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: