Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives by Edgar Landgraf (review)

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Nietzsche responded to the death of God with a vision of the “Improvisation des Lebens,” exemplified by a musician who lives boldly by breathing “einen schönen Sinn und eine Seele” into his accidents through bodily or spiritual flourishes. Edgar Landgraf’s book offers an important contribution to the questions of aesthetic autonomy and theatrical staging that the author of the Fröhliche Wissenschaft found so compelling, and in doing so raises larger questions about the promises and dangers of building a common world without a higher power.

The study opens with the challenge of conceptualizing improvisation, which in its strongest sense could be described as the problem of theoretically mapping a practice that celebrates the unforeseen. It thus resists the overarching power of the concept as such. Before turning to the years around 1800 that are the center of his study, however, Landgraf sets out a more precise field of concern through readings of Derrida and Luhmann that speak of improvisation as a celebration of the unexpected within a set system of rules. The first chapter takes up a careful reading of the lesser-known text “Play—The First Name: 1 July 1997,” which Derrida performed when he joined Ornette Coleman on stage and delicately paced out the line between the prepared and the improvised. Landgraf argues that because Derrida places too much weight on the impossibility of creating something truly new within a system of set rules, he underemphasizes the positive role of improvisation. He suggests that Luhmann’s system theory can be helpful here by describing a system that produces code that changes the system itself. Systems theory thus provides the general model for the study, but the later chapters sustain a dialog between Derrida and Luhmann even as they shift the field of debate over reflexivity and novelty to the aesthetics of genius, early German romanticism, and Kleist.

Historically, Landgraf intervenes at a point in the mid-eighteenth century where Gottsched expels improvisation from art on the grounds of its emphasis on the particular rather than the general. In a sense, the rest of the book can be seen to show how a new conception of art emerges that gradually accepts the particular. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Landgraf identifies a suspicion of improvisation in the character of the clergyman but contrasts it with a spontaneous scene of play that helps Wilhelm forget the loss of Marianne. Conceptually, the latter scene marks a step forward through the acceptance of the present that the improvisation of play affords. Turning to Karl Philipp Moritz then allows Landgraf to establish a link between improvisation and the autonomy of art: when art abandons its traditional role of copying nature, the question arises of its source. To create something truly new, the artist has to “plan on not planning” (74), a paradox Moritz solves through the unconscious activity of the artist who produces a new unity he is not aware of beforehand. Moritz though, like Kant, still anchors artistic production in the intention of the genius.

The discussion of Adam Müller in the third chapter offers a way of challenging the centrality of the author through the dialogue of “Universallustspiel.” In this new type of comedy the hierarchy of stage and audience would be replaced by an equal interaction of the two realms, “jedes unüberwunden und jedes gekrönt” (85). Landgraf works through Müller’s writings on Tieck and commedia dell’arte to develop the preconditions of such a dynamic in terms of an understanding of the space of theater. Placed in the context of Friedrich Schlegel’s writing on Romantic irony in general and parabasis in particular, we begin to see the theater as open to meaning created in the interaction between audience and actors rather than governed by the intention of the author of the drama. Landgraf delivers his finest analyses in the fourth chapter, however, where he argues that in the work of Kleist “the ability to...