In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

. Sehnsucht, Music, and the Sublime In his Allgemeine theorie der schönen Künste, Johann Georg Sulzer does not confine the experience of the sublime to feelings of wonder, terror, respect, or elevation. The sublime is ‘‘the highest in art, and must be employed when the mind is to be attacked with powerful strokes, when admiration, awe, powerful longing, high courage, or also fear or terror are to be aroused.’’1 Powerful longing, excessive and aimless—this recalls James Usher ’s mighty unknown want as a modality of the sublime feeling. Filtered by our readings of the pseudo-Longinus, Burke, and Kant, today’s outlook has obstructed this modality from view, but there it is, tucked away among passions such as awe, courage, fear, and terror, which we have familiarly associated with the sublime: sehnen. Sehnen—Sehnsucht: the romantic, catastrophic longing for the infinite that can repeat itself infinitely. Bent on preventing its own realization, Sehnsucht overturns conventional distinctions between pain and pleasure, end and endlessness, want and fulfillment, stasis and infinite movement. Pain becomes a pleasure, endlessness an end, want a fulfilment—all these distinctions collapse into each other when Sehnsucht’s peculiar logic reigns. Yet it is not an altogether unreasonable logic. We have encountered the same logic in Locke’s theory of the infinite and in Burke’s adaptation of it: endless movement that is at the same time stasis, stillness, immobility. In this chapter, I will argue that Sehnsucht, instrumental music, and the sublime can be seen as intersecting concepts that partake of a poetics and an aesthetics of indeterminacy in later eighteenth-century German criticism. I use the term ‘‘concept’’ to emphasize the status of instrumental music as a philosophical tool rather than a concrete phenomenon in this context. As Mark Evan Bonds has suggested, early romantic views of instrumental music ‘‘reflected fundamental transformations in contemporary philosophy and . . . aesthetics that were unrelated to the music of the time.’’ Notwithstanding the ‘‘new-found prestige of instrumental music in the later eighteenth century ,’’ the new aesthetics of music in Germany and central Europe were   Sehnsucht, Music, and the Sublime ‘‘not primarily driven by changes in the musical repertory.’’2 Thus, when writers such as Wilhelm Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck were engaged with instrumental music, they were engaged in thinking and debating issues relevant to (a then resurging) idealist philosophy, rather than only with ‘‘real’’ issues and developments in contemporary instrumental music. Seen in this light, ‘‘instrumental music’’ in early romantic German criticism and aesthetics signifies less a heterogeneous cultural practice than a conceptual vehicle to think and fantasize the infinite. This, of course, does not deny the presence of such a heterogeneous practice (indeed, the appropriation of instrumental music as a conceptual vehicle signals a cultural practice in itself ). But it does locate the ‘‘musical’’ in a more ideational, metaphysical space. Hence the early romantic tendency to refer to instrumental music in the general instead of the singular: this or that music hardly matters. This is not so say—as Daniel Chua has suggested—that instrumental music (as a ‘‘real practice’’) is invested with metaphysical significance, but that metaphysical issues such as the absolute, the infinite, or the eternal are thought musically.3 The difference is subtle but real, and it should prevent us from viewing later eighteenth-century instrumental music solely as a practice ‘‘out of step’’ with contemporary musical imaginings (such as Tieck’s and Wackenroder’s) that allegedly foreshadowed the nineteenthcentury practice of absolute music. Likewise, I approach Sehnsucht in early German romantic literature and idealist philosophy as a vehicle to intimate the infinite in terms of radical indeterminacy. As real a feeling as it may be in the fictional world of Goethe’s Werther or Jean Paul’s Hesperus, Sehnsucht is much more than ‘‘just a feeling’’: it is, rather, a particular configuration of lack and endless movement that can figure in many different settings. Thus, Sehnsucht is not restricted to literary genres as ‘‘theme’’ but also features prominently in philosophical discourses of German idealism as a rhythm and figure of thought.4 Indeed, I will argue, far from being a mere childish refusal of the given, Sehnsucht premediates a strand of German idealist philosophy that tries to think through the impossible unity of subject and object: the impossibility of the I (as a thinking, reflecting I) to coincide with itself as not-I. In romantic music criticism...

Share