation, which would have been easier with a larger-scale work in any case. As he did with the Third and Ninth Symphonies, Beethoven expanded the op. 130 B ♭ major string quartet to an unprecedented length. Although Beethoven maintained the traditional two violin, viola, and cello instrumentation and kept the work to a single home key, he added two movements for a total of six, rather than the usual four and used an extraordinary number of key and tempo changes in the first movement. Daniel Chua correctly observes that the expansion of the number of movements does not indicate a regression to the “looser, more arbitrary sequence” of Baroque suite form, as some commentators believe,68 yet the assertion contains some truth. In fact, the work continually questions the assumptions underlying the difference between the sequential nature of baroque compositional style and the cadential tendencies of the classical era. David Brodbeck and John Platoff correctly assert that the tensions between the first movement’s “classical elements” (those following standard stylistic practice for sonata form at the turn of the nineteenth century) and its “non-classical elements” undermine the audience’s sense of traditional compositional practices by exposing their artificiality.69 These tensions nevertheless resolve themselves into a coherent whole through thematic associations rather than by following more familiar formal and harmonic patterns. In this respect, the modulations in the first movement aptly represent the issues raised by the work as a whole. The eight keys Beethoven uses in this movement are centered on three principal keys: B ♭, the tonic; G ♭, the diminished submediant; and D, the mediant. The other modulations are mainly short passages that function as a means of easing the transition to

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the others; still, using three main tonal centers this remote from the tonic is extraordinary. For a composer of the time, the choices for modulations in sonata-allegro form were generally limited to the dominant; a dominant substitute, the relative major (if the movement was in a minor key); or the dominant preceded by a key that would serve as a dominant preparation. All these had clear analogues in small-scale tonal harmony and were basically a series of acceptable substitutions carrying the same overall significance. This key relation, the tonic-dominant axis, held the sonata together and was expected by the audience, consciously or unconsciously, as a clear sign of basic artistic unity.70 Beethoven’s departure from these traditional choices required him to find another means to hold the movement together; key relations this remote would otherwise make the movement sound diffuse, or even like several unrelated pieces played in close succession. However, Beethoven relied on the descending interval of the major third for the direction of his modulations, rather than the ascending fifth or descending fourth. Although he had used thirds as a large-scale structural principle before in several works, including the Waldstein Sonata (op. 53, from 1804) and both Leonore Overtures (op. 72, from 1805 and 1806), the descending major thirds here are nevertheless innovative. By making all the thirds major, they reach far more distant keys more quickly than alternating major and minor thirds would have; they are also closely related to the thematic material of the adagio introduction. Here are its first few measures (Example 1):

Example 1. Opus 130, First Movement, Measures 1–4.

At first hearing, the introduction seems perfectly ordinary. A single, slow melodic line of unisons and octaves descends a minor third before dividing into traditional four-part harmony on the third note of the first measure, clearly establishing the home key of B ♭ major. The same minor third resolves upward in the second half of the phrase for a V-I resolution. The

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opening section is well within the bounds of normal quartet writing, both melodically and harmonically. The rest of the adagio, another ten measures, offers no real surprises, other than the mildly interesting fact that the complement to the initial adagio phrase carefully balances each instrument (unlike many contemporaneous quartets, which by then would have featured a solo instrument), allowing first the cello, then the second violin, next the viola, and finally the first violin separate entrances on similar themes. As a whole, the introduction prepares the audience for a classical era quartet of high seriousness, firmly in the tradition of Haydn and Mozart, and somewhat of an anachronism in 1825. The allegro, which begins the exposition of the primary theme, destroys the illusion that this will be an ordinary quartet (Example 2):

Example 2. Opus 130, First Movement, Measures 13–19.

In these measures, Beethoven reveals the contrapuntal complexity that characterizes this movement and the late style as a whole. The first violin plays a descending series of forte sixteenth-notes outlining the key of B ♭ major in descending thirds. The second violin enters after two beats of this line with a simple motif on a perfect fourth. Then, a sudden dynamic shift to piano in all instruments indicates that something else may be going on, and within two more measures, all the instruments have picked up the sixteenth-note line. According to the conventions of sonata form, a clear, obvious melody should present itself as the primary theme; instead, we hear a complex counterpoint of sixteenth-notes against the perfect fourth

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motif. The movement abruptly returns to the adagio tempo and a slightly shortened version of the introduction is repeated a fourth lower. By now, the material of the first section of the exposition has become clear: descending thirds and ascending fourths played in either straight sixteenths or in the rhythmic pattern of the primary theme. The first violin replays this theme at various pitches while the other material is developed, eventually working its way into a series of loud, clear arpeggios that signal the transition to the secondary theme. However, the introduction to this section contains a strange return to the unison (Example 3):

Example 3. Opus 130, First Movement, Measures 51–55.

Instead of a standard modulation to the dominant by means of a pivot chord or a V/V, Beethoven approaches a unison D ♭ (the dominant of the next key) by chromatic steps, then silences every instrument except the cello, which establishes G ♭ as the next tonal center by means of another solo sixteenth-note motif in descending thirds. Joseph Kerman calls this chromatic approach to D ♭ “the most devastating event yet in the composition” and the establishment of G ♭ as the new key “utterly precarious.”71 Even Brodbeck and Platoff, who argue for the movement’s overall coherence, nevertheless admit that “the secondary theme begins tentatively, as though Beethoven himself can scarcely believe the key.”72 Although the connection may seem tenuous, Beethoven’s use of previous thematic material, the sixteenth-notes and the descending thirds, ties this new tonality to the beginning of the piece closely. Why does Beethoven use descending thirds instead of descending fifths, or rising fourths, either of which would establish the new key much more clearly? Why does he modulate to G ♭, instead of a more closely related key? The answers to these questions reside in the expanded possibilities that establishing the descending third as an alternative structural principle would give the composer. By constructing this movement around sequences of descending thirds, instead of V-I cadences, Beethoven creates a new

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large-scale structure that can substitute for, and even oppose, traditional structure. G ♭ is a major third lower than B ♭; the key relation is not that of I to ♭ VI, but instead the large-scale continuation of the descending-third principle used at the beginning of the allegro. The next modulation, after the repeat of the exposition, follows precisely the same pattern, descending a major third from G ♭ to D, the enharmonic equivalent to E ♭ ♭ on a tempered scale.73 If the initial tonal center is established by means of descending thirds, then the subsequent modulations can be related by descending thirds, outlining (as Kerman74 and others have observed) in this case an augmented chord, B ♭ -D-F ♯(G ♭)-B ♭. While both Haydn and Mozart made ample use of descending thirds as a small-scale compositional principle,75 the use of descending major thirds as a large-scale modulatory structure is unprecedented. It nevertheless works well; although the augmented chord is dissonant, it is stable and leaves open more possibilities than a simple modulation to the dominant would. Beethoven’s exposition of the secondary theme fits into the overall scheme perfectly, while paradoxically managing to both disturb and reassure the listener (Example 4):

Example 4. Opus 130, First Movement, Measures 55–60.

The secondary theme begins with a simple inversion of the major third motif, a minor sixth, and bears an overall resemblance to an inverted version of the opening adagio theme. The theme begins in the first violin, supported by ordinary harmony in the other instruments. After a slight variation on the transition, the theme is repeated an octave higher, again in the first violin. This is perhaps the least original treatment possible for this theme, which is itself the least original theme possible as well. The movement at this point sounds like a parody of a Haydn or a Mozart string quartet, although these composers rarely wrote anything quite so deliberately banal; Kerman correctly calls the secondary theme a “caricature of a lyric phrase, complete with trite-sounding harmonies.”76 Beethoven’s salute to the obligations of binary form, a contrasting secondary theme, is a parody of the ordinary

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composer’s willingness to fulfill the expectations of the bourgeois audience in every case. This theme’s bland treatment after such a tenuous, disturbing transition tells the audience that the composer has not forgotten what they are used to hearing, and gives them the expected theme in the expected place. It may also serve to clarify the hint of parody at the beginning of the allegro section. What even the most sophisticated listener may not yet realize is that Beethoven’s choice of tonal centers has given him license to use three balancing themes instead of the usual two. From here, the exposition continues the pattern of sixteenth-note against quarter-note exchanges to confirm G ♭ as the new tonal center, eventually leading to the first ending of the exposition. Once again, the opening adagio theme and the primary theme appear, then appear again a third lower, leading back to the beginning of the piece. The entire exposition is repeated, but this time, the listener is more prepared for the surprises to come; relationships between the material that may have escaped the listener the first time become clearer. The repetition also serves as a reminder of the first tonal center and the strangeness of the modulation, further building up the expectation of another tonal center to balance the first two. The modulation to the third tonal center, D major, immediately after the second ending follows the descending-third principle in a manner that by now has become characteristic of this movement (Example 5):

Example 5. Opus 130, First Movement, Measures 94–105.

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The adagio opening and the primary theme are played twice, each time a third lower, arriving at D major, the third tonal center in relatively little time. From here, these very basic themes can be developed with greater complexity than usual because the possibilities of the traditional fifth relations inherent in them have been left virtually untouched in the exposition and in the modulations so far. Beethoven takes full advantage of these fifth relations in the modulation back to the tonic – D to G to C to F to B ♭ – in fewer than thirty-four measures, an extremely swift harmonic tempo. In fact, the modulation seems almost perfunctory, as if it were to be accomplished as quickly as the listener can accommodate it. Why reassert the cadential fifth relation at all, if it has already been established in the movement that simpler and more radical means of modulation is now available? Beethoven returns to the traditional cadential relation for two reasons. First, the fifths appearing here in the development are anything but perfunctory; they are inversions of the fourth in the primary theme, serving as a variation on the thematic material as well as fulfilling a necessary harmonic function. Second, the strong fifth relations allow the variation on the secondary theme to take on greater significance as an independent theme than it would in an ordinary development. A closer look at this variation illustrates the point more clearly. Here is its first appearance, in D major (Example 6):

Example 6. Opus 130, First Movement, Measures 106–111.

The primary theme makes yet another appearance in the first violin, played in a subtle piano, with an ostinato figure in the cello and viola that will continue in at least two of the three lower instruments (either cello and viola or second violin and viola) for the duration of the development. The variation on the secondary theme (measures 106–7) appears first in the cello with an octave leap on A (an augmentation of the sixth leap of the secondary theme) and is harmonized so that at first it sounds like a six-four inversion

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of the tonic, a chord which normally serves as a dominant preparation. Instead, the ostinato figure returns to the cello with a chromatic alteration (the C natural in measures 108–9) that reveals its function as a pivot chord in the modulation to G major after the variation on the secondary theme is repeated. These deceptive moves are disorienting, but the overall effect, as Brodbeck and Platoff point out, is to create a development that is “relatively more stable than the exposition.”77 To compound the effect, this same variation appears again in the cello of the G major section (leading to C major), and a slightly altered version appears soon afterward, twice in the first violin. The development ends with yet another replaying of this variation in the cello, leading the F major section back to B ♭ for the recapitulation. After so many repetitions of the same variation on the secondary theme, as well as a repeated variation on the variation (measures 123–4 and 130–1), the demarcations of exposition and development become blurred almost beyond recognition. Even when the repetition of the exposition is taken into consideration, by the end of the development the secondary theme has been played only four times, whereas this variation has been played in one form or another six times. The variation is also much more interesting and powerful, arguably one of the most moving in all of Beethoven. Even as sober a commentator as Kerman finds the development ambiguous and unsettling: in the B ♭ Quartet the entire development section exists in a trance, as though somehow another movement has got going without our quite noticing how. . . . Alternately, a far-fetched derivative of the second theme appears, an ugly duckling dream-transformed into a graceful arching element which still, however, exhibits much ambiguity in the matter of continuation.78

It is worth reiterating that a movement of this length and with so many modulations already risks sounding as if it were several movements run together; the prominence of this variation pushes that risk to the limit. The variation almost sounds as if it were part of a new exposition because it is stronger, more sincere, and more interesting than the secondary theme, yet the section as a whole continues to function as the development – and is understood as such – because it contains solid links to previous thematic material and occupies that position by formal convention. If we do not quite notice how the connection between the variation and the secondary theme works, it is because it has been entirely intelligible to us all along. The ambiguity of the development lies in its strength as an independent section and the relative weakness of the original secondary theme. At this point, the triadic tonal structure of the movement strives hardest against the

String Quartet No. 13: Middle Movements

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binary nature of classical sonata form; it naturally follows that this section should elicit the strongest response from its listeners. The recapitulation resolves the ambiguity of the development in a fairly straightforward manner. The primary and secondary themes are restated with various figures that have been introduced before, mainly sixteenthnote runs and fragmented versions of the rhythmic pattern of the primary theme. The fourth of the primary theme itself is inverted to produce a fifth and prepare the way for the cadential sequence in the coda. The reprise of the secondary theme appears in a D ♭ section that has been introduced with the same sixteenth-note figure used in the exposition. This time, however, the viola plays the sixteenth-note figure. The listener has not only become accustomed to it, but the key relation, B ♭ major to D ♭, is not nearly so distant. By contrast, the harmonization of the secondary theme in this instance is much more interesting than it was in the exposition (a chromatic bass line in the cello leads to a clever modulation back to B ♭), providing the overall compositional structure with an effective symmetry; an innovative modulation followed by an ordinary harmonization in the exposition is balanced by a more ordinary modulation followed by a more interesting harmonization of the same material. Furthermore, the more sophisticated treatment of the secondary theme in the recapitulation makes its original parodic function in the exposition even clearer. The attention paid to the resolution of the main material in the recapitulation leaves the coda with little left to accomplish other than to end the movement. The coda begins with an adagio section to complement the introduction; its main difference from the introduction is a more widely spaced voicing that allows a smoother transition from the recapitulation than an exact repetition of the opening adagio would. From there, the familiar sixteenth-note runs and the primary theme are reworked and occasionally inverted to bring a clear conclusion to the movement. The final cadence, like many of Beethoven’s, is absolutely unambiguous due to the forte marking and the double and triple stops in all instruments except the cello, whose final interval is, naturally, a rising fourth (F-B ♭). string quartet no. 13: middle movements How does one follow a first movement of such depth and complexity? Traditionally, one follows it with a lyrical slow movement, made up of beautiful melodies and a relatively simple structure, often in either the relative or parallel minor key. As we have come to expect from him in this quartet, Beethoven keeps some traditions and deliberately violates others

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in his treatment of the second movement. It is indeed simple in structure and written in the parallel minor key, but the tempo marking is presto, and the form is that of a bagatelle,79 a dance form more popular in the baroque era than in classical or Romantic times. Although this little dance runs by in just under two minutes (approximately one-fifth the duration of the first movement),80 it manages to confirm that some of the more innovative elements of the first movement are integral to the piece as a whole. The distant tonal centers of the first movement, G ♭, D ♭, and D (D minor instead of major in this instance), reappear in the second, although they are almost as distant from B ♭ minor as they are from B ♭ major.81 There is also a curious moment of chromaticism (Example 7):

Example 7. Opus 130, Second Movement, Measures 49–65.

Unisons and octaves approach a single note and are followed by a solo chromatic line which arrives at the same single note before the end of the second movement, just as the transitions to the primary and secondary themes in the first movement were accomplished. In this case, the fast tempo and the glissando followed by three quick staccato notes make this phrase a kind of insolent joke, as if Beethoven were declaring that these unisons and chromaticisms were perfectly permissible anywhere he chose to put them. Together, these gestures indicate that the liberties Beethoven took in the first movement are now to be considered part of the normal

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tonal language of the piece. In effect, they are now part of the idiom of this string quartet and can even be used in a presto dance movement only two minutes long. Although the third movement begins with the chord that ended the second movement, B ♭ minor, it is really in D ♭ major, further emphasizing D ♭ major’s status as an important tonal center in the work as a whole. Although it has a slower tempo than the first two, marked “andante con moto ma non troppo,” it does not go as slowly as typical adagio second movement, but instead walks along as a true andante. Robert Hatten suggests that this movement “might be viewed as a trope at the level of genre, in that it creatively fuses the playfulness and rhythmic drive of a scherzo with the tunefulness of an Andante”82 ; on the whole, it retains an important role in the quartet as a respite from the complexities of the first movement and the chromaticism of both the first and second movements. Despite the apparent density of its notes on the page (it is notoriously difficult to sightread), this movement provides a calm contrast to the first two, its complex rhythms becoming clearer as they are imitated by each instrument. Its relatively few surprises come from sudden changes in volume and complex harmonies. Still, the simple beauty of the movement has made it a favorite of many Beethoven experts, including Kerman and Helm.83 The fourth movement is a danza alla tedesca, marked allegro assai, in G major. The term “alla tedesca” means “in the German style,” that is, in three, like a German waltz. The Italian title is therefore a little disingenuous when used by a German composer living in Vienna, the city whose name has become synonymous with waltzing. The movement is in its way disingenuous as well. At the beginning, it is almost banal; it has both a tempo appropriate to a quick waltz (a curious regression for the composer who gave the world the absurdly fast scherzo), and an opening chord progression that is so standard that it has become a joke among composition students: I-VI-IV-V7-I, all in root position. Later on in the movement, Beethoven makes this very ordinary dance more interesting through some rhythmic variations, none of which would be too radical for the later, but simpler Strauß. In general, this simple dance movement serves as a short break in an extremely complex quartet. It also reminds the listener that Beethoven has not lost his ability to write a more traditional piece. The Italian title may even indicate Beethoven’s desire to demonstrate that he could easily have written many light melodic pieces to equal those of Rossini (whom he hated and whose success he envied),84 if he had wished to reduce the level of innovation in his works to that degree. The light tone and occasional off-beat rhythms in this dance (the ending is uncharacteristically delicate

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for Beethoven) reveal a parodic element behind the obvious grace and skill. Little of even the earliest of Beethoven’s works is as light as this movement; its extreme delicacy may well be ironic. If there were any doubts left after the danza alla tedesca about Beethoven’s ability to write a beautiful melodic line and work within the constraints of a very simple form, they would be dispelled by the fifth movement, a cavatina with a tempo marking of adagio molto espressivo. The cavatina is a song form, used traditionally in opera and even simpler than the da capo aria, usually with no repeated sections. Beethoven chooses E ♭ major as the key for this movement, a major third lower than the G major key of the previous movement and not too remote from B ♭ major, the home key of the quartet. The adagio tempo makes this movement the only true slow movement of the work, which, along with its simple structure and attention to melodic line, balances the lightness of the dance movements and the harmonic complexity of the first movement well. However, as Lewis Lockwood has observed,85 underneath the apparent simplicity of the cavatina lies considerable harmonic complexity. Beethoven carefully uses the cavatina to expand the possibilities of harmonic voice leading by combining an imitation of vocal music with a balanced and systematic probing of new possibilities. Lockwood describes these incursions into new harmonic territory succinctly: He intensifies the interactive role of the voices by unexpected shifts in register, both within instrumental parts and between instruments; by the resolution of dissonances in registers other than those in which they are introduced; and by the avoidance of traditional step and leap motions in the bass part. The bass achieves a participatory role in the motivic content and operates as little as possible in the role of harmonic support; in the Cavatina the avoidance of direct V-I motions in the bass at intermediate points of closure is one of the most striking features of the movement.86

Beethoven manages to make the cavatina sing despite intervals and harmonizations that would normally be considered out of the bounds of traditional vocal music. What he achieves by doing so is a greater sense of coherence between the individual lines of each instrument and a transition to the even greater liberties taken with voice leading in the original Große Fuge finale. The deliberately sparse use of V-I cadences emphasizes the point that Beethoven has been making all along in op. 130/133: that contrapuntal elements can be expanded to become part of the overall structure of the movement as effectively as harmonic elements are.

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string quartet no. 13: gro ß e fuge and finale The finale of op. 130/133 is one of the great curiosities of music history. Originally, Beethoven concluded his String Quartet No. 13 in B ♭ major with the Große Fuge, later published separately as Opus 133. The length and difficulty of the Große Fuge proved to be too much for its first performers, its first audience, and its first publisher alike.87 This fifteen-minute long movement was so far beyond the experience of Beethoven’s contemporaries that Beethoven’s publisher, Matthias Artaria, dared to write the notoriously stubborn composer and ask him for a simpler and more palatable finale for op. 130. To the publisher’s surprise, Beethoven agreed to replace the finale and allowed Artaria to publish the Große Fuge as a separate work. (Artaria’s suggestion that the Große Fuge be published separately may even have been motivated by his desire to mollify Beethoven with a financial incentive.88 ) The problem of the finale stayed on Beethoven’s mind until his death; the new finale became the last piece of music he ever finished. The little that is known for certain about the history of the Große Fuge and its replacement leaves many important questions unanswered. What motivated Beethoven to turn to the older form of the fugue to conclude a work this advanced? What kind of fugue is it? Why did he agree to replace it, and what does the new finale reveal about the work as a whole? To answer the first question, it is not enough to remember Dahlhaus’s definition of the Sp¨atwerk and say that the Große Fuge is merely that part of the work which looks back to the past; it is too long and too strange to be a deliberate anachronism alone. It does bear comparison to Bach’s Kunst der Fuge as one of the definitive works in the form, but, as Kerman points out, the Große Fuge is nothing like the practical and exemplary work that the Kunst der Fuge was, either in intent or execution.89 Understanding the Große Fuge requires consideration of the form of the fugue in its most basic definition: a single theme explored to its fullest extent by means of contrapuntal devices. Although the Große Fuge has many elements that are more appropriate to sonata form (contrasting sections and thematic transformations, among others), its specifically fugal elements serve the overall intention of op. 130 well; they emphasize thematic unity and interval (that is, contrapuntal) relations at the expense of harmonic unity and the tonic-dominant axis, just as the unusual modulations of the first movement did. Moreover, the fugal structure enables the movement to explore a wide range of tonal centers while leading back through the circle of fifths to the home key of B ♭, confirming the overall tonal unity of

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the work despite its abnormally large share of dissonance and complexity. The Große Fuge is in this respect an apt emblem for op. 130/133 as a whole; its unsettling quality stems from the same dialectical tensions inherent in the rest of the work: fugue and sonata, harmony and counterpoint. Ultimately, the dissonant quality of the Große Fuge has its origin in the clash between tradition and innovation; one hears the sound of rules being broken. In light of the obvious pains Beethoven took in writing the Große Fuge as the conclusion of the quartet, it is hard to understand now why the usually uncompromising Beethoven agreed to replace the Große Fuge with the much lighter finale of the published version of op. 130. However, from the perspective of a working composer in 1826, it is a little easier to comprehend Beethoven’s concession to Artaria and his audience. The Große Fuge is still an overwhelming and difficult work; to Beethoven’s contemporaries, it was virtually incomprehensible. To have it as the finale of an already long and arduous string quartet went beyond the overwhelming into the realm of absurdity. Even modern performers in an era of attention to historical accuracy and the composer’s original intentions sometimes hesitate to perform the work as it was first written. William Kinderman, on the other hand, makes an excellent case for keeping the Große Fuge as the finale, arguing that it is this form of the work that pushes most strongly toward new aesthetic perspectives. Of all Beethoven’s compositions, the original B ♭ Quartet is perhaps the most heavily end-weighted, with a diverse series of shorter and lighter movements followed by a colossal fugal essay. . . . Without the rest of the quartet, moreover, the Great Fuge is effectively orphaned, and the beginning of its elaborate Overatura loses point.90

From the distance of nearly two centuries, one cannot deny the essential unity and power of the work as originally written (although several critics have tried), yet neither can one question the judgment of an aging composer who had already received clear indications that he had reached the limits of his audience’s capacity to understand him. The allegro finale of the published version of op. 130 should therefore not be considered a weak compromise between composer and publisher, although it is far lighter and simpler than the Große Fuge. I argue instead that it invokes the irony seen in some of the earlier movements with subtlety and wit. The first phrase of the finale reflects the tone of the whole movement accurately (Example 8):

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Example 8. Opus 130, Sixth Movement, Measures 1–6.

The octave eighth-notes on G in the viola start the movement with a clocklike ticking. By now, the listener has already heard a movement in G major and has realized that the work has more than four movements, leaving open the question of whether what is about to follow is another quick middle movement or the actual finale. As the first violin enters with the melody, the question is put to rest; the eighth-notes were part of a V/V chord in the key of B ♭ major, the home key. The appearance of the tonic chord itself occurs briefly at the end of the second phrase and leads directly into a repetition of the melody in the second violin, with the ticking eighth-notes in the viola and first violin. To extend the metaphor further, the ticking clock, the driving motion of the circle of fifths, and the rondolike feeling of the finale make it clear that time has run out on this long composition. Beethoven is in a hurry to reassert the primacy of the tonic-dominant axis, if only to give the work a solid cadence at the end, but the extensive use of V/V chords and the predominance of fourthand fifth-related modulations (B ♭ -F-A ♭ -F-B ♭ -E ♭ -B ♭) as well as the deceptive ticking on G remind the listener that the tonic-dominant axis may not be as solid as it once was. A ticking clock and deceptive V/V cadences are among the more famous trademarks of Haydn, and the finale may well contain an element of tribute to the mentor whose life and career influenced those of Beethoven and Mozart so much. Nevertheless, one cannot forget how much further Beethoven has expanded the language of the string quartet in this work. If Beethoven looks back in homage to his predecessor and teacher at this point, he does so to balance how far he has already looked forward toward an expanded notion of tonality in the first movement. The ticking clock in this last movement also provides an ironic, if unintentional metaphor for its chronological position in Beethoven’s works; the composer died shortly

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after he completed this second finale. In turn, op. 130/133 as a whole is emblematic of the composer’s paradoxical career. It contains some of his most advanced musical thought, as well as some of his most traditional writing; parts of the composition were immediately acclaimed as works of genius, whereas other parts were ignored and even edited out. reception of the late quartets On the whole, however, the work was not appreciated by its first audience. Opus 130/133, as well as the other late quartets, remained generally misunderstood, misinterpreted, or merely unheard until late in the nineteenth century. As Griffiths observes of the next forty-five years after the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert in 1827 and 1828, The development of the string quartet virtually stopped, and even went backwards, for throughout this period, for different reasons, the highest achievements of the 1820’s remained little observed. Schubert’s G major quartet was not published until 1851, and the late quartets of Beethoven existed only on the fringes of the repertory, rarely played and rarely understood: the extreme case is the Große Fuge, which apparently lay unheard between its first performance in 1826 and a revival in Paris in 1853.91

That the Große Fuge, possibly Beethoven’s most difficult piece, was not a popular favorite is unsurprising, but that it languished unheard for twenty-seven years is shocking. Still, popular taste is, to a certain extent, inexplicable; Beethoven’s most popular work during his lifetime was, of course, op. 91, Wellingtons Sieg, one of his least successful works artistically. The Große Fuge is nearly its opposite: an extraordinary artistic achievement but not a commercial success until long after its composition. The Große Fuge – and the late works in general – also ended the direction of formal innovation Beethoven was exploring. Rather than finding new ways to maintain internal coherence within classical forms, mid- and late-nineteenth-century composers began to rely more on extra-musical elements, evincing the ever-growing necessity of characterizing music with literary ideas. Composers increasingly made a conscious effort to create expression, beginning an exchange between means and end which would influence the evolution of Romantic music. Music became increasingly programmatic, thus compromising its autonomy and paralleling the general movement toward sentimentality described in Schiller’s On Na¨ıve and Sentimental Poetry. This tendency to fragment inherently musical structures (which began with Schumann) continued to the point where, with

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Wagner, individual chords and leitmotives were identified with particular characters and situations. These were arranged according to plot considerations, further relegating purely musical structure to a position of secondary importance in the compositional process. By the beginning of the twentieth century, when interest in absolute music once again began to increase, the diatonic axis had been utterly shattered and composers began experimenting with alternate forms and systems. It is by no means a coincidence that interest in Beethoven’s late quartets and the elevation of their reputation as some of his finest works also occurred at that time. In a sense, the quartets represented the point at which music in and of itself had left off and the point to which abstract musical thought had to return to continue its development.92 Still, the present task is not so much to determine what Beethoven’s late quartets meant to Sch¨onberg and Webern93 as to determine what, in light of the historical and analytical observations already presented, op. 130/133 can mean to us now. We may actually be in a better position now to hear the central significance of this quartet than Beethoven’s contemporaries. Our ears, accustomed to sounds in both contemporary music and daily life that no one in the nineteenth century could imagine, are perhaps not so easily distracted by the jarring dissonances and discontinuities of op. 130/133 and therefore better able to hear it for the meditative study of the musical self that it is. Indeed, the overwhelming appeal that Beethoven’s late quartets have now that they did not have at the time they were composed is probably due to how contemporary they sound; there is so little that is noticeably archaic about them that they fit more seamlessly in a concert program with modern compositions than they do in a program with works by Mozart and Haydn. The fundamental reason for the present affinity for Beethoven’s late quartets lies in their characteristic inversion of formal and thematic structure, which, as Dahlhaus points out, is particularly clear in the case of op. 130: There is an exchange effect between expressive and structural moments, and as soon as the thematic elements become mere surface structure – even if they appear to fulfill the laws of formal doctrines – the expressive characteristics assume a mask-like appearance.94

Beyond the various patterns and structural principles that have already become clear through this analysis of op. 130/133 is an overriding concern at the core of the work’s existence: a desire to transform sonata form from a structural element to a surface element and to use the thematic material itself as the work’s fundamental structure. Both small-scale

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compositional decisions and the overall design of the entire work are based on the concept that form should be secondary to theme, instead of the reverse. For present-day listeners, for whom these formal conventions are anachronisms, this inversion gives op. 130/133 an artistic coherence that retains its full power where stricter adherence to classical sonata form would not. The formal conventions of sonata form are indeed kept in op. 130/133, but in the last two centuries their main function has changed from maintaining the intelligibility of the quartet to creating the dialectical tension between tradition and innovation that so clearly characterizes Beethoven’s late works. conclusion: the meaning of a quartet However, the Rezeptionsgeschichte of a work, as well as the reasons behind it, is not a substitute for analysis of the work itself but merely the means to that end. As we have seen throughout op. 130/133, constant, audible references to the past as well as a constant strain of thematic force against formal structure are not only characteristic of the work but actually constitutive of it. Just as the strain of three against two in a hemiola figure actually serves to reassert the meter when the normal rhythm is reestablished, so does the strain of tripartite tonal structure against a binary form – as well as the tension created by having six movements instead of four – serve to reassert the primacy of the tonic-dominant axis while apparently undermining it. In turn, Beethoven creates his own tonal language between the established norms of harmony and counterpoint. Opus 130/133 has a musical language unto itself, operating according to its own rules, while simultaneously participating in the discourse of traditional classical harmony, counterpoint, and sonata-allegro form. This is self-consciousness expressed in musical terms: an identity in musical discourse that becomes aware of itself through its opposition and contrast to the other of traditional musical form. This set of dialectical tensions, along with the primacy of thematic material over formal convention, creates the sense of self-consciousness communicated by op. 130/133 that exists not only in the minds of music historians but also in the actual aesthetic experience of the work. For the composer who is immediately identifiable to almost anyone in the Western world by the single opening motif of his Fifth Symphony, the thematic material is the assertion of the composer’s identity, the self as a musical theme. In op. 130/133, Beethoven’s creation of his own musical language over its

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conventional elements, and even over the normal limitations of classical tonality, demonstrates an even greater challenge than the assertion of the heroic self of his earlier work. Opus 130/133 is, in musical terms, the assertion of a self that looks back on its constitutive elements, and in a clear, audible, and real sense, achieves self-consciousness through this reflection. Whether or not the composer himself thought about his music in these terms, the same pattern of self-realization through dialectical opposition seen in early-nineteenth-century philosophical and poetic discourse also occurs in Beethoven’s late music. That music became a metaphor for selfconsciousness among philosophers and poets should not surprise us; its presence is implicit in the discourse of music itself.

chapter 6

The Persistence of Sound

Two hundred years have passed since the premiere of Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the publication of Hegel’s Phenomenology, the end of Wordsworth’s Golden Decade, and the beginning of H¨olderlin’s madness, yet their influence is everywhere. Beethoven’s works are performed, recorded, and downloaded more often than any composer except for perhaps Mozart. Hegel’s works are selling well, if not briskly, in any bookstore of reasonable size; his influence among intellectuals in many fields rivals that of Aristotle and Machiavelli. Wordsworth is an industry, with new editions of his poetry, along with biographies and critical works, coming out at a steady rate. Even H¨olderlin, who languished in obscurity for nearly a century, has many editions and translations going into multiple printings; his major critics, Heidegger, Szondi, Adorno, Henrich, and de Man, have themselves become objects of study. These four figures –, H¨olderlin, Hegel, Wordsworth, and Beethoven – occupy a greater place in the cultural imagination than ever, for reasons that have nothing to do with profit motives, official approval, or nostalgia. They remain important simply because their works address issues of identity, freedom, and beauty that still matter. Still, I feel obligated to make a brief case for their continued relevance that goes beyond the mere observation that so many people still find them important – too many intelligent writers have argued that their popularity is not necessarily the direct result of genuine value and that their works are merely artifacts of a more na¨ıve era. On a purely rational level, I understand and appreciate how the Industrial Revolution, the 1848 uprisings, the two World Wars, the Vietnam War, and now the seemingly ceaseless “War on Terror” might make the Romantic assertion of independent subjectivity and the primacy of the aesthetic seem quaint, ridiculous, or even pernicious. Nevertheless, I must assert the opposite. Adorno, as I discussed in the last chapter, heard the disintegration of the subjective self in Beethoven’s late works, and I cannot blame him or any member of his generation for perceiving a melancholy despair in their complex, and often dark, harmonic 176

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ruminations. Surely the late Beethoven can be heard grieving for his heroic past at times, but I believe that we can now hear something else as well: hope for the reintegration of the self through beauty. Yet is such an optimistic conclusion possible? Certainly, many people – from Karl Marx to Louis Althusser to Judith Butler – have made the case to the contrary in the last two centuries, and they have a point. We may well be in the grip of a relentless propaganda machine that sustains the hegemony of the ruling class and convinces us that whatever is, is right. Sufficient evidence for this claim can be found all around us, and these critiques have served the commendable purpose of revealing both the pompous subservience of many high-culture productions and the disingenuous nature of much public discourse – one does not necessarily have to be a radical to be troubled by the alliances among global media organizations, defense contractors, and government officials. Yet as the Idealists observed even of Kant’s works, a critique is not a system and does not solve the problem of spontaneity – the unconditional appearance of both conscious self and the apprehension of beauty. Consequently, these contemporary critiques of Idealism do not satisfy us very deeply either as metaphysics or as aesthetics. If the self and the aesthetic are all masks for social constructions, why do they persist when unmasked? And what would be the point of unmasking if nothing were left afterward? Even if our subjective selves have been constructed for us out of a web of socially determined performances and ideologies, we still treasure freedom and independence, and even if our aesthetic judgment is a Pavlovian response to predetermined conditions, we still long for beauty. I believe that we continue to value the self and the aesthetic for two reasons: because we need them and because they belong to us. We need the self fundamentally as a practical matter; no matter what Hume or the postmodernists say, H¨olderlin was right: we cannot say “I” without selfconsciousness, and we have to say “I” all the time, in many spheres, or we risk losing what makes us human. We need the aesthetic to restore our knowledge of who we are – self-knowledge, as Hegel tells us in the Phenomenology, begins with an aesthetic moment: the initial knowledge of sense-certainty that allows us to differentiate ourselves from the external world and to establish that whatever a sensation may mean, it is really happening, here and now. The aesthetic resides in this phenomenal moment; works of art, especially great ones, extend and intensify our experience of it. What distinguishes H¨olderlin, Wordsworth, and Beethoven from any number of their contemporaries is their ability to shape the concrete material of words or sounds into works that make this experience unavoidable – and

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therefore inexplicable in purely ideological terms. The well-known denial of history and politics in Romantic thought is not so much a hegemonic conspiracy as a recognition of human freedom and individuality – including the freedom to leave behind ideology and politics, if only for the time it takes to experience a work of art. For these reasons and many more, the works of the past that have the most significance for us now are those that place the immediate experience of the self and the aesthetic in greatest relief. They do so not because they have become monuments of art; their role as canonical works is secondary to what they are, and what they do, as I hope I have demonstrated in this book. Wordsworth and Beethoven have more or less topped the canon charts for many years – but what can explain H¨olderlin’s rise from obscurity? Barely known in Germany for much of the nineteenth century, and still far from well-known in the English-speaking world, he continues to rise against the grain of history and ideology, rather than because of it. Likewise, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony may be more of a monument than the Statue of Liberty, Mother Russia, and the V¨olkerschlacht Denkmal combined, but why it still has the same, enormous impact everywhere – from concert halls in California and Korea to the utterly decontextualized headphones of countless digital devices worn on heads all over the world – would remain incomprehensible without an understanding of how its exaltation of the human spirit transcends the solipsism of the individual ego and the false consciousness of nationalism. The extent to which these early Romantics have described, and in a sense, created, self-consciousness and the aesthetic has demonstrated, at least to my satisfaction, that they fulfill the conditions of valid philosophical ideas, even in our analytic age – they describe a defensible set of positions, and when we use these terms, others generally know what we mean. What matters far more is how much we need them, however, and how they belong to all of us. I do not believe many of us would want to live in a world without respect for the freedom of the individual or for the experience of beauty. I am also increasingly convinced that when ideological concerns displace this respect, the worst kinds of crimes suddenly become justifiable. We define ourselves by what we find most meaningful; the relationship between objects of beauty and the self-conscious beings who encounter them has an individual element that cannot be explained away and, indeed, should be valued. If these statements are themselves ideological, then let them be so – I shall still prefer them to any other, and I shall continue to hear a hopeful future in the sounds of the past.

Notes

chapter 1: self-consciousness and music in the late enlightenment 1. Marshall Brown, “Mozart and After: The Revolution in Musical Consciousness,” Turning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 154. 2. Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 3. Andrew Brook, Kant and the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 46. I should note that Brook translates Bewußtein and Selbstbewußtsein as “awareness” and “self-awareness.” In my view, when translating well-known terms that have a specialized meaning for a particular set of authors, it is often better to adhere to tradition than to risk confusion by attempting to improve the accuracy of the translation. I will therefore continue to translate these two terms as “consciousness” and “self-consciousness.” 4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), p. 180. Hereafter abbreviated CPR. The original reads as follows: Der oberste Grundsatz eben derselben in Beziehung auf den Verstand ist: daß alles Mannigfalitge der Anschauung unter Bedingungen der urspr¨unglich-synthetischen Einheit der Apperzeption stehe . . . unter dem [Prinzip], sofern sie in einem Bewustsein m¨ussen verbunden werden k¨onnen; denn ohne das kann nichts dadurch gedacht oder erkannt werden, weil die gegebenen Vorstellungen den Aktus der Apperzeption “Ich denke” nicht gemein haben und dadurch nicht in einem Selbsbewußtsein zusammengefaßt sein w¨urden.

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Berlin: Cassirer, 1922), A 117 = B 136–7. I include the page numbers from the original A and B versions of Kant’s works according to standard practice. The original is hereafter abbreviated KrV. 5. Brook, Kant, pp. 64–6. 6. Kant, CPR, p. 74. A 21 = B 36. The original reads as follows: ¨ Die Deutschen sind die einzigen, welche sich jetzt des Worts Asthetik bedienen, um dadurch das zu bezeichnen, was andere Kritik des Geschmacks heißen. Es liegt hier eine verfehlte Hoffnung zum Grunde, die der vortreffliche Analyst Baumgarten faßte, die kritische Beurteilung des Sch¨onen unter Vernunftprinzipien zu bringen, und die Regeln derselben zur Wissenschaft zu erheben. Allein diese Bem¨uhung is vergeblich.

179

180

Notes to pages 8–15 Denn gedachte Regeln order Kriterien sind ihren vornehmsten Quellen nach bloß empirisch und k¨onnen also niemals zu bestimmten Gesetzen a priori dienen. . . . Um deswillen ist es ratsam, diese Benennung entweder widerum eingehen zu lassen und sie derjenigen Lehre aufzubehalten . . . oder sich in diese Benennung mit der speku¨ lativen Philosophie zu teilen und Asthetik teils im transzendentalen Sinne, teils in pyschologischer Bedeutung zu nehmen. Kant, KrV, A, pp. 56–7 = B, p. 35.

7. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968) p. 74. A V = B V. The original is hereafter abbreviated KdU; the first page number refers to the Suhrkamp edition, and A and B page numbers refer to page numbers used in the two editions published during Kant’s lifetime. 8. KdU, p. 207. A 129 = B 131. 9. Author’s translation. Hereafter, all unattributed translations are the author’s. The original reads as follows: Mit einer Wahrnehmung kann aber auch unmittlebar ein Gef¨uhl der Lust (oder Unlust) und ein Wohlgefallen verbunden werden, welches die Vorstellung des Objekts begleitet und derselben statt Pr¨adikats dient, und so ein a¨sthetisches Urteil, welches kein Erkenntnisurteil ist, entspringen. Einem solchen, wenn es nicht bloßes Empfindungs- sondern ein formales Reflexions-Urteil ist, welches dieses Wohlgefallen jederman als notwendig ansinnet, muß etwas als Prinzip a priori zum Grunde liegen, welches allenfalls ein bloß subjektives sein mag (wenn ein objektives zu solcher Art Urteile unm¨oglich sein sollte), aber auch als ein solches einer Deduktion bedarf, damit begriffen werde, wie ein a¨esthetisches Urteil auf Notwendigkeit Anspruch machen k¨onne. KdU, pp. 218–19. A 145–6 = B 147–8.

10. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian MacLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 38. 11. Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 73. 12. The original reads as follows: Die K¨unste des sch¨onen Spiels der Empfindungen (die von außen erzeugt werden), und das sich gleichwohl doch muß allgemein mitteilen lassen, kann nicht anders, als die Proportion der verschiedenen Grade der Stimmung (Spannung) des Sinns, dem die Empfindung angeh¨ort, d.i. den Ton desselben, betreffen; und in dieser weitl¨auftigen Bedeutung des Worts kann sie in das k¨unstliche Spiel der Empfindungen des Geh¨ors und der des Gesichts, mithin in Musik und Farbenkunst, eingeteilt werden. KdU, pp. 262–3. A 208–9 = B 211.

13. Edward Lippmann, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 133. 14. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Origins of Languages, excerpted in The Essential Rousseau, trans. J. H. Mason, ed. J. H. Moran (New York: Quartet Books, 1974), pp. 96–7. 15. Carl Dahlhaus, Esthetics of Music, trans. William Austin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 31–3. 16. Peter Kivy, The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 256–7. 17. Dieter Henrich, “Fichtes urspr¨ungliche Einsicht,” Subjektivit¨at und Metaphysik (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1966), pp. 188–232.

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18. Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 49. 19. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, pp. 48–50. 20. G¨unther Z¨oller, “An Eye for an I: Fichte’s Transcendental Experiment,” in Figuring the Self: Subject, Absolute, and Others in Classical German Philosophy, ed. David E. Klemm and G¨unter Z¨oller (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), p. 78. 21. The original reads as follows: Er denke sich hingegen einen a¨ußern Gegenstand. Er wird sich dabei nicht als das Denkende des Objekts bemerken, daß er das Denkende des Objekts sei, sondern gleichsam im Objekt verschwinden. Es findet sich aber leicht und offenbar, daß das Denkende und Gedachte von einander verschieden sei. . . . Verschieden sind sie dadurch: bei der Vorstellung meines Ichs ist das Denkende und Gedachte ebendasselbe – im Begriffe des Ichs. Ich bin das Denkende und Gedachte. Bei jenen ging die T¨atigkeit außer mir; hier aber geht die T¨atigkeit auf mich selbst zur¨uck.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo (1798) in Schriften aus den jahren 1790–1800: Nachgelassene Schriften II, ed. Hans Jacob (Berlin: Junker & D¨unnhaupt Verlag, 1937), p. 354. Excerpted in Manfred Frank, ed. Selbstbewußtseinstheorien von Ficthe bis Sartre (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 10. 22. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 7. (Text contains both German and English.) 23. G¨unther Z¨oller, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 12. 24. The original reads as follows: Jetzt aber herrscht das Bed¨urfnis und beugt die gesunkene Menschheit unter sein tyrannisches Joch. Der Nutzen ist das grosse Idol der Zeit, dem alle Kr¨afte fronen und all Talente huldigen sollen. . . . Selbst der philosophische Untersuchungsgeist entreisst der Einbildungskraft eine Provinz nach der andern, und die Grenzen der Kunst verengen sich, je mehr die Wissenschaft ihre Schranken erweiteret. (Schiller, Aesthetic Education, pp. 7–8)

25. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, p. 9. 26. Terry Pinkard discusses the difference between Bildung and Erziehung and its importance for intellectuals of the 1790s in Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 49. 27. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, pp. 102–5. 28. The original reads as follows: Die Musik in ihrer h¨ochsten Veredlung muss Gestalt werden und mit der ruhigen Macht der Antike auf uns wirken; die bildende Kunst in ihrer h¨ochsten Vollendung muss Musik werden und uns durch unmittelbare sinnliche Gegenwart r¨uhren; die Poesie in ihrere vollkommensten Ausbildung muss uns, wie die Tonkunst, m¨achtig fassen, zugleich aber, wie die Plastik, mit ruhiger Klarheit umgeben. Darin eben zeigt sich der vollkommene Stil in jeglicher Kunst, dass er die spezifischen Schranken derselben zu entfernen weiss, ohne doch ihre spezifischen Vorz¨uge mit aufzuheben, und durch eine

182

Notes to pages 17–21 weise Benutzung ihre Eignet¨umlichkeit ihr einen mehr allgemeinen Charakter erteilt. (Schiller, Aesthetic Education, pp. 154–5)

29. Schiller’s reference here to “the serene power of antiquity” is explored more fully in Na¨ıve and Sentimental Poetry, where he distinguishes na¨ıve, original artistic creation from sentimental longing for a lost past. Friedrich Schiller, On Na¨ıve and Sentimental Poetry, trans. Julias A. Elias (New York: F. Ungar, 1966). 30. The original reads as follows: H¨olderlin hat im Fr¨uhjahr 1795, wenig mehr als ein Jahr nach dem theologischen Examen, an der Jenaer Universit¨at, unter Fichtes Einfluß und zugleich im Gegenzug gegen ihn, eine eigene philosophische Position formuliert. Sie hat Hegel, zwei Jahre sp¨ater und im in Frankfurt erneuerten Gespr¨ach der Freunde, zu einer f¨ur seinen Weg entscheidende Wende veranlaßt. Schelling, der mit f¨unfzehn Jahren 1790 ins Stift eingetreten war, hat noch vor seinem Examen mit zwei Schriften in die nachkantische Entwicklung eingegriffen – als erster Autor u¨ berhaUniversity Presst, der wie er selbst an Hegel schrieb, “den neuen Helden, Fichte, im Lande der Wahrheit” begr¨ußte.

Dieter Henrich, “Philosophisch-theologische Problemlagen im T¨ubinger Stift zur Studienzeit Hegels, H¨olderlins und Schellings,” Konstellationen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), pp. 174–5. 31. F. W. J. Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1962), p. 32. 32. The original reads as follows: Das Selbstbewußtsein ist ein Akt, aber durch jeden Akt kommt uns etwas zustande. – Jedes Denken ist ein Akt, und jedes bestimmte Denken ein bestimmter Akt; aber durch jedes solches entsteht uns auch ein bestimmter Begriff. Der Begriff is nichts anderes, als der Akt des Denkens selbst, und abstrahiert von diesem Akt ist er nichts. Durch den Akt des Sebstbewußtseins muß uns gleichfalls ein Begriff entstehen, und dieser is kein anderer als der des Ich. Indem ich mir durch das Selbsbewußtsein zum Objekt werde, ensteht mir mir der Begriff des Ich, und umgekehrt, der Begriff des Ich ist nur der Begriff des Selbstobjektwerdens. (Schelling, System, p. 35)

33. Schelling, System, pp. 37–8. 34. Werner Marx, “Schelling and Hegel,” The Philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling, trans. Thomas Nennon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 36. 35. Schelling, System, p. 281. 36. The original reads as follows: [W]ie kann außer Zweifel gesetzt werden, daß sie [intellektuelle Anschauung] nicht auf einer bloß subjektiven T¨auschung beruhe, wenn es nicht eine allgemeine, und von allen Meschen anerkannte Objektivit¨at jener Anschauung gibt? Diese allgemein anerkannte und auf keine Weise hinwegzuleugnende Objektivit¨at der intelllektuellen Anschauung is die Kunst selbst. Denn die a¨sthetische Anschauung eben ist die objektiv gewordene intellektuelle. (Schelling, System, p. 294)

37. The original reads as follows: Die nothwendige Form der Musik ist die Succession. – Denn Zeit ist allgemeine Form der Einbildung des Unendlichen ins Endlich, sofern als Form, abstrahirt von dem Realen, angeschaut. Das Prinzip der Zeit im Subjekt is das Selbstbewußtseyn,

Notes to pages 21–26

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welches eben die Einbildung der Einheit des Bewußtseins in die Vielheit im Idealien ist. Hieraus is die nahe Verwandschaft des Geh¨orsinns u¨ berhaupt und der Musik und der Rede insbesondere mit dem Selbstbewußtsein begriffen. – Es l¨aßt sich hieraus auch lorl¨aufig, bis wir die noch h¨ohere Bedeutung davon aufgezeigt haben, die arithmetische Seite der Musik begriffen.

38.

39. 40. 41.

F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlich Buchhandlung, 1966), p. 135. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy review the provenance of the document in The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), p. 27. The original text can be found in Friedrich H¨olderlin, S¨amtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Friedrich Beißner (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1961), IV, 1, pp. 297–9, with Beißner’s commentary on pp. 425–6. Pinkard’s analysis of the text in Hegel: A Biography also suggests that it represents H¨olderlin’s work (p. 136). The original reads as follows: Die erste Idee ist nat¨urlich die Vorstellung von mir selbst, als einem absolut freien Wesen. Mit dem freyen, selbstbewußten Wesen tritt zugleich eine ganze Welt – aus dem Nichts hervor – die einzig wahre und gedenkbare Sch¨opfung aus Nichts . . . (H¨olderlin, Werke, IV, 1, p. 297)

42. The original reads as follows: Zuletzt die Idee, die alle vereinigt, die Idee der Sch¨onheit, das Wort in h¨oherem platonischem Sinne genommen. Ich bin nun u¨ berzeugt, daß der h¨ochste Akt der Vernunft, der, indem sie alle Ideen umfast, ein a¨sthetischer Akt ist, und daß Wahrheit und G¨ute, nur in der Sch¨onheit verschwistert sind. Der Philosoph muß eben so viel Kraft besizen, als der Dichter. (H¨olderlin, Werke, IV, 1, p. 298)

43. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy see this as evidence of H¨olderlin’s influence, if not authorship, of the document. See The Literary Absolute, note 4, pp. 131–2. 44. Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 48. 45. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 36. 46. Jim Samson, “The Musical Work and Nineteenth-Century Music History,” in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 11–12. 47. Letter to Abb´e Bullinger, 7 August 1778, in W. A. Mozart, The Letters of Mozart and His Family, trans. and ed. Emily Anderson (London: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 713–14. Also excerpted in Tim Carter, W. A. Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 1. 48. John Rink, “The Profession of Music,” in The Cambridge History of NineteenthCentury Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 67. 49. Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 17.

184 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

Notes to pages 27–35 Charles Rosen, The Classical Style (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 195–6. Rosen, The Classical Style, p. 244. Maynard Solomon, Mozart (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 301. Reprinted and translated in Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, trans. Eric Blom, Peter Branscome, and Jeremy Noble (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), pp. 273–4. Also excerpted in Carter, Mozart, p. 36. W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, Le nozze di Figaro, Act I, Scene 3. Dieter Henrich, Der Grund im Bewußtsein: Untersuchung zu H¨olderlins Denken (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992). Bowie, Aesthetics, p. 126. Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (New York: Schirmer, 1977), p. 37. ¨ chapter 2: h olderlin’s deutscher gesang and the music of poetic self-consciousness

1. Beate Julia Perry, in Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), gives an excellent account of the Schlegel brothers’ aptly named “poetological” enterprise and its relation to music. 2. Gerhard Kurz and Manfred Frank, “Ordo Inversus. Zu einer Reflexionsfigur bei Novalis, H¨olderlin, Kleist, und Kafka,” in Geist und Zeichen. Festschrift f¨ur Arthur Henkel, ed. H. Anton et al. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universit¨atsverlag, 1977), pp. 75–97. 3. Dieter Henrich, “H¨olderlin u¨ ber Urteil und Sein: Eine Studie zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Idealismus,” H¨olderlin Jahrbuch 14 (1965–6), 73–96. ¨ 4. Manfred Frank, Einf¨uhrung in die fr¨uhromantische Asthetik: Vorlesungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 137–54. 5. Dieter Henrich, “H¨olderlin on Judgment and Being,” The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on H¨olderlin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 74–5. 6. The original reads as follows: Urtheil. ist im h¨ochsten und strengsten Sinne die urspr¨ungliche Trennung des in der intellektualen Anschauung innigst vereinigten Objects und Subjects, diejenige Trennung, wodurch erst Objekt und Subjekt m¨oglich wird, die Ur=teilung. Im Begriffe der Theilung liegt schon der Begriff der gegenseitigen Beziehung des Objects und Subjects aufeinander, und die nothwendige Voraussezung eines Ganzen, wovon Object und Subject die Teile sind. »Ich bin Ich« ist das passendste Beispiel zu diesem Begriffe der Urtheilung, als Theoretischer Urtheilung, denn in der praktischen Urtheilung sezt es sich dem Nichtich, nicht sich selbst entgegen.

Friedrich H¨olderlin, “Urtheil und Seyn,” S¨amtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Friedrich Beißner (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1961), Vol. IV, p. 216. Beißner’s commentary is on pp. 245–6. This edition of H¨olderlin’s works hereafter referred to as StA, followed by volume and page number. H¨olderlin’s original spelling is preserved.

Notes to pages 36–39

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7. Andrzej Warminski discusses the problem of the essay’s sequence in Readings in Interpretation: H¨olderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 4–11. 8. The original reads as follows: Wie kann ich sagen: Ich! ohne Selbstbewußtseyn? Wie ist aber Selbstbewußtseyn m¨oglich? Dadurch daß ich mich mir selbst entgegenseze, mich von mir selbst trenne, aber ungeachtet dieser Trennung mich im entgegengesezten als dasselbe erkenne. Aber in wieferne als dasselbe? Ich kann, ich muß so fragen; denn in einer andern R¨ucksicht ist es sich entgegengesezt. Also ist die Identit¨at keine Vereinigung des Objects und Subjects, die schlechthin stattf¨ande, also ist die Identit¨at nicht = dem absoluten Seyn. (StA IV, p. 217)

9. Henrich, Remembrance, p. 86. 10. David Constantine, H¨olderlin, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 54–8. 11. The original reads as follows: ich suche mir die Idee eines unendlichen Progresses der Philosophie zu entwickeln, ich suche zu zeigen, daß die unnachl¨aßliche Forderung, die an jedes System gemacht werden muß, die Vereinigung des Subjekts und Objekts in einem absoluten – Ich oder wie man es nennen will – zwar a¨sthetisch, in der intellektualen Anschauung, theoretisch aber nur durch eine unendliche Ann¨aherung m¨oglich ist, wie die Ann¨aherung des Quadrats zum Zirkel, und daß, um ein System des Denkens zu realisieren, eine Unsterblichkeit ebenso notwendig ist, als sie es ist f¨ur en System des Handelns. Ich glaube dadurch beweisen zu k¨onnen, inwieferne de Skeptiker recht haben, und inwieferne nicht. No. 104. (StA, VI, p. 196)

12. No. 117. StA VI, pp. 218–19. ¨ 13. Ferdinand von Lindemann, “Uber die Zahl π ,” Mathematische Annalen 20 (1882), 212–25. See Peter Beckman, History of Pi, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971), p. 168. 14. Descartes’s well-known division between the mind and the body, part of his overall proof of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, can be found in “Meditations on First Philosophy,” Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), pp. 92–103. 15. Dieter Henrich, Der Grund im Bewußtsein: Untersuchungen zu H¨olderlins Denken (1794–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), pp. 127–8. 16. Martin Heidegger, Erl¨auterung zu H¨olderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt: Kloster, 1951), p. 47. 17. Theodor A. Adorno, “Parataxis,” Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 447–91. 18. Paul de Man, “Heidegger’s Exegesis of H¨olderlin,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971, 1983), pp. 246–66. 19. The original reads as follows: Der Dichter selbst steht zwischen jenen – den G¨ottern, und diesem – dem Volk. Er ist ein Hinausgeworfener – hinaus in jenes Zwischen, zwischen den G¨ottern und den Menschen. Aber allein und zuerst in diesem Zwischen entscheidet es sich, wer der

186

Notes to pages 39–43 Mensch sei und wo er sein Dasein ansiedelt. “Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde.” Unausgesetzt und immer sicherer, aus der F¨ulle der andr¨angenden Bilder und immer einfacher hat H¨olderlin diesem Zwischenbereich sein dichterisches Wort geweiht.

Heidegger, Erl¨auterung, p. 47. 20. De Man points out that the quotation in this particular paragraph, “Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde,” is probably apocryphal (p. 250). 21. Paul de Man, “Temporality in H¨olderlin’s ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage . . . ,’” in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 55. The essay is a transcription of a lecture given in 1967. 22. Lawrence Ryan, H¨olderlins Lehre vom Wechsel der T¨one (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960), p. 130. 23. Cyrus Hamlin, “The Philosophy of Poetic Form,” in ed. Aris Fioretos, The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich H¨olderlin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 292 and 311. 24. Wolfgang Seifert, Christian Gottfried K¨orner: ein Musik¨asthetiker der deutschen Klassik (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse: 1960), p. 7. 25. The original reads as follows: L¨ost sich nicht die idealische Katastrophe, dadurch, daß der nat¨urliche Anfangston zum Gegensatze wird, ins heroische auf? L¨ost sich nicht die nat¨urliche Katastrophe, dadurch, daß der heroische Anfangston zum Gegensatze wird, ins idealische auf? L¨ost sich nicht die heroische Katastrophe, dadurch, daß der idealische Anfangston zum Gegensatze wird, ins nat¨urliche auf? (StA IV, 1, p. 238)

26. The original reads as follows: Auch in der Musik giebt es zwar ein Ziel der Bewegung, den Hauptton der Melodie. In dem Verh¨altnisse, wie sich die Fortschreitung des Klangs diesem Ziele n¨ahert, oder sich von ihm entfernt, vermehrt oder vermindert sich die Befriedigung des Ohrs. Aber dieses Ziel der musikalischen Bewegung bezeichnet nichts in der sichtbaren Welt. Was es andeutet, is ein unbekanntes Etwas, das von der Phantasie nach Willk¨ur als irgend ein einzelner Gegenstand, oder als eine Summe von Gegenst¨anden, als die Außenwelt u¨ berhaupt gedacht werden kann.

¨ Charakterdarstellung in der Musik, reprinted Christian Gottfried K¨orner, Uber in Seifert, Christian Gottfried K¨orner, p. 154. English version, in Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries, ed. and trans. Peter le Huray and James Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 178. 27. The original reads as follows: Wohl f¨ur das epische Gedicht. Das tragische Gedicht gehet um einen Ton weiter, das lyrische gebraucht diesen Ton als Gegensaz und kehrt auf diese Art, bei jedem Styl, in seinen Anfangston zur¨uk oder: Das epische Gedicht h¨ort mit seinem anf¨anglichem Gegensatz, das tragische mit dem Tone seiner Katastrophe, das lyrische mit sich selber

Notes to pages 43–52

187

auf, so daß das lyrische Ende ein naividealisches, das tragische ein naivheroisches, das epische ein idealischheroisches ist. (StA IV, 2, p. 238)

28. Szondi, H¨olderlin-Studien, p. 113. 29. Friedrich H¨olderlin: Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) p. 173. 30. John Jay Baker, “Poetic Calling, Poetic Failure: Self-reflexivity in Texts of H¨olderlin, Wordsworth, and Shelley,” Modern Language Notes, 105 (1990), 915. 31. Guido Schmidlin, H¨olderlins Ode: Dichterberuf (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1958), p. 20. The original reads: “Wer beruft der Dichter? Beruft er sich selbst oder hat er auf “h¨oheren” Ruf sein Werk zu leisten? H¨olderlin stellt diese Frage, indem er sie dichtet.” 32. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, p. 175. 33. Ibid. 34. The original reads as follows: Wir lernen nichts schwerer als das Nationelle frei gebrauchen. Und wie ich glaube, ist gerade die Klarheit der Darstellung uns urspr¨unglich so nat¨urlich wie den Griechen das Feuer von Himmel. Eben deßwegen werden diese eher in sch¨oner Leidenschaft, die Du Dir auch erhalten hast, als in jener Homerischen Geistesgegenwart und Darstellungsgaabe zu u¨ bertreffen seyn. Es klingt paradox. Aber ich behaupt’ es noch einmal, und stelle es Deiner Pr¨ufung und Deinem Gebrauche frei, das eigentlich nationelle wird im Fortschritt der Bildung immer der geringere Vorzug werden. Deßwegen sind die Griechen des heiligen Pathos weniger Meister, weil es ihnen angeboren war, hingegen sind sie vorz¨uglich in Darstellungsgaabe, von Homer an, weil dieser außerordentliche Mensch seelenvoll genug war, um die abendl¨andische Junonische N¨uchternheit f¨ur sein Apollonsreich zu erbeuten, und so wahrhaft das fremde sich anzueignen. Bei uns ists umgekehrt. Desswegen ists auch so gef¨ahrlich sich die Kunstregeln einzig und allein von griechischer Vortreflichkeit zu abstrahieren. (StA VI, p. 426.)

¨ 35. Peter Szondi, “Der Uberwindug des Klassizisums,” in H¨olderlinstudien (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 95–118. 36. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative,” H¨olderlin Jahrbuch 22 (1980–1), 47–68. 37. Andrzej Warminski, “H¨olderlin in France,” Readings in Interpretation: H¨olderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 23–44. 38. Szondi, H¨olderlinstudien, p. 102. 39. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Caesura,” p. 212. 40. Warminski, Readings, p. 33. 41. Warminski, Readings, p. 35. 42. De Man, Blindness, p. 190. 43. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, p. 243. 44. Ibid. 45. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, p. 245. 46. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, pp. 245–7.

188

Notes to pages 52–66

47. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, p. 247. 48. See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), for an excellent history of Boyle’s discoveries and their significance. 49. See David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), pp. 100–19 for the empiricist refutation of the existence of miracles. 50. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, p. 247. 51. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, pp. 247–9. 52. Paul de Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) pp. 8–9. 53. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, p. 249. 54. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) 55. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, p. 253. 56. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, p. 463. 57. In this regard, Jochen Schmidt has argued that the role of Pietistic Millennialism and Revelation in H¨olderlin’s late poetry has been neglected and is the key to understanding his overall poetic project. Although I agree that this aspect of H¨olderlin’s religious background is important, I cannot believe its role in his late poetry is as central and as structured as Schmidt claims it is. H¨olderlin failed to fulfill his obligation to become a Lutheran minister after leaving the T¨ubinger Stift and was involved with Isaac Sinclair’s radical politics; a Pietistic Millennialist would have found these actions immoral. Instead, I would suggest that this is one element among many involved in the creation of H¨olderlin’s late work and part of an overall project that is primarily literary, rather than religious or historical. See Jochen Schmidt, H¨olderlins Elegie “Brod und Wein”; die Entwicklung des hymnischen Stils in der elegischen Dichtung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968) pp. 185–8. 58. Karlheinz Stierle, “Dichtung und Auftrag: H¨olderlins ‘Patmos’-Hymne,” H¨olderlin Jahrbuch 22 (1980–1), 52. 59. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, pp. 475–7. 60. StA II, 2, p. 677. 61. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, p. 373. 62. Ibid. 63. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, p. 375. 64. Renate B¨oschenstein-Sch¨afer, “Die Sprache des Zeichens in H¨olderlins hymnischen Fragmenten,” H¨olderlin Jahrbuch 19–20 (1975–7), 283. 65. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, pp. 375–7. 66. See William Alexander O’Brien, “Getting Blasted: H¨olderlin’s ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage . . . ’” Modern Language Notes 94 (1979), 571–86, for an excellent textual history of this poem which takes its fragmentary ending into account. 67. See StA II, 2, pp. 667–79. 68. Hamburger, H¨olderlin, p. 377.

Notes to pages 68–74

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chapter 3: hegel’s aesthetic theory: self-consciousness and musical material 1. Johann Gottfried Herder, in Peter le Huray and James Day (eds.), Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), p. 189. 2. Excerpted in Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 626–7. 3. Pinkard, Hegel, p. 114. 4. Yolanda Espi˜na, “Kunst als Grenze: Die Musik bei Hegel,” Jahrbuch f¨ur Hegelforschung 3 (1997), 103f. See also Pinkard, Hegel, pp. 593 and 612. 5. Robert Pippin rightly calls the characterization of Hegel as someone who claimed that virtually everything “was necessitated by the requirements of a progressing spirit,” however accurate, somewhat beside the point. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 10–11. 6. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, “Ph¨anomen versus System,” in Ph¨anomen versus System: zum Verh¨altnis von Systematik und Kunsturteil in Hegels Berliner ¨ Vorlesungen u¨ ber Asthetik oder Philosophie der Kunst, ed. Annemarie GethmannSiefert, Hegelstudien Beiheft 34 (1992), pp. 9–10. 7. Gethmann-Siefert, “Ph¨anomen,” p. 20. 8. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), I, p. 28. All English translations of ¨ Hegel’s Asthetik are from this text, the best available. Specific references are designated by Aesthetics, followed by volume and page number. 9. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, introduction to G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen u¨ ber die Philosophie der Kunst: Berlin 1823, transcribed by H. G. Hotho (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998), p. xx. 10. Hotho’s explanation of how the text of the Lectures on Aesthetics was prepared is ¨ reproduced in G. W. F. Hegel, Die Idee und das Ideal. Einleitung in die Asthetik. Mit den beiden Vorreden von Heinrich Gustav Hotho, ed. Wolfhart Henckmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1967), p. 8. 11. Stephen Bungay, Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 7. 12. Pinkard, Hegel, pp. 256–7. 13. Andrzej Warminski, Readings in Interpretation: H¨olderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 166. 14. See Christof Schalhorn, “Hegels Enzyklop¨adischer Begriff von Selbstbewußtsein,” Hegelstudien Beiheft 43 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2000), pp. 88– 156. 15. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 16. The original reads as follows: Die Aufgabe, das Individuum von seinem ungebildeten Standpunkte aus zum Wissen zu f¨uhren, war in ihrem allgemeinen Sinn zu fassen und das allgemeine Individuum, der selbstbewußte Geist, in siener Bildung zu betrachten. –Was das Verh¨altnis beider

190

Notes to pages 74–77 betrifft, so zeigt sich indem allgemeinen Individuum jedes Moment, wie es die konkrete Form und eigne Gestaltung gewinnt.

G. W. F. Hegel, Ph¨anomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952), p. 26. 16. Hegel, Phenomenology, pp. 16–17. The original reads: so sehen wir in Ansehung der Kenntnisse das, was in fr¨uhern Zeitaltern den reifen Geist ¨ der M¨annner besch¨aftigte, zu Kentnissen, Ubungen und selbst Spielen des Knabenalters herabgesunken und werden in dem p¨adagogischen Fortschreiten die wei in Schattenrisse nachgezeichenete Geschichte der Bildung der Welt erkennen. . . . Die Bildung in dieser R¨ucksicht bestehet, von der Seite des Individuums aus betrachtet, darin, daß es dies Vorhandne erwerbe, seine unorganische Natur in sich zehre und f¨ur sich in Besitz nehme. Dies ist aber von der Seite des allgemeinen Geistes als der Substanz nichts anders, als daß dies sich ihr Selbstbewußtsein gibt, ihr Werden und ihre Reflexion in sich hervorbringt. (Hegel, Ph¨anomenologie, p. 27)

¨ 17. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, “Die Asthetik in Hegels System der Philosophie” in Hegel: Einf¨uhrung in seiner Philosophie, ed. Otto P¨oggeler (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1977), p. 140. Author’s translation. The original reads: Die “Ph¨anomenologie,” die den Geistbegriff als Weg des individuell-geschichtlichen Wissens zu absolutem Wissen entwickelt, ordnet deshalb Kunst und Religion als objektive und subjektive Seite der Erfassung des Absoluten, d.i. Anschauung und Vorstellung, eindeutig der Philosophie, dem absoluten Wissen unter.

18. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen u¨ ber die Philosophie der Kunst: Berlin 1823, transcribed by H. G. Hotho (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998), p. 204. See also a letter from Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy to W. Taubert, No. 675, Hegel in Berichten seiner Zeitgenossen, ed. G¨unther Nicolin (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1970), p. 432. 19. “Sie [sculpture] stellt die g¨ottliche Gestalt selbst auf. Der Gott wohnt seiner ¨ Außerlichkeit ein in stiller, seliger, erstarrter Ruhe.” Hegel, Vorlesungen: Berlin 1823, p. 38. ¨ 20. Aesthetics I, p. 520. In German, G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesung u¨ ber die Asthetik, ed. F. Bassenge (Berlin: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1965), I, p. 501. All further citations ¨ of Hegel’s Asthetik are from this text, which is based on H. G. Hotho’s revised second edition (1842) of his transcriptions. Specific references are designated ¨ by Asthetik, followed by volume and page number. The original reads: Indem dadurch das wirkliche Subjekt die Erscheinung Gottes ist, gewinnt die Kunst ¨ jetzt erst das h¨ohere Recht, die menschliche Gestalt und Weise, der Außerlichkeit u¨ berhaupt zum Ausdruck des Absoluten zu verwenden, obschon die neue Aufgabe der Kunst nun darin bestehen kann, in dieser Gestalt nicht die Versenkung des Inneren in die a¨ußere Lieblichkeit, sondern umgekehrt die Zur¨ucknahme des Inneren in sich, das geistige Bewußtsein Gottes im Subjekt zur Anschauung zu bringen.

21. Aesthetics I, p. 28. In the original text: Zwar bedarf in dieser Beziehung die eine Kunst mehr als die andere des Bewußtseins und der Erkenntnis solchen Gehaltes. Die Musik z.B., welche es sich nur mit der

Notes to pages 77–81

191

ganz unbestimmten Bewegung des geistigen Inneren, mit dem T¨onen gleichsam der gedankenlosen Empfindung zu tun macht, hat wenigen oder keinen geistigen Stoff im Bewußtsein vonn¨oten. Das musikalische Talent k¨undigt sich darum auch am meisten in sehr fr¨uher Jugend, bei noch leerem Kopfe und wenig bewegtem Gem¨ute an und kann beizeiten schon, ehe noch Geist und Leben sich erfahren haben, zu sehr bedeutender H¨ohe gelangt sein; wie wir denn auch oft genug eine sehr große Virtuousit¨at in musikalischer Komposition und Vortrage neben bedeutender D¨urftigkeit des Geistes ¨ und Charakters bestehen sehen. (Asthetik I, p. 38)

22. Hegel, Aesthetics I, p. 28 ff. 23. Aesthetics I, p. 38. In the original text: Deshalb ist das Sinnliche im Kunstwerk im Vergleich mit dem unmittelbaren Dasein der Naturdinge zum bloßen Schein erhoben, und das Kunstwerk steht in der Mitte zwischen der unmittelbaren Sinnlichkeit und dem ideellen Gedanken. Es ist noch nicht reiner Gedanke, aber seiner Sinnlichkeit zum Trotz auch nicht mehr bloßes materielles Dasein, wie Steine, Pflanzen und organisches Leben, sondern das Sinnliche im Kunstwerk ist selbst ein ideelles, das aber, als nicht das Ideelle des Gedankens, zugleich als Ding noch ¨ a¨ußerlich vorhanden ist. (Asthetik I, p. 48)

24. Aesthetics I, p. 75. In the original text: Die Kunstformen sind deshalb nichts als die verschiedenen Verh¨altnisse von Inhalt und Gestalt, Verh¨altnisse welche aus der Idee selbst hervorgehen und dadurch den wahren Einteilungsgrund dieser Sph¨are geben. Denn die Einteilung muß immer in ¨ dem Begriffe liegen, dessen Besonderung und Einteilung sie ist. (Asthetik I, p. 82)

25. Period designations became common around this time, especially in response to systematic, large-scale works on the history of art, such as Winckelmann’s Kunstgeschichte. 26. Konrad Sch¨uttauf, Die Kunst und die bildenen K¨unste: Eine Auseinandersetzung ¨ mit Hegels Asthetik (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1984), p. 62. ¨ 27. Asthetik I, pp. 36–40; Aesthetics I, pp. 25–30. 28. See Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, introduction to Hegel, Vorlesungen: Berlin 1823, pp. lxii–lxiii. 29. Aesthetics I, p. 56. In the original text: ¨ Ich will deshalb das Geschichtliche von diesem Ubergange, das ich im Sinne habe, kurz ber¨uhren, teils um des Geschichtlichen willen, teils weil damit die Standpunkte n¨aher bezeichnet sind, auf welche es ankommt und auf deren Grundlage wir fortbauen wollen. Diese Grundlage ihrer allgemeinsten Bestimmung nach besteht darin, daß das Kunstsch¨one als eine der Mitten erkannt worden ist, welche jenen Gegensatz und Widerspruch des in sich abstrakt beruhenden Geistes und der Natur – sowohl der a¨ußerlich erscheinenden als auch der innerlichen des subjektiven Gef¨uhls und Gem¨uts – ¨ aufl¨osen und zur Einheit zur¨uckf¨uhren. (Asthetik I, p. 64)

¨ 30. Asthetik I, 68–69; Aesthetics I, 60. 31. Aesthetics I, p. 74. In the original text: In diesem Punkte der h¨oheren Wahrheit als der Geistigkeit, welche sich die dem Begriff des Geistes gem¨aße Gestaltung errungen hat, liegt der Einteilungsgrund f¨ur

192

Notes to pages 81–84 die Wissenschaft der Kunst. Denn der Geist, ehe er zum wahren Begriffe seines absoluten Wesens gelangt, hat einen in diesem Begriffe selbst begr¨undeten Verlauf von Stufen durchzugehen, und diesem Verlaufe des Inhalts, den er sich gibt, entspricht ein unmittelbar damit zusammenh¨angender Verlauf von Gestaltungen der Kunst, in deren ¨ Form der Geist als K¨unstlerischer sich das Bewußtsein von sich selber gibt. (Asthetik I, p. 79)

¨ 32. Asthetik I, pp. 71–2; Aesthetics I, pp. 63–4. 33. Bungay, Beauty and Truth, p. 23. 34. Author’s translation. In the original text: Die Erf¨ullung [from other arts] ist von mir immer selbst noch unterschieden. Die Erf¨ullung ist ihrer Natur a¨ußerlich, r¨aumlich und somit immer noch unterschieden von der Innerlichkeit des Ich. In der Musik aber f¨allt dieses Unterscheiden weg. Das Ich ist nicht mehr von dem Sinnlichen selbst unterschieden, die T¨one gehen in in meinem tiefsten Innern fort. Die innerste Subjektivit¨at selbst ist in Anspruch genommen und in Bewegung gesetzt. Dies is dann dasjenige, was die Macht der T¨one u¨ berhaupt ausmacht. (Hegel, Vorlesungen 1823, pp. 262–3)

35. Hegel, Vorlesungen 1823, pp. 263–4. 36. See Gethmann-Siefert, “Ph¨anomen vs. System,” p. 13. 37. Aesthetics I, pp. 527–8. In the original text: Fassen wir daher dies Verh¨altnis des Inhalts und der Form im Romantischen, wo es sich in seiner Eigent¨umlichkeit erh¨alt, zu einem Worte zusammen, so k¨onnen wir sagen, der Grundton des Romantischen, weil eben die immer vergr¨oßerte Allgemeinheit und rastlos arbeitende Tiefe des Gem¨uts das Prinzip ausmacht, sei musikalisch und, mit bestimmtem Inhalte der Vorstellung, lyrisch. Das Lyrische ist f¨ur die romantische Kunst gleichsam der elementarische Grundzug, ein Ton, den auch Epop¨oe und Drama anschlagen und der selbst die Werke der bildenen Kunst als ein allgemeiner Duft des Gem¨uts umhaucht, da hier Geist und Gem¨ut durch jedes ihrer Gebilde zum Geist und ¨ Gem¨ute sprechen wollen. (Asthetik I, p. 508)

38. Gethmann-Siefert, Introduction to Hegel, Vorlesungen 1823, p. XLV. 39. Aesthetics II, p. 890. In the original text: Mit dem Ton nun verl¨aßt die Musik das Element der a¨ußeren Gestalt und deren anschauliche Sichtbarkeit und bedarf deshalb zur Auffassung ihrer Produktionen auch eines anderen subjektiven Organs, des Geh¨ors, das wie das Gesicht nicht den praktischen, sondern den theoretischen Sinnen zugeh¨ort und selbst noch ideeller ist als das ¨ Gesicht. (Asthetik II, p. 261)

40. Aesthetics II, pp. 890–1. In the original text: Das Ohr dagegen vernimmt, ohne sich selber praktisch gegen die Objekte hinauszuwenden, das Resultat jenes inneren Erzitterns des K¨orpers, durch welches nichts mehr die ruhige materielle Gestalt, sondern die erste ideellere Seelenhaftigkeit zu Vorschein kommt. Da nun ferner die Negativit¨at, in die das schwingende Material hier eingeht, einerseits ein Aufheben des r¨aumlichen Zustandes ist, das selbst wieder durch die Reak¨ tion des K¨orpers aufgehoben wird, so ist die Außerung dieser zweifachen Negation, ¨ der Ton, eine Außerlichkeit, welche sich in ihrem Entstehen durch ihr Dasein selbst wieder vernichtet und an sich selbst verschwindet. Durch diese gedoppelte Negation ¨ der Außerlichkeit, welche im Prinzipe des Tons liegt, entspricht derselbe der inneren

Notes to pages 84–88

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Subjektivit¨at, indem das Klingen, das an und f¨ur sich schon etwas Ideelleres ist als die f¨ur sich real bestehende K¨orperlichkeit, auch diese ideellere Existenz aufgibt und ¨ ¨ dadurch eine dem Innerlichen gem¨aße Außerungsweise wird. (Asthetik II, p. 261)

41. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklop¨adie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 176–84. 42. Author’s translation. In the original text: Das Harmonische beruht auf der Leichtigkeit der Konsonanzen und ist eine in dem Unterschiede empfundene Einheit, wie die Symmetrie in der Architektur. Die bezaubernde Harmonie und Melodie, dies die Empfindung und Leidenschaft Ansprechende, soll von abstrakten Zahlen abh¨angen? Das scheint merkw¨urdig, ja wunderlich. (Hegel, Enzyklop¨adie II, p. 178)

43. Aesthetics II, p. 891. In the original text: F¨ur den Musikausdruck eignet sich deshalb auch nur das ganz objektlose Innere, die abstrakte Subjektivit¨at als solche. Diese ist unser ganz leeres Ich, das Selbst ohne weiteren Inhalt. Die Hauptaufgabe der Musik wird deshalb darin bestehen, nicht die Gegenst¨andlichkeit selbst, sondern im Gegenteil die Art und Weise widerklingen zu lassen, in welcher das innerste Selbst seiner Subjektivit¨at und ideelen Seele nach in sich ¨ bewegt ist. (Asthetik II, p. 261)

44. Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, pp. 187–8. 45. This appears early in the chapter, and may be the only admission of lack of ¨ expertise in the whole Hegel corpus. Asthetik II, p. 262; Aesthetics II, p. 893. 46. Bungay, Beauty and Truth, p. 141. 47. Hegel, Aesthetics II, p. 892. 48. Hegel Aesthetics II, p. 893. 49. Aesthetics II, p. 909. In the original text: Denn insofern es das subjektive Innere selbst ist, das die Musik sich mit dem Zweck zum Inhalt nimmt, sich nict als a¨ußere Gestalt und objektiv dastehendes Werk, son¨ dern als subjektive Innerlichkeit zur Erscheinung zu bringen, so muß die Außerung sich auch unmittelbar als Mitteilung eines lebendiges Subjekts ergeben, in welche dasselbe seine ganze eigene Innerlickeit hineinlegt. Am meisten ist dies im Gesang der menschlichen Stimme, relativ jedoch auch schon in der Instrumentalmusik der Fall, die nur durch aus¨ubende K¨unstler und deren lebendige, ebenso geistige als technische Geschicklichkeit zu Ausf¨uhrung zu gelangen vermag. Durch diese Subjektivit¨at in R¨ucksicht auf die Verwirklichung des musikalischen Kunstwerks vervollst¨andigt sich erst die Bedeutung des Subjektiven in der Musik, das nun aber nach dieser Richtung hin sich auch zu dem einseitigen Extrem isolieren kann, daß die subjektive Virtuosit¨at der Reproduktion als solcher zu alleinigen Mittelpunkte ¨ und Inhalte des Genusses gemacht wird. (Asthetik II, p. 279)

50. Carl Dahlhaus, “Hegel und die Musik seiner Zeit,” Hegelstudien Beiheft 22 (1983), 338. 51. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Rezension von L. van Beethovens Sinfonie in C moll,” Schriften zur Musik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), pp. 34–51.

194

Notes to pages 88–92

52. A. B. Marx, Erinnerungen. Aus meinem Leben (Berlin: Otto Janke, 1865), I, 179; II, p. 46. ¨ 53. Asthetik I, pp. 220 and 239; Aesthetics I, pp. 223 and 243. 54. Dahlhaus, “Hegel,” p. 338. 55. Robin Wallace, Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions during the Composer’s Lifetime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) pp. 6–7. 56. Wallace, Beethoven’s Critics, p. 18. 57. Aesthetics II, p. 908. In the original text: Wir d¨urfen deshalb keine abgeschmackte Meinung von der Allgewalt der Musik als solcher hegen, von der uns die alten Skribenten, heilige und profane, so mancherlei ¨ fabelhafte Geschichten erz¨ahlen. (Asthetik II, p. 278)

58. Hoffmann, “Rezension,” p. 37. 59. Aesthetics II, pp. 953–4. In the original text: Der Laie liebt in der Musik vornehmlich den verst¨andlichen Ausdruck von Empfindungen und Vorstellungen, das Stoffartige, den Inhalt, und wendet sich daher vorzugsweise der begleitenden Musik zu; der Kenner dagegen, dem die inneren musikalischen Verh¨altnisse der T¨one und Instrumente zug¨anglich sind, liebt die Instrumentalmusik in ihrem kunstgem¨aßen Gebrauch der Harmonien und melodischen Verschlingungen und wechselnden Formen; er wird durch die Musik selbst ganz ausgef¨ullt und hat das n¨ahere Interesse, das Geh¨orte mit den Regeln und Gesetzen, die ihm gel¨aufig sind, zu vergleichen, um vollst¨andig das Geleistete zu beurteilen und zu genießen, obschon hier die neu erfindende Genialit¨at auch den Kenner, der gerade diese oder jene Fortschre¨ ¨ itungen, Uberg¨ ange usf. nicht gewohnt ist, h¨aufig kann in Verlegenheit setzen. (Asthetik II, p. 322)

60. Aesthetics II, p. 959. In the original text: Nun hat aber der geistige Inhalt, als wesentlich dem Innern des Bewußtseins angeh¨orig, an dem bloßen Elemente der a¨ußeren Erscheinung und dem Anschauen, welchem die Außengestalt sich darbietet, ein f¨ur das Innere zugleich fremdes Dasein, aus dem die Kunst ihre Konzeptionen deshalb wieder herausziehen muß, um sie in ein Bereich hineinzuverlegen, das sowohl dem Material als der Ausdrucksart nach f¨ur sich selbst innerlicher und ideeller Art ist. Dies war der Schritt, welchen wir die Musik vorw¨arts tun sahen, insofern sie das Innerliche als solches und die subjektive Empfindung statt in anschaubaren Gestalten in den Figurationen des in sich erzitternden Klingens f¨ur das Innere machte. Doch trat auch sie dadurch in ein anderes Extrem, in die unexplizierte subjektive Konzentration her¨uber, deren Inhalt in den T¨onen eine nur selbst wieder ¨ ¨ symbolische Außerung fand. (Asthetik II, pp. 326–7)

61. Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 122. In the original text: Dieses denkende Bewußtsein so, wie es sich bestimmt hat, als die abstrakte Freiheit, ist also nur die unvollendete Negation des Andersseins; aus dem Dasein nur in sich zur¨uckgezogen, hat es sich nicht als absolute Negation desselben an ihm vollbracht. Der Inhalt gilt ihm zwar nur als Gedanke, aber dabei auch als bestimmter, und die Bestimmtheit als solche zugleich. (Hegel, Ph¨anomenologie, p. 154)

Notes to pages 92–99

195

62. Aesthetics II, p. 960. In the original text: Die Poesie nun, die redende Kunst, ist das dritte, die Totalit¨at, welche die Extreme der bildenen K¨unste und der Musik auf einer h¨oheren Stufe, in dem Gebiete der geistigen Innerlichkeit selber, in sich vereinigt. Denn einerseits enth¨alt die Dichtkunst wie die Musik das Prinzip des Sichvernehmens des Inneren als Inneren, das der Baukunst, Skulptur und Malerei abgeht; andererseits breitet sie sich im Felde des inneren Vorstellens, Anschauens und Empfindens selber zu einer objektiven Welt aus, welche die Bestimmtheit der Skulptur und Malerei nicht durchaus verliert und die Totalit¨at einer Begebenheit, eine Reihenfolge, einen Wechsel von Gem¨utsbewegungen, Leidenschaften, Vorstellungen und den abgeschlossenen Verlauf einer Handlung vollst¨andiger ¨ als irgendeine andere Kunst zu entfalten bef¨ahigt ist. (Asthetik II, pp. 327–8)

¨ 63. Asthetik I, p. 77; Aesthetics I, p. 82. 64. Aesthetics II, p. 956. In the original text: Hier wird teils die virtuoseste Bravour an ihrer rechten Stelle sein, teils begrenzt sich die Genialit¨at nicht auf eine bloße Exekution des Gegebenen, sondern erweitert sich dazu, daß der K¨unstler selbst im Vortrage komponiert, Fehlendes erg¨anzt, Flacheres vertieft, das Seelenlosere beseelt und in dieser Weise schlechthin selbst¨andig und produzierend ¨ erscheint. (Asthetik II, p. 324)

65. Adolf Nowak, Hegels Musik¨asthetik (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1971), pp. 98–9. ¨ 66. Asthetik II, 324; Aesthetics II, p. 956. 67. The original reads: “die . . . auf sich beruhende Seele des K¨unstlers sich ihrem ¨ Ergusse hingibt . . .” Asthetik II, p. 325; Aesthetics II, p. 957. 68. Author’s translation. In the original text: Der Inhalt der redenden Kunst, die bestimmte Gestaltung, die ins subjektive Element verlegt wird, is die Vorstellung, der Inhalt der redenden Kunst der ganze Reichtum der Vorstellung, das bei sich seiende Geistige, das in einem Elemente ist, das dem Geiste selbst angeh¨ort. Indem der Ton eine solche Erf¨ullung erh¨alt, wird er zum bloßen Mittel herabgesetzt, ist nur ein Zeichen und wirt zum Worte, und dieser Ausdruck ist so verschieden vom Inhalt selbst. (Hegel, Vorlesungen 1823, p. 271)

chapter 4: nature, music, and the imagination in wordsworth’s poetry 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 35. 2. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 116–50. 3. Jerome McGann, Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 4. Karl Kroeber, “Beyond the Imaginable: Wordsworth and Turner,” in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. K. Johnston and G. Ruoff (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), p. 198. 5. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 70–90.

196

Notes to pages 99–106

6. Paul de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 27–53. 7. De Man, “Hypogram,” p. 42. 8. De Man, “Hypogram,” p. 39. 9. Paul H. Fry, A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 12. 10. Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 11. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991). 12. Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 13. See Chapter 2 for a longer explanation of K¨orner’s theory. 14. Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). 15. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 16. Susan McCleary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 17. Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism, pp. 37–52. 18. Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 10–12. 19. John Hollander, “Romantic Verse Form and the Metrical Contract,” Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 183. 20. Hollander takes the apt term “contract” from Wordsworth’s use of it in the “Preface.” Hollander, “Romantic Verse Form,” p. 186. 21. Hollander, “Romantic Verse Form,” pp. 183–4. 22. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 188. 23. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802),” in William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason (New York: Longman Group, 1992), pp. 69–70. 24. Wordsworth, “Preface,” pp. 66–7. 25. Wordsworth, “Preface,” p. 82. 26. Wordsworth, “Preface,” p. 83. 27. Brendan O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1995), p. 6. 28. David P. Haney, “‘Rents and openings in the ideal world’: Eye and Ear in Wordsworth,” Studies in Romanticism 36 (1997), 176. His reference is to W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 29. Brian Bartlett, “‘Inscrutable Workmanship’: Music and Metaphors of Music in The Prelude and The Excursion,” The Wordsworth Circle 17: 3 (1986) 175–80. 30. Jeffrey C. Robinson, “The Power of Sound; ‘The Unremitting Voice of Nightly Streams,’” The Wordsworth Circle 23: 3 (1992) 176–9.

Notes to pages 107–121

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31. A useful collection of contemporaneous criticism can be found in Wordsworth: The 1807 Poems, ed. Alun R. Jones (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 25–59. 32. William Wordsworth, “The Solitary Reaper,” William Wordsworth: The Poems, Vol. I, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 659. 33. Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 12–13. 34. See Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, pp. 239–46, for the story of his brother John’s death and the composition of the poem. Curiously, Wordsworth based the scene not on a specific memory of his own but on a line in Thomas Wilkinson’s Tours to the British Mountains. 35. John Hollander goes even farther in describing how natural sound is made to be articulate in Romantic poetry; in his view, torrents and storms, as well as birds, become music or speech. See Hollander, “Wordsworth and the Music of Sound,” in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 48. 36. Nancy A. Jones, “The Rape of the Rural Muse: Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’” in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 263–77. Jones argues that similarities between “The Solitary Reaper” and the pastourelle indicate a kind of rape occurring in the poem. Judith W. Page responds to similar views in Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 6. 37. Fry, A Defense of Poetry, p. 36. 38. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 221. 39. Wordsworth to Sir George Beaumont, May 1, 1805. 40. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and S. Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 29. All further citations of The Prelude are from this text, followed by book and line number. The 1850 edition is used unless otherwise stated. 41. Jane Worthington Smyser, “Wordsworth’s Dream of Poetry and Science” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA), 121 (1956), 269–75. Smyser’s source is Ren´e Descartes, CEvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, eds. (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1966) Vol. 10, pp. 184–5. 42. Smyser, “Wordsworth’s Dream,” p. 275. 43. Hollander, Images of Voice, p. 18. 44. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 383. 45. Andrzej Warminski, “Missed Crossing: Wordsworth’s Apocalypses,” Modern Language Notes 99:2 (1984), 1003. 46. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 151. 47. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, pp. 229–30. 48. Wordsworth, “Preface,” p. 66.

198

Notes to pages 122–140

49. The original version of the passage is in Manuscript JJ, probably written in 1799. The manuscript is reprinted in Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 492. 50. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, p. 22. 51. Andrzej Warminski, “Missed Crossing,” p. 998. 52. Paul de Man, “Wordsworth and H¨olderlin,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 53–4. 53. Wordsworth, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” Poems I, p. 364. 54. Wordsworth, Prelude, p. 259 ff. 55. Wordsworth, Poems, Vol. II, p. 1030. 56. William Wordsworth to Alexander Dyce, 23 December 1837. Excerpted in Wordsworth, Poems, Vol. II, p. 1030. 57. Wordsworth, “On the Power of Sound,” Poems II, p. 664. Further references to this poem indicate stanza and line number. 58. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To Wordsworth,” The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. II, ed. Neville Rodgers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 10. chapter 5: beethoven and musical self-consciousness 1. Felix Medelssohn-Bartholdy, Letter to Julius Schubring, 27 February, 1841, in eds. Peter le Huray and James Day, Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 311. 2. In Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions during the Composer’s Lifetime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Robin Wallace describes the reactions of Beethoven’s earliest critics, and asserts that Hoffmann was virtually alone in his understanding of the relation between affect and technique in Beethoven’s music (pp. 20–6). 3. Beate Julia Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics: Fragmentation of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 4. See Carl Dahlhaus, Die Musik des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1989), pp. 8–9. 5. E. M. Forster, Howards End (New York: Vintage, 1921), p. 33. 6. Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (New York: Schirmer, 1977), p. 206. 7. Charles Rosen, in The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971, 1972, revised 1997), presents the most important and sophisticated version of this view, although it is not universally held. 8. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 87. 9. In Music as Cultural Practice: 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), Lawrence Kramer addresses the problem of musical interpretation and derives a “musical hermeneutics” in which structural relationships within a work of music can be brought into the wider sphere of aesthetic, literary, and philosophical considerations. However, Kramer warns that his (and any)

Notes to pages 140–145

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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theoretical model should only be “a provisional, implicit, occasional authority” and that one should “throw away this map before you use it” (p. 14). Nicholas Marston, “Intellectual Currents: Philosophy and Aesthetics,” in ed. Barry Cooper, The Beethoven Compendium (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), p. 64. Barry Cooper, “Beethoven’s Beliefs and Opinions,” in ed. Barry Cooper The Beethoven Compendium (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), pp. 142–3. See Arnold Schering, “Die Eroica, eine Homer-Symphonie Beethovens?”: Translated with an Introduction and Commentary, Current Musicology 69 (2000) pp. 68–96. Joseph Kerman and Alan Tyson, The New Grove Beethoven (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 2–3. Cooper, “Beethoven’s Beliefs,” p. 143. Bettina Brentano von Arnim’s account is reproduced and translated in Beethoven: Letters, Journals, and Conversations, ed. and trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Thames & Hudson, 1951), pp. 116–18. K. M. Knittel summarizes the evidence against the story’s veracity in “The Construction of Beethoven,” The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp. 118–19. Kerman and Tyson, The New Grove Beethoven, pp. 30–1. Leon Plantinga, Beethoven’s Concertos (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), pp. 22–4. Plantinga, Beethoven’s Concertos, p. 25. Robert W. Gutman, Mozart: A Cultural Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), p. 444. Gutman also describes Mozart’s resentment of the practice of antechambieren, the requirement that the court composer wait in an antechamber in case his services were needed (p. 537). Plantinga, Beethoven’s Concertos, p. 29. Plantinga, Beethoven’s Concertos, p. 30. See De Nora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 83–114. Cooper, “Biographical and Source Material,” p. 170. Kerman and Tyson, The New Grove Beethoven, p. 89. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971, 1972, revised 1997), p. 401. Nicolas Cook, “The Other Beethoven: Heroism, the Canon, and the Works of 1813–1814,” Nineteenth-Century Music 27:1 (2003), 11. Kerman and Tyson, The New Grove Beethoven, p. 89. Michael Broyles, The Emergence and Evolution of Beethoven’s Heroic Style (New York: Excelsior, 1987), p. 89. Adolf Bernhard Marx, Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen (Berlin: Verlag von Otto Janke, 1828, 1901), I, p. 265. Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 13. Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, p. 17.

200

Notes to pages 145–152

32. For example, Martin Cooper describes the late quartets as “self-communing.” Cooper, Beethoven: the Last Decade, 1817–1827 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 349. 33. Adolf Bernhard Marx, Die Lehre der musikalischen Komposition (Leipzig: Breitkopf & H¨artel, 1868), III, pp. 220–54. 34. Charles Rosen outlines the history of theorists of sonata form, including A. B. Marx, in Sonata Forms (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), p. 3. 35. In Sonata Forms, Rosen complains about the tyranny of the persistent notion of a fixed “sonata form” yet acknowledges the usefulness of the terminology derived from it (pp. 1–3). 36. Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 29. 37. Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. 121. 38. James Donelan, “H¨olderlin’s Poetic Self-Consciousness,” Philosophy and Literature 26:1 (2002), pp. 125–42. 39. Carl Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, trans. Mary Whittall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 219. The original passage can be found in Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven und seine Zeit (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1987), p. 263. 40. See Kerman and Tyson, The New Grove Beethoven, pp. 120–37. 41. Martin Cooper, Beethoven: The Last Decade, p. 416. 42. Theodor W. Adorno, “Sp¨atstil Beethovens,” in ed. Rolf Tiedemann Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), p. 183. The original reads: Die Gewalt der Subjektivit¨at in den sp¨aten Kunstwerken ist die auffahrenede Geste, mit welcher sie die Kunstwerke verl¨aßt. Sie sprengt sie, nicht um sich auszudr¨ucken, sondern um ausdruckslos den Schein der Kunst abzuwerfen. Von den Werken l¨aßt sie Tr¨ummer zur¨uck und teilt sich, wie mit Chiffren, nur verm¨oge der Hohlstellen mit, aus welche sie ausbricht. Vom Tode ber¨uhrt, gibt die meisterliche Hand die Stoffmassen frei, die sie zuvor formte; die Risse und Spr¨unge darin, Zeugnis der endlichen Ohnmacht des Ichs vorm Seienden, sind ihr letztes Werk.

43. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 29. 44. Subotnik, Developing Variations, p. 41. ¨ 45. Adorno, “Uber Vermittlung der Musik und Gesellschaft,” Beethoven, p. 75. 46. It is widely speculated, but unsubstantiated, that Schiller had intended to use Freiheit all along but did not do so out of fear that a word so clearly connected to the French Revolution would be censored. 47. Adorno, “Zur Theorie Beethovens,” Beethoven, p. 146. The original reads, “Die IX. Symphonie ist kein Sp¨atwerk sondern die Rekonstruktion des klassischen Beethoven (mit Ausnahme gewisser Teile des letzten Satzes und vor allem des Trios im dritten).” 48. Rudolf Erich Raspe, Baron M¨unchausen’s Narrative of His Marvelous Travels (London: Cresset Press, 1948).

Notes to pages 152–161

201

49. Lawrence Kramer, “The Harem Threshold: Turkish Music and Greek Love in Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy,’” Nineteenth-Century Music 22:1, 1998, p. 79. 50. Adorno, Beethoven, p. 270. Specifically, Adorno claims that the first movement and the scherzo are not late style works but actually belong to the middle period and that the symphony as a whole is not a representative late-style work, being less experimental and developed than the late piano and chamber music. He also claims – without qualification – that the Missa Solemnis (op. 123) belongs to Beethoven’s middle-period style (p. 204). 51. Berthold Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 21. 52. Maynard Solomon, Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 221. 53. Solomon, Late Beethoven, p. 227. 54. Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 88. 55. Daniel K. L. Chua, The “Galitzin” Quartets of Beethoven: opp. 127, 132, 130 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 8–9. 56. Chua, The “Galitzin” Quartets, p. 8. 57. Rosen, Sonata Forms, p. 10. 58. Rosen, Sonata Forms, p. 12. 59. Rosen, The Classical Style, p. 33. 60. Paul Griffiths, The String Quartet: A History (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1983), p. 92. 61. Griffiths, The String Quartet, p. 92. 62. Griffiths, The String Quartet, pp. 27–8. 63. Ludwig Finscher, Studien zur Geschichte des Streichquartetts (Kassel: B¨arenreiter-Verlag, 1974), pp. 131–3. 64. Alfred Wheelock Thayer, The Life of Beethoven (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960), III, p. 87. 65. Joseph Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), p. 223. 66. Cooper, Beethoven: The Last Decade, pp. 73–80. 67. Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2003), p. 442. 68. Chua, The “Galitzin” Quartets of Beethoven, p. 164. 69. David L. Brodbeck and John Platoff, “Dissociation and Integration: The First Movement of Beethoven’s Opus 130,” Nineteenth-Century Music 7:2 (1983), p. 149. 70. Rosen, The Classical Style, p. 33. 71. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, p. 309. 72. Brodbeck and Platoff, “Beethoven’s Opus 130,” p. 155. 73. Rosen points out that Beethoven assumes the use of a tempered scale even when writing exclusively for string instruments, which can play either a natural or tempered scale (The Classical Style, p. 27).

202

Notes to pages 161–173

74. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, pp. 311–312. 75. Rosen describes this pattern in the work of all three composers in The Classical Style (pp. 406–409); the opening descending third of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor may be the most famous interval in Western music. 76. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, p. 309. 77. Brodbeck and Platoff, “Beethoven’s Opus 130,” p. 158. 78. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, p. 312. 79. See Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, p. 313. 80. The precise playing times on the 1983 compact disc made by the Alban Berg Quartet (EMI Digital, CDC 7 47136 2), are 9′ 44′′ for the first movement and 1′ 54′′ for the second movement. 81. See Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, p. 314. 82. Robert Hatten, “Plenitude as Fulfillment: The Third Movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in B ♭, Op. 130,” in The String Quartets of Beethoven, ed. William Kinderman (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 216. 83. Theodor Helm, author of Beethovens Streichquartette (Nieder Walluf bei Wiesbaden: M. S¨andig, 1971); the observation is Kerman’s (p. 314). 84. A useful collection of Beethoven’s opinions on various subjects, Beethoven: the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words, ed, Friedrich Kerst, ed. and trans. Henry Edward Krehbiel (New York: Dover, 1964), contains three separate instances of Beethoven expressing his scorn for Rossini, including the suggestion that Rossini needed “some blows ad posteriora” (pp. 58–9). 85. Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 210. 86. Lockwood, Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process, p. 211. 87. Klaus Kropfinger’s excellent history of the last movement of op. 130, “Das gespaltene Werk: Beethovens Streichquartett Op. 130/133,” appears in Beitr¨age zu Beethovens Kammermusik: Symposion Bonn 1984, ed. Sieghard Brandenburg and Helmut Loos (Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1987), pp. 296–335. According to Kropfinger’s sources, both the musicians and the public called op. 133 “unverst¨andlich” and “chinesisch” (299). Martin Cooper’s account of the first performance indicates that the movements which were best liked by the audience were, naturally, the presto, the danza alla tedesca, and the cavatina, the least innovative of the work (Cooper p. 73). 88. Kropfinger, “Das gespaltene Werk,” pp. 301–2. Beethoven also transcribed it for piano, four hands. 89. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, pp. 276–277. 90. William Kinderman, “Beethoven’s Last Quartets: Threshold to a Fourth Creative Period?” in ed. William Kinderman, The String Quartets of Beethoven (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 295. 91. Griffiths, The String Quartet, p. 112. 92. Carl Dahlhaus, among others, concurs on this point in Die Musik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (p. 64).

Notes to page 173

203

93. Theodor W. Adorno has already done an admirable job of explaining this history in, among other works, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton. (New York: Continuum, 1976), pp. 85–103. 94. Dahlhaus, Die Musik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, p. 69. The original is as follows: Zwischen expressiven und strukturellen Momenten besteht eine Wechselwirkung; und sobald die Thematik – auch wenn sie nach außen hin noch das Gesetz der Formenlehre erf¨ullt – zur bloßen Oberfl¨achenstruktur wird, nehmen die Ausdruckscharaktere einen maskenhaften Zug an.

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Index

a posteriori knowledge, 1, 6 a priori knowledge, 1, 6, 23, 24 Absolute Knowledge, 74, 75 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 4, 39, 148, 176 on Beethoven’s Late Style, 150–151 aesthetic judgment, 10 Allgemeine musikalische Zeiting, 88 Althusser, Louis, 177 Aristotle, 176 Austin, John Langshaw, 57

String Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 95, 155 String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, Op. 130/133, 174 String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, Op. 130/133 (fifth movement), 168 String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, Op. 130/133 (first movement), 154–165 String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, Op. 130/133 (fourth movement), 167–168 String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, Op. 130/133 (second movement), 165–167 String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, Op. 130/133 (sixth movement), 170–172 String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, Op. 130/133 (third movement), 167 String Quartet No. 14 in C sharp minor, Op. 131, 157 String Quartet No. 15 in F major, Op. 135, 154, 157 Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21, 143 Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 55, 143, 144–146, 157 Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, 31, 102, 138, 140, 145, 146 Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, 138 Symphony No. 8 in F major, Op. 93, 143 Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, 30, 144, 151–153, 154, 156, 157, 178 Wellingtons Sieg, Op. 91, 144, 151, 172 Beißner, Friedrich, 36 Benjamin, Walter, 111 Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 136, 145 Bildung, 17 Bloom, Harold, 4, 121 B¨ohlendorff, Casimir Ulrich, 44, 46, 51 B¨oschenstein-Sch¨afer, Renate, 64 Bowie, Andrew, 23, 30, 86 Boyle, Robert, 53 Brodbeck, David, 157, 160, 164 Brook, Andrew, 5, 7

Bacchus, 39, 44, 53 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 142, 150 Bacon, Francis, 53 Baker, John Jay, 45 Bartlett, Brian, 106 Bate, Jonathan, 100 Baumgarten, Alexander, 8, 9 Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustine Caron de, 28 Beaumont, Sir George, 112 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 4, 25, 26, 30, 87 brothers, Carl and Johann, 142 education, 140–142 Fidelio, Op. 13, 102 Galitzin Quartets (Opp. 127, 130, 131, and 132), 143, 154, 156, 157 Große Fuge in B flat major, Op. 133, 154, 170 Hegel’s Phenomenology in relation to Symphony No. 3, 146–148 Heiligenstadt Testament (letter), 142–143 Heroic Style, 143–148 Late Style, 148–154 Leonore Overtures, Op. 72a and 72b, 158 musical form, influence on, 145–146 period divisions, validity of, 143–144 Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53 “Waldstein,” 157 programmatic responses to his music, 139 String Quartet No. 10 in E flat major, Op. 74, 155

213

214

Index

Brown, Marshall, 2 Broyles, Michael, 145 Buch, Esteban, 153 Bullinger, Abb´e, 25 Bungay, Stephen, 71, 82, 87 Burnham, Scott, 4, 146–148, 151 Butler, Judith, 177 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 107, 111, 134 Cervantes, Miguel de, 120 Chua, Daniel, 154, 157 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 30, 56, 104, 113, 115, 116 Colloredo, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, 1, 25, 27 Cook, Nicolas, 144 Cooper, Barry, 141 Cooper, Martin, 149 Czerny, Carl, 146 da Ponte, Lorenzo, 28 da Vinci, Leonardo, 31 Dahlhaus, Carl, 13, 88, 101, 139, 140, 145, 148, 152, 169, 173 Dante (Dante Alighieri), 117 Dasein, 82, 186 de Man, Paul, 39, 48, 55, 99, 125, 176 Derrida, Jacques, 11 Descartes, Ren´e, 1, 7, 38, 53, 116, 197 Don Quixote, 120, 121 Dyce, Alexander, 130 early Romantic period (defined), 3 Einbildung, 17 entgegensetzen, 16 Euclid, 118 Ferguson, Frances, 11 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 2, 5, 56, 72, 148, 181 influence on H¨olderlin, 34–36 influence on later Idealists, 18–19 self-consciousness, 14–16 Wissenschaftlehre, 16 formalism, 11 Formtrieb, 17 Forster, Edward Morgan, 138 Frank, Manfred, 35 Fry, Paul, 110 Galitzin, Prince Nicolas Boris, 154, 156 Gethmann-Siefert, Anne-Marie, 69, 71, 75, 189 Goehr, Lydia, 26 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 65, 70, 141 Gray, Thomas, 104 Griffiths, Paul, 155, 172

Hamburger, Michael, 50 Hamlin, Cyrus, 40 Handel, George Frideric (Georg Friedrich), 150 Haney, David, 106 Hanslick, Eduard, 101 Hartman, Geoffrey, 107, 121, 123 Hatten, Robert, 167 Haydn, Franz Josef, 26, 87, 137, 138, 142, 143, 150, 153, 155, 156, 159, 161, 171, 173, 198 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 30, 97, 98, 105, 111, 136 aesthetics, lectures on (history), 69–70, 71 Aufhebung (sublation), 73, 85 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 84, 85 end of art thesis, 70, 75 forms of art (Kunstformen) theory, 78 Geist (spirit), 73 History of Philosophy, 80 Lectures on Aesthetics, 131 Lectures on Aesthetics (general principles), 75–82 Lectures on Aesthetics (music), 82–90 Lectures on Aesthetics (poetry), 91–95 Phenomenology of Spirit, 16, 47, 72–75, 81, 147, 148, 151, 176, 177, 189 Philosophy of History, 80, 81, 152 role in creation of Systemprogramm Fragment, 22 Science of Logic, 73 T¨ubinger Freunde, as member of, 14, 18, 35, 68 unhappy consciousness, 91 Heidegger, Martin, 39 Heinse, Wilhelm, 56 Helm, Theodor, 167 Henrich, Dieter, 15, 18, 35, 37, 176 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 68 Hoeckner, Berthold, 152 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 4, 101, 136, 145 Hegel’s view of, 91 review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, 88–90 H¨olderlin, Friedrich, 4, 30, 32, 68, 73, 98, 137, 148 “An die Parzen,” 50 B¨ohlendorff letter, 48 “Brod und Wein,” 49–59, 60, 62 “Der Rhein,” 63 “Dichterberuf ,” 44–45, 50, 57, 63 “Diotima,” 43 “Friedensfeier,” 62 Hyperion (novel), 33 madness, 176 “Patmos,” 49, 62, 68 role in creation of Systemprogramm Fragment, 22

Index T¨ubinger Freunde, as member of, 14, 18 “Urtheil und Seyn,” 34, 35–37, 72 “Wechsel der T¨one,” 34, 43, 48, 50 “Wie wenn am Feiertage . . . ,” 49, 62–67 Hollander, John, 103, 119 Homer, 127 Hotho, Heinrich Gustav, 69, 70, 71, 82, 84, 189 Howards End (novel), 138 Hume, David, 6, 177 Industrial Revolution, 176 intellectual intuition, 20 Josef II, Emperor of Austria, 25 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 5, 30, 36, 72, 73, 80, 85, 101, 120, 141, 177 Affektenlehre (“doctrine of emotions”), 13 apperceptive self-awareness, 7 Critique of Judgment, 8, 9, 16, 24, 80 Critique of Practical Reason, 9, 16 Critique of Pure Reason, 1, 5, 7–9, 13, 21 empirical self-awareness, 7 intellectual intuition, 15, 20, 36 on music, 11–13 self-consciousness, 5, 14, 22, 33 synthetic unity of apperception, 6, 7 teleological judgment, 9 transcendental deduction, 6, 7 Kerman, Joseph, 143, 157, 160, 161, 164, 167, 169, 199 Kivy, Peter, 13 Knox, Thomas Malcolm, 77, 83, 87 Koj`eve, Alexandre, 4 K¨orner, Christian Gottfried, 40–42, 101 Kramer, Lawrence, 102, 111, 152 Kroeber, Karl, 98, 100, 102 Kurz, Gerhard, 35 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 24, 46, 47 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 38 Lippmann, Edward, 12 Liszt, Franz, 101 Lockwood, Lewis, 168 Lot’s wife, 120 Lukacs, Georg, 4 Machiavelli, Niccol`o, 176 M¨alzel, Johann Nepomuk, 144 Marianne, Princess of Hesse-Homburg, 68 Marston, Nicholas, 141 Marx, Adolf Bernhard, 4, 88, 136, 145, 146 Marx, Karl, 4, 79, 177 Marx, Werner, 20, 79

215

McCleary, Susan, 101 McGann, Jerome, 98 Mendelssohn, Felix (Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy), 77, 136 Metternich, Prince Klemens Wenzel von, 153 Meyer, Leonard B., 101 Michelangelo (Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni), 31 Milton, John, 129 mimesis, 11 Mitchell, W. J. T., 106 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1, 5, 77, 87, 137, 142, 143, 150, 156, 161 as genius, 24 Don Giovanni, K.527, 29–30, 136 father (Leopold Mozart), 25 La finta giardiniera, K.196, 28, 34 Le nozze di Figaro, K.492, 28–29, 123 piano concerto, 27–28 Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K.488, 27 Salzburg, view of, 25 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 24 Napoleon (Napol´eon Bonaparte), 68 Neefe, Christian Gottlob, 142 Newton, Isaac, 38, 53 Niethammer, Immanuel, 37 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 101 Nowak, Adolf, 94 O’Donnell, Brendan, 106 Oedipus, 129 Perrey, Beate Julia, 137 Pindar, 43, 49, 53 Pippin, Robert, 15 Plantinga, Leon, 141, 142 Plato, 37 Platoff, John, 157, 160, 164 Pythagoras, 22, 85 quatuor brillant, 156 quatuor concertant, 156 Raspe, Rudolf, 152 Reicha, Antonin, 146 Revelation, 60, 119 Rink, John, 26 Rob Roy (Robert Roy MacGregor), 109 Robinson, Jeffrey, 106 Romantic ideology, 98 Rosen, Charles, 27, 144, 155 Rossini, Gioachino, 88, 89, 167 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 39 Ryan, Lawrence, 40

216

Index

Salieri, Antonio, 26 Samson, Jim, 25 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 3, 14, 38, 72 on music, 21–22 on self-consciousness, 19–21 Philosophie der Kunst, 21, 23, 189 role in creation of Systemprogramm Fragment, 22 System des transzendentalen Idealismus, 21, 22 T¨ubinger Freunde, as member of, 18, 35 Schering, Arnold, 141 Schiller, Friedrich, 2, 5, 14, 21, 37, 40, 42, 70, 81, 118, 136, 137, 152, 172 compared to Fichte, 18 On Aesthetic Education, 16, 23 on music, 16–18 Schlegel, August Friedrich and Karl Wilhelm, 35, 81 Schmidlin, Guido, 45 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3 Schubert, Franz, 3 Sch¨uttauf, Konrad, 79 Selbstobjektwerden, 20, 72, 73 self-consciousness (defined), 3 self-positing, 15 Semele, 65 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 134 Sinclair, Isaac von, 68 Smyser, Jane Worthington, 116 Solomon, Maynard, 27, 138, 153 sonata-allegro form, dialectical nature of, 154–155 Spieltrieb, 17 spontaneity (of self-consciousness), 14 St. John, 60, 65, 133 St. Matthew, 54 St. Paul, 129 Stierle, Karlheinz, 60 stile brillante, 26 Stofftrieb, 17 Strauss, Johann, 167 Stravinsky, Igor, 101 Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, 101, 148, 150, 151 Systemprogramm Fragment, 22–24, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 68, 69 Szondi, Peter, 46, 47, 176

Tales of the Thousand and One Nights, 117 Tathandlung, 15 Tiresias, 129 tonic-dominant axis, 155 transcendental deduction, 5 T¨ubinger Freunde, 18, 68 Tyson, Alan, 143 Viennese Classicism, 4, 31, 87, 137, 156 Vietnam War, 176 Virgil (Publius Virgilius Maro), 117 Vorstellung, 7, 11, 12, 17 Wagner, Richard, 101 Wallace, Robin, 88 War on Terror, 176 Warminski, Andrzej, 46, 47, 73, 121, 124 Wellesley, Arthur, First Duke of Wellington, 144 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 78, 81 Wordsworth, William, 4, 30, 136, 137 Golden Decade, 176 knowledge of German philosophy, 98 Lucy poems, 126 “On the Power of Sound,” 99, 130, 133 Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), 107 “Power of Music, The,” 130 “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” 99, 103–105, 113 Prelude, 99, 110 Prelude, Book I, 112–115 Prelude, Book V, “The Boy of Winander,” 122–126 Prelude, Book V, “The Dream of the Arab,” 115–122, 133 Prelude, Book VI, “Simplon Pass” episode, 126 Prelude, Book VII, “The Blind Beggar,” 126–130 Prelude, Book XII, 134–135 “Resolution and Independence,” 130 “Rob Roy’s Grave,” 107 “Solitary Reaper, The,” 99, 107–112, 123, 125 The Prelude, 56 The Recluse, 129 “To a Cuckoo,” 109 Z¨oller, G¨unther, 15, 16 Zur Wohlt¨atigkeit (Masonic lodge), 29