Music, Aesthetics and Literature

[Musaeus]

I am interested in the ways in which these three pursuits interact, and have interacted in the past in extraordinary ways.

Figures who fascinate are Purcell and the English opera; Mozart, da Ponte and the Italian opera; Beethoven and Goethe; Schumann and Liszt; Wagner, Schopenhauer, Nietzche and Mann (and Strauss); Britten and the revival of English opera; and the general musical chaos of the present age.

Other aesthetic philosophers: Plato (who had strong views); Hegel; Wittgenstein, to an extent; Croce; in the present, Scruton (see his 'The Aesthetics of Music'). I don't count Marxists.

I wonder what the ideal relationship between literature and music is in a culture. I wonder if anyone has written with really deep understanding, and yet without excessive bias, on the subject.

[johann cruyff]

I suggest you try T. Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music. Other than being one of the most important philosophers and sociologists of the XX century, Adorno was also well versed in music, and one of his main philosophical interests was exactly in the field of aesthetics. I believe this would be very close to what you're looking for.

[Musaeus]

Thanks - but the problem with Adorno is that he was pretty much a Marxist modernist and rejected everything that did not fit his world view (as I understand it).

Scruton devotes a number of pages to the refutation of Adorno - and I side with Scruton

[Sebas. Melmoth]

the ideal relationship between literature and music

Carl Dahlhaus on Wagner's Tristan und Isolde speaks of the 'intercutting' of logos and melos, and how neither word nor music is given priority one over another, but rather the 'music' of poetry and the 'meaning' of music (i.e., leitmotif) are synthesized into this 'artwork of the future' (in tandem with movement and stage design).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Dahlhaus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitmotive

[Musaeus]

Interesting Mr Melmoth - thanks for the refs which I'll follow; but we cannot pretend that in Wagner the word is equal to the music! You really dont have to understand a word of it. In fact Tristan has some intriguing examples: the Prelude to Act I, for instance - surely that could not be about anything except love, erotic love. Could it? Or, at any rate, it uses the musical language of love as it had developed over the 19th century. Is it simply the fact that one has heard it before that informs that music with meanings that preclude its being, say, religious or some other kind of yearning (at any rate it is about yearning)

[Sebas. Melmoth]

Of course Wagner's extended chromaticism and delayed resolution in Tristan launched Modernism in music via Bruckner, Mahler, and Schönberg.
Too, Wagner's terse, oblique, elliptical poetry in Tristan launched Symbolism in literature via Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, and Yeats.

On the Goethe-Beethoven connection: well!--two genii, one of music, one of words--two genii who actually met face to face.
Beethoven did set a few of Goethe's lyrics to music; Goethe considered Beethoven 'an untamed personality'.
What is one to make of it?

[Musaeus]

Do you happen to know if Goethe said anything else about Beethoven - you would have thought that he might have had a good deal to say about him, and about music in Germany in general, but when I have looked for interesting discussions, I could not find them. Of course he wrote a great deal about science - but perhaps he was not after all that sensitive to music.

Interesting about Wagner - I had never thought of him as a great influence on poetry, though I know he inspired Baudelaire, who wrote to him

[Sebas. Melmoth]

Beethoven and Goethe had corresponded a bit.

Beethoven (who read a great deal) had a great admiration for Goethe; he composed an overture and a whole set of incidental music for Goethe's play Egmont (Op. 84) which was used in an 1814 production.
Beethoven also made a remarkable late setting of Goethe's Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage for voices and orchestra (Op. 112)

They met in Summer 1812 (of course, Goethe was 20 years older than Beethoven). Goethe later remarked, 'How singular must be his attitude towards the world!' (source Thayer, cited in Lockwood)

We must bear in mind Beethoven's poor hearing and chronic colitis which caused him excrutiating pain. Both symptoms were possibly syphilitic in origin.

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Baudelaire's essay 'Tannhäuser in Paris' is a terrific primary source for cultural historians.

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A good anthology on this topic is:
http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Romantic-Aesthetics-Cambridge-Philosophy/dp/0521001110/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_prod_4_1

[Asphara]

I think the link between philosophy, music and aesthetics is very clear. The philosophical insight is essentially an existential insight; that which is apprehended through sensuous, intuitive thought, rather than thinking through well warn neurological - or conceptual - pathways. I'm arguing in a paper I'm writing that the philosophic insight is essentially poetic. Life is apprehended on the level of immediate experience - hence the philosophers you mention have an intimation of life as a becoming totality - devoid of differentia, and the philosophical labour in bringing this into htought and language is akin to the labour of poetry. As such, the structural affinities between philosophical systems are far more instuctive then the conceptual peculiarities. They are like artists painting the same scene with different styles, orientations and so forth. All these philosophers are artists.

I disagree with the refutation of Adorno. The radically alienated perspective is the aesthetic standpoint, only without the "tremor". He rejects identity - he does not reject everything, but the form in which everything must present itself. Scruton is off the mark in a number of his analysis, in my view. By far the most instructive work, I think, in grasping the emotionality of Adorno is Minima Moralia - an absolutely hedonistic read for anyone who likes the barbed, aphoristic style of Nietzsche, but profoundly more humane. (Not that I would want to choose between the two mind).

[Sebas. Melmoth]

Actually, Asphara, I can agree with you here to some degree; yet, when you say 'The philosophical insight is essentially an existential insight; that which is apprehended through sensuous, intuitive thought, rather than thinking through well worn neurological - or conceptual - pathways', you entirely embrace an exclusively ontological explaination in exclusion of epimisemological and phenomenological considerations.

[Asphara]

Melmouth, that's because I do not beleive there are discrete, independent orders of experience - only thought. Everything is always existentially real; only according to certain conceptual schemas are things epistomological or phenomenological. What if you do not buy the distinction between appearence and noumena? Phenomenology becomes non-informative.

[Sebas. Melmoth]

I do not beleive...

You believe this; you don't believe that. Yadda, yadda, yadda...

You see: it all falls back on your own personal solipsism.

Why don't you try some universalism?

[Musaeus]

They met in Summer 1812 (of course, Goethe was 20 years older than Beethoven). Goethe later remarked, 'How singular must be his attitude towards the world!' (source Thayer, cited in Lockwood)

Thanks - Goethe is not exactly illuminating here is he! Tends to support my feeling that G did not really know what to make of B. Yes, of course I know the Egmont overture (and also that Beethoven endowed it with the political values of the play).

Asphara: I should give Adorno's Moralia a go then. But you don't mention music and its varied relationship with literature, which is what interests me

[Asphara]

I think you may have to write your own book on this! I think the closest you'll get is reading music theory and rhetorical theory together. Adorno is good on both.

[mal4mac]

Nietzsche in paragraph 103 of "the Gay Science" provides a highly amusing and, I think, insightful, comparison of Goethe and Beethoven - he also has quite a lot to say about music throughout this wonderful work (this is *after* his infatuation with Wagner and Schopenhauer...)

[Asphara]

I agree about Nietzsche. He really was an artist-philosopher; he worked in the aesthetic, and understood philosophy like dancing. I'd love to hear his compositions. Does anyone know the extent to which they survive?

[Sebas. Melmoth]

Nietzsche's musical compositions are amateurish; he was essentially a poet.

But if you're really interested:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dpopular&field-keywords=nietzsche+albany&x=9&y=20

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dpopular&field-keywords=nietzsche+Krucker&x=0&y=0