General introduction

Summary

The enthusiastic hopes for swift advances in forming a theory of music which I as a youngster pinned on Helmholtz's discoveries as I found them in Poggendorff's Annalen der Physik have not so far been realized. On the contrary, no progress of any kind has been made, owing to the fact that the theory constructed by Helmholtz in his work on sound-sensations and based on his experiments, had led to the false trail of the Sensualists.

These words of Eduard von Hartmann, dating from the penultimate decade of the last century, do not only describe the disappointment of his generation, they also reflect the main intellectual dilemma which characterized the outlook on music during the second half of the nineteenth century. In spite of a cliche which is often applied to descriptions of nineteenth-century music, emphasizing its emotionalism, reliance on fantasy, the cult of the virtuoso and a certain transcendental tendency, the century was also the period of immense advances in the sciences. Scientific progress, combined with national aspirations and economic enterprise, gave a particularly ‘dynamic’ quality to the second half of the century; the attitudes to music, whether as a living art or a historical phenomenon, went along with the inquiring spirit of philosophical and scientific writing. When he suggested that the aesthetics of music should ‘approach as nearly as possible the method of the natural sciences’, Hanslick did not have in mind only the quality of systematic investigation so dear to all followers of the classical German philosophical tradition.