What was the Romantic view of music? And where did it come from? To ask those questions in the singular – as if there were just one, unchanging view of music, shared by all Romantic thinkers – is to betray the variety, multiplicity, and constant change at the heart of the Romantic movements that first arose in late eighteenth-century Europe. Yet it is also to recognise that, amidst this diversity, there was a remarkable unity. For it is indeed possible, if only at the broadest level, to isolate a distinctively Romantic view of music.

According to the dominant view of music throughout the eighteenth century – the conception held by most thinkers of the so-called Enlightenment – the purpose of music is to move the affects (or the emotions) of its listeners, in a somewhat mechanical fashion, for their pleasure, for their moral improvement, for the betterment of their physical or spiritual health, or for some combination of these. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, however, this view was rejected by the leading figures of the movement now known as early German Romanticism. In its place, they developed a wholly new – and characteristically Romantic – conception of music. According to this new conception, the purpose of music is to provide non-linguistic knowledge or insight, most usually into one’s inner self or, especially, into the fundamental nature of reality. Though initially confined to a small circle of Romantic thinkers, this new view of music spread far and wide over the subsequent decades – to the extent that its consequences continue to reverberate through to the present day.

What could possibly have driven such a turnaround? Most commentators have assumed that a change so dramatic could only have been inspired by an equally dramatic change in the music of this time. A closer examination, however, shows that this new view of music arose not in response to changes in contemporary composition or performance, but rather in response to – indeed, as part of – changes in contemporary philosophy. More precisely, a revolution in philosophical epistemology – that branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge – led to a wholesale re-evaluation of what and how human subjects can know. As part of this re-evaluation, thinkers of this period came to believe that music itself could offer a distinctive route to knowledge.

The purpose of this chapter is to show how early Romantic thinkers came to this belief. In what follows, I start by charting some key moments in the philosophical background of the 1780s and ’90s. Building on this, I trace the emergence of the Romantic view of music in the works of the two philosophers most closely involved in its earliest formulations: Friedrich Schlegel and Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis). I conclude with brief examinations of the ways in which this view was elaborated by two now-canonical philosophers of this era, Friedrich Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer, and with a reflection on its subsequent influence.

The Philosophical Background

The starting point for Schlegel and Novalis – and indeed Schelling and Schopenhauer – was a radically new epistemology proposed by Immanuel Kant in his groundbreaking 1781 Critique of Pure Reason (also published in a significantly revised second edition in 1787).¹ The central insight of this work is that the subject – that is, the individual searching for knowledge – can know things only as they appear, rather than as they are in themselves. As such, Kant’s philosophy is a form of idealism: the view that the world around us (or our knowledge thereof) is in some fundamental way dependent on the shape of human thought. The Critique of Pure Reason is now widely regarded as a masterpiece. Initially, however, it was a bit of a damp squib: long, counter-intuitive, and very badly written, its main effect on its first readers was to confuse them. Kant’s fortunes changed only when his younger contemporary, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, took it upon himself to publish a series of public ‘letters’ that aimed to popularise the Kantian philosophy. These letters, published in the leading literary journal Der teutsche Merkur (The German Mercury) in 1786–7, met with remarkable success, and catapulted Kant’s philosophy straight into the popular imagination.²

Reinhold, however, was not content to stop at popularisation. Rather, he took Kant’s philosophy as the starting point for a new Idealist philosophical system that he called the Elementarphilosophie (‘elementary philosophy’ or ‘philosophy of elements’), and that he set forward in a series of works from the years 1789–91.³ And ‘system’ is very much the right word here: Reinhold believed that it should be possible to derive, systematically, the whole of philosophy from a single, self-evident fact. Reinhold’s work quickly brought him not just fame, but also a steady income, in the form of the first ever professorship in critical philosophy at the University of Jena, starting in 1787. Stemming in part from Reinhold’s appointment, Jena became at this time a hotbed for the latest developments in German philosophy, and was to be the main home of the early German Romantic movement.

In 1794, however, Reinhold gave up this post for a better-paid position at the University of Kiel. His successor was to be the young Kant enthusiast, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte believed Kant to be correct in his overall orientation to knowledge, but placed even greater emphasis than had Kant on the activity of the thinking subject. And he agreed with Reinhold that philosophy should be wholly and systematically derivable from a single, self-evident proposition, but pursued this goal with even more fervour than had Reinhold. This approach, which can be called epistemological foundationalism, was set out by Fichte in a serious of lectures and writings from the mid-1790s, known collectively as the Wissenschaftslehre, or the ‘Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge’.⁴

Friedrich Schlegel

In his early work from 1793–6, Schlegel accepts wholeheartedly Fichte’s epistemological foundationalism. In particular, in his essay ‘On the Study of Greek Poetry’, written in 1794–5, Schlegel states his intention to expand Fichte’s philosophical system to include the realm of aesthetics, something that Fichte himself had failed to address in any depth.⁵ Around the summer of 1796, however, Schlegel came to reject Fichte’s foundationalism. Reacting specifically against Fichte’s foundationalist epistemology, Schlegel established a distinctively anti-foundationalist alternative. Specifically, against Fichte’s belief that all philosophy can be derived from a single proposition, Schlegel argued that philosophy must start from multiple principles, each of which occupies a place in a system that is coherent, but that has no single foundation.

Against Fichte’s belief that philosophy can reach irrefutable and complete conclusions, Schlegel sees philosophy as an infinite task.⁶ The task is infinite in two senses: first, it is a quest to search for the infinity of total knowledge; second, as such, it is an endless quest that will never be complete. The human longs for the infinity of knowledge, but this longing will never be fulfilled. There will, rather, be a constant ‘longing for the infinite’ (Sehnsucht nach dem Unendlichen), which will itself forever spur further investigation. Because the nature of the human quest for knowledge is now characterised as longing, that which provides the most insight into the human condition is now, for Schlegel, that which provides the most insight into longing.

Subsequently, Schlegel begins to develop a view of art as equal or superior to philosophy. Years before he came to his post-Fichtean characterisation of the human quest for knowledge as a longing for the infinite, Schlegel had characterised modern poetry (as opposed to ancient poetry) in terms of longing.⁷ In his early work, Schlegel had seen this as a weakness of modern poetry, for its restless striving meant that it could not find a stable place in a systematic aesthetics. As Schlegel rejected Fichte’s epistemological foundationalism, however, he came to see the longing inherent in modern poetry as a strength, for it allows insight into the epistemological longing that is at the core of the human condition.

With this move, Schlegel also started to refer to modern poetry not simply as modern, but as ‘romantic’ poetry (romantische Poesie). In a fragment from a collection first published in the journal Athenaeum, which ran from 1798 to 1800, Schlegel writes that romantic poetry is

Whereas for the early Schlegel, the endless striving of modern poetry leaves it inferior to ancient poetry (whose striving is complete), for the anti-foundationalist Schlegel of 1796 onwards, the longing of romantic poetry joins it to the human quest for knowledge and, as such, is a mark of its superiority.

So what has this to do with music? The answer is simple: for the anti-foundationalist Schlegel, music is poetry. There has been much debate as to the exact nature of Schlegel’s romantische Poesie, but for several generations of scholars, the presumption has been that it refers to some kind of literature. Drawing on the work of the historian of philosophy Frederick Beiser, however, I would suggest that romantische Poesie refers not only to literature, but to all the arts, and indeed to creative work in general.⁹ The conclusion that music should be included within romantische Poesie is given confirmation by a passage from Schlegel’s Dialogue on Poetry of 1799–1800, in which three characters discuss the nature of poetry:

Similarly, in his most famous discussion of romantische Poesie – the Athenaeumsfragment 116 – Schlegel writes that:

In this definition, romantische Poesie includes music both implicitly (by including all the arts) and explicitly (by making reference specifically to artless song). Music, however, is more than just one more art within the broad spectrum of romantic poetry, for Schlegel also conceives of music as a distinctive, independent art form. Just as was the case with his broad view of romantic poetry, his thought on music in particular derives from his epistemological anti-foundationalism.

It should be noted that Schlegel’s ideas about music at this time are not wholly consistent. Such a situation does not indicate philosophical amateurism on Schlegel’s part, but rather reflects Schlegel’s general philosophical stance, which, after rejecting the possibility of a single, fixed system of knowledge, embraces contradiction and paradox. Yet Schlegel is decidedly not, as some postmodern interpretations would have it, an anti-systematic thinker. Rather, he aspired to complete systematicity, but also recognised that all human systems will be forever provisional and improvable. As he famously put it: ‘it is equally fatal for the mind (Geist) to have a system and to have none. It must decide to combine both.’ With that in mind, I set out in what follows a systematic overview of Schlegel’s thought, yet retain within that overview the deliberate unevenness that characterises Schlegel’s reflections on music, art, and philosophy at this time. More precisely, I identify three key themes running through Schlegel’s view of music in the years around 1800.

First, Schlegel repeatedly characterises music as a form of longing. This characterisation is especially apparent in his novel Lucinde of 1800, in which music is described as becoming ‘a dangerous and bottomless abyss of longing and melancholy’. Here, the bottomlessness of music’s abyss recalls the infinity of the human subject’s longing for knowledge.¹² In what is perhaps the most important reference to longing in the novel, Schlegel uses auditory metaphors to describe his hero’s awakening from a deep sleep: ‘when with childlike timidity he strives to escape from the mystery of his existence and, sweetly curious, seeks the unknown he hears (vernimmt) everywhere only the resonance (Nachhall) of his own longing (Sehnsucht)’.¹³ This passage is a literary paraphrase of Schlegel’s philosophical position on knowledge. Just as the philosopher seeks final and certain knowledge of the world as it is in itself but finds only longing, the character at the centre of this passage seeks the unknown but finds only longing. Significantly, this longing is not seen, but heard.

Second, Schlegel believes music to be itself a philosophical art form. Manfred Frank has noted that, with the phrase ‘longing for the infinite’, Schlegel and his contemporaries believed themselves to have found a new translation of the Greek filosofiva, root of the modern word ‘philosophy’ (in German: Philosophie).¹⁴ If music is an embodiment of longing, then music is also, implicitly, an embodiment of philosophy. Schlegel makes this connection explicit at several points, including in a fragment from the Athenaeum:

This passage explicitly rejects the idea that music should be only a ‘language of the emotions’, a clear reference to the older, Enlightenment view of music. Rather, the themes in music are ‘developed, reaffirmed, varied, and contrasted in the same way as the subject of meditation in a philosophical succession of ideas’, even while the passage leaves open the possibility that music might also remain effective at moving the emotions of listeners. The suggestion that there might be a correspondence between musical and philosophical ideas is developed in an entry from the notebooks that Schlegel kept at around this time, in which he associates musical variations with the philosophical thesis, because they involve repetition of a theme, but describes counterpoint as the philosophical antithesis.¹⁶ Schlegel does not provide an association between music and synthesis, the expected third term of the triad, for, he believes, there is no final synthesis, no completion, hence music’s longing will never be fulfilled.¹⁷ He does, however, think that there is a unity of being that lies beyond human consciousness but that can occasionally be intuited in finite syntheses that never align fully with each other. Schlegel refers to these syntheses as instances of wit, a term that is often presumed to refer only to a literary device, but which Schlegel explicitly associates with music, writing that ‘All wit is musical.’¹⁸

Third, and most simply, whereas music had long been considered the lowest of the beautiful arts, Schlegel at this time comes to believe, on occasion at least, that music is the highest of the arts. This claim appears in a fascinating fragment from his notebooks:

This brings us back full circle to the observation that music was, for Schlegel, part of romantic poetry. Indeed, Schlegel’s remark that poetry probably has musical principles makes clear that not only is music, for Schlegel, contained within romantic poetry, it is also sometimes deemed to be the essence of romantic poetry.

Novalis

In his works from around the same time, Novalis puts forward a position on music that is certainly distinct from that of Schlegel but also remarkably similar. As with Schlegel, Novalis’s philosophical development grew directly out of his engagement with, and rejection of, Fichte’s epistemological foundationalism. In place of this epistemological foundationalism, Novalis developed – as did Schlegel – a notion of philosophy as an infinite task. He built on this notion, however, to develop a unique philosophical position of his own. Novalis was certainly receptive to the idealism of Kant, Reinhold, and Fichte, but sought to combine this idealism with a realism – a belief in the reality of the external world – that he associated with the earlier philosopher Baruch Spinoza. He called the resulting approach to philosophy magical idealism, the term ‘magical’ denoting here the traditional goal of magic to gain control over nature, rather than any adherence to traditions of the occult in particular.²⁰

Novalis explains how idealism and realism can be united in a programme for magical idealism given in his unfinished encyclopaedia, the Allgemeine Brouillon (1798–9):

The ability ‘to transform thoughts into external things’ is a reference to Fichtean idealism, which had suggested, on some readings at least, that the thinking self might somehow create the external world out of itself. Novalis, however, counters this with its polar opposite, the ability to ‘transform external things into thoughts’. Novalis refers to this latter operation as ‘idealistic’, because it is based on the subject’s active engagement with the external world. Its philosophical underpinning, however, is thoroughly realist, for it posits a natural world whose existence is not predicated on the subject.

The internal and the external, the ideal and the real, the Fichtean and the Spinozistic all have a distinct meeting point: the human body.²² As such, the body is at the centre not only of Novalis’ philosophy in general, but also of his new, Romantic view of music in particular. In what follows, I present a systematic overview of this new view of music while refusing – mirroring my strategy with that of Schlegel – to iron out the unevenness of Novalis’s deliberately fragmentary writings. I identify again three key themes, this time dwelling on the first in particular: a close relationship between music and the body.

The idea that music engages closely with the human body was not new to Novalis. It was indeed foundational for the older, Enlightenment view of music, for theories of musical affect tended to draw specifically on mechanical understandings of the body.²³ One particular way in which they did so was with reference to music’s medical potential: to the ways in which music’s affective power could prove useful for the treatment of various ailments. Yet Novalis explicitly rejects this older view of music. With regard to art in general, Novalis writes that ‘Affects … belong to a lack of virtue (Untugend).’²⁴ With regard to music in particular, Novalis rejects another idea that had been closely tied up with the older view of music: the idea that music should imitate nature. According to Novalis, ‘the musician takes the essence of his art from within himself – not even the slightest suspicion of imitation can apply to him’.²⁵

Novalis posits instead a wholly new relationship between music and the body, a relationship that shows itself in a new conception of medicine itself. Drawing on his understanding of the body as meeting point for the internal and the external, Novalis complains that ‘common medicine is handiwork. It only has what is useful in mind.’ In contrast, ‘true therapeutics’ forms ‘a prescription for the preservation and restoration of [the] special relation and exchange between the [internal and external] stimuli or factors’.²⁶ Novalis also reconceives death in corresponding fashion, seeing it as ‘nothing but an interruption in the exchange between the inner and outer stimuli – between the soul and the world’.²⁷ By preserving the right balance of stimuli, Novalis believes, one could, in principle, extend life indefinitely. The physician who could do this would be an artist:

At one point, the musician becomes for Novalis the epitome of such an artist. ‘Every illness’, writes Novalis, ‘is a musical problem – the cure is a musical solution. The more rapid, and yet the more complete, the solution – the greater the musical talent of the doctor.’²⁹ The general goal of ‘the artist of immortality’ – to harmonise inner and outer stimuli – is now the specific goal of the musician. The whole of life is thus figured as musical. Of the traditional elements of music – harmony, melody, and rhythm – harmony would seem to be most closely related to this perceived goal. Novalis, however, stresses not harmony, but rhythm. Seeing the effect of stimuli on the body in terms of ‘excitability’ (or ‘irritability’, Reizbarkeit), Novalis writes of an ‘all-encompassing constitution’, that is ‘capable of an infinite maximum and infinite minimum of irritability’.³⁰ This constitution is ‘infinite rhythm’ (unendlicher Rhythmus). The difficulties of pinning down such a proposition are clear in Novalis’s decision to cross out this entry, which occurs in a draft of his Allgemeine Bouillon, in a later revision of the same manuscript. Nonetheless, this link raises the question of the role of rhythm in Novalis’s philosophy.

The second theme that I wish to identify in Novalis’s view of music is, then, an emphasis on rhythm. A few decades before Novalis was writing his Allgemeine Brouillon, Enlightenment stalwart Johann Georg Sulzer had developed a new theory of rhythm. Earlier theories of rhythm had believed it to be formed from the combination of discrete units. Sulzer, by contrast, thought rhythm to arise from the breaking down of a continual flow. This was achieved, thought Sulzer, by placing accents on certain notes.³¹ Novalis draws on this understanding of rhythm to develop a broader philosophical position that opposes movement (Bewegung) and inertia (Trägheit). Inertia functions for Novalis as does the rhythmic accent for Sulzer, punctuating continual movement.³² Novalis also comes to believe, however, that movement is the essence of all that is, hence all that is becomes rhythmical.

This leads straight into my third theme, a close connection – as we found also in Schlegel – between music and philosophy. The rhythmical outlook identified here certainly suggests such a close connection in itself. This outlook is, however, only one aspect of Novalis’s magical idealism, which seeks to combine realism and idealism. In particular, it highlights the idealist side of this pair. In a telling passage from the Allgemeine Brouillon, Novalis associates music with (Fichtean) idealism, sculpture with (Spinozistic) realism. Novalis writes that:

Here Novalis sees the essence of sculpture and atomism as being rest, whereas the essence of music and Fichtean idealism are movement. (Atomism in Novalis’ time was a wide-ranging school of thought whose essential feature, for our purposes here, was that it was thoroughly realist.) Both music and sculpture, however, and both atomism and idealism, take shape only through their contact with their opposing force or body. Fichte had claimed that the thinking subject needs a ‘check’ against which to strive. Novalis balances this claim by suggesting that matter is equally in need of ‘thrust’. Music, however, is associated with the Fichtean, idealist side of the equation, hence Novalis claims that ‘Fichte has done nothing else than discover the rhythm of philosophy, and expressed it in a verbal acoustic manner.’³⁴ Elsewhere, in his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800), Novalis also establishes a clear connection between music and longing.³⁵

Both Schlegel and Novalis, then, develop their new views of music out of an engagement with – and ultimately a rejection of – Fichte’s philosophy. For Schlegel, the key point was the rejection of Fichte’s epistemological foundationalism, to be replaced by an infinite longing for knowledge. Novalis, too, rejects Fichte’s epistemological foundationalism, but his view of music rests equally on a new philosophical position – magical idealism – that sought to combine Fichtean idealism with a more common-sensical realism. There can be no denying that Schlegel and Novalis differ in many ways in their conceptions of music, but they agree on two key points. The first is that they both reject the older, Enlightenment view of music, according to which the purpose of music is merely to move the affects of listeners. For sure, they do not deny music’s emotional power, or the uses to which this power might be put – but such uses are no longer music’s primary purpose. The second key point is that, in response to a shared awareness of the limits of philosophical discourse, they agree that music is able to provide some kind of knowledge or insight that mere philosophy alone cannot provide. This latter belief is the essence of the Romantic view of music.

Schopenhauer and Schelling

Schlegel and Novalis were central to the early German Romantic movement. As such, they can be considered archetypically Romantic thinkers. Their new, Romantic view of music, however, soon spread to thinkers who were less easily straightforwardly ‘Romantic’ in orientation, yet whose development of the Romantic view of music was to prove of immense historical importance. Two of the most essential of these were Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer.

Schelling was an associate of Novalis and Schlegel in Jena and accepted some of their core philosophical ideas, yet retained the systematic impulse that had been so central to Reinhold and Fichte. In his System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800, Schelling put forward a view of art in general as the synthesis of the real and the ideal.³⁶ In his lectures on the Philosophy of Art, first delivered at the University of Jena in the academic year 1802–3, Schelling developed this position and applied it specifically to music. Here, Schelling makes systematic what was fragmentary in Schlegel and Novalis. ‘The forms of music’, writes Schelling, ‘are the forms of the eternal things … . the forms of music are necessarily the forms of things in themselves.’³⁷ The reference to ‘things in themselves’ is a reference to that which Kant believed to be unknowable: reality apart from its perception in human thought. Music, thinks Schelling, can tell us about the universe as it really is.

Schopenhauer was famously dismissive of his immediate philosophical forebears. Both Fichte and Schelling, for example, are ‘windbags’.³⁸ Yet his view of music comes straight from the work of Novalis, Schlegel, and, especially, Schelling. In his seminal work The World as Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer suggested that behind all appearing reality lay a will (Wille), a blind striving that remained ever unfulfilled. This is a creative suggestion, but it is also just one more attempt to solve a problem that had lingered since Kant: how to describe reality as it really is, apart from human perception. By naming this more fundamental reality ‘will’, Schopenhauer thought that he had penetrated the essence of the universe itself. And Schopenhauer believed that music could offer access to this will, in a way that words could not. Hence, he claims that music has a ‘serious and profound significance, one that refers to the innermost essence of the world and our self’. Indeed, music is unique amongst the arts in offering ‘a direct copy of the will itself’.³⁹

As with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation was something of a sleeper hit: it was only with the publication of a volume of short essays, Parerga and Paralipomena, in 1851 that Schopenhauer was launched into the philosophical firmament, and interest in his earlier, lengthy tome truly ignited. Schopenhauer’s place in musical history was cemented when Wagner first read The World as Will and Representation in 1854, a reading that was to have a famously dramatic effect on Wagner’s musical and intellectual development.⁴⁰

Schelling and Schopenhauer may not, strictly speaking, have been Romantics. But their views of music grew out of and in dialogue with those of their Romantic contemporaries, and had a mutual impact on more straightforwardly Romantic thinkers. Indeed, to make such blunt distinctions between inside and outside, Romantic and non-Romantic, is itself inimical to the Romantic predilections for multiplicity and universality. (Recall, for example, Schlegel’s definition of Romantic poetry as ‘forever in a state of becoming’ yet a ‘universal poetry’.) Whether or not they themselves were Romantics, these two thinkers played a pivotal role in developing and disseminating the Romantic view of music.

There are also other, more typically Romantic, thinkers who could have been given a place in this story. Central amongst them is Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, widely considered to be one of the founders of literary Romanticism, and a famously florid writer on musical affairs. For all the magniloquence of its presentation, however, Wackenroder’s core conception of music is more reminiscent of the older, Enlightenment view of music – according to which its purpose is to move the affects of listeners – than it is to the Romantic view discussed in the present chapter. Hence Wackenroder’s fictional composer Joseph Berglinger, for example, believes that music is ‘created only to move the human heart’.⁴¹

Another thinker who could have merited attention is the theologian Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, whose On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers of 1799 suggested that art had an ‘inner affinity’ with religion – and that it could penetrate to the depths of infinity.⁴² Unlike that of Schlegel, Novalis, and Schelling, Schleiermacher’s work in the years around 1800 had no specific focus on music in particular. In lectures delivered in 1819, 1825, and 1831–2, Schleiermacher discussed music in more detail, setting forward a position that combined affective and epistemological perspectives in unique and pleasantly perplexing ways. The texts of these lectures, however, were available only in limited form until the twentieth century, and so Schleiermacher’s discussions of music were of limited historical influence in the later nineteenth century.⁴³

The Romantic View of Music

This, then, is the story of the rise of the Romantic view of music. The view first arose in the aphoristic cogitations of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis in the second half of the 1790s. It was systematised rigorously in Schelling’s lectures on the Philosophy of Art in 1802–3 and presented in novel form in Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation of 1818. Along the way, Wackenroder presented the older, Enlightenment view of music in Romantic clothing; and in the wake of Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher offered a view of music that was both quintessentially Romantic and unreservedly bound up in a rethinking of music’s affective power.

This new, Romantic view of music spread like wildfire through nineteenth-century Europe. It was quickly developed by other philosophers, notably G. W. F. Hegel, and formed a foundational point of engagement for numerous and quite diverse later nineteenth-century thinkers, notably Richard Wagner, Franz Brendel, Eduard Hanslick, and the young Friedrich Nietzsche. This was the case even when these thinkers might have sought to modify this view, or even to reject it altogether. This Romantic view of music infiltrated music criticism with equal speed, underpinning – amongst much else – E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous 1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Further, since many of the figures involved in its creation were also novelists, poets, or essayists – indeed, several were all of these – it swiftly fermented itself in the popular literary imagination of the day. It did not, of course, remain uniform – there were as many variations on this view of music as there were discussions of it – yet at its core remained a rejection (or, at least, a weakening) of the older, more mechanical Enlightenment view of music and the embrace of the belief that music could, and should, offer some kind of knowledge or insight, especially into the fundamental nature of reality.⁴⁴

Even more striking is that this Romantic view of music remains with us to the present day. For sure, few concert audiences are likely to think of music precisely as embodying the philosophical striving that results from epistemological anti-foundationalism. But performers, composers, and audiences across genres retain the belief that music can offer some kind of insight into life’s mysteries – insight that simply cannot be put into words. This is a belief that motivates, if not exclusively, so much of contemporary musical life: from the silent listening still customary at classical concerts, to the rapturous critical praise of leading popular musicians, to the practice of music therapy. Perhaps most pertinently of all, this belief helps to underpin the educational and scholarly desire better to understand music, a desire embodied in the time taken by students and scholars to read essays such as this.

Questions of aesthetic merit are often tied to questions of (some kind of) utility or meaning. Poems, novels, and plays might prove useful for pedagogic purposes, paintings and sculptures might shed light on the human condition, and buildings – besides having the practical function of housing and shelter – commonly represent the purpose they were built for: governance, spiritual worship, memorialisation, and the like. In the case of much music, its purpose and meaning is as evident as with other arts: church music has the function of uplifting or inspiring the congregation, march music governs the pace of soldiers or parades, and vocal music can readily draw import from a text or mise en scène. When it comes to ‘pure’ music – instrumental compositions without a programme, title, or text – the concept of purpose or meaning becomes more vexing. With the emancipation of instrumental music from functionality, a process usually dated to the eighteenth century,¹ the question of aesthetic merit poses special issues for an art form whose meaning is notoriously problematic to determine, or sometimes considered simply absent. The issue with ‘pure’ music as an abstract and intricate art form demanding the listener’s full cognitive attention, engagement, and participation is captured vividly by the famous outburst of Bernard de Fontenelle, reported by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1768: ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?’; that is, ‘Sonata, what do you want from me?’, or ‘Sonata, what do you mean to me?’

In 1790, the essence of Fontenelle’s question was restated in a way that continued to dominate the majority of nineteenth-century musical discourse by provoking responses to the growing problem of ‘pure’ music. In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Immanuel Kant declares a serious dilemma: for him, as for many of his contemporaries, music on its own is considered the ‘language of affects’. As it thus does not involve rational concepts or moral ideas akin to the other fine arts and appeals mainly to emotion, it is unclear whether music is to be classified as an agreeable or fine art, the former merely ‘intended as momentary entertainment’ while the latter ‘promotes the cultivation of the mental powers’. Kant proceeds to compare the aesthetic value of each of the fine arts and assigns music without words a double-edged ranking (§53). While poetry takes the first place, music – which ‘speaks through mere sensations without concepts’ and does not ‘leave behind something for reflection’ – comes in second if ‘charm and movement of the mind’ are the deciding features. As soon as it comes to a more intellectual assessment, however, music proves to be ‘more enjoyment than culture’ and has, ‘judged by reason, less value than any other of the beautiful arts’.² In Kant’s view, music lacks any kind of content, speaking by means of auditory sensations without concepts, and is far too elusive to provide any rational content for intellectual recollection – the hallmark of true fine art. ‘Pure’ music, put rather simply, has no semantic content and therefore lacks meaning and, by extension, (aesthetic) value.³

Kant was by no means alone in his sceptical attitude towards music; indeed, he reflects general problems in grappling with this new phenomenon. Several decades later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, compiled from transcripts dating from the 1820s and published posthumously, reflect this Kantian dilemma directly:⁴ music without a text to be sung, Hegel purports, forgoes any ‘cognitive content and expression’, ultimately becoming ‘meaningless’ so that it must not be counted amongst the fine arts. The ‘sensory element’ of music, expressing the inwardness of subjectivity, must convey ‘intellect’; only then does music rise ‘to the rank of true art’.⁵ Although regarding the entirety of nineteenth-century musical aesthetics as a response to Kant’s charge against music simplifies a complex discourse, many contemporary philosophers, composers, literary figures, and critics in fact came to music’s defence. While each writer had their own means of imbuing music with merit and value, I will discuss four main solutions to the problem of musical meaning in roughly the first half of the nineteenth century, all closely linked to ‘Romantic’ views: (1) a reappraisal of the significance of feeling and emotion, (2) a modified connection between music and words, (3) the use of titles and programmes in instrumental compositions, and (4) a fundamental rethinking of the relationship of content and form. These general strategies and their most important exponents will function as umbrella concepts to be exemplified in the remainder of the current chapter.

Feeling as Content: Hoffmann, Schopenhauer, and the Affektenlehre

Relating different kinds of music to feelings is certainly no invention of Romantic aesthetics. Plato, for example, awards music a central place in Book 3 of Politeia or Republic (c. 375 bc), a dialogue carving out the principles of an ideal city state. As music affects humans profoundly, educators must select modes that improve the morality of pupils, mainly those about to become soldiers: music and instruments categorised as feeble would result in citizens of a similar character and are therefore ostracised (Politeia, c. 398–c. 400). Derived from this view, modern notions of music were largely shaped by the Affektenlehre (the doctrine of affects) as the prevalent approach to music, often based on a mimetic concept of art,⁶ which states that music can portray emotions such as pain, joy, and grief by purely musical means that in turn elicit matching sentiments in listeners. Music could reach this goal by imitating actual sounds (birdsong), by emulating the dynamics of natural events (sunrise and sunset), or by retracing expression (the emotional inflections of human speech).⁷ This view even produced textbooks specifying which musical features would evoke which affects, exemplified by Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739).⁸ The pinnacle of modern mimetic theory is commonly associated with eighteenth-century French writers (e.g., Abbé Dubos and Charles Batteux), who define art as an imitation of nature.⁹ This view, which bases the value of music on an emulation of external objects, is ultimately discarded by British theorists such as James Beattie and Adam Smith, who consider musical meaning to be ‘complete in itself’.¹⁰

With the decline of mimetic concepts in general, the nineteenth century saw expression take centre stage in discussions concerning the value of music. Although the Affektenlehre gave major weight to emotion and feeling, it did so in terms of a shared lexicon of musical gestures on the part of the composer and emotive arousal on the part of the listener, whereas Romanticism framed this question in terms of individual expression. The Romantic composer was no longer obligated to convey a universally intelligible meaning to his or her audience. Rather, they were expressing subjective emotional states and (in the best of cases) introducing their listeners to hitherto unknown realms of profound experience, culminating in the magical, mystical, and supernatural. Musically speaking, this attitude resulted in the extension of musical material (e.g., intensification of chromaticism and liberal usage of timbral colours), the loosening and exceeding of traditional formal bounds (programmes in instrumental compositions), the blending of distinct genres (the use of choirs in symphonies from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8), or an emphasis on subjective and inward genres such as piano music and the lied. As E. T. A. Hoffmann and other Romantic writers indicate, however, this shifting attitude towards ‘pure’ music and its potential for the sublime was for the most part a question of perspective, reflecting primarily a new way of listening,¹¹ and thus not mirrored directly by changes in musical material or style.

In his famous review of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 (1810), Hoffmann views music as ‘the most romantic of all arts’, unlocking an ‘unknown realm’, a world in which humans ‘leave behind all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible’. While Joseph Haydn’s works are the expression of ‘childlike optimism’, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart gives us an ‘intimation of infinity’ by leading us ‘deep into the realm of spirits’. Beethoven, finally, sets in motion the ‘machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain’, and awakes ‘that infinite yearning which is the essence of romanticism’.¹² Ten years prior, another pivotal figure of Romantic aesthetics, Ludwig Tieck, had described his experience of attending a staging of Macbeth, captured in his brief essay ‘Symphonies’ (1799). For him, the overture outshone anything the play itself could depict, as the music had already ‘voiced the most tremendous and the most excruciating in greater and more poetic ways’. This prelude, capable of manifesting the ‘restless, fiercer and fiercer activity of all the psychic forces’,¹³ was not, however, composed by anyone like Beethoven, but by Johann Friedrich Reichardt in 1795 – a composer certainly not regarded as typically Romantic today. The early stages of Romantic musical aesthetics, as Carl Dahlhaus observed, therefore constitute an ostensible mismatch between Romantic rhetoric and the music it attempts to interpret and ‘did not find an adequate object until E. T. A. Hoffmann borrowed Tieck’s language in order to do justice to Beethoven’.¹⁴

Finally, Arthur Schopenhauer’s main work The World as Will and Representation presents the first full-fledged treatise to declare ‘pure’ music the central artform because of its capacity to express feelings in their purest form. While the initial edition of 1818 went practically unnoticed in the age of Hegel, the second edition of 1844 proved influential, particularly in music circles, and it deeply shaped composers’ philosophical convictions, from Wagner to Mahler, Strauss, and Schoenberg. Schopenhauer’s momentous revaluation of music is based on an overarching metaphysics rooted in Platonic and Kantian idealism as well as Indian Vedic philosophy. Schopenhauer distinguishes two aspects of the world: (1) a world of representation, constructed by our peculiar sensory apparatus and mind, and (2) a world apart from any act of perception, that is, the thing-in-itself or noumenon. While Kant treats the thing-in-itself as necessarily unknowable, Schopenhauer calls it Will – a blind force of striving impelling all phenomena, from the plant’s growth towards the sun to human volition. As the essential principle of life thus is insatiable striving, humans are torn between volition, temporary fulfilment, and boredom. While grasping the Will as the essence of being itself – thus obliterating the perceived difference between the ‘I’ and the world – results in the cessation of any volition, art can act as its momentary suppressant by offering objects of contemplation, fleetingly liberating the individual from this ‘vale of tears’. In doing so, music attains a special status: while other arts can merely present Ideas (the inner nature of objects), music alone can reveal the Will in totality.¹⁵ Music, states Schopenhauer,

Music and Words: Mendelssohn, Wagner, and the Specificity of ‘Pure’ Music

Romanticism frequently tended towards the ineffable, relating musical works to a ‘separate world unto themselves’ (Tieck) and to the ‘wondrous realm of the infinite’ (Hoffmann).¹⁷ The lack of precise content was thus no longer rated as some kind of vice, but was on the contrary perceived as a unique ability of music to approximate the spiritual and absolute. This view also modified the relations between music and words. The old question of the aesthetic priority of music and words in opera – immortalised in Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole (1786) and posed again in Strauss’s Capriccio (1942) – had typically been answered in favour of the text, so that Kant in 1798 could claim that music is an art ‘only because it serves poetry as a vehicle’.¹⁸ While this debate was usually framed in terms of hierarchy, Felix Mendelssohn restates this problem as one of precision and immediacy. Following a line of thought set out by Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Mendelssohn was mindful of the pitfalls of linguistic meaning based on generic, abstract, and highly conventionalised terms, which have different meanings and connotations for different individuals. Music, in contrast, viewed as an immediate expression of the composer’s innermost subjectivity, originality, and individuality, can convey precise (emotive) meaning to an audience of like-minded listeners.¹⁹ For him, ‘pure’ music expresses not ‘thoughts too indefinite to couch in terms, but on the contrary too definite’. He considers any attempt of translating musical thoughts into language to be inadequate in principle and thus also refrained from putting his theoretical convictions into writing, usually a hallmark of Romantic composers: ‘If you ask me, what I was thinking of [in writing these pieces], I must say: just this song as it is written.’²⁰

This view, reversing the argument against music’s vagueness and declaring language too imprecise to do justice to music’s import, is an attitude we will come across again in discussing Hanslick’s aesthetics, for Hanslick similarly declares ‘pure’ music to be ‘a language that we speak and understand, but are unable to translate’. If we wish to identify the ‘content’ of a piece or theme for someone, Hanslick continues, ‘we have to play the theme itself for him. The content of a musical work can therefore never be understood concretely but rather only musically, namely as that which actually resounds in each piece of music.’²¹ While Hanslick thereby claimed music’s content to be part of ‘music itself’ and not in need of clarification by language or concepts, other exponents of Romantic aesthetics still used words as a means to achieve musical meaning. Although this notion might, at first glance, seem a relapse into pre-Romantic reasoning, the motivation for introducing words to music had changed markedly. Whereas Baroque authors often treated words as an indispensable prerequisite for giving music merit in the first place, Romantic theorists assumed musical meaning to be intrinsic and self-evident. While this intrinsic meaning was regarded by Mendelssohn as having the utmost immediacy and precision, a second thread of Romantic reasoning considered it transcendent and therefore as exceeding regular human comprehension. Following Hoffmann in linking musical meaning to ineffability, some felt the need to objectify its abstract content by reifying music’s absolute meaning through words, thereby linking the universal expression of ‘pure’ music to concrete human events.

One of these Romantic theorists was Richard Wagner, who, in his Zurich exile (1849–58) following the revolution of 1848, embarked on creating an inclusive concept of art, conceived as a general philosophy including (amongst other things) a critique of the state, society, religion, and capitalist economy, and of the steady decline of art since ancient Greek tragedy.²² In his key essays from around this time – Art and Revolution (1849), The Artwork of the Future (1850), and Opera and Drama (1851) – Wagner portrays the historical evolution of art as one of progressive segregation. While Wagner views mousiké techné – the unity of song, dance, and music – and the tight link of ancient Greek tragedy to morality, religion, and society as an apex of art, he regards modern art as the result of an ‘egoistic’ isolation of the arts from each other, ever approximating mere l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake). While the fine arts had revelled in their isolated technical progress, they had lost sight of their ‘true’ purpose: the ‘unconditioned, absolute portrayal of perfected human nature’ that only the united efforts of all the arts – the Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art – can wholly muster. The autonomous expressive properties of music, Wagner asserts, had reached their limit in Beethoven’s symphonies, as testified by the use of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ in his Ninth, which represents ‘the redemption of music from out her own peculiar element into the realm of universal Art’. In order to portray the essence of human nature, music’s conceptless universality had to be specified, marking the boundary between ‘absolute’ music and the purely human artwork.²³

In the Romantic tradition of viewing music as an intimation of the absolute, Wagner treats music as the ‘organ of the heart’ and ‘faculty of uttering the unspeakable’. For the purpose of expressing something more than endless longing, the ‘unspeakably expressive language’ and ‘infinitely soul-full element’ of music must focus on tangible objects.²⁴ This move, however, differs from the question of the aesthetic priority of music and words and is motivated by Wagner’s resort to Greek tragedy viewed through the prism of Friedrich Schlegel’s universal Romantic poetry, which aimed at fusing philosophy, spirituality, art, and life as such.²⁵ Wagner, after becoming acquainted with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics in 1854, would later award to music an elevated position amongst the fine arts (see his Beethoven essay of 1870).²⁶ His Zurich writings, however, consider words and music as equal in opera, the error of which lay in the fact that ‘a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means’. Note that Wagner says that music must serve not the text, but rather the drama, the poetic kernel of the total work of art, which all the arts must convey to their fullest extent. Separately, the arts are incapable of fulfilling their expressive potential and need each other to become a universal and undivided art.²⁷ In deeming music without words unable to portray specific feelings, concepts, and objects, Wagner and Hanslick are still part of Kantian discourse and – although reaching different conclusions – hold ‘quite similar’ views of music’s expressive powers, ‘even if they approached the issue of “absolute music” from opposite sides’.²⁸

Poetic Music Between the Characteristic and the Programmatic

While words were a tried and tested means of establishing musical meaning, Romanticism brought to fruition another way of defining musical content by creating complete genres still used today: the programme symphony and symphonic poem.²⁹ The former is frequently considered to have been introduced by Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830) and Harold en Italie (1834), before being continued effectively in works such as Franz Liszt’s Faust-Sinfonie (1857) and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony (1885). The symphonic poem, meanwhile, was a theoretical conception introduced by Liszt, whose thirteen specimens presented an exemplary precedent for numerous successors in the later stages of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, including well-known pieces by Balakirev, Dvořák, Respighi, Saint-Saëns, Smetana, Sibelius, and Strauss. Using labels or programmes to identify musical meaning was itself hardly an invention of the Romantic era: prominent precedents introducing programmes to instrumental compositions include Antonio Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni (1725), Luigi Boccherini’s Musica Notturna delle strade di Madrid (1780), Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf’s symphonies after Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1783), or Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral, 1808).³⁰ But it is the belief that music could be imbued with poetic import through the use of fully developed programmes derived from novels, plays, and other forms of stimuli that most of all sets the programme symphony and symphonic poem apart from earlier examples.

It is this very distinction that differentiates such programmatic music from another typical and equally central Romantic development in music in the 1820s and 1830s, the ‘characteristic’ or ‘poetic’ piano piece, overture, or symphony, in which ‘extra-musical’ content is indicated by such means as titles and evocative or topically allusive musical material. This category is epitomised by Mendelssohn’s independent concert overtures – Sommernachtstraum (1826), Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt (1828), Die Hebriden (1832), and Das Märchen von der schönen Melusine (1834) – Schumann’s piano cycles of the 1830s (e.g., Carnaval, Kinderszenen, and, inspired by Hoffmann’s writings, Kreisleriana and Fantasiestücke), and to an extent the symphonies of both these composers. In many cases, the boundary between the programmatic and the musically evocative is rather fuzzy: some of Mendelssohn’s earlier pieces flirt with more patently programmatic content,³¹ whereas several of Liszt’s symphonic poems originated as concert overtures or other pieces and profess a tenuous or retrospective association with their expressly declared programme.³² A work like Louis Spohr’s Symphony No. 4, Die Weihe der Töne (1832), a ‘characteristic tone-painting’ based on a poem by Carl Pfeiffer and ending unusually in a measured Larghetto movement, shows how easily the programmatic and characteristic became blurred in the symphony after Beethoven.³³ Moreover, the division between the two positions hardened around mid-century, with lines drawn around ideological and political agendas that bury the fluid usage of literary content from the delicately evocative to the categorically programmatic.

By 1850, though, the degree to which music was supposed to conform to ‘external’ literary templates was proving a matter of heated debate. Composers disagreed as to what extent such literary models were part of ‘music itself’. Schumann, for instance, had adopted an attitude that allowed for perspectivist assessments – one and the same work ‘as poetry’ and ‘as a composition’ – and regularly used headings as depictions a posteriori, clarifying the ‘content’ of any given piece. Poetry and music, Schumann asserts, coincide in essence: ‘the aesthetics of one art is the same as that of all the other arts; only the material is different’.³⁴ Liszt, however, regarded the retrospective use of programmes as ‘childish’³⁵ (at least in theory if not in actual practice), as for him, the plot or idea is an integral element of programme music, which simply is ‘pure’ music with definite spiritual content and not a composite of music and words, thus meeting Hegel’s demands for ‘real’ art.³⁶ The definiteness of programmes was a further matter of dispute: Schumann, for example, regarded an exhaustive programme as obstructing the free flow of imagination. For him, art was life and life was art, expressing the personality, ferventness, and emotions of the creator directly. Liszt, however, endorsed guiding the listener by way of fully developed plots, at least when it came to his theoretical deliberations, which were not always realised in practice. As Franz Brendel, Schumann’s successor as editor of Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, put the matter: while music’s ability to ‘express the ineffable’ embodies its ‘loftiest aspect’, the ‘completely unspecified’ realm of music had to be ‘fixed by a programme directing the vagabond imagination towards a definite object’.³⁷

Hanslick, Aesthetic Autonomy, and ‘Absolute’ Music

Whereas Romantic writers largely agreed that any given piece of music might be perceived poetically, irrespective of the creator’s intention, defining the relation between the literary subject and music’s formal features proved a divisive problem. Rather than acting merely as poetic stimuli, ideas, plots, and entire stories could govern music on the level of structural organisation, justifying harmonic ‘oddities’ by virtue of literary cohesion. The harmonic ventures of the witches’ sabbath in the Symphonie fantastique and the final part of Eine Faust-Sinfonie, pushing the limits of tonality, were thus explained by their plots: while they might not ‘make sense’ musically, they were warranted by their poetic topics. Brendel, for instance, held that extraordinary musical progressions are ‘legitimised not by technical harmonic analysis, but by the [poetic] subject directly’.³⁸ This opinion, however, did not remain unchallenged amongst Romantic writers, as August Wilhelm Ambros shows: while upholding Schumann’s poetic notion of music, he at the same time asserts that literary subjects could never justify a deviation from music’s organic unfolding as ‘each detail of a piece of music must, according to purely musical logic, allow itself to be entirely derived from and justified by the mere formal element’.³⁹ This issue is related directly to questions of aesthetic autonomy and the nature of music, ultimately resulting in opposing schools of thought around 1850: the ‘New German School’, rallying around Wagner and Liszt with Brendel as their main journalistic mouthpiece, and the more ‘conservative’ Romanticist camp of Brahms, Hanslick, and Joseph Joachim.⁴⁰

While Liszt and Wagner argued for the coherence of different art forms, united in respect of common expressive purposes, Hanslick and like-minded individuals remained sceptical towards music’s poetic ambitions. This discord, however, was not based simply on dogmatic appeals to music’s purity and the general rejection of poetic music but was derived chiefly from the perceived tendency of programmatic compositions to disregard the ‘inherent’ principles of music, which were suspended for the purpose of depicting extra-musical content. For Hanslick, music had ‘sense and logic’ like other arts, but ‘musical sense and logic’, which might allow for literary stimuli but must not adhere to external precepts that could compromise an aesthetic autonomy only recently attained.⁴¹ While this idea might appear less ‘Romantic’ than Wagner’s position, it should be viewed as the flipside of Romantic aesthetics: although many Romantics were invested in creating tangible musical content, the purely musical is, as Benedict Taylor observes, an invention of Romanticism as well.⁴² Hegel posits three classes of art: symbolic, classical, and Romantic art, the last-named including painting, music, and poetry in order of merit. Romantic musicians, however, went one step further by calling music ‘Romantic as such’⁴³ and stipulating that ‘when music is spoken of as an independent art the term can properly apply only to instrumental music, which scorns all aid, all admixture of other arts, and gives pure expression to its own peculiar artistic nature. It is the most romantic of all arts – one might almost say the only one that is purely romantic.’⁴⁴

This notion of music as essentially instrumental instead of vocal, although common in certain circles today, marks a profound conceptual shift carried into effect by Romantic aesthetics. Eduard Hanslick, whose On the Musically Beautiful probably presents the most significant musical aesthetics of nineteenth-century discourse, develops his approach from this idea: ‘only what can be asserted about instrumental music is valid for music as such … Whatever instrumental music cannot do, can never be said that music can do it. For only instrumental music is pure, absolute music’. Although Hanslick refrains from allotting priority to ‘pure’ music – he calls this move an ‘unscientific procedure’ – he asserts against the ‘New German School’ that ‘the unification with poetry extends the power of music, but not its boundaries’.⁴⁵ He therefore repudiates Schumann’s universal aesthetics and rather insists on a particular approach to music, which ‘holds firmly to the maxim that the laws of beauty of each art are inseparable from the characteristics of its material, of its technique’.⁴⁶ By defining musical content as ‘sonically moved forms’,⁴⁷ he leaves behind the customary distinction between these factors, thereby turning beauty as well as emotional expression into intrinsic features of ‘music itself’.⁴⁸ Music thus does not have any purpose beyond itself, nor does it need to arouse affects or present ‘external content’ in order to have merit, as beauty ‘resides solely in the tones and their artistic connection’: music, he states, is ‘an end unto itself’ and not merely ‘a means of or material for representing feelings and thoughts’.⁴⁹

While this view is commonly considered the origins of formalist aesthetics and ‘traditional’ musicology grounded in technical analysis, Hanslick’s defence of ‘absolute’ music – a term he uses only once – clearly derives from Romanticism. What turns ‘pure’ music into true art for Hanslick besides formal beauty is an essentially Romantic idea: Geist, that is, mind, spirit, intellect. Conforming to (historically arbitrary) principles of regularity, symmetry, and perfection is not enough for music to be considered beautiful; composing, Hanslick contends, is ‘an operation of the intellect in material of intellectual capacity’, which utilises existing musical material to ‘invent new, purely musical features’.⁵⁰ The original Romantic setting of Hanslick’s aesthetics gets lost in translation quite literally, as the English-language renditions of On the Musically Beautiful are based on revised editions. The initial 1854 edition of Hanslick’s treatise shows the early Romantic leanings of its author most clearly in the concluding paragraph, omitted from later editions, and thereby reveals how both formalism and expressivism are deeply rooted in Romanticism:

Das Gemüt, die Seele, das Innere, die Tiefen: these and other words connoting heart, soul, and the inner depths of the self are the lexical landmarks of German Romantic thinking about interiority. In writings on music, such words map the shadowy inner arena of music’s impact on attentive listeners. The listening posture that accompanied the rise of Romantic musical aesthetics in the late 1790s valorised interior response over external circumstance, the inner sensation of transport over the discharging of functional purposes. In states of rapt attention, perhaps with eyes closed, Romantic listeners desired to be carried away by tones, to be swept up into a world that, as E. T. A. Hoffmann insisted, had nothing to do with everyday concerns or conventional sociality.¹ Contemporary accounts suggest that such experiences could be had in the home, at a concert, or in church. No matter where listeners were located, though, the world into which music transported them was one of both feeling and imagination, a world that stretched inward through the ear to the affective wellsprings of human existence and outward to the realm of nature, whose dynamism served as a frequent point of comparison for musical processes. Listening to a symphony, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder surmised, entailed confronting ‘an entire world’ as well as an ‘entire drama of human emotions’.² Wackenroder’s breathless commentary on the genre of greatest interest to Romantics indicates that the defining quality of instrumental music was its fertile production of metaphor. Music, in short, carried Romantic listeners across some indefinable inner boundary into novel regions of emotion and fantasy. Music’s pertinence for Romantic notions of interiority arises largely from its capacity to induce such transport, a capacity that many witnesses considered unparalleled amongst the arts.

The most voluble contributors to the transformation of musical values between about 1800 and 1830 tended to be German speakers.³ The historical and cultural reasons for this were many, and they include the growing fascination with symbols of darkness and obscurity (such as dense forests, deep waters, and ruined castles); an Enlightenment-rejecting hostility to the perceived superficiality of France, that politically and culturally powerful nation to the west of the fragmented Germanic lands; an unusually high dissemination of mining lore into the popular imagination, abetted by the underground exploits of authors such as Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; and the inward-facing tradition of religious devotion that sprang from seventeenth-century Pietism, itself a disillusioned variation of Lutheranism.⁴ Following the debilitating losses of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which disproportionally affected Germans, God seemed to have abandoned humans to a world replete with violence and suffering. All the better to seek divinity within through prayer or the cultivation of mystical feelings. Indeed, turning away from the world to pursue private contemplation or reflection presupposes that active immersion in everyday social, political, or mercantile life was antithetical to certain human pursuits. Even the pivotal Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant took his own inward path in the three Critiques – namely, an epistemological turn that redirected thought to the very process of knowing itself, to the hidden constraints that organised human cognition from within. For aesthetes and thinkers frustrated by a lack of sympathy for their enthusiasms, solitary study, creative activity, or even private musical performance offered an escape from mundane reality.

Hoffmann’s fictional musician Johannes Kreisler was one such aesthete, and he will serve as the tour guide for our excursion into the terrain of German Romantic interiority. Composer, keyboardist, music teacher, and all-round eccentric, Kreisler is the central figure of Hoffmann’s music-themed essays Kreisleriana (1814) and a key protagonist in his novel Kater Murr (Tomcat Murr, 1820–1). It might be objected that a fictional character should not be considered a trustworthy guide to Romantic principles. However, not only is Hoffmann’s Kreisler semi-autobiographical, but it would also be quite artificial to insist on a strict separation of truth from fiction in Romantic writings. The very word romantic originally meant novelistic, and Romanticism generally sought to make life artistic and art lifelike; witness, for example, Bettina von Arnim’s semi-fictionalised versions of her correspondence with Goethe and her close friend Günderode. Wackenroder’s best-known essays on music, furthermore, were written as if from the pen of the fictional composer Joseph Berglinger. Without further ado, then, let us turn to the second essay of Kreisleriana (‘Ombra adorata’), which recounts Kreisler’s experiences at a concert of instrumental and vocal music. Its very first lines comprise a suitable point of departure for a study of Romantic aesthetics:

Three guiding principles can be extracted from Hoffmann’s words: that music is inscrutably deep or profound, that musical sounds penetrate into and change the listener’s inner world, and that music is capable of transporting listeners to some more ideal, and markedly spiritual, state of being. This essay will show how each of these principles undergirds broader Romantic convictions about the relationship between music and interiority. I draw for support on the writings of Hoffmann, Wackenroder, and Bettina von Arnim; the philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer; and the author and champion of women’s rights Malwida von Meysenbug. Finally, the essay will close with some reflections on how the Romantics’ much-vaunted inwardness, for all its apparent self-absorption, engages in a dialogue with the natural world through the boundary-defying powers of metaphor and analogy.

Hidden Depths

At issue for Romantic thinkers was not simply the influence music exerted over the inner life, but the way that music seemed to harbour its own inner depths by virtue of its occult efficacy, mathematical foundations, and physical origin in vibration. In particular, commentators on music wondered how (or even if) the sensuous rapture and spiritual transport occasioned by music were related to the art’s numerical and proportional bases, whose rational character seemed so out of step with its affective sway. Hoffmann’s suspicion that music’s ‘deeper mysteries’ could not really be elucidated was shared by Wackenroder, who encapsulated the enigma as follows: ‘Between the individual, mathematical, tonal relationships and the individual fibres of the human heart an inexplicable sympathy has revealed itself, through which the musical art has become a comprehensive and flexible mechanism for the portrayal of human emotions.’⁶ With these words, Wackenroder effectively placed something essential about music, something he called its ‘dark and indescribable element’, in a permanent state of obscurity.⁷

Where explanation is lacking, myth steps in. Wackenroder speculated that before music could advance beyond the ‘screaming and the beating of drums’ of ancient peoples (modelled, one assumes, on Eurocentric notions of allegedly uncivilised contemporaries), ‘wise men first descended into the oracle caves of the most occult sciences, where Nature, begetter of all things, herself unveiled for them the fundamental laws of sound. Out of these secret vaults they brought to the light of day the new theory, written in profound numbers.’⁸ Several senses of mystery and depth converge in these remarks. First, knowledge must be obtained by way of a penetration into the nature of things analogous to the descent into a cave (here, the image is less geological or mineralogical than evocative of the underground oracle at Delphi). Knowledge is then gained only when nature ‘unveils’ herself to inquiring human minds. Finally, the fruits of knowledge – the ‘profound numbers’ of modern music theory – retain an aura of depth indebted to their recondite origins. While the rational underpinnings of music theory may seem to supply the ‘objective’ counterpart to music’s ‘subjective’ impact, both were connected to domains (natural law, interior feeling) marked as inward or deep.

That sound was not a visible property of objects but was caused by physical vibration only added to music’s mystique. Voices emerged from the depths of the vocal cavity, instrumental sounds (in many cases) from a resonance-producing chamber. Just as musical sounds emerged from such inner spaces, so too did they enter the hidden passages of the ear and, by some obscure pathway, find their way to the seat of feeling and emotion. In his writings on aesthetics, Hegel posited that the ‘world of sounds, quickly rustling away, is directly drawn by the ear into the inner life of the heart and harmonizes the soul with emotions in sympathy with it’.⁹ Hegel sought to explain the peculiar effect that music exercises on inner feeling by recourse to two factors: the inward nature of tones (what the Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics calls the ‘earliest inwardness of matter’) and the fleeting character of music, which, by neither occupying nor persisting in space, mirrors the fluidity and non-specific location of ‘inwardness as such’.¹⁰

While it is easy to understand how the sound of the voice (either as uttered or merely imagined) could be considered a medium for mental inwardness, it is nothing short of remarkable that the sounds of inanimate objects fulfil the same purpose in Hegel’s account. This supposition hints at a human readiness to hear sound, whether or not it is produced by living things, as evidence of animation. Confronted with the fragile tones emanating from vibrating bodies, Romantic listeners felt as though they were hearing secret messages transmitted from one soul to another. Hegel’s one-time friend and colleague Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling contended that tone is ‘nothing other than the intuition of the soul of the material body itself’, a phrase that speaks to the borderline animism of Romantic Naturphilosophie.¹¹ Indeed, the liveliness of sound helps to account for much of the intimacy Romantic thinkers intuited between music and the natural world. The narrator of Kreisleriana’s final instalment praises music as a ‘universal language of nature’ that ‘speaks to us in magical and mysterious resonances’, while Kater Murr features a scene in which Kreisler reports that, during an excursion into the countryside, he ‘listened to the voices of the forest and of the brook that spoke to me in comforting melodies’.¹² As only one member of a wider community of jostling, vibrating entities, music exhibits affinities with both living and non-living modes of expression, at least for those skilled in the category-defying, soul-extending perception demanded by Romanticism.¹³

Music Is Inwardness Is Music

Music, Kreisler says, harbours inscrutable mysteries, yet it also resides ‘in the breast of man himself’ and ‘fill[s] his heart with its enchanting images’. Kreisler’s references to the breast and heart might lead one to expect a paean to the feelings music either expresses or awakens. Yet Hoffmann’s take on the expressivist tenets of conventional music aesthetics was rather unusual, as his famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and its reworking in Kreisleriana, demonstrates. In contrast to earlier theories that focused on the isolated, nameable emotions (such as joy or sorrow) purportedly conveyed by music, Hoffmann argues that, when listening to contemporary symphonic works, one ‘leaves behind all precise feelings’ and experiences only ‘an inexpressible longing’.¹⁴ Hoffmann’s commentary traces a progression in which instrumental music gradually penetrates inward, moving from the ‘humanity in human life’ (Haydn) to the ‘superhuman, magical quality residing in the inner self’ (Mozart) to the ‘infinite yearning which is the essence of romanticism’ (Beethoven).¹⁵ Curiously, the further inward one goes, the less personal one gets, with interior exploration ultimately opening out onto the infinite reaches of the sublime.

Beethoven, who in Hoffmann’s view penetrated to the ‘innermost nature’ of instrumental music, revealed that music was essentially both vague and deeply affecting, a peculiar confluence of qualities that distinguished it from representational arts such as poetry and sculpture.¹⁶ Thanks to its non-specific semiotic character, instrumental music was the only ‘genuinely romantic’ art for Hoffmann, ‘since its only subject-matter is infinity’.¹⁷ Even as he rejected the idea that music expresses particular feelings, though, Hoffmann attached specific images to Beethoven’s music as well as to that of his predecessors. Haydn’s symphonies ‘lead us through endless, green forest glades, through a motley throng of happy people’, while Mozart ‘leads us deep into the realm of spirits’, where we ‘hear the gentle spirit-voices of love and melancholy’. Beethoven’s music, finally, ‘unveils before us the realm of the mighty and immeasurable’, where ‘shining rays of light shoot through the darkness of night and we become aware of giant shadows swaying back and forth’.¹⁸ The point of listening, it seems, is not simply to swoon in hazy yearning but to revel in the imagery music spontaneously engenders. In the phase of Romanticism that followed the waning of Enlightenment aesthetics but preceded the rise of programme music later in the nineteenth century, music was considered more an occasion for intensely ‘subjective’ experiences of feeling and the generation of mental images than a vehicle for the ‘objective’ expression of emotion or the representation of events such as sunrises, storms, or battles (all of which Hoffmann rejected as topics of musical discourse).

Wackenroder fell somewhere in the middle of Enlightenment and Romantic aesthetic positions. On the one hand, he hewed to a fairly traditional mimetic theory of music when he stated that ‘no art portrays the emotions in such an artistic, bold, such a poetic … manner’, and he listed a whole gamut of emotions that music might represent, from ‘masculine, exulting joy’ to the ‘sweet, ardent yearning of love’ to ‘deep pain’.¹⁹ On the other hand, Wackenroder discounted the power of language truly to capture such feelings, whereas music, so much more akin to the ‘secret river in the depths of the human soul’, streams feelings out before our very ears.²⁰ And not just any feelings, but explicitly musical feelings. Musical sounds, he wrote, teach us to feel emotion and ‘enrich our souls with entirely new, bewitching essences of feeling’.²¹ These remarks suggest that music does not merely reflect emotions that would exist without it, but inducts listeners into an alternative zone of affect, one whose contents ultimately resist linguistic translation. ‘Why do I strive to melt words into tones?’ Wackenroder asks at the end of his essay, ‘It is never as I feel it.’²² Music represents what is unrepresentable by other means – and thus coaxes feelings from us that could not exist by other means.

Experiences in which one listens to a symphony and undergoes all the feelings of its protagonist-like ‘resounding soul’ (as Wackenroder called it) inspired Hegel to ask how music could so closely resemble or even replace the listener’s own sense of interiority. In addition to the ‘inward’ quality of tone discussed above, Hegel located the key to music’s power in the temporal and insubstantial character music shared with the feelings he understood to be its content. What music ‘claims as its own’, Hegel wrote, ‘is the depth of a person’s inner life as such’.²³ In taking inwardness as its point of departure, music adopts a subject matter that is not cleanly distinguishable from the observer, as, say, a painting of a tree can be said to hang on that wall over there. When we experience emotions, Hegel claims, the distinction between the ‘I’ who experiences and the feelings experienced is ‘not yet explicit’. Instead, emotions are ‘interwoven with the inner feeling as such, without any separation between them’.²⁴ Because of this, music, which constitutes (he says) feelings in the form of tones, wields a power over the heart that does not so much come to consciousness as reside in the ‘undisclosed depth’ of feeling.²⁵ Even though music can be considered a form of sensuous existence independent of the listener, the inherently expressive nature of musical tones and music’s failure to establish a stable existence in either space or time mean that this inescapably mobile art ‘penetrates the arcanum of all the movements of the soul’. ‘Therefore’, Hegel continues, music ‘captivates the consciousness which is no longer confronted by an object and which in the loss of this freedom is carried away itself by the ever-flowing stream of sounds.’²⁶

Though Hegel’s ascription of music’s content to determinate feelings was perhaps not as sophisticated as Hoffmann’s hypothesis of music’s fundamental indeterminacy, Hoffmann would surely have agreed with the philosopher’s account of music’s uncanny ability to take possession of its listeners.²⁷ Indeed, Hoffmann’s alter ego Kreisler epitomises the figure of the listener (and, in his case, performer) routinely possessed by music. For Kreisler, music went so far beyond Kant’s notion of a meaningless ‘play with sensations’ as to threaten the very integrity of his personality.²⁸ The preface to Kreisleriana notes that singing had an ‘almost fatal effect’ on its main character, because ‘his imagination became overstimulated and his mind withdrew into a realm where nobody could follow him without danger’.²⁹ Whether co-opting the listener’s feelings or calling forth a tumult of mental imagery, music issued directives to the self so irresistible as to become a surrogate inwardness. Where the self ‘goes’ in such moments is a question for the next section.

Transported, Within and Beyond

Had Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony not been omitted from the concert that included ‘Ombra adorata’, Kreisler imagines that he would have been transported to a sublime realm that seems thoroughly overpowering, if not outright unfriendly. Much of Kreisler’s language derives from Hoffmann’s earlier review of the Fifth. While the experience Kreisler envisions is unusually violent – he is, after all, immoderately susceptible to music – the sense of being catapulted to the beyond that the passage describes falls squarely within what music’s devotees expected of their favourite art. Even Hegel’s casual reference to being ‘possessed’ by music confirms that, by the 1820s, transport was considered an indispensable feature of Romantic musical experience.

Describing the rich musical life of her childhood in the 1820s and ’30s, Malwida von Meysenbug recalled that she preferred listening over playing because she could give herself up wholly to the music. Otherwise, she had to spend too many dull hours practising the piano in order to achieve the results she had in mind. As an able singer, however, she could play a more active role in bringing about the distinctly musical mood of being ‘transported from the world’ (weltentrückter).³¹ Meysenbug considered music a requirement of the soul, and her memoirs describe a powerful instance of transport she experienced at the funeral of a close friend’s mother. In the midst of the ceremony, she recounts, ‘a power suddenly arose from the beautiful, earnest singing that elevated me above myself. I broke the fetters of grief, full of pride and energy; I raised up my head and eyes, for wings carried me far above fate and death, into the ranks of free spirits.’³² Meysenbug’s account suggests that music affords an inward sensation of soaring spirits, of a virtual inner movement that transports the self beyond its apparent limits. Her impressions had plenty of antecedents: the rapt Berglinger, for example, feels his soul ‘soaring up to the radiant Heavens’ when he listens to music in church, while Kreisler’s ‘soul flies with rapid wing-beats through shining clouds’ as he drinks in the melismas of ‘Ombra adorata’.³³

These and other evocations of flight, along with the vocabulary of soul, spirit, and heavenly motion that frequently accompanies them, indicate that for Romantic listeners, music was a fundamentally spiritual affair. Yet the nature of the spirit involved varied considerably amongst commentators, a situation further complicated by the multivalence of the German word Geist, with its range of sacred and secular meanings. For some listeners, the spiritual import of music was explicitly religious. Wackenroder wrote that music’s raw material (tone) is ‘already impregnated with divine spirit’, while Kreisler maintained that through music, humans are ‘suffused by a divine power’.³⁴ As a self-described idealist, Meysenbug nonetheless refused to relegate spirit to an entirely otherworldly realm. Objecting to the tenets of Christian asceticism, she held that ‘the senses are not the enemies of the spirit, but rather its instruments’.³⁵ In portraying spirit as a partner to sensation rather than its negation, Meysenbug concurred with one of her heroines, Bettina von Arnim, who wrote that music was a ‘medium of the spirit, whereby the sensuous becomes spiritual’.³⁶ For these listeners, the sense of transport was induced by the transmutation of sensuous input into spiritual intimations, a process whose obscurity only further burnished music’s reputation for mystery.

While Romanticism’s spiritual aspirations were undeniably lofty, sometimes transport was just as much about what one was fleeing as where one was going. Kreisler, for example, finds that music opens up a ‘radiant new life’ and offers consolation for the ‘torment’ of everyday reality. Kreisler’s desire for transcendence by way of music arises in large part from the philistinism of the respectable but unimaginative society folk who employ him, while Berglinger complains of the indifferent audiences to whom he pours out his soul in sound. Even as a youth, Berglinger suffered from the ‘bitter conflict between his inborn ethereal striving and the claims of everyday life’, and he would become depressed upon returning from his musical feasts in church to the world of ‘normal, happy, jovial people’.³⁷ Literary portrayals of music as both cause of and panacea for disappointment, as the temporary vehicle of an existence more exalted than that of everyday life, suggest that Romantic ideals thrived best in middle-class settings. Why, indeed, would the well-to-do patrons who employed musicians such as Kreisler (not to mention countless real-life figures) need to be transported to a world beyond the everyday? Servants, farm workers, and other manual labourers, on the other hand, had little leisure time in which to indulge in musical or other artistic pursuits, let alone to bask in what Hoffmann called the ‘purple shimmer of romanticism’.³⁸

A final scene of transport from Hoffmann’s novel Kater Murr illustrates the class-related tensions attendant upon the practising musician’s career. In his capacity as the local Kapellmeister, Kreisler has become entangled with two young friends, Julia and the Princess Hedwiga, daughter of Fürst Irenaus. The Princess has taken offence at Kreisler’s unpredictable behaviour but is also jealous of his musical instruction of Julia (and its successful results). Julia’s mother, the Rätin Benzon, has persuaded the Princess to attend a party where Kreisler will be present, and she urges her not to avoid him just because he ‘behaved now and then in a bizarre way’.³⁹ Just as the Princess makes a halting overture to the Kapellmeister, the partygoers demand music from him and Julia. The two sing an impassioned duet of his own composing that concludes with a graphic climax, one in which both voices ‘founder[ed] in the roaring stream of chords until ardent sighs announced imminent death and the last addio burst forth in a wild cry of pain from the lacerated heart like a fountain of blood’.⁴⁰ Many of the listeners are moved to tears.

The Princess, by contrast, is not amused, and she upbraids Kreisler, saying, ‘Is it right, is it proper that in a pleasant gathering where friendly conversation should prevail … that such extravagant things are served up which lacerate the soul and whose powerful, destructive effect cannot be mastered?’ She continues, ‘Is there then no Cimarosa, no Paisiello whose compositions are written for social gatherings?’ Falsely apologetic, Kreisler retorts, ‘Is it not a violation of all manners and neatness in dress to appear in society with the breast with all its sorrow, all its pain, all its rapture, without a heavy wrapping of the muslin of good manners and propriety?’⁴¹ Increasingly frenzied, Kreisler enjoins Julia to sing several pieces of lighter fare (Paisiello amongst them), an imposition that makes her angry in turn. Stating that she cannot understand his wild lurching from one affect to another, Julia cries, ‘I beg you, dear Kreisler, do not again demand that I sing something comic, no matter how charming and pretty, when I am deeply agitated, and when the sounds of deepest sorrow are echoing in my soul.’⁴² Like Rameau’s nephew in Diderot’s story, Kreisler exchanges his interior states for those of music at the drop of a hat – Julia, however, is too earnest for such aesthetic play. Kreisler’s duet has transported her into a state of spiritual unrest, and she cannot simply forfeit that affect in favour of another. While Kreisler’s susceptibility to music seems to go hand in hand with his unstable personality, Julia’s love of the art arises from her capacity for enduring, authentic feelings. If musical transport takes Kreisler to a place where ‘nobody could follow him without danger’, it does so to the detriment of his mental integrity. For Julia, music sends her more deeply within and strengthens her sense of self. Yet for both, the transport occasioned by music erodes tolerance for the demands of polite society. Transport, it seems, is a dish best served in solitude.

Conclusion: What Is Inward?

The three principles of Romantic musical aesthetics I have elucidated in this essay – that music harbours hidden depths, that it is intimately entwined with inwardness, and that it induces a sense of transport – might be better called impressions or intuitions since the boundaries between them are porous. Ponder one long enough, and it is liable to turn into another: the special qualities of tone, for example, are what allow it to become a vehicle for human inwardness; the inner identification with music is what creates the sensation of being transported; and so on. In this regard, the mutability of Romantic thought, once again, finds its most fitting emblem in music.⁴³

I would like to close by considering one further transformation that music encouraged in the minds of Romantic listeners. While music potentially can be heard in relation to many aspects of human and non-human existence, it is surely no coincidence that so much Romantic commentary on the impact of music resorts to nature imagery. Music may have resembled the flux of feeling, but it also resembled torrents of water, massing clouds and storms, even violent upheavals of the earth. Wackenroder’s description of the images that come to him upon listening to a symphony blends emotive, martial, and natural occurrences into a single dramatic unfolding; his account culminates with distorted shapes falling upon one another like ‘a mountain range come alive’.⁴⁴ The wave-upon-wave unfolding of music seems to have called especially for water imagery. Recall Hegel’s depiction of being carried away by a stream of tones, or Wackenroder’s image of music causing the ‘secret river in the depths of the human soul’ to flow past us in audible form. That music conjures up both ‘an entire world’ and an ‘entire drama of human emotions’, as Wackenroder put it, points not just to music’s capacity to create metaphor, but to a more fundamental relatedness between music, the dynamic nature of the self, and the world in which both are embedded.⁴⁵

Shortly before Hegel began offering lectures on aesthetics, Arthur Schopenhauer located the source of that relatedness in what he termed the will, a blind, eternal striving that courses through inanimate matter and living creatures alike. For Schopenhauer, music’s power over the inner life was so great not because it represented the will that presents itself as feelings and desires, but because it was a directly audible manifestation of will, one whose expressive import could be understood just as immediately as feeling itself.⁴⁶ Nor was that import restricted to the human realm: in musical polyphony, Schopenhauer found an analogue to the world’s stratified ‘grades’ of existence, with soprano, alto, tenor, and bass parts corresponding to human, animal, plant, and mineral registers of being. With very few exceptions, Schopenhauer suggested, human interiority shares in the tendencies and strivings found everywhere else in the universe, a thesis for which music, in his view, offered a strange kind of confirmation. Even as it simulates human (read: linguistic) consciousness through the freedom of melodic invention, music also turns the analogy-prone listener’s attention to the supporting layers of animal, vegetal, and mineral existence metaphorised by the multiple voices of musical texture.

However idiosyncratic Schopenhauer’s perspective, and however reluctant we may be today to believe that music of any sort is immediately comprehensible, Schopenhauer’s conviction that we can hear an echo of ontological totality in music remains a source of inspiration, at least for those inclined to dispense with the customary understanding of music as primarily a matter of human emotions. It may be that, as Hoffmann put it in one of Kreisleriana’s falsely satirical moments, only ‘madmen’ think that music allows them to ‘perceive the sublime song of – trees, flowers, animals, stones, water!’⁴⁷ It would nonetheless be fittingly Romantic if the inward journey inspired by music ended up taking us outward once more, transporting us beyond ourselves by effectively turning our minds inside out.

When Mozart was commissioned to write a symphony for the Concert Spirituel in Paris in 1778, he made a point of learning about the tastes and expectations of his audience. As his letter to his father details, he composed his ‘Paris’ Symphony, No. 31 (K. 297) with an eye to their response, writing particular passages to delight and astonish them, and taking immense satisfaction in their applause. In doing so, he was following his father’s tried-and-true advice: as Leopold Mozart had written to his son just a few months earlier regarding another work, ‘you will do well to follow the taste of the French. If one can only win applause and be paid well, the rest is not important.’³

According to Liszt, the Irish pianist-composer John Field, born only a generation after Mozart, had a completely different attitude towards his music and his public. He was ‘unabashedly indifferent’ to his audience, relying only on his own interior experience (his ‘inner feelings’ and ‘dreams’) for inspiration. Not only was there no question of an audience’s tastes and expectations influencing his compositions, but Liszt emphasised that the ‘feelings and dreams’ that infused Field’s piano music were possible only because of the composer’s complete autonomy and independence from the public.

To be sure, caveats can be added to both of these accounts. Mozart’s relationship to his audience was often more ambivalent and complex than what he described in this letter, and Liszt’s essay on Field probably says as much about Liszt’s own creative ideals (or the ideals with which he wanted to be associated) as it says about Field’s views and creative process. Nevertheless, the differences between the two reflect a sea change in ideas about music that occurred in the early decades of the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany and Britain. Under the influence of the Romantic movement, these years saw a rethinking of the aesthetics and ethics of musical expression, and Liszt’s remarks distil several important features of the new orientation. As Liszt described it, Field’s music was valuable not only because it stemmed from his innermost ‘feelings and dreams’, but also because it was authentic. Authenticity, as it is colloquially used, often denotes the quality of being ‘true to oneself’. But for Liszt and other Romantics, the concept meant more. Being true to oneself was contingent on the ability to hold oneself apart from the external world, to resist its influence, to compose (and live) almost as though it did not exist. The reasons for this shift in priorities are multiple and complex, and as we shall see, the concept of authentic self-expression was not without internal tensions and contradictions. Nevertheless, it was one of the core ideals of musical Romanticism, and as such, it contributed to new expectations for composers, performers, and audiences, as well as significant changes in the status of music as an art form.

For much of Western history, the concept of mimesis (imitation, or ‘re-presentation’) provided a foundation for understanding music’s effects.⁴ At a basic level, mimetic theories hold that music’s expressive power derives from its capacity to imitate something observable and definable in the world – often (although not always) human passions. Mimesis was a particularly important concept in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Discussions varied as to what exactly music imitated (the impassioned rhetoric of a skilled orator; the internal motions of bodily humours and passions; the pre-articulate cries of early humans, etc.) and the techniques by which this imitation was accomplished. Nevertheless, many eighteenth-century writers on musical aesthetics assumed that: (1) what music imitated was a recognisable phenomenon in the world around it; (2) the musician, through a combination of skill, training, and judgement (including reliance on known techniques and past models), could somehow re-present this phenomenon in the medium of music; and (3) if the music was successful, it would produce the desired effect (often a sympathetic emotional resonance, delighted recognition, or pleasure) on the part of the listener. This last part is crucial: in this paradigm, the work of art is directed towards an audience. It is a means to an end, and can be evaluated according to its success at eliciting the intended response. We can observe this view in the Mozart letter quoted above. Although there is no consensus about which passage Mozart was describing in his letter to his father (and he seems to have been aiming for delight and astonishment rather than a more specific imitation of emotion through music), he makes it clear that he viewed his symphony as a success because of the audience’s strong reaction.

In the later decades of the eighteenth century, though, mimetic theories of music gradually ceded ground to what has sometimes been termed an ‘expressive’ or ‘expressivist’ orientation.⁵ The extent to which Romantic thinkers rejected earlier audience-centred paradigms can be seen in an essay by E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘On a Remark of Sacchini’s, and on so-called Effect in Music’, which first appeared in 1814.⁶ Hoffmann, one of the foundational figures in Romantic music criticism, bemoaned what he saw as a tendency amongst contemporary opera composers to heed ‘the eternal braying of theatre-directors for “Effect! Only effect!” in order to pull in the audience’. According to Hoffmann, because the goal of so many composers was ‘effect’, they set about composing in exactly the wrong way. Studying the works of past composers, they ‘became preoccupied with technical resources, seeing them as the means whereby effect was obtained’. With Mozart as a model, for example, they might observe that ‘striking modulations’ and ‘his frequent use of wind instruments’ produced strong emotional effects on the audience. (Notably, Hoffmann viewed Mozart as a ‘Romantic’ composer and did not find him guilty of the same ‘composing for effect’ as his successors.) But by mechanically imitating the features they observed in Mozart, composers could only produce ‘curious compositions in which without any motivation … crude changes of key and blaring chords from every conceivable wind instrument follow in rapid succession, like garish colours that never coalesce into a picture’. Ironically, because of their overemphasis on ‘effect’, the music of these composers failed to move the audience.

Instead, Hoffmann outlines a creative process for would-be opera composers in which the key to writing ‘effective’ music, paradoxically, is not thinking about its effect at all:

The passage encapsulates several Romantic ideas about musical expression. First, the content comes not from the external world, but from deep within the composer (‘deep within his own heart’ or ‘the fire of inspiration that inflames [his] breast’).⁸ This is not to say that this inner experience cannot be stimulated by something external, such as the characters and situations of the libretto, but rather that these external stimuli need to be internalised, processed, lived by the composer, and that this inner process, rather than the external stimulus, is the true source of the composition that results.

Furthermore, the process of composition that Hoffmann describes seems to preclude any rationalised calculation; it happens ‘unconsciously’ and ‘in a state of ecstasy’ as the composer’s ‘inner music’ flows outward. While his musical training has a role to play, at no point does he consciously wield technique. Instead, all of his previous training only gives him the ability to ‘grasp hold of the music that would otherwise rush past him’. Indeed, such a description evokes the etymological origins of the word ‘express’: to ‘push’ or ‘press’ out. Hoffmann’s understanding was predicated on the Romantic conviction that within the artist there lay mysterious, untapped depths, an inner spiritual domain that could never definitively be articulated or rationally understood, but that nevertheless could be accessed or intuited through art. Yet crucially, the originality and depth of inner experience that this process required was not available to just anyone. Hoffmann ended his account of the creative process by noting, ‘admittedly all this is tantamount to saying: just make sure, my dear fellow, that you are a musical genius, and then the rest will take care of itself!’⁹

Hoffmann’s concept of the composer’s autonomy hinged on following inner inspiration and renouncing the objective of creating an ‘effect’ on an audience. Other writers cast this autonomy in even more stringent terms, attempting to bracket out any awareness of an audience from the creative process. This principle was explored at length in the British philosopher John Stuart Mill’s essay, ‘What Is Poetry?’ from 1833. Mill, for whom the work of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth had been personally transformative, drew a strict hierarchical distinction between ‘poetry’ and what he called ‘eloquence’, and he believed that this distinction applied not only to the written word, but also to music.¹⁰ ‘Eloquence’, Mill wrote, ‘is heard; poetry is overheard.’ He continued:

Mill recognised that it was a tall order to ask poets to remain unaware of the eventual readers of their work, that their poems would eventually be ‘printed on hot-pressed paper, and sold at a bookseller’s shop’.¹² Still, he maintained that the creative process and product should be uncontaminated by this knowledge: ‘No trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself’, and the poet must ‘succeed in excluding from his work every vestige of such lookings-forth into the outward and every-day world, and can express his feelings exactly as he has felt them in solitude, or as he feels that he should feel them, though they were to remain for ever unuttered’.¹³

In short, Romantic theories of expressive authenticity frequently emphasised the need to erect boundaries against the external social world. Their concern was that becoming too porous, too subject to the influence (‘in-flowing’) of society would corrupt or fragment the artist’s unique sense of being – the inner source from which all true art springs. A host of philosophical, social, and economic developments contributed to this shift in priorities. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau had argued that human nature was essentially good, but became corrupt through participation in society, which required artifice and posturing in pursuit of status and esteem. This valuing of ‘inner’ nature over ‘outer’ social relations was amplified as the bourgeoisie replaced the aristocracy as the primary patrons and consumers of music and other cultural products in the nineteenth century. As has been well documented, a reconfiguration of social space (and the modes of subjectivity and relationship cultivated within that space) accompanied the ascendancy of these middle classes.¹⁴ The bourgeois individual cultivated his or her inwardness most assiduously within the private sphere of the home, where the sense of being sheltered from the demands of public and economic life was thought to enable a kind of idealised, ‘purely human’ form of relationship unmarred by pretence or artifice – an ideal to which the many earnest, confessional letters written during this time period vividly attest.¹⁵ The supposedly unmannered intimacy of this space was defined in contrast to the pomp and artifice of the noble court, where ritual, ceremony, and display (often involving music and other arts) served to convey distinctions of wealth, power, and status.¹⁶

At the same time, increased social, economic, and geographic mobility during the nineteenth century meant that individuals frequently found themselves in unfamiliar social settings and amongst strangers. This social reality required the ability to interpret others, and present oneself, in situations where a system of shared social codes (the meanings ascribed to comportment, speech, dress, and other forms of behaviour) could no longer be assumed. In this context, the moralising tone accompanying exhortations to personal authenticity also betrays an anxiety, both about misinterpreting (or worse, being deliberately misled about) the essential character of someone else, or about being misinterpreted oneself. The ideal of the authentic individual arose partly in response to these circumstances: a virtuous person was cast as someone in whom there was complete harmony between inner nature and outward behaviour, who remained the same no matter the social circumstances, who resisted the temptation to alter his or her behaviour in different settings, in a word, who refused to perform.¹⁷

There was a continuity, then, between ethical demands placed on individuals and aesthetic standards applied to the arts. Amongst the arts, the ideal of authenticity was perhaps most pronounced within music. In the early nineteenth century, music and lyric poetry were seen as the art forms most conducive to self-expression, and music in particular was thought to offer the most pure, direct, and unmediated access to the inner life. As many Romantic writers pointed out, even poetry relied on the seemingly arbitrary symbols and syntax of language, and thus inserted a layer of artifice and convention between subjective experience and its artistic expression. Music, on the other hand, was known as the least representational medium, and instrumental music in particular was defined by its absence of clear signifiers, and was thus best suited to expressing the ‘inexpressible’. Indeed, in some Romantic thought music did not merely ‘represent’ this deeper reality, but rather embodied or manifested it.¹⁸ As Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder wrote (in language reminiscent of Hoffmann’s later image of music ‘flowing out’ of the composer), ‘with the mysterious stream in the depths of the human spirit – speech reckons and names and describes its changes in a foreign material; music streams out before us as it is in itself’.¹⁹

Nevertheless, at the same time that music was idealised as the purest, most immediate expression of interiority, it also entered into a series of expanded contexts in public life. In the nineteenth century, public concerts became widespread, mass market publishing made printed music more readily available than ever before, and a burgeoning music criticism industry produced accounts of new compositions and events that were consumed by a diverse reading public.²⁰ These contexts placed strain on the ideal of expressive authenticity, making it difficult to ignore the centrifugal forces of outward performance and other-orientedness that inevitably accompany the social practice of music.²¹ In an era in which expressive authenticity had become a moral and aesthetic standard, musicians found themselves in the paradoxical position of needing to perform an authentic self through music – to convince audiences and critics of this authenticity – in order to achieve any degree of success or critical esteem. Even the most idealistic composers found it difficult to operate outside this logic. Robert Schumann, writing to his fiancée Clara Wieck in 1838, told her that she had made the right choice in not performing his Études symphoniques in one of her concerts: ‘they do not suit the public – and it would be lame if I later wanted to complain that they had not understood something that was not intended for applause; it was not intended for anything at all and exists only for its own sake’. Nevertheless, in the next sentence, he wrote, ‘But I confess that it would make me very happy if something of mine were successful sometime, that is, if you played it and the audience ran up the walls from excitement; we composers are vain, even if we have no reason to be.’²²

Due in no small part to these inherent tensions, then, in practice expressive authenticity was not a stable quality. Instead, it functioned as what has sometimes been termed a ‘regulative’ ideal in nineteenth-century musical life: broadly and intuitively understood and valued, and frequently evoked as a way of conferring aesthetic legitimacy and prestige, yet employed in ways that were inconsistent and complex.²³ Because of this function, it is important to ask not only what it was, but also how it worked. How did nineteenth-century musical practice (including composing, performing, listening, and criticism) orient itself towards the ideal of expressive authenticity? What were the practical consequences of adherence to this ideal? And how did it create or reinforce hierarchies and power relationships in musical culture? The remainder of this essay will explore how these questions played out in several interrelated areas of musical practice in which questions of expression and authenticity came into the foreground.

In nineteenth-century criticism, efforts to discern the authenticity of a composition often hinged on evaluating the extent to which certain technical features emanated from a point at the centre – the composer’s inner subjectivity, or more specifically, an inner experience that manifested outwardly as music. For many nineteenth-century listeners and critics, Beethoven’s music came to represent a gold standard in this respect, as a veritable industry of biographical and myth-making initiatives encouraged listeners to experience his music as the sonic record of his inner experiences and struggles, and analytical criticism by Hoffmann, A. B. Marx, and others drew attention to the integration between whole and parts in his music, and argued for an organic relationship between individual features and essential, spiritual content (in Marx’s terms, the Idee of a work).²⁴

Such a division of works of art into inner essence and external form was indebted to the Idealist philosophy that dominated German intellectual life in the early nineteenth century.²⁵ And indeed, in his Lectures on Aesthetics, the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel had considered the question of authenticity in art. Hegel drew a contrast between what he termed the ‘ideal style’, which ‘hovers in between the purely substantive expression of the topic [Sache] and the complete emergence of what pleases’, and the ‘pleasing’ artistic style, whose primary aim was to produce an effect on the spectator:

The notion that particular details can become detached from inner content and turn towards an audience provides an indication of how certain musical characteristics and practices emerged as flashpoints in discussions of authenticity in music. Many critics, for example, viewed piquant orchestral sonorities with some degree of suspicion. Timbre was often cast as a way of using instrumental effects to ‘dress up’ the more enduring content of a musical work (usually thought to reside in such elements as pitch, rhythm, and harmony) with ephemeral sound effects that played directly on listeners’ senses.²⁷ Because timbre seemed to fall into the category of ‘external appearance’, it was at risk of becoming independent of the ‘topic’ and existing solely ‘in relation to the spectator’. Indeed, the abuse of orchestral effects (‘blaring chords from every conceivable wind instrument’) was exactly what Hoffmann lambasted in the essay cited above, when he admonished composers for pandering to audiences at the expense of their inner inspiration.

In practice, composers responded to the discourse on timbre in varying ways. When the British composer Ethel Smyth lived and studied amongst Brahms and his friends in the 1870s, her impression was that they viewed orchestration with a high-minded disdain: ‘in that circle what you may call the external, the merely pleasing element in music, was so little insisted on that its motto really might have been the famous “take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves”’.²⁸ Other composers, of course, fully embraced the creative possibilities offered by timbre. But it is noteworthy that even Berlioz, a composer famous for his innovative orchestral effects, regularly emphasised that such effects were only justified when they were ‘motivated’ by some deeper expressive purpose.²⁹ When discussing Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer in his memoirs, for example, he praised the overall ‘sombre colouring’ and ‘certain stormy effects perfectly appropriate to the subject’, yet censured Wagner for his ‘abuse of the tremolo’ in passages that contained no other ‘striking ideas’.³⁰ The implication was that such passages might appeal to listeners’ senses and emotions with their wash of shimmering sound, but because they expressed nothing, they were effects without a cause; in fact, they may even disguise a lack of invention or authentic content on the composer’s part.

For similar reasons, virtuosity represented another flashpoint in nineteenth-century discussions of self-expression and authenticity. Rooted in the physical process of singing or playing an instrument and the spectacle of performers displaying their technique, virtuosity brought forward several familiar dichotomies. Could virtuoso showpieces be the expression of a composer’s deep interiority, or were they merely a hodgepodge of impressive techniques and figures designed to impress audiences? To what extent did virtuoso performers allow the ‘mysterious stream in the depths of the human spirit’ to flow forth ‘as it is in itself’ (to paraphrase Wackenroder), and to what extent were they merely skilled technicians, compromised by a desire to gain applause, acclaim, and commercial success? Many of these recurring questions can be observed in an anonymous 1834 review of Sigismund Thalberg’s Grande fantaisie sur ‘I Capuletti e Montecchi’ that appeared in Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Describing the work’s alternation between learned contrapuntal writing and brilliant virtuosity, the reviewer discerned no inner expressive necessity, but rather a desire to ‘adorn itself with different colours for each person’: ‘One sees very clearly how the composer wanted to make the variations pleasing for the connoisseur as well as the layperson, how he thinks to satisfy the former with pretty fugued or four-voice passages, and for the latter, to compensate for their boredom with brilliant and elegant passages. … A piece like this’, he concluded, ‘whose highest and only tendency is to seek admiration … we cannot possibly call good’.³¹

Scattered throughout the review are suggestions about how Thalberg should approach composing: ‘A young composer, if like Herr Thalberg he possesses knowledge in addition to natural talent, does not need to fear that he will become ordinary if he only renders simply and transparently what is inwardly felt.’ The reviewer’s conviction that Thalberg had not achieved this goal derived from an analysis of the piece’s technical bravura and frequent stylistic shifts. Yet tellingly, the reviewer describes authenticity in both absolute and strikingly personal terms, perceiving a continuity between Thalberg’s compositional choices and his essential character: ‘If he mistakes this principle, if he senses it not even once, if he worships the fashion of the day as his God, and if he subordinates his talent to the applause of the masses, then everything that he wants to do to preserve a deeper individuality is a vain effort.’³²

Such identification between the musical (‘the piece’ seeks admiration) and the personal (the composer is unable to preserve his ‘deeper individuality’) were typical in nineteenth-century criticism. In an age of musical celebrity, listeners and critics consumed reports, biographies, and images of famous musicians coterminously with their music; each informed the other. But this emphasis on the identity of the composer could combine in troubling ways with the assumption (as articulated above by Hoffmann) that only a unique individual – a genius – would possess both the inner depth and creative power to produce authentically expressive music. Increasingly over the course of the nineteenth century, such an individual was assumed to have a gender (male) and a nationality (German). For musicians who did not fit this profile, it was often the case that even the most compelling music was suspected of inauthenticity, of meeting the surface requirements of form and technique but lacking expressive depth.

Of this strain of criticism, Wagner’s invective against Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn in Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850/1869) is only one of the most well known and pernicious examples. Wagner’s argument was that an artist’s inner inspiration could only be nurtured through membership in a historical community: the German Volk, which Wagner defined in racialised terms that excluded even German-born converted Jews such as Mendelssohn. In Wagner’s view, a Jewish composer, a perpetual outsider, could never obtain ‘so intimate a glimpse into our essence: … he merely listens to the barest surface of our art, but not to its life-bestowing inner organism’.³³ In Mendelssohn’s case, Wagner wrote, his music might appeal to audiences when it is confined to ‘the presentment, stringing together and entanglement of the most elegant, the smoothest and most polished figures’;³⁴ indeed, it may mimic the music of other great German composers with ‘quite distressing accuracy and deceptive likeness’.³⁵ But it had no centre; it could not contain the ‘deep and stalwart feelings of the human heart’, all external appearances to the contrary.³⁶ In a word, it was inauthentic.

It is here that we can observe how the Romantic ideal of authentic self-expression, while nurturing artists’ ‘feelings and dreams’, also enabled many of the ideologies of exclusion that have become deeply embedded in the Western musical canon. Within an aesthetic framework valuing skilful imitation and demonstrable effect, the kind of argument advanced by Wagner lacked power. Yet with the composer’s inner experience as the yardstick, inauthenticity became one of the most damning charges to level at music. It was also one of the most difficult to counter: Wagner’s evidence for his claims lay in common knowledge about Mendelssohn’s Jewish identity and social background, and descriptions of what Wagner felt or failed to feel when listening to Mendelssohn’s music. Wagner warns his readers not to be deceived, to question the music’s authenticity. But he leaves it to ‘professional critics’ to ‘prove’ his claims with ‘specimens of Mendelssohn’s art-products’.³⁷ Yet even if someone attempted to ‘disprove’ Wagner’s allegations using the tools of musical analysis, the essay’s distrust of musical surfaces – Wagner’s assertion that they can bear a deceptive, even indistinguishable similarity to the ‘real thing’ – would to some extent defang such a defence. The success or failure of the argument depended on its appeal to readers’ existing prejudices and their acceptance of the writer’s authority as someone who is able to discern authentic from inauthentic music. As even the most cursory look at much music criticism of the last 200 years shows, the logic underlying this kind of critical gatekeeping has proved remarkably tenacious despite its speciousness.³⁸

Yet Wagner was hardly the dominant voice on Mendelssohn’s music, and a final example shows in a more general sense how the Romantic aesthetics of authenticity opened up new modalities of musical experience that have remained influential. When Mendelssohn was away from Berlin on his Grand Tour in 1829, his sister Fanny often consoled herself for his absence by engaging with his music, and recorded a particularly intense experience one evening: ‘I’ve been alone for two hours, at the piano, which sounds especially nice today, playing the Hora [Felix’s motet Hora est]. I get up from the piano, stand in front of your picture, and kiss it, and immerse myself so completely in your presence that I – must write you now.’³⁹ In some intangible way, Fanny felt her brother’s spirit to be there in his music, accessible to her under the right conditions; while her description may seem uncanny, even extreme, belief in this possibility guided many nineteenth-century approaches to listening, performance, and criticism. The fact that this belief can still be observed informing these practices today, albeit sometimes in altered ways, testifies to the flexibility and capaciousness of expressive authenticity as a critical concept.