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Beethoven and the Aesthetic Thought of His Time Author(s): Luigi Magnani Source: International Review of Music Aesthetics and Sociology, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Dec., 1970), pp.

125-136Published by: Croatian Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/836372Accessed: 23-05-2015 11:50 UTC

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BEETHOVEN AND THE AESTHETIC THOUGHT OF HIS TIME:'

LUIGI MAGNANI

Universitd di Roma

At a moment which will always be remembered in the history of the German thought the young Goethe, watching the magnificent work of the legendary Erwin von Steinbeck, the Strassburg Cathedral, visioned the genius of his nation. In those boldly elongated and powerful archi- tectural forms Goethe, anticipating the romantics, discovered a beauty which was in complete contrast with the then predominating concept of beauty and which with its mystic spirituality shone against the dark background of the time as a clear and original expression of an inspi- ration which had its roots deep in the soul of the nation.

The German artist, who had apparently forgotten his own genius under foreign influences, had to recover his former creative impulse within his own tradition.

In those years it seemed that youthful enthusiasm would wake Ger- many from her lethargy. In that tumult of feelings and in that fermen- tation of ideas, freedom and categorical imperative, pietism and criticism, nation and humanity, the feeling for nature and the aspirations for the transcendental were in mutual contrast like Novalis's metaphysical poles of day and night; and it was in these very antinomies that the faverish life of the Sturm und Drang was developing, seeking to establish a new relationship between men and existence and penetrate into the mystery of the world.

Inspired by its own troubles, the German spirit - as if reacting to the austere rationality of the Enlightenment - began to investigate new and unknown spheres by which it felt instinctively attracted. To >>clear and bright philosophy>obscure feel- ings

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was becoming conscious of her own true spiritual reality and deep-lying metaphysical need which sought its satisfaction and supreme expression in music (which Wackenroder raised to the highest level of human activity, and which Schelling regarded as a means for higher cognition).

However, what that music was as an expression of the Abhsolute none of them explained decisively; it would seem that they were content with sensing its transcendental nature and potential emotive power and that in Haydn's and Mozart's works they recognized the awakened voice of the conscience of the nation. Identifying music with all that vibrates in nature and man on the basis of the cosmic harmony, Herder regards it as the art of mankind: Die Musik, eine Kunst der Menschheit. The man will come - he would say - who will be able

,to unify music with purely

human feelings, who will know how to adjust it to the roles of expression and action: a man who will interpret faithfully the spirit of the German nation but who, at the same time, will be able to rise above it to a sphere of a wider brotherhood of men making all men partakers of the achie- vements reached by lmusic in the sphere of the pure spirit.

The tasks were set out, the ideals made clear, and only the arrival of the expected one was awaited.

A participant in that unanimous aspiration for what is humane and eternal, the invoked artist was already busy in the shadows, bent dil- ligently over his work. He was born in 1770, that decisive year when Goethe was toasting the German genius at Strassburg calling for its full expression by an artist who - through struggle, suffering and joy - would :succeed, better than Prometheus, in bringing the >,felicity of the gods down to the earth

BEETHOVEN AND THE AESTHETIC THOUGHT OF HIS TIME 127

It was during the time when in the eager intellectual atmosphere of his native town he studied at the university which more than others was open to the trends of the French Enlightenment, Kant's ideas and Schil- ler's poetry - that Beethoven became acquainted with philosophy and literature, with mankind's new ideals and a religiosity which epitomized the wisdom and morals of both paganism and Christianism:

,Socrates und Jesus waren mir Musterre (Socrates and Jesus were my models). When despair brought him to the brink of suicide, it was these high ideals that held him back: >Plutarch taught me resignation?

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relations between these two terms, i. e. a link which enndbled them and made them related, and raised them to the highest principle from which they both originate.

Endorsing, like Leibnitz, the view that the laws of reality should not depart from ideal laws, Beethoven - in order to justify a passage from the Andante con moto in his Quartet Op. 127 which was criticized at Petrograd - explained to Prince Gallitsin that this was a technical pro- cess >>which any good musician would use, because nature is based on art and, vice versa, art is based on natureNature and Art>par- ticipate in producing the artist'~s greatness. Follow them bo'th without fear you will not attain the great or the greatest objective an artist can achieve on earthThere is no greater pleasure for me than to put my art into practice>Every musical thought>?inti- mate and indivisible 'unity with the universeAt night, when watching in wonder the sky with that multitude of luminous bodies called suns or planets which for ever

4 Fiir mich gibt es kein gr6oeres Vergniigen, als meine Kunst zu treiben und zu zeigen.

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BEETHOVEN AND THE AESTHETIC THOUGHT OF HIS TIME 129

circle in their orbits, my soul rises towards those distant stars, towards the prime source from which all that is created draws its origin... But when on occasion I try to give musical form to my excited emotions, I feel terribly disappointed: I fling my blotted sheet of paper with anger to the floor feeling deeply convinced that no mortal man will ever be able to depict in sounds, words or colours the heavenly im'agzs that rose before his excited imagination at a happy mo'mentiber- ties

130 THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MUSIC AESTHETICS AND SOCIOLOGY

as classicism and romanticism, i. e. as two aesthetic ideals which his philosophy tries to fuse into a higher unity of the type that seems to have been realized by Goethe's poetry and Beethoven',s music. Both these men of genius were actually presented by the Muses with >>content in heart and form in mind< from a synthesis of which their absolute art derives.

Their common attitude towards the problems of that time, and their common reaction against the decadence of artistic values reveal their close relationship arising from secret mutual affinities. A wide and free development of the personality - the dream and aim of 'the Enlighten- ment - was regarded by both not only as a right, but also as a duty of man and the artist. AllI that man undertakes . . . must 'result from the totality of his combined faculties?, - Goethe used to warn, while Beetho- ven repeated the same demand for a joint harmonious concurrence of all mental abilities: >Since my chilhood I have been trying to grasp what the best and wisest man of every period had in mind. It would be a shame if an artist would not regard it his duty to achieve a~t least that muchfusion of many 'different forms which flow along one single bed 'towards their destination

BEETHOVEN AND THE AESTHETIC THOUGHT OF HIS TIME 131

rectly originates. Thus in complete harmony with the idealistic concept, Beethoven could regard music as ?the only immaterialized door which leads into the higher world of cognition which comprises man in his totality

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conflict like reason and feelings, like the forces which are subordinated to the laws of love and hatred and act in the sonata as they do in life. Although they exert their inspiring and limiting influence on each other, the positive principle must prevail, subordinating but not annihilating the opposite side. In fact, an inseparable link connects the two themes which in the course of the musical process find their higher reconciliation lending music that unity of life which, according to Kant, takes the form of an a priori synthesis and, according to Hegel, that of dialectics. The analogy will become more evident if one considers that it is the very contrast of themes that suggests 'the reason and meaning of the Beethoven sonata form, which firmly contains contrasts and ensures their vitality while preserving the cohesion of its own formal structure.

Hegel set himself the task ?to translate the ideal of youth? as he described lit in his Erstes System-Programm in 1796 >>'into a system>If I could express my thoughts about my illness by means of such definite signs as are those by which I express my musical thoughts, I could soon help myselfabstract licentiousness? and >>satanic arrogance>for listening onlyempty and mIeaningless

BEETHOVEN AND THE AESTHETIC THOUGHT OF HIS TIME 133

moral and humane concepts which draw inspiration from classic sources which have again become highly relevant and operative in noble spirits; he defends the ideal of that calocagathia which he himself glorified bor- rowing the following verses from Matthison's Opferlied:

Gib mir, o Zeus... das Sch6ne zu dem Guten (Give

,me, Zeus, the beautiful together with the good)

As he himself said, this was a prayer for all times, a constant aspir- ation of his soul.

This ideal world of which the whole of Germany, 'including Hoilderlin, Schelling and Beethoven, dreamed it would become revived on German soil was regarded by Hegel as a lost paradise, an irretrievabole past and nostalgic memory.

?The happy times of Greek art and the golden period of the late Mid- dle Ages are things 'of the 'distant past. Due to the prevailing conditions our own times do not favour art?, >>thinking and philosophizing have transcended the fine arts>religion of art

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to the manner in which a theme is developed and another one added both forging ahead in mutual relationship, changing in the process, seeming to disappear at one moment to re-emerge at the next, at one time appear- ing defeated and at another triumphant

BEETHOVEN AND THE AESTHETIC THOUGHT OF HIS TIME 135

he was more faithful 'to his own philosophical system than to historical truth. These artists included even his own friend Holderlin who, like Beethoven himself, not only realized the happy harmony of >>the late lamented< Classical Age in his works but also a live dialectical rela- tionship between art and thought. If for Hegel, as earlier for Plato, art - becoming a subject for philosophy - was declining and dying, for Hol- derlin and Beethoven philosophy, becoming the subject of their meditat- ions, became the substance of their poetry, i. e. the living essence of their art. For them no less than for Hegel what is beautiful constitutes itself as the sensorial manifestation of an idea, as the content of art, in which form is the formulation of the sensorial and the imaginative.

>Truth exists for the Iphilosopher - Beauty for the sensitive heart; the one belongs to the otherenters art and flowers in it< as this is the case in Holderlin's poetry and Beet- hoven's music.

For us who celebrate the greatest of these three great German contem- poraries, - the greatest because he awakens the widest echo in men's hearts and most directly continues to pass on to men the inspiration of his creative mind, i. e. continues to live, - it is therefore not without deepest pleasure that we can now recognize that they are concordant in an ideal sense, - above all differences, misunderstandings and silences that separated them during their lives, - united by the common >>religion of art

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slobodu najvihom vrijedno6iu, koja stoji u osnovi ,umjetnosti, premda ne isklju- Euje prirodu i nuhnost. Prema Beeithovenu, izmedu muzirke misli i kozmosa po-

stoji intimno nedjeljivo jedinstvo. Slibno kao Goethe i Schelling, u >~svrie- nosti>ianad svake znanostii ,i filozofije