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10 - Music in Early German Romantic Philosophy

from Part III - Aesthetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2021

By
Tomás McAuley
Edited by
Benedict Taylor
Benedict Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

This chapter examines the nature and the origins of what it identifies as a distinctively Romantic view of music. According to this, the purpose of music is to provide non-linguistic knowledge or insight, most usually into one’s inner self or, especially, into the fundamental nature of reality. The chapter starts by charting some key moments in the philosophical background of the 1780s and ’90s. Building on this, it traces the emergence of the Romantic view of music in the works of the two philosophers most closely involved in its earliest formulations: Friedrich Schlegel and Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis). It concludes with brief examinations of the ways in which this view was elaborated by two now-canonical philosophers of this era, Friedrich Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer, and with a reflection on the subsequent influence of this view.

Keywords

IdealismRomantic philosophyanti-foundationalismmusicFriedrich SchlegelNovalisSchellingSchopenhauer
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism , pp. 165 - 182
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Beiser, Frederick. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).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
Bowie, Andrew. Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Bowie, Andrew. ‘Music and the Rise of Aesthetics’, in Samson, Jim (ed.), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 29–54.Google Scholar
Chua, Daniel K. L. Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Gordon, Paul. Art as the Absolute: Art’s Relation to Metaphysics in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).Google Scholar
Hodkinson, James. ‘The Cosmic-Symphonic: Novalis, Music, and Universal Discourse’, in Donovan, Siobhán and Elliot, Robin (eds.), Music and Literature in German Romanticism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 13–26.Google Scholar
McAuley, Tomás. The Music of Philosophy: German Idealism and Musical Thought, from Kant to Schelling (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar
Millán-Zaibert, Elizabeth. Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Morrow, Mary Sue. German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pritchard, Matthew. ‘Music in Balance: The Aesthetics of Music after Kant, 1790–1810’, Journal of Musicology, 36/1 (2019), 39–67.Google Scholar
Sorgner, Stefan Lorenz, and Fürbeth, Oliver (eds.). Music in German Philosophy: An Introduction, trans. Gillespie, Susan H. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).Google Scholar

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