Aesthetic Amputations: Absolute and the Deleted Endings of Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen Author(s): Mark Evan Bonds Source: 19th-Century Music , Vol. 36, No. 1 (Summer 2012), pp. 3-23 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2012.36.1.003

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARK EVAN BONDS and Hanslick

Aesthetic Amputations: Absolute Music and the Deleted Endings of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen

MARK EVAN BONDS

Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen arouse emotions in listeners but insists that (On the Musically Beautiful), first published in these emotions are neither in the music nor 1854, remains the single most important docu- expressed by it. The value of a musical work, ment in the history of the aesthetic construct he maintains, resides in its , which arises broadly known as “absolute music,” the idea from purely musical features that stand quite that music is an essentially self-contained and apart from any connections or symbolic asso- self-referential . Hanslick argues that music’s ciations a particular type of theme, rhythm, content, to quote the treatise’s most celebrated , or timbre might evoke in the mind of catchphrase, consists entirely and exclusively a listener. of tönend bewegte Formen, “forms set in mo- Over the next forty years, Vom Musikalisch- tion through sound” or “tonally animated Schönen would serve as a lightning rod in dis- forms.”1 He acknowledges that music can putes between self-styled “progressives” and “conservatives” about the essence of music, and Hanslick revised the text repeatedly over Preliminary versions of this article were presented as lec- the course of no fewer than ten authorial edi- tures in 2011 at Indiana University, Florida State Univer- tions, the last of which appeared in 1902. But it sity, and the University of Buffalo, State University of was the very ending of the treatise that gave New York; I am grateful to members of all three audiences for their comments and questions. Kevin Karnes, Tom him the greatest difficulty. In preparing a sec- McAuley, and Michael Morse also provided valuable sug- ond edition in 1858, Hanslick deleted all but gestions for improving a much earlier draft of this article. the first sentence of the last paragraph, and for 1Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst, 2 vols., ed. the third edition of 1865, he deleted that one Dietmar Strauß (Mainz: Schott, 1990), I, 75. Citations to remaining sentence. By the third edition, then, Hanslick’s treatise (hereafter VMS) will be to the first vol- nothing of the original concluding paragraph ume of Strauß’s edition, which facilitates comparison across the work’s many editions; all translations in this article remained: what had originally been the treatise’s are my own. penultimate paragraph was now its conclusion.

19th-Century Music, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 3–23 ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2012 by the Regents of 3 the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2012.36.1.003.

This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH These three endings, at the close of the treatise’s The entire process resembles a series of am- CENTURY MUSIC final chapter on the relationship between form putations: Hanslick severed the original ending and content, read as follows: in 1858 but then in 1865 decided that he had not cut away enough of the offending text, and so he Contrary to the reproach that it lacks content, then, made a second cut. That one held. He would see music has content, though it is musical content, the treatise through seven more editions during which is no less a spark of divine fire than the his lifetime, but the double amputation of the beautiful in every other art. Only by relentlessly ending remained unchanged from the third edi- negating any and all other “content” of music, how- tion onward. ever, can one preserve its “substance.” For no intel- Amputation may seem like a violent term to lectual-spiritual meaning can be derived from the vague feeling that might somehow serve as the basis use for this process, but in making these cuts of these other kinds of content, whereas such spiri- Hanslick did real violence to his text. These tual-intellectual meaning can be derived from the deleted endings have much to tell us about the precise configuration of tones as a free creation of remainder of the treatise: we cannot grasp the the spirit out of materials that lack concepts and yet full breadth of Hanslick’s argument without are capable of being imbued with Geist. [= End of coming to terms with this suppressed conclu- third (1865) and all later editions, with the phrase sion. This is not some obscure passage buried “that lack concepts and yet are” dropped from third in the middle of an internal chapter, after all, edition onward.] nor is it a draft of something rejected before In the mind of the listener, furthermore, this in- publication. It is—or at least was—the ringing tellectual-spiritual substance unites the beautiful in peroration of his entire argument. music with all other great and beautiful ideas. [= End of second edition (1858).] It is not merely and Scholars who have addressed this closing absolutely through its own intrinsic beauty that paragraph have focused almost entirely on music affects the listener, but rather at the same Hanslick’s motivations for deleting it.3 The time as a sounding image of the great motions of the standard explanation begins and ends with the cosmos. Through profound and secret connections figure of Robert Zimmermann (1824–98), to nature, the meaning of tones elevates itself high Hanslick’s lifelong friend. The two grew up above the tones themselves, allowing us to feel at together in and then later became col- the same time the infinite in works of human talent. leagues at the University of , Hanslick Just as the elements of music—sound, tone, rhythm, as Professor of Music and History, loudness, softness—are to be found throughout the entire universe, so does one find anew in music the entire universe. [= End of first edition (1854).]2 Töne hoch über sie selbst hinaus und läßt uns in dem Werke menschlichen Talents immer zugleich das 2VMS, p 171. “Gegenüber dem Vorwurf der Inhaltlosigkeit Unendliche fühlen. Da die Elemente der Musik: Schall, also hat die Musik Inhalt, allein musikalischen, welcher Ton, Rhythmus, Stärke, Schwäche im ganzen Universum ein nicht geringerer Funke des göttlichen Feuers ist, als sich finden, so findet der Mensch wieder in der Musik das das Schöne jeder andern Kunst. Nur dadurch aber, daß ganze Universum.” [= End of first edition (1854).] man jeden andern ‘Inhalt’ der Tonkunst unerbittlich negirt, Nothing of this concluding paragraph appears in either rettet man deren ‘Gehalt.’ Denn aus dem unbestimmten of the published English translations by Gustav Cohen Gefühle, worauf sich jener Inhalt im besten Fall (The Beautiful in Music [London: Novello, 1891]) or zurückführt, ist ihr eine geistige Bedeutung nicht Geoffrey Payzant (On the Musically Beautiful [Indianapo- abzuleiten, wohl aber aus der bestimmten Tongestaltung lis: Hackett, 1986]), which are based on the seventh and [from the third (1865) edition onward: “aus der bestimmten eighth editions of 1885 and 1891 respectively. schönen Tongestaltung . . . ”] als der freien Schöpfung des 3Felix Printz was the first to discuss the repressed ending Geistes aus geistfähigem, begriffslosem Material.” [= End in any detail; see his Zur Würdigung des musikästhetischen of third (1865) and all later editions, with the wording Formalismus Eduard Hanslicks (Borna-Leipzig: R. Noske, altered to read: “als der freien Schöpfung des Geistes aus 1918), pp. 7–9. See also Rudolf Schäfke, geistfähigem Material.”] und die Musikästhetik (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1922), “Dieser geistige Gehalt verbindet nun auch im Gemüth pp. 28–31; and Carl Dahlhaus, Die Idee der absoluten des Hörers das Schöne der Tonkunst mit allen andern Musik (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1978), pp. 33–34, trans. Roger großen und schönen Ideen. [= End of second edition (1858).] Lustig as The Idea of Absolute Music (Chicago: University Ihm wirkt die Musik nicht blos und absolut durch ihre of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 27–29. In the commentary eigenste Schönheit, sondern zugleich als tönendes Abbild volume to his edition of VMS (II, 20–65), Strauß surveys der großen Bewegungen im Weltall. Durch tiefe und the scholarship that addresses all of Hanslick’s many revi- geheime Naturbeziehungen steigert sich die Bedeutung der sions to the text as a whole, including the altered endings.

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Zimmermann as Professor of Philosophy.4 In musical idea presented in its entirety is already au- MARK EVAN tonomous beauty; it is already an end in itself and in BONDS an otherwise highly favorable review of the Absolute Music first edition, Zimmermann took the author— no way simply a medium or material for the repre- and Hanslick his friend—to task on the grounds that the sentation of feelings and thoughts, even if it is ca- treatise’s ending adopted the kind of specula- pable of possessing, at the same time, a high degree of symbolic significance in its reflection of the great tive philosophy it had otherwise refuted. laws of the universe, which is something we find in Zimmermann closes his review by quoting the all artistic beauty. treatise’s original penultimate sentence about Tonally animated forms are the sole and exclu- the “profound and secret connections to na- sive content and object of music.6 ture” and glosses it thus: Yes indeed, these connections to nature are “se- Zimmermann agreed wholeheartedly with cret,” for do they exist at all? What great motions of the characterization of music as tönend bewegte the universe are supposed to resonate in music? Formen, but he could not understand why Those of the celestial bodies, perhaps? Would music Hanslick had felt the need to “muddy this cor- thus be a sounding astronomy? And would music rect insight at once with a superflous conces- then not in fact have a template in nature, some- sion to a false aesthetic” that viewed a musical thing denied earlier [in the treatise]? Why does idea as a reflection of universal laws.7 For the Hanslick at the end of his work cancel out his prin- second edition, Hanslick deleted the qualifying cipal idea—this golden truth that the musically beau- phrase about the great laws of the universe tiful pleases by virtue of itself—by saying that it (“even if it is capable of possessing . . . all should please because it is a sounding reflection of the motions of the universe? It seems to me that at artistic beauty”), ending the sentence with “in this point, the author has unintentionally allowed no way simply a medium or material for the himself to be taken unaware by the same aesthetic representation of feelings and thoughts.” These he otherwise opposes so thoroughly and victoriously.5 two passages—the ending and the qualification that introduces the book’s most famous Zimmermann also took exception to another phrase—are closely related, and Hanslick was key passage Hanslick would delete for the sec- therefore entirely consistent in deleting both. ond edition. It appears, significantly, just be- Zimmermann’s critique hit close to home, fore he introduces the phrase tönend bewegte and not only because of Hanslick’s personal Formen: relationship to him. On the surface, at least, If we now ask what is to be expressed with this tone- there is some merit to the charge of inconsis- material, then the answer is: musical ideas. But a

4See Geoffrey Payzant, “On the Hanslick-Zimmermann 6VMS, p. 75; emphasis in the original (through Sperrdruck, Friendship,” in his Hanslick on the Musically Beautiful: indicated here as italics). “Frägt es sich nun, was mit diesem Sixteen Lectures on the Musical Aesthetics of Eduard Tonmaterial ausgedrückt werden soll, so lautet die Hanslick (Christchurch, N.Z.: Cybereditions, 2002), pp. Antwort: Musikalische Ideen. Eine vollständig zur 129–42. Erscheinung gebrachte musikalische Idee aber ist bereits 5Robert Zimmermann, review of VMS in Oesterreichische selbstständiges Schöne, ist Selbstzweck und keineswegs Blätter für Literatur und Kunst, no. 47 (20 Nov. 1854), p. erst wieder Mittel oder Material zur Darstellung von 315: “Ja wohl sind diese Naturbeziehungen ‘geheim,’ denn Gefühlen und Gedanken; wenn sie gleich in hohem Grad sind sie denn überhaupt? Welche Bewegungen im Weltall jene symbolische, die großen Weltgesetze wiederspiegelnde sollen denn wiederklingen in der Musik? Etwa die der Bedeutsamkeit besitzen kann, welche wir in jedem Himmelskörper? Wäre die Musik eine tönende Astronomie? Kunstschönen vorfinden. Und hätte denn nicht die Musik in der That ein Vorbild in “Tönend bewegte Formen sind einzig und allein Inhalt der Natur, was doch vorher geleugnet worden? Warum und Gegenstand der Musik.” Payzant (pp. 28–29) offers a hebt der Verfasser den Hauptsatz seiner Schrift: das different translation, based on changes that had been made Musikalisch-Schöne gefällt durch sich selbst, diese goldene by the time of the eighth edition of 1891. Wahrheit am Schluss dadurch auf, daß es als ‘tönendes 7Zimmermann, review of VMS, p. 314: “Warum trübt Abbild der Bewegungen im Weltall’ gefallen soll? Mich Hanslick diese richtige Erkentniss gleich wieder durch eine dünkt, hier hat der Verfasser sich unwillkürlich durch überflüssige Concession an eine falsche Aesthetik?” Reminiscenzen derselben Aesthetik überraschen lassen, die Zimmermann was not the only reviewer to point out the er sonst so schlagend und siegreich bekämpft.” Zimmer- apparent contradictions of the concluding paragraph with mann reissued this review, with minor changes, in his the rest of the treatise: see also the anonymous review in Studien und Kritiken zur Philosophie und Aesthetik, 2 the Leipziger Repertorium der deutschen und ausländi- vols. (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1870), II, 239–53. schen Literatur 13/1 (1855), 36–39.

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH tency, for in both passages, Hanslick seems to and beautiful ideas.” And most important of CENTURY MUSIC be contradicting his central argument about all, nothing in this final paragraph is funda- music being entirely self-contained and self- mentally inconsistent with the rest of his trea- referential. There is, moreover, a striking con- tise: it resonates, in fact, with the deleted pas- trast of tone between the original ending of sage that had immediately preceded the pro- Vom Musikalisch-Schönen and all that comes nouncement about tönend bewegte Formen. before: the closing paragraph, with its evoca- Hanslick, as we will see, had good reasons for tions of the cosmos and infinity, verges on the ending his treatise the way he did, not only for rhapsodic and differs markedly from the sharp, later editions but for the first one as well. If we often acerbic prose that is otherwise so charac- approach this paragraph from this perspective, teristic of Hanslick’s . Some scholars have we can begin to read Vom Musikalisch-Schönen interpreted the fact that Hanslick could simply in a different light, which in turn suggests the delete this paragraph and replace it with noth- need to rethink in fundamental ways the his- ing at all as an indicator of the degree to which tory of the construct we now think of as abso- this original ending stood apart from the body lute music. of the treatise.8 The conventional view of this Hanslick’s Dilemma change, in short, is that the final paragraph features inconsistencies of both substance and There is nothing particularly striking or novel tone, that it carries no structural weight in the about Hanslick’s closing thoughts in and of treatise as a whole, and that Hanslick’s dele- themselves: the idea of the artwork as a hetero- tion of it makes good sense. cosm, as a world unto itself and at the same But why did Hanslick put this paragraph time a reflection of the cosmos, is a venerable there in the first place? If his closing argument trope that appears in modern thought in the is so inconsistent with the rest of the treatise, writings of such diverse figures as Alexander why did he make it at all? To accept Baumgarten, Georg Friedrich Meier, Karl Philipp Zimmermann’s explanation is to accept the Moritz, Goethe, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Jean idea that Hanslick had essentially fallen asleep Paul, Schelling, and Hegel.9 It also figures promi- at the switch: even Homer nods from time to nently in the Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1837– time, after all. The problem with this account 41) by Ferdinand Hand, the first extended study is that the very end of a treatise is an unlikely devoted exclusively to the point for an author to doze off, especially one and a work cited approvingly in chapter 6 of as careful and sparing with words as Hanslick. Vom Musikalisch-Schönen.10 The grandiosity of this original ending, with its What is striking about this ending is that it reference to “the great motions of the cosmos,” appears at the end of a text that has gone out of stands out too prominently for its content to be its way to isolate music from all other forms of a product of neglect or a mere afterthought. human expression. This original final paragraph Hanslick, moreover, did not cut the final para- represents Hanslick’s attempt to resolve a di- graph all at once: even after Zimmermann’s lemma he had created for himself, for by the criticism, he retained the opening sentence of the paragraph, which opens out his inquiry to connect beauty in music “with all other great 9On the idea of the artwork as heterocosm, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1953), chap. 10, “The Criterion of Truth to Nature: Romance, Myth, and Metaphor”; idem, “From 8Wilhelm Seidel, for example, calls this original ending a Addison to Kant: Modern Aesthetics and the Exemplary superfluous “superstructure,” proof that the idea of abso- Art,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and lute music has no need of metaphysics (“Absolute Musik Aesthetics, ed. Ralph Cohen (Berkeley: University of Cali- und Kunstreligion um 1800,” in Musik und Religion, 2nd fornia Press, 1985), pp. 16–48. On Moritz’s applicability to edn., ed. Helga de la Motte-Haber [Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, music aesthetics, including Hanslick’s deleted ending, see 2003], p. 135). Peter Kivy, in turn, sees this passage as a Dahlhaus, Die Idee der absoluten Musik, pp. 33–34 (The demonstration of Hanslick’s “failure of nerve” to carry Idea of Absolute Music, pp. 28–29). through with his theory of musical formalism (Antitheti- 10Ferdinand Gotthelf Hand, Aesthetik der Tonkunst, 2 vols. cal : On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and (Leipzig: Hochhausen und Fournes 1837–41); 2nd edn., 2 Music [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009], p. 67). vols. (Leipzig: Eduard Eisenach, 1847). See VMS, 149.

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms time he reached the end of his treatise, he real- edge had begun to fracture and lose its appeal. MARK EVAN BONDS ized that he had painted himself into a philo- And in the wake of the failed revolutions of Absolute Music sophical corner. This paragraph is his cryptic, 1848–49, the desire for a more “objective” brand and Hanslick awkward, and not entirely successful attempt of philosophy and aesthetics was gaining ground to extricate himself from a difficult position of steadily. The momentum in this direction was his own making. particularly strong in Austria, where philoso- Hanslick never claimed to be a philosopher, phers gravitated toward the work of Johann but it is clear from his writings, criticisms, Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) and his follow- letters, and autobiography that he was well ers in Prague, including Bernard Bolzano (1781– read in the field. His father, Joseph Adolph 1848) and Franz Serafin Exner (1802–53), the Hanslik (1785–1859), who consistently spelled latter one of only two nonmusic teachers his name without a “c,” was a librarian by Hanslick praised by name in his memoirs when profession but at heart a philosopher who made recalling his early years in the Bohemian capi- extracts from philosophical works for his chil- tal. Throughout his life, Hanslick consistently dren to study.11 He had studied for a time with claimed to be a Herbartian. This was a wise the philosopher and aesthetician Johann career strategy in Austrian academic politics in Heinrich Dambeck (1774–1820) and even sub- the middle decades of the nineteenth century. stituted for him for a year at the Charles Uni- To what extent this claim is borne out in his versity of Prague during one of his teacher’s writings is a matter of some dispute among illnesses. Hanslik would later edit and see into scholars and beyond the scope of the present print Dambeck’s lectures on aesthetics. In his article; the important point for the moment is memoirs, Eduard Hanslick would note that the that Herbart, Exner, and other likeminded phi- book his father had edited “was highly valued losophers offered an alternative to the critical in its time, i.e., when Kantian philosophy was philosophy of Kant and the various strands of still being cultivated.”12 idealism put forward by Fichte, Schelling, and Like many intellectuals of his time, Hanslick Hegel.14 rejected the philosophy of Kant and the later German idealists as overly abstract modes of “Ästhetik von oben? Ästhetik von unten? Objektivität und thought unconnected to the realities of day-to- ‘naturwissenschaftliche’ Methode in Eduard Hanslicks day existence.13 By the early 1840s, even Hegel’s Musikästhetik,” AfMw 61 (2004), 38–53; and Eduard more historically oriented approach to knowl- Hanslick und Bernard Bolzano: Ästhetisches Denken in Österreich in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2004). Important earlier studies in- clude Schäfke, Eduard Hanslick und die Musikästhetik, 11Eduard Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben, 2 vols. (Berlin: and Werner Abegg, Musikästhetik und Musikkritik bei Allgemeiner Verein für deutsche Litteratur, 1894), I, 8. Eduard Hanslick (Regensburg: Bosse, 1974). 12Johann Heinrich Dambeck, Vorlesungen über Aesthetik, 14For an overview of Herbart’s influence in Austrian ed. Joseph A. Hanslik, 2 vols. (Prague: Carl Wilhelm Enders, thought, see William Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An 1822–23); Joseph Adolph Hanslik, Uebersicht der logischen Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 (Berkeley: Uni- Formen, als Hilfsmittel beim öffentlichen und versity of California Press, 1972), pp. 281–86. On the im- Selbstunterricht (Prague: Enders, 1822). Hanslick, Aus plications of “objective” philosophy for aesthetics, see Kurt meinem Leben, I, 4: “ein Lehrbuch, das seinerzeit, d.h., als Blaukopf, “Kunstforschung als exacte Wissenschaft,” in so lange die Kantsche Philosophie noch Pflege fand, sehr Elemente moderner Wissenschaftstheorie: Zur Interaktion geschätzt war.” On Hanslick’s early education, see Ines von Philosophie, Geschichte und Theorie der Wissen- Grimm, Eduard Hanslicks Prager Zeit: Frühe Wurzeln schaften, ed. Friedrich Stadler (Vienna: Springer, 2000), pp. seiner Schrift Vom Musikalisch–Schönen (Saarbrücken: 177–211. On Bolzano, see Kurt Blaukopf, “Im Geiste Pfau, 2003). On Joseph Adolph Hanslik, see I. J. Hanus, Bolzanos und Herbarts: Ansätze empiristischer Musikfor- Zusätze und Inhalts-Verzeichnisze [sic] zu Hanslik’s schung in Wien und Prag,” in Bolzano und die österreich- Geschichte und Beschreibung der k. k. Prager Universitäts- ische Geistesgeschichte, ed. Heinrich Ganthaler and Otto Bibliothek (Prague: Hanus, 1863), pp. vii–viii. Neumaier (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 1997), pp. 237–64. 13See Roger Bauer, Der Idealismus und seine Gegner in On Exner, see Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Österreich (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1966). The most pen- Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (Chi- etrating work on Hanslick’s intellectual background has cago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), chap. 1. Kevin been carried out in a series of publications by Christoph Karnes discusses Hanslick’s career-related decision to de- Landerer, who situates the critic in a specifically Austrian clare himself a Herbartian in his Music, Criticism, and context. See his “Eduard Hanslicks Ästhetikprogramm und the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought die österreichische Philosophie der Jahrhundertmitte,” in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (New York: Oxford Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 54/9 (1999), 6–20; University Press, 2008), pp. 30–35.

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH The irony here is that many of Hanslick’s things themselves, to investigate that which is per- CENTURY manent, objective, and unchangingly valid quite apart MUSIC most distinctive views on the nature of music are adumbrated in the aesthetics of idealism.15 from the multiple thousands of impressions they To the extent that they commented on music make on humans: these characterize modern knowl- 16 at all, idealist philosophers tended to see the edge in all its various branches. essence of the art in its form, but with the This paragraph, too, is one that did not sur- important difference that they connected vive the first edition; Hanslick replaced it with music’s formal design with the experience of a different, somewhat less strident text, so the transcendence. Hanslick was happy to accept revision here is not nearly as radical as the one the idea of music’s essence as form but wanted he would make at the end of his treatise. Like nothing to do with metaphysics, whereas for the deleted ending, this original opening pro- earlier writers, the experience of transcendence vides important evidence for the roots of was what made music worth listening to in the Hanslick’s thought. The reference to “systems” first place: Jean Paul, Schelling, and E. T. A. is code for Kant and Hegel, and particularly Hoffmann all saw the arts in general and music Hegel, whose thought was frequently described in particular as a means of transport to an as a “system” in the middle decades of the otherworldly realm, a realm without any dis- nineteenth century. Hanslick objected to the tinction between subject and object—in a word, theories of both these philosophers because they the realm of the Absolute. Precisely because of emphasized the constitutive role of the subject its lack of concepts or representational quali- in aesthetic contemplation: he wanted to cre- ties, instrumental music could provide a ate an aesthetics of music in which beauty was glimpse of the infinite, the all-encompassing, a fixed and unchanging in the work in ways that no other art could offer. Hanslick itself, not a construct of the listener. In his agreed about music’s freedom from any obliga- Critique of Pure Reason Kant had argued that tions of representation, but he was averse to we cannot know things in themselves but rather discussions about the Absolute and speculative only through our mental representations of philosophy in general. them. Hegel, in turn, considered music the most The opening paragraph of the first edition of subjective of all the arts, “the art of the psyche Vom Musikalisch-Schönen stakes out a posi- that addresses itself directly toward the tion that rejects both Kant and Hegel in all but psyche.”17 name and seeks to establish a more “objective” approach to the aesthetics of music:

The time of aesthetic systems in which the beauti- 16 ful is considered only in regard to aroused “sensa- VMS, p. 21: “Die Zeit jener ästhetischen Systeme ist vorüber, welche das Schöne nur in Bezug auf die dadurch tions” has passed. The desire for an objective under- wachgerufenen ‘Empfindungen’ betrachtet haben. Der standing of things, insofar as such is granted to hu- Drang nach objectiver Erkenntniß der Dinge, soweit sie man inquiry, had to topple a method that takes menschlicher Forschung vergönnt ist, mußte eine Methode subjective sensation as its point of departure, one stürzen, welche von der subjectiven Empfindung ausging, um nach einem Spaziergang über die Peripherie des that strolls around the periphery of the phenomenon untersuchten Phänomens wieder zur Empfindung being investigated in order to come full circle back zurückzugelangen. Kein Pfad führt ins Centrum der Dinge, to sensation. No path leads into the center of things, allein jeder muß dahin gerichtet sein. Der Muth und die even though every one of them should point in that Fähigkeit, den Dingen selbst an den Leib zu rücken, zu direction. The fortitude and capacity to close in on untersuchen, was losgelöst von den tausendfältig wechselnden Eindrücken, die sie auf den Menschen üben, ihr Bleibendes, Objectives, wandellos Giltiges sei, —sie charakterisiren die moderne Wissenschaft in ihren verschiedensten Zweigen.” This passage does not appear 15See Paul Moos, Moderne Musikästhetik in Deutschland: in the translations by Cohen or Payzant. For a fuller dis- Historisch-kritische Übersicht (Leipzig: Hermann Seemann cussion of the philosophical context of this deleted open- Nachfolger, 1902), pp. 79–88; Dahlhaus, Die Idee der ing, see Landerer, “Ästhetik von oben?” pp. 39–43. absoluten Musik, passim; Mark Evan Bonds, Music as 17Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Aesthetik, 3 vols., ed. H. G. Hotho (Berlin: Duncker und Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), Humblot, 1835–38), III, 129. “Die Kunst des Gemüths, pp. 104–15. welche sich unmittelbar an das Gemüth selber wendet.”

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This is the kind of thinking that Hanslick his treatise provide a much-needed corrective MARK EVAN BONDS rejected as circular and unproductive. He be- to a certain sloppiness in discourse about mu- Absolute Music lieved it was possible to know things in them- sic. The essence of wine, as he points out, can- and Hanslick selves, and he wanted to get at the essence of not be fathomed by getting drunk.19 The effect musical beauty, which for him was tantamount of an object should not be confused with its to saying the essence of music. For Hanslick, essence. If we are trying to identify the essence beauty is a quality within the object itself and of wine, in other words, we cannot base our has nothing to do with . “The beau- account on what it does to us when we drink tiful is and remains beautiful,” he insisted, it. Drinking is an activity, not the thing itself; “even when it arouses no emotions, indeed it is what we do to wine, and it is the activity when it is neither perceived nor contemplated. that creates the effect. Hanslick makes this Beauty is thus only for the pleasure of a per- same kind of distinction for music, consistently ceiving subject, not generated through that sub- separating essence from effect. He does not deny ject.18 By this line of thought, the effect of a the latter, but he rejects attempts to make it musical work is simply not relevant to any the basis of any account of the former, which account of music’s essential nature. In order to leads to his insistence that musical beauty ex- create an objective aesthetics of music, then, ists with or without a listener. In this respect, Hanslick had to identify music’s unchanging Hanslick is very good at focusing our attention essence, which meant ignoring the listener, the on what music is, but he dismisses the ques- act of listening, all issues of perception, and tion of what it does on the grounds that our most importantly of all, anything having to do responses to it are subjective and variable and with music’s effect. He did not deny that mu- therefore inadmissible in the court of objective sic could move us emotionally, but he insisted aesthetics, which seeks to identify music’s es- that such a response was little more than a by- sence, its unchanging nature. product of beauty, that the musical work itself This is where Hanslick paints himself into a could not contain or express sadness or joy or corner. His reasoning is perfectly sound but in any other emotion. Hanslick wanted to iden- limiting his efforts to defining music’s essence, tify the essence of music, not its effect on lis- he limits the usefulness of his argument. Even teners. if we accept his definition of music as “tonally While this may seem like semantic hair- animated forms,” how does music then relate splitting, this is not a trivial point. Hanslick to the broader idea of beauty? In a way, Hanslick was correct to insist on the distinction between had made his case too well, isolating music not essence and effect, and the first two chapters of only from all other arts but from the concept of beauty in general, insisting that specifically musical beauty is its own separate category. (The title of his treatise, it should be recalled, 18VMS, p. 26: “Das Schöne ist und bleibt schön, auch wenn is not “The Beautiful in Music,” as Cohen’s es keine Gefühle erzeugt, ja wenn es weder geschaut noch betrachtet wird; also zwar nur für das Wohlgefallen eines translation renders it, but Payzant’s more accu- anschauenden Subjekts, aber nicht durch dasselbe.” rate “On the Musically Beautiful.”) This ten- Hanslick added this sentence to the second edition, and it dency to isolate music from all other arts is a remained in all subsequent editions; he took it almost verbatim and without acknowledgment from Robert point on which Hanslick’s more thoughtful Zimmermann’s review of 1854, though Zimmermann’s for- early critics would attack him, for beyond this mulation is itself an unacknowledged sharpening of an brief final paragraph, Hanslick offers no expla- assertion already present in the same paragraph in the first edition of VMS (p. 26): “Das Schöne hat seine Bedeutung nation at all of just how music might relate to in sich selbst, es ist zwar schön nur für das Wohlgefallen anything beyond itself. eines anschauenden Subjects, aber nicht durch dasselbe.” Payzant, in his translation (p. 3) of the sentence “Das Schöne ist und bleibt . . . nicht durch dasselbe” omits the final portion of that sentence (beginning with “also zwar”) and justifies this omission (p. 105) on the grounds that 19VMS, p. 31; Payzant edn., p. 6. This analogy appears in a these words are “apparently . . . vestigial,” a bizarre claim, passage inserted into the sixth edition (1881), but it illus- given Hanslick’s scrupulous attention to detail in every trates a point made throughout the treatise from the first new edition of the treatise. edition onward.

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH The original ending reflects Hanslick’s an- had already taken Hanslick to task earlier in CENTURY MUSIC ticipation of that criticism; more importantly, this review for using another term (Phantasie) it suggests that he formulated his ideas within in a specifically Hegelian sense, and we can a much broader framework than has been rec- read his critique of the treatise’s closing para- ognized to date. His comments here at the end graph just as easily in this way, as a gentle do not in fact contradict what he has said be- chiding to his friend for a last-minute Hegelian fore, for what Zimmermann perceived as an maneuver that extends the argument without inconsistency in fact goes to the heart of the closing it off.21 issue Hanslick was struggling to resolve but Hanslick indeed seems to have sensed that had never (and would never) confront directly: he needed something more here at the end of the relationship of the “musically beautiful” to his treatise, for if music really is nothing more beauty in general. Aesthetic accounts of music or less than tönend bewegte Formen, what is up to this time had always approached musical its broader significance? In what way does it beauty as a particular variety of beauty in all its amount to something more than a mere play manifestations. But Hanslick broke with tradi- with tones? Hanslick repeatedly asserts that tion on this point and consistently regarded music is imbued with spirit (Geist), but in the music in purely musical terms. The final para- absence of any appeal to other arts or to a graph suggests that he was aware of the circu- general concept of beauty—a move that would larity of this logic: if musical beauty could be have contradicted his commitment to consid- defined only in terms of music, this begged the ering music in purely musical terms—it is not question of beauty itself. a particularly convincing argument. It is only Zimmermann, too, must have recognized the here at the eleventh hour that Hanslick finally problem, for his choice of words in the review entertains the notion of beauty as a quality quoted above is striking: “Warum hebt Hanslick that goes beyond simply musical beauty. Here den Hauptsatz seiner Schrift: das Musikalisch- at last—on the way out the door, so to speak— Schöne gefällt durch sich selbst, diese goldene Hanslick connects das Musikalisch-Schöne Wahrheit, am Schluss dadurch auf, dass es als with das Schöne. All the elements of sublation tönendes Abbild der Bewegungen im Weltall are in place: the intrinsic beauty of music cre- gefallen soll?” The verb Zimmermann uses here ates its effect neither solely nor entirely (nicht is aufheben, a famously difficult word, espe- blos und absolut) by itself, but also by virtue of cially when used by a philosopher in the middle its capacity to reflect at the same time the of the nineteenth century. In a literal sense, it great motions of the universe, through which means “to lift”; metaphorically, it means to “the meaning of the tones elevates itself high cancel or annul, as in the lifting of a siege, and above the tones themselves.” Music’s intrin- this reading would reflect Zimmermann’s dis- sic, self-contained beauty is aufgehoben: can- tress that Hanslick had “canceled” or “an- celed, preserved, and elevated all at once. Even nulled” the leading argument of his book at the in the second edition, Hanslick’s conclusion last moment. But as professor of philosophy, describes a synthesis that occurs in the psyche Zimmermann knew Hegel’s use of the term to (Gemüth) of the listener, a process that unites indicate a more complicated process of cance- “the beautiful in music” (das Schöne der lation, preservation, and elevation all at the Tonkunst) with “all other great and beautiful same time. A concept or thesis can be over- ideas.” In this sense, Zimmermann’s review is turned by its antithesis even as it is preserved spot-on, for Hanslick’s maneuver is indeed an in an elevated synthesis. When a concept is Aufhebung—a cancelation, a preservation, and aufgehoben (often translated as “sublated”), it an elevation—of all that has gone before. is at once negated, sustained, and subsumed within a higher reconfiguration.20 Zimmermann

Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 283–85 20For an overview of Hegel’s use of these terms, see the and 81–83. entries “Sublation” and “Dialectic” in Michael Inwood, A 21Zimmermann, review of VMS, p. 313.

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms NATURPHILOSOPHIE 1854), the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter MARK EVAN BONDS (1776–1810), and the scientist Hans Christian Absolute Music In his review of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, Ørsted (1777–1851), believed that nature was and Hanslick Zimmermann also correctly identifies the prin- imbued with spirit (Geist). cipal source of Hanslick’s misguided thinking. At no time was Naturphilosophie a wholly “Our physics today,” he sniffs, “has moved coherent or stable body of thought. The histo- beyond the music of the spheres. At most, this rian of science Kenneth L. Caneva calls it a is something that goes through the heads of “congeries of like-spirited but specifically di- those same Naturphilosophen from whom that verse systems,” a “program for understanding aesthetic derives. The musical idea has no need and interpreting, not for producing new knowl- to reflect universal laws in order to be beauti- edge,” while the historian of philosophy ful; it has nothing to do with metaphysics.”22 Frederick Beiser characterizes it as a search for Although of interest today primarily to histori- “the first causes of nature, its deeper sources, ans of philosophy and science, Naturphilosophie and its inner activity,” as opposed to empirical was very much a part of mainstream thought physics, which in the minds of Naturphi- in German-speaking lands during the first half losophen limited itself to nature’s “secondary of the nineteenth century. It is a mode of causes, its external appearances, and the re- thought that resists easy definition but might sults or products of its activity.”24 Naturphi- best be described as an attempt to reconcile losophie offered a holistic paradigm of explana- empirical science and metaphysics, using the tion in which mechanism functioned within a one to justify the other. The Naturphilosophen broader (and higher) organic whole. As Beiser to whom Zimmermann refers believed that notes, it grew out of the perceived failure of common principles united organic and inor- Kantian thought to explain the relationship be- ganic nature, and that the universe itself was, tween reason and the senses, even though Kant in effect, one enormous organism.23 The har- himself, in his Metaphysical Foundations of mony of the spheres served as a metaphor for Natural Science (1786) had established the this view of the universe as a coherent, quasi- groundwork for a unified conception of the organic whole; it was an image that suggested forces of nature.25 Herbart and Hermann Lotze purposeful order without the necessity of any (1817–81), two of the few philosophers with divine entity, even while accommodating the whom Hanslick openly aligned himself, both possibility of one. On the basis of nature’s co- embraced Naturphilosophie as central to their herent design, many of the leading Naturphi- metaphysics. Lotze in particular accorded spe- losophen, including most notably the philoso- cial importance to the concept of motion, which pher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775– he called “the most evolved of the cosmologi- cal forms.”26

22Zimmermann, review of VMS, p. 314: “Ueber die Sphärenmusik, dünkt uns, ist unsere heutige Physik hinaus. 24Caneva, “Physics and Naturphilosophie,” p. 40; Caneva, Sie geht höchstens noch in den Köpfen derselben Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy (Princeton: Naturphilosophen um, von welchen auch jene Aesthetik Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 394 n.4; Beiser, Ger- herrührt. Die musikalische Idee braucht keine Weltgesetze man Idealism, p. 525. widerzuspiegeln, um schön zu sein; mit der Metaphysik 25Frederick Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Con- hat sie nichts zu schaffen.” cept of Early German Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 23The scholarly literature on Naturphilosophie is enormous. University Press, 2003), p. 154. On Kant and Naturphiloso- For concise introductions, see Frederick Beiser, German phie, see The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Sci- Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 ence, ed. Michael Friedman and Alfred Nordmann (Cam- (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 483– bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), particularly the essay by 90, 506–28; and Michael Heidelberger, “Naturphiloso-phie,” Friedman, “Kant—Naturphilosophie—Electromagnetism,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: pp. 51–79. Routledge, 1999), vol. 6, pp. 737–43. See also Barry 26Herbart identifies Naturphilosophie as the basis of his Gower,“Speculation in Physics: The History and Practice metaphysics in the opening sentence of the preface to his of Naturphilosophie,” Studies in the History and Philoso- Allgemeine Metaphysik, nebst den Anfängen der phy of Science 3 (1973), 301–56; and Kenneth L. Caneva, philosophischen Naturlehre, 2 vols. (Königsberg: August “Physics and Naturphilosophie: A Reconnaissance,” His- Wilhelm Unzer, 1828–29), I, iii; see also I, 6–8. The same tory of Science 35 (1997), 35–106. close connections between metaphysics and Naturphiloso-

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH Zimmermann’s implicit connection of music as a sounding image (tönendes Abbild) CENTURY MUSIC Naturphilosophie to beauty and the universal of the motions of the cosmos, not of the bodies laws of nature is particularly important for un- themselves. This is an important distinction, derstanding his objections to—and the reasons for the concept of motion lies at the very heart behind—Hanslick’s deleted ending. One need of Hanslick’s understanding of music, enshrined not have subscribed to the more speculative in the central slogan of tönend bewegte Formen. elements of Naturphilosophie to believe in a It is easy to overlook the element of Bewegung close relationship between beauty and the “great in this phrase and focus instead on the more motions of the cosmos.” Goethe, for example, obviously difficult Formen. But however we had little sympathy for Schelling’s metaphys- understand Formen—and it is open to many ics, yet he observed in an oft-quoted maxim interpretations—the concept of movement re- that “the beautiful is a manifestation of secret mains.28 Music may not have a model in na- laws of nature that without its appearance ture—and Hanslick devotes the whole of his would have remained forever hidden from us.”27 treatise’s sixth chapter to drive home this Hanslick’s original conclusion, linking “the point—but its motions do. In a comment added beautiful in music” to “profound and secret to the first chapter of the third edition, Hanslick connections” of nature, reads like a paraphrase emphasized the centrality of this idea: “In con- of Goethe’s aphorism. Hanslick revered Goethe, sidering the essence and effect of music, the and this aphorism alone would have been concept of motion has been remarkably ne- enough to encourage him, here at the end of his glected; it strikes us as the most important and treatise, to broaden the scope of his argument fruitful.”29 about the nature of beauty. Motion, in the form of energy, is what many Zimmermann was thus correct to link Naturphilosophen perceived as the unifying el- Hanslick’s ending to Naturphilosophie, but he ement in the cosmos, manifested in such di- erred in assuming that this involved matter verse forms as light, heat, sound, magnetism, (“celestial bodies,” not mentioned by Hanslick) electricity, and gravity. The essence of matter, as opposed to energy. The idea of music as according to this line of thought, lay not in the tönend bewegte Formen conceives of the art in idea of extension—the taking up of space—but physical terms, emphasizing motion—the in force, and specifically the forces of attrac- movement of vibrating air—as the force that tion and repulsion. Kant had developed this produces musical tones. Music, by this line of idea in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natu- thought, is a sounding manifestation of motion ral Science, and it was taken up with enthusi- and “moves” through time, much like heav- asm by Schelling and his followers in the early enly bodies themselves. Hanslick does not in decades of the nineteenth century. Polarities of fact suggest that planets or any other objects in force were essential to Kant’s dynamic physics: the heavens “resonate” (widerklingen), as in a universe consisting only of attraction, all Zimmermann portrays it; he posits instead matter would be drawn to a single point; in a universe consisting only of repulsion, all mat- ter would be scattered into infinity. In this sense, Kant’s system of dynamic physics of- phie are evident throughout Herbart’s Kurze Encyklopädie der Philosophie (Halle: C. A. Schwetschke und Sohn, 1831), fered an alternative to the Newtonian mecha- a work Hanslick cites explicitly in an extended addition he made to Vom Musikalisch-Schönen from the sixth edi- tion (1881) onward; see VMS, pp. 37–38; Payzant edn., p. 85. Hermann Lotze, Metaphysik (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1841), 28On the importance of Bewegung in Hanslick’s thought p. 218: “Die Bewegung ist die entwickeltste der and in musical aesthetics of the nineteenth and twentieth kosmologischen Formen.” centuries in general, see Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: 27Johann Wolfgang Goethe,“Maximen und Reflexionen,” Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New in his Werke, vol. 12: Schriften zur Kunst, Schriften zur York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 6–11 et passim. Literatur, Maximen und Reflexionen, ed. Erich Trunz and 29VMS, pp. 47–48: “Der Begriff der Bewegung ist bisher in Hans Joachim Schrimpf (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981), p. den Untersuchungen des Wesens und der Wirkung der 467: “Das Schöne ist eine Manifestation geheimer Natur- Musik auffallend vernachlässigt worden; er dünkt uns der gesetze, die uns ohne dessen Erscheinung ewig wären wichtigste und fruchbarste” (emphasis in original; Payzant verborgen geblieben.” edn., p. 11).

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms nistic-atomistic view of the universe by giving niß der bildenden Künste zur Natur (On the MARK EVAN BONDS priority to energy over matter, moving forces Relationship of the to Nature, 1807), Absolute Music (bewegende Kräfte) over objects. These forces from which he quotes with approval a com- and Hanslick are not necessarily convertible (though some ment about the “ indifference of Naturphilosophen held them to be), but they beauty.” Hanslick also no doubt appreciated all share the basic principle of polarization.30 (though he did not quote) the sentence that For Hanslick, tönend bewegte Formen were immediately follows: “The external side or the sounding manifestations of such polarities, and basis of all beauty is the beauty of form.”33 The he had explicitly connected these motions with fact that Hanslick would not only read but “forms” in a key sentence early in chapter 3, in actually acknowledge a work by Schelling is which he defines the nature of musical beauty: surprising enough in its own right, given Hanslick’s declared aversion to idealism in all It is a specifically musical beauty. By this we mean its various guises. And while On the Relation- a beauty that is independent and has no need of any ship of the Visual Arts to Nature is by no content from outside, residing solely in tones and in means an obscure work, neither is it one of their artistic combination. The meaningful connec- Schelling’s best known: it is the published ver- tions among sounds, delightful in themselves, their sion of a speech delivered on the occasion of coming together and their resistance against one the name-day of the king of Bavaria and as such another, their flight away from one another and their mutual arrival, their soaring and their subsiding— offers an indication of the breadth and depth of this is what presents itself in free forms to our intel- Hanslick’s philosophical readings. The choice lectual-spiritual intuition and pleases us as beauti- is nevertheless consistent with Hanslick’s trea- ful.31 tise as a whole, including its deleted ending, for as René Wellek points out, Schelling posits in Although music, in Hanslick’s view, could this oration a conception of art as “an analogue not embody emotions, it could embody the of nature and of nature’s creative power,” in dynamics of these emotions, and this concept which “art constitutes an active link between of motion—energy, force, movement—is cen- the soul and nature.”34 In this oration, Schelling tral to his argument about the essence of mu- also downplays the role of imitation in the sic.32 visual arts and emphasizes form as a “positive force,” the creative basis of all art.35 Hanslick’s NATURPHILOSOPHEN Schelling’s comments just before the pas- sage quoted by Hanslick are particularly strik- Hanslick’s familiarity with Naturphilosophie ing when read in light of the original ending of could have come from any number of sources, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. In discussing several of which he cites in Vom Musikalisch- Winckelmann’s contributions to the fields of Schönen. One of the most remarkable and un- aesthetics and art history, Schelling addresses likely of these is Schelling’s Ueber das Verhält- the distinction between the characteristic and the sublime and in so doing evokes a process of

30See Beiser, German Idealism, pp. 513, 531–35; Caneva, 33Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Ueber das Verhältniß “Physics,” p. 41. der bildenden Künste zur Natur (Munich: Philipp Krüll, 31VMS, p. 74. “Es ist ein specifisch Musikalisches. Darunter 1807), p. 29: “die erhabene Gleichgültigkeit der Schönheit. verstehen wir ein Schönes, das unabhängig und unbedürftig Die äußre Seite oder Basis aller Schönheit ist die Schönheit eines von Außen her kommenden Inhaltes, einzig in den der Form.” This work had also been reissued more re- Tönen und ihrer künstlerischen Verbindung liegt. Die cently by the Berlin publisher G. Reimer in 1843. sinnvollen Beziehungen in sich reizvoller Klänge, ihr 34René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, Zusammenstimmen und Widerstreben, ihr Fliehen und sich vol. 2: The Romantic Age (New Haven: Yale University Erreichen, ihr Aufschwingen und Ersterben, —dies ist, was Press, 1965), pp. 75–76. in freien Formen vor unser geistiges Anschauen tritt und 35Schelling, Ueber das Verhältniß der bildenden Künste als schön gefällt” (emphasis in original; Payzant edn., p. zur Natur, pp. 13–14. On the idea of form as a “positive 28). force,” see Dieter Jähnig, Der Weltbezug der Künste: 32Hanslick brings out this point repeatedly in chap. 2 of Schelling, Nietzsche, Kant (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2011), pp. VMS. 37–79.

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH sublation in which the former is aufgehoben in CENTURY MUSIC a synthesis with the latter. This kind of trans- formation, Schelling notes, “had to be of the kind that we can imagine in the cosmos [Weltall],” in which lower elements are ab- sorbed into higher ones, thereby “canceling each other out” and yet preserving the force [Kraft] of both. “If we therefore cannot call this high and self-sufficient beauty characteristic, on the grounds of its limited or contingent manifesta- tion, that which is characteristic in it never- theless continues to work its effect indistin- guishably, as in a crystal, which, even if it is transparent, nevertheless has its texture. Even if only very gently, every characteristic ele- ment contributes to and helps bring about the sublime indifference of beauty.”36 Within the more specific realm of musical aesthetics, the acoustical figures (Klangfiguren) created by the scientist Ernst Chladni (1756– 1827) provided a seemingly endless source of fascination for Naturphilosophen and those Plate 1: Drawings of Chladni’s acoustical sympathetic to music as part of a broader web figures (Klangfiguren), from his of natural laws. At no point does Hanslick ac- Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges tually cite Chladni or his work by name, but he (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1787). looms large in the work of three writers he does cite: the Swiss choral conductor and peda- gogue Hans Georg Nägeli (1773–1836), Goethe, tions for the first time by scattering a layer of and the Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted very fine sand on a thin surface, usually glass, (1777–1851). Chladni’s acoustic figures are also and then drawing a violin bow lightly along the discussed at length (and illustrated) in the phys- outer edge of the surface. The vibrations pro- ics textbook by J. Ferdinand Hessler (1803–65), duced not only sound but also geometric pat- who along with Exner was the second of the terns of astonishing variety and design (see plate two nonmusic teachers from his Prague years 1). The symmetry of these nodal patterns gave that Hanslick mentions by name in his mem- new credence to the idea that music was in fact oirs.37 a sounding manifestation of number, just as Chladni caused a sensation in the 1780s when Pythagorean thought had always insisted it was. he made it possible to “see” acoustic vibra- Over the next three decades Chladni gave nu- merous lecture-demonstrations throughout Eu- rope (see plate 2), and his work attracted the 36Schelling, Ueber das Verhältniß der bildenden Künste attention of leading scientists and philosophers zur Natur, pp. 28–29: “Wenn wir daher diese hohe und of the time. selbstgenügsame Schönheit nicht charakteristisch nennen For us today, accustomed as we are to oscil- können, inwiefern dabei an Beschränkung oder Bedingtheit der Erscheinung gedacht wird; so wirkte in ihr das loscopes and similar instruments that make Charakteristische dennoch auch ununterscheidbar fort, wie sound waves and other invisible forces visible, im Krystall, ist er gleich durchsichtig, die Textur it may be difficult to appreciate just how mo- nichtsdestoweniger besteht: jedes charakteristische Ele- ment wiegt, wenn auch noch so sanft mit, und hilf[t] die mentous the idea of “seeing” sound for the first erhabene Gleichgültigkeit der Schönheit bewirken.” time really was. But the experience made a 37J. Ferdinand Hessler, Lehrbuch der Physik, nach den deep impression on a great many diverse fig- Bedürfnissen der Technik, der Künste und Gewerbe (Vienna: Braumüller, 1852), pp. 387–90. See Hanslick, Aus ures, including not only Nägeli, Goethe, and meinem Leben, I, 22. Ørsted, but also the poet-philosopher Friedrich

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARK EVAN BONDS Absolute Music and Hanslick

Plate 2: Ernst Chladni demonstrates his acoustical figures in a public lecture in Regensburg, ca. 1803. Anonymous artist. Courtesy of the Deutsches Museum, Munich. von Hardenberg (“Novalis”), the physicist standing the nature of the universe and the Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Schopenhauer, and connections between the phenomenal and Hegel.38 To varying degrees, all of these indi- noumenal: “He strewed sand on glass and then viduals saw Chladni’s demonstrations as tan- drew musical tones from the glass, and the gible evidence of a link between the material sand assumed symmetrical figures. With dis- and spiritual worlds. Perhaps nowhere is this cords the sand was thrown about. Orpheus, connection more tellingly expressed than in then, is no fable: Sing, and the rocks will crys- lectures Ralph Waldo Emerson gave in the tallize; Sing, and the plant will organize.”39 United States in the 1840s and 50s. He called Nägeli considered Chladni’s demonstrations Chladni’s demonstrations “central” to under- so important that he opened his Lectures on Music (1826) by recounting the excitement they had caused decades before: 38References to Chladni’s acoustical figures appear in Ritter’s Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Years ago the celebrated Chladni gave lectures on Physikers, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1810), I, acoustics here in Zürich. He presented that experi- 227; the opening paragraph of Novalis’s Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (published posthumously in 1802); Hegel, Enzyk- lopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (3rd edn., 1830), §300 (“Der Klang”); Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 1 (1819), §52. Chladni’s 39Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo acoustical figures continued to fascinate throughout the Emerson, 1843–1871, 2 vols, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel nineteenth century and well into the twentieth: they are Myerson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), I, mentioned by (Über Wahrheit und 120. See Sarah Ann Wider, “Chladni Patterns, Lyceum Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne), Thomas Mann (Doktor Halls, and Skillful Experimenters: Emerson’s New Meta- Faustus), Walter Benjamin (Ursprung des deutschen physics for the Listening Reader,” in Emerson Bicenten- Trauerspiels), and Theodor Adorno (“Die Form der nial Essays, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Bos- Schallplatte”), among others. ton: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2006), pp. 86–114.

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH ment, now well known, with plates of glass and ing citations in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen CENTURY grains of sand. With one stroke of the bow and a 42 MUSIC would indicate. Printz, the first scholar to sound, the scattered grains of sand jumped up, quickly discuss Hanslick’s deletion of the treatise’s separated, and quickly conjoined into a mathemati- original ending, also identified a series of pas- cal figure. Those of us who were present were sur- sages in Nägeli’s treatise that sound remark- prised, captivated, enthralled! A magical touch trans- ably Hanslickian avant la lettre. Nägeli uses formed for us the internal into the external, feeling into the visible, time into space. He allowed us to his opening account of Chladni’s tone figures see tone and even to make it visibly perceptible, and as a springboard to an extended discussion of he made its law-bound nature visible.40 instrumental music, justifying this unusual gambit on the basis of his equation of “pure” Nägeli goes on to note that Chladni’s demon- music with “autonomous instrumental mu- strations made visible the nature of the har- sic.”43 He calls play (Spiel) the characteristic mony that infuses the universe. “Like a ray of essence (das eigentümliche Wesen) of the art light, the ray of tone fills the entire world. and places great emphasis on the movement Whether or not and how spheres can be carried (Bewegung) of tones. Music “has no content,” by it—or whether and how they carry it—we Nägeli insists, “as is usually maintained and in do not know. But a primordial myth, and in- spite of anything that might be ascribed to it. It deed more than a myth, tells us that these has only forms, ordered concatenations of tones spheres are brought into reciprocal action and series of tones that constitute a whole.”44 through it, and the myth designates this reci- Hanslick acknowledges none of this. This is procity with the beautiful-sounding word ‘Har- not in itself unusual: his attitude toward other mony’.”41 The speed with which Nägeli moves authors might best be described as unchari- from a replicable experiment to speculation table: he rarely cites the work of predecessors about the organization of the cosmos is typical in any positive way and often quotes or para- of Naturphilosophie in general. His attention phrases them in ways that are misleading or (as to parallels between the disparate phenomena we shall see in the case of Ørsted) willfully of light and sound, as we will see, is also char- obtuse. That Hanslick might not wish to cite acteristic of this mode of thought. anyone else—Chladni or Nägeli—in the per- Hanslick’s intellectual debt to Nägeli’s lec- oration of his treatise should not be surprising, tures is far more extensive than the two pass- but both figures lurk just beneath the surface here. Goethe, too, welcomed Chladni’s work as tangible evidence for a connection among the 40Hans Georg Nägeli, Vorlesungen über Musik, mit forces of nature. When Chladni visited Goethe Berücksichtigung der Dilettanten (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1826), p. 1: “Vor Jahren hielt einmal der bekannte Chladni auch in Weimar in 1803, Goethe wrote this to in Zürich Vorlesungen über die Akustik. Er brachte jenes, Schiller: nun bekannte Experiment vor mit Glasscheiben und Sandkörnchen. Auf einen Strich und Klang hüpften die hingestreuten Sandkörnchen auf, schnell sich sondernd, Doctor Chladni has arrived and brought with him schnell sich fügend zur mathematischen Figur. Wie waren his extensive study of acoustics, published in a quarto alle Anwesenden überrascht, ergriffen, entzückt! Ein volume. I have already read half of it and will be able Zauberschlag verwandelte ihnen Inneres in Aeusseres, to tell you in person some rather pleasing things Gefühl in Anschauung, Zeit in Raum. Er gab ihnen den Ton zu sehen, gab ihn sogar sichtbar zu erkennen, machte dessen Gesetzmässigkeit anschaulich.” Chladni had lec- tured in Zurich in 1810: see Dieter Ullmann, Chladni und 42VMS, pp. 109 and 147. From the eighth edition onward, die Entwicklung der Akustik von 1750–1860 (Basel: Hanslick dropped the first reference to Nägeli, and so this Birkhäuser, 1996), p. 119. passage does not appear in Payzant’s edition; the second of 41Nägeli, Vorlesungen, pp. 1–2: “Gleichwie der Lichtstrahl, the two references is on p. 69. so erfüllet auch der Tonstrahl die ganze Welt. Ob und wie 43Nägeli, Vorlesungen, p. 187: “die ‘reine’ Musik, die die Sphären von ihm getragen werden,—oder, ob und wie selbständige Instrumentalmusik.” sie ihn tragen, wissen wir nicht. Aber eine uralte Mythe, 44Nägeli, Vorlesungen, p. 32: “Sie [die Musik] hat . . . wohl mehr als Mythe, sagt uns, daß sie durch ihn in keinen Inhalt, wie man sonst meinte, und was man ihr Wechselwirkung gebracht sind, und bezeichnet diese andichten wollte. Sie hat nur Formen, geregelte Wechselwirkung mit dem schönklingenden Worte: Zusammenbindung von Tönen und Tonreihen zu einem Harmonie.” Ganzen.”

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms about its content, substance, method, and form. He MARK EVAN belongs . . . to those fortunate souls who don’t have BONDS Absolute Music the slightest inkling that there is such a thing as and Hanslick Naturphilosophie and who simply try to observe phenomena attentively so that afterward they can classify them and use them as much as they can be used and to the extent that these individuals’ innate and practiced talent in and for the matter will allow them.45

Later, in his study of entoptic colors (1820), Goethe noted the striking parallels between Chladni’s acoustical figures and the patterns of refracted light created by the physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck (1770–1821). Seebeck, with whom Goethe had been in close personal con- tact, used various configurations of prisms and mirrors to create refractions of polarized light that under certain conditions projected patterns remarkably similar to those made by Chladni using sound (see plate 3).46 For Goethe, such analogies provided “a handle, a lever by which to grasp and move nature.” One should not be discouraged, he noted, if such analogies occa- sionally led the researcher astray, for “if we keep to our goal of a pure and methodical anal- ogy,” we can connect those phenomena that are separate and seemingly far apart, thereby allowing us to perceive, gradually, their “iden- Plate 3: Seebeck’s “Entoptic figures” tity and the actual integrated life of nature” in from his “Einige neue Versuche und a systematic, scientific fashion. Through such Beobachtungen der Spiegelung und analogies, supported by experimental evidence, Brechung des Lichtes,” we can see that “everything in the universe Journal für Chemie und Physik (Nürnberg) 7 (1813), 259–98, 382–384 (plate II).

45Goethe to Schiller, letter of 26 January 1803, in Der hangs together, affects everything else, and re- Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, ed. Emil Staiger and Hans-Georg Dewitz (Frankfurt/Main: Insel sponds to all else. . . . As soon as . . . the Verlag, 2005), p. 978: “Doktor Chladni ist angekommen universality of each law is recognized, the iden- und hat seine ausgearbeitete Akustik in einem Quartbande tity of countless phenomena must readily come mitgebracht. Ich habe sie schon zur Hälfte gelesen und werde Ihnen darüber mündlich, über Inhalt, Gehalt, into play.” At this point in his essay, Goethe Methode und Form manches Erfreuliche sagen können. Er turns to a discussion of Chladni’s sound fig- gehört . . . unter die Glückseligen, welche auch nicht eine ures, laying out in parallel columns the simi- Ahndung haben, daß es eine Naturphilosophie gibt, und die nur, mit Aufmerksamkeit, suchen die Phänomene larities between the geometrical patterns gewahr zu werden, um sie nachher so gut zu ordnen und Seebeck had discovered in light and those that zu nutzen, als es nur gehen will und als ihr angebornes, in Chladni had revealed in sound.47 These were der Sache und zur Sache geübtes Talent vermag.” 46For an account of Seebeck’s experiments that produced these so-called entoptic figures, see Keld Nielsen, “An- other Kind of Light: The Work of T. J. Seebeck and His Collaboration with Goethe,” Historical Studies in the 47Goethe, “Entoptische Farben” (1820), in his Schriften Physical and Biological Sciences 20 (1989), 107–78; 21 zur allgemeinen Naturlehre, Geologie und Mineralogie, (1991), 317–97. Hanslick refers in passing to Goethe’s study ed. Wolf von Engelhardt and Manfred Wenzel (Frankfurt/ of color in VMS, p. 48 (Payzant edn., p. 12). Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), pp. 710–11. “Hier

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH precisely the kinds of connections that Goethe, CENTURY MUSIC in his 1803 letter to Schiller, had found lacking in Chladni’s work and person when he described him as an intelligent individual who “doesn’t have the slightest inkling that there is such a thing as Naturphilosophie”48 and that such dis- parate phenomena might in fact be attributed to a common force. Hans Christian Ørsted, best known for his discovery of electromagnetism, extended the implications of Chladni’s discoveries still fur- ther. He, too, was committed to identifying the underlying connections among the laws of na- ture. Using metal plates rather than glass, along with ultra-fine metallic dust or pollen rather than sand, Ørsted demonstrated in 1808 that the patterns created by the plates set in motion by sound were caused by not only mechanical forces but electrical ones as well (see plate 4).49 Like Goethe, Ørsted postulated a connec- tion between beauty and the laws of nature, and he wrote several essays and dialogues on the subject.50 Hanslick refers to one of these at

Plate 4: C. W. Eckersberg, portrait of Hans Christian Ørsted holding an acoustical figure dürfen wir also die Analogie als Handhabe, als Hebel die Natur anzufassen und zu bewegen, gar wohl empfehlen (1822). Anon. artist. Courtesy Danish Mu- und anrühmen. Man lasse sich nicht irre machen, wenn seum of Science and Technology, Helsingor. Analogie manchmal irre führt. . . . Halten wir uns aber zu unserm Zweck an eine reine, methodische Analogie, wodurch Erfahrung erst belebt wird, indem das several points in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, Abgesonderte und entfernt Scheinende verknüpft, dessen albeit misleadingly. In discussing the role of Identität entdeckt und das eigentliche Gesammtleben der Natur auch in der Wissenschaft nach und nach empfunden symmetry in musical beauty, Hanslick dis- wird. . . . Hieran finden wir abermals ein herrliches Beispiel, misses the idea that this quality alone might daß alles im Universen zusammenhängt, sich auf einander account for beauty in either melody or rhythm, bezieht, einander antwortet. . . . Sobald . . . die Allgemeinheit jenes Gesetzes anerkannt sein wird, so muß and he takes Ørsted to task on this point: “Most die Identität unzähliger Phänomene sich alsobald recently, Ørstedt has developed this Platonic betätigen.” Goethe’s poem “Entoptische Farben” (“Laß dir outlook for music by using the example of the von den Spiegeleien . . . ”), written in 1817, centers on the idea of the crystal as a macrocosm of the universe and circle, to which he ascribes positive beauty. makes references to the shapes of Seebeck’s figures. Has this esteemed individual never experienced 48Goethe to Schiller, letter of 26 January 1803, in Der the utter repulsiveness of an orbicular compo- Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, p. 978: “welche 51 auch nicht eine Ahndung haben, daß es eine sition?” Naturphilosophie gibt.” 49Ørsted, “Versuche über die Klangfiguren,” Journal für die Physik, Chemie und Mineralogie 8 (1809), 167–254. Ole Knudsen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 115–33; and An English translation of the original Danish version (1808) Kristine Hays Lynning and Anja Skaar Jacobsen, “Grasp- is available as “Experiments on Acoustic Figures,” in Se- ing the Spirit in Nature: Anschauung in Ørsted’s Episte- lected Scientific Works of Hans Christian Ørsted, ed. and mology of Science and Beauty,” Studies in History and trans. Karen Jelved, Andrew D. Jackson, Ole Knudsen Philosophy of Science, Part A 42 (2011), 45–57. Ørsted’s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 264–81. aesthetic writings are summarized in Lorraine Daston, 50On Ørsted’s belief in the connections between science “Ørsted and the Rational Unconscious,” in Hans Chris- and beauty, see Dan Charly Christensen, “Ørsted’s Con- tian Ørsted and the Romantic Legacy in Science, pp. 235– cept of Force and Theory of Music,” in Hans Christian 46. Ørsted and the Romantic Legacy in Science: Ideas, Disci- 51VMS, p. 96: “Zuletzt hat für die Musik diese Platonische plines, Practices, ed. Robert M. Brain, Robert S. Cohen, Ansicht Oerstedt an dem Beispiel des Kreises entwickelt,

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Aside from a poor attempt at humor, there stripped of all context—the question indeed MARK EVAN BONDS are two problems here. The first is that Ørsted makes little sense; but within the framework Absolute Music never made any such claim. Hanslick misrep- of Ørsted’s dialogue, it serves as an illustration and Hanslick resents the analogy of the circle by applying it of how beauty, even though it defies rational in an overly literal manner and by ignoring its explanation, resides in elements that are them- context. Ørsted goes out of his way to empha- selves rational, including the frequency of vi- size that his use of the circle as an image of brations and the distance between pitches.55 rational—geometric, mathematical—beauty is The last of Hanslick’s citations to Ørsted is the intentionally simplistic.52 Ørsted’s image of the unkindest of all, for it attributes to him a state- circle is but one element in an extended and ment posed by one of the dimmer characters in subtle discussion that advocates a dual approach a dialogue, who relates a story that has been to both nature and art from the perspectives of told to him about a dog trained to howl at a the phenomenal and noumenal, the same op- certain passage of music. The story itself is position Hanslick was trying to reconcile in pointless, but Ørsted comes across in Hanslick’s the original final paragraph of Vom Musikalisch- telling of it as a simpleton, as if he himself Schönen. The second problem is that at several believed the story and placed great stock in it.56 points in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen Hanslick Hanslick’s misrepresentations of Ørsted’s himself evokes symmetry as a quality that can writings mask a deeper underlying debt, for in contribute to musical beauty: in his analysis of his aesthetic dialogues and essays, Ørsted re- the main theme in Beethoven’s Overture to peatedly returns to the connections that link Prometheus; in his discussion of large- and the laws of nature to beauty and more specifi- small-scale rhythm; in his comparison of musi- cally to musical beauty, the central concern of cal form to the images produced by turning a the deleted endings of Vom Musikalisch- kaleidoscope; and as an element of musical Schönen. Chladni figures centrally in Ørsted’s form.53 thought, for in another essay in the same vol- Hanslick’s second reference to Ørsted a few ume quoted by Hanslick, Ørsted notes that pages later is simply obtuse. In dismissing math- these acoustical figures ematics as a basis of musical beauty, he claims not to understand what is meant or what is to show us another remarkable confluence of natural be calculated when a character in one of Ørsted’s effects that must seem worlds apart to the uniniti- dialogues asks (rhetorically) if “the lifetimes of ated, whereas in reality they have their origin in a multiple mathematicians” would “suffice to single fundamental idea of nature. The dust-covered calculate all the beauties of a Mozartean sym- surface reveals to the eye divisions and shapes that follow laws [of nature], that is, figures stamped with phony.”54 As presented by Hanslick—that is, thought. But only when vibrations produce figures that are pleasing to the eye do they create impres- sions that please us as well when transmitted through dem er positive Schönheit vindicirt. Sollte der Treffliche niemals die ganze Entsetzlichkeit einer kreisrunden Com- air. Even in our impressions of beauty, the one sense position an sich erlebt haben?” The reference is to Ørsted’s thus confirms the testimony of the other.57 “Ueber die Gründe des Vergnügens, welches die Töne hervorbringen,” trans. K. L. Kannegiesser, in Ørsted’s Neue Beiträge zu dem Geist in der Natur (Leipzig: Carl B. Lorck, 1851), pp. 20–21. Payzant (p. 41) offers a different transla- so bekenne ich, daß ich das nicht verstehe. Was soll denn tion of Hanslick’s comments, based on alterations made oder kann berechnet werden?” Payzant edn., p. 41. In a to this passage in the fourth (1874) and seventh (1885) footnote, Hanslick cites at this point Ørsted’s Der Geist in editions. der Natur, vol. 3, p. 32, but the reference is slightly con- 52On Ørsted’s use of geometrical figures as examples of fusing, in that it cites the Neue Beiträge zu dem Geist in beauty, see Lynning and Jacobsen, “Grasping the Spirit in der Natur (1851) as the third volume of the two-volume Nature,” pp. 50–51. Der Geist in der Natur (1850–51). The essay from which 53Beethoven: VMS, p. 50 (Payzant edn., pp. 12–13); rhythm: Hanslick quotes is once again “Ueber die Gründe des VMS, p. 74 (Payzant edn., p. 28); kaleidoscope: VMS, p. 76 Vergnügens, welches die Töne hervorbringen.” (Payzant edn., p. 29); musical form: VMS, p. 167 (Payzant 55See Daston, “Ørsted and the Rational Unconscious.” edn., p.81). 56VMS, pp. 113–14; Payzant edn., p. 51; Ørsted, “Ueber die 54VMS, p. 97: “Wenn Oerstedt fragt: ‘Sollte wohl die Gründe des Vergnügens,” pp. 8–9. Lebenszeit mehrerer Mathematiker hinreichen, alle 57Ørsted, “Zwei Kapitel der Naturlehre des Schönen,” in Schönheiten einer Mozart’schen Symphonie zu berechnen?’ his Neue Beiträge zu dem Geist in der Natur, trans. K. L.

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH Later in this same essay, Ørsted relates the In another volume of the same series quoted by CENTURY MUSIC vibrations of air that create sound to other kinds Hanslick, Ørsted observes that “every well con- of vibrations—motion, movement, Bewegung— ducted investigation of a limited phenomenon that create light, heat, electricity, and magne- reveals to us the eternal laws of the infinite tism.58 In another essay in the same volume, Whole.”62 Observations and pronouncements Ørsted aligns beauty with the infinite, the ugly like these, coming from the pen of an “objec- with the finite. “That which is essentially tive,” empirical scientist of international re- beautiful,” he says, “is eternal.”59 Ørsted even nown, could not have failed to make an im- uses the term “bewegte Formen” to describe pression on Hanslick, and they help explain the ripples created by a stone thrown into a the source of his ideas in the final paragraph of pond, and a few pages later he relates these the first edition of his treatise. visual manifestations of motion to Chladni’s Nägeli, Goethe, Ørsted, and even Hanslick, acoustical figures.60 Still within the same vol- at least in his earlier years, all believed that ume cited by Hanslick, Ørsted sums up his beauty, including musical beauty, could be ex- argument about the relationship between the plained according to the laws of nature, and world of physical sound and the world of the that these laws could be reduced to the prin- spirit: ciple of motion, or as Hanslick put it, “the great motions of the cosmos.” While Hanslick’s If we assume our perspective in external nature, original ending may have struck Zimmermann then the effects of music would seem to belong as contradictory and superfluous, it was as much entirely to the physical world. If on the other hand an appeal to physics as to metaphysics. The we assume our perspective in the world of ideas, final paragraph represents Hanslick’s attempt then their entire essence would seem to belong there. to connect beauty with the inductive science Having made this division, however, we must bring of his time and without recourse to speculative them together as one. The natural laws of the physi- cal world are laws of reason . . . that lead us to see philosophy. the laws of all-encompassing nature. In other words: Hanslick was determined to identify laws of spirit and nature are one, viewed from two different beauty, and by grounding them in the immu- sides. Thus we cease to be astonished at their har- table laws of nature, he could justify beauty as mony.61 an objective quality not subject to the vagaries of individual perception.63 In the preface to the second edition of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, he conceded that “the final value of beauty will Kannegiesser (Leipzig: Carl B. Lorck, 1851), pp. 80–81: “Die always rest on the direct evidence of feeling,” Klangfiguren zeigen uns ein anderes merkwürdiges but he declared himself committed to the con- Zusammentreten von Naturwirkungen, die dem Unkundigen himmelweit verschieden scheinen müssen, viction “that one cannot derive even a single während sie doch in der Wirklichkeit ihren Ursprung aus Einem Grundgedanken der Natur haben. Die bestäubte Platte zeigt dem Auge gesetzbestimmte Eintheilungen und Figuren, also Gestalten mit Gedankengepräge. Aber nur Körperwelt anzugehören scheinen müssen; wählen wir wenn die Schwingungen solche das Auge befriedigende dagegen unseren Standpunkt in der Gedankenwelt, so Figuren hervorbringen, wird auch das Ohr durch die scheint ihr ganzes Wesen dieser anzugehören. Aber Eindrücke, die wir von ihnen durch die Luft empfangen, nachdem wir diese Trennung bewerkstelligt haben, müssen befriedigt. Der eine Sinn bestätigt so das Zeugniß des Beide in Eins gefaßt werden. Die Naturgesetze in der andern, auch was den Schönheitseindruck betrifft.” My Körperwelt sind Vernunftgesetze. . . . Mit anderen Worten: translations of Ørsted’s texts are based on Kannegiesser’s Geist und Natur sind Eines, angesehen von zwei German renderings of the Danish originals on the grounds verschiedenen Seiten. Wir hören so auf, uns über ihre that these are the versions Hanslick would have known. Harmonie zu wundern.” 58Ørsted, “Zwei Kapitel,” p. 85. 62Ørsted, “Ueber Geist und Studium der allgemeinen 59Ørsted, “Ueber das ‘Unschöne’ in der Natur,” p. 142: Naturlehre,” in his Der Geist in der Natur, II, 437–38: “Ist meine Auffassung richtig, so wird das Häßliche, sowie “daß jede wohlgeführte Untersuchung eines beschränkten in einer gewissen Bedeutung das Böse, ein Endlich- Gegenstandes uns einen Theil von den ewigen Gesetzen keitsverhältniß. Das Wesentlichschöne dagegen ist ewig.” des unendlichen Ganzen enthüllt.” 60Ørsted, “Zwei Kapitel,” pp. 80–82. 63Among the references to laws (Gesetze) in VMS are pp. 61Ørsted, “Zwei Kapitel,” p. 87: “Es zeigt sich also, daß, 25 (“Naturgesetze”), 35 (“Gesetze [des] Organismus”), 48– wenn wir unseren Standpunkt für die Betrachtung der 49 (“höhere Gesetze”), 75 (“Weltgesetze”), 78–79 Tonwirkungen in der äußeren Natur wählen, sie ganz der (“Naturgesetze”), and 84 (“allgemeine Gesetze”).

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms musical law from an appeal to feeling.”64 The Naturphilosophie provided Hanslick the MARK EVAN BONDS laws of nature offered a source of transcendent framework for what he thought of as an “objec- Absolute Music authority not to be found elsewhere. Even with tive” aesthetics, for it allowed him to align and Hanslick all the changes he made to subsequent edi- musical beauty with the immutable laws of tions, he never altered this remarkable sen- nature. In the original and later-to-be-deleted tence in the central third chapter: “All musical opening of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, Hanslick elements relate to one another in secret con- had spoken hopefully of a time when the “in- nections and elective affinities based on natu- ductive method of natural science” would sup- ral laws.”65 The idea of beauty as the manifes- plant the “metaphysical principle” as a means tation of some kind of universal, eternal law of identifying the essence of musical beauty, was central to Hanslick’s thought, even if he thereby overcoming the “unscientific aesthetic was reluctant to elaborate on this point. If of feeling” to arrive at an understanding of the beauty was immutable, then its laws must simi- beautiful in its “primordial, pure elements.”67 larly be immutable, no matter how obscure Because he had dropped most of the final para- they might remain. This was an idea Hanslick graph of his original treatise, however, it was seems to have harbored at least half a dozen inevitable that Hanslick would drop this open- years before the publication of Vom Musika- ing portion of his text as well. lisch-Schönen. In an 1848 review of a work that contained parallel fifths, he argued that Amputations these could not be prohibited a priori, for “only the laws of nature are inviolable,” and the pro- Given Hanslick’s reasons to say what he said hibition against parallel fifths could not be in his original final paragraph, we can now justified on the grounds of any natural law.66 revisit the perennial question of why he de- leted it. There are several possible answers here, none of which contradicts any of the others. 64VMS, p. 10: “Ich theile vollkommen die Ansicht, daß der Briefly: letzte Werth des Schönen immer auf unmittelbarer Evidenz des Gefühls beruhen wird. Aber ebenso fest halte ich an 1. Zimmermann was an extremely close per- der Ueberzeugung, daß man aus all den üblichen Appellationen an das Gefühl nicht ein einziges sonal friend and not just another critic. musikalisches Gesetz ableiten kann.” This passage does Hanslick would in fact dedicate the second, not appear in the translations by Cohen or Payzant. third, fifth, and seventh through ninth edi- 65VMS, pp. 78–79: “Alle musikalischen Elemente stehen unter sich in geheimen, auf Naturgesetze gegründeten tions of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen to Verbindungen und Wahlverwandtschaften.” Payzant edn., Zimmermann. He was also the chair of a p. 31. On the broader concept of “elective affinities” in philosophy department at a leading univer- music and its connection to Goethe’s novel, see Goehr, Elective Affinities. sity; even without the personal connection, 66Hanslick, Sämtliche Schriften: Historisch-kritische Zimmermann was, once again, not just an- Ausgabe, vol. 1/1: Aufsätze und Rezensionen, 1844–48, other critic. ed. Dietmar Strauß (Vienna: Böhlau, 1993), p. 164: “Diesen Pentateuch begrüßen wir mit Freudigkeit als eine 2. Hanslick probably realized that to argue his ästhetische Demonstration gegen das Polizeiregiment, das case about music’s connections with the cos- in der Musik doch auch einmahl aufhören muß. Mit Unrecht wird dem Verboth der parallelen Quinten und Octaven noch immer eine unverjährbare Heiligkeit zugeschrieben; nur die ewigen Gesetze der Natur sind 67VMS, p. 21: “Sollte sich nun immerhin auch in unantastbar. Ein solches ist aber das Quintenverboth nicht, Behandlung ästhetischer Fragen ein Umschwung in der kann es nicht sein, da eine Tonfolge an sich, allgemein Wissenschaft vorbereiten, welcher an der Stelle des nicht verbothen werden kann” (emphasis in original). metaphysischen Princips eine der inductiven Geoffrey Payzant offers a different translation and com- naturwissenschaftlichen Methode verwandte Anschauung mentary in his “Eduard Hanslick and the ‘geistreich’ Dr. zu mächtigem Einfluß und wenigstens zeitlicher Oberhand Alfred Julius Becher,” Music Review 44 (1983), 104–15. verhälfe, —vor der Hand stehen die jüngsten Spitzen unsrer Whether or not the convention of discouraging or prohib- Wissenschaft noch unverdunkelt da und behaupten für alle iting parallel fifths had any grounding in the physical laws Zeit das unvergängliche Verdienst, die Herrschaft der of acoustics was of course a hotly disputed topic in the unwissenschaftlichen Empfindungs-Aesthetik vernichtet, nineteenth century but is not at issue here; what is und das Schöne in seinen ureigenen, reinen Elementen significant is Hanslick’s assertion that only the laws of durchforscht zu haben.” This passage does not appear in nature can be accepted a priori in any aesthetic debate. the translations by Cohen or Payzant.

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH mos, he would have had to expand his trea- sufficiently vague as to be unexceptionable. He CENTURY MUSIC tise considerably. As he noted in his preface nevertheless removed it seven years later, in to the second edition, he had made what 1865, perhaps on the grounds that it raised alterations he could without creating “an more questions than it answered, much like altogether different” work.68 To elaborate on the closing paragraph as a whole in its original his closing comments would have meant guise. making the text considerably longer, and The durability of Naturphilosophie, or at even Hanslick’s harshest critics had praised least certain aspects of it, can be seen in the brevity of the first edition. Hermann von Helmholtz’s Die Lehre von den 3. Vom Musikalisch-Schönen was part of a po- Tonempfindungen (1863), a work that tried to lemical assault against Liszt, Wagner, and put musical acoustics on a more empirical ba- the “,” as Hanslick him- sis. Hanslick greeted Helmholtz’s treatise en- self acknowledged in the preface to the sec- thusiastically, in part because it endorsed Vom ond edition. This was a debate in which slo- Musikalisch-Schönen, in part because it prom- gans were more important than subtleties. ised renewed evidence of a link between beauty By 1858 it had become clear that the treatise’s and the laws of nature.69 Like Ørsted, Helmholtz case in favor of music’s self-sufficient nature emphasized that beauty, although based in the was finding a receptive audience, and there reason and rationality of nature, could not be was no point in qualifying its principal the- calculated or prescribed and therefore remained sis in ways that even allies like Zimmermann beyond the grasp of human reason. At the very might misunderstand. end of his treatise, in a section entitled “Con- 4. The writings of Schopenhauer, which had nections to Aesthetics” (Beziehungen zur languished in obscurity for decades, became Aesthetik), Helmholtz deemed the musical art- extremely well known in the middle of the work an image of the order of the universe, 1850s. It is entirely possible that someone— “governed in all its parts by law and reason.”70 perhaps Zimmermann himself—pointed out It is, as the historian of science Lorraine Daston to Hanslick in conversation that the original notes, “a piquant irony to find a transmogrified ending of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen reads version of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie nestled almost like a passage out of Die Welt als within a weighty scientific treatise by Wille und Vorstellung: we find in music a Helmholtz.”71 direrct and immediate reflection of the uni- verse itself. The original ending of Vom Musikalisch- 5. Hanslick may have begun to entertain doubts Schönen captures a pivotal moment in the his- about the wisdom of Naturphilosophie, tory of what would eventually come to be which was rapidly falling out of fashion in thought of as absolute music. Hanslick used the 1850s. Zimmermann’s summary dis- the term itself only rarely, which is not surpris- missal of it in his 1855 review reflects this attitude. 69Hermann von Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Even in the face of all this, Hanslick did not Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1863), capitulate entirely, at least not at once. This pp. 2, 386. Hanslick praised Helmholtz’s work in the pref- was, after all, a two-stage amputation. He re- ace to the fourth edition (1874) of VMS, p. 14, and in an tained the first sentence of his closing para- extended passage revised for chap. 4 of the same edition (pp. 118–19; Payzant edn., p. 54). graph in the second edition, thereby preserving 70Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen, p. 555: his assertion that there is indeed some sort of “Wir lernen . . . in dem Kunstwerk das Bild einer solchen connection between musical beauty and “all Ordung der Welt, welche durch Gesetz und Vernunft in allen ihren Theilen beherrscht wird, kennen und other great and beautiful ideas.” This seemed bewundern.” Helmholtz contradicts himself on many points concerning the relationship of tonality to nature, however; see Margaret Notley, Lateness and Brahms: Mu- sic and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism 68VMS, p. 9. This passage does not appear in the transla- (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 126–27. tions by Cohen or Payzant. 71Daston, “Ørsted and the Rational Unconscious,” p. 245.

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This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ing, given his aversion to speculative philoso- spect, his amputated endings anticipate the MARK EVAN BONDS phy; he was nevertheless committed to the idea postmodern condition that recognizes the con- Absolute Music of music as an art of abstraction that tran- sequences and ultimate futility of any attempt and Hanslick scended verbal conceptualization.72 In its origi- to isolate music—or for that matter, any hu- nal guise, the treatise embraces the concept of man endeavor—in a hermetically sealed l absolute music in the sense of the absolute as space.74 all-encompassing; from the second edition on- ward, it implicitly adopts the idea of “abso- lute” in the sense of music as an art wholly 74On the postmodern condition in musical discourse, see Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowl- separate from and unrelated to anything out- edge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), espe- side itself. Hanslick’s original, holistic concep- cially chap. 1: “Prospects: and Musicol- tion of absolute music differs fundamentally ogy.” from the hard-core formalism that would emerge in subsequent editions of his treatise. Abstract. The deleted final paragraph also suggests that Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) we need to rethink the history of the idea of is the single most important document in the his- absolute music in basic ways. To date, the con- tory of the construct known as absolute music, the cept has been debated largely along the lines idea that music functions as an entirely self-con- laid down by the original participants of the tained and self-referential art. Hanslick deleted— and did not replace—the final paragraph of the first mid-century polemics—Wagner, Liszt, Franz edition, cutting most of it for the second edition of Brendel, and Hanslick—which is to say, along 1858 and the remainder for the third edition of 1865. the lines of a dichotomy between “absolute” This original ending evokes imagery that stands out and “program” music. The key historical ques- from most of the rest of the treatise, including refer- tion, then, is just when, how, and why these ences to the “great motions of the cosmos” and two concepts emerged as supposedly polar op- “profound and secret connections to nature.” Schol- posites.73 Hanslick assumed, along with his con- ars have pointed to the apparent inconsistencies of temporaries, that the essence of music could be both tone and substance in this paragraph over and isolated. He did so first by defining music in against the rest of the treatise to explain its later terms of what it was not (expression) and then deletion but have not suggested why Hanslick might by describing it in more positive but strictly have ended his treatise in this way originally. The evocation of “connections to nature” points to the musical terms. But his deleted endings suggest influence of Naturphilosophie, a mode of thought that he recognized the isolation and circularity particularly prevalent in Germany in the first half of of his logic, and the original closing paragraph the nineteenth century that posited a basic unity of represents his last-minute attempt to break out all nature. Proponents of Naturphilosophie, includ- of the double cycle of negativity and self- ing such major figures as Schelling, Ritter, Goethe, referentiality. Only later did he abandon this and Ørsted, believed that the basic forces of nature effort, and the fact that he sought to eliminate were all interconnected. Ernst Chladni’s demonstra- virtually all traces of it in later editions says tions of the geometric patterns that could be created more about the polemics of his time than it by sound under certain conditions fascinated his does about the nature of the problem. In retro- contemporaries and provide an example of how mo- tion, sound, form, and beauty might all be interre- lated. Hanslick saw tönend bewegte Formen (“forms 72On the origins and use of the term, see Sanna Pederson, set in motion through tones”) as the essence of mu- “Defining the Term ‘Absolute Music’ Historically,” Mu- sic, and his original ending suggests that the kind of sic & Letters 90 (2009), 240–62. Pederson rightly notes the motion resulting in sound was related to the mo- tendency of scholarship to treat this idea monolithically, tions at work in physics, light, magnetism, and other Die Idee der absoluten Musik most notably in Dahlhaus’s . forces, the “great motions of the cosmos.” Keywords: 73I address these broader issues in a book-length study, now in progress, whose working title is Absolute Music: Hanslick, absolute music, Naturphilosophie, The History of an Idea. Chladni, Ørsted

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