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Musical Revolutions in German CultureFriedrich Schlegel and Romanticized Music

Musical Revolutions in German Culture: Friedrich Schlegel and Romanticized Music [As the symphonies of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were resounding throughout the late eighteenth-century concert halls of Berlin, Dresden, and Jena, a 25-year-old Friedrich Schlegel was scribbling fragments in his literary notebooks about music with “sublime audacity” (KA, 24: 31).1 Although he never developed these fragments into a comprehensive theory of musical aesthetics, numerous remarks on music can be found scattered throughout his many aesthetic, literary, and philosophical writings. Unlike for the early German Romantic writers Friedrich von Hardenburg (Novalis), Ludwig Tieck, and Heinrich Wilhelm Wackenroder, music did not serve as a key theoretical axis of his philosophical project. However, contrary to the contentions of earlier scholarship, Schlegel was neither insensitive nor oblivious to music’s inherent aesthetic potentiality.2 Even though he was never, strictly speaking, a music aficionado, Schlegel was very familiar with contemporary debates on music. While studying classical Greek culture, for example, he carefully read the first volume of Johann Nicolaus Forkel’s A General History of Music (1788), which is widely considered to be the first modern work of musicology. In two letters to his older brother, August Wilhelm, in 1795, Schlegel caustically dismisses Forkel’s ahistorical reduction of music into a system of rhetorical strategies as inherently flawed (KA, 23: 226, 251).3 This negative evaluation of rhetorically deducible effects would soon resonate throughout his entire cultural critique.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Musical Revolutions in German CultureFriedrich Schlegel and Romanticized Music

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2014
ISBN
978-1-349-49763-8
Pages
25 –51
DOI
10.1057/9781137449955_2
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[As the symphonies of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were resounding throughout the late eighteenth-century concert halls of Berlin, Dresden, and Jena, a 25-year-old Friedrich Schlegel was scribbling fragments in his literary notebooks about music with “sublime audacity” (KA, 24: 31).1 Although he never developed these fragments into a comprehensive theory of musical aesthetics, numerous remarks on music can be found scattered throughout his many aesthetic, literary, and philosophical writings. Unlike for the early German Romantic writers Friedrich von Hardenburg (Novalis), Ludwig Tieck, and Heinrich Wilhelm Wackenroder, music did not serve as a key theoretical axis of his philosophical project. However, contrary to the contentions of earlier scholarship, Schlegel was neither insensitive nor oblivious to music’s inherent aesthetic potentiality.2 Even though he was never, strictly speaking, a music aficionado, Schlegel was very familiar with contemporary debates on music. While studying classical Greek culture, for example, he carefully read the first volume of Johann Nicolaus Forkel’s A General History of Music (1788), which is widely considered to be the first modern work of musicology. In two letters to his older brother, August Wilhelm, in 1795, Schlegel caustically dismisses Forkel’s ahistorical reduction of music into a system of rhetorical strategies as inherently flawed (KA, 23: 226, 251).3 This negative evaluation of rhetorically deducible effects would soon resonate throughout his entire cultural critique.]

Published: Nov 2, 2015

Keywords: Rhetorical Strategy; Musical Work; Musical Signifier; German Culture; Transcendental Philosophy

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