Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment

For the modern musicologist, it may seem that to devote one's energies to the great works of the German canon is a dubious career choice, unless it is one's goal to critique them out of existence. As Berthold Hoeckner acknowledges in his preface, 'the nineteenth century has now receded from its position as the foremost forum of change in the field' (p. xv): after two decades of assault on this canon and on the dogmas that sustained it, the caravan has moved on to fresher pastures. This is not to deny the value of recent revisionism, or to question the fact that our discipline is healthier as a result. Yet the scholar engaging with this repertory today faces an anxious dilemma, that of conceiving an intellectually viable means of salvaging something from the wreckage. While the sombre dust jacket of Hoeckner's book may suggest an elegiac memorial to this canon (indeed, he describes it, paraphrasing Adorno, as a 'gesture of solidarity with the metaphysics of German music at the moment of its fall', p. 11), he aspires to something altogether more ambitious. Hoeckner seeks to reclaim, or rather reinvent, the idea of absolute music and to provide a new model of 'essayistic musicology', combining a sophisticated approach to the works under consideration and to the discourse that has accumulated around them. The result is a remarkable, stimulating book which, although dense and difficult in places, will prove rewarding to any scholar concerned with this repertory.

As Hoeckner indicates, his relation to the German canon of Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, Schoenberg, Mann, and Adorno (he is right to consider this body of music inseparable from its two greatest celebrants) is 'caught up in the dialectic of critique and affirmation' (p. xvi). On the one hand, Hoeckner acknowledges the validity of earlier critiques of the universal claims of this canon and of the concept of absolute music (as a result of which 'absolute music has become relative', p. 3) and seeks himself to contribute to this process of relativizing. But on the other, he asserts his own commitment to, and 'narcissistic identification' with, this music and this ideal, and the light of hope that its moments afford (P- H).

It is the interpretation of such moments—the 'practice of seizing on moments in music that seem ineffable, and nevertheless of putting their meaning into words' (p. 2)—that is both Hoeckner's method and object of enquiry. Thus, 'programming the absolute' refers not to the relation between absolute and programme music, but rather to the hermeneutic impulse that accompanied the rise of absolute music and is inseparable from it. Hoeckner's introduction offers a short discussion of the role of the 'hermeneutics of the moment' in earlier musical and aesthetic thought, ranging from the purple prose that such passages elicited from nineteenth-century critics to the profound significance of the moment for Romantic literary theory. It is Adorno's conception of the musical moment that is central to the introduction, and which forms the basis of Hoeckner's own interpretative practice. For the most part, he provides a lucid discussion of the extraordinary significance that Adorno accorded to the moment. On occasion, however, his account becomes dense and off-putting, as a result of the sheer number of references to other philosophers and theorists: the penultimate paragraph of the introduction (p. 10), for example, refers in rapid succession to seven different thinkers (eight, if you count Adrian Leverkühn). Since, even by this stage of the book, Hoeckner has more than proved his credentials, it seems a pity to indulge in such rhetorical flights (although some may be mesmerized by his A to Z from Adorno to Zuidervaart).

Such incidentals should not detract from the important insights that Hoeckner offers on Adorno. In spite of the latter's tirades against atomistic listening, musical moments (or 'Beautiful Passages', the title of a radio broadcast from 1965) provide a key to his conceptions of musical meaning and the absolute. Indeed, as Hoeckner notes, for Adorno the moment is the locus of the musical absolute: 'music finds the absolute immediately, but at the moment of discovery it becomes obscured, just as too powerful a light blinds the eye which can no longer see what is completely visible'; 'as in music what is beautiful flashes up in nature only to disappear in the instant one tries to grasp it' ('Music and Language: A Fragment', Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1992), 4; Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London, 1997), 72). In Hoeckner's analysis, Adorno's conception of the ungraspable, fleeting appearance of the absolute in the moment is the crystallization of a broader focus of modernist art and aesthetics, and is predicated, however sceptically, on the idea that the part points to the 'modernist Utopia' of a lost whole (p. 10). As he goes on to demonstrate, it is in Adorno's writings on Beethoven that this idea finds its most sustained and profound realization, in particular in Adorno's interpretation of a moment towards the end of the first movement of the 'Les Adieux' Sonata: 'the eternal attaches itself precisely to this most transient moment', in which the evocation of the 'clatter of horse hooves moving away into the distance carries a greater guarantee of hope than the four Gospels' (Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik: Fragmente und Texte, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 250, as quoted in Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute, 23).

Adorno and Beethoven are central to the concerns of Hoeckner's first and last chapters, which offer 'two different hearings of Beethoven from the perspective of 1945' (p. 2). In chapter 1, following a reflection on Adorno's reversal of Hegel's conception of the relation between whole and part, Hoeckner dissects another of Adorno's commentaries on Beethoven sonatas, this time the one in which Adorno compares a passage from the slow movement of Op. 31 No. 2 with a sentence from Goethe's Elective Affinities: 'Hope shot across the sky above their heads like a falling star' (p. 19). In analysing Adorno's comments on such transcendent passages, Hoeckner usefully explores how he adopted Walter Benjamin's misreading of Goethe's passage, and examines the other contexts in which Adorno alludes to Goethe's simile in discussing Beethoven. All this is by way of preparation for Hoeckner's own first exercises in the hermeneutics of the musical moment: his interpretations of two passages from Fidelio (Leonore's aria in Act I and the quartet from Act II). In reference to the first, he points out the significance of the vocal melisma at the line 'Komm, Hoffnung, lass den letzten Stern der Müden nicht erbleichen', in which a moment of absolute music symbolizes 'the romantic trope of reaching out for the distant beloved with wordless voice' (p. 35). It is, however, the second of these passages—in particular, Leonore's line 'Tödt' erst sein Weib!'—that he regards as the opera's truly pivotal moment, and his commentary on this passage is highly illuminating. One quibble concerns his treatment of the political significance of this passage. Since he regards Leonore's scream as the act that brings about the arrival of Don Fernando (arguing that he 'is no deus ex machina . . . it is Leonore who summons the minister, or in eschatological terms, the Messiah', p. 38), it seems strange to claim that this reference to higher authority 'puts Fidelio into the orbit of the Vienna Congress' (p. 45). Elsewhere, Hoeckner's interpretations of its relation to revolutionary and restoration-era politics also seem questionable, an impression heightened by two references to the opera's Jacobean (sic) context (pp. 25, 45).

Much of chapter 6 concentrates on a single moment of Beethoven (the C# at the end of the Arietta variations in the Piano Sonata Op. 111) and on interpretations of its significance by Adorno and Thomas Mann (or rather, Mann's character Wendell Kretzschmar). The chapter opens with a detailed discussion of Mann's dependence on Adorno's assistance while writing Kretzschmar's lecture on Op. 111, making it clear that the description of the C# as the 'most moving, consolatory, pathetically reconciling thing in the world' (Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London, 1996), 55) would not have seemed hyperbolic to Adorno. The most puzzling aspect of Adorno's and Kretzschmar's preoccupation with this note is its seeming insignificance: certainly, many readers of Doctor Faustus would assume that Kretzschmar's comments on it, and the lecture as a whole, are a caricature of the excesses of musical hermeneutics. But while their fixation on the C# (which stemmed from the desire to create a counterbalance to this note's role in the first movement of the 'Eroica') is incomprehensible from the perspective of structural analysis, it epitomizes Adorno's aesthetics of the moment: Hoeckner aptly quotes Benjamin here, noting that if '"the eternal is in any case rather a frill on a dress than an idea", then the C# flourish is such a frill' (p. 235).

As in Fidelio, this momentary revelation of hope has a counterpart later in the novel. In addition to interpreting the significance of this second musical moment—the sustained cello note that concludes Leverkühn's Lamentations of Dr Faustus —Hoeckner relates it to the conclusion of Mahler's Ninth Symphony. Given that Mann explicitly links Leverkühn's note to the C# in Beethoven's Arietta, it functions as a potent, if ambivalent, symbol: it marks the end point of modernism, German music and German culture, but arguably offers hope too. (While Mann stresses that nothing but 'silence and night' can follow this note, he also writes that the note 'changes its meaning', continuing to resound in this silence and abide in the night (Doctor Faustus, 641).) To understand the novel's ending therefore requires an exercise in musical as well as literary hermeneutics. Accordingly, Hoeckner pursues 'the similarity (whether intended or not) between the endings of Mahler's Ninth and of Leverkühn's Lamentations' (p. 252) and, in turn, the significance for the former of its quotation from the fourth song of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. This chain of associations may appear arbitrary; certainly, I am not wholly convinced by the (fragmentary) conclusions that Hoeckner draws from these parallels. The main problem is that while the reader expects the section on Mahler to be a digression, leading to a return to the question of meaning in Doctor Faustus, this return does not materialize. As a result, the most concrete interpretation of the relation between these two works is the implication, much earlier in the chapter, that Bruno Walter's description of the final bars of Mahler's Ninth (as 'a singular hovering between the sorrows of farewell and the presentiment of celestial light', p. 253) is also applicable to Leverkühn's Lamentations and Mann's novel as a whole. The experience of reading Hoeckner's last chapter is thus strangely anticlimactic, and the function of his insights on Mahler is unclear.

Chapters 2 and 3, which focus respectively on Schumann's piano music and on Wagner's Lohengrin, have already appeared in print as journal articles and thus require little introduction here. The Schumann chapter is, in my view, the highlight of the monograph, combining a stimulating discussion of some key issues in Romantic literary theory with a series of very productive hermeneutic encounters with Schumann. Part of its success stems from the close affinity between Hoeckner's hermeneutic strategies and Schumann's concerns; in addition, his approach seems more ideally suited to shorter works, such as Schumann's Fantasie, Op. 17, than to Fidelio or Lohengrin. In reading this chapter, however, one is particularly aware of a tension that runs throughout the book: while the sections of detailed musical commentary and exegesis are lucidly written, the material on Romantic aesthetics is in places too compressed.

This tension is not apparent in chapter 3, where Hoeckner's aesthetic discussions are less wide-ranging. Like other recent commentators—one thinks in particular of Thomas Grey and Jean-Jacques Nattiez—Hoeckner treats Wagner's operas and theoretical texts as being intertwined, the former enacting allegorically the aesthetic concerns of the latter. This provides a productive means of approaching Lohengrin: even so, it may seem that his argument merely affirms Wagner's later conception of the work as a stepping stone to music drama, or requires one to accept that its defects were planned (the allegory Hoeckner describes is predicated on the opera's failure). These comments simplify Hoeckner's interpretation, as well as his conception of hermeneutics, but remain nagging doubts nonetheless. But Wagner's own writings on the character of Lohengrin, whom he depicted as an absolute artist, certainly invite this kind of interpretation, and Hoeckner approaches the music and characterization of the opera with great subtlety.

Hoeckner's decision to focus chapter 4 on Liszt's Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne or Bergsinfonie reflects his German background, since this remarkable work has traditionally received more attention from German musicians and critics than from their British and American counterparts. He acknowledges that what Liszt and his circle regarded as a watershed work failed to enter the canon, yet argues that there is 'no need to lament such a failure now that the pantheon of Western music seems to be a thing of the past' (pp. 155–6). This comment is puzzling on several grounds. In other respects Hoeckner's book seems to affirm rather than question the canon (the only non-canonical composers whose music is discussed, Carl Gottlieb Reissiger and Clara Schumann, serve merely as a foil to the German masters who form the principal object of attention). More significantly, the chapter on Liszt hinges on the reasons why the Bergsinfonie failed to enter the canon: Hoeckner makes the 'failure' of the work his chief concern, and in interpreting it he seems constrained by mid-nineteenth-century aesthetic constructs. This is especially clear in the oppositions that he considers the work to embody: 'it remained caught between autonomy and function, traditional and avant-garde techniques, personal and public expression . . . between an art religion overreaching itself, and a religious art becoming trivialized. This dilemma is the hermeneutic crux of the Mountain Symphony' (pp. 156, 160).

Teasing out the contradictions embodied in Liszt's works is certainly a productive means of approaching them. Yet the first and last of these pairings seem questionable. In arguing that the work enacts a conflict between secular and sacred conceptions of the sublime, Hoeckner invokes the contrast between the two 'chorales' that he identifies in the work (p. 178): an 'overstated secular chorale' (bar 812 onwards) and an 'understated sacred one' (the Andante religioso sections). It is misleading, however, to associate either of these passages with functional liturgical music: as so often in Liszt's music, it represents the construction of a more generalized religioso idiom, which, while drawing on elements of earlier church music, strips them of their precise associations and functionality. As a result, Hoeckner's notion of a dialectical relation between a secular and a sacred chorale is unconvincing. I also fail to see how the distinction between phenomenal and noumenal music is relevant to the Andante religioso (loc. cit.). Hoeckner's reliance on such oppositions mars what, in other ways, is a stimulating discussion of the work. Especially useful is his comparison between the political and religious ideas of Liszt and Benjamin, and his interpretation of the motivation behind Liszt's vast expansion of the Bergsinfonie in its final version. As elsewhere, his discussion of the aesthetic background to the work suffers in places from excessive compression: his two sentences on Hanslick (p. 163) not only presume that the reader has a thorough knowledge of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, but also of its relation to Hegel and Dahlhaus's conception of this relation.

Chapter 5 centres on Schoenberg's Erwartung and Die Jakobsleiter, and returns both Adorno and the aesthetics of the moment to prominence. Hoeckner approaches Erwartung via a comparison with Schoenberg's self-portraits of 1910, whose staring and disembodied eyes provide a metaphor for the problems of aesthetic perception raised by expressionist music. Drawing on Schoenberg's own remarks, as well as those of Adorno and Paul Bekker, Hoeckner explores how Erwartung represents a negation of the Beethovenian musical moment. Especially interesting is his commentary on the significance of Schoenberg's quotation from his song Am Wegrand and of the resulting tonal allusion, although, ultimately, his stance does not diverge significantly from Adorno's. At times, during the discussion of Die Jakobsleiter, one wishes that Hoeckner might liberate himself from his task of interpreting alongside Adorno, since the latter's perspectives on this work get in the way of Hoeckner's more sympathetic evaluation.

Berthold Hoeckner's mode of 'essayistic musicology' is performative without being arch or contrived. It fuses serious scholarship with insightful criticism, and few musicological monographs exhibit such polished prose and lucid argumentation. (The book is marred, however, by numerous typographical errors: at least one per page in some chapters, and more in the endnotes.) In spite of the criticisms ventured above, it contributes significantly to the task of redefining our understanding of 'the moment of German music' and offers an impressive demonstration of what the combination of music criticism and philosophical critique can offer.