Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Summary
MAN MUß SCHRIFTSTELLEN, WIE COMPONIREN” proclaimed Novalis, the pioneering German Romantic. His aphorism formulated, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the Romantic belief in the transformation of the arts — here: the two auditory arts of music and literature — and the interaction between them. Its ultimate implication — the superiority of music over verbal language — would be rather more forcibly expressed by his contemporary Friedrich Schlegel, who, comparing music with sculpture, hailed music as the highest art form and “eigentlich die Kunst dieses Jahrhunderts.”
Many representatives of literary and philosophical German Romanticism held music to be the most expressive of the arts: not bound by the limitations of conceptual thought, it was freer and more immediate. In Die Weltals Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea, 1819), Schopenhauer contrasted music with the other arts. While those arts represent ideas, he declared, music is an image of the will itself and thus able to communicate the essence of things:
Die Musik ist also keineswegs gleich den andern Künsten das Abbild der Ideen; sondern Abbild des Willens selbst, […]: deshalb eben ist die Wirkung der Musik so sehr viel mächtiger und eindringlicher als die der andern Künste: denn diese reden nur vom Schatten, sie aber vom Wesen.
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- Information
- Music and Literature in German Romanticism , pp. xi - xxxPublisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004