Jo Tudor, Sound and Sense: Music and Musical Metaphor in the Thought and Writing of Goethe and His Age. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011. xvi + 515 pp.

Summary

When you open the contents page of Tudor's monograph, you come up against the windowpane of musical metaphor, as if gazing from behind a barrier at the tempting mysteries beyond. In the course of these chapters, the author's solitary vigil—her unwavering pursuit of these images—is slowly unraveled for her reader. The monograph has many moments of illumination, where the eye looks in from the dark into the brightness.

In honor of the significance that Goethe attached to music in his writing, Jo Tudor has highlighted four key areas in which the musical metaphors that Goethe and his contemporaries employed are most evident. In part 1, traditional concepts of music—music as harmony and conversely music as an embodiment of the irrational, the demonic—are unveiled; equally potent is her unraveling of the conceptions of musical structure and their influence on musical metaphor in part 2. The balance she strikes between her vigilant, detached witnessing of conceptions of music and language (in part 3) and insightful interpretation of the synthesis of these conceptions (in part 4, where she explores the metaphor of music as harmony and sequence) leaves us with a new understanding of and insight into Goethe's poetic practice.

Goethe's understanding of music, so often vaunted as maladroit, is here richly endorsed. Tudor profiles Goethe against his contemporary reality and presents us with a book in which the whole question of Goethe's relationship to musical values is worked out in extreme detail. As his comments on European musical life in his notes to his 1806 translation of Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau show, the poet was pervious to the importance of intellectual engagement with music as a self-standing discipline. As early as 1772, Goethe had read the Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste by Johann Georg Sulzer, whom Michael Spitzer identifies as “the most important German theorist of the eighteenth century” (Metaphor and Musical Thought, 243). As Tudor rightly observes in her rich contextualization of Goethe's engagement with music: “Germans wrote extensively about music; not only in cultural periodicals but in their literature and in essays and treatises of all kinds. In short, a significant part of the discourse in Germany took place not in public but in private, between writers of various kinds and their readers” (11).