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The Application of the Aesthetics of Music in the Philosophy of the Sturm und Drang: Gerstenberg, Hamann, and Herder

1974; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sec.1974.0014

1938-6133

Paul Marks,

Philosophy, Science, and History

The Application of the Aesthetics of Music in the Philosophy of the Sturm und Drang: Gerstenberg, Hamann, and Herder Paul F. Marks The DEVELOPMENT of both the Viennese Classic and the Ro­ mantic periods in music is generally accepted as being chronolog­ ically and culturally consecutive, and thus as originating at differ­ ent periods. There is evidence, however, of their simultaneous growth, particularly in the interreaction of their forms. The leaders of the dynamic changes taking place in music, literature, aesthetics, and philosophy after the middle of the eighteenth century believed that they were reviving archaic and forgotten forms. In music, this amounted to a revitalization of Baroque principles: fugue, canonic fugue, strict canon, and the textural and formal structure of the sonata da chiesa\ indeed, what we have come to call the Viennese Classic period (as well, for that matter, as the pre- or proto-Classic period) was out of phase with other art forms. Swift and Pope were both dead before J. S. Bach, and Johnson died before the mature works of Mozart were written. In any case, the essentially classic principles in the music of any period are realized fully during only a fraction of the swing of the historical pendulum. Much of the High Classic phase was Rococo on the surface, and had as well in­ novative, forward-looking elements of Romanticism. The interreaction of the Baroque fugal ideal and the spun-out melodic style with the sonata-allegro process was very important for the refinement of the emotional Geniebewegung then emerg­ 219 Racism in the Eighteenth Century ing; of equal importance, however, at least in the self-image of the last half of the eighteenth century, were its grammatical and rhe­ torical principles, what Arnold Schering called das redende Prinzip .1 Hand in hand with the change from the Baroque doctrine of the "affections” to the Classic/Romantic ideal of the Gefiihlsbegriff went an alteration in the relationship between word and music. Many of the early concepts of nineteenth-century Romanticism had their source in this new word-tone relation. There is interesting evidence on the application of aesthetic theory in the artistic as­ sociations between Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg (17371823 ) and Carl Philip Emanuel Bach (1714-88), between Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88) and Johann Reichardt (1752-1814), and between Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) and Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (1732-95). It was Carl Philip Emanuel Bach who set the tone for most of the second half of the eighteenth century. Particularly after Bach’s move from Berlin to Hamburg in 1768 and his establishment as a respectable burgher of international reputation, he was very often in correspondence with the leading German poets and aesthetic philosophers of the period, and was quite familiar with the the­ ories and experiments in the application of dramatic, rhetorical, and grammatical principles to music. Bach was a musician at the court of Frederick the Great from 1740 to 1768, at a period when artistic circles in Berlin—though not necessarily at Sans Souci—shared greatly the current interest, French and German in origin, in folknationalistic ideals and their influence on both instrumental and vocal music. C. P. E. Bach’s innovative, daring—and often chaotic—har­ monic language, formal structure, and technique of word setting, typical as they were of the often simple, yet dramatic, qualities of certain aspects of the musical Sturm und Drang, were known to Gerstenberg and his contemporaries. Bach combined in his music some of the tenets of the so-called First Berlin Liederschule (c. 1750-70), though he could not be considered an adherent of its doctrine of ultra-simplicity for its own sake. Led by Christian Gott­ fried Krause (1717—70), the Liederschule made use of the ideas 220 The Aesthetics of Music in the Sturm und Drang on comparative aesthetic analysis of musical expression and the application of symbolism to music current with the members of the prestigious Thursday Club. That German Parnassus the Berliner Kreis provided Bach with a foil against which to direct his own ideas on musical expression, as did fleeting but problematical ex­ periments with word and tone by Friedrich Klopstock, Matthius Claudius, J. H. Voss...