Deirdre Loughridge's book is a fascinating audiovisual recuperation of optical technologies of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, revealing overlooked soundscapes, practices of listening and looking, and metaphorical resonances. Her materials alone will captivate those of an antiquarian inclination, but they are also used skilfully to intervene in several ongoing conversations within musicology and cultural history more generally. Central among these is the project of unpicking romanticism: Loughridge explicitly foregrounds the ways her visual technologies ‘made sense of music's not making sense’ (121). Thus to recent philosophical examinations of romantic and German idealist approaches to music, and to economic explanations of the value of romantic frameworks to professional musicians, Loughridge adds her own blend of material and media history, history of technology, close reading and sound studies – though the point is, pointedly, audiovisual studies. Her work is also refreshing in its free movement between areas of culture later to be categorized as high and low, allowing her to present a paradox: in the sorts of entertainments from which nineteenth-century writers would feel the need to distance ‘serious’ music culture came some of the frameworks that they would use to do so.
The Introduction historicizes theories of the audiovisual by showing that although aestheticians (Herder among them) increasingly understood the different senses and media as operating independently of each other – as per the standard account – their project also involved reconsidering how senses and media could be combined in the act of (multi-sensory) perception. Moreover, both Tieck and Wackenroder provided examples of how a single sensory input (music) could create visual impressions in the ‘mind's eye’, and thus audiovisual experience. Each of the following chapters centres on an optical technology that came to play a significant role in musical discourses or practices that promoted listening to music as essentially otherworldly, charting a moment of aesthetic transition from mimesis to sensory extension and ‘transport’.
The first chapter, on the telescope and microscope, is the only one to focus on technologies that extended vision without also using sound. But Loughridge argues that as these ‘prosthetic’ technologies became accepted and widely disseminated, they habituated people to look beyond immediate sensory experience and to assume an outsider stance, looking and then listening in to another(’s) world. This impulse took on musical associations through ‘analogues’ established in philosophical texts and on the operatic stage. As examples of the former, Loughridge presents Kant's comparison between magnifying instruments and keyboard improvisation – both of which give access to what is normally inaccessible, whether something material or the human soul – and Rochlitz's story ‘Der Besuch im Irrenhause’, which describes illicit and silent listening to the keyboard improvisation of a lunatic as a way to gaining insight into his unconscious. In the other strand of the chapter, Loughridge argues that muted tone also became associated with this ‘prosthetic mode’ through Haydn's music about the experience of seeing through a telescope in Il mondo della luna (1777) and Grétry's magic-picture scene in Zémire et Azor (1771). In portraying modes of absorbed (and listening) spectatorship, of looking and hearing beyond, Loughridge argues that such music can itself ‘call forth’ the same mode even without dramatic context (27), using the example of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 (1809): the combination of muted strings and ‘improvising’ pianist isolated from the orchestra positions the listener as eavesdropper on an inaccessible world.
Chapter 2 introduces the peepshow, a street entertainment (stereo)typically run by the despised itinerant Savoyard, and describes a twenty-year period of ‘friendly meetings’ between peepshows and opera, 1770–1790 (64). This consists of more than a passing operatic trend for peepshows as plot devices or props, and relies, Loughridge argues, on two ‘vectors of similarity’ (72): the framed visual spectacle and the showman's babbling voice. The sources presented to support these vectors are a highlight of the book, and include a 1715 caricature of a peepshowman called Nicolo Cantabella, a 1743 street-cry cantata featuring the peepshowman's elaborate vocality and three operas in which the peepshow is central to the plot. All three reinforce the audiovisual relationships that Loughridge has established as characteristic of the peepshow experience on the street: the vocal advertisement of the spectacle, the narration of the images and the barrel-organ accompaniment. Moreover, through the alternation of musical and textual descriptions of objects hidden from the audience inside the onstage peepshow, music is presented as an alternative way of seeing, with the three operas responding differently to matters of musical imitation and expression. The onstage representation of the showman's musical invitation to look inside the peepshow, meanwhile, fuels Loughridge's larger argument: that music pointed to another world, to hidden sights. While this might seem to look forward to romantic approaches to music, the peepshow was increasingly seen as a regressive form, and was used by Carl Maria von Weber as a model of all that was wrong with opera, including passive spectatorship, melodic trickery and mechanical gimmickry.
In chapter 3 Loughridge focuses on Bürger and André’s Leonore ballad and its performance as a shadow play, directed by Henriette von Berberich in Regensburg in 1781. Through Herder, Bürger and Lessing, Loughridge argues (against Kittler) for the continuing importance of sounded poetry in this period, as it was valued for its capacity to stimulate the imagination and conjure images. For Herder and Bürger, this capacity was a key virtue of the folk tradition, and Leonore was an attempt to recapture it in both form and subject matter. If musical settings raised the question of whether the task of stimulating the imagination could be left to the words alone or should be supplemented by music, shadow-play performance added a further layer to the experience. Loughridge shows how André’s through-composed setting and Berberich's shadow play both realized imagery in the text and added elements the text did not contain. She proposes ultimately that the shadow play contributed to the rising popularity of the through-composed ballad and the increasing appeal of what might lie beyond the text, or, as Rochlitz put it, ‘the ever-expanding grasp of the music against the claims of the poem’ (159). At the same time, this chapter shows yet again the continuity between street and elite forms of musical experience. The figure of the ballad singer was represented in Berberich's Leonore, though he was admittedly elevated by his incarnation as Hans Sachs. The shadow play itself existed on the edge of respectability: by externalizing the imagination, it came close to the derided visual elements of the ballad singer's trade (the illustrations shown to accompany their strophic songs).
These themes are continued in chapter 4, in Loughridge's discussion of Haydn's Creation and the celebration and vilification of his tone-painting. Two prominent critics, Johann Karl Friedrich Triest and Carl Friedrich Zelter, used image-projecting apparatuses to describe the work metaphorically – the magic lantern and the shadow play respectively. Like the peepshow, the magic lantern show had sonic as well as visual elements. Each image was accompanied by the verbal commentary of the Savoyard, and preceded by music that evoked a barrel-organ, often a mechanical minuet. Loughridge uses this alternation of music and text/image to probe Triest's metaphor more deeply. In one section of the Creation (No. 3), Loughridge shows how the musical tone-painting of meteorological incidents precedes the recitative description, reducing the music to apparently meaningless, mechanical, motoric rhythms and arpeggios, and Haydn to the position of lowly Savoyard. Zelter's comparison, however, is more positive, thanks to his appreciation of the philosophical content of man-made visual displays such as shadow plays and fireworks, which he referred to as ‘eye-concerts’. He would later compare The Seasons to both, reflecting, Loughridge argues, his admiration for Haydn's equivalent manipulation of natural materials.
Chapter 5 turns to musical illusions of motion, briefly discussed in the Introduction in relation to the march in Mozart's Idomeneo that comes ever closer, but now considered in relation to the phantasmagoria. These optical shows, produced by ghost fakers and those attempting to reveal the fakery, used light and sound effects to create experiences of immersive, rather than distanced, spectatorship, and to probe the limits of the natural world and of sensory perception. A key feature of the North German phantasmagoria were appearing and disappearing images travelling through the air, including those of dead and living Prussian monarchs. This Loughridge links to Beethoven's use of the crescendo in his Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II, to depict the monarch's arrival in the world, a parallel demonstrating ‘not lines of influence, but rather . . . shared strategies for producing meaning and pleasure’ (215). E. T. A. Hoffmann's productions of phantasmagoria during his time at the Bamberg theatre, meanwhile, suggest that the reference to ‘giant approaching shadows’ in his review of Beethoven's Fifth might be more than a generalized evocation of the sublime. Connecting these shadows to the motion of the optical illusion allows Loughridge in turn to connect Hoffmann's imagery to Beethoven's crescendos, and thus recast the Fifth Symphony as not just a narrative of the triumph of the individual, but also a reflection on the boundary between the natural and the supernatural.
Loughridge's book as a whole not only demonstrates the frequency of references to audiovisual technologies in the philosophical and literary works of the idealist and romantic writers, and enables us to identify implicit references such as Hoffmann's, but, in recuperating the characteristic sound world of these optical devices, it also reveals new resonances in these metaphors. It should also encourage us to be alert to ‘the varied capacities of media to produce sensory experience beyond their own material qualities’, a welcome addition to the voices chipping away at Dahlhaus's persistent absolute music narrative (15). More broadly, it reminds us that audiovisuality is not an invention of the twentieth century.
Loughridge's larger thesis – about the role of optical spectacles in shaping German romanticism and the mode of listening beyond – is ultimately convincing and rewarding, though the sceptical reader might have wished for greater attention to be paid to the relative weight and number of examples, which vary from chapter to chapter. Chapter 3, for instance, argues that moving-image apparatuses were ‘a shaping force’ (160) in the shift from strophic to through-composed ballads, but the fascinating close reading of a rather particular case study occupies most of the chapter, and there is little sense of whether other shadow plays would intersect with this discourse quite so neatly. Chapter 4 also abounds with interpretative possibilities without making it clear which of them might extend beyond the specific case studies featured. Loughridge is certainly not making crude claims for straight ‘lines of influence’ from the telescope to Wackenroder (215). She explicitly avoids deterministic causal relations, but rather presents technologies as one ‘condition of possibility’ amongst others for romanticism (21) – an approach that accommodates the long history of several of the optical devices prior to the period in question. As already mentioned, in chapter 5 they are cast as sharing ‘strategies for producing meaning and pleasure’ (215). But even so, the establishment of these musical meanings could sometimes be supported by fuller illustration. In chapter 1 Loughridge states that the association of muted tone with the prosthetic mode in the Haydn and Grétry operas is not established by convention but by a specific combination of other musical features and the dramatic context (37); her reading of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, on the other hand, assumes that muted tone has become sufficiently associated with prosthesis to call forth the attitude without that dramatic context. This is something of a leap, both temporal and geographical, to the canonical examples thought necessary by the author: only Mozart's muted music in Idomeneo has been provided (in the Introduction) to bridge the gap, and that march was interpreted as signalling distance, rather than spectatorship. More instances of this combination of meanings and musical techniques could be provided here (there are plenty in the music of spoken theatre, for instance), and elsewhere, along with slightly more information indicating the relative distribution and consumption of the audiovisual technologies in question.
I will end by being clear about the relative weight of my own observations: these issues do not detract from the achievements of Loughridge's book. Her research is a joy to discover, and her work offers many stimulating arguments and approaches that open up both new understandings of the period and new avenues of enquiry.
