Autonomy, Ontology and the Ideal: Music Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics in Early Nineteenth-Century German Thought

Autonomy, Ontology and the Ideal: Music Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics in Early Nineteenth-Century German Thought Ian D. Biddle NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 095 50649 4 --MesIs 1-6516 Submitted in fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, July 1995. Autonomy, Ontology and the Ideal: Music Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics in Early Nineteenth-Century German Thought Abstract This thesis falls into two distinct parts. The first gives an account of the economic and social factors which contributed to the emergence of the new post- Cartesian world order in early nineteenth-century Germany and attempts to ground the German response to the French theories of mimesis in this broader context. The second, larger, part engages in an analysis of the philosophical aesthetics of the critic and writer Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and the Idealists Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, paying particular attention to the notions of musical closure embedded in the their usage or intimation of the terms autonomy, ontology and the ideal. To this end, this thesis attempts to analyse the relationship between the organic structures of early nineteenth-century Naturphilosophie and aesthetic approaches to music from that same period. Ian Biddle, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, July 1995. Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: The Problem of History Theory and Practice 1 Structuralist Histories and their Indebtedness to the Moment of Naturphilosophie 6 The Postmodern Discourse 8 Foucault versus History 12 Neo-Hegelian Opposition and the Reclamation of Causality 18 Chapter 1: The Dissemination of Music in the Old Reich 26 The Decline of the Monarcho-Corporatist Order 27 Cameralism: a Baroque Science in Crisis 34 The German Bourgeoisie 36 New Disseminations 39 Robert Eitner's Model 44 Augsburg 48 Berlin 51 Rostock, Hamburg, Lubeck and Bremen 55 From Reichsstadte to Residenzstadte 64 The Napoleonic Factor 70 Chapter 2: The New Ontology 74 The Significance of Music: Mimesis versus Poiesis: from Gottsched to Forkel 79 The Challenge to a World of Visible Meanings 97 Chapter 3: Wackenroder: Music Beyond Articulation 101 Chapter 4: Schelling: Music as Potence 130 On Representation 155 On Ontology 166 On Antithesis 178 On Indifference and Music 184 Chapter 5: Hegel: Music as Mediation Introduction: Art in the Hegelian Trichotomy 213 The Romantic Art Forrn 219 Mediation 225 The Revealing of Spirit in the Objective Realm 233 Time and Mediation 243 Comparison with the Visual and Plastic Arts 251 Comparison with Poetry 259 Music and Text Simple Mediation? 261 The Effect of Music 267 Music as Mediation 269 Conclusion: Aufliebung and Vermittlung 276 Conclusion 283 Autonomy 283 Ontology 284 The Ideal 287 Natuiphilosophie as semiology? 289 Score and Musical Work: the Division of Labour in the FrUhromantik 293 Select Bibliography 305 iv Acknowledgements For assistance in the preparation of this thesis, I would like to acknowledge my supervisors Dr. Ronald Woodley and Dr. David Clarke, Sophie Pearson, for her remarkable attention to detail in proof reading, Pauline Fairclough and Dr. Richard Chandler, for their helpful suggestions for Chapter 1, the staff of the Robinson Library and the University Computing Service, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and the expert help and advice offered by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt. Finally, I wish to thank my parents for their unceasing love and support, and my sister, George, for her indulgence. This thesis is for them. vi Introduction The Problem of History Theory and Practice To undertake a broad survey of music theory and philosophical aesthetics in early nineteenth-century thought in a work of this size seems foolhardy. Even to limit such an undertaking to a survey of the distinct discourses of the German tradition seems overly ambitious. For this reason alone, this undertaking is focused on an attempt to give an account of the texts on music by Wackenroder, Schelling and Hegel that coheres. That is not to say that there is, implicit to this undertaking, some anxiety in the compilation of disparate sources or that its central aim is to make cohere what otherwise should not. On the contrary, it is the fundamental assertion of this work that there is, in early nineteenth-century German culture, an underlying coherence which is intimately bound to the emergence of the commodity. The emergent specialisation of scholarly labour in the early nineteenth century is thus not to be attributed solely to the 'collapse' of universal Cartesian reason, but also to the radical shift in the economic requirements of post-Napoleonic Europe.1 In confronting the generic permissiveness of some of the metaphysical writings on music from this time, however, we become painfully aware of the alien nature of these texts and, similarly, in analyses of music by early analysts such as Vogler and the generic theories of Koch, Ttirk and Forkel, we are constantly bewildered by a language that seems so to blur the distinctions between description, analysis and criticism that they seem wilfully uncentred in any clearly coherent discourse. What many of the aesthetic and theoretical texts of early nineteenth-century Germany seem to have in common is an urge to articulate the boundaries of music - to somehow give an account 1 For a more detailed analysis of economic and administrative theory in post-Napoleonic Germany, see Chapters 1 and 2. 2 of how music might be musical. They were, in short, anxious attempts to create a culture of debate in which music could emerge as a self-contained discursive phenomenon, an autonomous art form. The frequency of the designation Theorie is thus not surprising in these texts since there are all consistently grounded within a searing dichotomy: how to articulate music's self-quality through the medium of language which is external to it. As if to recognise such a dichotomy, music theory and musical aesthetics at this time were burdened with a the need for metaphorical abstraction, driven both by the systematising requirements of German Idealism and the poetic urge of the Weimar classicism of such works as Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and Schiller's Kabale und Liebe. The hermeneutic sensitivity that these texts require is perhaps most clearly demonstrable in the early nineteenth-century usage of the term 'theory'. It is not always clear what the German T7zeorie might mean since it is often indiscriminately interchanged with Wissenschaft ('science' or 'scholarship' or 'knowledge). The apparent confusion demonstrates perhaps the early nineteenth-century tendency towards discursive promiscuity. Where such terms seemed, by the end of that century, to be reasonably clearly delineated and disciplined, they were, in the earlier part of that century, less clearly separated, constantly spilling over into organicist resemblance across discourses. It is interesting that Marx saw the need - perhaps the single most unifying tendency of his complete oeuvre - to ground theory in the social, economic and political discourses. To read early nineteenth-century theory, therefore, requires a radicalised reinvention of theory as a practice that, whilst admittedly protocol-driven, opens itself across many discourses and blurs the distinction between its own apparent circumspection and the 'otherness' of empirical reality.2 The protocol of early nineteenth-century systematic theorising 3 requires, then, a certain purity of form and thus demands, in particular, the extremities of style. Such 2 In other words, the procedural 'rules' of a theory spring from its relationship with previous theories. Such a relationship can be expressed in certain structural or stylistic responses to its own past. Similarly, its 'protocol' can also be determined by its historical predicament, the questions with which that theory's contemporary social environment requires it to engage. 3 Henceforward referred to merely as 'theory'. 3 extremities motivate dissatisfaction with pragmatic reality and theory thereby conjures up for itself, in forced clear relief, a somewhat anxious account of reality's mediocrity. Such extremities, often dogmatically characterised by pragmatists as overblown 'abstractions', are not a retreat from reality, nor are they a kind of reification of reality. Theory's alternative to the mundane does not consist in some kind of surrogate after- life; it is, rather, a drive for the initiation of action. Theory can thus be seen as an instrument to mould reality and in this sense it is profoundly proactive. Nor is theory a quagmire or a vacuum, free of value. Theory's very existence, its very initiation, springs from the urge which brings forth action - it is a form of social practice, if somewhat abstract_ But this qualification in itself, this very abstraction or extremity, instigates critical action. When, however, theory becomes historicised, when it becomes a reified abstraction after the usefulness of its action is overturned, then that theory remains as merely a residue of the social nexus that it once constituted. If we mistake this 'shell' of theory as Theorie an sich, then we run the danger of imputing some kind of closed value, a kind of internalised or immanent essence that is somehow moulded into the closed ontological configuration that remains. This is the danger of structuralist accounts of theory that evoke the development of theory merely in terms of the theoretical texts themselves. Thus this strange creature called The History of Theory, largely synonymous with the German ldeengeschichte, ignores the proactive dimensions of theory and at best trivialises the presence of theory in praxis. This thesis is not such an undertaking; it is not an account of a theoretical moment in the closed structuralist history of thought. It is, rather, an account of a theoretical moment in situ, as a kind of formal account and response to its synchronous mundane environs. The 'urge' from which this moment sprang, and which, in turn, it constitutes, is presented in its historical context, as integrated firmly in the dynamics of social and political life.

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