The Role of Music in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics

Author(s): Peter le Huray

Source: Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 105, (1978 - 1979), pp. 90-99
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/766250
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 The Role of Music in Eighteenth- and
Early Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics
PETER LE HURAY

FEWreaders will be unfamiliar with E. T. A. Hoffmann's imaginative music

criticism, and especially with his essay on Beethoven's instrumental music' in
which the author compares the music of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn.
Haydn, Hoffmann suggested, leads us through green groves and amongst
throngs of happy people. We find there life such as was before the Fall, full of
bliss, with no pain or suffering other than a sweet, sad longing for the beloved.
Mozart, however, leads us into the very heart of the spirit world. Fear grips us,
but not a torturing fear; rather a premonition of the infinite. Tender accents of
love and melancholy are to be heard, and we follow with inexpressible longing
the figures that wave to us in friendlygreeting as they soar through the clouds in
the eternal dance of the spheres. Beethoven, on the other hand, transportsus to
the realms of the monstrous and the unfathomable. Glowing raysflash through
the deep night and we are conscious of giant, surging shadows that close in on
us, obliterating everything within us other than the pain of infinite yearning.
Hoffmann's prose is striking; indeed, nothing quite like it had existed before.
His criticisms are veritable symphonies in words of which Ludwig Tieck would
surely have been proud. Original as this kind of criticism may have been,
though, the ideas behind it owe rather more to the immediate past than is at
first sight apparent. We have only to explore one or two of the paths that lead
through the forbidding no-man's-land of eighteenth-century musical
aesthetics to see that this was so, paths that once were much frequented but
which are now sadly overgrown.2
Before we proceed any further a word is perhaps in order about the term
aesthetics. The first formal definition that is generally acknowledged is by the
Swisswriter,J. G. Sulzer,whose Allegemeine TheoriederschonenKiinstedates from
1771. The definition was subsequently translatedfor inclusion in a supplemen-
taryvolume of the French Encyclopedie.'Aesthetics',Sulzerwrote, 'is a new term
that has been coined to identifya science that came into being a few yearsago. It
is the philosophy of the Fine Arts, from which their fundamental laws and
general theories are deduced. The word is of Greek origin, and its meaning is
"feeling". Aesthetics then is basically the science of the feelings.' Sulzer paid
particulartribute to the work of the Abbe Dubos in this field, and he drew atten-
tion to the fact that it was A. G. Baumgarten who first brought the term back
into use, in a series of writings dating from 1750 that came under the general
title of Aesthetica.
We tend to act nowadays of course as if that no-man's-land of aesthetics had
never existed. There is precious little in our histories of music about Dubos,
Batteux, Diderot, D'Alembert, Barthelemy or Rousseau even, about Locke,
Hutcheson, Burke or Alison, about Baumgarten, Sulzeror Michaelis; and even
 MUSIC IN EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETICS 91

Kant and Schopenhauer are commonly accorded no more than a passing nod.
Yet these are but a handful of the more active writers for whom musical
aesthetics was a subject of more than passing interest. Whether or not we now
accept aesthetics as a valid subject for scholarly study, the fact remains that for
eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century men, aesthetics was a 'science', and
one meriting serious debate. If the number of publications is anything to go by,
general interest in aesthetic matters increased steadily during the course of the
eighteenth century. In England, for instance,just five books were published on
the subject between 1700 and 1725; between 1725 and 1750 there were twelve,
between 1750 and 1775, thirty, and between 1750 and 1800 well over forty
(these figures exclude reprints and translations). During the early years of the
nineteenth century, moreover, the newly founded European musical journals
all did much to foster interest in musical aesthetics. Although few writers were
professional musicians, and although much that they wrote is tedious,
repetitive and even naive, they were almost all keen amateurs of music and to a
degree at least, informed about it. To ignore what they had to say, then, is to
overlook a useful way in which we can come to a closer understanding of what
music (and especially contemporary music) meant to thinking people of the
day.
One of the earliest and most comprehensive surveys of the history of
eighteenth-century musical aesthetics that I have yet come across is to be found
in the Paris Revuemusicalefor 1838. It is by the founder and editor of the Revue,
FranCoisJosephFetis. Fetis discerned four main schools of thought; three could
be traced back to classicalantiquityand were broadly definableas Pythagorean,
Aristotelian and Platonic, the fourth was an eighteenth-century conflation and
adaptation of these three, its principal exponent being Immanuel Kant. The
Pythagorean position - in which musical beauty stemmed from simple
harmonic proportion - was principally represented, Fetis observed, by
Leibnitz, for whom music was a secret calculation that the soul unknowingly
makes, and by Rameau, who in his last theoretical work, the 1760 Nouvelles
reflexionssur le principesonore,extended the idea that unity of harmony and
melody derive from the harmonic constituents of a single note, to the time-
honoured proposition that the very cosmos was founded on simple harmonic
proportions. The Aristotelian position, Fetis observed, was chiefly represented
by the Frenchmen Batteux, Lacepede and Gretry,and by the German-speaking
Hiller, Sulzer and Herder. It centred on the belief that although man has no
innate, a prioriknowledge of beauty he is by nature attractedto the things in the
world around him that are beautiful. The artist, therefore, whose task is the
creation of beauty, will do so by the process of imitating beautiful nature. This
process, however, is not as mindless as it may sound, for as Batteux put it, the
artist must imitate nature not as she is but as she ought to be.3 'The pleasanteries
of a waterman [said Addison], the observations of a peasant, the ribaldry of a
porter or a hackney coachman are all natural, but disagreeable. Fine writing
consists of sentiments that are naturalwithout being obvious.' The Aristotelian
principle is surely somewhat misnamed then; it ought more properly to be
92 MUSIC IN EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETICS

described as the 'idealization' of nature, as it was the artist's task- as far as his
experience and imagination allowed - to represent perfect forms of natural
beauty. Batteux was quite clear, incidentally, that as far as music was concerned
'imitation' meant the mirroring of the human passions. Opponents of his
theory from Diderot onwards, however, seem wilfully to have misunderstood
this and to have interpreted what Batteux meant, as the imitation of natural
sounds - birds, storms and so on - in music.
The third of the four aesthetic theories to which Fetis drew attention can be
traced back to Plato, who held that man has a priori knowledge of beauty. This,
Fetis believed, was at once the most attractiveand the most dangerous of the
theories. It was attractivein that it elevated man to the dignity of the creator,
rather than the recreator of beauty. It was dangerous in that it found no
convincing criteria by which absolute qualities of beauty might be determined.
Much play was made of unity as a primaryattribute of beautyand of the need to
secure variety within an overall unity, but in the last analysis a sense of beauty
seemed to boil down to a question of individual response: man, in short, was
left to the mercy of his own feeling. The point is well illustratedby a study of the
way in which the idea of beauty changed during the course of the eighteenth
century, in English aesthetic literature. The English philosopher, Francis
Hutcheson set out to develop a theory of beauty within the Platonic tradition,
in his widely-read InquiryintotheOriginalof ourIdeasofBeautyand Virtue4of 1725.
He accepted the concept of varietywithin unity as a centralprinciple governing
our idea of beauty: as he put it (TreatiseI, Section 2), 'The figures which excite
in us the ideas of beauty seem to be those in which there is uniformity amidst
variety.' He was nonetheless uncomfortably aware that opinions did differ in
practice as to which objects and experiences were beautiful. To get over this
difficultyhe proposed a theory of association whereby the individualjudgment
could be clouded and even distorted by temperament, and by experiences
through which the person making the judgment had passed. He wrote, 'When
men are of such different dispositions and prone to such a varietyof passions it
is no wonder that they should often disagree in their fancies of objects, even
though their sense of beauty and harmony were perfectly uniform. We knew
how agreeable a very wild country may be to any person who has spent the
cheerful days of his youth in it, and how disagreeable very beautiful places may
be if they were the scenes of his misery.' By the end of the eighteenth century5a
Copernican revolution had taken place in English aesthetic theory, the focus of
interest having shifted from the object of the experience to the response of the
beholder. Whether or not something was beautiful, therefore,was decided, not
by reference to abstract criteria such as proportion, unity or variety, but by
reference to the feelings. Simply put, if the thing in question was felt to be
beautiful, then nothing furtherneed be said. The Germanparallel to this was of
course Herder's 'Gefuhl ist alles'. The change in focus is particularlyevident in
Alison's Essayson the Nature and Principlesof Taste(Edinburgh, 1790): 'The
landscapes of Claude Lorraine, the music of Handel, the poetry of Milton
excite feeble emotions when our attention is confined to the qualities which
 MUSIC IN EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETICS 93
they present to our senses. It is thenonly we feel the sublimity or beauty of their
productions when our imagination is kindled by their power, when we lose
ourselves in the numerous images that pass before our minds [as in] the charm
of a romantic dream.'
Fetis had little sympathy with the ideas that were being developed by
members of the fourth and uniquely eighteenth-century school of aesthetic
theory, chief of whom was Immanuel Kant.The culmination of Kant'swork on
aesthetics, and indeed, a keystone in his whole philosophical system was his
Kritikder Urteilskraft(Berlin, 1790). In many respects it is a synthesis of the
empirical and apriorisystemsas they had been representedby Kant'simmediate
predecessors, and of which Kant clearly had a good working knowledge. Fetis
objected chiefly to Kant'sargument that music was a language of pure feeling,
and that as such it was devoid of intellectual content. This conclusion, he
considered, was based on a misunderstanding of what music really is about,
music being a singular art that in no way deals with the same precisely
determined concepts as poetry and painting do. Few advanced philosophers,
Fetis maintained, had yet comprehended that an idea can exist - one engaging
the intelligence and giving rise to a lively if indeterminate sense of pleasure -
and yet be incapable of precise definition. Fetis certainly had no doubt that if
the musical emotion is profound enough, very much more than physical
pleasure is involved. 'We listen to a piece of music,' he declared, 'it disturbs us;
it carries us away.... How beautiful, we exclaim, how great, how sublime! In
doing so, we judge, [and] something has been revealed to us - abstract ideas of
beauty, grandeur and sublimity.' For all its surface pomposity the survey that
Fetis provided for the readers of the Revuemusicaleis still worth reading. It may
not be very profound: the remarksthat I havejust quoted on Kant leave much
still to be said. It does nonetheless succeed in surveying a vast field of literature
and it does bring to the fore some of the more important aesthetic issues that
were being debated during the course of the eighteenth century.
Having filled in, with the help of the Revuemusicale,a little of the background
to the debate, let us now move on to consider three much discussed concepts
that provided as it were the foundations for Hoffmann's subjective, or if you
will, romantic criticism. The first is the idea - most explicitly stated during the
early part of the eighteenth century by English writers - that aesthetic
experience is necessarily 'disinterested'experience. The second is that music, by
its very nature, is an expressive or romantic art. The third is that there are two
levels of aesthetic experience, one that is commonly described as the experience
of beauty, the other, the experience of the sublime.
The concept of aesthetic 'disinterest' was perhaps the most distinctively
original contribution that English writers of the period made to aesthetic
theory.6As Francis Hutcheson put it, 'Do we not often see convenience and use
neglected to obtain beauty, without any other prospect of advantage ... than
the pleasant ideas of beauty?' The point was an important one, since it had the
effect of focusing attention on the aesthetic experience itself, separating it on
the one hand from such pleasurable experiences as serve merely to satisfy
94 MUSIC IN EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETICS

appetites and needs, and on the other from issues that are of ethical rather than
aesthetic moment. A particularly extended discussion of the concept of
disinterest is to be found in Kant'sKritikderUrteilskraft.It owes something both
to Hutcheson and to Batteux, who is commonly credited with the formulation
of the moder idea of the Fine Arts - arts that are an end in themselves, and
which are separate and distinct from the functional mechanical arts. In his
discussion of aesthetic disinterest, Kant distinguishes between three kinds of
pleasure: the first merely engages the senses and is often associated with the
satisfaction of some appetite. In such cases, Kant argues, each person will be
entitled to his own opinion. One may consider purple soft and attractive;
another may find it faded and lifeless. One may like the sound of wind
instruments; another may prefer strings. Clearly,it would be absurd to dispute
such matters, since thejudgments are not made on logical grounds. The second
category of pleasure is associated with the delight that we experience in
anything that is good. In this case an interest of some kind is always involved;
the pleasure is not therefore a 'disinterested' one. For to discover the good in
something we must alwaysknow what sort of thing the object is supposed to be.
We must therefore have some concept of it. This is not necessary,however, if we
wish to discover its beauty - delight in the beautiful must derive from the
experience of the thing itself, before rational concepts are formed. As far as
Kant was concerned, however, the argument that truly aesthetic experience
must be disinterested experience led him into deep waters, especially where
music was concerned. If indeed such experience is truly disinterested, then the
Fine Arts have absolutely no ulterior function: not even the arousal of the
emotions. As Kant put it categorically: beauty has nothing to do with being
moved (para. 14). In the last analysis therefore, musical beauty is not a matter of
the emotions but of the underlying mathematical relationships that are the
physical basis of the music. In reaching this conclusion Kantwas not of course
going against the widely accepted idea that music was the art which spoke most
directly to the emotions; indeed, as we have seen, he himself described music as
the language of pure feeling. Evidently, however, he had scant regard for the
intellectual processes involved in the 'mathematical'experience of music, for in
rational terms, he declared, music was of less value than any of the other arts
(para. 52). It is hardly surprising then that Kant's severe aesthetic had so little
appeal to those, who like Herder and Fetis, were particularlyattuned to music.
Although Kant was so careful to distinguish between pleasures that were
sensual, ethical and aesthetic, he could not ultimately avoid the time-honoured
conclusion that the highest forms of art were those which contribute to ethical
ends. As he observed, in para. 52 of the KritikderUrteiskraft,'If the Fine Arts are
not associated with moral ideas, either directlyor indirectly... they serve only
as amusements. And where the aim is merely enjoyment, no ideas are left
behind, the spirit is blunted .. . and we become dissatisfiedand ill-tempered.
We realize that we are not making use of our rational powers ofjudgment.' On
the ethical question Kant was in agreement with many of his contemporaries.
Sulzer held that 'the highest goal of the arts is to awaken a keen sense of the
 MUSIC IN EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETICS 95
good and the true'. Rousseau developed the idea at length in his Essai sur
I'originedes langues,published in 1764. Pre-Revolutionary French literature is
full of it, notably Barthelemy's Entretienssur l'etatde la musiquegrecqueof 1777,
later incoporated into his best-seller, Le voyagedu jeune Anacharsis, which
appeared a year before the outbreak of the Revolution, and which was
reprinted no fewer than forty times, as well as being translated, abridged and
plagiarized.
Now there have always been, and therewill alwaysbe those who would assign
an ethical function to the Fine Arts, and during the early yearsof the nineteenth
century there were many powerful advocates of the idea, including the French
philosopher, Victor Cousin, whose lectures at the Sorbonne on Kant, in 1817,
first attracted attention, and Pestalozzi, who saw music as a basic tool of
education. To view the Fine Arts simply as audio-visual aids in the process of
moral education, however, is to run the risk at best of seriously undervaluing
them, and at worst, of crippling them: we have only to study proposals that
were made for the censorship of the artsby the revolutionaryidealist Leclerc, to
realize how precarious the balance can be between creative idealism and
idealistic sterility.
A good deal has already been said to substantiatethe observation that music
was then generally held to be an expressiveart. 'Musicalcompositions that fail
to move us', wrote Dubos in his Reflexionscritiques of 1719, 'can unhesitatinglybe
equated with pictures that have no merit other than their colours, or with
poems that are merely well-constructed verses.' Yves Marie Andre, in his
influential Essai sur le beau(1742), dwelt on 'the natural sympathy that exists
between certain sounds and the emotions of the soul'. InJames Harris's Treatise
Concerning Music,Paintingand Poetry,of 1744 we find an enquiry into music's
power, 'which consists not in imitations and the raising of Ideas, but in the
raising of Affections, to which ideas may correspond'. And similarly, in
Batteux, we read: 'the prime function of music and the dance must be the
imitation of the feelings'. Statements of the kind are scattered through almost
every eighteenth-century discussion in which musical aesthetics has any part,
and they seem to be the naturalforerunnersofE. T. A. Hoffmann's proposition
that 'of all the arts, music alone is trulyromantic'. Hoffmann here was referring
particularly to instrumental music, music - as he put it - which was
unadulterated by the other arts. And of course the authors from whom I have
quoted were thinking primarily of vocal music, and above all, opera. Even so,
there were many signs that Hoffmann's predecessorsdid recognize the emotive
power of instrumental music, notably instrumental music within an operatic
context, even though such music was inarticulateand its ethical value, in theory
at least, negligible. Dubos, an avid opera-goer, was full of praise for Lully's
affective symphonies. Batteux somewhat grudgingly admitted that operatic
symphonies could have 'meaning', even though 'music was able to accomplish
much more in song'. Even Rousseau, a particularlyardent champion of vocal
music, confessed in a letter to D'Alembert of 1754 that 'the symphony has
learned to speak without the help of words, and that often the feelings which are
 96 MUSIC IN EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETICS

inspired by the orchestra are no less vital than those that come from the actors'
mouths'.
If a distinction is to be made between the early-eighteenth- and early-
nineteenth-century concepts of musical expression, then it is perhaps that there
was a change of emphasis from expression as a mirror of the human emotions,
to expression as the revelation of the ineffable. No discussion of the emotive
qualities of the Fine Arts can in fact long avoid mention of the thirdconcept that
we have to consider, namely the much debated proposition that there are
broadly speaking two levels of aesthetic experience, the one being the
experience of beauty, the other of the sublime. Interest in the idea of the
sublime was sparked off anew in 1674 when Boileau published a translation of
a study of the sublime, attributed to Dionysius Longinus. This was quickly
followed by other editions and commentaries, including one in 1739 by
the English scholar William Smith. Longinus was primarily interested in the
sublime 'in writing and discourse' - the product, as he described it, of boldness
and grandeur of thought, and in which the passions could be raised to a violent
and even enthusiastic degree. Longinus saw the sublime as an ethical agent, a
powerfully persuasiveforce harnessed to moral ends, but it was not long before
the sublime was being studied, as the idea of beauty was being studied,
'disinterestedly'- as pure aesthetic experience.
Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiryintothe Originof ourIdeasof the Sublime
and the Beautifulis perhaps the most celebrated work to do just this. It first
appeared in 1757, it was reprinted no fewer than fourteen times during Burke's
lifetime, and it was translated both into French, in 1765 and into German in
1773. 'Sublime objects', Burke argued, are vast in their dimensions, beautiful
ones comparatively small: beauty should be smooth and polished; [the
sublime] rugged and negligent: ... beauty should not be obscure; the
[sublime] ought to be dark and gloomy.... They are indeed ideas of a very
different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure.' Here then
we find tremendous emphasis on the sublime as overwhelming, and even
irrational experience; the sublime could be 'mathematical'(as Kantput it), the
physical dimensions of the source of the experience being beyond
comprehension, or 'dynamic', the sheer power of the source of the experience
being immeasurable. Burke suggested that there were both natural and
artificial causes of sublime feelings. There were vast mountain landscapes and
storms at sea, for instance; there were the terrible sounds of battle, and the
tolling of the deep, midnight bell. Burke does go as far indeed as to hint of the
possibility of a sublime musical style, though he does this obliquely in his
discussion of musical beauty. 'The beautiful in music' he wrote, 'may not have
the loudness or strength of sounds which may be used to raise other passions, or
notes that are harsh, shrill or deep; it agrees best with such notes as are clear;
even smooth or weak. Greatvariety,and quick transitionsfrom one measure to
another are contrary to the genius of the beautiful in music.' If Burke was
arguing here that sublime music may well be both 'mathematically' and
'dynamically'sublime, then he has already distanced himself considerably from
 MUSIC IN EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETICS 97

those of his contemporaries, who like Sir John Hawkins, were still using the
term as Longinus might have done in a musical context, to indicate dignity and
grandeur of sentiment. The difference, one might almost say, is equivalent to
that between the Handelian sublime and the Beethovenian sublime.
Kant knew Burke's Discoursewell and indeed the structure of his Kritikder
Urteilskraftowes something at least to that of the earlierwork, divided as it is into
sections that deal successively with the beautiful and the sublime. Kant took
issue with Burke on several fundamental points, however. He argued that in
placing such weight on the feelings Burke had failed to establish any absolute
criteria of aesthetic judgment. As he put it in his commentary on Burke,
empirical investigation can only show us how we judge; it cannot tell us how we
ought to judge. Even so, Kantwas of the opinion that sublime experiences were
emotional experiences; the feelings that are awakened by the sublime, he
argued, involve a change in the temperament of the person who is experiencing
the sublime, whereas the appreciation of beauty presupposes and sustains a
mood of calm contemplation. Curiously enough, though, Kantdoes not seem
seriously to have considered the possibility that music might be a source of
sublime experience, although as we have seen, he acknowledged music's
emotive power. In fact, he ratheruncertainlyplaced music within the dimension
of the 'beautiful' after some heart-searching that music could be called a Fine
Art at all: could it, he wondered, be a merely pleasurable art, satisfying a
sensual appetite?
In the event it was Kant's younger contemporary and admirer, Michaelis,
who first offered detailed suggestions as to the ways in which music could
arouse sublime emotions, and in this respect his thought represents a
significant departure from that of Kant. FriedrichMichaelis, Beethoven's exact
contemporary, is a comparativelyunknown figure, and yet the more one reads
of him the more central he becomes to the development of musical aesthetics.
He studied law, philosophy and aesthetics at Leipzig University and
subsequently taught there in a private capacity. His published works include
translations of an Italian singing tutor and Busby's GeneralHistoryof Music,and
his original works include a two-volume study, Ueberden Geist der Tonkunstmit
Riicksichtauf Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft(1795 and 1800) and more importantly
perhaps (because it must have reached a wider public) a series of articles for the
Berlin and Leipzig music periodicals on various aspects of musical aesthetics.
These articles show a great sensitivityto music and an understanding of musical
techniques that was far from superficial.
In an article for the Berlin AllgemeinemusikalischeZeitung of 1805 (five years,
that is, before E. T. A. Hoffmann's appreciation of Beethoven's instrumental
music) Michaelis set out his ideas on the musical sublime in considerable
detail. He first refers to Kant'scomparative definition of the sublime and the
beautiful, in which beauty is seen to derive from form, shape, the most easily
apprehended images of spatial objects or the most readily comprehensible
tunes, and the sublime from things that have no clearly definable shape and
which seem to be immeasurable or infinite. He then goes on to elaborate these
 98 MUSIC IN EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETICS

ideas in a way that Burke might well have done, had he possessed the necessary
technical knowledge. The music may well achieve sublime intensity, he
suggested, when notes are sustained for unusually long periods of time and
when the sheer volume of sound is shatteringly intense, when the music's
progress is frequently interrupted, or when the textures are so complex that the
imagination is stretched to its limits in an effort to follow what is going on.
When we feel that we are poised over a bottomless chasm, when the imagination
encounters the limitless and the immeasurable, then the experience may be
described as sublime. Experiences of this kind, Michaelis suggests, can even be
produced by multi-voiced polyphonic compositions in which the themes are
interlinked in such a complex manner that the mind cannot adequately grasp
them. Sublime notes, moreover, are not a source of instant pleasure; they are
often violent, even terrifying.In so far as music can depict greatnessbeyond the
normal limits of the imagination, transfixing the listener with horror and
rapture, to that extent can it express the sublime. But, Michaelis concludes,
such music will only appeal to men of spirit and sensibility, to men of the
noblest intellect.
But if so much was asked of the listener, how much more was required of the
composer. It is here, in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-centurydiscussions of
the nature of musical genius, that the musical aspirations of the age are most
clearly revealed. In his famous review of Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony,
Schumann wrote: 'We are satisfiedif talent of the second rank masters the form
it finds and makes use of it. But from talent of the first rank we demand that
form shall be enlarged. Genius must bring forth in freedom.' How typically
romantic, we exclaim. Yet we have only to turn to the article on Genius in the
Diderot, D'Alembert Encyclopedie of 1757, to see how wrong we are: 'The man of
genius', it reads, 'is cramped by rules and laws of taste. He breaksthem in order
to fly upwards to the sublime - to things that are great and intensely
moving. ... Energy, richness of invention, pathos, and sublimity, all these are
the hallmarks of artistic genius.' The article on musical genius that Rousseau
wrote for his musical dictionary contains some of the author's very purplest
prose: 'Seek not, young man', he declared, 'to comprehend the nature of
genius. If you are blest with it you will sense it within you. If not, you will never
know it! The musician of genius encompasses the entire universe in his art. Do
you wish to know whether a spark of this devouring flame inspires you? Then
run, fly to Naples! Listen to the masterpieces of Leo, Durante, Jomelli and
Pergolesi. If your eyes brim with tears, if your heart pounds, if you are seized
with fits of trembling ... then take Metastasio and set to work. His genius will
warm yours and you will build upon the model he has given you. But if you are
unmoved by this great art ... vulgar mortal, do not profane that sublime word.
How could you ever come to understand it if you have never felt it!' These
surely are sentiments of which E. T. A. Hoffmann himself might have been
proud!
MUSIC IN EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETICS 99

NOTES

1 This first appeared in the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische ZeitunginJuly 1810.

2 In an attempt to supplement such original material as is currently available in print, the
Cambridge University Press is publishing an annotated and translatedanthology of writings on
musical aesthetics of the eighteenth and early-nineteenthcenturies, edited by DrJames Day and
the author. The volume will be the first in a new series of CambridgeSourceReadingsin theHistoryof
Music.
3 Lesbeaux-artsreduitsa un mimeprincipe(Paris, 1746).
4 Ed. Peter Kivy(The Hague, 1973).
5 See the admirable study byJerome Stolnitz, "Beauty": Some Stages in the History of an Idea',
Journalofthe Historyof Ideas,xxii (1961), 185ff.
6 Jerome Stolnitz, 'On the Origins of "Aesthetic Disinterestedness"',Journalof Aesthetics(1961),
i31ff.