Two hundred years have passed since the premiere of Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the publication of Hegel's Phenomenology, the end of Wordsworth's Golden Decade, and the beginning of Hölderlin's madness, yet their influence is everywhere. Beethoven's works are performed, recorded, and downloaded more often than any composer except for perhaps Mozart. Hegel's works are selling well, if not briskly, in any bookstore of reasonable size; his influence among intellectuals in many fields rivals that of Aristotle and Machiavelli. Wordsworth is an industry, with new editions of his poetry, along with biographies and critical works, coming out at a steady rate. Even Hölderlin, who languished in obscurity for nearly a century, has many editions and translations going into multiple printings; his major critics, Heidegger, Szondi, Adorno, Henrich, and de Man, have themselves become objects of study. These four figures –, Hölderlin, Hegel, Wordsworth, and Beethoven – occupy a greater place in the cultural imagination than ever, for reasons that have nothing to do with profit motives, official approval, or nostalgia. They remain important simply because their works address issues of identity, freedom, and beauty that still matter.

Still, I feel obligated to make a brief case for their continued relevance that goes beyond the mere observation that so many people still find them important – too many intelligent writers have argued that their popularity is not necessarily the direct result of genuine value and that their works are merely artifacts of a more naïve era.

No other philosophical concept so clearly defines the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of Romanticism as self-consciousness, the process by which the self becomes aware of its status as a thinking, knowing entity, and the precondition, according to the Idealists and Romantics, for all knowledge. In a limited sense, the concept goes much farther back into the history of philosophy, to Plato or even Parmenides, and one could even make a case for the presence of poetic or musical self-consciousness in the Homeric epics. However, by the seventeenth century, Descartes appeared to have made the definitive statement about self-consciousness with the cogito, the well-known “I think therefore I am” argument of the Meditations on First Philosophy. Enlightenment philosophical investigations after Descartes generally turned outward, toward the systematic acquisition and organization of all possible knowledge about the world, following Newton's and Leibniz's mathematical models of understanding, the alphabetical tendencies of Voltaire, Diderot, and the Philosophes, or the British empiricists’ distrust of metaphysics. Immanuel Kant, at the time an obscure professor at the University of Königsberg, returned to the problem with the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 by focusing his considerable analytic power on knowledge itself and separating it into two central categories: a priori knowledge, that which is known prior to experience, and a posteriori knowledge, that which is known as a result of experience.

Mendelssohn's low opinion of talk about music, a common sentiment among composers, musicians, and music lovers, did not prevent him from continuing to engage in it. He not only composed many brilliant works, and performed many more, he also attended Hegel's lectures on aesthetics and read widely on music, art, and literature. He was a close friend of Adolf Bernhard Marx, the editor of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, a leading journal of music reviews and essays on music, and as both an active composer and a member of Berlin society, Mendelssohn had an excellent working knowledge of current debates in the philosophy of music. People in early-nineteenth-century Europe did, indeed, talk about music a lot, and the same issue came up repeatedly: does all this talk really have anything to do with the actual composition, performance, and experience of music?

I believe that it does. Listeners from E. T. A. Hoffmann to the present have frequently reported the singular affective power of Beethoven's music and attributed some form of self-consciousness to it as well, but describing the relationship between this perceived content and Beethoven's compositional technique runs directly counter to the persistent view, expressed by Mendelssohn, Schiller, Hegel, Wordsworth, and many others, that music represents precisely the antidiscursive element contained in all art forms: the aesthetic.

In the early Idealist accounts of self-consciousness explored in the previous chapter, the subject generally recognizes its existence by defining itself against various kinds of object. However, theoretical explanations of subjectivity do not themselves generate self-conscious entities; the actual, practical experience of the self remains elusive. In Kant's version of subjectivity, self-consciousness emerges from intellectual intuition, a prereflective sense of the self's existence as the subject of different experiences over time; the construction of the subject is therefore a synthetic act, realized through transcendental deduction. However, this formulation contains a surprisingly unmotivated version of the self, with no clear account of its origin.

In Fichte's answer to this dilemma, the self posits itself through its opposition to a material object, a nonself he calls the Nicht-ich, and becomes self-conscious by differentiating the Ich from the Nicht-ich and declaring “I am I.” Still, Fichte's explanation of self-consciousness relies on a potentially solipsistic moment and does not sufficiently address the ultimate cause of the process.

In March of 1830, the year before his death, G. W. F. Hegel, by then the rector of the University of Berlin and a celebrated philosopher, met Princess Marianne of Hesse-Homburg, the wife of the crown prince of Prussia. The princess was the daughter of the Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg, for whom Hölderlin had written “Patmos.” In her diary, Princess Marianne records that she asked Hegel about Isaac von Sinclair, a friend to both Hegel and Hölderlin from their Tübingen days, and received a curious response: “At that point, he [Hegel] began to speak of Hölderlin, whom the world has forgotten…. A whole lost past went through me.” The Tübinger Freunde had long dispersed and Hegel had essentially given up on Hölderlin as hopelessly mad in 1803 when Schelling wrote to him about their friend's worsening condition. Suddenly, the mention of a friend's name brought Hölderlin to Hegel's mind, along with the plans they had made long ago in Jena, Frankfurt, and Homburg. The “lost past” mentioned by Princess Marianne refers to the time immediately after the French Revolution that had raised fleeting hopes for reform before Napoleon ravaged Europe and released the forces that would control European politics for the rest of the nineteenth century. It also refers to the period in Hegel's life when a project like the one described in the Systemprogramm fragment seemed worth considering and even possible.

Hegel's distinction between the sensuous and the spiritual apprehension of art, like many of his ideas, continues to cast a shadow on literary criticism. His dismissal of “a speech, for example” as something other than art (despite the possibility that a speech might make occasional use of “sensuous ideas and feelings”) complicates the status of poetry by requiring it, as a true art form, to exist at once a material object and also as intentional, communicative discourse. As the previous chapter explained at some length, Hegel also points out that this dual existence in both the sensuous and spiritual realms is precisely what constitutes an object as art, separating artistic from natural beauty.

These lines, although written by a twentieth-century American, nevertheless provide an eloquent summary of what I intend to examine in European poetry, philosophy, and music between 1798 and 1830. Although many critics have studied vision and the visionary in Romantic poetry, relatively few have confronted the related issues of sound, voice, and music, and even fewer have looked into corresponding moments in musical aesthetics and composition. I attempt to answer several questions about these concepts and practices in all three fields and relate these answers to each other. How does musical sound become the articulate voice of the self? How does natural sound become music? How can music represent self-consciousness? I argue that Hölderlin and Wordsworth, despite their obvious differences, follow a similar path of self-constitution through a musical conception of poetic sound. Furthermore, I maintain that Hegel and Beethoven, although working in radically different fields, nevertheless establish music and self-consciousness as mutually positing, reciprocal dialectical structures. In other words, at the core of early Romanticism lies a structure – the dialectic of Idealist self-consciousness – and a metaphor – the self-sustaining aesthetic of absolute music – that mirror and support each other, often in ways difficult to discover.