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Beethoven and the Aesthetic Thought of His Time Author(s): Luigi
Magnani Source: International Review of Music Aesthetics and
Sociology, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Dec., 1970), pp.
125-136Published by: Croatian Musicological SocietyStable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/836372Accessed: 23-05-2015 11:50
UTC
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BEETHOVEN AND THE AESTHETIC THOUGHT OF HIS TIME:'
LUIGI MAGNANI
Universitd di Roma
At a moment which will always be remembered in the history of
the German thought the young Goethe, watching the magnificent work
of the legendary Erwin von Steinbeck, the Strassburg Cathedral,
visioned the genius of his nation. In those boldly elongated and
powerful archi- tectural forms Goethe, anticipating the romantics,
discovered a beauty which was in complete contrast with the then
predominating concept of beauty and which with its mystic
spirituality shone against the dark background of the time as a
clear and original expression of an inspi- ration which had its
roots deep in the soul of the nation.
The German artist, who had apparently forgotten his own genius
under foreign influences, had to recover his former creative
impulse within his own tradition.
In those years it seemed that youthful enthusiasm would wake
Ger- many from her lethargy. In that tumult of feelings and in that
fermen- tation of ideas, freedom and categorical imperative,
pietism and criticism, nation and humanity, the feeling for nature
and the aspirations for the transcendental were in mutual contrast
like Novalis's metaphysical poles of day and night; and it was in
these very antinomies that the faverish life of the Sturm und Drang
was developing, seeking to establish a new relationship between men
and existence and penetrate into the mystery of the world.
Inspired by its own troubles, the German spirit - as if reacting
to the austere rationality of the Enlightenment - began to
investigate new and unknown spheres by which it felt instinctively
attracted. To >>clear and bright philosophy>obscure feel-
ings
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126 THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MUSIC AESTHETICS AND
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was becoming conscious of her own true spiritual reality and
deep-lying metaphysical need which sought its satisfaction and
supreme expression in music (which Wackenroder raised to the
highest level of human activity, and which Schelling regarded as a
means for higher cognition).
However, what that music was as an expression of the Abhsolute
none of them explained decisively; it would seem that they were
content with sensing its transcendental nature and potential
emotive power and that in Haydn's and Mozart's works they
recognized the awakened voice of the conscience of the nation.
Identifying music with all that vibrates in nature and man on the
basis of the cosmic harmony, Herder regards it as the art of
mankind: Die Musik, eine Kunst der Menschheit. The man will come -
he would say - who will be able
,to unify music with purely
human feelings, who will know how to adjust it to the roles of
expression and action: a man who will interpret faithfully the
spirit of the German nation but who, at the same time, will be able
to rise above it to a sphere of a wider brotherhood of men making
all men partakers of the achie- vements reached by lmusic in the
sphere of the pure spirit.
The tasks were set out, the ideals made clear, and only the
arrival of the expected one was awaited.
A participant in that unanimous aspiration for what is humane
and eternal, the invoked artist was already busy in the shadows,
bent dil- ligently over his work. He was born in 1770, that
decisive year when Goethe was toasting the German genius at
Strassburg calling for its full expression by an artist who -
through struggle, suffering and joy - would :succeed, better than
Prometheus, in bringing the >,felicity of the gods down to the
earth
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BEETHOVEN AND THE AESTHETIC THOUGHT OF HIS TIME 127
It was during the time when in the eager intellectual atmosphere
of his native town he studied at the university which more than
others was open to the trends of the French Enlightenment, Kant's
ideas and Schil- ler's poetry - that Beethoven became acquainted
with philosophy and literature, with mankind's new ideals and a
religiosity which epitomized the wisdom and morals of both paganism
and Christianism:
,Socrates und Jesus waren mir Musterre (Socrates and Jesus were
my models). When despair brought him to the brink of suicide, it
was these high ideals that held him back: >Plutarch taught me
resignation?
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128 THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MUSIC AESTHETICS AND
SOCIOLOGY
relations between these two terms, i. e. a link which enndbled
them and made them related, and raised them to the highest
principle from which they both originate.
Endorsing, like Leibnitz, the view that the laws of reality
should not depart from ideal laws, Beethoven - in order to justify
a passage from the Andante con moto in his Quartet Op. 127 which
was criticized at Petrograd - explained to Prince Gallitsin that
this was a technical pro- cess >>which any good musician
would use, because nature is based on art and, vice versa, art is
based on natureNature and Art>par- ticipate in producing the
artist'~s greatness. Follow them bo'th without fear you will not
attain the great or the greatest objective an artist can achieve on
earthThere is no greater pleasure for me than to put my art into
practice>Every musical thought>?inti- mate and indivisible
'unity with the universeAt night, when watching in wonder the sky
with that multitude of luminous bodies called suns or planets which
for ever
4 Fiir mich gibt es kein gr6oeres Vergniigen, als meine Kunst zu
treiben und zu zeigen.
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BEETHOVEN AND THE AESTHETIC THOUGHT OF HIS TIME 129
circle in their orbits, my soul rises towards those distant
stars, towards the prime source from which all that is created
draws its origin... But when on occasion I try to give musical form
to my excited emotions, I feel terribly disappointed: I fling my
blotted sheet of paper with anger to the floor feeling deeply
convinced that no mortal man will ever be able to depict in sounds,
words or colours the heavenly im'agzs that rose before his excited
imagination at a happy mo'mentiber- ties
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130 THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MUSIC AESTHETICS AND
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as classicism and romanticism, i. e. as two aesthetic ideals
which his philosophy tries to fuse into a higher unity of the type
that seems to have been realized by Goethe's poetry and
Beethoven',s music. Both these men of genius were actually
presented by the Muses with >>content in heart and form in
mind< from a synthesis of which their absolute art derives.
Their common attitude towards the problems of that time, and
their common reaction against the decadence of artistic values
reveal their close relationship arising from secret mutual
affinities. A wide and free development of the personality - the
dream and aim of 'the Enlighten- ment - was regarded by both not
only as a right, but also as a duty of man and the artist. AllI
that man undertakes . . . must 'result from the totality of his
combined faculties?, - Goethe used to warn, while Beetho- ven
repeated the same demand for a joint harmonious concurrence of all
mental abilities: >Since my chilhood I have been trying to grasp
what the best and wisest man of every period had in mind. It would
be a shame if an artist would not regard it his duty to achieve a~t
least that muchfusion of many 'different forms which flow along one
single bed 'towards their destination
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BEETHOVEN AND THE AESTHETIC THOUGHT OF HIS TIME 131
rectly originates. Thus in complete harmony with the idealistic
concept, Beethoven could regard music as ?the only immaterialized
door which leads into the higher world of cognition which comprises
man in his totality
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132 THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MUSIC AESTHETICS AND
SOCIOLOGY
conflict like reason and feelings, like the forces which are
subordinated to the laws of love and hatred and act in the sonata
as they do in life. Although they exert their inspiring and
limiting influence on each other, the positive principle must
prevail, subordinating but not annihilating the opposite side. In
fact, an inseparable link connects the two themes which in the
course of the musical process find their higher reconciliation
lending music that unity of life which, according to Kant, takes
the form of an a priori synthesis and, according to Hegel, that of
dialectics. The analogy will become more evident if one considers
that it is the very contrast of themes that suggests 'the reason
and meaning of the Beethoven sonata form, which firmly contains
contrasts and ensures their vitality while preserving the cohesion
of its own formal structure.
Hegel set himself the task ?to translate the ideal of youth? as
he described lit in his Erstes System-Programm in 1796
>>'into a system>If I could express my thoughts about my
illness by means of such definite signs as are those by which I
express my musical thoughts, I could soon help myselfabstract
licentiousness? and >>satanic arrogance>for listening
onlyempty and mIeaningless
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BEETHOVEN AND THE AESTHETIC THOUGHT OF HIS TIME 133
moral and humane concepts which draw inspiration from classic
sources which have again become highly relevant and operative in
noble spirits; he defends the ideal of that calocagathia which he
himself glorified bor- rowing the following verses from Matthison's
Opferlied:
Gib mir, o Zeus... das Sch6ne zu dem Guten (Give
,me, Zeus, the beautiful together with the good)
As he himself said, this was a prayer for all times, a constant
aspir- ation of his soul.
This ideal world of which the whole of Germany, 'including
Hoilderlin, Schelling and Beethoven, dreamed it would become
revived on German soil was regarded by Hegel as a lost paradise, an
irretrievabole past and nostalgic memory.
?The happy times of Greek art and the golden period of the late
Mid- dle Ages are things 'of the 'distant past. Due to the
prevailing conditions our own times do not favour art?,
>>thinking and philosophizing have transcended the fine
arts>religion of art
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134 THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MUSIC AESTHETICS AND
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to the manner in which a theme is developed and another one
added both forging ahead in mutual relationship, changing in the
process, seeming to disappear at one moment to re-emerge at the
next, at one time appear- ing defeated and at another
triumphant
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BEETHOVEN AND THE AESTHETIC THOUGHT OF HIS TIME 135
he was more faithful 'to his own philosophical system than to
historical truth. These artists included even his own friend
Holderlin who, like Beethoven himself, not only realized the happy
harmony of >>the late lamented< Classical Age in his works
but also a live dialectical rela- tionship between art and thought.
If for Hegel, as earlier for Plato, art - becoming a subject for
philosophy - was declining and dying, for Hol- derlin and Beethoven
philosophy, becoming the subject of their meditat- ions, became the
substance of their poetry, i. e. the living essence of their art.
For them no less than for Hegel what is beautiful constitutes
itself as the sensorial manifestation of an idea, as the content of
art, in which form is the formulation of the sensorial and the
imaginative.
>Truth exists for the Iphilosopher - Beauty for the sensitive
heart; the one belongs to the otherenters art and flowers in it<
as this is the case in Holderlin's poetry and Beet- hoven's
music.
For us who celebrate the greatest of these three great German
contem- poraries, - the greatest because he awakens the widest echo
in men's hearts and most directly continues to pass on to men the
inspiration of his creative mind, i. e. continues to live, - it is
therefore not without deepest pleasure that we can now recognize
that they are concordant in an ideal sense, - above all
differences, misunderstandings and silences that separated them
during their lives, - united by the common >>religion of
art
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136 THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MUSIC AESTHETICS AND
SOCIOLOGY
slobodu najvihom vrijedno6iu, koja stoji u osnovi ,umjetnosti,
premda ne isklju- Euje prirodu i nuhnost. Prema Beeithovenu, izmedu
muzirke misli i kozmosa po-
stoji intimno nedjeljivo jedinstvo. Slibno kao Goethe i
Schelling, u >~svrie- nosti>ianad svake znanostii ,i
filozofije