Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language by Hamilton John;

Author:Hamilton, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: MUS000000, Music/General, LIT000000, Literary Criticism/Semiotics & Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2008-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

WACKENRODER’S BERGLINGER NOVELLA

In Das merkwürdige musikalische Leben des Tonkünstlers Joseph Berglinger (The strange musical Life of the composer Joseph Berglinger, 1797), Wackenroder liberally incorporates ideas and descriptions of the sublime inherited from Longinus, Burke, and Herder. His exploitation of the themes discussed so far (music’s nonmimetic character, the loss of rational control in listening, the ecstatic community) formulates an important assessment of musical experience as something analogous to experiences of madness. His Berglinger therefore anticipates in many respects Kleist’s Heilige Cäcilie, which portrays four brothers driven insane by the “power of music” (Gewalt der Musik). Both stories demonstrate a tension between verbal language, which abets reflective cognition, and music, which is grounded in immediate feeling. In this way, they bring out the ambivalent aspects of music’s sublimity, as something both desirable and dangerous.

Beyond Kleist, Wackenroder’s text played a considerable role in determining later philosophies of music, especially in the writings of Friedrich Schlegel and Arthur Schopenhauer, for its insistence on both the autonomy of art and music’s capacity to articulate dimensions of human experience irreducible to verbal language. Although still grounded in the culture of Empfindsamkeit and its accompanying aesthetics of music as the expression of passions (Ausdrucksästhetik), Wackenroder’s description of musical processes and effects already moves toward a new, nonrepresentational paradigm. Here music is less a “language of expression” and more an art of pure self-reference, what Berglinger refers to (in an allusion to Kant) as a “play of tones” (“Spiel der Töne” [WW 1.134/149]). The contradictory tension between expression and self-reference, between communication and noncommunication, rehearses the age-old querelle between the “melodists” and the “harmonists.”40 For the Berglinger novella, which is divided into two clearly demarcated parts, the terms and ramifications of this debate are concretely dramatized.

The tension polarizes the social world of productivity and the metaphysical sphere of art, which is essentially asocial. In short, the outer world is opposed to the inner realm of the imagination. This division engenders Wackenroder’s figure of the isolated artist, who must struggle with the conflicting demands of expression, which is bound to the social world of communication, and the pure self-reference of his art. In this sense, Wackenroder’s influence on literature was especially great. The disparity between a transcendent realm of musical fantasy and the quotidian world of noise represents a core feature of Hoffmann’s versions of the composer-figure (for example, Ritter Gluck and Johannes Kreisler). The conflicts that the eccentric artist suffers in relation to the world around him reemerge in Grillparzer’s mad violinist (Der arme Spielmann) and later in the mysterious association of music and death that structures the early work of Thomas Mann, from Hanno Buddenbrook’s sickly fascination to Gabriele Klöterjahn’s fatal Wagnerism (Tristan).

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