E. T. A. Hoffmann, in one of his more provocative moods, set out to give a frank account of the music of the day in an 1814 issue of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. His contribution was entitled simply ‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’ (Old and New Church Music), and it begins with a scathing condemnation of a recent trend. Composers seem to have repudiated religious music, devoting their efforts instead to works for the theatre, works that have become disposable, vulgar, ‘lifeless puppets with a semblance of vitality’ (‘dessen Flimmer der toten Puppe den Schein des Lebens verleihen sollte’).Footnote 1 For a point of contrast, Hoffmann looks to the age of Palestrina. In those wonderfully Catholic times, he argues, composers created religious works of such crystalline purity that they produced ‘the most glorious period in church music (and hence in music in general)’ (‘mit Palestrina hub unstreitig die herrlichste Periode der Kirchenmusik (und also der Musik überhaupt) an’).Footnote 2
Hoffmann's parenthetical remark should raise an eyebrow. We typically place him at the helm of musical romanticism, a position immortalized in his famous review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony from 1810, where he effusively guides us through the intricacies of the new music of his time, celebrates its enormity and embraces its otherworldliness.Footnote 3 Hoffmann appears to pursue conflicting agendas: on one hand he grieves for a lost musical past, and on the other he champions the new. As Karol Berger has argued, Hoffmann's championing exemplified a broader social phenomenon characteristic of the years around 1800, nothing short of the establishment of a ‘musical modernity’. Critics effectively separated recent musical practice from everything before it, embracing ‘the exceptional, epoch-making character of late eighteenth-century musical innovations’.Footnote 4 Yet all was not rosy. Exemplified by Hoffmann's mourning for an irrecoverable past, an elegiac strand of musical modernity was being articulated by a select group of critics. Their efforts led them to find ‘sentimental unity’ in a modern music that appeared alarmingly opaque, and their quest shaped the ascendant discourse of music criticism and analysis.
My narrative highlights the social and historical claims of the elegiac moderns. Earlier texts offered optimistic accounts of musical progress, such as Johann Nikolaus Forkel's introduction to his Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, which presents modern music as the fruition of humanity's historical pursuit of a fully rational language of emotion.Footnote 5 To Hoffmann and some his contemporaries a few decades later, the account was less straightforward: while they recognized and extolled the advancements of music's modernization, they also connected these advancements with unstable developments in society. Looking to the past as a way to get a grip on the present, they were enthralled by a pre-modern music that appeared wholly transparent in its worldly purpose, particularly Palestrina's church music. In stark contrast, modern music's function was utterly elusive. Prefiguring G. W. F. Hegel's aesthetic theory, critics grappled with the situation by theorizing about how modern music connected to the social totality.
These critics considered musical style to be central to their elegiac narrative, fortifying the division between pre-modern and modern music by establishing a stylistic dichotomy: the former was gloriously simple and the latter was impressively innovative, echoing Friedrich Schiller's ‘naive’ and ‘sentimental’ art. Yet innovation risked volatility. With new music threatened by instability and incoherence at every turn, critics found criticism and analysis to be necessary for securing its place in the world. If in their eyes the musical work was fractured, new conceptualizations of form and models of structural features were needed to stitch it back together. Above all, critics approached music with unprecedented fervour, in the hopes of rehabilitating it. Hoffmann's proclamation that modern music was ‘Sanskrit of nature, translated into sound’ (‘in Tönen ausgesprochene Sanskrita der Natur!’) sums up the situation well: while undoubtedly esoteric, modern music was not outright illogical – it still held meaning.Footnote 6
CONFRONTING THE FRACTURED PRESENT
The musical discourse of modernity that developed at the turn of the nineteenth century has received much scholarly attention.Footnote 7 By no means far-reaching geographically, it was primarily a Germanic phenomenon whose contributors were concerned with instrumental music. Yet it resonated with a contemporaneous philosophical discourse that fashioned itself as a response to a variety of ‘modernizing’ social developments, particularly the intellectual tradition of the Aufklärung – the discourse of the late eighteenth-century German Enlightenment – and the traumatic political events of the French Revolution.Footnote 8
At the most abstract level, scholars have argued that modernity constitutes the historical moment when society appeared to have abandoned its traditional structures, when the present seemed ruptured from the past and poised for the future. Jürgen Habermas argues that its first phase originated with the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, there had been a noticeable shift. To philosophers, society's quest for grounding itself had reached a moment of crisis that they saw requiring an intervention. The world appeared sharply divided into three domains: ‘science, morality, and art were . . . institutionally differentiated as realms of activity in which questions of truth, justice, and of taste were autonomously elaborated’. The hallowed unity of truth, goodness and beauty that characterized antiquity had splintered, and furthermore these ‘spheres of knowing’ became separated from religion by an ever-increasing rift between secular and religious life.Footnote 9 The establishment of rational foundations led paradoxically to a radical fracturing, fuelling what Habermas terms ‘the philosophical discourse of modernity’.
To the German idealists and the early German romantics, Hoffmann among them, contemporary life was fraught. Modernity produced subjects who were alienated from the world and from each other, exemplifying the broken conditions of the present by living fractured lives.Footnote 10 According to Frederick Beiser, the romantics were responding to the internal conflicts of the Aufklärung, embracing the Enlightenment concept of Bildung as a way to advance society while contending with the potentially alienating tendencies of reason and radical criticism, particularly in the wake of Immanuel Kant's philosophical Copernican turn.Footnote 11 They ultimately put their faith in art, which, they posited, ‘could restore belief and unity with nature and society’.Footnote 12
The possibility of restoration implied an earlier unification between subject and society as well as self and nature, an ideal many attributed to Ancient Greece. Above all, philosophers and critics posited a harmonious antiquity as a foil against which to interpret modern conditions, and it proved to be a potent hermeneutic. Initiated by the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the procedure was appropriated by Friedrich Schiller in his influential ‘Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man’. He asserts that the Ancient Greek citizen was at once both an individual and an embodiment of the state, while the modern citizen was alienated from the world as a consequence of society's efficient division of labour.Footnote 13 Enlightenment values had led humanity astray and atomized the world into ‘innumerable but lifeless parts’. To Schiller society was no longer a living organism but a mechanical clock. He claims, ‘Utility is the great idol of our age, to which all powers are in thrall and to which all talent must pay homage.’Footnote 14
Art's place in the modern world was less than obvious. According to J. M. Bernstein, art suffered the most from modernity's repudiation of tradition, a condition he terms ‘aesthetic alienation’. In the aftermath of society's fragmentation, art had lost its former authority in the world and was expelled from the spheres of everyday life, religion, knowledge and morality.Footnote 15 Decades after Schiller, Hegel would embed the impoverishment of modern art into the very centre of his aesthetic theory, particularly in his shift from what he terms ‘Classical’ to ‘Romantic’ art.Footnote 16 Breaking away from neoclassical aesthetics, Hegel claims that art embodies and reinforces socially meaningful forms of life. Art does not depend on timeless standards – it is a historically and socially contingent vehicle for articulating how society relates human agency to the natural world. According to Gillian Rose, Hegel's conception of art is a ‘historically specific phenomenon which reproduces social contradiction in the medium of sensuous illusion. Art in this sense is not ideal, not integral, not beautiful’.Footnote 17 In other words, art is not an abstraction for its own ends, but rather an expression of the character of the spheres of social life. Artistic form is harmonious when created in a climate of political harmony, or unstable in one of political instability.
For Hegel there was no better art than that of Ancient Greece. It had served as a perfect material realization of freedom: ‘Therefore the world-view of the Greeks is precisely the milieu in which beauty begins its true life and builds its serene kingdom; the milieu of free vitality which is not only there naturally and immediately but is generated by spiritual vision and transfigured by art’.Footnote 18 In contrast, romantic art, that is, modern art in the post-Reformation Christian world, cannot serve the function as well. Hegel sees this as a direct consequence of the modern invention of individual subjectivity. To him, humanity outgrows the need for art or beauty as it functioned in antiquity, as the quest for its self-understanding no longer requires a material means for the job. Hegel states, ‘The peculiar nature of artistic production and of works of art no longer fills our highest need. We have got beyond venerating works of art as divine and worshipping them’, eventually leading to his famous claim: ‘art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past’.Footnote 19 Art's obsolescence occurs alongside religion's loss of power, both being superseded in the most recent age by philosophy.Footnote 20 Modern art could no longer function as perfectly as it did in Ancient Greece – it was a relic.
MODERN ART'S ANALYTICAL IMPERATIVE
While modern art had lost its ‘highest vocation’, it did not go away quietly. Hegel's account offers intriguing, if enigmatic, new directions for modern art. He contends, ‘In this way romantic art is the self-transcendence of art within its own sphere and in the form of art itself’.Footnote 21 Central to art's new status was a new mode of engagement. Modern art simply could not offer a compelling sensory experience as it could in the Classical age; instead it required some sort of discursive mediation:
What is now aroused in us by works of art is not just immediate enjoyment but our judgment also . . . The philosophy of art is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is.Footnote 22
In short, art now needed criticism.
Earlier figures had found modern art complex and unstable, fundamentally different from the gloriously simple art of antiquity. As Winckelmann had asserted, ‘Had the ancients been poorer, they would have written better about art: compared to them, we are like badly portioned heirs; but we turn over every stone, and by drawing inferences from many tiny details, we at least arrive at a probable assertion that can be more instructive than the accounts left by the ancients.’Footnote 23 Schiller's account from his essay ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’ provides a helpful model for illustrating the shift. In Schiller's Ancient Greece, the subject and society were harmoniously united, with no division sensed between the two. The naive artist was nature, associating intuitively with the world, aesthetically depicting an object from a limited perspective. Regardless of genre or the intensity of affect, the relation of the depiction to its imitated object remained constant. Naive art required no intermediary to secure its meaning – it simply mattered.
In a sentimental world, on the other hand, art was hardly as fortunate. The sentimental artist could only seek nature in his fractured modern life. This sentimental longing for the naive world drove the artist to compare his actual situation to the ideal one, and the resulting dissonance led to a variety of sentimental art forms.Footnote 24 Thus when the sentimental artist appropriated the classical forms of old, he could no longer use the traditional norms they relied upon. Hegel deepens the claim that the modern artist was separated from tradition, revealing that the relation between outer material and inner freedom was no longer straightforward: ‘The artist thus stands above specific consecrated forms and configurations and moves freely on his own account, independent of the subject-matter and mode of conception in which the holy and eternal was previously made visible to human apprehension.’Footnote 25
While classical art forms had reflected and supported the harmonious relations of the world and seamlessly blended into life, modern ones retreated into themselves as unique totalities. Schiller expands on this claim in a set of letters to Gottfried Körner, a notable attempt to work through his conception of aesthetics, influenced by Karl Phillipp Moritz's Ueber die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen (On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful)Footnote 26 and Kant's third Critique. According to Beiser, the basis of Schiller's project was to stress human freedom in the aesthetic realm, and it is in the Kallias-briefe where his conception of their relationship most closely matches Kant's.Footnote 27 Modern art could no longer depend on societal custom, and so its materials appeared free: ‘A form appears as free as soon as we are neither able nor inclined to search for its ground outside it . . . A form is beautiful, one might say, if it demands no explanation, or it if explains itself without a concept.’Footnote 28 All of a work's components seemed self-determining, ‘as if technique flowed freely out of the thing itself’.Footnote 29 The components also had to stand apart from each other. Schiller writes, ‘Freedom comes about because each restricts its inner freedom such as to allow every other to express its freedom.’Footnote 30 No longer a harmonious assemblage of features readily submitting themselves to a unified whole, the art work was now an atomized totality.
Friedrich Schlegel's call for ‘Romantic poetry’ gives a radical perspective on just how much freedom the arrangement of artistic materials should display. The criteria for binding materials together within an art work lost their traditional basis, requiring the work to combine disparate elements in a convincingly original way. Schlegel claims that Romantic poetry ‘tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical; poeticize wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humour’.Footnote 31 As Hegel later claims, the modern artist had no more rules to follow, faced no forbidden juxtapositions of styles or genres and was free to assemble any features imaginable. The work became a unique system of intermingling parts bound only by his imagination.
Unity no longer referred to a pleasingly formed whole with all parts harmoniously supporting a straightforward artistic depiction. To borrow Schiller's term, it was now sentimental unity, a singular totality containing a succession of fragments. Each work demanded its own principles for understanding – instead of traditional norms binding the work together, the work itself authorized its unification. Critics were drawn to the work to affirm its wholeness, attempting to reconcile two opposing claims: the components of the work appeared self-determining, but they were nonetheless arranged in a way that they cohered into a singular whole. Schlegel referred to this coherence as ‘a higher unity . . . through the bond of ideas, through a spiritual central point’.Footnote 32 The critical pursuit of this ‘bond of ideas’ was a procedure that evinced modern art's loss of naive unity.
Schlegel attempted, in Winckelmann's words, to ‘turn over every stone’ in his lengthy analytical essay on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre of 1795. ‘This book’, he contends, ‘is absolutely new and unique. We can learn to understand it only on its own terms. To judge it according to an idea of genre drawn from custom and belief, accidental experiences and arbitrary demands, is as if a child tried to clutch the stars and the moon in his hand and pack them in his satchel.’Footnote 33 There were no pre-existing models to determine the inner logic of Goethe's novel. Instead, Schlegel carefully pores over the novel section by section, considering how each one relates to its surroundings and how the transitions between sections help to connect them. Central to his analysis is how each part maintains independence from the whole: each fragment was part of the totality, yet each could also stand alone, exhibiting ‘unintentional homogeneity and original unity’.Footnote 34 Following Schiller's model, the sections of Goethe's novel demanded independence from each other. A fragment's independence threatened to dissolve the glue that made it cohere with its surroundings, yet somehow all of the fragments coalesced together into a sentimental unity. Resonating with Hegel's conception of modern art, Schlegel's conception of the novel contained an assertion about art's new status. A work held a claim to its coherence originating from within it and hovering over it, a claim attained through criticism.
NAIVE MUSIC
At the turn of the nineteenth century some critics recognized music's unstable position in the wake of aesthetic modernity, a recognition that reached its apotheosis in Hoffmann's ‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’.Footnote 35 The essay starts off with a contentious observation: operatic music in the last decades of the eighteenth century was lacking any sort of deeper connection to society beyond its commercial worth. Instead of dutifully studying counterpoint for the purpose of creating religious music, composers now ditched the church for the theatre: ‘their only concern is to dazzle and impress the multitude, or indeed for ignoble monetary gain to pander to passing taste and become merely popular composers instead of serious ones’ (‘daß es ihnen nur darum zu tun sei, zu glänzen, der Menge zu imponieren, oder wohl gar, des schnöden Geldgewinstes wegen, dem augenblicklichen Zeitgeschmack zu frönen, und, statt ein gründlicher, tiefer, nur ein beliebter Komponist zu werden’).Footnote 36 Composers were increasingly preoccupied with entertaining the masses, and were beholden to the commodified marketplace, rendering modern music fundamentally hollow.Footnote 37
While he was far from being the first to claim that composers had succumbed to popular taste, Hoffmann provides an intriguing explanation for his thought.Footnote 38 Instead of faulting composers for misjudgment, he argues that the situation was part of a larger social crisis:
Die tiefere Ursache dieses Leichtsinns in der Kunst lag in der Tendenz der Zeit überhaupt. Als regierten dämonische Prinzipe, strebte alles dahin, den Menschen festzubannen in das befangene, ärmliche Leben, dessen Tun und Treiben er für den höchsten Zweck des Daseins hielt: so wurde er abtrünnig allem Höheren, Wahrhaften, Heiligen.
The deeper cause of this frivolity in art lay in the general tendency of the times. As though governed by demonic forces, everything conspired to hold men spellbound within their miserable, blinkered world, whose constant activity seemed to them the highest purpose of existence. And so they turned against all that was noble, true and sacred.Footnote 39
In the modern world the subject was alienated, distracted from pursuing a higher way of life, inhibited from composing a noble style of music. Even music for the church was not immune, as the Enlightenment ‘killed every deeper religious impulse’ (‘allen tieferen religiösen Sinn tötenden Aufklärerei gleichen Schritt haltend’).Footnote 40 Composers could no longer create an authentic church music because society no longer supported authentic religious worship. Modern church music, with all its faults, was just a manifestation of modernity itself.Footnote 41
Hoffmann articulated an elegiac modernity when he constructed a musical analogy for Hegel and Schiller's Ancient Greece, a moment when musical practices likewise appeared to be in harmony with society. Resonating with the German early-romantic nostalgia for Catholic Europe, Hoffmann chose Renaissance Rome as an instructive foil to modern life.Footnote 42 Here music was grounded by pre-Enlightened religion, which, in Hoffmann's eyes, made church music truly and clearly meaningful:
dem ausübenden, praktischen Komponisten geht aber die heiligste Tiefe seiner herrlichen, echt-christlichen Kunst erst da auf, als in Italien das Christentum in seiner höchsten Glorie strahlte, und die hohen Meister in der Weihe göttlicher Begeisterung das heiligste Geheimnis der Religion in herrlichen, nie gehörten Tönen verkündeten.
For the practising composer . . . the most sacred depths of his noble and truly Christian art are first revealed in Italy, when Christianity shone forth in its greatest splendour, and the great composers, with the solemnity of divine rapture, proclaimed the holiest mysteries of religion in magnificent sounds not heard before.Footnote 43
Music worked jointly with other arts, such as painting and sculpture, to advance the spiritual mission of Christianity at its hub, the Vatican. Resonating with Hegel's conception of classical art, music served as a vehicle through which to embody and reinforce the harmony between the human and divine. Hoffmann claims:
Die Liebe, der Einklang alles Geistigen in der Natur, wie er dem Christen verheißen, spricht sich aus im Akkord, der daher auch erst im Christentum zum Leben erwachte; und so wird der Akkord, die Harmonie, Bild und Ausdruck der Geistergemeinschaft, der Vereinigung mit dem Ewigen, dem Idealen, das über uns thront und doch uns einschließt.Footnote 44
The love, the consonance of all things spiritual in nature promised to the Christian, finds expression in the chord first brought to life in Christendom; and thus the chord, the harmony, becomes the image and expression of that community of spirits, of that unification with the eternal, the ideal, which reigns over us and yet embraces us.
Music's efficacy in the world was beyond question; it was something, in Ludwig Tieck's words, ‘to compose to the movement of the stars’ (‘welche sinnige Alte dem Umschwung der Gestirne ebenfalls zuschreiben wollten’).Footnote 45
For Hoffmann, Palestrina served as the paradigmatic composer of the age: his music had a wonderfully uncomplicated character, with ‘bold, powerful chords, blazing forth like blinding shafts of light’ (‘wie blendende Strahlen hereinbrechenden Akkorde, auf das Gemüt zu wirken vermöge’). The music was ‘simple, true, childlike, good, strong, and sturdy’ (‘einfach, wahrhaft, kindlich, fromm, stark und mächtig’). It was also free from recent technical developments: ‘no contrived frivolity or orchestral mimicry defiles the purity of this heaven-sent music; nothing is heard of the so-called striking modulations, the gaudy figures, the feeble melodies, the impotent, confusing clamour of instruments’ (‘keine gesuchte Spielerei und Nachäffung entweiht das rein vom Himmel Empfangene; daher kommt nichts vor von den sogennanten frappierenden Modulationen, von den bunten Figuren, von den weichlichen Melodien, von dem kraftlosen, verwirrenden Geräusch der Instrumente’).Footnote 46 In short, Palestrina's music was naive.
Other critics also imagined an idyllic musical past, and whether it was in Palestrina's Rome or elsewhere, it always evinced an unadulterated style that privileged simplicity of expression. Amadeus Wendt tellingly refers to his version of a lost age as the ‘Kingdom of Consonance’ (‘im Reiche der Consonanzen’), a world of old folk and church music whose name refers both to music's clear societal role and to its uncontrived stylistic components.Footnote 47 Christian Friedrich Michaelis explicitly labels such music ‘naive’ in his 1805 article ‘Etwas über sentimentale und naive Musik’ (On Sentimental and Naive Music). As with Hoffmann's characterization of Palestrina's style, Michaelis's naive music opposed the features of modern music:
Die naive Musik drückt in der größten Einfalt und Ruhe die sanften Gefühle des mit sich selbst harmonirenden Gemüths, des von der Unruhe der heftigen Affekten und Leidenschaften freien, in sich selbst zufriedenen Herzens aus. Leicht fließend ist ihre Melodie, kunstlos, einfach und natürlich in den Akkorden und Wendungen ihre Harmonie; ihre Bewegung gleichmäßig und mild; ihre Modulation ohne kühne Sprünge und auffallende Abwechslungen. Die Nüancen ihres Ausdrucks sind sanft, und er ist frei von starken Contrasten. Alles was die Musik pikant und humoristisch macht, z. B. durch fremde harmonische Ausweichungen, erschütternde Dissonanzen, durch frappante Verstärkungen, rhythmische Illusionen u. dergl. ist fern von dieser Gattung.Footnote 48
Naive music expresses, with the greatest simplicity and calmness, the gentle sentiments of a mind in harmony with itself, of a heart content with itself, free from the restlessness of intense affects and passions. Gently flowing is its melody, its harmony artless, simple and natural in its chords and inflections; its motion is even and mild; its modulations are without bold leaps or striking digressions. The nuances of its expression are gentle, and the expression is free of strong contrasts. All that makes music piquant and humorous – such as through strange harmonic deviations, shocking dissonances, through striking intensifications, rhythmic deceptions and the like – is distant from this genre.
In the naive style, according to thinkers like Michaelis, the imagination stood beneath understanding.Footnote 49 A work held a naive unity: each feature completely subsumed itself under the whole without any jagged edges. As a reflection of the harmonious world, the music of antiquity served to complement and reinforce traditional societal structures.
SENTIMENTAL MUSIC
Critics invented naive music in order to grasp modern sentimental music. The two were linked: if naive music had reflected its idyllic surroundings with simplicity and stability, then modern music epitomized the fractured present with complexity and volatility. Initially, eighteenth-century critics such as Johann Adolph Scheibe saw early versions of the modern style as a jumbled mixture of incompatible techniques. Composers risked mixing styles defined by social stratum, national idiom or generic convention that potentially resulted in incoherence:
Man hat in einer Zeile hoch, in der andern mittelmäßig, und in der dritten endlich gar niedrig geschrieben. Hier stehen französische, dort aber italienische Stellen. Bald zeiget sich ein theatralischer Satz, bald auch ein anderer, der sich in die Kirche schickte. Ja, alles ist so bunt und so kraus durch einander gemischet, daß man keinesweges eine herrschende Schreibart, oder einen gehörigen Ausdruck der Sachen finden wird.
There is one line written in a high style, another in a middle, and finally a third in a low. Here there are French passages, but there we find Italian ones. First goes a theatrical phrase, then one suitable for the church. Everything is so chaotically mixed together that a dominant style or a proper expression of things cannot be found.Footnote 50
In contrast, the critical upholders of the elegiac strand of musical modernity found such a style ineluctably tied to the present, foreshadowing Hegel's claim that the modern artist was no longer bound to any tradition. The modern style was the grotesque negation of pre-modern clarity and balance, overflowing with bizarre modulations, clashing dissonances, wobbly syncopations and exaggerated dynamic juxtapositions. As noted earlier, the style even prompted a new conceptualization of musical form, as the materials of the work appeared fractured, no longer readily fusing into a whole.Footnote 51
Instrumental music exemplified the modern style's volatile tendencies. While scholars have often characterized the rise of instrumental music as an achievement, such as when Carl Dahlhaus calls the symphony the culmination of absolute music in the early nineteenth century, the musical moderns were less emphatic.Footnote 52 Their writings betray an ambivalence, acknowledging instrumental music's impressive artifice but tempering that with an awareness of its destabilizing capacities.Footnote 53 In an evocative passage, Tieck compares modern music to Orpheus's horrific failure to resurrect his deceased wife:
Ich sehe hierinn die Geschichte des Orpheus und der Eurydice. Sie ist gestorben; bei den Schatten, in der dunkeln Unterwelt weilt die Geliebte; er fühlt Kraft und Muth genug, das Licht der Sonne zu verlassen, sich der schwarzen Flut und Dämmerung anzuvertrauen; sein Zauberspiel rührt den ernsten, sonst unerbittlichen Gott; die Larven und Verdammten genießen in seinen Tönen eine schnell vorüber fliehenden Seeligkeit; Eurydice folgt seinem Saitenspiel, aber nicht rückwärts soll er blicken, ihr nicht ins Angesicht schauen, sie nur im Glauben besitzen; sie lockt, sie ruft, sie weint, da wendet sich sein Auge, und blasser und blasser zittert die geliebte Gestalt in den gähnenden Orkus zurück. Der Sänger tritt mit der Kraft seiner Töne wieder in die Oberwelt, sein Lied singt und klagt die Verlorene, alle Melodien suchen sie, aber er hat aus dem tiefen Abgrund, den kein Sänger vor ihm besucht, das schwermüthige Rollen der unterirdischen Wässer, das Aechzen der Gemarterten, das Stöhnen der Geängstigten und das Hohnlachen der Furien, samt allen Gräueln der dunkeln Reiche mit herauf gebracht, und alles klingt in vielfach verschlungener Kunst in der Lieblichkeit seiner Lieder. Himmel und Hölle, die durch unermeßliche Klüfte getrennt waren, sind zauberhaft und zum Erschrecken in der Kunst vereinigt, die ursprünglich reines Licht, stille Liebe und lobpreisende Andacht war. So erscheint mir Mozarts Musik.Footnote 54
I see [in Mozart's music] the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. She is dead; the beloved abides among the shades in the dark underworld. He feels enough strength and courage to abandon sunlight, to confide himself to the black flood and twilight. His enchanting playing stirs the serious, otherwise merciless god; the ghosts and damned enjoy a quickly fleeting bliss in his music. Eurydice follows his string playing, but he is forbidden from glancing backward and looking into her face – she can only be held on faith. She entices, she shouts, she cries, then his eyes turn toward her, and the beloved's form trembles fainter and fainter back into the cavernous underworld. The singer, with the force of his music, returns to the world of the living. His song sings and laments the lost one. All melodies seek her, but from the deep abyss that no singer had visited before him he brought the desolate rolling of the underground waters, the groaning of the martyred, the wailing of the fearful and the mocking laughter of the furies, along with all the horrors of the dark realm, and everything sounds within the frequently convoluted art in the charm of his songs. Heaven and hell, which were separated by vast chasms, are magically and frightfully combined in the art that originally was pure light, tranquil love and glorifying prayer. This is how Mozart's music appears to me.
Like sorcery gone awry, modern music was a perversion of traditional order, a volatile juxtaposition of opposing images, a sounding art form rooted in catastrophic loss.
Tieck's dismal portrayal of musical modernity was hardly exceptional, as critics and early German romantics often noted the perverseness of music's dizzying new style.Footnote 55 Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder describes the experience of listening to a modern symphony as initially delightful, suddenly transforming into something utterly horrifying:
Mit leichter, spielender Freude steigt die tönende Seele aus ihrer Orakelhöhle hervor . . . Aber bald gewinnen die Bilder um sie her festern Bestand, sie versucht ihre Kraft an stärkeres Gefühl, sie wagt sich plötzlich mitten in die schäumenden Fluthen zu stürzen, schmiegt sich durch alle Höhen und Tiefen, und rollt alle Gefühle mit muthigem Entzücken hinauf und hinab. – Doch wehe! sie dringt verwegen in wildere Labyrinthe, sie sucht mit kühn-erzwungener Frechheit die Schrecken des Trübsinns, die bittern Quaalen des Schmerzes auf, um den Durst ihrer Lebenskraft zu sättigen, und mit einem Trompetenstoße brechen alle furchtbaren Schrecken der Welt, alle die Kriegsschaaren des Unglücks von allen Seiten mächtig wie ein Wolkenbruch herein, und wälzen sich in verzerrten Gestalten fürchterlich, schauerlich wie ein lebendig gewordenes Gebirge über einander.
With easy, playful joy the resounding soul rises forth from its oracular cave . . . But soon the images around it acquire firmer contours; it tests its power with stronger emotion; it suddenly dares to plunge itself into the foaming floodwaters, moves lithely through all heights and depths, and rolls up and down all emotions with spirited delight. – But alas! It recklessly invades wilder labyrinths; with boldly forced impudence it seeks out the horrors of dejection, the torments of pain, in order to quench the thirst of its vitality; and with one burst of the trumpet, all frightful horrors of the world, all the armies of disaster violently break in from all sides like a cloudburst and roll over each other in distorted forms, frightfully, gruesomely, like a mountain come alive.Footnote 56
Jean Paul even claims that Haydn's ‘annihilating humour’ (‘des vernichtenden Humors’) – brought upon by the abrupt juxtaposition of key centres, dynamics and tempos in his symphonies – results in a disturbing ‘psychic vertigo which suddenly transforms our own rapid motion into an external one affecting the whole steady world’ (‘gleichsam ein Seelen-Schwindel welcher unsere schnelle Bewegung plötzlich in die fremde der ganzen stehenden Welt umwandelt’).Footnote 57 Though John Neubauer celebrates the turn of the nineteenth century as the moment of instrumental music's ‘emancipation’ from traditional mimetic aesthetics, the contributors to the elegiac strand of musical modernity recognized that this freedom came at a high cost.Footnote 58 Music's artifice evinced its modern estrangement from traditional social structures, and the virtuosic advancement of its own materials supplanted a simple style that was no longer sustainable.
Returning to Hoffmann, while ‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’ initially seems to condemn modern church music – squaring with Hoffmann's reputation for privileging instrumental music – the essay exposes a space for both genres in light of their modern complexities. Hoffmann uncovers a purpose for new church music when he discusses its deficiencies. In stark contrast to Palestrina's music, which had lucidly reinforced the harmonious social totality, modern church music exacerbates the discontinuities of modern life. Its chromatic figures were ‘glued-on pieces of rustling tinsel’ that ‘mar the calm composure of the whole, smother the singing and, particularly in the high vault of a cathedral, only produce a confusing noise’ (‘die wie aufgeklebte, knisternde Goldflitter die Ruhe und Haltung des Ganzen stören, die den Gesang übertäuben, und vorzüglich in dem hohen, gewölbten Dom nur ein verwirrendes Geräusch machen’).Footnote 59 Hoffmann takes Haydn's church music to be an exemplar of the genre's corrupted manner, as it incorporates mercurial shifts of affect that contaminate the church with images of the profane: ‘This wonderful music is charged with the same constant alternation of gravity, awe, horror, jollity, and exuberance as that which mundane activity gives rise to, and it relates to the church only to the extent that pious reflections play a part in the affairs of everyday life.’ (‘Derselbe ewige Wechsel des Ernsten, Grauenhaften, Schrecklichen, Lustigen, Ausgelassenen, wie das irdische Sein ihn treibt, herrscht in jener wundervollen Musik, die auf die Kirche sich höchstens nur insofern bezieht, als auch fromme Betrachtungen in den Kreis des täglichen Lebens gezogen werden.’) Church works are infected with ‘the contagion of mundane, ostentatious levity’ (‘ansteckenden Seuche des weltlichen, prunkenden Leichtsinns’) and, at worst, ‘sound like dogs snapping beneath their master's table’ (‘wie jene sich unter dem Tisch des Herrn beißenden Hunde erscheinen’).Footnote 60 In essence, new church music was noisy: it undermined the church's metaphysical stature by reducing it to the realm of everyday life, laying bare the weakened state of enlightened religion.
Hoffmann's turn to instrumental music toward the end of the essay demonstrates modern music's dialectical nature. Just as modern religious music contaminated the sacred with the profane, modern instrumental music had achieved the reverse by disrupting the quotidian realm with spirit. To be sure, Hoffmann rehearses a romantic truism when he claims that music harboured spiritual content: ‘By virtue of its essential character, therefore, music is a form of religious worship’ (‘Ihrem innern, eigentümlichen Wesen nach, ist daher die Musik . . . religiöser Kultus’).Footnote 61 Yet within an elegiac musical modernity, this claim highlights the perversion of music's split from the religion of antiquity. It was a testament to the unstable fracturing of modernity that music now offered a religious experience by itself, apart from the church. Hoffmann's underlying contention is that Beethoven's music corrupts the bourgeois venue, whether it be a concert hall or salon, by engulfing the listener in spiritual ecstasy. New instrumental music was actually subversive because a spiritual experience in the secular realm exposed the inadequacy of civic life divorced from religion.
Hoffmann sums up the situation with the claim that ‘Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven have evolved a new art’ (‘Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven entfalteten eine neue Kunst’).Footnote 62 Here he prefigures Hegel's realization that the romantic art of modernity was functionally different from the classical art of Ancient Greece, particularly in light of his discussion of Palestrina. Following Dahlhaus, Berger flattens the historical distinction: ‘But [for Hoffmann] Beethoven's symphony appears already to be the Palestrina mass for the times when Christianity no longer shines forth in all its glory, the new revelation of “the other world”, the realm of the spirit.’Footnote 63 While Berger interprets Hoffmann's programme as celebrating music's spirit-revealing capacity in both Palestrina and Beethoven, Hoffmann himself argues something else. Mirroring Hegel's narrative of classical giving way to romantic art forms, he claims that Palestrina's music was a vehicle through which to embody and reinforce the pre-modern bond between spirit and nature. New music – either in the church or the concert hall – revealed that the bond was broken. It was an infestation of otherworldly content in the, to use Hegel's word, ‘prosaic’ modern world.
‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’ constitutes an elegiac reflection of musical modernity, claiming that modern music in all its genres called attention to the fault lines of modern society. Five years later in his Die Serapions-Brüder, and paralleling the style of Tieck's Phantasus of 1812, Hoffmann recast the essay as a dialogue, primarily between the two characters Theodore and Cyprian.Footnote 64 The former attempts to salvage contemporary music while the latter mourns the bygone age of Palestrina, highlighting the countervailing forces of the original essay and the grounding ambivalence of the elegiac musical discourse of modernity. Music stood at a crossroads, looking back to a harmonious past and forward to an uncertain future. Hoffmann's essay presents one possibility for music's new-found role: it was to reveal the rift between the secular and religious realms by exposing the religiosity of the former and the secularity of the latter. The spectacular quality of a Beethoven symphony came with the sabotaging quality of a Haydn mass. Music could no longer be glorious, only destabilizing.
MODERN MUSICAL FORM
The ‘new art’ of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven adopted an unstable, mercurial, ‘sentimental’ style. In Hegel's words, it ‘invites us to intellectual consideration’. Modern music required a modern appreciation, a thought that Hoffmann reflects on in a late article entitled ‘Zufällige Gedanken beim Erscheinen dieser Blätter’ (Casual Reflections on the Appearance of This Journal). Appealing directly to the composer, he defends the critic's job of dissecting and elucidating a work. The critic, Hoffmann claims, is an intermediary, a ‘kindred spirit’ between the composer and the listener, ‘who is able, by means of a mysterious magic, to let the people see into the depths of the earth, as through crystal, so that they discover the seed, and realise that from this very seed the entire beautiful tree sprang’. (‘Da kommt aber jener verwandte Geist gegangen und vermag mittelst eines geheimnisvollen Zaubers es zu bewirken, daß die Leute in die Tiefe der Erde wie durch Kristall schauen, den Kern entdecken und sich überzeugen können, daß eben aus diesem Kern der ganze schöne Baum entsproß.’)Footnote 65 Implicit in ‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’ is the assumption that the pre-modern music of Palestrina's day required no criticism or analysis to operate as effectively and simply as it did. Sentimental music, on the other hand, was quite different.
To a subscriber to the period's music journals, Hoffmann's proprietary ‘mysterious magic’ was not as esoteric as he suggests. Some of his contemporaries outlined theories about the structure of modern music that confronted fundamental difficulties broached by the discourse of musical modernity. They extended Schiller and Schlegel's conception of form to musical works, taking up the question of what exactly about a musical totality animated all of its fragments. The answer came on two levels: globally, critics idealized musical form as a variegated collection of fragments; locally, they catalogued structural components that seemed to bind the work from section to section.
While contending with the early German romantic model of sentimental unity, critics responded to prevailing conceptions of musical form. An important predecessor was the notion of the Hauptsatz, a deeply hierarchical model requiring that a work's introductory passage regulate the structural and expressive content of its remainder.Footnote 66 Critics most taken by sentimental unity challenged such a hierarchy, focusing instead on how sections began to exert their own independence and how they caused the splintering of the work. Michaelis writes, ‘Form, however, relies on that array and position of parts small and large, how they correspond to each other, hoist and carry each other, as it were, place each other in light, shade and contrast, and work towards the principal impression that gives the totality its aesthetic character.’ (‘Die Form aber beruht auf derjenigen Anordnung und Stellung der Theile im Kleinen und Grossen, wodurch sie einander entsprechen, einander gleichsam heben und tragen, in Licht, Schatten und Contrast setzen, und auf den Haupteindruck hinwirken, der dem Ganzen seinen ästhetischen Charakter gibt.’) While this embodies the Schlegelian ideal of a non-hierarchical group of fragments connected by some ethereal force, Michaelis soon betrays that the earlier models could not be shaken completely:
Wie sind die grössern und kleinern Theile der Musik geordnet und zum Ganzen verbunden, oder wie entwickelt sich Alles aus einander? Stehen die Theile im richtigen, natürlichen Verhältniss und im innigen Zusammenhange, so dass das Wesentliche klar und schön hervortritt? In welchem Verhältniss steht der Hauptgegenstand zum Nebenwerk, das Thema und der Hauptsatz zu den Neben- und Zwischensätzen? Ist jener durch gehäufte Zierrathen oder weite Abschweifungen verdunkelt? Sind die Episoden zu lang, die Contraste zu häufig und zu grell? Ist der Hauptgedanke ohne Weitschweifigkeit gehörig entwickelt, oder klar und bündig ausgeführt? Oder trifft man gar keinen Hauptgedanken an, indem Alles ohne Haltung bunt durch einander läuft?Footnote 67
How are the larger and smaller parts of music organized and related to the totality, or how does everything diverge? Do the parts stand in an appropriate, natural relationship and in intimate coherence so that the essentials emerge clearly and beautifully? In what relationship is the main subject matter with the supporting material, the theme and main section to the subsidiary and transitional sections? Is it clouded by heaps of embellishments or broad digressions? Are the episodes too long, the contrasts too frequent and garish? Is the main idea properly developed without being long-winded, or accomplished clearly and succinctly? Or does one not even find any main idea, with everything being scattered colourfully without control?
For Michaelis, each fragment – by virtue of being a fragment – has a unique profile: it might contribute to the main subject matter, serve as a transition or even explore other matters altogether different from the main subject matter. His concern about overly conspicuous episodes echoes Schiller, as such a section could infringe on the freedom of surrounding sections. Rather than embrace Jean Paul's ‘annihilating humour’, Michaelis retains the hierarchical ‘Hauptsatz’, ‘Nebensatz’ and ‘Zwischensatz’ concepts, even as he calls for each individual part to explore its own pursuits. The Schlegelian ideal was elusive.
Critics readily adopted the term ‘character’ to address sentimental unity in abstraction. As theorized by Christian Gottfried Körner, the recipient of Schiller's Kallias-briefe, it was a term that encompassed a work's multifaceted disposition.Footnote 68 In his essay ‘Über Charakterdarstellung in der Musik’ (On the Representation of Character in Music), Körner sought to defend music as a fine art in the wake of Kant's and Schiller's doubts.Footnote 69 He articulates how a modern musical work transcends a mere titillation of the senses by incorporating human freedom to form a coherent, self-sufficient whole. The work required a careful balance, though, threatening its aesthetic claim from two opposite extremes: if it was too simple, it became dull, and if it was too chaotic, it risked incoherence. A compelling work actually contained a flux of changing states, and Körner coins the concept of ‘character’ to suggest their overarching relation.Footnote 70 To say that a musical work had a character was to claim that the work cohered in spite its fragmented appearance.
Character was extraordinarily tricky to locate. Körner claims, ‘Character cannot be perceived directly, either in the real world or in any work of art. Rather, we can only deduce it from that which is contained in the features of individual conditions. It must be asked then, whether, in the series of conditions that music represents, sufficient material is present to form a definite presentation of a character.’ (‘Was wir Charakter nennen, können wir überhaupt weder in der wirklichen Welt, noch in irgend einem Kunstwerke unmittelbar wahrnehmen, sondern nur aus demjenigen folgern, was in den Merkmalen einzelner Zustände enthalten ist. Es fragt sich also nur, ob auch in einer solchen Reihe von Zuständen, wie sie durch Musik dargestellt wird, Stoff genug vorhanden sei, um daraus die bestimmte Vorstellung eines Charakters zu bilden.’)Footnote 71 As Matthew Pritchard has argued, ‘character’ is thoroughly idealist, an abstract feature unable to be located in the specifics of musical material.Footnote 72 Its conceptualization nonetheless affected how critics viewed the musical material. Character rested upon a compelling series of sections – each its own ‘individual condition’ – to create a totality and, through analysis, critics attempted to relate the local assemblage of disparate elements to a central idea. In 1799, in the inaugural volume of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Friedrich Fleischmann extends character's binding power to the most minor of musical features: ‘One should easily understand that not only must the key comply with the character of the movement, as well as the metre, the tempo, the rhythms, but also the form of the melody, and the embellishments of the principal voices.’ (‘Es ist sofort ohne Schwierigkeit einzusehen, dass sich nach dem Charakter des Satzes nicht nur die Tonart desselben, die Taktart, das Tempo, der Rhythmus, sondern auch die Formen der Melodien, so wie Coloraturen der Prinzipalstimmen richten müssen.’)Footnote 73 A work's singular character regulated its form and content, and was incrementally disclosed through them.
To investigate a work's sentimental unity on the local level, critics traced the main melodic idea and its subsequent variants, or what is now termed ‘motivic development’. The motive rescued the work from utter chaos, saturating it with character. Wendt proposes that a musical composition ‘should suggest a dominant idea and character during the temporal sequences of its development. This occurs, first, when these sequences develop one from another out of necessity rather than wilfulness, and second, when all the various sequences developed by the art work are governed by a fundamental idea.’ (‘in den Zeitreihen seiner Entwickelung auf einen herrschenden Gedanken und Charakter immer hindeute. Dieses geschieht erstens, wenn diese Reihen mit Nothwendigkeit, ohne Willkühr sich eine aus der andern entwickelt, zweytens, wenn alle verschiedene Reihen, in denen sich das Kunstwerk entwickelt, von einem Grundgedanken beherrscht werden.’)Footnote 74 This technique fortified the work with ‘comprehensible connectedness and coherence’ (‘überschauliche Verbindung und Zusammenhang’), while also supporting a variegated modern form.Footnote 75
The symphony once again exemplified the modern style by showcasing the binding power of motivic development. With the technique at hand, a composer could incorporate the genre's dizzying array of musical features while maintaining a semblance of cohesion. According to Ernst Ludwig Gerber, the modern symphony owed its very success to the motive:
Meister in ihren Symphonien oft aus einer einzigen Phrase von zwey bis vier Takten, durch Zergliederung und Vertheilung unter die verschiedenen Instrumente, nach den Regeln der Harmonie und des Rhythmus, bey der höchsten Mannigfaltigkeit im Moduliren, zwey und mehr Seiten voll schreiben können; wie sie dadurch jene vortreffliche Einheit in ihren Kunstwerken erreichen, welch dem Ganzen, ungeachtet seiner vielfältigen Theile . . . das Ansehen eines Ey's giebt, dessen unendliche, aber durchaus gleichartige Theile, ebenfalls ein unzertrennliches Ganzes bilden.
Masters in their symphonies are wholly able to fill page after page often from a single phrase of two to four measures, through dissection and distribution in various instruments, following the rules of harmony and rhythm and with the highest diversity of modulation. As a result, how they achieve that admirable unity in their masterworks, which the totality regardless of its diverse parts . . . gives the appearance of an egg whose infinite, but thoroughly similar parts, likewise form an inseparable totality.Footnote 76
The egg metaphor conveys the idealized fulfilment of sentimental unity: motives grouped fragments into a singular totality, as if each section grew or ‘hatched’ from an original entity. Gerber attributes the rise of the technique to Haydn, whose symphonic style marked a significant departure from prior times. As he notes, motivic development made possible the lengthening of the musical work, serving to break it away from outside influence and convincing the listener of its status as a self-contained system.
Motives nonetheless required careful use of repetition and alteration in order to maintain the balance between monotony and chaos. Michaelis states as much in an article on repetition and variation: ‘Variation forestalls the monotony, the triviality, in short, that void through which a melody simply becomes worn out or a mere street tune.’ (‘Die Variation kommt der Einförmigkeit, der Trivialität, kurz derjenigen Leere zuvor, durch welche eine Melodie leicht, wie man sagt, abgedroschen, abgenutzt oder zum Gassenhauer wird.’)Footnote 77 This idea was not entirely new, as earlier critics had already recognized the need for such musical invention.Footnote 78 What was new is the repudiation of strict hierarchy: a motive's development highlighted the independence of one section from another, with the motive itself disguised. Michaelis states, ‘But if the basic theme, the main melody, appears clothed in a new manner, under a delicate transparent cloak, so to speak, thus the soul of the listener obtains pleasure, in that it can independently look through the veil, finding the known in the unknown, and can see it develop without effort’ (‘Erscheint aber das Grundthema, die Hauptmelodie, auf eine neue Art eingekleidet, gleichsam unter einer zarten durchsichtigen Hülle, so gewinnt die Seele des Zuhörers an Vergnügen, indem sie selbstthätig durch den Schleier hindurchblickt, das Bekannte in dem Unbekannten auffindet, und aus demselben ohne Anstrengung entwickelt’). He claims that the process ‘attractively fus[es] the new with the old without creating a bizarre mixture of heterogeneous figures’ (‘das Neue mit dem Alten reizend verschmolzen zu treffen, ohnen dass jedoch hier eine abentheuerliche Vermischung heterogener Manieren Statt findet’).Footnote 79 Here Michaelis echoes Körner's abstract conception of character by lifting the main theme up from the surface of the work – it animated the musical material and contributed to the work's sentimental unity, while also hovering over the work as a governing idea.
In their pursuit of sentimental unity, critics also scrutinized key relations. The period conception of ‘modulation’ was something more like our ‘tonicization’, as critics generally understood keys and modulations as local entities without any significant underlying prolongation.Footnote 80 While the pre-modern style supported the understated use of modulations and a limited range of keys, the modern style abandoned any regulation of key areas or modulations in a musical work. Friedrich Kanne finds key to be a principal constituent of unity, and while he cautions composers against modulating to close or distant keys with ‘destructive caprice’ (‘mit zerstöhrender Willkühr’), he does not exclude any relations in his discussion of unity. He claims, ‘yet unity does not preclude variety; in fact it precisely requires that for its triumph’ (‘aber Einheit schliesst nicht Mannigfaltigkeit aus, sondern fordert sie gerade zu ihrem Triumphe’).Footnote 81 A composer arranged a work's succession of keys so that each belonged freely, without recourse to rule, while simultaneously supporting the character of the whole.
As critics repudiated a priori key restrictions, they investigated how key relations could be compellingly presented. Kanne contends that the burden fell on modulatory passages to tie a work together: ‘The transition or the connection between two remote keys is now of equally great importance for the unity of music . . . because the relation of beauty and the interesting relationship in which the two keys stand – which is immediately obvious to the eye – is not to be biased beforehand by means of false views or improper principles.’ (‘Der Übergang oder die Verbindung der zwey entfernten Tonarten ist nun von eben so grosser Wichtigkeit für die Einheit der Musik . . . weil das Verhältniss der Schönheit und der interessanten Beziehung, in welcher zwey Tonarten stehen, dem sehr schnell in die Augen springt, der durch falsche Ansichten oder unrichtige Grundsätze nicht vorher befangen ist.’)Footnote 82 Kanne also asserts that the composer should connect two sections with care to effect a compelling arrangement.Footnote 83 Even the commonplace modulation from tonic to dominant required a masterly transition. Modern music no longer supported the convention of the dominant as a normative key area, and so only the work itself could authorize the dominant as well as its preparatory modulation. Hoffmann implies this when he states, ‘It is as though a hidden, sympathetic bond often connected the most remotely separated keys, and as though under certain circumstances an insuperable idiosyncrasy separated even the most closely related keys. The most common and most frequent modulation of all, that from the tonic to the dominant, or vice versa, can seem at times unexpected and unusual, even unpleasant and unbearable.’ (‘Es ist, als ob ein geheimes, sympathetisches Band oft manche entfernt liegende Tonarten verbände und ob unter gewissen Umständen eine unbezwingbare Idiosynkrasie selbst die nächstverwandten Tonarten trenne. Die gewöhnlichste, häufigste Modulation, nämlich aus der Tonika in die Dominante und umgekehrt, erscheint zuweilen unerwartet und fremdartig, oft dagegen widrig und unausstehlich.’)Footnote 84 Key areas essentially became fragments, whose juxtapositions were regulated not by rule but rather by the work itself.
HOFFMANN'S SENTIMENTAL BEETHOVEN
Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is undeniably the most famous text of early German musical romanticism.Footnote 85 Alongside ‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’, Hoffmann's introductory praise for the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart and especially Beethoven constitutes a significant part of the project to secure the meaning of modern music. Yet the majority of the review presents a detailed analysis of the symphony, where Hoffmann grounds the work's ethereal ‘purple shimmer of romanticism’ in concrete terms.Footnote 86 According to Holly Watkins, Hoffmann developed a metaphor of ‘musical depth’ to aid his analytical endeavour, which ‘preserves the impenetrable mystery of the genius's creations while simultaneously attesting to their rational construction, however disjunct they may appear on the surface’.Footnote 87 Beethoven's work was seemingly opaque yet held an underlying logic, that Schlegelian spiritual central point which required elucidation. To plumb the work's ‘depths’, Hoffmann utilized an analytical toolkit supplied by his critic-colleagues.
Hoffmann's agenda was to demonstrate sentimental unity, as illustrated by the first few paragraphs of his discussion of the opening movement. He first notes the obvious: the work begins with the ‘Hauptgedanke’, a motive ‘which subsequently appears again and again in a variety of forms’ (‘in der Folge, mannigfach gestaltet, immer wieder durchblickt’). Much like Michaelis, Hoffmann cannot shake the hierarchical model of the Hauptsatz or the motivic development that it precipitates. He includes a musical example of the first group through to the grand pause at bar 21, boldly claiming that this passage ‘determines the character of the whole piece’ (‘entscheidet den Charakter des ganzen Stücks’), essentially calling it the Hauptsatz.Footnote 88 Following a fermata there is a new fragment – the beginning of the transition – which incorporates the main motive. The second theme enters which, while uniquely lyrical, maintains the work's character. Hoffmann dutifully traces the main motive as he divides the exposition into discrete parts, determining each of their functions within the totality.
Hoffmann considers the remainder of the movement bit by bit as well, referring to each section's key areas and motivic content. In line with Fleischmann and Gerber, he concludes that the motive exhibits a formidable binding power:
Es gibt keinen einfacheren Gedanken, als den, welchen der Meister dem ganzen Allegro zum Grunde legte und mit Bewunderung wird man gewahr, wie er alle Nebengedanken, alle Zwischensätze, durch rhythmischen Verhalt jenem einfachen Thema so anzureihen wusste, dass sie nur dazu dienten, den Charakter des Ganzen, den jenes Thema nur andeuten konnte, immer mehr und mehr zu entfalten.
There is no simpler idea than that on which Beethoven has based his entire Allegro, and with admiration one becomes aware of how he was able to relate all the secondary ideas and episodes through the rhythmic content of this simple theme, so that they only serve to reveal facets of the character of the totality ever gradually, which the theme itself could only suggest.Footnote 89
Yet here Hoffmann tempers his grand claim about the regulative capacity of the opening bars. While the first group of the exposition determined the character of the whole, it could not dictate how the character was to be revealed – it could not undercut the freedom of the other sections. Each fragment made an individual contribution to the character, collectively forming the whole.
While Hoffmann takes significant pains to show that the work has a singular character, he nevertheless attempts to give each section some leeway. The finale offers an illuminating example: the joyful second theme at bar 44 initially strikes him as foreign. Robin Wallace notes that Hoffmann brought attention to this moment to appreciate the movement's impetuosity.Footnote 90 But Hoffmann also sees this as a knot to be untied, subsequently recognizing that this curious theme gets significantly worked out in the development, complete with new harmonic and contrapuntal features. Its relation to the whole is incrementally revealed, offering some retroactive context for its earlier foreignness: ‘the character already apparent in its original guise fully emerges’ (‘der Charakter, der sich schon in seiner ursprünglichen Gestalt aussprach, ganz entwickelt’).Footnote 91 Skirting this difficulty, he asserts that the work as a whole maintained a unity of one feeling, evinced by its motivic content and orchestration.Footnote 92
Perhaps Hoffmann realized that he was papering over the cracks of the finale, and so at the close he claims that the work has a ‘deeper relationship’ (‘tiefere Verwandtschaft’) that analysis cannot account for, one that ‘often speaks only from heart to heart’ (‘spricht oft nur aus dem Geiste zum Geiste’).Footnote 93 His pursuit of sentimental unity finishes with the realization that the work's unity cannot be fully explicated. No matter how much analysis can be done – how many keys, modulations, motives and orchestral effects elucidate the totality of the tortuous symphonic world – some aspect of the work's logic remains beyond the listener's comprehension.
Here Hoffmann inserts a sentimental gap between analysis and the critic, revealing analysis itself to be a fragmentary pursuit and throwing into question the efficacy of the critic's ‘mysterious magic’. While the contributors to the elegiac discourse of musical modernity sought to ground music in the unstable present through criticism, they could not wholly endorse a critical method. A bleak conclusion emerges from Hoffmann's review, particularly once taken with the arguments established in ‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’. Despite even the best criticism, the ‘new art’ of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven would remain elusive and ambiguous. While Beethoven's music demanded criticism to elucidate its inner structure, it also served to disrupt modern life in a fit of ineffable, otherworldly force. Such ambitions were gloriously foreign to Palestrina.
