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12 - Music and Romantic Interiority

from Part III - Aesthetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2021

By
Holly Watkins
Edited by
Benedict Taylor
Benedict Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

The listening posture that accompanied the rise of Romantic musical aesthetics in the late 1790s was decidedly inward-facing. Valorising interior response over external circumstance, Romantic listeners sought to be catapulted into a world of feeling and imagination, a world that stretched inward to the affects and outward to the realm of nature. Taking E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana as a point of departure, this essay identifies three guiding principles of musical Romanticism: that music is inscrutably deep or profound, that musical sounds penetrate into and change the listener’s inner world, and that music is capable of transporting listeners to a more ideal, and markedly spiritual, state of being. The essay shows how these principles undergird broader Romantic convictions about the relationship between music and interiority, as evidenced by authors ranging from Hoffmann, W. H. Wackenroder, and Bettina von Arnim to G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Malwida von Meysenbug.

Keywords

interiorityinwardnessdepthprofundityE. T. A. HoffmannWackenroderBettina von ArnimSchopenhauerHegelMeysenbug
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism , pp. 199 - 213
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Hardy, Henry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999).Google Scholar
Bonds, Mark Evan. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Bonds, Mark Evan Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).Google Scholar
Dahlhaus, Carl. The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Lustig, Roger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Hegel, Georg Friedrich, Wilhelm. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. Knox, T. M., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).Google Scholar
Hoffmann, E. T. A. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. Charlton, David, trans. Clarke, Martyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Selected Writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann, vol. 2: The Novel, ed. and trans. Kent, Leonard J. and Knight, Elizabeth C. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, trans. Pluhar, Werner S. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987).Google Scholar
Lippman, Edward A. Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader, vol. II: The Nineteenth Century (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1988).Google Scholar
Meysenbug, Malwida von. Memoiren einer Idealistin, 3 vols. (Berlin and Leipzig: Schuster & Loeffler, 1905).Google Scholar
Rosen, Charles. The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, trans. Payne, E. F. J., 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1958).Google Scholar
Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich. Confessions and Fantasies, trans. Schubert, Mary Hurst (University Park, PA: Pennsylvanian State University Press, 1971).Google Scholar
Watkins, Holly. Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Watkins, Holly Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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