Intellectual Contexts of “the Absolute” in French Musical Aesthetics, ca. 1830–1900

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-502
Author(s):  
Noel Verzosa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Ideological Tensions ◽  
Hippolyte Taine ◽  
Varied History

In 1895 the critic Édouard Dujardin reviewed a production of an Offenbach opera in a brief article titled “De la Périchole et de l’Absolu dans la musique.” That Dujardin invoked the term “absolute” in a discussion of a stage work suggests that, for him, “the absolute in music” was defined by something other than the presence or absence of texts. Moreover, that Dujardin uses the phrase “absolute in music” rather than “absolute music” suggests the terrain of the absolute was not exclusively musical. This article reveals that the word “absolute” had a rich and varied history in French intellectual discourse of the nineteenth century. By placing the writings of music critics alongside those of philosophers such as Victor Cousin, Auguste Comte, Hippolyte Taine, and Étienne Vacherot, I show that the word “absolute” evoked decades of ideological tensions—between Catholicism and secularism, between faith and positivism, and between monarchy and constitution—stemming from the culture wars of post-revolutionary France. Dujardin and his colleagues effectively made music criticism another arena where these battles were fought.

Not a “Telephone to the Beyond”: Nietzsche's Early Writings on Music

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70
Author(s):  
Katherine Fry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophical Writings

Much has been written about the importance of music and music making to Nietzsche's life and works as a whole, and the relevance of his philosophy for particular composers, repertoires, and works. Meanwhile, music historians and philosophers have approached Nietzsche's musical aesthetics by way of larger nineteenth-century paradigms such as “absolute” music or the history of “metaphysics.” This article explores Nietzsche's philosophical writings on music from the 1870s as they reveal the emergence of his critical outlook on Romantic aesthetics and the musical culture of his time. Against the backdrop of more recent debates about material culture and aesthetics in current musicology, it traces the development of his critical ideas about musical expression and listening as presented in his published and unpublished texts, concentrating on the period from Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1872) to the first volume of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human, 1878). Rather than foreground Nietzsche's relationship with particular composers or works, it illuminates his double relationship with music as actual compositional practice in society and as an idealist metaphor for philosophy.

Brahms in the Priesthood of Art

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie McManus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Self ◽  
Never Married ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Religious Stereotypes ◽  
Mental Well Being

Brahms in the Priesthood of Art: Gender and Art Religion in the Nineteenth-Century German Musical Imagination explores the intersection of gender, art religion (Kunstreligion), and other aesthetic currents in Brahms reception of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the theme of the self-sacrificing musician devoted to his art, or “priest of music,” with its quasi-mystical and German Romantic implications of purity seemingly at odds with the lived reality of Brahms’s bourgeois existence. While such German Romantic notions of art religion informed the thinking on musical purity and performance, after the failed socio-political revolutions of 1848/49, and in the face of scientific developments, the very concept of musical priesthood was questioned as outmoded. Furthermore, its essential gender ambiguity, accommodating such performing mothers as Clara Schumann and Amalie Joachim, could explain why Brahms never married while leaving the composer open to speculation about his health and masculinity. Supportive critics combined elements of masculine and feminine values with a muddled rhetoric of prophets, messiahs, martyrs, and other art-religious stereotypes to account for the special status of Brahms and his circle. Detractors tended to locate these stereotypes in more modern, fin-de-siècle psychological frameworks that scrutinized the composer’s physical and mental well-being. In analyzing these receptions side by side, this book revises the accepted image of Brahms, recovering lost ambiguities in his reception. It resituates him not only in a romanticized priesthood of art but also within the cultural and gendered discourses overlooked by the absolute music paradigm.

A ‘LESS THAN ENTHUSIASTIC’ FRIENDSHIP: JOHN MORLEY, GEORGE ELIOT, AND GEORGE HENRY LEWES

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin A Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Middle Age ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Critical Distance ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Liberal Philosophy ◽  
Aesthetic Preferences

Abstract For roughly a decade, John Morley enjoyed a warm and deferential sociality with George Henry Lewes and George Eliot. The basis for their friendship was the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, which initially held great appeal to Morley, who had lost his religious faith while studying as an undergraduate at Balliol, Oxford. While Lewes and Eliot’s views on Comte were largely fixed by middle age, Morley, still in his twenties, was searching for a substitute belief system. As Morley began to embrace the liberal philosophy of (and form a friendship with) John Stuart Mill, who had declared himself to be an antagonist of Comte’s, Morley, Lewes, and Eliot increasingly held less in common. This lack of commonality gave Morley the critical distance to reassess the couple both personally and intellectually. Embracing a new philosophy and divergent aesthetic preferences, Morley developed an equivocal view of his friends, roughly two decades his senior. Utilizing letters, diary entries, published writings, and a previously untranslated document in French, this essay provides a complex portrait of an intergenerational friendship among three nineteenth-century intellectuals.

scholarly journals Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Lowry French
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Romantic Poet

Poets and scholars are all wrong about the villanelle. While most reference texts teach that the villanelle’s nineteen-line alternating-refrain form was codified in the Renaissance, the scholar Julie Kane has conclusively shown that Jean Passerat’s “Villanelle” (“J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle”), written in 1574 and first published in 1606, is the only Renaissance example of this form. The nineteenth-century “revival” of the villanelle in fact stems from an 1844 treatise by a little-known French Romantic poet-critic named Wilhelm Ténint. This study traces the villanelle first from its highly mythologized origin in the humanism of Renaissance France to its deployment in French post-Romantic and English Parnassian and Decadent verse, then from its bare survival in the period of high modernism to its minor revival by mid-century modernists, concluding with its prominence in the polyvocal culture wars of Anglophone poetry ever since Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” (1976). The villanelle might justly be called the only fixed form of contemporary invention in English; contemporary poets may be attracted to the form because it connotes tradition without bearing the burden of tradition. Poets and scholars have neither wanted nor needed to know that the villanelle is not an archaic, foreign form.

scholarly journals Dissociation and the Unconscious Mind: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on Mediumship

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-596
Author(s):  
Carlos S. Alvarado
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
General Interest ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
History Of ◽  
Memory States ◽  
Hippolyte Taine ◽  
Unconscious Mind

There is a long history of discussions of mediumship as related to dissociation and the unconscious mind during the Nineteenth Century. After an overview of relevant ideas and observations from the mesmeric, hypnosis, and spiritualistic literatures, I focus on the writings of Jules Baillarger, Alfred Binet, Paul Blocq, Théodore Flournoy, Jules Héricourt, William James, Pierre Janet, Ambroise August Liébeault, Frederic W.H. Myers, Julian Ochorowicz, Charles Richet, Hippolyte Taine, Paul Tascher, and Edouard von Hartmann. While some of their ideas reduced mediumship solely to intra-psychic processes, others considered as well veridical phenomena. The speculations of these individuals, involving personation, and different memory states, were part of a general interest in the unconscious mind, and in automatisms, hysteria, and hypnosis during the period in question. Similar ideas continued into the Twentieth Century.

scholarly journals Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 387-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Evan Bonds
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Aesthetic Principle

The growing aesthetic prestige of instrumental music in the last decades of the eighteenth century was driven not so much by changes in the musical repertory as by the resurgence of idealism as an aesthetic principle applicable to all the arts. This new outlook, as articulated by such writers as Winckelmann, Moritz, Kant, Schiller, Herder, Fichte, and Schelling, posited the work of art as a reflection of an abstract ideal, rather than as a means by which a beholder could be moved. Through idealism, the work of art became a vehicle by which to sense the realm of the spiritual and the infinite, and the inherently abstract nature of instrumental music allowed this art to offer a particularly powerful glimpse of that realm. Idealism thus provided the essential framework for the revaluation of instrumental music in the writings of Wackenroder, Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and others around the turn of the century. While this new approach to instrumental music has certain points of similarity with the later concept of "absolute" music, it is significant that Eduard Hanslick expunged several key passages advocating idealist thought when he revised both the first and second editions of his treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. The concept of "absolute" music, although real enough in the mid-nineteenth century, is fundamentally anachronistic when applied to the musical thought and works of the decades around 1800.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 228-232
Author(s):  
Laurie McManus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Selection Of

This brief epilogue addresses the relationship—historical and present—between the exclusivity of the priestly performing persona and the development and perpetuation of canonical compositions. The author suggests that the two reinforce each other; Clara Schumann’s status as a priestess was informed by her selection of certain repertoire, but at the same time her “restrained” performance of the pieces helped mark them as serious works worthy of preservation. Jumping to today’s world of performance, the author analyzes the rhetoric in a New York Times article by Anthony Tommasini comparing two young pianists. The juxtaposition of these sources suggests that some nineteenth-century values of priestly performance, such as “seriousness” and “modesty,” still inform music criticism today.

Listening, Touching, Meaning: On Translating Musical Experience, Answering the Call of Art, and Aesthetic Subjectivity in Baudelaire and Proust

2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 597-614
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chamber Music ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Musical Experience ◽  
Blank Space ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Dramatic Music ◽  
The Way

Abstract This essay examines the way Baudelaire and Proust respond to music in terms of trying to account for being ‘touched’ or ‘struck’ by it. I contrast dramatic music, as it figures in Baudelaire’s writing on Wagner, with the newly emergent notion of ‘absolute music’, as it manifests itself in the fictitious chamber music of Vinteuil in Proust’s novel. The essay thereby demonstrates how emptying music of referential meaning allows writers to fill up that blank space with a verbal reply to the call of music, which itself becomes an act of aesthetic creation. Such an approach to listening, which emerged in the nineteenth century, still resonates with contemporary accounts by scholars working between musicology and literary studies, and shapes their account of aesthetic subjectivity.

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