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‘The moral background of the work of art’: ‘character’ in German musical aesthetics, 1780–1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2012

Matthew Pritchard
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Abstract

The terms ‘character’ and ‘characteristic’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have usually been thought of as having had rather limited significance, often being restricted in application to ‘picturesque’ or ‘realistic’ genres such as the romantic ‘character piece’ or ‘characteristic symphony’. Through a re-examination of Christian Gottfried Körner's 1795 essay ‘On the Representation of Character in Music’ and other contemporary texts, I argue that, on the contrary, these terms are conceptually fundamental to the classical German idealist project of defending music's dignity as a true and morally beneficial fine art. Although persistently misread during the twentieth century as a disguise for concerns with stylistic or thematic unity, the metaphor of ‘character’ was in fact a sophisticated hermeneutic tool and a means of equal discursive engagement for performers, composers and critics. It was only the rise of politically oriented criticism and Wagnerian polemics that undermined the legitimacy of the ‘characteristic’ – a concept that may have a better claim than ‘absolute music’ to be considered the leading idea of the classical and romantic eras in music aesthetics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Eighteenth-Century Music , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 63 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 One major source ought to have been Fritz Reckow's planned article on Charakter for the typically thorough Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie: the second report on preparations for the dictionary contained the first half of a model article on Charakter by Reckow (Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich, ‘Bericht II über das Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 27/3 (1970), 229–232CrossRefGoogle Scholar), but this covered only early and notation-related uses of the term. The aesthetic contexts of the term after about 1700 were reserved for discussion in part 2 of the article, but this seems not to have been completed, and in the final version of the dictionary, Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, ed. Riethmuller, Albrecht (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1972–)Google Scholar, there is no separate article on Charakter at all.

2 See de Ruiter, Jacob, Der Charakterbegriff in der Musik: Studien zur deutschen Ästhetik der Instrumentalmusik 1740–1850 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1989), 48–116Google Scholar; Daniel Gottlob Türk's definition of the terms is discussed briefly in Kirby, F. E., ‘Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony as a Sinfonia caracteristica’, The Musical Quarterly 56/4 (1970), 610–611Google Scholar.

3 See Will, Richard, ‘Time, Morality, and Humanity in Beethoven's “Pastoral” Symphony’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 50/2–3 (1997), 279CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Sisman, Elaine, ‘After the Heroic Style: Fantasia and Beethoven's “Characteristic” Sonatas of 1809’, Beethoven Forum 6 (1997), 81–83Google Scholar.

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6 Cited by Adolf Sandberger in a review of Arnold Schering's Beethoven und die Dichtung (1936) in Neues Beethoven-Jahrbuch 7 (1937), 173, trans. Kirby in ‘Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony’, 608 (translation altered); the incident is described further in Thayer, Life of Beethoven, 765–766.

7 Kirby, ‘Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony’, 608.

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10 Dahlhaus, Carl, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Lustig, Roger (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), 3Google Scholar. Mark Evan Bonds writes, ‘to apply the term – or even the idea – of absolute music … to the repertory of aesthetics of the early nineteenth century is fundamentally mistaken’ (Bonds, , ‘Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 50/2–3 (1997), 419CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Sanna Pederson even removes it from the nineteenth century entirely, identifying the origins of the concept proper in the early twentieth-century writings of August Halm and Ernst Kurth (Pedersen, , ‘Defining the Term “Absolute Music” Historically’, Music & Letters 90/2 (2009), 240–262CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

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12 Dahlhaus, Carl, Musikalischer Realismus: Zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Piper, 1982), 41ffGoogle Scholar. The English reader should beware of Mary Whittall's rendering of charakteristisch as ‘descriptive’ in her 1985 translation (Dahlhaus, , Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. Whittall, Mary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar), a choice that might have been intended to clarify and reinforce Dahlhaus's argument but instead comes close to making it tautological: it is scarcely possible to imagine ‘descriptive’ music as anything but a case of ‘realism’. I have altered Whittall's translation of this word to the more exact English ‘characteristic’ in all following quotations.

13 Dahlhaus, , Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, 29Google Scholar.

14 ‘Broadly speaking, it is possible to distinguish between idealist and realist interpretations of the characteristic’ (Dahlhaus, , Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, 32)Google Scholar.

15 Dahlhaus, , Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, 32–33Google Scholar.

16 Dahlhaus, , Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, 33Google Scholar.

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18 Bremer, ‘Charakter/charakteristisch’, 782.

19 Schmidt, Marlene, Zur Theorie des musikalischen Charakters (Munich: Katzbichler, 1981), 5Google Scholar.

20 Schiller, Friedrich, letter of 7 July 1797, in Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, ed. Staiger, Emil (Frankfurt: Insel, 1966), 418Google Scholar, trans. Dieckmann, Liselotte in Correspondence between Goethe and Schiller 1794–1805 (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 201Google Scholar (translation altered).

21 On aesthetic ‘idealism’ in this period see Bonds, ‘Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music’.

22 Matthias Tischer argues for the characteristic as a central ‘modern’ (but not romantic) concept in early nineteenth-century music aesthetics; see his Ferdinand Hands Aesthetik der Tonkunst: Ein Beitrag zur Inhaltsästhetik der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Sinzig: Studio, 2004), 65–73Google Scholar. On Wendt, Seidel and Lobe see below.

23 Seidel, Carl, Charinomos: Beiträge zur allgemeinen Theorie und Geschichte der schönen Künste (Magdeburg: Ferdinand Rabach, 1828), volume 2, facing page 1Google Scholar. Quotation from Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1800)Google Scholar.

24 Bremer, ‘Charakter/charakteristisch’, 792.

25 For a modern text of the German original see the Appendix to Seifert, Wolfgang, Christian Gottfried Körner: Ein Musikästhetiker der deutschen Klassik (Regensburg: Bosse, 1960), 147–158Google Scholar.

26 See de Ruiter, Der Charakterbegriff, part 2, and Riggs, Robert, ‘“On the Representation of Character in Music”: Christian Gottfried Körner's Aesthetics of Instrumental Music’, The Musical Quarterly 81/4 (1997), 610–612CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 See Besseler, Heinrich, ‘Mozart und die deutsche Klassik’, in Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte, ed. Gülke, Peter (Leipzig: Reclam, 1978), 442–454Google Scholar; Wolfgang Seifert, Christian Gottfried Körner, 136 and 120–121; Dahlhaus, Carl, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, trans. Whittall, Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 121–142Google Scholar; and de Ruiter, Der Charakterbegriff, 127–204. De Ruiter devotes an exhaustive analytical essay, supposedly an application of Körner's theory, to the first movement of Mozart's ‘Jupiter’ Symphony (184–202). He only mentions at the end that ‘Körner's category of character is not, however, aimed exclusively at the formal side of a composition’, and then devotes no more than a short paragraph to describing how Mozart might have shaped the actual ‘expressive character’ of the movement, which he summarizes as ‘ceremoniousness’ (202). An honourable exception to this formalist tendency is Schmalzriedt, Siegfried, ‘Charakter und Drama: Zur historischen Analyse von Haydnschen und Beethovenschen Sonatensätzen’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 42/1 (1985), 37–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who suggests a more metaphorical approach.

28 Besseler, ‘Mozart und die deutsche Klassik’, 447.

29 Seifert, Christian Gottfried Körner, 120–121 (italics in original).

30 Besseler, ‘Mozart und die deutsche Klassik’, 448.

31 On the twentieth-century development of the concept of ‘material’ see Paddison, Max, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 65–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 For a theoretical discussion of compositional Mittel by the editor of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung see Rochlitz, Friedrich, ‘Ueber den zweckmaessigen Gebrauch der Mittel der Tonkunst’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1805)Google Scholar, columns 3–10, 49–59, 193–201 and 241–249.

33 Jonathan Dunsby, for instance, gives the strong (and misleading) impression that the first theorist to deal with the subject in any systematic fashion was Schoenberg; see his article ‘Thematic and Motivic Analysis’ in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Christensen, Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 907–926CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Christoph von Blumröder traces a more convincing intellectual history of the idea in his articles ‘Thematische Arbeit, motivische Arbeit’ (1991), ‘Thema, Hauptsatz’ (1995) and ‘Motivo/motif/Motiv’ (1987) in Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie.

34 Reicha, Anton, Traité de melodie (Paris: author, 1814)Google Scholar; trans. Landey, Peter M. as Treatise on Melody (Hillsdale: Pendragon, 2000), 62–63Google Scholar (translation altered). The original reads ‘la mélodie exprime différens caractères, ou, pour mieux dire, différentes modifications de sentiment. Deux airs composés dans le même ton et avec la même mesure, modulés de la même manière, et ayant le même rhythme et la même coupe, peuvent être neanmoins entièrement opposés de caractère … en un mot, cette difference existe principalement dans le choix des dessins mélodiques’. Reicha, Anton, Vollständiges Lehrbuch der musikalischen Composition, ed. and trans. Czerny, Carl (with facing original French text) (Vienna: Ant. Diabelli & Co., no date), volume 2Google Scholar, Traité de mélodie, 485.

35 ‘La morceau se ressentira du caractère de ces dessins dévéloppés; il sera gai, triste, original et sensible’. Reicha, Traité de mélodie, 510; Treatise on Melody, 75 (translation altered).

36 Treatise on Melody, 72 and music examples B5 /1–11, 169. Reicha categorizes bars 3 and 7 of Mozart's theme, with their repeated quavers, as unsuitable for individual development, though he does give an example (B5/24, 170) of how bars 7–8 taken as a whole (with a quaver upbeat) can be developed successfully. The discussion is all the more interesting for the fact that Reicha does not refer to the complete Mozart movement, but treats its theme as the starting-point for his own independent inventions.

37 ‘Nicht jedes Motiv [ist] zu jeder Art von Melodiegestaltung tauglich, sondern … jedes [scheint] eine, seinem eigenthümlichen Wesen nach auch eigenthümliche Verwendung zu verlangen, wenn nur schon eine sinnlich-angenehme, geschweige denn gar eine ausdrucksvolle schöne Melodie hervorgehen soll’; Lobe, Johann Christian, Compositions-Lehre, oder umfassende Theorie von der thematischen Arbeit und den modernen Instrumentalformen (Weimar: B. F. Voigt, 1844), 38Google Scholar.

38 Letter to Schiller, 15 March 1795, cited in Seifert, Christian Gottfried Körner, 130.

39 Besseler, ‘Mozart und die deutsche Klassik’, 445.

40 Christian Gottlob Neefe, Dilettanterien (Bonn, 1785), cited in Schiedermaier, Ludwig, Der junge Beethoven (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1925), 152Google Scholar.

41 Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Berlin: Lagarde & Friederich, 1790; reprinted Hamburg: Felix Meiner 2001), 222Google Scholar.

42 ‘Wir unterscheiden in dem was wir Seele nennen, etwas Beharrliches und etwas Vorübergehendes, das Gemüth und die Gemüthsbewegungen, den Charakter – Ethos – und den leidenschaftlichen Zustand – Pathos –. Ist es gleichgültig, welches von beiden der Musiker darzustellen sucht?’. Körner, ‘Über Charakterdarstellung in der Musik’, in Seifert, Christian Gottfried Körner, 147, trans. Riggs in ‘On the Representation of Character in Music’, 613.

43 Stevens, Jane R., ‘The Meanings and Uses of Caractère in Eighteenth-Century France’, in French Musical Thought 1600–1800, ed. Cowart, Georgia (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989), 35Google Scholar.

44 Stevens speculates that in France it was likewise ‘partly the changes in musical style during the second half of the century, when constant diversity sometimes seemed to be prized more than the traditional value of unity, that led writers to stress the importance of unity of character’ (‘The Meanings and Uses of Caractère’, 35).

45 Körner, ‘On the Representation of Character’, 613.

46 ‘Wenn es der Musik nicht an deutlichen Zeichen fehlt, um einen bestimmten Zustand zu versinnlichen, so ist ihr dadurch auch die Möglichkeit der Charakterdarstellung gegeben. Was wir Charakter nennen, können wir überhaupt weder in der wirklichen Welt, noch in irgend einem Kunstwerke unmittelbar wahrnehmen, sondern nur aus demjenigen folgern, was in den Merkmalen einzelner Zustände enthalten ist.’ Körner, ‘Über Charakterdarstellung in der Musik’, 155; Riggs, ‘On the Representation of Character’, 621.

47 Schiller, Friedrich, ‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen’, published in Die Horen, 1–2 (1795), 6Google Scholar; cited and trans. in Riggs, ‘On the Representation of Character’, 606.

48 Dahlhaus comments extensively on this asynchrony (Ungleichzeitigkeit) of ‘classical’ music and the aesthetic frameworks corresponding to it in ‘Romantische Musikästhetik und Wiener Klassik’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 29/3 (1972), 167–181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 von Weiler, G., ‘Ueber den Begriff der Schönheit, als Grundlage einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 13/7 (February 1811)Google Scholar, columns 117–124. Robin Wallace cites a sympathetic review of Beethoven's late quartets by a writer of the same surname and initial (Wallace, Beethoven's Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions during the Composer's Lifetime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 94Google Scholar); it seems very probable that these are the same person, though biographical information is hard to come by.

50 ‘Das Schöne gefällt ohne alles Interesse, ob es zu einem bestimmt gedachten Zwecke diene, oder nicht’; Weiler, ‘Ueber den Begriff der Schönheit’, column 119.

51 ‘Als solcher [als Zweck] ist sie [die bestimmte Leidenschaft] nicht ästhetisch’; Weiler, ‘Ueber den Begriff der Schönheit’, column 120.

52 Weiler, ‘Ueber den Begriff der Schönheit’, column 120.

53 Weiler, ‘Ueber den Begriff der Schönheit’, column 119. Compare Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft: ‘freie Gesetzmässigkeit der Einbildungskraft’, 99, and ‘Zweckmässigkeit … ohne Vorstellung eines Zwecks’, 93 (original italics).

54 Weiler, ‘Ueber den Begriff der Schönheit’, column 119. Compare Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 80: ‘Das Urteil heisst auch eben darum ästhetisch, weil der Bestimmungsgrund desselben kein Begriff, sondern das Gefühl (des inneren Sinns) jener Einhelligkeit im Spiel der Gemütskräfte ist, sofern sie nur empfunden werden kann’.

55 Weiler, ‘Ueber den Begriff der Schönheit’, column 121.

56 Wendt, Amadeus, ‘Gedanken über die neuere Tonkunst, und van Beethovens Musik, namentlich dessen Fidelio’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 17 (1815)Google Scholar, columns 347–350 (original italics).

57 Triest, Johann Karl Friedrich, ‘Bemerkungen über die Ausbildung der Tonkunst in Deutschland im achtzehnten Jahrhundert’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 3 (1801)Google Scholar, columns 390–391.

58 Wendt, ‘Gedanken über die neuere Tonkunst’, columns 350–353.

59 See Goldschmidt, Harry, ‘Über die Einheit der vokalen und instrumentalen Sphäre in der klassischen Musik’, Deutsches Jahrbuch der Musikwissenschaft 11 (1966), 35–49Google Scholar. Goldschmidt's East German musicological perspective contrasts, as one would expect it to, with the more familiar Dahlhausian claim for the autonomy of ‘absolute’ instrumental music.

60 Ludwig van Beethovens Konversationshefte, ed. Köhler, Karl-Heinz and Herre, Grita (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1981), 268Google Scholar. In his Beethoven biography Lewis Lockwood substitutes the rather vague ‘what does it mean?’ for Holz's much more specifically representative ‘was soll das vorstellen?’ (Lockwood, , Beethoven: The Music and the Life (New York: Norton, 2003), 350Google Scholar); I have altered this, but otherwise followed Lockwood's translation.

61 ‘Ein anderes ist es mit den den Karakter des Stücks bezeichnenden Wörtern, solche können wir nicht aufgeben, da der Takt eigentlich mehr der Körper ist, diese aber schon selbst Bezug auf den Geist des Stückes haben’ (Beethoven to Ignaz Franz Mosel, November 1817, in van Beethoven, Ludwig, Briefwechsel Gesamtausgabe, ed. Brandenburg, Sieghard (Munich: Henle, 1996), volume 4, 130Google Scholar; trans. Riggs in ‘On the Representation of Character’, 611).

62 Pace Riggs, ‘On the Representation of Character’, 612.

63 Schumann, Robert, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, ed. Kreisig, Martin, fifth edition (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1914), volume 2, 207Google Scholar; trans. Lippman, Edward in ‘Theory and Practice in Schumann's Aesthetics’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 17/3 (1964), 331–332CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Lippman, ‘Schumann's Aesthetics’, 332.

65 Letter to Marc André Souchay, 15 October 1842, in Bartholdy, Felix Mendelssohn, Briefe aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1847, ed. Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Paul and Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Carl (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1899), 229Google Scholar.

66 Riggs, ‘On the Representation of Character’, 610.

67 Cited in de Ruiter, Der Charakterbegriff, 2.

68 Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven, 126–127.

69 Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven, 127.

70 ‘Poesie kann nur durch Poesie kritisiert werden’; Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente 117, in Schlegel, Friedrich, Der Historiker als rückwärts gekehrte Prophet: Aufsätze und Vorlesungen zur Literatur, ed. Marquardt, Marion (Leipzig: Reclam, 1991), 159Google Scholar.

71 ‘Genie ist das Talent (Naturgabe), welches der Kunst die Regel gibt.’ Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 193.

72 Schnaus, E. T. A. Hoffmann als Beethoven-Rezensent, 27–28.

73 Michaelis, Christian Friedrich, ‘Über die Kritik musikalischer Werke, nebst beyläufigen Bemerkungen über die letzteren’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf den österreichischen Kaiserstaat 3 (1819)Google Scholar, columns 675–676.

74 Pace Dahlhaus, ‘Romantische Musikästhetik und Wiener Klassik’, 173. To call Hanslick ‘the first Austrian aesthetician’, as Dahlhaus does, is a wild overstatement.

75 ‘verrottete Gefühlsästhetik’; Hanslick, Eduard, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (Leipzig: Rudolph Weigel, 1854)Google Scholar, Foreword to first edition, in Eduard Hanslick: Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik in der Tonkunst, ed. Strauß, Dietmar (Mainz: Schott, 1990), volume 1Google Scholar (Historisch-kritische Ausgabe), 9.

76 Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 355Google Scholar.

77 Kerman, Joseph, The Beethoven Quartets (New York: Norton, 1979), 379Google Scholar.

78 Alfred Brendel, ‘On Character in Music’, public lecture as Humanitas Visiting Professor in Chamber Music at University of Cambridge, 13 May 2011.

79 Brandt, Torsten, Johann Christian Lobe (1797–1881): Studien zu Biographie und musikschriftstellerischem Werk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.