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IS THE SUBLIME A MUSICAL TOPOS?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2010

WYE J. ALLANBROOK
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Eighteenth-Century Music , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , September 2010 , pp. 263 - 279
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Elaine Sisman, Mozart: The ‘Jupiter’ Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 79.

2 A. Peter Brown, ‘The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Ornamental: English Aesthetic Currents and Haydn's London Symphonies’, in Studies in Music History, Presented to H. C. Robbins Landon on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Otto Biba and David Wyn Jones (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 44–71.

3 James Webster, ‘The Creation, Haydn's Late Vocal Music, and the Musical Sublime’, in Haydn and His World, ed. Elaine Sisman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 57–102; James Webster, Haydn's ‘Farewell’ Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 162–163, 230–231, 247–248, 365, 369.

4 Judith L. Schwartz, ‘Periodicity and Passion in the First Movement of Haydn's “Farewell” Symphony’, in Studies in Musical Sources and Style: Essays in Honor of Jan LaRue, ed. Eugene K. Wolf and Edward H. Roesner (Madison: A-R Editions, 1990), 293–338.

5 Mark Evan Bonds, ‘The Symphony as Pindaric Ode’, in Haydn and His World, 131–153. Concerning the article's authorship, as Sulzer explains in his Preface to volume 2 of his Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, first edition (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1771–1774; facsimile edition Hildesheim: Olms, 1967), he was assisted in the writing of articles with a specific musical focus first by Johann Philipp Kirnberger (through to letter K), and then by Johann Abraham Peter Schulz (L to R). Sulzer's failing health prompted him to turn over to Schulz all the articles from S to Z (Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch, ed. and trans. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 14, note 22).

6 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, volume 2: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 646.

7 Matthew Riley, ‘Civilizing the Savage: Johann Georg Sulzer and the “Aesthetic Force” of Music’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 127/1 (2002), 2, note 5.

8 In this article Schulz uses the word ‘sublime’ only twice, once as a noun and once as an adjective. In her translation Bathia Churgin uses ‘noble’ and ‘elevated’ (‘The Symphony as Described by J. A. P. Schulz (1774): A Commentary and Translation’, Current Musicology 29 (1980), 10–14). Sisman uses Churgin's translation of Schulz's article ‘slightly modified’, the modifications consisting of the substitution of ‘sublime’ for Churgin's ‘noble’ and ‘elevated’ (The ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, 9). Bonds's translation is his own (‘The Symphony as Pindaric Ode’, 132, 133). James Webster uses ‘noble’ and ‘elevated’, and points out that Schulz used the word ‘sublime’ ‘in contexts that clearly perpetuate the traditional rhetoric of “high” style’ (‘The Creation, Haydn's Late Vocal Music, and the Musical Sublime’, 61). Both Ratner and Baker quote Schulz's article in its citation by Koch, who reprints it with some omissions, including the second occurrence of the word ‘sublime’ (Heinrich Christoph Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (Leipzig: A. F. Böhme, 1782–1793), volume 3, 302–304; Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980), 145; Heinrich Christoph Koch, Introductory Essay on Composition, trans. Nancy Kovaleff Baker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 198). To the ‘sublime’ list one could add Thomas Christensen, but he justifies ‘sublime’ by a mistranslation of another term (see note 16).

9 Michael Broyles, ‘The Two Instrumental Styles of Classicism’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 36/2 (1983), 213, 214.

10 Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association, 1935).

11 The best-known of this group are Thomas Gray (1716–1771), Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774), William Cowper (1731–1800) and Christopher Smart (1722–1800). Many of them were elegists, who meditated on the twilight of man's life.

12 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), paragraph 25, ‘Explanation of the Term Sublime’ (‘Namenerklärung des Erhabenen’), 89. ‘Thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived’; Saint Anselm, ‘Proslogium, or Discourse on the Existence of God’, in Basic Writings: Proslogium, Monologium, Cur Deus Homo, trans. S. N. Deane, second edition (La Salle: Open Court, 1962), 7.

13 Erhabenheit occurs twice in discussions of particular musical repertories (the French and the ecclesiastical, which features ein stille Erhabenheit nurtured by the pathetic rather than the exalted). Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste, second edition, volume 4 (Leipzig: Weidmannschen Buchhandlung, 1794), ‘Symphonie’, 480.

14 Heinrich Christoph Koch, Musikalisches Lexikon (Frankfurt am Main, 1802; facsimile edition Hildesheim: Olms, 1964), see entry for ‘Erhaben’. In his Versuch Koch said that the first movements of symphonies should possess ‘the character of magnificence and the erhaben’ (‘Der Charakter der Pracht und des Erhabenen’) (Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, volume 3, 301), and it is here that he quotes Schulz's article listing ‘the grand, the ceremonial and the erhaben’ as characteristics of the symphony in general: ‘Die Symphonie ist zu dem Ausdrucke des Grossen, des Feyerlichen und Erhabenen vorzüglich geschickt’ (303).

15 See Wye J. Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’ and ‘Don Giovanni’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 19–22.

16 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1125a12-16 (translation mine).

17 Daniel Gottlob Türk also uses this trio as the first three hallmarks of the symphony, which should be ‘von einem grossen, feyerlichen, erhabenen, kühnen, feurigen u. Charakter’ (of a great, ceremonial, elevated, bold, fiery etc., character) (Klavierschule, oder Anweisung zum Klavierspielen für Lehrer und Lernende (Leipzig, 1789), 391–392). Thomas Christensen translates the trio as ‘grandeur, passion, and the sublime’, giving an incorrect emotional upgrade to feyerlich (could he possibly have confused it with feurig, which appears later in Schulz's article?). This error effectively normalizes its partnership with ‘sublime’ (Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 106).

18 Edmond Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 75.

19 Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, ‘Erhaben’, volume 2, 98. The sublime needs a worldly yardstick [Maß] – a comparator – to keep it within normal limits.

20 All the citations of Michaelis are taken from Schwartz, who uses the le Huray and Day translation but includes the original German (‘Periodicity and Passion in the First Movement of Haydn's “Farewell” Symphony’, 325–329). Strikingly, Michaelis claimed that only ‘men of the noblest intellect’ could respond to the sublime, betraying his interest in identifying a romantic musical elite. For Kant, of course, the emphasis is on the sublime as it reveals general humanity's ‘supersensible faculty of cognition’ (Critique of Judgment, ‘Explanation of the Term Sublime’, 89).

21 Baker and Christensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 130.

22 Friedrich Rochlitz, ‘Rhapsodische Gedanken über die zweckmässige Benutzung der Materie der Musik’, Der neue teutsche Merkur 10 (1798). Cited in Baker and Christensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 130.

23 In a rather less sublime but still alpine association, the Salzburg nuns in The Sound of Music, baffled by their rebellious charge, Maria von Trapp, ask themselves this question.

24 See Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music: History, Theory, and Ideology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

25 The late eighteenth-century symphony came directly out of opera, and preserved that introductory function even as in the 1780s Mozart was developing his ‘mature’ style. First movements were fanfares, heralding the coming event. And last movements, finales, served as slam-bang, celebratory closures, like the choral happy endings that close Mozart's Italian operas. Both the first and the last movements of the ‘Jupiter’ – to which I shall shortly devote my attention – have a military air, with fanfares, trumpets and drums; like earlier symphonies, the work might have served as an opener for a subscription concert. We do not know the precise circumstances for which Mozart's last three symphonies were intended. For speculation about the possible occasions for which Mozart might have intended them see Neal Zaslaw, Mozart's Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 421–423.

26 The theme of the panel on which I first read this paper, at the International Musicological Society's conference held in Zurich in 2007, was ‘The Topical Universe in Transition’.

27 Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 48.

28 Bonds, Music as Thought, 51.

29 Sisman, The ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, 79.

30 Zaslaw, Mozart's Symphonies, 540.

31 Ratner, Classic Music, 395.

32 Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, 18–22.

33 This paper was delivered in the same session of the Zurich International Musicological Society conference (‘The Topical Universe in Transition’) as mine, on 11 July 2007.

34 Schiller to Professor Süvern, Weimar, July 26, 1800, in Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe from 1794 to 1805, volume 2, trans. L. Dora Schmitz (London: George Bell, 1879), 326.

35 Taruskin, Oxford History of Music, volume 2, 645–646.

36 Bonds, Music as Thought, 58.