Slipping Off the Horizon
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DAAN LODDER SLIPPING OFF THE HORIZON SPIRITUALITY, SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF LANDSCAPE IN THE TIMES OF WOLFGANG AMADÉ MOZART AND FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY FOUR CASE STUDIES Cover: Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer [Wanderer above the Sea of Fog], c. 1818. Oil on canvas, 94.8 x 74.8 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle. Copyright © Daan Lodder SLIPPING OFF THE HORIZON SPIRITUALITY, SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF LANDSCAPE IN THE TIMES OF WOLFGANG AMADÉ MOZART AND FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY FOUR CASE STUDIES WEGGLIPPEN AAN DE HORIZON SPIRITUALITEIT, AANBLIKKEN EN KLANKEN VAN LANDSCHAP TEN TIJDE VAN WOLFGANG AMADÉ MOZART EN FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY VIER CASESTUDIES (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof. dr. H.R.B.M. Kummeling, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op maandag 4 november 2019 des middags te 12.45 uur door Daan Lodder geboren op 9 juli 1989 te ’s-Hertogenbosch 1 Promotor: Prof. dr. A.A. Clement 2 CONTENTS PREFACE 7 INTRODUCTION 11 Purpose 12 The field of landscape in scholarly literature: state of the art 14 Periodical and interdisciplinary rifts 16 Four case studies 17 Treacle, milk, and the horizon 19 I. GERMAN EARLY-ROMANTIC HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF LANDSCAPE PAINTING 21 I.1 The discovery of Romantic spirituality in Jena and Weimar 23 I.2 Spiritual engagement with 17th century Dutch landscape paintings 29 I.3 The conflation of secular with spiritual concerns 38 I.4 Contemporary sources for spiritual engagement with Dutch landscape painting 49 I.5 Perspectives: spirituality and imaginative re-identification in historiographies of landscape art 58 II. TELEOLOGY AND GEO-DETERMINISM IN GERMAN LANDSCAPE PAINTING: JOHANN JOACHIM WINCKELMANN AND CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH 61 II.1 Winckelmann and Friedrich – The obvious distinctions 63 Friedrich’s Tetschen Altarpiece and its context 65 ‘Imitation’ as a means of progress 72 II.1 Neo-Platonic idealism 73 II.1.2 Emulation versus invention 84 II.1.3 Aesthetic similarities: ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’ 89 II.1.4 Patriotic historicism and ‘philhellenism’ 92 Democratic tendencies represented in Friedrich’s paintings 97 Geo-determinism 101 II.2 Teleological historiographies of Friedrich’s landscapes 108 3 II.2.1 Teleology in historiographies of politico-religious aesthetics: Andreas Aubert 108 II.2.2 Teleology of ‘modernity’ in Friedrich’s art: William Vaughan 115 II.2.3 Teleology of ‘postmodernity’ in Friedrich’s art 123 II.3 Perspectives: beyond a teleological historiography of modern art 128 III. THE SECULARISATION OF GERMAN LANDSCAPE SCENOGRAPHY: FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER AND WOLFGANG AMADÉ MOZART 131 III.1 Schiller’s Die Räuber 133 III.1.1 Scenography of the Uraufführung 134 III.1.2 Swabian Pietism in Die Räuber 138 III.1.3 Swabian landscape in Die Räuber 148 III.1.4 Early-modern and postmodern landscape scenography for Die Räuber 156 Preliminary observations 161 III.2 Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte 162 III.2.1 The artists behind four early scenographies 163 Scenography 1: Wolfgang Amadé Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder 164 Scenography 2: J. Quaglio 166 Scenography 3: Karl Friedrich Schinkel 166 Scenography 4: Simon Quaglio 167 III.2.2 Emulative balancing of symmetry, light, and nature: a comparison of five stage designs 168 First stage design – Act 1, scene 1: “Eröffnungsbild mit pyramide” 168 Second stage design – Act 1, scene 6: “Der Auftritt der Königin der Nacht” 173 Tenth stage design – Act 2, scene 26: ein “kurzer” garten 178 Eleventh stage design – Act 2, scene 28: “Feuer- und Wasserprobe” 180 Twelfth stage design – Act 2, scene 30: “sogleich verwandelt sich das ganze Theater in eine Sonne” 184 III.2.3 Contemporary scenography for Die Zauberflöte 188 III.3 Perspectives: historicity and artistic balance 195 IV. LANDSCAPE AS LITURGICAL SPACE IN THE ART OF FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY 197 IV.1 Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s religion and aesthetics 199 4 Natural over Human Sublimity 205 IV.2 Musical landscapes as liturgical space 211 Liturgical space in Die erste Walpurgisnacht op. 60 211 Liturgical space in the ‘Scottish’ and ‘Italian’ symphonies 218 Liturgical space in ‘Lieder ohne Worte’ 228 IV.3 Landscape painting as a liturgical activity 234 In Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s gaze 234 Through Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s lens 240 Onto Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s canvas 251 IV.4 Perspectives: wordlessness in the age of celebrity 254 CONCLUDING REMARKS 255 Beyond the horizons 260 SAMENVATTING 263 BIBLIOGRAPHY 267 APPENDIX 287 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 291 CURRICULUM VITAE 295 5 6 PREFACE One sunny day, in the hills of southern Germany, I hiked to the top of one of the larger mountains together with my local hosts. As we reached the summit, I was struck by the sheer scale of the panoramic view, with mountains scattered around us, as far as the eye could see. On the way up, nature had surrounded us in close proximity, and now it was still all around us but at a tremendous distance. The constant creaking of the flora and the fidgeting of the fauna suddenly, up there, made way for the much smoother but equally ubiquitous rushing of a breeze. Before I had a chance to ponder the natural splendour and serenity of it all in silence, my friends – who were of a much more technical disposition – had sparked up a conversation about the landmarks and infrastructure that they recognized in the landscape. They pointed out the changes in the landscape made by a large-scale lumber harvest, the local ski-jumping rink, the train tracks, and the roads, listing their every village of origin and destination. In a misfortunate effort to hide my frustration, I hardly responded to what they, no doubt, had said with only the kind purpose of making me feel welcome. The ways in which people can engage with landscape are countless – which, I hasten to add, does not excuse me being a bad guest. A few key intellectual and artistic currents, however, can be identified as culturally and historically dominant. My friends’ focus on the human influence in the landscape may, for instance, be typified as an Enlightenment-inspired response; focusing on the progress made possible by the technical ingenuity with which nature is subjugated to human reason. My response, by contrast, could be termed either (neo-)classical or Romantic; searching in nature for something beyond it or within it which transcends its laws, be it a creative force or something altogether ineffable. The communicative chasm between these categories, as this story illustrates, can be prohibitively wide. The discussion of the historiographic pitfalls of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romantic quest for spiritual engagement with landscape in this dissertation, to no small extent, is intended to provide pillars upon which, one day, hopefully, this chasm may be bridged. The first idea for this dissertation, however, was conceived long before my hike in southern Germany. I became aware of the dynamics and, in my view, inherent flaws of teleological methods in historiography through the critical lectures and writings on this topic by the legal philosopher Prof. Dr. Andreas Kinneging, during my bachelor studies at (then) the Roosevelt Academy in Middelburg. The ‘Independent Research Project’ I wrote, just before 7 graduation, was an attempt to synthesise Kinneging’s critique of modernity as a destination to which all roads linearly lead, with Edward Saïd’s critique of the geographical self as a destination to which all “Others” must, through progress, converge. In the Master dissertation that I subsequently wrote at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) in St Andrews, I further explored these ‘horizontal’ (teleological) and ‘vertical’ (geo-determinist) pull factors, applying them to the topic of the German Romantic misappropriation of spirituality in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. Finally, while writing this dissertation, I was made aware of Thomas Ernest Hulme’s critical theological reflections on Romanticism in literature, which prompted the idea to examine if a study of the spiritual engagement with landscape in German Romantic non-verbal art (a century after Hulme) would yield similar results. Once an idea is there, however, it still takes a village to write a dissertation about it. To write one about a single topic from the perspective of an array of relatively independent disciplines, took an entire diaspora of communities and individuals. Long before wider society had anything to do with it, however, my parents and my aunts were preparing me for life. For their love and for the immense support they have given me throughout my studies and the writing process, I cannot thank them enough. For the enumerable hours, over the past four years, of patient and attentive listening to my deliberations about this book, and for their tireless good cheer, I thank Jeroen Savelsbergh, Marcella van Amerongen, Marijn van Cuijk, Sebastian Frattina della Frattina, and Mikhael Hack. I also thank Alex Farrell, Allison Walker, Caitlin Washburn, Michael Anderson, Nina Davies, and Veronika Hlinicanova, for their patience, attention, and good cheer, during our marathon seminars at the ITIA. Their ideas and those of the lecturers, Prof. Dr. David Brown and Prof. Dr. Gavin Hopps, guided and inspired me in constructing the foundations upon which I would later write this work. Hulme’s metaphor of Romanticism as ‘spilt treacle’ (which I will explain in the introduction), in my mind, is irrevocably associated with the mountains of jammy-dodgers, generously provided by Dr. Hopps to sustain us in the seemingly infinite lengths and depths of conversation. For their kind and knowledgeable guidance, for the jammy- dodgers and for the treacle, I thank Dr. Brown and Dr. Hopps. No villager can write a dissertation without the guidance of wise elders.