2 - Adolf Bernhard Marx and the inner life of music

Summary

A. B. Marx holds such high rank in Germany as a writer upon the subject of Musical Composition, that any recommendation of his great work to those who are at all acquainted with the musical literature of the land which is emphatically the home of music, would be superfluous. It is without a rival as a treatise upon this subject, thoroughly scientific, and yet adapted to popular comprehension. A work of this character in the English language has been so much sought after in vain, as to lead to the present translation . . .

“Publisher’s Advertisement” for Marx’s Theory and Practice of Musical Composition, 7th American edn., ed. and trans. Herrman S. Saroni (New York: S. T. Gordon & Son, 1854), vol. I

With a zeal typical of promotional literature, the remarks above testify to the international scope of Adolf Bernhard Marx’s reputation in the musical world by the middle of the nineteenth century. As editor of the Berliner Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung from 1824 to 1830, professor at the University of Berlin from 1830 to his death in 1866, and author of a four-volume composition treatise and other music-related books dating into the 1860s, Marx crusaded tirelessly for his more “spiritual” (geistig) methods of criticism and pedagogy. Full of admiration for E. T. A. Hoffmann’s efforts to penetrate the depths of Beethoven’s art, Marx had ample opportunity to ponder his predecessor’s choice of metaphors. Like Hoffmann, Marx believed in the essential rationality of Beethoven’s works as well as their deep significance. As a pedagogue, however, he refused to be stopped at the borders of the ineffable. Marx belonged to a growing number of critics and composers who felt that music should strive for ever more determinate expression by attempting to represent poetic ideas. Championing the idea (Idee) as both compositional and hermeneutic guidepost, Marx offered programmatic interpretations of Beethoven’s most ambitious pieces. Programmaticism, however, is only part of Marx’s legacy – and indeed, the part discarded most quickly by later critics. Even when faced with works that did not suggest a program, Marx strove to connect his impressions of deeper import to specific musical techniques and their psychological implications, an approach which spilled over into his more general studies of musical form.

Studies in the history of music theory have tended to focus on the influences of Hegelian teleology, organicism, and the imperatives of pedagogy and Bildung on Marx’s thought. To a certain extent, Marx’s concern with the degree of spirit and depth evident in different musical forms (especially sonata form) reflects the dissemination of philosophical Idealism into intellectual discourse, particularly in Berlin, where Hegel had joined the faculty of the university in 1818. But whereas Idealist philosophers sought dialectical solutions to common antitheses like sensation versus spirit, universal versus particular, and freedom versus necessity, less systematic appropriations of their terminology such as Marx’s tended to polarize the terms of antithesis rather than bring about their “sublation.” This was doubly true when it came to the categories of sensation and spirit and the pair of terms increasingly understood as their cognates: “surface” and “depth.” Marx paid lip service to Idealist notions of art’s reconciliatory power, but he also viewed contemporary musical culture as a battle between “spiritual” and “sensuous” music – that is, between German instrumental music and the operas of France and Italy. Marx’s selective deployment of Idealist categories established ties between German identity, German music, and depth that inflected Germanic criticism and analysis for a hundred years and more.