Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T16:33:36.640Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Haydn as Romantic: a chemical experiment with instrumental music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

W. Dean Sutcliffe
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access

Summary

The early Romantics, it is said, formulated the idea of absolute music. If this is so, then its emergence at the close of the eighteenth century was muttered rather than announced by them. In fact, the Romantics were so reticent on the subject that they did not even name absolute music ‘absolute music’; that task was left to Wagner in the 1840s. The Romantics, however, did call instrumental music ‘pure music’, and this can be read as ‘absolute’, for they used the term to imply that instrumental music, as the essence of music, is the spirit of creativity itself. Music is pure poesis, claims Tieck; it is the ‘centre and circumference of all the arts’.

But what did this ‘Romantic music’ sound like to the Romantics? By the time someone like Schumann stylized Romantic philosophy as music, it was too late. When the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Tieck and Schelling were writing in the late 1790s, Schumann was not even a gleam in his father's eye. There was no ‘Romantic music’ as we know it, only what we call ‘Classical music’. What the Romantics heard were the symphonies of Stamitz or Haydn and they renamed the music as their own. E. T. A. Hoffmann, in his celebrated review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, simply appropriates Haydn and Mozart as Romantic composers in retrospect.

The idea of absolute music is therefore not ‘Classical’ but ‘Romantic’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Haydn Studies , pp. 120 - 151
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×