The ‘idea of absolute music’ proposed by Carl Dahlhaus has encouraged a view of German Romantic music aesthetics as preoccupied with instrumental music, and more interested in lofty metaphysics than emotion. Yet writers such as Novalis and Hoffmann saw the ‘Absolute’ precisely in emotional terms, and argued that its presentation was the task of a new, socially accessible genre of national opera. This would draw its subjects from the popular mythological and ‘romantic’ realm of fairy tale and fantasy, while ‘pure’ music – instrumental and church genres – was imagined in the sensational contemporary terms of the gothic. When instrumental genres were eventually revaluated above opera, it was because they were held to embody another popular trait valued by Hoffmann – humour. Strongly promoted by German critics in the 1830s, humour and the ‘humoristic’ posited the exploitation of emotional contrast as the highest aim of instrumental music after Beethoven.

Although nowadays Vaughan Williams is sometimes associated in popular writing with a Romantic musical style, broadly conceived, this is a view that few of his contemporaries would have recognized. Indeed, his own understanding of the term suggests that he saw himself marking a break with the earlier, largely Germanic Romantic tradition that culminated in Wagner and Strauss.  Nevertheless, several important aspects of his musical and aesthetic views form strong continuity with earlier Romantic thought. These include viewing music as (1) self-expression; (2) the expression of a community; and (3) a revelation or intimation of the beyond.  The tension between these three, partially antithetical, conceptions of music informs his creative output in often productive ways that are teased out over the course of this chapter.

The question of how to make art speak in the modern world is fundamental to MacMillan’s thought. Theologian Olivier Davies describes ‘the reorientation’ of Transformation Theology as like ‘a new tonality in music’, an apposite image for MacMillan’s work. This study begins with an exegesis of two strains of thought. First, like composers such as Messiaen and Pärt, MacMillan creates a topical form of absolute music that sublimates the aesthetics of desire for the absolute. MacMillan’s project also relates to the aesthetics of post-Tridentine violence and realism. Second, with reference to Transformational Theology, MacMillan’s thought configures Christ as present not merely in images but as ‘presently real’. This belief in the ‘real presence of Jesus’ in the world is manifest in images of embodiment in MacMillan’s music that seek to overcome mere representation to function as a form of (en)activism: Jesus - wounded, ascended, glorified - but present and corporeal. The final section draws these ideas together through analysing images of embodiment in MacMillan’s output including in Veni, Veni Emmanuel, the Cello Concerto, and Seven Last Words that profess MacMillan’s resurrection theology, and finding comparison with artists such as Caravaggio.