‘The moral background of the work of art’: ‘character’ in German musical aesthetics, 1780–1850

ABSTRACTThe terms ‘character’ and ‘characteristic’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have usually been thought of as having had rather limited significance, often being restricted in application to ‘picturesque’ or ‘realistic’ genres such as the romantic ‘character piece’ or ‘characteristic symphony’. Through a re-examination of Christian Gottfried Körner's 1795 essay ‘On the Representation of Character in Music’ and other contemporary texts, I argue that, on the contrary, these terms are conceptually fundamental to the classical German idealist project of defending music's dignity as a true and morally beneficial fine art. Although persistently misread during the twentieth century as a disguise for concerns with stylistic or thematic unity, the metaphor of ‘character’ was in fact a sophisticated hermeneutic tool and a means of equal discursive engagement for performers, composers and critics. It was only the rise of politically oriented criticism and Wagnerian polemics that undermined the legitimacy of the ‘characteristic’ – a concept that may have a better claim than ‘absolute music’ to be considered the leading idea of the classical and romantic eras in music aesthetics.

Richard Steinitz, György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), ISBN 0 571 17631 3 (hb)

Hungarian composer György Ligeti has not lacked for attention since coming into contact with Europe’s new music scene in the early 1960s. In 1966 he was featured in Moderne Musik I: 1945–65, and by 1969 Erkki Salmenhaara had published a dissertation on three major works. Although periodic illness and a painstaking approach to composition slowed his progress, Ligeti continued to refine and expand his style in the 1970s, producing everything from intimate solo works for harpsichord to the suitably grand opera Le Grand Macabre (1974–7, revised 1996). His turn towards traditional orchestral forms and a quasi-diatonic language in the 1980s brought him new prominence, and the voluble composer has seemed ever ready to provide ripe commentary on his work and the state of new music. The numerous awards and publications that followed Ligeti’s seventieth birthday in 1993 support his status as probably the most widely fêted and influential composer of the latter half of the twentieth century. And if that degree of timely recognition was not enough, the composer has entered his ninth decade with no noticeable decline in compositional energy or ideas. Ligeti continues to fashion brilliant revisions of the tried but true genres of concerto, solo étude, song cycle, choral work, and character piece. His compositions bear the weight of extramusical influence as well as that from beyond the Western canon, yet each innovation affirms his inimitable voice and his singular musical journey from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century.

The Wanderer's Many Returns: Schubert's Variations Reconsidered

Franz Schubert composed four instrumental movements that form a distinct repertoire: the "Trout" Quintet D. 667/iv; the Octet D. 803/ iv; Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 845/ii; and the Impromptu in B-flat, D. 935/iii. Each of them comprises a set of variations on a major-key theme. Each includes (not unexpectedly) one variation in the parallel minor and (more remarkably) a variation in VI followed by a retransition leading to a dominant interruption that prepares the final tonickey variation. Examination of these movements reveals the intimate relationship and common derivation of variation set, sonata form, character piece, Lied, and aria in Schubert. Schubert's formal integrations are made in the service of a Romantic sensibility of distance, loss, memory, and regret. He joins musical aspects of distance (from the theme, from a home key, from a home register) to distance in its poetic aspects: from the past, from home, from old loves and places. Schubert not only continues the 18th-century tradition of musical depictions of distance, he transforms and expands them in unprecedented ways. The result is a poignant intersection of formal innovation and musical poetics.