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Princeton University Press Chapter Title: Idealism and Inspiration Book Title: The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity Book Author(s): Raymond Knapp Published by: Princeton University Press. (2006) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rjwz.10 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Princeton University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity This content downloaded from 76.77.171.98 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:41:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Idealism THE AMERICAN MUSICAL has long offered inspiring and and idealistic perspectives to its audiences, most often within song and/or dance numbers that seek to project and em- Inspiration body qualities of courage, heroic resolve, and the capacity to do the right thing and overcome difficulties. Almost al- ways, these perspectives form an essential part of what makes good outcomes possible and bad outcomes more emotionally wrenching; in the latter case, they help make it clear that such outcomes are first of all failures of personal aspirations. Because inspiring and idealistic perspectives are set to music in musicals, they are eminently exportable from their immediate contexts as something to be recalled or sung, to similar ends, outside the theater. Numbers of this type inspire well beyond their immediate contexts, taking part in the emotional lives of those who sing, for example, “Old Man River,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” or “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” in the shower, who thereby gain a surer sense of their own capacities for heroic perseverance, especially since heroism for most people involves being heroically vocal in a central way. Indeed, many Broadway songs with a heroic trajectory, whatever their subject matter, serve this kind of inspirational purpose, through their ability to instill heroic feelings of internalized competency in their singers. Hence the familiar recourse to sing- ing in the shower, with its gratifying acoustic amplifying other positive feel- ings of renewal often provided in that setting. Singing “If Ever I Would Leave You,” “On the Street Where You Live,” or “So in Love” in the shower might have specific application, in reinforcing a capacity for long-term romantic commitment, but it first of all affirms the singer’s vocal courage, as he or she (mentally) strikes a romantic pose and sustains it through ever higher and longer notes as the song approaches and reaches its predestined climax.1 Yet, important as the theme of inspiration and idealism has been to the American musical, and however familiar many of its specific manifestations might be, three dimensions of the theme require some discussion before we take up our slate of musicals that adopt it centrally. First, the many possible meanings of these charged terms (and their close relatives) offer a sometimes useful confusion about both the content of an ideal or inspiration and its perceived relationship to reality; it will be important here to consider briefly how these often blurred terms have evolved, with direct consequences for the American musical. Second, the relationship between this theme and the previous theme, fairy tales and fantasy, requires clarification as to the ways in which they parallel each other and yet differ significantly. Third, there is This content downloaded from 76.77.171.98 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:41:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms IDEALISM AND INSPIRATION 165 a large difference between “inspiration and idealism” when it functions as a secondary theme, when it might simply support or enhance a larger action (implicitly, the situation described in the first paragraph), and when it func- tions as a primary theme. Fundamental to idealism is the core concept of “idea”; thus, “idealism” refers specifically to mental constructs understood to be essentially inter- nal—that is, of the mind—although related to the external world at least by aspiration. “Idealism” incorporates some aspects of “ideation,” the capacity to imagine or visualize alternatives to the real world, as perceived through the senses. Many common uses of the word “ideal” stem from both this separateness from reality and the aspiration to change reality so as to bring it more in line with an internal vision of what might be; thus Utopian visions and ambitious goals have become naturalized associates of the word “ideal,” especially when those visions and goals project a better version of the reality we already know. Yet most applications of the term also see the separation from reality as fundamental, so that “of the mind” can seem to mean “only of the mind,” with “ideal” coming to mean “impractical” or even “useless”; from this perspective, the phrase “impractical idealist” can seem redundant. Nevertheless, idealism—especially when understood to be a personal quality, denoting the capacity to cherish and hold fast to ideals in the face of a hostile reality—is almost universally admired as an attribute that might help pull humanity out of the limitations of the known world and raise it above im- pulses of sensual gratification or of accommodation to more immediate worldly demands. (In this sense, idealism can function as a form of redemp- tion; often, the two concepts blur in their dramatic presentation.) Fundamen- tal to this validation of the most subjectively intense form of idealism is the strand of philosophy known as German Idealism, which emerged forcefully in the nineteenth century, stemming most immediately from Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), and more distantly from Plato. German Idealism is both separate from and a fundamental basis for more general notions of idealism as they evolved in the twentieth century. Idealism, in philosophical terms, posits a necessary division between reality and ideas of reality as gained through perception and thought, and places epistemolog- ical priority on the ideal world; in its most intense form, Idealism places metaphysical priority there as well. Thus, according to Idealist philosophy, what we know is, first of all and perhaps only, the content of our own minds; moreover, what we identify as “reality” is—to the extent that it is “real” in the conventional sense—entirely circumscribed by those dimensions that we may perceive through our senses, so that what we call reality is wholly an internal construct. In its extreme form, Idealism maintains that the develop- ment and maintenance of a subjective self is what matters more than achieve- ments in the “real world”; indeed, the subjective self is, in an important sense, the very source of that “real world.” Idealism maintains that what you are, and not what you do, carries by far the greater moral and ethical This content downloaded from 76.77.171.98 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:41:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 166 CHAPTER FOUR weight. As an important consequence of German Idealist thought, music, which has always seemed more removed from reality than the other arts, became for that very reason regarded by many as the highest of the arts. Thus, music, in a formulation that came to be known as absolute music, seemed increasingly to represent an Ideal construct in the strict sense of the term: existing in the mind, mainly bypassing the representational dimension of the other arts, and thereby placing us in closer proximity to the infinite. Although most Americans tend to think of idealism in terms more of per- sonal qualities and attitudes than of philosophy, German Idealism has never- theless exerted a powerful if limited influence on how those qualities and attitudes have been formulated and regarded. Idealists are generally taken to be impractical, since they discount practicality in favor of noble ideas and causes, refusing to compromise, and risking life itself for the sake of either the soul or an ideal that has little chance of realization. Yet, even before German Idealism had fully evolved in the nineteenth century, Americans had fought their Revolutionary War based on ideals, inspired by such slogans as “Give me liberty or give me death” (Patrick Henry, 1775) and “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country” (Nathan Hale, 1776). The success of that war against formidable opposition, and the legendary popu- larity of these slogans and others (such as New Hampshire’s later motto, “Live free or die”), has allowed America—a country that fetishizes practical success above all else—to redeem idealism in terms of its long-range practi- cality. Americans thus tend to merge notions of idealism with “vision,” the ability to foresee long-term consequences, and act accordingly despite the certainty of having to suffer through shorter-term defeats and reverses. In The Sound of Music, for example, the Baroness reproaches the Captain in 4.1 “No Way to Stop It” (a song dropped for the film version): “You dear attrac- tive dewy-eyed idealist, / Today you have to learn to be a realist.” But Ameri- can audiences who know she is advising the Captain to accommodate to the Nazis will understand that his ability to maintain his idealism—and thus to risk his life, wealth, and family—is his only path to personal salvation, his only means of escape from the taint of association with what is generally regarded as the most evil of an array of totalitarian regimes that emerged during the twentieth century.

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