The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk recently posed the question ‘where are we when we hear music?’1 Romantic responses are consistent in their religious and often specifically Christian imagery: a ‘better world’ (Jean Paul), ‘paradise’ (Tieck), the land of ‘faith’ and ‘holy peace’ (Wackenroder), a ‘kingdom not of this world’ (Hoffmann), and so on.2 Like Sloterdijk’s question, these responses are more complex than they may at first appear, pointing to more than just subjective piety or religiosity (not coincidentally a term introduced into the German language in the years around 1800).3 Since the time of Heine’s Die romantische Schule (1835), the Romantic investment in religion has often been disparaged as regressive and equated with ‘throne-and-altar nostalgia’.4 A more sympathetic, though no less one-sided standpoint is to treat such religious rhetoric as an arbitrary ‘jargon of ultimacy’ servicing purely secular conceptions of transcendence.5 In different ways, both these approaches reflect how, more broadly, the master narrative of secularisation has shaped conceptions of the relationship between Romanticism and religion.6 Although scholars have long abandoned clunky notions of an Age of Reason sweeping aside an Age of Faith, the view that religion became a marginal force fighting a doomed rearguard action continues to shape attitudes towards post-Enlightenment religious art. While we may no longer share the confidence with which modernist commentators such as Adorno blasted the false consciousness and ‘poisonous’ religiosity tainting the products of art-religion, something of this suspicion still clings to works such as Wagner’s Parsifal and Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (let alone Gounod’s Ave Maria).7 The issues yoked together by the secularisation paradigm are far from irrelevant to Romantic religion, art, and art-religion; indeed, the secular-modernist brand of critique epitomised by Adorno feeds on the anxieties of its host, converting Romantic concerns over the continuing possibility of religious art into accusations of mystification and falsity. But to understand the nature of the religion within art-religion, we need to approach it with an alternative model of secularisation in mind: one that emphasises the continuous, dynamic unfolding of religion and the dialogic nature of art’s encounters with it. As Daniel Weidner argues, secularisation and art-religion do not wipe the slate clean; rather, both resemble palimpsests in which the sacred meanings they overwrite remain tangible and active.8
Most discussions of the relationships between Romanticism, religious art, and art-religion divide the field into three broad categories, each encompassing a distinct set of attitudes:
i. art considered as an element within traditional religious practices, such as music for use in the liturgy or private devotions
ii. art as offering its own points of access to the truths, meanings, and experiences of religion, serving to complement, supplement or interpret them (in Claudia Stockinger’s phrase, primary art-religion)9
iii. art as co-opting the claims and cultic functions of religion, reconstructing, critiquing, or negating it, or simply taking its place; in Adorno’s phrase, ‘the self-exaltation of art as the absolute’ (secondary art-religion).10
Two caveats are needed before exploring these categories further. First, we should avoid pre-emptively treating them as successive stages within the process of secularisation (or music’s journey from being ‘the most religious among the arts’ (Tieck) to what Georg Simmel described as ‘the religion of today’).11 Art-religion – particularly in the secondary form outlined above – has often been represented as one of the secular forces filling the void left by the retreat of religion; this model is at work in Max Weber’s view that in modernity art ‘takes over’ religion’s functions, laying claim to its own form of redemption.12 While this perspective fits well with some works from Weber’s own period (such as Delius’s Eine Messe des Lebens or Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie) it exaggerates the secularity of earlier forms of art-religion, which tend to be heterodox or syncretic rather than post-Christian in orientation. Second, we need to resist the polarised view of sacred and secular fostered by the secularisation paradigm. Under Romanticism, the borders between religious art and art-religion were porous, and often the same genres and works were approached from all three of the perspectives outlined above. Consider, for example, the Romantic reception of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, elevated by Wackenroder as an emblem of the Christian calling of the artist, by Hoffmann as an intimation of infinity, and by Wagner as a symbol of a ‘redemption through love’ that transcended religious dogma.13 Within individual compositions, too, these strands overlap and collide, in spite of energetic attempts by critics and institutions to police the boundaries of the sacred.14
Listening Religiously: Art-Religion and Music Aesthetics
Romantic conceptions of art-religion percolated only gradually into the musical sphere, shaping attitudes towards listening and performing music well before they had an impact on composition. Although art-religion emerges in the years around 1800, the term itself is seldom found in discussions of music prior to the 1850s, when it was invoked by critics seeking to burst the bubble of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Tellingly, his opponents, such as the literary historian Julian Schmidt, presented Wagner’s vision of the ‘oneness of religion, art and society’ as a stale rehash of the ideas of the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Romantic school from half a century earlier.15 While Schmidt’s aim was polemical, he is right to identify Schleiermacher and the Romantic school as the key sources for what has been described as the ‘convergence’ model of art-religion: the view that art and religion – functioning as separate reality compartments in modernity – needed to be drawn into unity.16 In his Über die Religion (1799), Schleiermacher argued that such convergence provided a vital route for reviving religion and reconciling it with the present: ‘Religion and art stand alongside one another like two friendly souls whose inner affinity, whether or not they feel it to the same degree, is as yet unknown to them … To bring them together and to unite them in one bed is the only thing that can bring religion to completion on the path on which we are heading.’17 Schleiermacher’s conception of this convergence assumes that each of these partners has its own autonomous capacity for revelation. In the writings of the Romantic school, however, the boundaries between the two are often blurred, dissolving art and religion into equivalence or identity: for Hölderlin, ‘that which is most beautiful is also holiest’, while Tieck apostrophises music as ‘the completely revealed religion’.18
For Carl Dahlhaus, the impulse to draw art and religion together reflects not only the new metaphysical claims being made for art around 1800, but also the primacy given to feeling within contemporary religious thought.19 One of the most important legacies of art-religion is the heightened awareness it helped to generate of the proximity between aesthetic and religious experience. In terms derived from aesthetics, Schleiermacher describes religion as ‘a sense and taste for the infinite’, metaphorically linking it to the feelings instilled by art (religious feelings are ‘like a piece of sacred music’ accompanying human actions, while religious communication aims at transmitting ‘heavenly tones’ in a manner akin to Orpheus).20 For Schleiermacher, both art and religion share the capacity to enable individuals to ‘lose the finite and find the infinite’, generating moments of revelation in which ‘the sense of the universe bursts forth as if through immediate inner illumination’.21 While Schleiermacher is keen to recruit art as a conduit to religion, he is careful not to treat aesthetic and religious feelings as equivalent, arguing that he does not himself grasp ‘how the artistic sense [Kunstsinn], by itself alone, merges into religion’; indeed, he coins the term art-religion (Kunstreligion) in the context of denying the possibility of art being the dominant element in such a partnership.22 Less caution is displayed in the two other foundational texts of Romantic art-religion, Wackenroder and Tieck’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797) and Phantasien über die Kunst (1799). In these texts, religion and art are folded into one another to the extent that they become interchangeable; artworks become altars, artists priestly mediators with the divine, and aesthetic experience a force capable of triggering religious conversion:
The all-powerful music began in slow, full, sustained chords, as if an invisible wind was gusting over our heads; it surged in ever greater waves like an ocean, and the tones drew out my soul entirely from my body. … A priest stepped up to the altar, elevated the Host before the people with a gesture of rapture, and all the people fell to their knees as trombones and I know not what other mighty sounds thundered and roared sublime reverence through every limb. … Art had wrought a powerful change in me, and now for the first time I truly understood and inwardly comprehended art.23
Wackenroder and Tieck’s Herzensergießungen and Phantasien are best known for their idealisation of medieval and Renaissance religious art, playing a significant role in fostering the Nazarene movement in painting and the Palestrina revival in music. In discussing painting, they focus almost exclusively on old Italian and German art, idealising it as a model of art in the service of the Church, a relic of an authentic, unreflective religious belief lost to modernity. Their picture of music is more nuanced, elevating both early church music and modern instrumental music as sources of religious revelation. In common with most early Romantic writers, Wackenroder and Tieck treat the former as a kind of artless mood music whose naivety, simplicity, and purity exercises an immediate effect on the listener.24 In contrast, they imbue modern instrumental music with a distinctively modern form of religiosity.25 In the musical essays and experiences of the fictional composer Joseph Berglinger, such music is presented as a mysterious, otherworldly language, an object of religious devotion on account of its ‘deep-seated, immutable holiness’.26 With Berglinger, the experience of ‘divine, magnificent symphonic movements’ becomes a religious exercise, transforming the concert hall into a sacred space in which he ‘listened with just the same devotion as if he were in church’.27
Given the extent to which such perspectives helped to shape both art-religion and the reception of absolute music, it is worth probing the conception of religion at work in them. Here, we are not dealing with the ‘heavenly innocence’ or ‘purity and sanctity of devotion’ that Romantic commentators discerned in premodern art, but with the inscription of new meanings onto a religious background.28 When Tieck speaks of instrumental music as revealed religion, or when Hoffmann evokes the unknown kingdom unlocked by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, they employ metaphors and imagery that diverge significantly from those they apply to early church music.29 As Tom Spencer notes, Wackenroder and Tieck present a ‘loose patchwork’ of religious references and allusions, stitching together language drawn from the Bible, the Pietist tradition, classical mythology, and the poetics of the sublime in order to create a modern form of aesthetic religiosity, akin to the new mythology invoked by Schelling and Schlegel.30 These ingredients call attention to the capacity of instrumental music to convey religious truth, while at the same time giving that truth a specifically modern character. If this music, for Wackenroder and Tieck, imparts revelation, it does so through a glass darkly, offering incomprehensibility, infinite longing and a ‘frightful, oracularly ambiguous murkiness’.31
The kind of primary art-religion epitomised by Wackenroder and Tieck fits well with Rüdiger Safranski’s description of Romanticism as ‘the continuation of religion by aesthetic means’.32 In places, however, the Berglinger pieces flirt with the secondary form of art-religion outlined above; not merely through their syncretic language, but through drifting towards an aestheticism in which art and its cult seemingly aspire to replace religion rather than renew it. Thus Berglinger presents music as a seductive alternative reality cut off from the everyday world, a ‘beautiful poetic delirium’ in which life becomes a musical work.33 This view of art is simultaneously proposed and critiqued, giving these texts what Marco Rispoli describes as a ‘manic-depressive dynamic’; Wackenroder’s final piece on Berglinger dwells mercilessly on the delusions of aestheticism, rejecting its presumptuous elevation of the artist as an ‘autonomous, human God’ and damning its view of art as a ‘deceptive, fraudulent superstition’.34 The presence of such multiple, competing conceptions of art-religion within these and other early Romantic texts enabled a wide range of artists and movements to draw inspiration from them. But it also explains why the concept met with hostility from both those (such as Goethe) who equated it with religious regression and those (such as Eichendorff) who saw it as a Trojan horse for secularising tendencies.
Composing Religiously
Art in the Service of the Church
The idea that premodern religious art was the product of unreflective belief had a fundamental impact on Romantic artistic production. In the paintings of the Nazarenes, the desire to rekindle the Christian mission of art becomes programmatic; works such as Friedrich Overbeck’s Der Triumph der Religion in der Künsten (1831–40) have a manifesto character, rededicating art to ‘the glorification of God’ and celebrating artists who ‘consecrated their gifts to the service of religion’.35 The quest to recapture the spiritual fervour of Renaissance painting led Overbeck and the other Nazarenes to imbibe and emulate its styles, symbols, and techniques. Similar goals impelled composers, spurred on by the notion that the composition of authentic Christian music was a near-hopeless venture in modernity; for Hoffmann, in terms echoed by commentators throughout the nineteenth century, ‘it is probably completely impossible for a composer today to be able to write in the same way as Palestrina, Leo, and later Handel and others. That age, pre-eminently when Christianity still shone in its glory, appears to have vanished from the earth, and with it the holy dedication of the artist.’36 This stance had not precluded Hoffmann from composing his own compositional essays on the problem of church music, the Canzoni per 4 voci alla Capella (1808): Latin-texted, quasi-liturgical pieces that engage with the idioms of the Italian stile antico. For Felix Mendelssohn and other composers of his generation, emulating the styles of old Italian and German compositions was the key to retrieving their spiritual content; the composition of church music becomes a salvage operation with the aim, as Mendelssohn’s father put it, of ‘combining old ways of thinking with new materials’.37
Alongside the emulation of earlier sacred works, Romantic commentators demanded that composers practise what Hoffmann terms ‘self-renunciation’ (Selbstverleugnung) in composing church music.38 For Hoffmann, this entailed not only suppressing external motives but also those aspects of modern musical practice antithetical to the ideals epitomised by Palestrina; his own Canzoni tread a starkly ascetic path, stripping away any musical elements that might be perceived as secular. This approach points to the anti-aesthetic dimension of Romantic religiosity, equating service to the Church with self-effacement and the elimination of art-ness. It parallels the literary work of the Catholic author Clemens Brentano, who aimed to subsume art into religion, regarding his writings as tools of belief rather than artworks. While a similar suppression of artistry pervades Romantic liturgical and quasi-liturgical music, it finds its apogee in Liszt’s late church pieces. In music such as Via crucis (1878–9) and even more radically in De profundis (1883) and Qui Mariam absolvisti (1885), Liszt rejects compositional artifice in favour of stark, emotionally charged fragments, translating into practice Wackenroder and Tieck’s feeling-oriented view of church music.
Symbols, Frames, and Riddles
If art-religion draws the infinite through the finite, August Wilhelm Schlegel observes, it can do so ‘only symbolically, through tropes and signs’.39 To understand how this symbolic divination of the absolute functions in practice, it makes sense to turn to the artist most associated with Romantic art-religion, Caspar David Friedrich. Rather than cultivating one form of art-religion, Friedrich’s paintings circle fluidly through a range of models: some seemingly overdetermined in their Christian symbolism, some employing what Kant described as the ‘cipher language’ of nature to hint at a pantheist drift, while others present open spaces stripped of anchoring symbols.40 Paintings such as Abtei im Eichwald (1808–10), Kreuz und Kathedrale im Gebirge (1812), and Winterlandschaft mit Kirche (1811, see Fig. 9.1) draw on multiple familiar religious tropes. In the latter, the wooden wayside crucifix, prayerful penitent, and visionary Gothic church concealed in the mist point to a specifically Christian vision of redemption, an impression confirmed by the discarded crutches in the foreground, which suggest the kind of sudden conversion experience described by Schleiermacher. Even here, where the Christian dimension of the symbols seems transparent, their placing within nature serves to broaden the painting’s vision of transcendence. Elsewhere, as in Der Mönch am Meer (1808–10), Friedrich empties his canvases of clear religious symbolism, drawing on imagery associated with the secular sublime to imbue his works with an unspoken plenitude of meaning. (For those unsympathetic to Friedrich’s work, such as Hegel, the riddle character of his paintings amounted to no more than ‘mystery-mongering’ [Geheimniskrämerei].)41 But perhaps the most interesting works for our purposes are those in which religious symbols are withheld, but appear present in absence. In Fichtendickicht im Schnee (c. 1828, see Fig. 9.2) the religious symbolism of Winterlandschaft mit Kirche is gone, yet seems to cling imperceptibly to the thicket of spruce trees recalled from the earlier picture. While there, the thicket enclosed a penitent gazing at a crucifix, here the sanctuary-like configuration of trees seems to generate a similarly intense focus, relying on the viewer to imbue it with meaning. The lack of explicit signs of religious transcendence has the result, as Ian Cooper argues, that ‘their reference is entirely interiorised in our sense of the scene as revelation, and specifically as revelation occurring through the framing effect of the picture’.42
Figure 9.1 Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Winterlandschaft mit Kirche (Dortmund version) (1811). Oil on canvas, 33 × 45 cm, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund
In music, works of art-religion traverse a similar spectrum of symbolisation, and are also inscribed with religious meanings as a result of framing effects. Some works, such as Spohr’s Symphony No. 4 Die Weihe der Töne, Op. 86 (1832), and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2 Lobgesang, Op. 52 (1840), proclaim their proximity to religion through multiple ingredients: titles, texts or poetic programmes, musical topics, and the use of pre-existing materials with religious associations (in Spohr’s case, the Ambrosian Te Deum and funeral chorale ‘Begrabt den Leib in seine Gruft’, while in Mendelssohn’s, the chorale ‘Nun danket alle Gott’ as well as allusions to religious works by Handel and Bach). Not all art-religion, it should be noted, involves a quest for transcendence; in the case of the Lobgesang, it is the community effect of religion that is reconstituted, while Die Weihe der Töne celebrates the blessings and consolations bestowed by music.43 While these works present a dense array of verbal and stylistic pointers, other compositions rely purely on musical topics to draw religious resonances into their fields of meaning. Like the monk’s habit in Der Mönch am Meer, the concluding chorale in Anton Rubinstein’s Symphony No. 2 ‘Océan’, Op. 42 (1851) injects religion into the natural sublime, an effect not lost on the critic August Wilhelm Ambros:
The work turns at its end to the loftiest thoughts of which man is capable. Where the ocean is concerned, such declarations are hardly necessary: the roar of the waves is the sound of the organ, the altar candles shine in the eternal stars, plumes of mist ascend as incense, and the gathering clouds serve as altar hangings! All these elements coalesce into a ceremonious chorale like the thrilling one with which Rubinstein concludes his final movement.44
As seen earlier, absolute music was prone to being heard through the filter of art-religion, even in the case of works lacking the kind of conspicuous symbols found in Rubinstein’s symphony. In a recent essay, Wolfram Steinbeck seeks to refute the long-established tendency to treat Bruckner’s symphonies as ‘masses without texts’ and ‘cathedrals in sound’; for Steinbeck, Bruckner’s musical materials – including his so-called ‘chorales’ – lack clear connections to church music, while the composer’s fervent Catholicism would have rendered him immune to the claims of art-religion.45 Much of what Steinbeck has to say is convincing; there is, after all, little intrinsic relationship between, for example, the four root-position chords that mark the climax of the first movement of Bruckner’s Ninth and either the Lutheran chorale or Catholic chant harmonisations. Yet his arguments ignore the extent to which, like Friedrich’s Fichtendickicht im Schnee, works of absolute music were imbued with a religious dimension as a result of framing factors. Sacralised by the consecrated space of the concert hall and the discourses of art-religion, such music could rely on subtle hints – akin to the traces of blue sky in Friedrich’s painting – to point listeners towards the transcendent.
Recovering Religion: Heterodox and Syncretic Approaches
Perhaps the most interesting musical products of art-religion are those which juggle multiple forms of the concept, or which aspire to transform both religion and art. Liszt’s piano cycle Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (1840–53) epitomises the former, juxtaposing arrangements of settings of liturgical texts (his own Ave Maria and Pater noster, as well as the so-called Miserere d’après Palestrina) with movements inspired by verses by the deist poet Alphonse de Lamartine. At least two divergent aesthetics of religious music come together in this cycle: on the one hand, a pantheism-inflected religion of art, and on the other, a liturgically grounded approach that points to Liszt’s growing rapprochement with Catholicism.46 Liszt’s largest work, the oratorio Christus (1866), offers a similar pluralism, integrating quasi-liturgical pieces and large-scale choruses within the framework of a giant sacralised symphonic poem. The aesthetic and stylistic diversity of Christus makes it resemble a kind of spiritual autobiography, ranging from the young Liszt’s Christian socialist ideal of a musique humanitaire uniting church and theatre, to austere chant harmonisations redolent of his identification with the Ultramontane Catholicism of the 1860s. According to Liszt’s ‘authorised’ biographer, Lina Ramann, the work also combines the primary and secondary forms of art-religion identified above, simultaneously presenting the Christ of the Church while satisfying pantheist conceptions of the divinity of humanity. For Ramann, Christus thematises rather than embodies religious worship, taking as its subject the historical unfolding of the idea of Christ as manifested in the Catholic liturgy.47 The multiple textural and stylistic layers of the work thus serve as a means to differentiate the superseded dogmas of the Church from Christ’s living relevance as an icon of purely human values; the choral sections (particularly those that draw on the idioms of early church music) represent the past of Christianity while the symphonic portions – ‘hymns to the heartbeat of our age’ – grasp hold of its enduring core.48
The idea of art-religion as a salvage exercise, a means to preserve the truths at the core of religion, is also crucial for Wagner’s Parsifal. Often Parsifal has been upheld as the supreme exemplar of art usurping religion’s place or elevating itself as a ‘counter-church’, a perspective that is no less mistaken than treating it as a straightforwardly Christian work.49 The idea that Wagner was aiming to create a substitute for religion takes its cue from the opening lines of his essay ‘Religion und Kunst’ (1881):
One could say that where religion becomes artificial, it remains for art to salvage the core of religion by grasping the figurative value of its mythic symbols – which religion would have us believe in their literal sense – in order to show forth their profound, hidden truth through an ideal representation. While the sole concern of the priest is that religious allegories be regarded as factual truths, this matters not a jot to the artist since he presents his work freely and openly as his own invention.50
In isolation, this passage suggests a secularising agenda in which art seizes the baton from a moribund religion; the impression that Wagner approaches religion solely as an aesthetic resource is seemingly confirmed by the exaggerated contrast he draws between the priest’s truths and the artist’s invention. But Wagner is not diagnosing a crisis in modernity, but rather what he perceives to be the normal condition of organised religion. Rather than viewing art as a substitute for religion, Wagner casts them in a reciprocal relationship, arguing that art compensates for the dogmatising tendencies of religion by revealing ‘its inner essence, ineffably divine truth’, a function he sees as embodied by Beethoven’s symphonies no less than Raphael’s paintings.51 The nature of the religion evoked in this essay – as in Parsifal – is protean and wilfully syncretic, aiming at a synthesis of Christian symbolism, Buddhist ethics, and Schopenhauerian renunciation. But what is consistent here, as in Wagner’s other writings from the period, is his enduring fascination with Christ as redeemer (a concept he understands not in terms of substitutionary sacrifice but rather ‘divine compassion’).52 In portraying the flaws of established religion in Parsifal while concluding with a message of ‘redemption to the redeemer’, Wagner thematises the logic of loss and recovery that lies at the core of Romantic art-religion.
Whether Parsifal succeeds, even fleetingly, in this mission of religious re-enchantment is a moot point; as with the Ring, its critique of the existing order seems more compelling than its vision of a new one. Like most of the other works discussed above, it relies heavily on pre-existing materials and gestures in staging its religious effects, some of which were distinctly shop-worn even at the time of composition (I am thinking in particular of the chromatic-third progressions that strain for the epiphanic at the work’s close). And like Friedrich’s paintings, Parsifal seems to veer between hyper-explication and mystery-mongering, overburdened with messages yet dependent on obscurantism for its allure (the notion that the work transmits a hidden secret, accessible only to initiates, fuelled its popularity with occultists and theosophers well into the twentieth century). Stripping away something of the work’s superabundance of religious symbolism has become the norm in recent productions, a process that brings the whole closer to what is surely its most effective part: the orchestral prelude. Even for those resistant to the religious claims of the rest of Parsifal, such as Nietzsche, the prelude offers one of the most sublime monuments to the nostalgia and hope invested in art-religion. While Nietzsche focused on the melancholic gaze with which Wagner painted religious feeling, the most impressive aspect of the prelude is surely the chain of seventh chords which bring it to a poised, expectant close; it is hard to imagine a more apt sonic realisation of the ‘infinite longing’ of Romantic religiosity.53
