Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics

6. Archaic Endings

S I X Archaic Endings The first of Herder’s Kritische Wälder (1769) aims a telling critique at Lessing ’s Laokoon, published three years earlier. The dispute concerns a passage from the Iliad in which Apollo hides Hector, pursued by Achilles, beneath a cloud (xx: 441–54). Lessing had interpreted the cloud metaphorically : “In poetic language, this means nothing more than that Achilles was so enraged that he no longer saw his enemy. Achilles saw no real cloud, nor does the entire artifice whereby the gods make themselves invisible consist in a cloud, but rather in their swift departure.”1 Herder attacked this reading as foreign to the Hellenic mind: “No! My Homer is much too sensate to conceive his entire poem through such spiritualized gods and refined allegories.”2 Such a reading, he protested, assumed anachronistically that Homer could distinguish between literal and figurative meaning. Lessing failed to appreciate the primitive vigor of Homer’s 171 language, reducing him to “one of those sober poets of our time, who think prosaically and speak poetically, whose Gradus ad Parnassum is the magic thesaurus that transforms prosaic thought into a poetic language.”3 Herder’s critique echoes a wider debate over the nature of language. Lessing upheld the rationalist view of language as communication. According to this conservative view, still promoted by Johann Christoph Gottsched, Nicholas Beauzée, or Thomas Reid, words merely served as a conduit between minds, permitting the transfer of ideas. Herder, on the other hand, articulated the empiricist theory of language as cognition. This view, also espoused by Vico, Condillac, and Adam Smith, saw language as an evolutionary tool that allowed humans to think, learn, and attain self-reflection. Marcelo Dascal summarized the debate: “The main underlying question is whether language mirrors the mind only because it serves to convey to others one’s language-independent contents or because it also somehow participates in the mental operations involved in the formation of such contents.”4 The rationalist view assumed a Cartesian dualism of soul and body that underwrote the rhetorical binarisms of res and verba, matter and manner, prose and poetry. The empiricists temporalized these binarisms, projecting the Cartesian hierarchy into history. They claimed that language began as primitive poetry, rich in sensation and emotion, and evolved toward increasingly abstract prose. Herder could thus argue that the Iliad contained neither metaphors nor poetry of any kind: Homer was speaking the everyday language of primitive humanity. The reference to the Gradus ad Parnassum hints at related debates in musical poetics. Herder was not referring to Johann Joseph Fux’s counterpoint treatise but its famous namesake, a Latin thesaurus by Paul Aler that went through thirty-nine editions between 1689 and 1770. Aler and Fux both followed the Jesuit rhetorical program, teaching students to elaborate a simple structure (amplificatio) according to strict rules (praecepta), borrowing formulae from Classical models (imitatio).5 Such pedagogy persisted throughout the Enlightenment, not least in composers’ lessons in strict counterpoint. Yet it consorts oddly with the new galant style, whose proponents shunned artifice and complexity in favor of a pleasing “natural ” simplicity. Long before he submitted to Padre Martini’s tutelage, 172 a r c h a i c e n d i n g s Mozart cut his teeth on simple minuets, and he schooled his student Thomas Attwood with the same light dance forms.6 In both method and aim, style galant and stile antico differ as fundamentally as Homerian verse and formal rhetoric. By the late eighteenth century, traditional rhetoric had fallen from favor among aesthetic writers, supplanted by the new representational poetics . As the preceding chapters have argued, formal rhetoric also plays a limited role within Mozart’s musical thought, serving as a foil to his more normative procedures. The rhetorical tradition by no means disappeared, in either literature or music; it remained an option for both authors and composers. We should resist the temptation, however, to fold these historical practices into a single overarching system. Neoclassical rhetoric and Enlightenment poetics belong to distinct historical moments and enshrine largely antithetical social and intellectual ideals. The point emerges dramatically in Mozart’s stile antico finales, such as the “Jupiter” Symphony finale. Warren Kirkendale hailed Mozart’s “terza prattica” in these hybrid movements, which triumphantly unite strict counterpoint and free composition.7 Yet, as I shall argue, these movements expose a rift in eighteenth...