The Role of Music in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics

Abstract

Few readers will be unfamiliar with E. T. A. Hoffmann's imaginative music criticism, and especially with his essay on Beethoven's instrumental music in which the author compares the music of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn. Haydn, Hoffmann suggested, leads us through green groves and amongst throngs of happy people. We find there life such as was before the Fall, full of bliss, with no pain or suffering other than a sweet, sad longing for the beloved. Mozart, however, leads us into the very heart of the spirit world. Fear grips us, but not a torturing fear; rather a premonition of the infinite. Tender accents of love and melancholy are to be heard, and we follow with inexpressible longing the figures that wave to us in friendly greeting as they soar through the clouds in the eternal dance of the spheres. Beethoven, on the other hand, transports us to the realms of the monstrous and the unfathomable. Glowing rays flash through the deep night and we are conscious of giant, surging shadows that close in on us, obliterating everything within us other than the pain of infinite yearning. Hoffmann's prose is striking; indeed, nothing quite like it had existed before. His criticisms are veritable symphonies in words of which Ludwig Tieck would surely have been proud. Original as this kind of criticism may have been, though, the ideas behind it owe rather more to the immediate past than is at first sight apparent. We have only to explore one or two of the paths that lead through the forbidding no-man's-land of eighteenth-century musical aesthetics to see that this was so, paths that once were much frequented but which are now sadly overgrown.