[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

book review:

Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic

by James H. Donelan

reviewed by Martine Prange, University of Amsterdam & University of Maastricht (The Netherlands)

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010. Copyright © 2010 Martine Prange and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

Two hundred years have passed since the premiere of Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the publication of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the end of Wordsworth’s Golden Decade, and the beginning of Hölderlin’s madness, yet these four key figures of Romanticism and Idealism—all born in the year 1770—still occupy a tremendous place in the collective cultural imagination, for the reason that, as James Donelan argues in his fine Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic, in their works they addressed issues of ‘identity, freedom, and beauty that still matter’ (p. 176), i.e., they express ‘hope for the reintegration of the self through beauty’ (p. 177). That is the wider, extra-musical meaning that absolute (instrumental/non-programmatic) music conveys, particularly Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13, according to Donelan. ‘How can music represent self-consciousness?’ is the central question of an account that soon admits that music indeed can represent self-consciousness, according to the Romantic-Idealist aesthetic, which goes so far as to imagine music and self-consciousness as ‘mutually positing, reciprocal dialectical structures’ (p. xi). Recently, Andrew Bowie already demonstrated the intimate, mutually qualifying relationship between music and modern subjectivity in Modern German philosophy, while inquiring the meaning of music ‘qua music’ (instead of as ‘language’) in Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche (2nd ed. 2003) and Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Donelan operates along similar lines, covering the fields of literary criticism, musicology, and philosophy, and likewise starting from the Oldest System Programme. Remarkably, though, Donelan denies that other landmark framework of nineteenth-century musical discussions: the binary opposition between beauty (produced by visual arts and poetry) and the sublime (music), for undeclared reasons, as well as the question of music’s unique power to create universal understanding and community, due to its independence of language. His contextualization does not go so far as to raise questions about music’s changing political and cultural function at the time, although these questions indeed relate directly to the central question of the expression (or representation) of self-awareness in music (as well as to the question of the genius composer and the experience of the sublime) as it rises with Romanticism and German Idealism. Donelan confines his research methodologically to this single question, historically to the years 1795-1831, thus focusing on the new ontology of music that emerged in the wake of Mozart’s struggle to overcome the patronage system of his time and the celebratory character of music that went with it (i.e., celebrating God or the patron), and geographically/culturally to the German-speaking (Hölderlin, Hegel, Beethoven) and English-speaking (Wordsworth) worlds.

Concentrating on Hegel, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, and Beethoven, Donelan moreover avoids the larger part of both German/English and wider Romantic music. Of course, all Romantic music relates in one way or another to Beethoven, but not accounting for skipping Wagner, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Verdi, and Strauss, while speaking of ‘the Romantic musical aesthetic’ in the book title, is a substantial omission, next to its being a smart move if one wants to shun discussion of one’s own essentialist characterization of Romanticism. Would it not have been more obvious to discuss E.T.A. Hoffmann, Brendel, Liszt, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the ‘war’ between Old and New German School of Music over Beethoven’s symphonic legacy, if one claims to discuss ‘the’ Romantic musical aesthetic rather than Hegel, Hölderlin, and Wordsworth, the first being a philosopher and the other two being poets?

Rather than pointing out the variety and development in different Romantic musical aesthetic theories, however, Donelan sets out to explore how and why the conception of the human self as an autonomous, free mind became an object of artistic, more specifically musical reflection in early Romantic poetry and music. In other words, why was music, rather than poetry and visual arts, so apt to express or represent selfhood? That Donelan chooses Hegel, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, and Beethoven in this investigation is not only because they were all born in 1770, but also for the reason that they, or rather the works they produced discussed by Donelan, may be conceived as exemplary for a whole range of scholars and artists that regarded music as of utmost relevance for philosophy and aesthetics—their artworks expressing a growing sense of self-awareness. Donelan analyses representative art works as products and representations of the particular feelings and thoughts of the individual artist. In this regard, however, it is rather estranging that so little attention is paid to the Romantic cult of ‘genius.’

‘Self-consciousness,’ of course, is an invention of Enlightenment philosophy and culture, subsequently explored by Romantic art and thought. Donelan is aware of this, given his accuracy to outline, in a very clear, rather brief yet narrative way (i.e., drawing upon secondary literature rather than arguing his position in discussion with it) the developments intimating the Romantic interest in ‘self-consciousness’ in chapter 1 (‘Self-Consciousness and Music in the Late Enlightenment’). He points out its roots in Kant’s critical works and Mozart’s transformation of Enlightenment musical aesthetics, discusses further the Oldest System Programme fragment, after which he devotes consecutive chapters to Hölderlin’s implementation of musical forms in the Deutscher Gesang poems, the place of music in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, Wordsworth’s poetical interest in sounds of nature, and the expression of selfhood in Beethoven’s String Quartets. He does so in an very readable, lucid, and elegant prose, however not always questioning or explicating the different philosophical and aesthetic concepts (‘Idealism,’ ‘subjectivity,’ ‘beauty’) and sometimes drawing more on secondary sources for the interpretation of primary literature than on his own understanding.

Despite the book’s focus on the years 1795-1831, chapter 1 shows that the turning point must be located in 1781, when Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason came out and Mozart gave up his position as court composer in order to continue autonomously, thus planting the seeds of the later Romantic project. Donelan shows that the combined power of Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgement, published nine years later, should be held accountable for the Romantic defence of art and self-expression. In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant set the limits of human knowledge, arguing the active role of the human mind in structuring the reception of appearances. This focus on appearances led him to explore the aesthetic judgement, i.e., the judgement of sense data, in Critique of Judgement. Thus directing the metaphysical focus to aesthetics and the subjectivity of knowledge, Kant paved the way for scientific and philosophical reflections on the subject, aesthetics, and, despite his focus on the beauty of nature, art. In the same period, Mozart forged an independent career as a public composer, soloist, and conductor, making his control over the musical performance nearly absolute, and, negating the rules of decoration by focusing in its place on the expression of inner thought, feeling, and freedom in the newly created stile brillante, changed and professionalized European musical culture. Mozart’s influence reached its pinnacle in the opera Don Giovanni of 1787, in which he not only innovated musical style but also challenged social conventions in asserting his individual freedom.

Thus, the year 1781 was a landmark year, the year in which art and philosophy hooked up, albeit still rather unconsciously, in order to be wedded and blossom in Romantic philosophy of music, launched by the Oldest System Programme Fragment (very probably conceived in 1796 by Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin), which Donelan then discusses in the same chapter. It offers a solution to the problem of self-consciousness, stated by Kant, referring to the aesthetic imagination, beauty, and freedom and thus unifying ideas put forward by Kant, Schiller, Fichte, and Schelling. Through an act of the imagination (the presentation of the self in an image or ‘aesthetic intuition’), the self postulates itself as absolutely free and self-conscious, as inherent in the idea of the subject itself. Thus, this programmatic leaflet placed the concept of ‘self-consciousness’ entirely within aesthetics, Donelan shows, ‘leaving open the possibility that art could better express, demonstrate, or manifest the concept than philosophy’ (p. 23), representing ‘the beginning of philosophical beginnings in self-consciousness as aesthetic investigations’ (ibid.).

The fragment thus paved the way for poetry as the basis for philosophy and aesthetics as the basis of metaphysics. The fragment, combining and transgressing Kant, Fichte, and Schelling’s understandings of self-consciousness as emerging from intellectual intuition (Kant), the positing of the self in the phrase ‘I am I’ (Fichte) and the aesthetic encounter and unification of subject and object (Schelling) describes the moment in which the self becomes conscious of itself as a free and ‘aesthetic choice to become self-conscious, the result of a desire for beauty’ (p. 33). This is primarily materialized in the ‘poetological’ writings of Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘the poet of poets’ (Heidegger). On the basis of close readings of the fragmentary essay ‘Judgement and Being’ (‘Urteil und Sein’, 1795), ‘Change of Tone’ (p. 34) or ‘Exchange of Tones’ (‘Wechsel der Töne’, p. 40), and the poem Deutscher Gesang, it is argued in Chapter 2 (‘Hölderlin’s Deutscher Gesang and the Music of Poetic Self-Consciousness’) that for Hölderlin musical form plays a critical role in reconciling poetry (concreteness) and philosophy (abstraction) by synthesizing subject and object, while concurrently researching the connection between human existence and divine transcendence, as well as between German/European present and Greek past. Hölderlin’s focus was on the realization of the self in poetry’s music, the material manifestation of the divine in the human, thus making up ‘[...] a system in which the poet’s vocation, poetic language, and finally poetry itself manifest themselves as a combination of self-consciousness and divine will’ (p. 67). This is indeed the case in Deutscher Gesang, which consists of a series of complex musical metaphors based on an idealized view of the Pindaric poetical tradition, reflecting a longing for transcendence typical for Romantic aesthetics, while at the same time the poetical language underwrites the claim of self-consciousness in its awareness of being poetical itself: ‘[...] the philosophical act of saying “I am I” becomes both a theoretical and a practical statement when performed in poetic discourse’ (p. 40). This is especially true for ‘Exchange of Tones,’ which Donelan (rather than with Schiller) reads in the light of Christian Körner’s essay ‘On the Representation of Character in Music,’ published in Die Horen in 1795. Körner argues, against Kant, that music requires unity and that that unity equals the representation of character. Donelan then argues that Hölderlin identifies keys (‘Töne’) as unifying elements of poetic composition, representing a ‘naïve,’ ‘heroic’ or ‘ideal’ character (rather than emotional states), following Schiller’s admonition that ‘all great art should try to approach the condition of music through sheer form’ (p. 42). In combining this formal device with Körner’s notion of (naïve, heroic, ideal) ‘character’ and the poetic self-awareness (or: the ‘Greece-Hesperia dialectic’, p. 48), Hölderlin comes to a practical-poetic solution to the problem of self-consciousness: the poet identifies himself with the naïve, heroic or idealistic character to construct his own identity and the poem: ‘The Hesperian poet begins by recognizing that the naïveté of Greek poetry reveals their fiery nature, yet cannot be shared at this historical and cultural distance. He or she therefore must undergo a heroic act of self-positing with respect to that difference and create an idealistic vision of this transformation in poetry’ (p. 49). Rather than sentimentally longing for Greek naïveté, Hölderlin wants to acknowledge the difference between Greek and Modern poetry (remarkably, Donelan does not at all refer to Schiller’s ‘Ueber naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung’ here, also published originally in Die Horen of 1795-1796, which obviously influenced Hölderlin’s thought). The ‘self-consciousness,’ then, is gained in song, by way of confrontation with ‘what is foreign’ (‘das Fremde’).

Having pointed out the musicality of Hölderlin’s poetry and dialectic, or triadic, poetics, the question in chapter 3 (‘Hegel’s Aesthetic Theory: Self-Consciousness and Musical Material’) is what the role of music is in Hegel’s dialectical interpretation of the self. Idea of self-consciousness in Hegel, Hölderlin’s friend of the Tübinger Stift, continues to keep some notion of aesthetic intuition epitomized by music, Donelan argues by showing how Hegel first regarded music as a manifestation of self-consciousness, only to leave that function to philosophy later on, and viewing Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (delivered first in 1818 and last in 1829) as a maturatization of the Oldest System Programme fragment. More generally, Hegel regarded artworks to be acts of self-reflection. In Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel had presented his Idealist account of the self as a historical, retrospective, and progressive process of coming to self-consciousness (one gets to know the self by knowing one’s history), while overcoming the gap between theory and praxis (the practice of becoming self-aware, rather than understanding the self as a theoretical construct) and the material manifestation of the knowledge the self has gained about itself in the social realm. The subject creates objects in order to enter the world, positing itself in it. Such objects are, for example, works of art—as concrete and sensuous representations of knowledge.

For Hegel, however, the highpoint of art (‘the end of art’) was already reached in Classical Times—as for so many of his contemporaries. This view had its ramifications for his appreciation of music. Hegel is not a good example of the Romantic school of music, simply because he does not believe that (Romantic, German) music is the highest form of art (whether or not it imitates Greek music). Music does, however, represent ‘the indeterminate movement of the inner spirit’ for him, and therefore he does call music a paradigmatic ‘Romantic’ art form. Like Körner, thus, Hegel rejects Kant’s interpretation of music as ‘beautiful play of emotions,’ apprehending it physiologically (music as sound heard by the ear) and philosophically (intellectual/emotional meaning of music as abstract apprehension of inner subjectivity). However, rather than supporting ‘absolute music’ (instrumental music), like the Romantics, Hegel prefers Italian opera (Rossini), claiming that the singing human voice is the highest expression of the subjective, inner self (and it is music’s task to express this). Hegel despised Beethoven, regarding his music to be ‘empty technicality’ (just like Beethoven hated Rossini). ‘Absolute’ music is ‘hopelessly subjective’ (p. 91), for Hegel, and therefore he prefers the combination of music and poetry, as the latter is, by way of its language, able to establish a relation between the inner and the outer. Poetry, in the end, is a higher art form for Hegel than music.

The link between music and poetry is central in chapter 4 (‘Nature, Music, and the Imagination in Wordsworth’s Poetry’), too, in which poems of Wordsworth are discussed. Here, we witness a turn in the book: however beautiful the poems are, and however interesting it is to read more about Wordsworth’s meta-poetical reflections, this chapter relies fully on Donelan’s projective interpretation, which leads to a forced connection of music and the self in Wordsworth’s poetry. Perhaps this is the most interesting chapter of the book, at least it seems to be the most personal, but it is the weakest when it comes to supporting Donelan’s central thesis. Wordsworth did not write poetry to express a philosophy of self-consciousness, such as Hölderlin, inspired by extensive reflections on contemporary philosophy and musical aesthetics. Rather, Wordsworth understood ‘the materiality of poetry through metaphors of music’ and wrote poems about or referring to sound, hearing, and singing (for example in ‘The Solitary Reaper’), but that is foremost in line with his view that the artwork must present itself for sensuous apprehension (p. 111). Wordsworth does not use music to assert the self, also not the Idealist formula of self-consciousness Donelan projects into The Prelude because of its separation of the I in a voice and an internal echo: ‘My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind’s/Internal Echo of the imperfect sound; [...]’ (p. 113).

A similar thing happens in chapter 5 (‘Beethoven and the Musical Self-Consciousness’), because Beethoven did not use his music to convey some (Idealist) philosophy of the self. Moving from the early Viennese Classicism of his early days via his heroic compositions to a style revolving around ‘self-conscious reflection on musical representations of inner life’ (p. 137) or the ‘exalted representations of genius’ (ibid.) respectively, Beethoven became paradigmatic of the Romantic musical aesthetic, but he never really surpassed the level of psychological and egotistical interest in himself. Although Donelan claims that his later musical compositions ‘posit’ the self in an act of self-reflection as well as by reflecting on the inner workings of music itself and that the ‘meaning’ of Beethoven’s work therefore is not to be derived from something external to it (as Donelan claims with Dahlhaus) but rather from ‘the musical formulation’ of the ‘extramusical substrate’ (p. 139), the question remains whether Beethoven’s ego can be so easily widened to ‘the self’ as object of philosophical reflection (either in music or outside music). Similar to Wordsworth, Beethoven was not a philosopher, and his music cannot be interpreted as deliberate vehicle for some (Idealist) philosophy. The self-consciousness that his music expresses is, other than Hölderlin’s poetry, not the result of a discussion with philosophers like Schelling and Hegel and the idea that music is more appropriate to assert the self than philosophy. Beethoven’s ‘care for the self’ is closer to Mozart’s than Hölderlin’s or Hegel’s. The self was not so much a philosophical problem, to them, but a personal problem, inspired by their desire for personal, artistic freedom. Beethoven’s famous lament that, due to his deafness, he was forced ‘to become a philosopher already at my 28th year,’ should not be taken as literally as Donelan does when he writes that Beethoven had indeed ‘prepared himself to become a philosophical composer’ (pp. 142-143).

Rather than philosophical, Beethoven’s positing of the self, as in his late String Quartets, which are paradigmatic of his ‘absolute music’ (‘absolute’ as ‘instrumental’), is a psychological statement. The ‘parallel’ that Donelan construes between Beethoven’s heroic and ‘late’ compositions (‘heroic’ because they form a sort of Bildungsroman in music) and Idealist philosophy is, indeed, nothing more than a parallel, even though the ‘late’ compositions showcase a moment of self-criticism, which make them more reflective than the heroic compositions. However, it is not philosophical, as Donelan claims (p. 150), because, again, Beethoven’s self-critique hardly transcends the level of artistic and psychological criticism. For example, artistically, he decided to focus on melody and counterpoint, against his previous focus on the dramatic development of motif, and turn to older musical traditions (e.g., Baroque) as sources of inspiration. Adorno explains the late style as the ‘deliberate’ attempt to destroy the idea of autonomous subjectivity (key to his heroic style), and that would take it from a psychological, individual level to a more philosophic and general plane (although, obviously, not to Idealist altitudes). Adorno’s ‘self-destructive’ interpretation, however, contrasts Donelan’s interpretation of Beethoven’s music as, let’s say, ‘deliberative self-assertion.’ Donelan then rightfully points to the Ninth Symphony as counter-evidence of Adorno’s claim, and corroborates his rejection of Adorno with a close hearing of String Quartet No. 13 in B flat.

This String Quartet is a metaphor of self-consciousness, in that it seeks to establish itself as part of the classicist tradition, but simultaneously partly transcends that very tradition by expanding its musicality far beyond the classicist principles of symmetry and closure by breaking new ground in form and harmony, Donelan discloses. In other words, Beethoven sought to redefine himself as a composer by returning to his former ‘teachers’ Mozart and Haydn. The pupil was trying ‘to master the masters,’ and establish himself at their level, by showing the same kind of originality, genius, and artistic innovation. Innovating the saturated genre of the string quartet, he forced the public to re-examine their view of Beethoven as ‘composer of grand statements’ (p. 156) and opened ways for a new musical future—thereby securing his influence for future generations. Operating according to its own rules (and Donelan gives a delightful 20-page analysis of those rules), while simultaneously participating in the tradition of classical harmony, counterpoint, and sonata-allegro form, this work expresses a remarkable self-consciousness. Again, it does so through identification and opposition to its predecessors, but this is only a parallel of Hegel’s dialectics, Schelling’s aesthetics, and Fichte’s ‘I am I,’ and not a musical expression of their philosophy.

As Donelan remarks himself, the book ‘interpret[s] individual works through historical, social or biographical materials rather than to understand or create something outside them’ (p. xii). Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic therefore is not the work of ‘philosophical criticism’ it wants to be (ibid.): one can maintain that music carries extra-musical meaning, but it cannot be proved; the meagre three-page chapter which draws the book to a close by seeking such proof does not succeed in any case, when merely positing against Marxist criticism of aesthetic autonomy that ‘even if our subjective selves have been constructed for us out of a web of socially determined performances and ideologies, we still treasure freedom and independence, and even if our aesthetic judgment is a Pavlovian response to predetermined conditions, we still long for beauty’ (p. 177). This is a non-argument that will not convince any (empirical) psychologist or philosopher. Our need for something does not prove anything beyond the fact that there exists a need, and certainly not the autonomous existence of aesthetic meaning per se, a purely aesthetic or ‘cult’ value in art beyond its ‘exhibition’ value, or the ‘aura’ of a work of art in times of not only reproduction but also all-encompassing, global capitalism.

Soit, I would say. A Romantic ‘aesthete’ like Donelan will never turn one single Marxist ‘philistine’ (Beech and Roberts, eds., The Philistine Controversy, 2003) into a believer in the auratic force and the aesthetic and existential meaning of art. And the Marxist, holding to ‘instrumental reason’ and the dialectic rule of capitalism, will always repudiate the Romantic Aestheticist as a ‘naïve,’ if not sentimental, believer in aesthetic autonomy. As yet, ‘another third way’ (Andrew Bowie in The Philistine Controversy, pp. 161-174) seems a far-off prospect. But why bother? Donelan has written a lovely book, despite its inept argument for the autonomy of the aesthetic and despite the fact that the argument of its central claim is only partially convincing. Donelan promotes the necessity of further research into the close, complicated, and fascinating relation between music and philosophy, especially by drawing attention to Hölderlin’s “Wechsel der Töne” and arguing for the momentous role of musical aesthetics in Hegel’s aesthetics, not in the least because it responds to the eminent proponent of Romantic music, E.T.A. Hoffmann. Moreover, Hölderlin’s reflections on the musicality of poetry continue to be of importance to any poetics. He demonstrates, above all, that the relation between philosophy, poetry, and music deserves further research with regard to the historical study of modern aesthetics and its wider, cultural meaning as well as with regard to present-day theory building on art, freedom, and self-consciousness, and the meaning of music qua music.

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010)

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