Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Donelan J. H PDF
Donelan J. H PDF
viii
P1: KAE
9780521887618pre CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:49
P O E T RY A N D T H E RO M A N T I C
MUSICAL AESTHETIC
i
P1: KAE
9780521887618pre CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:49
ii
P1: KAE
9780521887618pre CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:49
P O E T RY A N D T H E
RO M A N T I C M U S I C A L
AESTHETIC
JAMES H. DONELAN
University of California, Santa Barbara
iii
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
P1: KAE
9780521887618pre CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:49
Contents
v
P1: KAE
9780521887618pre CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:49
vi Contents
Textual Silence: The Blind Beggar 126
Conclusion: On the Power of Sound and The Prelude 130
Notes 179
Bibliography 205
Index 213
P1: KAE
9780521887618pre CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:49
vii
P1: KAE
9780521887618pre CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:49
viii
P1: KAE
9780521887618pre CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:49
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of the advice, assistance, and goodwill of many peo-
ple over the course of twenty-three years. It began as an independent study
project I undertook as an undergraduate at Yale University with Geoffrey
Hartman; it became my doctoral dissertation at the same institution, under
the wise and patient guidance of Cyrus Hamlin, the single person who has
had the longest and most important influence on the project. John Hol-
lander gave me a great deal of good advice, as did Leon Plantinga, Harold
Bloom, Andrzej Warminski, J. Hillis Miller, Heinrich von Staden and many
other members of the Departments of Comparative Literature, English,
German, and Music at Yale University, where I studied and worked for fif-
teen years. Manfred Frank at the University of Tubingen was also extremely
helpful and patient while I was there on a fellowship from the Deutsche
Akademishe Austausch Dienst, an extraordinarily benevolent organization
to which I am extremely grateful. Haun Saussy has been a good friend and
patient listener since we began graduate school together.
During my brief stay at the University of California at Berkeley, Lydia
Goehr and Joseph Kerman gave me the crucial encouragement and advice
that helped me turn the dissertation into a book. Here at UC Santa Barbara,
I have had the assistance of many generous and kind colleagues, including
Lee Rothfarb (who taught me music theory when I was a freshman in
college), William Warner, Alan Liu, Bob Erickson, Simon Williams, and the
members of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music. Luke Ma
provided essential technical assistance in the preparation of the manuscript.
Cody Franchettis efforts on behalf of this project rank as one of the
most extraordinary demonstrations of generosity, intelligence, and idealism
I have ever encountered, and I am grateful for his help and friendship in ways
I cannot adequately express. He found a copy of my dissertation on a street
in New York City and spent weeks finding me, a total stranger, in California,
to tell me how important he thought it was and that it deserved publication.
Over the next few years, he worked on the manuscript constantly, suggesting
ix
P1: KAE
9780521887618pre CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:49
x Acknowledgments
sources, editing it for clarity and correctness, and lending his considerable
musical and linguistic expertise to the project. Many of its finest moments
are the direct result of his suggestions, and I cannot imagine how I would
have finished it without his help.
Linda Peterson at Yale and Muriel Zimmerman at UC Santa Barbara have
given me advice and employment when I needed both most. Steven Scher of
Dartmouth College invited me to an National Endowment of Humanities
Summer Seminar on music and literature that enlightened and energized
me. My friends and colleagues in the UC Santa Barbara Writing Program,
especially Judy Kirscht, Patrick McHugh, Craig Cotich, John Ramsey, Nick
Tingle, Chris Dean, and Karen Lunsford, have all been supportive and
encouraging. Victoria Cooper, my editor at Cambridge University Press,
has been helpful and encouraging throughout the publication process.
My brother Charles and I have always considered our scholarly efforts a
kind of joint project, and I see no reason stop believing that now. My parents
helped me with everything from the beginning. My wife, Martha, and my
children, Jed and Emily, are the source of my energy and inspiration, and
this book is dedicated to them.
P1: KAE
9780521887618pre CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:49
chapter 1
The supreme principle for the possibility of all intuition in reference to understand-
ing is that everything manifold in intuition is subject to conditions of the original
synthetic unity of apperception. . . . They are subject to [this] principle insofar as
they must be capable of being combined in one consciousness. For without that
combination, nothing can be thought or cognized through such presentations,
because the given presentations do then not have in common the act of appercep-
tion, I think, and thus would not be collated in one self-consciousness.4
But a feeling of pleasure (or displeasure) and of satisfaction can be combined with a
perception, which accompanies the representation of the object and serves in place
of its predicate; thus, an aesthetic judgment, which is not a cognitive judgment,
can originate. Such a judgment, if it is not a mere judgment of feeling but a formal
judgment of reflection, in which everyone senses this satisfaction to be necessary,
must have an a priori principle as its basis, which in any case may be a merely
subjective principle (if an objective principle is impossible for judgments of this
kind), but also as such requires a deduction, so that we may understand how an
aesthetic judgment could make a claim of necessity.9
At the center of this difficult passage lies the heart of Kants argument for
a separate faculty of aesthetic judgment: judgments that are both objective
(in the sense of being universally accepted) and subjective (in the sense of
being empirically unprovable) must originate in some faculty between the
necessity of logic and the freedom of the individual. If aesthetic judgments
were entirely objective, their creation would be available to examination by
reason; if they were entirely a matter of individual freedom, they would be
idiosyncratic and completely dependent on individual preferences. Neither
is the case; thus, we possess a separate, a priori faculty of judgment.
Aesthetic judgment occupies a position somewhere between a priori and
a posteriori knowledge, as both the result of experience with the external
world and part of an innate faculty. An encounter with an aesthetic object
does not involve the sheer inventions of the perceivers mind but a presen-
tation of something external to it, the result of an actual experience. On
the other hand, the aesthetic object does not perform any function for the
perceiver other than merely to be perceived; the perceiver does not cate-
gorize it further in terms of function. Because works of fine art do not do
anything except exist as objects of perception, their presentations do not
progress further into analysis by the faculties for qualities unrelated to the
perception already experienced. When looking at a painting, for instance,
we do not think about how much it weighs, whether we can lift it by our-
selves, whether it will fit on the wall over the couch, and so on as part of
our aesthetic contemplation of the painting examining it for practical
purposes, or even for physical characteristics, such as weight or dimension,
unrelated to its appearance as a painting remains superfluous to its role as
an aesthetic object. As art, we judge the painting in terms of its beauty, and
nothing else.
P1: KAE
9780521887618c01 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:53
Aesthetic objects are not in and of themselves different from objects of cognition;
the aesthetic domain contains no object that cannot be shared, as material, with the
understanding or the reason. Rather, aesthetic objects are constituted not merely
by a shift from seeing them in terms of properties to seeing them in terms of formal
functions. It is that this formality can appear as an imitation of empirical objects,
the empty or superfluous imitation of the look of function.11
The element of the aesthetic inheres in the object itself only to the degree
that it contains the formal elements of an aesthetic object; whether it counts
as an aesthetic object depends entirely on what faculty the conscious sub-
ject brings to bear on the presentation, or image, it causes. In addition, by
describing imitation as a mere subclass of the overall formal structure of
beauty, Kant encompasses both mimesis (the deliberate imitation of nature
in art) and natural beauty (the unintentional imitation of art in nature)
without compromising his overall position. This formalist conception of
art thereby releases the aesthetic object from its mimetic function the
object does not necessarily imitate anything but instead fulfills a set of
formal criteria for beauty. By moving away from mimesis and toward for-
malism, Kant can include both the beautiful, the property of objects that
provide satisfaction without fulfilling a specific purpose, and the sublime,
the property of objects that overwhelm the senses or the understanding in
his system, because the experience of the aesthetic has been relieved of the
burden of comprehending the object as well.
This broad, formalist conception of the aesthetic translates into the prac-
tice of individual art forms with some difficulty. For the visual arts, a
renewed focus on the experience of vision rather than the reality of appear-
ance becomes possible, as many critics have noted. However, what Kant
himself has to say about music reveals surprisingly little of importance and
is somewhat disappointing. Kants problem with music lies in the over-
whelmingly visual orientation of his idea of the aesthetic object. To cite
P1: KAE
9780521887618c01 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:53
Kant, for reasons that neither Kivy nor I can adequately explain, chose
instead to maintain a theory of music more consistent with past theories
than with his own innovations in aesthetics. Ignorance of the workings
of music may have played a role, but in my judgment, the limitations of
human understanding and experience, even for someone of Kants enor-
mous intellect, provide as plausible an explanation as we are likely to find.
Nevertheless, different versions of a better-informed and more consistent
aesthetics of music based on Kants overall aesthetic program and rooted
in formalism would emerge in the next few years, as Lippmann implies in
the earlier citation. Until the late Enlightenment, treatises on music theory
generally followed either extremely practical or nearly theological lines of
reasoning, consisting of either technical information about composition
for practicing composers or vague ideas of correspondence between music,
numerology, emotion, and the harmony of the spheres. With Kant, the
formalist conception of aesthetics in general provided both philosophers
P1: KAE
9780521887618c01 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:53
Freedom, for Schiller, begins with the freedom of the imagination (Einbil-
dung), the internal capacity of humans to represent things to themselves
without reference to the external world. As concrete representations of the
imagination, artworks set the mind free and as such are reflections of the
mind rather than imitations of anything external to it. By making aesthetics
prior to practical reason, Schiller essentially reverses the order of the sec-
ond and third critiques, creating a concept of moral choice dependent on
freedom (as Kant does in the second critique) but accessible only through
artistic beauty, stating explicitly that it is only through Beauty that man
makes his way to Freedom.25 Schiller is careful to distinguish this broader
concept of the imagination, Einbildung, from Vorstellung, because of its ety-
mological relation to Bildung, the development of character made possible
by this program of aesthetic education.26
Schillers declaration of beauty as the ultimate principle also strength-
ens the formalist claims of Kants third critique considerably and enables
Schiller to develop his own theories of beauty even further. Abandoning
mimetic theories altogether, Schiller develops the tripartite concept of the
Spieltrieb, or play drive, which is the combination of the Formtrieb, or form
drive, and the Stofftrieb, or material drive.27 Beauty, therefore, embodies
the freedom of play in the formal configuration of actual material and pro-
vides aesthetic satisfaction through the resolution of two opposing forces:
material reality and formal necessity.
The balance between the material and the formal varies with the par-
ticular material of each individual art, thereby creating a hierarchy among
them; Schiller lists the arts according to the level on which each engages its
formal and material elements. In contrast to Kants view of the individual
arts, music holds an especially honored position here:
Music, at its most sublime, must become sheer form and affect us with the serene
power of antiquity. The plastic arts, at their most perfect, must become music and
move us by the immediacy of their sensuous presence. Poetry, when most fully
developed, must grip us powerfully as music does, but at the same time, like the
plastic arts, surround us with serene clarity. This, precisely, is the mark of perfect
style in each and every art: that it is able to remove the specific limitations of the art
in question without thereby destroying its specific qualities and through a wise use
of its individual peculiarities, is able to confer upon it a more general character.28
P1: KAE
9780521887618c01 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:53
How can it be posited without doubt, that it [intellectual intuition] is not founded
on a merely subjective deception, if there is no general and universally acknowl-
edged objectivity of that intuition? This generally acknowledged and undeniable
P1: KAE
9780521887618c01 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:53
For this reason, art is the organon of Schellings system, its unifying
principle, as it is for Schiller, who claims that art heals the fracture between
the opposing impulses of human nature. Art unites the purely subjective
and metaphysical with the purely natural and physical and renders it in
concrete material. Intellectual intuition and aesthetic intuition both depend
on each other and mirror each other. We need aesthetic intuition to know
that intellectual intuition adheres to the description Schelling gives it, and
we need intellectual intuition to understand art as art.
The connection between aesthetics and self-consciousness becomes even
clearer in Schellings lectures on art, presented publicly in 1802 and 1803,
then repeated in 1804 and 1805 at Jena, but only published in their entirety in
1859, five years after Schellings death. The overall theory of art explicated
in the Philosophie der Kunst generally agrees with that of the System des
transzendentalen Idealismus but contains far more detail about the individual
arts. In particular, music plays an extraordinarily important role with regard
to his theory of self-consciousness:
The necessary form of music is succession, for time is regarded as the general form
of the imagination of the infinite in the finite, in so far as it is abstracted from the
real. The principle of time in the subject is self-consciousness, which is precisely
the imagination of the unity of consciousness into multiplicity in the ideal. From
this we can grasp the close relationship of the sense of hearing in general, and of
music and speech in particular, with self-consciousness. We can also understand
provisionally, until we have indicated a still higher meaning, the arithmetic side of
music.37
The subject in this case is not an already existing consciousness that attempts
to observe or contemplate itself; it constitutes itself from the beginning as
an absolutely free, self-conscious being through an act of the imagination,
thereby solving Kants dilemma by reversing the order of conceptual events.
Self-consciousness does not come from the act of an already created subject;
it is inherent in the idea of the subject itself, which posits itself purely
P1: KAE
9780521887618c01 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:53
That the idea of beauty should be taken in its higher, platonic sense
makes the unambiguous point that the author (or authors) of the docu-
ment recognizes the extent to which it embraces pure Idealism, where the
understanding of the external world depends as much on the conceptual
structure with which the subject perceives it as on the actual world itself.
The valorization of the aesthetic judgment of beauty as the highest act
of reason does not merely mean that art is a superior mode of discourse
to philosophy, but that the intuition of self-consciousness is actually based
on the free choice of beauty (echoing, and in a sense, completing Schillers
project in the Aesthetic Education43 ). We organize our perceptions and our
conclusions about everything, from pure logic to practical ethics, because
we choose to create our idea of the world according to an ideal. Because this
ideal precedes all other aspects of judgment, it can only be chosen for aes-
thetic reasons. Consequently, the philosopher must possess as much ability
to judge the beautiful as the poet, because beauty, alone among all the rea-
sons a philosopher can choose to articulate one system over another (such
as truth and goodness, for example), can encompass these other qualities
as the results of an already postulated aesthetic choice.
The Systemprogramm fragment, more even than Schellings later Philoso-
phie der Kunst, breaks new ground in both the exploration of subjectivity
and aesthetics. By making the self-positing act of self-consciousness not
merely parallel to aesthetic intuition but identical to it, the document has
potentially moved the concept of self-consciousness from the discourse
of metaphysics and placed it entirely within aesthetics, leaving open the
possibility that art could better express, demonstrate, or manifest the con-
cept than philosophy. This fragment therefore represents the beginning
of philosophical investigations in self-consciousness as aesthetic investi-
gations. Andrew Bowie, whose contribution to the understanding of the
P1: KAE
9780521887618c01 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:53
Because the aesthetic product still remains, qua created object, in the realm of
intuition, it is able to point to why the world of the senses is not radically separate
from the intelligible world. What makes the work a work of art which gives aes-
thetic pleasure depends upon our free judgment, which is independent of interest.
Without the object, though, we would have no real access to our freedom. In the
terms of the SP [Systemprogramm] we have this access via the work of art, which
gives us a sensuous image of freedom.44
This idea of art is consistent with Kantian aesthetics in which the work of
art arouses pleasure without interest, yet goes far beyond it. The disinter-
ested apprehension of beauty is the only means of uniting our perceptions
with the conceptual framework required to make it intelligible. The System-
programm fragment solves the problem of Kantian synthesis by connecting
a priori and a posteriori knowledge through an intuitive aesthetic sense,
which provides the essential mental framework to make the external world
correspond to the internal workings of the mind, and vice versa. In a sense,
the Systemprogramm fragment constitutes both a philosophical and a liter-
ary document, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have observed, because it
claims the absolute to be literary, that is, Dichtkunst or the art of poetry,
yet is not itself a work of poetry.45 By positing the aesthetic discourse of
poetry as the basis for philosophy, the author of the fragment has made the
discourse of philosophy itself part of poetry.
Having been one of the foremost prodigies in the history of music, Mozart
knew what it was like to be adored by kings and queens and that he was
a better musician and composer than anyone in the world. Salzburg was
a dull outpost; Vienna was the center of the musical world, a cosmopoli-
tan city with a steady flow of composers, musicians, and patrons from all
parts of Europe, and a wealthy, enlightened, music-loving emperor, Josef II.
P1: KAE
9780521887618c01 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:53
the opera will not be one of the shortest to have been exhibited in our theatre for
which we hope sufficient of excuses the variety of threads from which is woven the
action of this drama, the vastness and size of the same, the multiplicity of musical
pieces which had to be made in order not to keep the actors excessively idle, in order
to reduce the boredom and monotony of the long recitatives, in order to express
on occasion with diverse colour the diverse passions which there stand forth, and
our desire particularly to offer a virtually new kind of spectacle to a public of such
refined taste, and such informed judgment.53
Here, da Ponte reveals that his and Mozarts intention is not merely to create
a better opera than anyone had created before but an entirely different kind
of opera, in which greater dramatic and musical complexity would expand
public taste. He nevertheless also acknowledges the difficulties involved in
managing such a production: singers may not be excessively idle, and
the long recitatives necessary to connect the plot must be tempered with a
variety of more interesting musical forms.
The subversive nature of the opera, as well as the role that the music
itself would play in dramatizing the subversion, reveals itself in the open-
ing scene. As the curtain rises, Figaro counts off the measurements necessary
for fitting a bed in his new room, while Susanna admires how she looks in
the new hat she has made. Mozart shows Figaro and Susanna to be more
than obedient servants; they are hardworking, independent members of
the new bourgeois class of traders, bankers, craftsmen, and merchants who
were gaining power and significance in European society. For Mozart the
Freemason, Figaro and Susanna are precisely the kind of people who should
acquire power and self-confidence. In addition, Figaro is counting, using
P1: KAE
9780521887618c01 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:53
chapter 2
I should forget only her song, only these notes of the soul should never
return in my unending dreams.
The proudly sailing swan remains unknown, when it sits on the bank
slumbering.
Only when she sang could you recognize the loving, silent one, who
so reluctantly made herself understood in words.
Holderlin, Hyperion
Judgment. in the highest and strictest sense is the original separation of object
and subject which are most deeply united in intellectual intuition, that separation
through which alone object and subject become possible, the arche-separation.
In the concept of separation, there lies already the concept of the oppositional
relationship of object and subject to each other, and the necessary presupposition
of a whole, of which object and subject form the parts. I am I is the most suitable
example for this concept of judgment as theoretical separation, for in practical
judgment it opposes the not-I, not itself.6
P1: KAE
9780521887618c02 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:59
Despite the dubious textual evidence Heidegger himself cites in his essays
on Holderlin,20 Holderlins more certain texts support Heideggers overall
claims. Here, Heidegger poses the question of the ontology of the poet in
terms of the poets metaphysical location, where he settles his being, a
place between a series of related oppositional terms and outside of human
society. Holderlins poetry abounds with references to figures who are also
outsiders and mediators, including Christ, Bacchus, and Rousseau. Hei-
degger correctly describes them as Hinausgeworfener, thrown-out ones,
exiles who create their own context and identity in a Zwischenbereich, an
area of between-ness.
As a poet, Holderlin stands between many worlds, but his poetry creates a
particular ontological space. The poem itself is the Zwischenbereich, as Paul
de Mans commentary on Heideggers interpretation of Holderlin makes
clear:
Each poem, or every work seen as a whole, is a particular version of the under-
standing that a poetic consciousness possesses of its own specific and autonomous
intent or, to put it differently, each work asks the question of its own mode of
being, and it is the task of the interpreter not to answer this question but to make
explicit in what manner and with what degree of awareness the question is asked.
The intent of poetic language is certainly not directed toward empirical insight,
nor is it transcendental in the sense that it leads to a closer contact with being in
P1: KAE
9780521887618c02 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:59
The vital distinction between poetry and other modes of discourse espe-
cially philosophy is in the self-awareness of poetic language as poetic
language, its awareness of its own particular being. This statement does
not reflect a mythologized valorization of poetry in general, nor does it
intend to indicate that Holderlins poetry contains some mystical quality;
rather, it simply means that in Holderlins poetry, the poems formal ele-
ments rhythm, meter, trope, modality, diction and so forth and the
indications of its status as poetry in the poems content create a form of
poetic self-consciousness by reflecting on the conditions of the poems exis-
tence. In other words, the philosophical act of saying I am I becomes both
a theoretical and a practical statement when performed in poetic discourse
because the material of poetry is, in fact, language, and a declaration of
a poems existence as poetry has both theoretical and practical results: the
poem gains its own existence as poetic language through poetic language.
Music, too, has a specific aim that of regaining the home tonic. The ears satisfac-
tion increases or diminishes to the extent that the musical progression approaches
or moves away from it. This objective towards which music moves does not, how-
ever, symbolise anything in the visible world. It symbolises the unknown something
which can be imagined as an individual object, as the sum of many objects, or as
the external world in its entirety.26
The word Korner uses for the tonic key, Hauptton, is nearly identical in
meaning to Holderlins Anfangston; the sensation of reaching this goal,
that is, resolving the cadence, both gives the listener pleasure, and provides
music with its formal beauty. In addition, music indicates or symbolizes
(andeuten) an unknown something that can be imagined as an individual
object, a group of objects, or the entire external world. A poetics based
on Korners concept of musical form could therefore resolve the problem
of abstraction by replacing a linguistically based hermeneutic of symbolic
representation with a musically based hermeneutic of formal beauty.
Holderlin therefore changes musical modulation, Tonartwechsel, into
poetic modulation, Wechsel der Tone, a calculated succession of character-
istic poetic modes. The rest of the essay confirms his intention to create
a formal dialectical structure similar to that of music in poetry, in which
P1: KAE
9780521887618c02 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:59
Divine Self-Positing 43
traditional genres epic, tragic, and lyric serve as the counterparts to the
Tone:
Indeed for the epic poem. The tragic poem goes about a key further, the lyric uses
this key as an opposite and returns in this way, in every style, back to its beginning
key or: The epic poem ends with its original opposite, the tragic with the key of
its catastrophe, the lyric with itself, so that the lyric end is a nave-ideal [end], the
tragic is a nave-heroic [end], the epic is an ideal-heroic [end].27
Like classical harmony, the modalities of poetry in this scheme have con-
trasting opposites against which they define themselves and find resolution.
In both musical composition and Holderlins poetic scheme, a work begins
by stating a theme in a certain key, modulates to another key for a contrast-
ing theme, then modulates back to the first key. An intermediate tonal-
ity common to both mediates between contrasting keys, allowing polar
opposites to find resolution. By associating the purely formal structure of
instrumental music with these modalities, Holderlin replaces the triadic
structure of Pindaric ode strophe, antistrophe, epode with a mod-
ern version that can assimilate and synthesize his own style and provide a
connection between formal structure and thematic content.
The poetic modulations Holderlin describes, however briefly, in Wech-
sel der Tone outline precisely the same kind of abstract rules of composi-
tion for poetry that the rules of harmony would for musical composition
the abstract principles which govern particular aesthetic choices and allow
a conceptual scheme to be realized in the work. A concept of musical form
therefore links the abstract principles of poetry to their concrete realization
in poetry. The question remains, however, of the extent to which Holderlin
put this theory into practice.
I believe that the third element of Holderlins project, the body of poetic
works, reveals how poetic theory and practical poetics become the aesthetic
material of poetry. In addition, a letter to a friend describing the mod-
ern poets relation to the tradition of Greek poetry confirms Holderlins
commitment to continuing his project. In a certain sense, the result of
Holderlins efforts brought him far closer than his contemporaries to solv-
ing the problem of self-consciousness that had vexed them for so long.
Here, poets rise above basic material needs, fulfilling a fundamentally dif-
ferent role in the world from that of animals, who know no law but survival,
and from that of human beings, who work on a more civilized level. Poets,
P1: KAE
9780521887618c02 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:59
Divine Self-Positing 45
like priests, have a fundamentally different task: they serve the Highest
and have been entrusted with a sacred mission to sing the praises of the
divine ever newly, yet as part of a tradition.
Curiously, Holderlin chooses to categorize poets as a group and to call
himself one of them implicitly through the pronoun wir (we), rather than
name himself a poet directly; John Jay Baker has correctly observed that
Dichterberuf uses every pronoun except Ich (I), indicating a powerful
urge toward self-negation.30 However, as Guido Schmidlin observes, the
question of creating oneself as a poet cannot be dismissed so easily: Who
calls the poet? Does he call himself or does he have a higher call to do
his work? Holderlin poses this question, in that he writes poetry.31 In
Dichterberuf, the divinely inspired call to write poetry cannot come from
the poet alone, yet the poet himself must respond appropriately not by mere
self-praise but by writing actual poetry, rather than merely posturing.
The poem goes even further, warning against the degeneration of poetry
into a mere craft by distinguishing divinely inspired poets and those whose
skill lies in mere imitation. The difference lies in their relationship with
their Greek predecessors:
Writing poetry well means creating not for material gain but in remem-
brance of Greek song and Eastern prophecy; it requires the poet to receive
inspiration in his own time, even as he remembers the past. The absence
of the gods in these times makes the obligation to remember all the more
acute, as the paradoxical final lines indicate: Und keiner Waffen Brauchts
und keiner / Listen, so lange, bis Gottes Fehl hilft, And needs no weapon
and no wile till / Gods being missed in the end will help him.33 Divine
absence helps him by allowing him to realize his purpose as the represen-
tative of the divine principle the poets vocation would not be nearly so
essential if the divine being were actually present.
P1: KAE
9780521887618c02 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:59
We learn nothing with more difficulty than to use freely that which is national.
And I believe that clarity of representation was originally as natural to us as the
fire from heaven was to the Greeks. They therefore are easily surpassed in beautiful
passion, which you have also taken on yourself, than in Homeric presence of spirit
and the gift of representation.
It sounds paradoxical. But I assert once again, and I submit freely for your
examination and use, that what is actually of ones own nationality will always be
less advantageous in spiritual development. Therefore, the Greeks are less masters
of holy pathos because it was inborn for them, while on the other hand, they have
a greater advantage in the gift of representation from Homer onward, because this
extraordinary person was soulful enough to capture Western Junonian sobriety for
his realm of Apollo and to learn so truly that which was foreign to him.
For us its reversed. For this reason, its also so dangerous to abstract the rules of
art solely and only from Greek splendor.34
This letter has been examined many times and in great detail because it con-
tains two extraordinarily important elements for understanding Holderlin:
a clear, practical poetics and a dialectical examination of the relationship
the poet bears to his Greek predecessors. At first glance, it appears to
be a remarkably straightforward statement of Holderlins compositional
principles; a closer examination reveals a far more ambiguous document.
Fortunately, three of Holderlins greatest critics have given us a series
of insightful readings: Peter Szondi,35 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,36 and
Andrzej Warminski.37 All these readings reveal an inherent problem in the
Greece-Hesperia opposition described in the first letter to Bohlendorff that
closely resembles a difficulty with reflective models of self-consciousness:
the dialectical relation between the self and the other does not yield a
P1: KAE
9780521887618c02 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:59
Divine Self-Positing 47
symmetrical set of binary oppositions, and therefore does not necessarily
reveal the grounds on which it has been posited.
More specifically, das Eigene, that which is ones own, and das Fremde,
that which is foreign, the primary categorical oppositions in this letter,
create what appears at first to be a kind of mirror image, but on closer
examination reveals a difficult instability. Die Klarheit der Darstellung, clar-
ity of representation, is natural to Hesperians; das Feuer von Himmel, the
fire from heaven, is natural to Greeks. These characteristics, our own, are
held inwardly, with little outward demonstration. That which is foreign,
on the other hand, becomes the most visible aspect of each groups art:
the Greeks demonstrate Junonian sobriety, whereas Hesperians demon-
strate holy pathos. These characteristics manifest themselves outwardly
precisely because they do not come easily or naturally to each group what
requires the most effort to master becomes most prominent. In Holderlins
view, Homer, the greatest poet among the Greeks and fiery by nature, pro-
duced great poetry by expressing the cool sobriety foreign to him, whereas
we the Hesperians produce great works by expressing the passion that
Greeks possessed naturally. According to Peter Szondi, Holderlin uses this
scheme to overcome the obligation to imitate Greek models perceived by
Neoclassicists while still learning from them.38 As both Lacoue-Labarthe39
and Warminski40 point out, Szondis reading of the text reflects a funda-
mentally Hegelian bias: the Hesperian poetic self struggles for recognition
from its Greek other in much the same way that the master and slave struggle
in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. Warminski, however, sees ways in which
Holderlins dialectical scheme does not correspond precisely to Hegels:
it is clear that a dialectical mediation of that which is our own and that which
is foreign, das Eigene and das Fremde in short, a representation of das Eigene as
das Fremde (our own origin as a foreign one) is possible only as long as we
do not read these words in Holderlins sense but transform them, translate them,
as it were, into a Hegelian sense: that is, in order for us to recognize our origin,
das Eigene, we must translate Holderlins das Fremde into Hegelian das Fremde, a
foreignness that is not our own (but is natural, their own, for the Greeks), into a
foreignness that belongs to us, in short, we must translate that which is radically
foreign into that which is foreign for us (i.e., not really foreign but our own das
Fremde into das Eigene).41
In other words, what can be known of the Greeks can only be understood
by making the das Eigene and das Fremde dialectic serve as a determinate
negation, an opposition with a specific understanding already inherent
in the terms of the opposition, when the opposition itself from our
position relative to the Greeks tells us very little, if anything at all. The
P1: KAE
9780521887618c02 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:59
Thus it would be difficult to assert that in the poems of Holderlin, the island
Patmos, the river Rhine, or, more generally, the landscapes and places that are
described in the beginnings of the poems would be symbolic landscapes or entities
that represent, as by analogy, the spiritual truths that appear in the more abstract
parts of the text. To state this would be to misjudge the literality of these passages,
to ignore that they derive their considerable poetic authority from the fact that
they are not synechdoches designating a totality of which they are a part, but are
themselves already this totality.42
Poetry distinguishes itself from philosophy not merely through its use of
metaphorical language but also through its presentation of various kinds of
objects merely as themselves poems contain literal landscapes, encompass
actual totalities, and constitute themselves as real poems in metrical and
temporal dimensions. The resolution of the Greece-Hesperia dialectic is
not further abstraction but the poetry itself: actual poetry, written in a
particular time and place, modern Hesperia or Germany.
Holderlins Greece-Hesperia dialectic therefore does not necessarily lose
its meaning in an endless series of unstable binary terms if read against
the background of the unavoidable constraints of historical and material
circumstance. A poet does not become a poet only in theory but when his
or her poetry is realized as the concrete manifestation of words and sounds.
The poets vocation, therefore, is to follow the triadic nave-heroic-idealistic
scheme outlined in Wechsel der Tone in the process of composition and
in the construction of his or her own identity. The Hesperian poet begins
by recognizing that the naivete of Greek poetry reveals their fiery nature, yet
P1: KAE
9780521887618c02 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:59
The Greek past looms large in the poets imagination, becoming a place
of titanic proportions, but the question, So is it true . . . ? seems almost
juvenile a longing for reassurance that the stories we were told as children
are indeed true, because we wish to recapture not only the magnificence of
a lost past, but the idealism and happiness of youth. Indeed, the tables and
chairs did seem larger when we were children, and Holderlin has projected
this childlike sense of wonder onto ancient times, conflating the youth of
Western civilization with his childhood.
The strophe nevertheless continues with a series of questions that intro-
duce doubt and hint at disappointment, asking where the thrones, the nec-
tar, and the temples have gone. The answer is clear: the land has endured,
but the human institutions that celebrated the gods natural wonders lie in
ruins. The poetry of the past is over, despite its glories, and the ceremonies
and traditions that keep a culture alive have long since ceased. The present
requires new inspiration, which the rest of the stanza provides in a startling
echo of the Pentecost:
Vater Aether! so riefs und flog von Zunge zu Zunge
Tausendfach, es ertrug keiner das leben allein;
Ausgetheilet erfreut solch Gut und getauschet, mit Fremden,
Wirds ein Jubel, es wachst schlafend des Wortes Gewalt
Vater! heiter! und hallt, so weit es gehet, das uralt
Zeichen, von Eltern geerbt, treffend und schaffendhinab.
Denn so kehren die Himmlischen ein, tiefschutternd gelangt so
Aus den Schatten herab unter die Menschen ihr Tag.
(StA II, 1, p. 92)
Father Aether! One cried, and tongue after tongue took it up then,
Thousands, no man could bear life so intense on his own;
Shared, such wealth gives delight and later, when bartered with strangers,
Turns to rapture; the word gather new strength when asleep:
Father! Clear light! and long resounding it travels, the ancient
Sign handed down, and far, striking, creating, rings out.
So do the Heavenly enter, shaking the deepest foundations
Only so from the gloom down to mankind comes their Day.47
The poets of Hesperia are those who come to fulfill the prophecy of the
old songs, the fruit of a particular time and place. However, these songs,
their predictions, and the entire cycle of history that encompasses them are
Holderlins own creation; the fictional Father Aethers ability to give living
flesh and hearts to the shadows of German poetry is really a reflection of
Holderlins own poetic power, generated by faith in divine inspiration. At
the center of Brod und Wein is a clear and distinct vision of the poet: an
autonomous subject who has acquired self-consciousness through poetry
and whose words allow this self-consciousness to have real existence when
poetry once again becomes song. When night falls, ending the reasoning day
and allowing song to replace other, more rational modes of discourse, the
terrible guardian of the border between the living and the dead, Cerberus,
P1: KAE
9780521887618c02 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:59
Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott.
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wachst
Das Rettende auch.
Im Finstern wohnen
Die Adler und furchtlos gehn
Die Sohne der Alpen uber den Abgrund weg
Auf leichtgebaueten Bruken.
Drum, da gehauft sind rings
Die Gipfel der Zeit, und die Liebsten
Nah wohnen, ermattend auf
Getrenntesten Bergen,
So gieb unschuldig Wasser,
O Fittige gieb uns, treuesten Sinns
Hinuberzugehn und wiederzukehren.
So sprach ich . . .
(StA II, 1, p. 165)
Near is
And difficult to grasp, the God.
But where danger threatens
That which saves from also grows.
In gloomy places dwell
The eagles, and fearless over
The chasm walk the sons of the Alps
On bridges lightly built.
Therefore, since round about
Are heaped the summits of Time
And the most loved live near, growing faint
On mountains most separate,
Give us innocent water,
O pinions give us, with minds most faithful
To cross over and return.
So I spoke . . . 56
P1: KAE
9780521887618c02 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:59
Poetry requires sacrifice, yet nothing can be omitted; the poetry of this age
must be all-encompassing, preserving the world of the Greeks yet aware
of the present. A mysterious force tears at the poets heart; the difficulty
P1: KAE
9780521887618c02 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:59
Here, a broad and continuous view of the universe, from its highest to its
lowest levels, reveals everything to be in its proper place after the chaos of
the storm the night before. Holderlin uses a rare Ich to insert his activity
into the poem, along with an odd shift to the subjunctive, Und was ich
sah, das Heilige sei mein Wort, (And what I saw, the hallowed, my word
shall convey). Hamburgers translation of the subjunctive of sein, sei, (to
be) does not adequately emphasize the force of the poets statement his
vision has made him capable of making his word holy merely by uttering
it. All renewal here is self-renewal, the poetic version of the Fichtean I am
I, a creation of the self-as-poet through the performative statement.
This poetic inspiration is not only holy, but also heroic, as the poem
changes tone once again toward the heroic in the fourth strophe with
another extended simile:
Und wie im Aug ein Feuer dem Manne glanzt,
Wenn hohes er entwarf; so ist
Von neuem an dem Zeichen, den Thaten der Welt jezt
Ein Feuer angezundet in Seelen der Dichter.
(StA II, 1, p. 119)
And as a fire gleams in the eye of that man
Who has conceived a lofty design,
Once more by the tokens, the deeds of the world now
A fire has been lit in the souls of the poets.63
A revealing chiasmus occurs in the course of the simile: the fire in the eye of
the hero becomes a fire in the souls of the poets. Usually, poets have visions of
fire, whereas heroes have fire in the soul; the association between vision and
poetic creation as well as that between fiery spirits and heroic action is well
established in tradition. Moreover, two terms are used in apposition which
normally appear as opposites: dem Zeichen and den Thaten, the sign and
the deeds. Together, these reversals indicate that language and action are
somehow interchangeable. Renate Boschenstein-Schafer has examined a
similar collapsing of the distinction between sign and deed in several of
Holderlins late fragments and correctly concludes that making these ele-
ments interchangeable is an essential part of Holderlins poetics that
is, what is usually considered the domain of empirical reality becomes
P1: KAE
9780521887618c02 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 13:59
chapter 3
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
Holderlin had written Patmos. In her diary, Princess Marianne records
that she asked Hegel about Isaac von Sinclair, a friend to both Hegel and
Holderlin from their Tubingen days, and received a curious response: At
that point, he [Hegel] began to speak of Holderlin, whom the world has
forgotten. . . . A whole lost past went through me.2 The Tubinger Freunde
had long dispersed and Hegel had essentially given up on Holderlin as
hopelessly mad in 1803 when Schelling wrote to him about their friends
worsening condition.3 Suddenly, the mention of a friends name brought
Holderlin to Hegels 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 Hegels life when
a project like the one described in the Systemprogramm fragment seemed
worth considering and even possible. Princess Mariannes question did not
elicit remembrances of Sinclair himself but of Holderlin, whom the world
had indeed forgotten, but Hegel, clearly, had not.
This incident represents in microcosm the project Hegel had been con-
tinuing for over a decade: the assimilation of aesthetics into his overall
philosophy. In 1818, while still at Heidelberg, Hegel gave his first series of
lectures on aesthetics and later delivered revised and expanded versions of
68
P1: KAE
9780521887618c03 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:2
Art, the objective side of the path toward Absolute Knowledge (literally, the
grasping [Erfassung] of the absolute), demonstrates spiritual development
through specific, concrete manifestations in works of art. Because they are
enduring products of human consciousness, art objects provide a picture of
this development not necessarily accessible through the remote and often
accidental patterns of the slaughter-bench of history or the subjective
complexities of theology. In this way, aesthetics, for Hegel, represents more
than a temporary departure from the serious business of writing philosophy:
it is the concrete, sensuous representation of absolute knowledge.
The conjoining of art and religion as two sides of the progress of Spirit
explains, to some degree, Hegels puzzling statement about the end of
art, which appears not only in the Lectures on Aesthetics but also in the
transcription of the 1823 lectures and in reports of contemporaries.18 The
end of art thesis, as it is frequently called, does not mean that all artistic
endeavors would abruptly come to an end in the late 1820s; it simply
means that the high point of the significance of art for humanity had
already been reached in classical times, when art and religion were part of
the same spiritual experience. As Hegel says in the 1823 lectures, in classical
P1: KAE
9780521887618c03 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:2
The forms of art themselves are the relationships between the overall idea
of beauty (often called the Idea) and its realization in the artwork and are
therefore the proper divisions for the classification of art.25 The correspon-
dence of the various forms of art to particular historical epochs is only the
indirect consequence of the tendency of artists in particular times to work
in a particular style. Hegel describes these relationships between content
(Inhalt) and particularization (Besonderung) as essentially epistemological
P1: KAE
9780521887618c03 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:2
I will therefore touch briefly on the history of this transition which I have in mind,
partly for the sake of the history itself, partly because in this way there are more
closely indicated the views which are important and on which as a foundation
we will build further. This foundation in its most general character consists in
recognizing that the beauty of art is one of the means which dissolve and reduce to
unity the above-mentioned opposition and contradiction between the abstractly
self-concentrated spirit and nature both the nature of external phenomena and
that of inner subjective feeling and emotion.29
Hegel therefore bases his conclusions in the Asthetik both on his observa-
tions of particular works of art and on the conclusions of philosophical
predecessors. Beauty, for Kant, resides in the formal characteristics of the
work and in the subjective apprehension of the work by the perceiver, yet
Hegel finds Kants views of aesthetics, like his metaphysics, inadequate
to the task of reconciling the subjective self with the objective world.30
Hegel manages this task by using the same principle that he had previously
employed in the description of self-consciousness, the concept of historical
progression. Placing himself (or rather, the text or lecture series) in histori-
cal context as the endpoint in the progression from concept to actualization
reinforces his argument by creating a role for it in the history of aesthetics
that parallels the course of self-consciousness.
Hegels praise of Kant nevertheless introduces the question of the neces-
sity of his own addition to the history of aesthetic theory, previously
P1: KAE
9780521887618c03 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:2
In this point of higher truth, as the spirituality which the artistic formation has
achieved in conformity with the Concept of spirit, there lies the basis for the
division of the philosophy of art. For, before reaching the true Concept of its
absolute essence, the spirit has to go through a course of stages, a series grounded
in this Concept itself; and to this course of the content which the spirit gives to itself
there corresponds a course, immediately connected therewith, of configurations of
art, in the form of which the spirit, as artist, gives itself a consciousness of itself.31
By turning Spirit into the artist, Hegel has given the Lectures on Aesthetics
the same structure as the Phenomenology or the Philosophy of History; in
other words, the Lectures on Aesthetics become a narrative account of Spirit
realizing itself in the world through its progress toward self-consciousness.
As Spirit reaches a higher level of consciousness, the content of art comes
to a higher level with it, which in turn determines the mode of presenta-
tion and consequently the concrete manifestations of art in the individual
works. Because Spirit is the motivating force behind both history and art,
both fields are immediately and inextricably connected to the realization
of self-consciousness. Through this description of artistic development,
Hegel manages to combine elements of Schillers Aesthetic Education and
the periodization of Winckelmanns theory of art history. Artistic develop-
ment corresponds to the general course of the history of civilization, as well
as to the development of the individual; Hegels theory thereby accounts
for both individual and collective education.
The use of the forms of art concept as an intermediary term between
individual works of art and the course of cultural history also insulates
Hegels aesthetic theory, to some extent, from the vagaries of individual
taste, a problem he considered a terrible weakness in the writings of the
Schlegel brothers.32 More important, Hegel associates historical epochs with
characteristic modes of representation in a way that takes into account
changing religious and spiritual ideals. As I mentioned earlier, the three
distinct forms of art correspond to three historical eras: Symbolic (Egyp-
tian and Oriental art), Classical (Greek and Roman art), and Romantic
(Christian era art). Defining artistic creations solely in terms of historical
development would obscure the enormous conceptual changes evident in
the works and the varying suitability of particular media for each mode;
P1: KAE
9780521887618c03 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:2
The fulfillment [from other arts] is always differentiated from my self. The ful-
fillment is in its nature external, spatial and thereby always differentiated from
the interiority of the I. But in music this differentiation falls away. The I is
no longer differentiated from the sensuous itself, the notes go forth in my deep-
est interior. The inmost subjectivity itself is enlisted and set in motion. This is
therefore exactly what really makes up the power of [musical] notes.34
However, the text also includes, in outline form, a list of the physical
characteristics of music added later in the corner of the manuscript on
two separate pages, including lists of both the structural elements of music
(rhythm, harmony, melody, etc.) and several more abstract and distinctly
Hegelian concepts regarding the aesthetics of music.35 Whether these
added outlines are Hegels own words or notes from Hothos later research is
impossible to determine with absolute certainty; however, their resemblance
to the overall structure of the music chapter of the Lectures on Aesthetics is
unmistakable. In light of Hothos own admission that his contribution to
the text was to add structure,36 the probable genesis of the more mundane
parts of the music chapter in the Lectures on Aesthetics begins to appear
Hotho has most likely taken Hegels distinctly theoretical statements and
attempted to link them to the physical characteristics of music, preserving
the encyclopedic spirit of the enterprise.
In contrast, the central principle described in this strange passage
remains: Hegel claims that music is a special case among the arts because it
does not possess the exteriority that is the central characteristic of artworks
in other media. Hegel consistently asserts that music, although undeniably
an art form, has no particular Dasein, and therefore bypasses the normal
process of sensuous apprehension of an art object, in which the essential
differentiation between the self and the object occurs. Music goes directly
to the self, setting the inmost subjectivity in motion, without allowing the
P1: KAE
9780521887618c03 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:2
Therefore if we sum up in one word this relation of content and form in romantic
art wherever this relation is preserved in its own special character, we may say that,
precisely because the ever expanded universality and the restlessly active depths of
the heart are the principle here, the keynote of romantic art is musical and, if we
make the content of this idea determinate, lyrical. For romantic art the lyric is as
it were the elementary fundamental characteristic, a note which epic and drama
strike too and which wafts even round works of visual art as a universal fragrance
of soul, because here spirit and heart strive to speak, through every one of their
productions, to the spirit and the heart.37
The ear, on the other hand, represents the mental faculty of hearing, the
intellectual process of perceiving the practical sensations received by the
bodys actual ear:
The ear, on the contrary, without itself turning to a practical relation to objects,
listens to the result of the inner vibration of the body through which what comes
before us is no longer the peaceful and material shape but the first and more ideal
breath of the soul. Further, since the negativity into which the vibrating material
enters here is on one side the cancelling of the spatial situation, a cancellation
cancelled again by the reaction of the body, therefore the expression of this double
negation, i.e. sound, is an externality which in its coming-to-be is annihilated again
by its very existence, and it vanishes of itself. Owing to this double negation of
externality, implicit in the principle of sound, inner subjectivity corresponds to
it because the resounding, which in and by itself is something more ideal than
independently really subsistent corporeality, gives up this more ideal existence also
and therefore becomes a mode of expression adequate to the inner life.40
This passage deals with Ton, basic musical sound itself, and is closely based
on Hegels more general discussion of the distinction between Ton, musical
sound, and Klang, sound in general, in the Encyclopedia.41 The self-negation
P1: KAE
9780521887618c03 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:2
Music is either too much itself, that is, just vibration in the ear, or it is
too much within us, abstract subjectivity as such. Music communicates
directly with the completely objectless inner: the self without reference
to the external world, the solipsistic, abstract I am I. In Andrew Bowies
view, the Lectures on Aesthetics reveals a critical fault at this point; Hegel
cannot incorporate an element of subjectivity that does not ultimately have
its articulation in language.44 Hegels concept of artistic content depends
too much on its linguistic expression; he therefore fails to account for the
content of absolute instrumental music, of music as such, because he cannot
find words for it. Although Bowie has correctly pointed out this flaw in
Hegels theory of music, I believe it should be considered in the context
of the historical circumstances of the aesthetic lectures, which included
an increasingly significant debate over precisely this point: the nature of
instrumental music, which began to be called absolute music at about
this time.
P1: KAE
9780521887618c03 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:2
After Hegel has stated that music has the subjective life itself as its sub-
ject matter, why does the virtuosity of the instrumental performer lead to a
one-sided extreme? Even for as cautious and deliberate a lecturer as Hegel,
this warning against asserting the value of absolute music seems excessive,
as if he had to prevent such arguments from occurring. After examining
P1: KAE
9780521887618c03 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:2
Although Hegel continues with a recounting of the Orpheus myth, the fall
of Jericho, and several other legends of the magical power of music, the
target of his scornful criticism is probably Hoffmann, who wrote of a won-
derful, infinite spirit-kingdom to which music gave access.58 To maintain
the systematic discipline of his overall project, Hegel cannot allow Hoff-
mann to create another world for music in particular, nor valorize music
among the other arts at the expense of the theoretical basis for art Hegel
has so carefully constructed. For Hegel, Hoffmanns spirit-kingdom is a
mythological explanation improperly invoked in the middle of a serious
work of musical analysis. Hoffmanns opinion is rendered even more taste-
less when juxtaposed with the specific and concrete musical analysis he
includes in the essay; a layperson might be allowed to resort to grandiose
metaphors, but an expert should know better.
Hegels discussion of instrumental music also includes an overt mention
of the difference between lay and expert opinion, with Hegel again choosing
sides in an apparent debate:
What the layman likes most in music is the intelligible expression of feelings and
ideas, something tangible, a topic, and therefore turns in preference to music as an
accompaniment: whereas the expert who has at his fingers ends the inner musical
relations between notes and instruments, loves instrumental music in its artistic
use of harmonies and melodious interactings and changing forms; he is entirely
satisfied by the music itself and he has the closer interest of comparing what he
P1: KAE
9780521887618c03 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:2
Hegel emphasizes the word artist, indicating that, in his view, the per-
former is also an artist and that the duty of a good performer is to deliver
a version of the work that contains more than the mere execution of
the piece. As Adolf Nowak has pointed out, Hegel fails to see the further
implications of the mediation between composer and performer for his
ideas about the nature of music in general.65 He calls the improvisation
brought to the performance by a good opera singer, for instance, nothing
more than mere room to play.66 The performer therefore ranges between
his or her role as an artist and that of a thoughtless vehicle for emotion,
whose soul . . . gives itself over to its outpouring.67 When lost in the music
this way, the performer and the audience have nearly the same experience
the music moves them both. The terms which we are accustomed to using
in descriptions of performances demonstrate the same ambiguity; the per-
former is an artist, yet his performance is not an artwork in itself, but an
interpretation of one. Hegel makes it clear that without the artistry of
the performer, a work of music is flat, empty, and soulless, yet he does not
give the performer the status of a true artist, someone who creates as well
as mediates.
The dilemma of the musical performer provides us with an apt
emblem for Hegels problems with music and their relationship with self-
consciousness. The performer realizes the idea of music in performance,
yet the work endures only as long as the performance lasts. The work van-
ishes as it becomes fully realized; the idea of the work becomes actual in
performance, yet ceases to exist upon completion. The performer realizes
the idea of the work yet cannot fully articulate the idea except through the
performance itself. Self-consciousness, in the practical terms of the individ-
ual, follows a similar pattern. Individual consciousness inevitably contains
P1: KAE
9780521887618c03 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:2
The content of the speaking art, the particular structure into which the subjective
element is transposed, is the imagination, the content of the speaking art [is] the
entire realm of the imagination, the spiritual existing of itself, that in one element
is that to which Spirit itself belongs. In that the sound preserves such a fulfillment,
it is reduced to a mere means, [it] is only a sign and becomes a word, and this
expression is therefore different from content itself.68
chapter 4
The poem, in itself, is still what it is, a text that consists of those words, signi-
fying those sounds, and no others, a material object of ink, paper, word, and
sound, subject to various forces and appearing under various circumstances
but still a particular material object designed to elicit a response from those
who encounter it. An encounter with the poem, whether as written text or
as spoken performance, produces an identifiable phenomenon, the experi-
ence of the particular poem as a material object. A poem therefore cannot be
reduced entirely to the status of historical artifact or economic commodity
because to do so would eliminate its difference from all other poems pro-
duced or consumed under similar conditions and would obscure the most
significant characteristic of any artwork: the experience of the aesthetic as
an encounter with sensuous material.
So far, I have attempted to describe how the Idealists, especially Holderlin
and Hegel, understood this experience of the aesthetic as a critical element
in self-consciousness, and how both metaphors of music and imitations
of actual musical structures represented this concept in the discourses of
philosophy and poetry. William Wordsworth, who knew little of German
philosophy and less of music, nevertheless shows the pervasiveness of the
musical aesthetics in poetry during the Romantic period, revealing that the
link between poetry and music went beyond the borders of the German-
speaking world. Although Wordsworth lacked the specifically philosophical
(or poetological) project of the kind that Holderlin pursued, he neverthe-
less understood the materiality of poetry through metaphors of music, and
his descriptions of listening to music represent self-consciousness through
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
The stylistic choices [of Romantic verse form] (which I am calling metrical, rather
than rhythmic) occur at a different level of decision-making from those of mys-
terious choices which must occur in actual composition. . . . The metrical choice
provides a basic schematic fabric of contingencies governing the range of expressive
effect. But it also establishes a kind of frame around the work as a whole. Like a
title, it indicates how it is to be taken, what sort of thing the poem is supposed to
be, and, perhaps, taken in historical context, what the poet thought he was doing
by calling his curious bit of language a poem at all.19
The poets decision to use a particular verse form does not necessarily
affect the poems content directly, but the choice of metrical form is far
from arbitrary. A poet chooses meter in a specific historical context that
creates a contract (the legal term is Wordsworths, from the Preface
to the Lyrical Ballads20 ) between the reader and the poet. Each reader
expects a poem to do certain things according to the artistic context of
its composition; no poet may vary from these expectations (his end of the
contract) without justification. However, when an innovative aspect of the
poem varies this contract, it creates a new set of conditions by which readers
will judge the next set of poetic agreements. In time, these innovations alter
the previous set of conventions; what was once variation now becomes
convention, and what was once convention becomes somehow natural
(that is, intrinsic) to the genre. Hollander argues correctly that uncovering
these moments of formal transformation provides an excellent starting point
for scholarly investigation and reveals much about the terms of this implicit
contract.21
Wordsworth most famous work on poetics, the Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads, not only demonstrates his concerns about these contractual con-
ditions but also his conception of their meaning. Despite worries about
money and criticism from his friends, he insisted on writing the theoret-
ical Preface for the 1800 edition, expanding it for the 1802 edition, and
reprinting it in his first collected works.22 Although Wordsworth possessed
an unshakable belief in his own importance as a poet, he was concerned
that his readers might accuse him of breaking the unspoken agreement of
comprehensibility between the poet and his readers. His attempt to deflect
criticism for prosaisms, places where poetry, despite adherence to a met-
rical scheme, becomes too much like prose, demonstrates this anxiety most
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
Now the music of harmonious metrical language, the sense of difficulty overcome
and the blind association of pleasure which has been previously received from works
of rhyme or metre of the same or similar construction, and indistinct perception
perpetually renewed of language closely resembling that of real life and yet in the
circumstance of metre, imperceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight, which
will always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the passions.26
Although this text is twenty years older and in a different language, it shows
a remarkable affinity with Hegels statement on the artwork that began
this chapter. For Wordsworth, his poetry does resist easy comprehension
because of the complexity and difficulty of its language he has deliberately
taken his materials from the language of ordinary men rather than high
poetic diction but because of precisely those elements that distinguish
poetry from prose, harmonious metrical language. Because his diction
no longer presents such difficulty, the sound of the poem must provide the
resistance that results in the sense of difficulty overcome. Moreover, the
metrical elements of a poem contribute to its emotional content, either
through associations with other poems or emotional states. Poetic meter
connects the newly created poem with the readers previous experience of
the pleasure of poetry, at once positioning the poem within the tradition
and recalling the pleasure associated with other poems as a pleasure of
form the association with other poems does not derive its pleasure from
allusion, but from meter. The complex feeling of delight that poetry
evokes stems from the combination of sensuous and spiritual pleasures in
one experience.
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
The key word here is articulate: the word that distinguishes sound as
comprehensible language from sound as pure sensory experience, a central
issue both in poetics and in the concept of absolute music. As I intend
to show here, Wordsworth frequently confronts the problem of the degree
to which the sound he hears is, or should be, comprehensible, and he
often struggles in his efforts to understand. At times, as Brian Bartlett29
and Jeffrey Robinson30 have shown, Wordsworth hears a musical voice
in natural sound; at others, the sound of nature is utterly alien to him.
However, when Wordsworth describes the sound of song in The Solitary
Reaper, he discovers that his inability to understand Gaelic, the language
of the reapers song, has rendered it a kind of absolute music.
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
The stanza spans the widest extremes possible, from the nightingale in the
Arabian desert to the cuckoo in the Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. In
both cases, the birds do not produce articulate words but natural cries that
acquire meaning through the poets interpretation of their context.35 To the
travelers in the desert, the song indicates that they have arrived at an oasis.
To the listener in the Hebrides, not far from where Wordsworth traveled
on his tour, it carries the double message that land is near or that spring has
come. This ambiguity reflects Wordsworths desire to find a spring of hope
after a long winter of mourning as well; travel and time have long been
known to ease sorrow. Although both bird songs communicate welcome
news to their listeners, neither is a message in words; they are merely sounds
that accompany welcome natural events. In this respect, the reapers song
is also a natural sound, the result of a seasonal change in a particular
place. That he finds relief in her voice results from his own condition, not
her intent. This relief may even depend on her solitude; neither audience
nor any social dynamic disturbs the scene, reassuring him that natural
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
The poet feels a breeze, both within and without, and makes a song . . . in
measured strains for a specific audience, his friend Coleridge. At the
moment of composition itself, the inner breeze of inspiration has become
a tempest, a natural force, which makes present joy a the matter of a
song. Curiously, the text contains a sudden shift in narrative chronology;
the phrase Thus . . . did I . . . / Pour forth that day reveals that he is not
describing the act of composition itself but the memory of that act. In the
recalled moment, poetic inspiration comes from the inner response to the
outer, natural breeze, but from the later perspective of the next lines, the act
of creation requires him to write measured strains. The process of com-
position described here, as in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, involves an
initial moment of inspiration, in which the poet finds the material for
his poem and the crafting of that material into metrical form. However,
The Prelude dramatizes the process of poetic transformation through mem-
ory by means of this self-quotation, elaborating the process of creating
poetry through emotion recollected in tranquility, in the famous phrase
from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
The process of recollection and composition is far from simple; here,
Wordsworth intertwines the recollection of an emotional state and the
memory of a sound in a deceptively complex doubling of poetic voice:
My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the minds
Internal echo of the imperfect sound;
To both I listened, drawing from them both
A cheerful confidence in things to come.
(I, 559)
The 1805 version of the first two lines of this excerpt is even plainer: The
mind of man is framed even like the breath / And harmony of music
(1805, I, 3512). We are mere material, dust, yet mysteriously, something
immortal and conscious can emerge from this dust, the way the mere sound
of a single note gains significance when in harmony with others. Like chords
in music, events in life take their meaning from the imaginative structure
imposed on them in an artistic design; they are, and are not, as the mind
answers to them, that is, they have meaning both in themselves and within
a deliberately designed scheme. For Wordsworth, the emotion and vision
of a moment resembles harmony in music because poetry, like music, takes
the flash of inspiration and turns it into the material of ordered sound
in time. Memories of difficulty and unhappiness even contribute to the
harmonious whole as a needful part of the state of mind that poetry can
create, just as dissonance in music creates the possibility of resolution.
However, Wordsworth remains painfully aware that he cannot become
a poet merely by feeling natures breeze and that his poetic voice depends
on a great deal of growth and development. He recognizes that despite his
affinity with nature, his voice must be separate from it and that he must
balance the competing demands of nature, humanity, imagination, and
self. As several episodes later in The Prelude show, Wordsworth must learn
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
Whereupon I told,
That once in the stillness of a summers noon,
While I was seated in a rocky cave
By the seaside, perusing, so it chanced,
The famous history of the errant knight
Recorded by Cervantes, these same thoughts
Beset me, and to height unusual rose,
While listlessly I sate, and, having closed
The book, had turned my eyes toward the wide sea.
On poetry and geometric truth,
And their high privilege of lasting life,
From all internal injury exempt,
I mused, upon these chiefly: and at length,
My senses yielding to the sultry air,
Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream.
(V, 5670)
In earlier versions of the text, the dream actually belongs to the friend,
and the poet is the audience; Wordsworth simply changed he to I in
most instances to create the reversal of roles. However, once Wordsworth has
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
Like Dante in the Inferno, the poet finds himself lost in a wilderness until
someone appears at his side, and he feels a similar religious and cultural
distance from his guide; both the Arab and Dantes guide, Virgil, are strange
apparitions (an uncouth shape) and non-Christians. The Arab also rides
a camel and carries strange, magical objects, as if he were from the Tales
of the Thousand and One Nights. The Tales (known in Wordsworths time
as Arabian Nights Entertainments, or The Thousand and One Nights) also
have a characteristic series of narrative frames in which the overall story
is suspended while Scheherazade (the heroine) tells a story to delay her
execution, which inevitably contains a character who tells another story,
followed by another, and so on. The Arab at the center of this elaborately
framed story will guide Wordsworth through this strange underworld of
dreams, carrying the legacy of both past literary achievements and popular
literature. Significantly, the episode links oral and written literary culture
through the figure of the Arab. The Tales are themselves written representa-
tions of an oral folktales, and the heros visit to the underworld is a standard
part of the Western epic tradition in which the present hero consults char-
acters from previous epics for advice and guidance. In these episodes, the
dead texts of ancient works are made to speak, essentially acknowledging
the tradition and providing a model for what can be learned from poetry.
Here in the Prelude, the Arab does not reveal his identity immediately,
and the poet asks what the Arab is carrying. The answer contains many
ambiguous and antithetical objects, the kind that appear only in dreams:
No sooner ceased
The song, than the Arab with calm look declared
That all would come to pass of which the voice
Had given forewarning, and that he himself
Was going then to bury those two books:
The one that held acquaintance with the stars,
And wedded soul to soul in purest bond
Of reason, undisturbed by space or time;
The other that was a god, yea many gods,
Had voices more than all the winds, with power
To exhilarate the spirit, and to soothe,
Through every clime, the heart of human kind.
(V, 98109)
These absolute, idealized books do not even need readers; they are still
valuable when buried. They are also represented as two separate books
because the pure reason of geometry cannot be preserved in the same book
with voices with power / To exhilarate the spirit. In a previous era (most
visibly during the Renaissance), the rules of mathematics, music, and poetic
meter were all considered different aspects of one universal order, but for
Wordsworth, geometric and poetic truth represent two sides of a large divi-
sion in human thought. Geometry is a priori reason itself: a single, unified
hierarchy of pure logic. Poetry, on the other hand, is diverse and enigmatic,
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
The strangeness here derives from both the uncanny nature of dream sym-
bolism and that of poetic language. Things are, and are not, what they
appear; they are simultaneously that which they represent and that which
interpretation makes of them. The structure of poetic language therefore
parallels that of the sound of a shell. A shell in itself makes no sound; what
one hears when the shell is pressed to the ear, according to Hollander, is
background noise of a certain texture and frequency, audible only because
the shell simultaneously reflects this sound and blocks out the other, usually
more prominent noises of the outside world.43 The sound of a shell also
makes a natural analogy with the mimetic and symbolic modes of poetic
discourse. Just as the sound of the shell resembles the sound of the ocean, so
do the rhythmic and onomatopoetic associations of poetic language resem-
ble their objects. Likewise, the association between the object and its origin
makes an inevitable symbolic or synechdochal connection.
The shell/book therefore represents an imaginary, idealized poem that
transcends the limitations of ordinary poetic discourse on every level. It
is articulate, yet musical; its language is wholly removed from ordinary
speech, yet comprehensible; its metaphors and images are purely symbolic,
yet entirely credible, giving the poet a perfect faith in all that passed.
The book reads itself and has a devoted follower dedicated to preserving it
against apocalyptic destruction, which the book miraculously predicts as it
occurs. Like the book of Revelation, the shell/book foretells the end of time,
when signs become reality, and the distinction between symbol and refer-
ent collapses as all prophecies are fulfilled. The shell/book both reads and
interprets itself, eliminating the resistance of poetic language entirely. Fur-
thermore, the shell/book maintains a perfect connection between language
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
People and objects found in dreams are well known to possess double
identities; they enable the dreamer to make symbolic connections hidden
in the subconscious during waking hours. Of course, the character of Don
Quixote also had two identities, one as a minor nobleman fond of chivalric
romance novels, the other as a character within them, a knight, and the
central theme of this novel (which the poet had been reading just before
he fell asleep) is the distance between literary ideals and ordinary reality.
As long as the mysterious dream-figure remains an Arab, he presents the
possibility that a story can last forever, endlessly told and retold, printed
and reprinted, like an Arabian Tale; when the Arab becomes Don Quixote,
the poet realizes that the quest for permanence may be a self-aggrandizing
delusion. Until this point, the poet has believed everything the Arab has
said and trusted that the Arab will succeed in his mission to preserve the
books; as the waters rush forward, the poet begins to fear that this is all a
hopeless fantasy and sees a flood approach that will destroy him and his
poetry.
Like Lots wife, the poet looks back and is left behind, lost to the Arab
and his mission.
His countenance, meanwhile, grew more disturbed;
And, looking backwards when he looked, mine eyes
Saw, over half the wilderness diffused,
A bed of glittering light: I asked the cause:
It is, said he, the waters of the deep
Gathering upon us; quickening then the pace
Of the unwieldy creature he bestrode,
He left me: I called after him aloud.
(V, 12633)
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
At first, the hoots double and redouble, echoing through the landscape,
but the owls stop hooting, having baffled his best skill. At this moment,
A gentle shock of mild surprise strikes the Boy, leading to what Geoffrey
Hartman recognizes as a crisis of self-recognition the shock of self-
consciousness50 that results from the realization that he cannot really hoot,
that is, actually have a communicative exchange with owls, only imitate
them. The Boy has made a sound, heard a response and its echo, but he
must acknowledge that he remains fundamentally separate from the natural
landscape and its representatives, the owls. As in The Solitary Reaper,
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
The boys surprise at standing perplexed before the sudden silence of nature was an
anticipatory announcement of his death, a movement of his consciousness passing
beyond the deceptive constancy of a world of correspondences into a world in
which our mind knows itself to be in an endlessly precarious state of suspension:
above an earth, the stability of which it cannot participate in, and beneath a heaven
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
In the 1805 version of the Prelude, the lines about the sudden silence of the
owls read, And when it chanced, / That pauses of deep silence mocked
his skill (1805, V, 4045). Death, the unavoidable end of human life in a
natural world, lies in the mocking silence of the owls, reversing the process
of coming to self-consciousness. Similarly, in Wordsworths Lucy poems,
the once-conscious and alive Lucy becomes a natural object when she dies;
she is Rolled round in earths diurnal course / With rocks and stones
and trees.53 Neither Wordsworth nor the Boy can choose his position
within the natural scheme, because each must remain human while living
and become natural when dead. The recognition of mortality and of self-
consciousness in the second silence parallels that of the first silence; it
contains the same moment of perplexity, the same shock at the loss of a set
of correspondences between Boy and owl, poet and Nature, and the same
vertigo at the sudden opening of the abyss. In the first silence, the Boy hears
the voice of mountain torrents, in the second, the poet sees the churchyard
and school. Both moments of listening are among the visionary moments in
which Wordsworth trusts for restorative power, yet here, anxiety overcomes
any possibility of restoration. This episode differs from, for instance, the
visionary moment in Book VI known as the Simplon Pass episode, where
Imagination rose from the minds abyss / Like an unfathered vapour (VI,
5945) because nothing rises from this abyss. When one creates harmonious,
ordered sound, a product of the mind, and hears it reflected, one becomes
a self-conscious poet; when one extends mimics the sounds of the natural
world and expects to become natural in return, the reward is silence and
death. The silence of the text, however, is another matter entirely.
The lines quoted here show that they are the work of the late Wordsworth,
formal and cautious, following the structure of a traditional Homeric simile,
As . . . , so. According to the editors of the Norton/Cornell edition of The
Prelude, these lines were among the last Wordsworth wrote for the work,
added during revisions between 1839 and 1850.54 For most of the forty-five
years between the 1805 and the 1850 manuscripts, this large simile was not
in the poem at all, yet Wordsworths last and most radical rewriting was
devoted to including it. Wordsworth wrote this passage late in his career,
when he had become increasingly aware of how his powers had faded, and it
reflects his growing concern that the excesses of his youthful style might be
considered too extreme for posterity. The simile therefore serves a double
purpose; it both demonstrates his technical skill within a classical formula
and justifies his choice of subject matter.
The subject of the simile itself, however, does not follow any classical
model by referring to a concrete object, but instead enters the abstract world
of poetics. It does not compare a storm cloud and sunbeam to a particular
thing but to a general class of single forms and objects for which the power
to elicit feeling and thought is enhanced by their contrast to the general
tide of humanity. The particular object of this type that Wordsworth has
in mind, the beggar, does not arrive in the poem until much later. Here,
the simile describes the origin of the visionary object and an artistic process
of contrast and relief, rather than the object itself. In effect, these lines
justify the choice of subject by alluding to a traditional poetic style, calling
unusual attention not only to the object itself but also to the process of
poetic composition.
Wordsworth needs this justification because in this instance, he does not
find his visionary object in nature but in the city, where he found asserting
his independence and writing poetry much more difficult. The next passage
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
What and whither, when and how the poet finds himself at a loss when
confronted by so many people about whom he knows nothing but their
current appearance; he is overwhelmed by their sheer numbers and by the
utter lack of any context or natural landscape. In the second-sight proces-
sion, he recognizes something familiar, yet nothing he can identify clearly
the uncanny feeling of unconscious recognition. These strangers, simulta-
neously disturbingly familiar and utterly alien, form a murky backdrop for
the sudden appearance of the visionary character of the beggar, whom the
poet recognizes with painful clarity as a version of himself.
The shock of this self-recognition causes him to have an almost physical
reaction:
And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond
The reach of common indication, lost
Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten
Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)
Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,
Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest
Wearing a written paper, to explain
His story, whence he came, and who he was.
(VII, 63542)
The process of selection has been reversed; he does not choose this subject,
he is smitten by it. Although a sight not rare, this Beggar stands out
sharply because he has written what and whither, when and how plainly
across his chest, and the story cannot be a happy one. The Prelude, like the
beggars sign, explains Wordsworths story, whence he came, and who he
was; the violence of this sight therefore lies in the horrible caricature it
makes of the poet himself. Having begun with lofty ambitions and writing
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
The familiar dialectic of blindness and insight, of sight as vision and sight
as understanding, reminds the poet that what he seeks can only be found
by looking into himself, instead of on the faces of the city dwellers. The
Blind Beggar is a blunt and traditional symbol; he is Tiresias, who sees
the truth that Oedipus does not, and St. Paul, who must be blinded by
a light from heaven to receive divine revelation. In the midst of a search
for subtle answers in the outside world, the appearance of so obvious an
emblem of the poets condition reproaches him for both faulty observation
and hubris. The piece of paper pinned to the Beggars chest is not only the
utmost we can know, but also all a poet can do with his life and ambition.
The Beggar, although unaware of the poet, nevertheless reminds him of
the cruel reality of the poets vocation. Whether a poet laureate or a blind
beggar, a poet lives by telling his own story, in the hope that whoever reads
it will be moved to give him money. No more lofty possibility is offered;
the paper is the utmost, and all poetry merely more and less successful
versions of the same crude note. Most significantly, the Beggar has neither
sight nor voice, rendering him unable to describe anything but his own
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
Conclusions 131
with a reference to the physical faculty of hearing, the Ear, and tries to
connect the physical manifestation of sound and hearing to the aesthetic
effects of music through historical, mathematical, and, finally, cosmological
principles. The abstract also has a generally philosophical tone; the idiot,
as someone who can appreciate music despite mental defects that would
prevent him from enjoying visual art or literature to the same degree, estab-
lishes almost experimentally that music has a direct effect on the emotions.
He then examines the origin of music, and its effect in early ages, follow-
ing the historicizing tendency of many nineteenth-century philosophers,
and expresses a wish for a unified system that would explain how music fits
into the system of the arts. (Wordsworth was unable to have read Hegels
not yet transcribed or translated Lectures on Aesthetics in 1828.) After a con-
sideration of outdated Pythagorean theories of the connection between
music and the harmony of the spheres through mathematics, the argument
turns toward theological explanations, representing music in all its forms as
a means of praising God and partaking, in small measure, of the eventual
call of trumpets that will end the world.
Both the argument and the poem as a whole, in my view, seem forced, as
if the reconciliation of these different versions of musics causes and effects
did not easily fit into a medium-length poem, and as if the theological
explanation that ends the poem were simply a kind of theoretical deus
ex machina, or God term, used as a last resort to resolve an intractable
conflict. Stylistic and metrical elements in the first stanza also reflect these
contradictions:
Here, the poem comes closer to what Wordsworth has been trying to
achieve: a connection between the qualities of natural sound and the clearly
artistic effects of music. The stanza begins with abstractions Ye voices,
and ye Shadows, / And Images of voice and follows them with nat-
ural scenes and an instance of music at its most denotative: the hunters
horn. Then, church bells call back the hunters in measured glee, with
Wordsworths italics making the unmistakable point that humanity has con-
trolled sound to serve religious and social purposes. Wordsworths under-
standing of music in 1828 reflects many of the concerns of his later career
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
Conclusions 133
that represented a reversal of his views earlier in life. The impulse to express
transcendent experience in secular terms, as he did in his earlier poetry, has
been replaced by more conventional piety, experienced in the community
of the church, rather than in the solitude of nature. In addition, both the
first stanza and this selection from the third indicate a retreat toward tra-
ditional religion as the poet grows older, a desire to settle down to married
life and its milder echoes of wedding bells and, later, to find solace in the
requiems of lifes last retreats. Music in this poem is therefore a civilizing
force, organizing and socializing the wild, emotional impulses from which
it originated, calling back the hunt to the conventions of a settled society.
The final stanza recalls the apocalypse of The Dream of the Arab but
provides a far more traditional account of the music heard at the end of
time and omits the poets ambition to create a lasting work entirely:
A Voice to Light gave Being;
To Time, and Man his earth-born Chronicler;
A Voice shall finish doubt and dim foreseeing,
And sweep away lifes visionary stir;
The Trumpet (we, intoxicate with pride,
Arm at its blast for deadly wars)
To archangelic lips applied,
The grave shall open, quench the stars.
O Silence! Are Mans noisy years
No more than moments of thy life?
Is Harmony, blest Queen of smiles and tears,
With her smooth tones and discords just,
Tempered into rapturous strife,
Thy destined Bond-slave? No! though Earth be dust
And vanish, though the Heavens dissolve, her stay
Is in the WORD, that shall not pass away.
(XIV, 20925)
The world begins and ends with the sound of a voice, and Wordsworth
alludes the Gospel of St. John in asserting the primacy of the Divine Word
over silence. No longer does he concern himself with the durability of his
own works, as he did in The Dream of the Arab; instead, he hears the
trumpets of the Second Coming, blown by angels, not by poets. The Voice
of God that shall sweep away lifes visionary stir has clearly superseded his
own visionary gleam and the transcendence of nature. The poet no longer
dwells on the inevitable end of earthly life or on the restorative power of the
seasons but prefers to think of last things and to trust in a clearly traditional,
biblical God.
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
Here, Wordsworth turns natural sound into the voice and music of nature,
and finds his ability to rejoice restored by a change in season. As in The
Solitary Reaper, the poet finds that natures sounds have order and mean-
ing, as do the seasons, and that his ability to find joy returns with this
realization. Wordsworths desire to answer in kind, in the joyful song of
poetic expression, shows that the restorative beauty of these sounds does not
lie in any denotative content they tell him no stories, and use no words
but in their contextual significance, as natural sounds associated with the
seasons. Like the nightingale in The Solitary Reaper, these sounds tell him
that spring comes and that natural cycles still exist, gloriously independent
of humanity. Here, he has hope for his own voice, separate from nature,
yet restored by it.
His final coming to consciousness as a poet takes place in the last book
of The Prelude, where he contemplates the completed poem and the course
of his own life up to that point:
I said unto the life which I had lived,
Where art thou? Hear I not a voice from thee
Which tis reproach to hear? Anon I rose
As if on wings, and saw beneath me stretched
Vast prospect of the world which I had been
P1: KAE
9780521887618c04 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 22:22
Conclusions 135
And was; and hence this Song, which like a lark
I have protracted, in the unwearied heavens
Singing, and often with more plaintive voice
To earth attempered and her deep-drawn sighs,
Yet centring all in love, and in the end
All gratulant, if rightly understood.
(XIV, 37989)
chapter 5
People talk so much about music and they say so little. I am absolutely
certain that words are not adequate to it, and if ever I found that they
were, I should eventually give up composition.
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy1
Conspicuous dramatic features in the music must be heard to issue from the past to
be decisive for the future; they must inspire an intense degree of involvement in a
recognizable yet experientially individual temporal process. This is why Beethovens
internalization of classical syntax and phraseology may be seen as paramount: he
is thus provided with a style stable enough in its sense of both local and global
balance to assimilate and project a highly dramatic sense of temporality.36
In Beethovens heroic style, both urges [the urge to be subsumed in a greater organic
whole and the urge to be passionately self-assertive] are satisfied: the passionately
individual is made to sound as a larger organic universality. This is because the
passionately individual self, which is heard to be projected by the music, is all there
is: one does not hear a world order against which a hero defines himself one hears
only the hero, the self, fighting against its own element. Thus the superclosure
effect of the organically unified musical masterpiece: there is no world beyond
the piece, no fading horizon, no vanishing point of perspective. . . . The feeling
provoked by this music is one of transcendent individuality, of merger with a higher
world order in the name of Self. This effect is identical to that enunciated in the
Idealist trajectory of Hegels phenomenology, with one overwhelmingly important
exception: Beethovens music is heard and experienced; it is a concretion with
a degree of compression and concentration that Hegels philosophy could never
hope to reach.37
Burnham bases this persuasive account of the heroic style and its meaning
on a great deal of careful research, yet the self he describes here as creating
P1: KAE
9780521887618c05 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 30, 2008 17:1
The sense of timelessness that emanates from late works is profoundly different
from that attributed to classic works. When its aesthetic validity matures in the
later existence which is its true life, the classic work seems to be detached from the
age in which it was written, and the historical conditions in which it came into
being fall away from it. It is characteristic of a late work, on the other hand, that
already, while it is still new, it is inwardly alien to the age to which it outwardly
belongs. It is not in its aesthetic survival alone, but even in its historical origins,
too, that a gulf separates it from the age that gives it a date.39
A late work, in this sense, fulfills the composers desire for completion of
his lifes work; it looks back toward the composers past and forward toward
the future of musical composition after the composers death, contributing
to an odd sense of timelessness because of a lack of stylistic specificity in
late period works which makes them both a summation of the composers
career and a reflection of his understanding of music history. The defining
characteristic of the late style, therefore, is actually a meta-characteristic
it defines itself by defying easy chronological characterization.
To what extent do the concrete musical elements of Beethovens late
works justify this designation, and to what degree can the late style be
termed a conscious, coherent set of compositional decisions? Biographical
information does not give much assistance in answering these questions.
Although Beethoven went through a period of relative inactivity between
1812 and 1816, no evidence of overt plans to a make a major stylistic shift
has come to light. Nevertheless, the works themselves tell a different and
abundantly clear story. The overall character of the late works reveals unam-
biguously that Beethoven abandoned the heroic style process of developing
a short, bold motif in dramatic ways and began instead to focus on melody,
demonstrating a new emphasis on lyricism, as well as an increased interest in
counterpoint, especially the fugue.40 In general, the personal, political, and
philosophical crises of the years between 1812 and 1816 had driven Beethoven
to concentrate on what he had perceived to be the weakest aspects of his
composition, melody and counterpoint, and make them the central ele-
ments of his new style. Although Martin Cooper believes that [n]othing
was further from Beethovens whole attitude toward his art than a conscious
search for originality, the deliberate adoption of a new style,41 we nev-
ertheless cannot avoid observing that the late works differ so significantly
from those he had written before that Beethoven must have made a number
of conscious decisions to change his compositional practice. Whatever its
P1: KAE
9780521887618c05 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 30, 2008 17:1
If the same melody can hymn universal joy and also honor the emperor Francis,
we must either believe, with Metternich, that the emperor was the guarantor of
universal joy, or we must assume a continuity between the musical rhetoric of the
Revolution and that of the Restoration a continuity that, when added to the
nonreferential nature of the actual sounds themselves, sums up all the ideological
ambiguities of Beethovens music.54
The secondary theme begins with a simple inversion of the major third
motif, a minor sixth, and bears an overall resemblance to an inverted version
of the opening adagio theme. The theme begins in the first violin, supported
by ordinary harmony in the other instruments. After a slight variation on
the transition, the theme is repeated an octave higher, again in the first
violin. This is perhaps the least original treatment possible for this theme,
which is itself the least original theme possible as well. The movement at this
point sounds like a parody of a Haydn or a Mozart string quartet, although
these composers rarely wrote anything quite so deliberately banal; Kerman
correctly calls the secondary theme a caricature of a lyric phrase, complete
with trite-sounding harmonies.76 Beethovens salute to the obligations of
binary form, a contrasting secondary theme, is a parody of the ordinary
P1: KAE
9780521887618c05 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 30, 2008 17:1
The primary theme makes yet another appearance in the first violin, played
in a subtle piano, with an ostinato figure in the cello and viola that will
continue in at least two of the three lower instruments (either cello and
viola or second violin and viola) for the duration of the development. The
variation on the secondary theme (measures 1067) appears first in the cello
with an octave leap on A (an augmentation of the sixth leap of the secondary
theme) and is harmonized so that at first it sounds like a six-four inversion
P1: KAE
9780521887618c05 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 30, 2008 17:1
Unisons and octaves approach a single note and are followed by a solo
chromatic line which arrives at the same single note before the end of the
second movement, just as the transitions to the primary and secondary
themes in the first movement were accomplished. In this case, the fast
tempo and the glissando followed by three quick staccato notes make this
phrase a kind of insolent joke, as if Beethoven were declaring that these
unisons and chromaticisms were perfectly permissible anywhere he chose
to put them. Together, these gestures indicate that the liberties Beethoven
took in the first movement are now to be considered part of the normal
P1: KAE
9780521887618c05 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 30, 2008 17:1
Beethoven manages to make the cavatina sing despite intervals and har-
monizations that would normally be considered out of the bounds of tra-
ditional vocal music. What he achieves by doing so is a greater sense of
coherence between the individual lines of each instrument and a transi-
tion to the even greater liberties taken with voice leading in the original
Groe Fuge finale. The deliberately sparse use of V-I cadences emphasizes
the point that Beethoven has been making all along in op. 130/133: that con-
trapuntal elements can be expanded to become part of the overall structure
of the movement as effectively as harmonic elements are.
P1: KAE
9780521887618c05 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 30, 2008 17:1
it is this form of the work that pushes most strongly toward new aesthetic per-
spectives. Of all Beethovens compositions, the original B Quartet is perhaps the
most heavily end-weighted, with a diverse series of shorter and lighter movements
followed by a colossal fugal essay. . . . Without the rest of the quartet, moreover, the
Great Fuge is effectively orphaned, and the beginning of its elaborate Overatura
loses point.90
From the distance of nearly two centuries, one cannot deny the essential
unity and power of the work as originally written (although several critics
have tried), yet neither can one question the judgment of an aging composer
who had already received clear indications that he had reached the limits
of his audiences capacity to understand him.
The allegro finale of the published version of op. 130 should therefore
not be considered a weak compromise between composer and publisher,
although it is far lighter and simpler than the Groe Fuge. I argue instead that
it invokes the irony seen in some of the earlier movements with subtlety and
wit. The first phrase of the finale reflects the tone of the whole movement
accurately (Example 8):
P1: KAE
9780521887618c05 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 30, 2008 17:1
The development of the string quartet virtually stopped, and even went backwards,
for throughout this period, for different reasons, the highest achievements of the
1820s remained little observed. Schuberts G major quartet was not published until
1851, and the late quartets of Beethoven existed only on the fringes of the repertory,
rarely played and rarely understood: the extreme case is the Groe Fuge, which
apparently lay unheard between its first performance in 1826 and a revival in Paris
in 1853.91
That the Groe Fuge, possibly Beethovens most difficult piece, was not
a popular favorite is unsurprising, but that it languished unheard for
twenty-seven years is shocking. Still, popular taste is, to a certain extent,
inexplicable; Beethovens most popular work during his lifetime was, of
course, op. 91, Wellingtons Sieg, one of his least successful works artistically.
The Groe Fuge is nearly its opposite: an extraordinary artistic achievement
but not a commercial success until long after its composition.
The Groe Fuge and the late works in general also ended the direc-
tion of formal innovation Beethoven was exploring. Rather than finding
new ways to maintain internal coherence within classical forms, mid- and
late-nineteenth-century composers began to rely more on extra-musical
elements, evincing the ever-growing necessity of characterizing music with
literary ideas. Composers increasingly made a conscious effort to create
expression, beginning an exchange between means and end which would
influence the evolution of Romantic music. Music became increasingly
programmatic, thus compromising its autonomy and paralleling the gen-
eral movement toward sentimentality described in Schillers On Nave and
Sentimental Poetry. This tendency to fragment inherently musical struc-
tures (which began with Schumann) continued to the point where, with
P1: KAE
9780521887618c05 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 30, 2008 17:1
Beyond the various patterns and structural principles that have already
become clear through this analysis of op. 130/133 is an overriding con-
cern at the core of the works existence: a desire to transform sonata
form from a structural element to a surface element and to use the the-
matic material itself as the works fundamental structure. Both small-scale
P1: KAE
9780521887618c05 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 30, 2008 17:1
chapter 6
Two hundred years have passed since the premiere of Beethovens Fifth
and Sixth Symphonies, the publication of Hegels Phenomenology, the end
of Wordsworths Golden Decade, and the beginning of Holderlins mad-
ness, yet their influence is everywhere. Beethovens works are performed,
recorded, and downloaded more often than any composer except for per-
haps Mozart. Hegels 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 Holderlin, 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 , Holderlin, Hegel,
Wordsworth, and Beethoven occupy a greater place in the cultural imag-
ination 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 nave era. On a purely rational level, I understand
and appreciate how the Industrial Revolution, the 1848 uprisings, the two
World Wars, the Vietnam War, and now the seemingly ceaseless War on
Terror might make the Romantic assertion of independent subjectivity and
the primacy of the aesthetic seem quaint, ridiculous, or even pernicious.
Nevertheless, I must assert the opposite. Adorno, as I discussed in the
last chapter, heard the disintegration of the subjective self in Beethovens
late works, and I cannot blame him or any member of his generation for
perceiving a melancholy despair in their complex, and often dark, harmonic
176
P1: KAE
9780521887618c06 CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 22, 2008 19:52
Notes
179
P1: KAE
9780521887618not CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:11
43. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western
Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 29.
44. Subotnik, Developing Variations, p. 41.
45. Adorno, Uber Vermittlung der Musik und Gesellschaft, Beethoven, p. 75.
46. It is widely speculated, but unsubstantiated, that Schiller had intended to use
Freiheit all along but did not do so out of fear that a word so clearly connected
to the French Revolution would be censored.
47. Adorno, Zur Theorie Beethovens, Beethoven, p. 146. The original reads, Die
IX. Symphonie ist kein Spatwerk sondern die Rekonstruktion des klassischen
Beethoven (mit Ausnahme gewisser Teile des letzten Satzes und vor allem des
Trios im dritten).
48. Rudolf Erich Raspe, Baron Munchausens Narrative of His Marvelous Travels
(London: Cresset Press, 1948).
P1: KAE
9780521887618not CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:11
204
P1: KAE
9780521887618bib CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:18
Bibliography
206 Bibliography
Carter, Tim, W. A. Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987
Chua, Daniel K. L., The Galitzin Quartets of Beethoven: opp. 127, 132, 130,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995
Cook, Nicolas, The Other Beethoven: Heroism, the Canon, and the Works of
18131814, Nineteenth-Century Music 27:1 (2003), 324
Cooper, Barry, Beethovens Beliefs and Opinions, in ed. Barry Cooper, The
Beethoven Compendium, London: Thames & Hudson, 1991
Cooper, Martin, Beethoven: the Last Decade, 18171827, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1970
Constantine, David, Holderlin, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988
Dahlhaus, Carl, Die Musik des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Laaber: Laaber Verlag,
1989
, Esthetics of Music, trans. William Austin, Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1983
, The Idea of Absolute Music, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989
, Hegel und die Musik seiner Zeit, Hegelstudien Beiheft 22 (1983),
33350
, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, trans. Mary Whittall,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991
, Ludwig van Beethoven und seine Zeit, Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1987
, Nineteenth-Century Music, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989
Del Caro, Adrian, Holderlin: The Poetics of Being, Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1990
de Man, Paul, Aesthetic Ideology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996
, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971, 1983
, The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986
, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984
, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other
Papers, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993
De Nora, Tia, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna,
17921803, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995
Derrida, Jacques, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian Mac-
Leod, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987
Descartes, Rene, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans.
Donald A. Cress, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998
, CEvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Paris: Librairie
Philosophique J. Vrin, 1966
Deutsch, Otto Erich, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, trans. Eric Blom, Peter
Branscome, and Jeremy Noble, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965
Donelan, James H., Holderlins Poetic Self-Consciousness, Philosophy and
Literature 26:1 (2002), 12542
Espina, Yolanda, Kunst als Grenze: Die Musik bei Hegel, Jahrbuch fur
Hegelforschung 3 (1997), 10333
P1: KAE
9780521887618bib CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:18
Bibliography 207
Ferguson, Frances, Solitude and the Sublime, New York: Routledge, 1992
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, Schriften aus den jahren 17901800: Nachgelassene Schriften,
ed. Hans Jacob, Berlin: Junker & Dunn Verlag, 1937
Finscher, Ludwig, Studien zur Geschichte des Streichquartetts, Kassel: Barenreiter-
Verlag, 1974
Forster, E. M., Howards End, New York: Vintage, 1921
Frank, Manfred, Einfuhrung in die fruhromantische Asthetik: Vorlesungen, Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1989
, Selbstbewutseinstheorien von Fichte bis Sartre, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990
Fry, Paul H., A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995
Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie, Die Asthetik in Hegels System der Philosophie,
in ed. Otto Poggeler, Hegel: Einfuhrung in seiner Philosophie, Freiburg: Verlag
Karl Alber, 1977, 12749
, Phanomen versus System, in Phanomen versus System: zum Verhaltnis
von Systematik und Kunsturteil in Hegels Berliner Vorlesungen uber Asthetik oder
Philosophie der Kunst , ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Hegelstudien Beiheft 34
(1992), pp. 939
Gill, Stephen, William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989
Goehr, Lydia, The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997
Griffiths, Paul, The String Quartet: A History, New York: Thames & Hudson, 1983
Gutman, Robert W., Mozart: A Cultural Biography, New York: Harcourt Brace,
1999
Hamburger, Michael (ed. and trans.), Beethoven: Letters, Journals, and Conversa-
tions, London: Thames & Hudson, 1951
Hamlin, Cyrus, The Philosophy of Poetic Form, in ed. Aris Fioretos, The Solid
Letter: Readings of Friedrich Holderlin, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999,
pp. 292311
Haney, David P., Rents and openings in the ideal world: Eye and Ear in
Wordsworth, Studies in Romanticism 36 (1997), 17399
Hartman, Geoffrey, Wordsworths Poetry, 17871814, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1971
Hatten, Robert, Plenitude as Fulfillment: The Third Movement of Beethovens
String Quartet in B, Op. 130, in ed. William Kinderman, The String Quartets
of Beethoven, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006, pp. 21433
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Die Idee und das Ideal. Einleitung in die Asthetik.
Mit den beiden Vorreden von Heinrich Gustav Hotho, ed. Wolfhart Henckmann
Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1967
, Hegels Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975
, Enzyklopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1970
, Phanomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister, Hamburg: Felix Meiner
Verlag, 1952
P1: KAE
9780521887618bib CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:18
208 Bibliography
, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1977
, Vorlesung uber die Asthetik, ed. F. Bassenge, Berlin: Felix Meiner Verlag,
1965
, Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Kunst: Berlin 1823, ed. Annemarie
Gethmann-Siefert, transcribed by H. G. Hotho, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag,
1998
Heidegger, Martin, Erlauterung zu Holderlins Dichtung, Frankfurt: Kloster, 1951
Helm, Theodor, Beethovens Streichquartette, Nieder Walluf bei Wiesbaden: M.
Sandig, 1971
Henrich, Dieter, The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Holderlin,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997
, Der Grund im Bewutsein: Untersuchung zu Holderlins Denken (17941795),
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992
, Holderlin uber Urteil und Sein: Eine Studie zur Entstehungsgeschichte
des Idealismus, Holderlin Jahrbuch XIV (19656), 7396
, Konstellationen, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991
, Subjektivitat und Metaphysik, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1966
Hoeckner, Berthold, Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-century German Music
and the Hermeneutics of the Moment, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002
Hoffmann, E. T. A. Rezension von L. van Beethovens Sinfonie in C moll, in
Schriften zur Musik, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979, pp.
3451.
Holderlin, Friedrich, Friedrich Holderlin: Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael
Hamburger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966
, Samtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Friedrich Beiner, Stuttgart: Verlag W.
Kohlhammer, 1961
Hollander, John, Romantic Verse Form and the Metrical Contract, in Romanti-
cism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Norton,
1970), pp. 181200
, Wordsworth and the Music of Sound, in New Perspectives on Coleridge
and Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey Hartman, New York: Columbia University Press,
1972, pp. 4184
Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, New York:
Prometheus Books, 1988
Jones, Nancy A., The Rape of the Rural Muse: Wordsworths The Solitary
Reaper in ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver, Rape and Representa-
tion, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, pp. 26377
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1996
, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Berlin: Cassirer, 1922
, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968
Kerman, Joseph, The Beethoven Quartets, New York: W. W. Norton, 1966
, and Alan Tyson, The New Grove Beethoven, London: Macmillan, 1980
P1: KAE
9780521887618bib CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:18
Bibliography 209
Kerst, Friedrich (ed.) and Henry Edward Krehbiel (ed. and trans.), Beethoven: the
Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words, New York: Dover, 1964
Kinderman, William, Beethovens Last Quartets: Threshold to a Fourth Creative
Period? in ed. William Kinderman, The String Quartets of Beethoven, Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2006, pp. 279322
Kivy, Peter, The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993
Knittel, K. M., The Construction of Beethoven, in The Cambridge History of
Nineteenth-Century Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11856
Korner, Christian Gottfried, Uber Charakterdarstellung in der Musik, reprinted in
Wolfgang Seifert, Christian Gottfried Korner: ein Musikasthetiker der deutschen
Klassik, Regensburg: Gustav Bosse: 1960
Kramer, Lawrence, The Harem Threshold: Turkish Music and Greek Love in
Beethovens Ode to Joy Nineteenth-Century Music 22:1 (1998) 7890
, Music as Cultural Practice, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990
Kroeber, Karl, Beyond the Imaginable: Wordsworth and Turner, in ed. K. John-
ston and G. Ruoff, The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Ro-
mantic Tradition, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993, pp. 196213
, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1994
Kropfinger, Klaus, Das gespaltene Werk: Beethovens Streichquartett Op. 130/133,
in ed. Sieghard Brandenburg and Helmut Loos, Beitrage zu Beethovens
Kammermusik: Symposion Bonn 1984, Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1987,
pp. 296335
Kurz, Gerhard, and Manfred Frank, Ordo Inversus. Zu einer Reflexionsfigur bei
Novalis, Holderlin, Kleist, und Kafka, in ed. H. Anton et al., Geist und Zeichen.
Festschrift fur Arthur Henkel, Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1977,
pp. 7597
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, The Caesura of the Speculative, Holderlin Jarhbuch
XXII (19801), 4768
, and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in
German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, Albany: SUNY
Press, 1988
le Huray, Peter, and James Day, Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-
Nineteenth Centuries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988
von Lindemann, Ferdinand, Uber die Zahl , Mathematische Annalen 20 (1882),
21225
Lippmann, Edward, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics, Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1992
Liu, Alan, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1989
Lockwood, Lewis, Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process, Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1992
, Beethoven: The Music and the Life, New York: W. W. Norton, 2003
P1: KAE
9780521887618bib CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:18
210 Bibliography
Marston, Nicholas, Intellectual Currents: Philosophy and Aesthetics, in ed.
Barry Cooper, The Beethoven Compendium, London: Thames & Hudson, 1991,
pp. 6264
Marx, Adolf Bernhard, Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen, Berlin: Verlag von Otto
Janke, 1828, 1901
, Die Lehre der musikalischen Komposition, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1868
, Erinnerungen. Aus meinem Leben, Berlin: Otto Janke, 1865
Marx, Werner, Schelling and Hegel, in The Philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling, trans.
Thomas Nennon, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984
McCleary, Susan, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991
McGann, Jerome, Romantic Ideology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983
Medelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix, Letter to Julius Schubring, 27 February, 1841, in
ed. Peter le Huray and James Day, Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and
Early-Nineteenth Centuries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp.
310311
Meyer, Leonard B., Emotion and Meaning in Music, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1956
Mozart W. A., and Lorenzo da Ponte, Le nozze di Figaro, New York: Schirmer, 1951
, The Letters of Mozart and His Family, trans. and ed. Emily Anderson,
London: Macmillan, 1966
Nicolin, Gunther (ed.), Hegel in Berichten seiner Zeitgenossen, Hamburg: Felix
Meiner Verlag, 1970
OBrien, William Alexander, Getting Blasted: Holderlins Wie wenn am
Feiertage . . . Modern Language Notes 94 (1979), 57186
ODonnell, Brendan, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworths Metrical Art,
Kent: Kent State University Press, 1995
Page, Judith W., Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994
Pinkard, Terry, Hegel: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000
Pippin, Robert B., Hegels Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989
Plantinga, Leon, Beethovens Concertos, New York: W. W. Norton, 2000
Raspe, Rudolf Erich, Baron Munchausens Narrative of His Marvelous Travels,
London: Cresset Press, 1948
Rink, John, The Profession of Music, in ed. Jim Samson, The Cambridge History
of Nineteenth-Century Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001,
pp. 5586
Robinson, Jeffrey C., The Power of Sound; The Unremitting Voice of Nightly
Streams, The Wordsworth Circle 23:3 (1992), 1769
Rosen, Charles, The Classical Style, New York: W. W. Norton, 1971
Roth, Stephanie, Friedrich Holderlin und die deutsche Fruhromantik, Stuttgart:
J. B. Metzler, 1991
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Essential Rousseau, trans. J. H. Mason, ed., J. H.
Moran, New York: Quartet Books, 1974
P1: KAE
9780521887618bib CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:18
Bibliography 211
Ryan, Lawrence, Holderlins Lehre vom Wechsel der Tone, Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer,
1960
Samson, Jim, The Musical Work and Nineteenth-Century Music History, in ed.
Jim Samson, The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 328
Schalhorn, Christof, Hegels Enzyklopadischer Begriff von Selbstbewutsein,
Hegelstudien Beiheft 43 (2000), 88156
Schelling, F. W. J., Philosophie der Kunst, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlich Buchhand-
lung, 1966
, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1962
Schering, Arnold, Die Eroica, eine Homer-Symphonie Beethovens? Translated
with an Introduction and Commentary, Current Musicology 69 (2000), 6896
Schiller, Friedrich, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, trans.
Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967
, On Nave and Sentimental Poetry, trans. Julias A. Elias, New York: F. Ungar,
1966
Schmidlin, Guido, Holderlins Ode: Dichterberuf, Bern: Francke Verlag, 1958
Schmidt, Jochen, Holderlins Elegie Brod und Wein; die Entwicklung des hymnischen
Stils in der elegischen Dichtung, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968
Schuttauf, Konrad, Die Kunst und die bildenen Kunste: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit
Hegels Asthetik, Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1984
Seifert, Wolfgang, Christian Gottfried Korner: ein Musikasthetiker der deutschen
Klassik, Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1960
Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1985
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Neville
Rodgers, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975
Smyser, Jane Worthington, Wordsworths Dream of Poetry and Science, Pro-
ceedings of the Modern Language Association, 121 (1956), 26975
Solomon, Maynard, Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination, Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2003
, Beethoven, New York: Schirmer, 1977
, Mozart, New York: Harper Collins, 1995
Stierle, Karlheinz Dichtung und Auftrag: Holderlins Patmos-Hymne, Holderlin
Jahrbuch 22 (19801), 4768
Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western
Music, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991
Szondi, Peter, Holderlinstudien, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977
Thayer, Alfred Wheelock, The Life of Beethoven, Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1960
Wallace, Robin, Beethovens Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions During the
Composers Lifetime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986
Warminski, Andrzej, Missed Crossing: Wordsworths Apocalypses, Modern Lan-
guage Notes 99:2 (1984), 9831006
P1: KAE
9780521887618bib CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 January 25, 2008 14:18
212 Bibliography
, Readings in Interpretation: Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger, Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1987
Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason,
New York: Longman Group, 1992
William Wordsworth, The Letters of William Wordsworth: A New Selection,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991
, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and S.
Gill, New York: Norton, 1979
, Wordsworth: The 1807 Poems, ed. Alun R. Jones, London: Macmillan, 1990
, William Wordsworth: The Poems, Vol. I, ed. John O. Hayden, New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1981, p. 659
Zoller, Gunter, An Eye for an I: Fichtes Transcendental Experiment, in ed. David
E. Klemm and Gunter Zoller, Figuring the Self: Subject, Absolute, and Others in
Classical German Philosophy, Albany: SUNY Press, 1997, pp. 7398
, Fichtes Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and
Will, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998
P1: KAE
9780521887618ind CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:40
Index
213
P1: KAE
9780521887618ind CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:40
214 Index
Brown, Marshall, 2 Hamburger, Michael, 50
Broyles, Michael, 145 Hamlin, Cyrus, 40
Buch, Esteban, 153 Handel, George Frideric (Georg Friedrich), 150
Bullinger, Abbe, 25 Haney, David, 106
Bungay, Stephen, 71, 82, 87 Hanslick, Eduard, 101
Burnham, Scott, 4, 146148, 151 Hartman, Geoffrey, 107, 121, 123
Butler, Judith, 177 Hatten, Robert, 167
Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 107, 111, 134 Haydn, Franz Josef, 26, 87, 137, 138, 142, 143, 150,
153, 155, 156, 159, 161, 171, 173, 198
Cervantes, Miguel de, 120 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 30, 97, 98,
Chua, Daniel, 154, 157 105, 111, 136
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 30, 56, 104, 113, 115, aesthetics, lectures on (history), 6970, 71
116 Aufhebung (sublation), 73, 85
Colloredo, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, 1, 25, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 84, 85
27 end of art thesis, 70, 75
Cook, Nicolas, 144 forms of art (Kunstformen) theory, 78
Cooper, Barry, 141 Geist (spirit), 73
Cooper, Martin, 149 History of Philosophy, 80
Czerny, Carl, 146 Lectures on Aesthetics, 131
Lectures on Aesthetics (general principles),
da Ponte, Lorenzo, 28 7582
da Vinci, Leonardo, 31 Lectures on Aesthetics (music), 8290
Dahlhaus, Carl, 13, 88, 101, 139, 140, 145, 148, 152, Lectures on Aesthetics (poetry), 9195
169, 173 Phenomenology of Spirit, 16, 47, 7275, 81, 147,
Dante (Dante Alighieri), 117 148, 151, 176, 177, 189
Dasein, 82, 186 Philosophy of History, 80, 81, 152
de Man, Paul, 39, 48, 55, 99, 125, 176 role in creation of Systemprogramm Fragment,
Derrida, Jacques, 11 22
Descartes, Rene, 1, 7, 38, 53, 116, 197 Science of Logic, 73
Don Quixote, 120, 121 Tubinger Freunde, as member of, 14, 18, 35, 68
Dyce, Alexander, 130 unhappy consciousness, 91
Heidegger, Martin, 39
early Romantic period (defined), 3 Heinse, Wilhelm, 56
Einbildung, 17 Helm, Theodor, 167
entgegensetzen, 16 Henrich, Dieter, 15, 18, 35, 37, 176
Euclid, 118 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 68
Hoeckner, Berthold, 152
Ferguson, Frances, 11 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 4, 101, 136,
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 2, 5, 56, 72, 148, 181 145
influence on Holderlin, 3436 Hegels view of, 91
influence on later Idealists, 1819 review of Beethovens Fifth Symphony, 8890
self-consciousness, 1416 Holderlin, Friedrich, 4, 30, 32, 68, 73, 98, 137,
Wissenschaftlehre, 16 148
formalism, 11 An die Parzen, 50
Formtrieb, 17 Bohlendorff letter, 48
Forster, Edward Morgan, 138 Brod und Wein, 4959, 60, 62
Frank, Manfred, 35 Der Rhein, 63
Fry, Paul, 110 Dichterberuf , 4445, 50, 57, 63
Diotima, 43
Galitzin, Prince Nicolas Boris, 154, 156 Friedensfeier, 62
Gethmann-Siefert, Anne-Marie, 69, 71, 75, 189 Hyperion (novel), 33
Goehr, Lydia, 26 madness, 176
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 65, 70, 141 Patmos, 49, 62, 68
Gray, Thomas, 104 role in creation of Systemprogramm Fragment,
Griffiths, Paul, 155, 172 22
P1: KAE
9780521887618ind CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:40
Index 215
Tubinger Freunde, as member of, 14, 18 McCleary, Susan, 101
Urtheil und Seyn, 34, 3537, 72 McGann, Jerome, 98
Wechsel der Tone, 34, 43, 48, 50 Mendelssohn, Felix (Jakob Ludwig Felix
Wie wenn am Feiertage . . . , 49, 6267 Mendelssohn Bartholdy), 77, 136
Hollander, John, 103, 119 Metternich, Prince Klemens Wenzel von, 153
Homer, 127 Meyer, Leonard B., 101
Hotho, Heinrich Gustav, 69, 70, 71, 82, 84, Michelangelo (Michelangelo di Lodovico
189 Buonarroti Simoni), 31
Howards End (novel), 138 Milton, John, 129
Hume, David, 6, 177 mimesis, 11
Mitchell, W. J. T., 106
Industrial Revolution, 176 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1, 5, 77, 87, 137,
intellectual intuition, 20 142, 143, 150, 156, 161
as genius, 24
Josef II, Emperor of Austria, 25 Don Giovanni, K.527, 2930, 136
father (Leopold Mozart), 25
Kant, Immanuel, 1, 5, 30, 36, 72, 73, 80, 85, 101, La finta giardiniera, K.196, 28, 34
120, 141, 177 Le nozze di Figaro, K.492, 2829, 123
Affektenlehre (doctrine of emotions), 13 piano concerto, 2728
apperceptive self-awareness, 7 Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K.488, 27
Critique of Judgment, 8, 9, 16, 24, 80 Salzburg, view of, 25
Critique of Practical Reason, 9, 16
Critique of Pure Reason, 1, 5, 79, 13, 21 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 24
empirical self-awareness, 7 Napoleon (Napoleon Bonaparte), 68
intellectual intuition, 15, 20, 36 Neefe, Christian Gottlob, 142
on music, 1113 Newton, Isaac, 38, 53
self-consciousness, 5, 14, 22, 33 Niethammer, Immanuel, 37
synthetic unity of apperception, 6, 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 101
teleological judgment, 9 Nowak, Adolf, 94
transcendental deduction, 6, 7
Kerman, Joseph, 143, 157, 160, 161, 164, 167, 169, ODonnell, Brendan, 106
199 Oedipus, 129
Kivy, Peter, 13
Knox, Thomas Malcolm, 77, 83, 87 Perrey, Beate Julia, 137
Kojeve, Alexandre, 4 Pindar, 43, 49, 53
Korner, Christian Gottfried, 4042, 101 Pippin, Robert, 15
Kramer, Lawrence, 102, 111, 152 Plantinga, Leon, 141, 142
Kroeber, Karl, 98, 100, 102 Plato, 37
Kurz, Gerhard, 35 Platoff, John, 157, 160, 164
Pythagoras, 22, 85
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 24, 46, 47
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 38 quatuor brillant, 156
Lippmann, Edward, 12 quatuor concertant, 156
Liszt, Franz, 101
Lockwood, Lewis, 168 Raspe, Rudolf, 152
Lots wife, 120 Reicha, Antonin, 146
Lukacs, Georg, 4 Revelation, 60, 119
Rink, John, 26
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 176 Rob Roy (Robert Roy MacGregor), 109
Malzel, Johann Nepomuk, 144 Robinson, Jeffrey, 106
Marianne, Princess of Hesse-Homburg, 68 Romantic ideology, 98
Marston, Nicholas, 141 Rosen, Charles, 27, 144, 155
Marx, Adolf Bernhard, 4, 88, 136, 145, 146 Rossini, Gioachino, 88, 89, 167
Marx, Karl, 4, 79, 177 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 39
Marx, Werner, 20, 79 Ryan, Lawrence, 40
P1: KAE
9780521887618ind CUUS116/Donelan 978 0 521 88761 8 March 11, 2008 18:40
216 Index
Salieri, Antonio, 26 Tales of the Thousand and One Nights, 117
Samson, Jim, 25 Tathandlung, 15
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 3, 14, Tiresias, 129
38, 72 tonic-dominant axis, 155
on music, 2122 transcendental deduction, 5
on self-consciousness, 1921 Tubinger Freunde, 18, 68
Philosophie der Kunst, 21, 23, 189 Tyson, Alan, 143
role in creation of Systemprogramm Fragment,
22 Viennese Classicism, 4, 31, 87, 137, 156
System des transzendentalen Idealismus, 21, 22 Vietnam War, 176
Tubinger Freunde, as member of, 18, 35 Virgil (Publius Virgilius Maro), 117
Schering, Arnold, 141 Vorstellung, 7, 11, 12, 17
Schiller, Friedrich, 2, 5, 14, 21, 37, 40, 42, 70, 81,
118, 136, 137, 152, 172 Wagner, Richard, 101
compared to Fichte, 18 Wallace, Robin, 88
On Aesthetic Education, 16, 23 War on Terror, 176
on music, 1618 Warminski, Andrzej, 46, 47, 73, 121, 124
Schlegel, August Friedrich and Karl Wilhelm, 35, Wellesley, Arthur, First Duke of Wellington, 144
81 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 78, 81
Schmidlin, Guido, 45 Wordsworth, William, 4, 30, 136, 137
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3 Golden Decade, 176
Schubert, Franz, 3 knowledge of German philosophy, 98
Schuttauf, Konrad, 79 Lucy poems, 126
Selbstobjektwerden, 20, 72, 73 On the Power of Sound, 99, 130, 133
self-consciousness (defined), 3 Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), 107
self-positing, 15 Power of Music, The, 130
Semele, 65 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 99, 103105,
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 134 113
Sinclair, Isaac von, 68 Prelude, 99, 110
Smyser, Jane Worthington, 116 Prelude, Book I, 112115
Solomon, Maynard, 27, 138, 153 Prelude, Book V, The Boy of Winander,
sonata-allegro form, dialectical nature of, 122126
154155 Prelude, Book V, The Dream of the Arab,
Spieltrieb, 17 115122, 133
spontaneity (of self-consciousness), 14 Prelude, Book VI, Simplon Pass episode, 126
St. John, 60, 65, 133 Prelude, Book VII, The Blind Beggar,
St. Matthew, 54 126130
St. Paul, 129 Prelude, Book XII, 134135
Stierle, Karlheinz, 60 Resolution and Independence, 130
stile brillante, 26 Rob Roys Grave, 107
Stofftrieb, 17 Solitary Reaper, The, 99, 107112, 123, 125
Strauss, Johann, 167 The Prelude, 56
Stravinsky, Igor, 101 The Recluse, 129
Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, 101, 148, 150, 151 To a Cuckoo, 109
Systemprogramm Fragment, 2224, 30, 32, 33, 37,
38, 68, 69 Zoller, Gunther, 15, 16
Szondi, Peter, 46, 47, 176 Zur Wohltatigkeit (Masonic lodge), 29