Argues for the value of the humanities in addressing contemporary social and ecological crises.

The most common physical substance on our planet, water touches and shapes human lives, cultures, and histories in all three of its physical states: solid ice, liquid water, and gaseous vapor. Environmental humanities scholarship has focused largely on oceans and large bodies of fresh water. A wider frame for water-focused ecological scholarship should also include gaseous vapor, solid ice, and other less visible forms that water takes on our planet. Engaging in turn with each of the physical phases in which humans encounter water, and distinguishing between salt and fresh liquid water, this chapter demonstrates the range and dynamism of the relationship between humans and this essential substance. The invisible touch of humidity, the glacial immensity of polar ice, the sweetness of fresh water, and the imaginative breadth of the great salt sea all provide matter for environmental analysis. The chapter contains accounts of recent water-focused writings in the environmental humanities, presents a brief literary history of water in its various shapes, and concludes by gesturing toward the possibilities for new work.

This chapter moves beyond the primarily German, elite context in which E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1810 review of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 was initially received, to consider musical Romanticism in its broader European (and in particular, French) context. In so doing it highlights three expressive modes in which music was understood as operating in partnership with real and imagined visual stimuli: the melodramatic tableau, the unsung voice, and symphonic scenography. These modes pervaded European culture and offer a perspective on musical Romanticism that acknowledges its breadth and the social diversity of its audiences, as well as the variety of listening experiences. Theatre and concert works by Benda, Cherubini, Beethoven, Weber, Meyerbeer, Auber, Donizetti, Berlioz, and Mendelssohn are considered.

The analogy between music and language is both problematic and essential for any rich understanding of musical Romanticism. Few commentators today would accept that music functions as a language; but the idea that music has poetic, literary, or dramatic substance is foundational to Romantic aesthetics and find expression in music as stylistically disparate as Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Schumann’s Papillons. This chapter explores the musical languages of Romanticism, focusing both on the melodic, harmonic, and formal dimensions of musical practice and on the literary and linguistic labour they perform. It explores music from Beethoven and Field at the turn of the nineteenth century to Brahms and Mussorgsky at the century’s end, paying attention to the contrasted thematic cultures that Beethoven and Field instantiate, the harmonic innovations of Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, and Mussorgsky, and the intersections of form and narrative in Schumann’s Second Symphony.

This chapter explores the rise of the twin ideals of authenticity and self-expression in Romantic musical aesthetics. Abandoning earlier aesthetic paradigms of mimesis and rhetoric, Romantic musicians were exhorted to bring forth music from the depths of their inner experience. Authentic expression, in this context, depended on the composer maintaining complete autonomy and renouncing the objective of affecting or pleasing an audience. After examining philosophical, social, and economic developments behind this shift in priorities, the chapter argues that expressive authenticity functioned less as a stable quality than as a regulative concept in nineteenth-century musical life. As such, it was often evoked as a way of conferring aesthetic legitimacy and prestige, but was employed in ways that were inconsistent and complex. As examples from nineteenth-century discourses on orchestral timbre, virtuosity, and identity in music show, the ideal of expressive authenticity could function as an effective tool in the creation and reinforcement of hierarchies of power and authority.

Romantic music has often been seen as an exploration of ideal, disembodied realms of spirit and feeling. It has also been presented as a consolation against the violent changes, profound uncertainties, and fierce social tensions of industrial modernity. Yet technical inventions and adaptions, such as new and improved instruments and new lighting and staging techniques, were at the heart of many of the defining characteristics of Romantic music: these included the sense of wild, dangerous, creative energies in both nature and human arts, the exploration of the most exalted and sombre of human emotions and states, restless formal invention, and appeals to both the intimacy of the individual soul and to vast audiences. Romantic music was bound up with industrialisation, urbanisation, and imperial expansion. Through its dependence on technology, and its ability to reflect upon technology’s consequences, Romantic music was an exemplary manifestation of its age.

Opening his City of God is a heartfelt dedication from Augustine to his “dearest son” (fili carissime) Marcellinus, a Roman tribune and the imperial commissioner who was dispatched by Emperor Honorius to preside over the Council of Carthage in June of AD 411. Best known for his assistance to the Bishop of Hippo in bringing the Donatist Schism to an end, Marcellinus was not shy in asking Augustine questions by exchanging rich letters (epp. 128, 129, and 133) during this time. Furthermore, Augustine’s On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins and on Infant Baptism (pecc. mer.) and The Spirit and the Letter (spir. et litt.), both dated AD 412, are also dedicated to Marcellinus in response to some answers this theologically cultured aristocrat first posed to the great bishop. Overseeing the debates between Catholics and Donatists in AD 411 would eventually cost Marcellinus his life, yet win him the hallowed crown of martyrdom. The well-connected Donatists were able to convince Marinus, comes rei militaris of both Italy and Africa, that Marcellinus and his brother Apringius (cf. ep. 134), African proconsul in AD 411, were secretly plotting with the comes Africae Heraclinus to usurp imperial power. Despite Augustine’s and other African bishops’ intervention, Marinus ordered the brothers’ beheading in mid-September of AD 413 on charges of high treason. However, a year later the imperial court realized that these charges had been fabricated. Emperor Honorius exonerated both brothers, produced evidence that Marinus had acted out of selfishness, and thereby referred to Marcellinus and Apringius with great honor, and had both celebrated as Catholic martyrs of the Donatist rebellion.

The secularisation paradigm, the notion that religion faded into irrelevance in the post-Enlightenment era, has long defined perceptions of Romantic religiosity and religious art. From this perspective, art – in particular, the phenomenon of art-religion – served to fill the void left by the retreat of religion, offering new secularised forms of transcendence to replace those once offered by conventional religious art. This chapter aims to overhaul our received picture by arguing that rather than usurping the place of religion, art-religion serves as its dynamic continuation. It reveals the porous nature of the boundaries between religious art and art-religion in early Romantic thought, examining key texts by Schleiermacher, Wackenroder, and Tieck. It then demonstrates how a similar logic of recuperation and reinvention is at work in Romantic music, drawing on examples ranging from quasi-liturgical music to the monuments of absolute music. The chapter culminates with an exploration of what are arguably the most complex, multilayered examples of Romantic art-religion in the musical sphere, Liszt’s Christus and Wagner’s Parsifal.

This chapter examines the nature and the origins of what it identifies as a distinctively Romantic view of music. According to this, the purpose of music is to provide non-linguistic knowledge or insight, most usually into one’s inner self or, especially, into the fundamental nature of reality. The chapter starts by charting some key moments in the philosophical background of the 1780s and ’90s. Building on this, it traces the emergence of the Romantic view of music in the works of the two philosophers most closely involved in its earliest formulations: Friedrich Schlegel and Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis). It concludes with brief examinations of the ways in which this view was elaborated by two now-canonical philosophers of this era, Friedrich Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer, and with a reflection on the subsequent influence of this view.

“The whole Church of the true God holds, confesses and professes that Christ is going to come from heaven to judge the living and the dead” (ciu. Dei 20.1; Babcock 2.390), as Augustine shows throughout ciu. Dei 20. As simple as this affirmative statement may sound, its emphatic nature masks the complexity of thought about God’s final judgment that had already come to challenge the Christian community by the early 5th century AD, and which Book 20 was designed, in part, to address. True enough, all known early creeds encapsulated the promise of a future judgment requiring Christians to affirm their belief that Christ, with the Father, would judge the living and the dead. But this still left many questions unanswered. When would this judgment occur? How would the events of the last day unfold? How would divine justice be done, and be seen to be done? How did the ordinary experience of human death relate to the events outlined in the Book of Revelation? And what kind of community would result?

When did the period of musical Romanticism end? This question is enticingly simple, but the answer is surprisingly difficult. Drawing on the recent developments in the historiography of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music, this chapter examines some of the categories commonly used to describe this period – late Romanticism, early modernism, maximalism, and Weltanschauungsmusik – and their methodological and epistemological orientations. It will be argued that these categories, far from being merely convenient labels for stylistic categorisation, can be understood as different responses to the complex historiographical challenges arising from the destabilised ontological foundation of the work-concept. Grounded in a discussion of the alienation between Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss between 1909 and 1914, this chapter contends that the question concerning the end(s) of musical Romanticism can thus only be rendered approachable as a heuristic idea, in the way it prompts us constantly to question, challenge, and rethink the historiographical foundations of an era.

At the heart of Romantic supernaturalism was a newly ‘real’ or ‘material’ magic described by philosophers and aesthetic theorists including Friedrich Schlegel, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Théophile Gautier, Charles Nodier, and others. Rejecting the illusory marvels of the eighteenth century and recalling aspects of natural magic associated with Renaissance cosmology, Romantic fantasy reconciled science and enchantment, phenomena and noumena. This chapter explores how such a reconciliation happened, outlining the impact of post-Kantian Idealist thought, the role of pantheism, the social shifts initiated by eighteenth-century revolutionary and imperialist activity, and the emergence of Gothic culture. From these developments, a new magical mode emerged – a fantastic epistemology – with special implications for music. It allowed fairies to converge with insects, demons to merge into colonial Others, and supernatural spirits to enter the domain of the real. These ideas are fleshed out via close readings of Schubert’s Erlkönig, Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable.