22 - On infinity

Summary

A work is not God: to place one on the altar of the absolute would have been rather rash, even for the Romantics who tried to replace the material philosophies of the eighteenth century with a transcendental aesthetic. God is not a symphony or a sonata – that would be blatantly idolatrous: idolatry is usually more sophisticated than that. For music to ‘mean God’, says Schlegel, ‘the whole of music must undoubtedly become one’. There needs to be an in-gathering of all musical works to reconstitute the face of God. And this is a task that is both necessary and impossible if the particularity of each composition is to have any meaning within the Romantic system. Each work, as a fragment of the whole, yearns towards the completion which is Totality. All that music can do on earth is to reflect the divine image as a negative imprint, for a piece of music is precisely what it means – a piece that has been broken off from the whole. To borrow an imagery central to Schlegel's philosophy, a work is like an ancient fragment that has been torn from an original form, but is still able to recapture in its brokenness the perfection of an unknown totality that the Romantic imagination can reconstruct, as if it could hear the distant strains of a divine music. A work as a fragment therefore always gestures beyond itself; it is never complete.