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1 results

  • 12 - Music and Romantic Interiority

  • from Part III - Aesthetics
  • Edited by Benedict Taylor, University of Edinburgh
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism
    Published online:
    06 August 2021
    Print publication:
    26 August 2021, pp 199-213

  • Summary

    The listening posture that accompanied the rise of Romantic musical aesthetics in the late 1790s was decidedly inward-facing. Valorising interior response over external circumstance, Romantic listeners sought to be catapulted into a world of feeling and imagination, a world that stretched inward to the affects and outward to the realm of nature. Taking E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana as a point of departure, this essay identifies three guiding principles of musical Romanticism: that music is inscrutably deep or profound, that musical sounds penetrate into and change the listener’s inner world, and that music is capable of transporting listeners to a more ideal, and markedly spiritual, state of being. The essay shows how these principles undergird broader Romantic convictions about the relationship between music and interiority, as evidenced by authors ranging from Hoffmann, W. H. Wackenroder, and Bettina von Arnim to G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Malwida von Meysenbug.