Sound and Sense: Music and Musical Metaphor in the Thought and Writing of Goethe and His Age by Jo Tudor (review)

When you open the contents page of Tudor’s monograph, you come up against the windowpane of musical metaphor, as if gazing from behind a barrier at the tempting mysteries beyond. In the course of these chapters, the author’s solitary vigil—her unwavering pursuit of these images—is slowly unraveled for her reader. The monograph has many moments of illumination, where the eye looks in from the dark into the brightness.

In honor of the significance that Goethe attached to music in his writing, Jo Tudor has highlighted four key areas in which the musical metaphors that Goethe and his contemporaries employed are most evident. In part 1, traditional concepts of music—music as harmony and conversely music as an embodiment of the irrational, the demonic—are unveiled; equally potent is her unraveling of the conceptions of musical structure and their influence on musical metaphor in part 2. The balance she strikes between her vigilant, detached witnessing of conceptions of music and language (in part 3) and insightful interpretation of the synthesis of these conceptions (in part 4, where she explores the metaphor of music as harmony and sequence) leaves us with a new understanding of and insight into Goethe’s poetic practice.

Goethe’s understanding of music, so often vaunted as maladroit, is here richly endorsed. Tudor profiles Goethe against his contemporary reality and presents us with a book in which the whole question of Goethe’s relationship to musical values is worked out in extreme detail. As his comments on European musical life in his notes to his 1806 translation of Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau show, the poet was pervious to the importance of intellectual engagement with music as a self-standing discipline. As early as 1772, Goethe had read the Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste by Johann Georg Sulzer, whom Michael Spitzer identifies as “the most important German theorist of the eighteenth century” (Metaphor and Musical Thought, 243). As Tudor rightly observes in her rich contextualization of Goethe’s engagement with music: “Germans wrote extensively about music; not only in cultural periodicals but in their literature and in essays and treatises of all kinds. In short, a significant part of the discourse in Germany took place not in public but in private, between writers of various kinds and their readers” (11). Goethe’s correspondence with composers bears rich testimony to Tudor’s words, as does the poet’s belief that metaphor and mythology were part of the “multiple discourse” needed for the transmission of human knowledge (23).

In Goethe’s musical imagination, poetry sings. In “An Lina,” he insists that verse should be sung not read—“Nicht nur lesen! Immer singen! / Und ein jedes Blatt is Dein!” (stanza 2.7–8)—a belief that prevailed in the long nineteenth century. As a young man and member of the brotherhood of Herder, Goethe regarded himself as a singer with a bardic position in the national culture—a custom with which Goethe’s practice as a writer and speaker of his own verse was continuous. Tudor argues convincingly how this idea of “poetry as vocalized ‘song,’ of music as absorbed into language to voice human feeling and experience, … Thus became part of Goethe’s consciousness at an early stage” (138). The musicality with which he firmly and intimately embosses his literary practice is here identified by Tudor, whose study testifies to the continuing efficacy of his literary work as a necessary and fundamental part of our musical inheritance.

As I read and reread Tudor’s monograph, I became more and more tied up in the Gordian knot of text and context. Throughout her monograph she draws richly on word and music studies, musicology, philosophy, metaphor theory, literary criticism, and aesthetics, in a level of detail that elicits admiration. We register and are fortified by Tudor’s commitment to scholarship, which...