Abstract

A musical performance is a complex, multi-sensorial and interactive artistic act that consists of a set of relationships. In early Romantic music aesthetics, an expressive performance was attributed with the potential to create an experience of synthesis between the real and the ideal, the material and the spiritual, as well as between the actors involved. Sensations and feelings were conceived as vague and ineffable, and this dynamism was seen as an asset to musical expression. For a performer, engaging in the unutterable, constantly changing sentiments of the music required both an inward orientation and an act of sympathy. According to early Romantics, the performer who understands and resonates with the music can identify with the composer’s self. In a research project preceding this essay, I together with my colleagues aimed at re-enacting ideas and mindsets of early Romantic discussions of music performance. The present essay includes two videos of these re-enactments-in-performance during which chamber music by Schubert and Beethoven is performed and the listener’s real-time thoughts and feelings are visualised.

Expressivity in music performance has sparked increasing research interest over the last decades.[1] The term expressive musical performance is, however, difficult to define.[2] In music psychology as well as other fields of music research, expression in a musical performance is often defined as the performer’s deviation from the regular: a “change” or “departure” (whether conscious or unconscious) from what is expected or what is indicated in the score.[3] Mine Doğantan-Dack suggests another definition, which is not restricted to the sonic properties of the performance, namely that an expressive performance is “generative of a valued affective response triggered (at least in part) by the sounds of the performance.”[4] In a study by Erik Lindström et al., students in higher music education in the subjects of classical music and jazz defined musical expression in terms of “communicating emotion” and “playing with feeling”.[5] As Aaron Williamon observes, the practical limitations associated with experimental studies have forced researchers of music performance to focus on core principles that “transcend a specific time and place”.[6] This timelessness can lead to misconceptions. According to David Milson and Neal Peres Da Costa, “[o]ne of the main limitations of expressiveness analyses in the domain of cognitive studies of music performance is that expressivity is often defined as being constant or, more precisely, as if traits of music performance associated with the invocation of emotion have remained more or less stable over time.”[7] Doğantan-Dack suggests that this dehistoricisation is a consequence of a research focus on musical scores and the properties of the sounding music, and calls it “perhaps the most serious weakness of research on expressive performance”.[8] How music is viewed and understood in different cultures and periods interacts with how it is and was performed and experienced.

When preparing for concert performances of early nineteenth-century music, musicians usually pay close attention to expressive tools such as dynamics, articulation and timbre. Metaphors are also often used as tools for expressivity, some of which derive from early nineteenth-century aesthetics. The early Romantic discussion on music performance also includes metaphors and prompts that are not commonly used today. Can these metaphors and prompts be helpful for creating expressive performances of early nineteenth-century music? Arguably, when we perform music that has been performed before, we re-enact—to a greater or lesser extent—not only practices such as playing techniques and styles, but also thoughts, ideas and feelings. To re-enact an aesthetic mindset or conception means that they become embodied and experienced. This can form a deeper understanding of the mode of thinking in question, and of how it might affect us.[9] As part of the research project “Rhetorical and Romantic affective strategies in musical performance”, I, together with my colleagues, aimed at re-enacting aesthetic ideas and mindsets of early Romantic discussions of musical performance to explore their artistic potential and further develop the understanding of early nineteenth-century music aesthetics. This essay is based on these re-enactments as well as historical sources. It is written from the perspective of the performer in the sense that it is guided by what I, as a musician, consider relevant for performances of early nineteenth-century music.

Aspects of Early Romantic German and French Music Performance Aesthetics

As signalled by the often non-systematic and non-dialectical magnificent language of the early Romantics, an ideal musical performance was conceived as a magical, ecstatic event, where value corresponded with affective engagement and the music’s ineffability and indefinability. Music was said to be able to enflame the heart with a warm love, and to give access to another, supernatural world of the unfathomable. Arguably, early Romantic musical performance aesthetics is characterised by an ideal of synthesis. A performance was attributed with the potential to create an experience of unification of the real and the ideal, the material and the spiritual, as well as between performer and music, performer and composer, performer and instrument. By understanding and reproducing the composer’s innermost ideas and feelings, entering into and resonating with the music, the performer could identify with the spirit of the composer. Through this unification, the performer became the music’s co-creator, or real-time creator, expressing both the music and themself with an expanded artistic power.

The paradigmatic transformations in eighteenth-century European music aesthetics included a changing conception of emotions. The Cartesian view of passions as definable and separable drew repeated criticism during the second half of the century, and another view of sentiments as dynamic, fluctuating entities and therefore indeterminate entered the discussion.[10] Johann Nikolaus Forkel was a music theorist and historian who in the 1780s cultivated the notion that just like all other natural phenomena, sentiments [Empfindungen] are subject to constant change.[11] The Leipzig writer on music Friedrich Rochlitz suggests that we cannot name and specify the mixtures, gradations, transitions and nuances of our own feelings, and that the same is true of feelings expressed through music.[12] The Romantics further emphasised this conception of sentiments or feelings—both in the inner lives of individuals and in music—as dynamic entities, ever-flowing and fluctuating, and thus undefinable and ineffable.[13]

Especially in instrumental music, this dynamism and vagueness was seen as an asset to musical expression: an artistic strength that enabled the sounding music to connect to a deep inwardness in the listener. Heinrich Domnich was appointed one of the horn professors at the Paris Conservatory. In his treatise Méthode de premier et de second cor (1808), he writes: “That which the musical language in and of itself has in terms of vagueness and lack of determinedness, enters its [expression’s] domain and thus becomes a profit for the art. Expression takes hold of it and finds in it a source of beauty.”[14] Partly due to its ineffability, music could express what conventional language could not.[15] Johann Gottfried Herder writes in Kalligone: Von Kunst und Kunstrichterei (1800):

[E]very moment of this art [music] is and must be transitory. For precisely the longer and shorter, the louder and softer, higher and lower, the greater and lesser is its meaning, its impression. The victorious power of the tone and its sentiment lies in its coming and going, its becoming and having been. As the former and the latter melt together with others, rise, fall, sink and—along the tensed rope of harmony, following eternal fixed laws—re-emerge with new effects, so [does] my spirit, my courage, my love, and my hope… You air spirits, you came and fled on weightless tones, moved my heart and left behind in me an endless longing, through you, for you.[16]

In the aesthetics of idealism, art is the means through which the ideal takes shape and is embodied in the real. Music was seen as a sensuous manifestation of the ideal, something that could represent the infinite in the finite and open up the possibility for mankind to perceive a supernatural, otherworldly sphere.[17] A musical performance could generate a sense of immersion in another, magical or spiritual world, a sense of being transferred into a higher reality, independent of earthly phenomena, abandoning the struggles of the everyday world. For a number of Romantic thinkers, art could even synthesise the real and the ideal. The essence of art was suggested to “manifest the suprasensuous, to unite the finite and the infinite.”[18]

Image 1. Caspar David Friedrich, The Garden Terrace, 1811–12, oil on canvas[19]
Metaphors of depth and inwardness are widely employed in writings of the early Romantics, especially in discussions on music.[20] The idea was that music penetrates the inner human soul. When performers and listeners express or perceive music’s ineffable, obscure feelings, we are ultimately drawn into our own deepest selves. For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the essence of music is its subjective inwardness. For him, music conveys us to ourselves. It “draws us into our own subjective depth, lets that depth resound and thereby be sounded.”[21] The performer’s emotional engagement is thus both inward and outward turning. Musical expression relies on the mutual influences between inwardness and outwardly directed communication.

Passions were supposed to be highly present in musical performances, embodied in the performers as well as in the sounding music. Pierre Baillot was one of violin professors at the Paris Conservatory from 1795 until his death in 1842. He wrote two violin methods, of which the second one, L’Art du violon, became one of the most influential of the nineteenth century.[22] Baillot writes about the violin soloist being profoundly moved, and “communicating the full range of feelings he has”.[23] The performer wished to touch the listener, to make the listener respond sympathetically to their feelings. These feelings were supposed to be the same as, or similar to, the composer’s feelings that were incorporated into the music.[24] Johann Nepomuk Hummel—one of Europe’s most famous pianists of the early nineteenth century—writes in his piano treatise: “Expression refers directly to the feelings, and indicates the disposition and ability of the player to put into his playing and impress upon the listener whatever feeling the composer has put into his work, and which the player feels in the same manner.”[25] According to Baillot, “it is genius of performance that allows the artist […] to transmit to the soul of the listener the feeling that the composer had in his soul.”[26] The idealist Romantic aesthetic still makes no attempt to explain any naturalist cause-and-effect relationships in a musical performance. The German professor of music and aesthetics Joseph Fröhlich suggests that the sounding music incorporates and displays the composer’s self; it has to serve “the revelation of his inner self” and allow the composer to open “a view on his mind.”[27]

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a Romantic writer, composer, and painter, today perhaps best known as a music critic. He suggests that “to the proper and adequate performance of Beethoven’s compositions […] belongs nothing less than that one understands him, that one penetrates deeply into his essence, that in the consciousness of one’s own blessings one boldly dares to enter the realm of those magical things that his powerful spell invokes”.[28] At least for Hoffmann, Beethoven’s music could arouse feelings of awe, fear, terror, and pain.[29] To sincerely engage in, reproduce, and sympathise with such emotional content requires strength and bravery.

Image 2. E.T.A. Hoffmann, Self-portrait, before 1822[30]
Understanding and reproducing the composer’s innermost ideas and feelings incorporated in the music are reciprocal activities. Understanding the feelings and aesthetic ideas of the music supports an engagement with them and vice versa: engaging in the composer’s sentiments and ideas not only helps move the listeners but also deepens and develops the performer’s understanding of them. This interaction can be a process over time, or it can take place in momentum, in the multi-layered complex that is a musical performance. In chamber music performance, entering into the composer’s ideas and bringing them to life is a communal act. The violinist Louis Spohr writes that when performing string quartets, “all four instruments enter in the same way into the composer’s idea and make it perceptible.”[31]

To connect with the composer and identify with their style can also be facilitated through bodily movements. When the composer of violin music is a violinist themself, to render the composer’s personal imprint includes re-enacting their individual playing style, that is the physical movements. Baillot advises students to follow the composer’s fingering style to “identify oneself with the style of the author,” and “come the closest to the true meaning of the compositions”.[32] When the performing body of one musician re-enacts the precise movements of another, a feeling of closeness or even identification can emerge, which expands beyond the physical gestures to include sensibility and musical expressivity.

Engaging in the situation of another or transporting oneself outside of one’s self and identifying with somebody else was a major theme of both the cult of sensibility and early Romanticism. According to Baillot, “[i]t is genius of performance that allows the artist to seize at a glance the different characters of music, and by a sudden inspiration identify himself with the genius of the composer, follow him in all his intentions, and communicate them with both facility and precision.”[33] Through this act of identification, the talented performer can reanimate the spirits of genial composers from an earlier age, make them become alive and present.[34] In a pamphlet from 1831, the French writer on music François Fayolle honours Baillot for possessing “the genius of performance because he strips away his ego to become, by turn, Haydn, Boccherini, Mozart and Beethoven.”[35] For the beholder, to perceive such a transformation can be an extraordinary and magical, even idolatrous, experience. The famous violinist Joseph Joachim made his first public performance in Berlin in December 1852, playing Beethoven’s violin concerto. The critic Otto Gumprecht was very enthusiastic and describes an immersive listening experience that included the presence of the dead composer:

Now a young violinist entered the stage… During the Tutti at the beginning of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, I had enough time to look at him, but at the first sounds of the violin I forgot everything else, the concert hall, the audience, even Mr. Joachim. The nobility and fullness of the tone, the perfect technique, the spirited conception occupied my full attention. Not before the Adagio did I look again, but of the figure of the violinist I could not see anything anymore; it was entirely eclipsed by another. I recognized it well, this short, nonchalantly dressed figure with the tangled hair standing on end, the high forehead on which the most sublime thoughts leave their illuminated traces, with the deep-seated eyes that radiated the most audacious spirit and the deepest love of mankind, with those lips into which pain had drawn the sharpest creases and lines… It was he himself, the creator of the Ninth Symphony, whom I imagined seeing face to face.[36]

Image 3. Karl Joseph Stieler, Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven when composing the Missa Solemnis, 1820, oil on canvas[37]
This idea of self-transformation also relates to the early Romantic discussions of individuality, the belief “that individuality demanded an expansion of the self towards infinity”.[38] In this way of thinking, self-annihilation could function as a vehicle for a sense of self-expansion: what Hunter calls a “reciprocal self-loss and self-realization”.[39] By spontaneously and temporarily surrendering to the composer’s subjectivity and leaving one’s self behind, the performer could expand their self.

The performer merging with the musical instrument is a metaphor of unification that was used in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and still persists today. According to the early Romantics, the instrument permeated by the innerness of both the performer and the music could become something more than a separate item. It could transform into a soulful subject, expressing the performer. Baillot writes that for the violin “becomes the most noble interpreter of [the] genius; initiated to all mysteries of the heart by its continuous contact, it breathes and it beats with the heart [of the performer].”[40] Later in his treatise, Baillot further anthropomorphises the violin: “The violin is no longer just an instrument, it is a sonorous soul; traveling through space, it strikes the ear of even the least attentive listener and seeks in the depths of his heart emotional strings to set in motion.”[41]

Hegel explains what is unique about music as an artform: that it has to be performed by another artist. The performer physically puts life into and embodies the music, expressing both the music and themself. The sounding music becomes soulful, permeated with the performer’s subjectivity. For Baillot, the mature violin soloist, expression becomes “the story of his life; he sings of his memories, his sorrows, the pleasures he has tasted, the hurts he has endured […] the melody is his interpreter, his faithful friend; it gives him the purest of all enjoyments by revealing to him the secret of communicating the full range of feelings he has, and the secret of enabling his fellow men to become passionately involved in his destiny.”[42]

The idea of a musical performance as an interpretation of a musical work was not established before the 1840s.[43] The early nineteenth-century understanding of an ideal musical performance—public or private—can rather be described as a relational and interactive artistic act. The visual perception of the performer or performers contributed to the listener’s artistic experience and feeling of participation.[44] The listeners were given an active role, both regarding their own understanding of the music and in that their response to the music—perceived by the performer—could contribute to the development of new expressions. Baillot writes: “The artist [playing a string quartet] cannot be unaware that the listener, thus situated in visual contact with the players, is under the influence of his outpouring of feeling. It is only by the continuous exchange of feelings that he feels born in himself new feelings resulting from the effect of those he has conveyed; these new inspirations give him new means to move the audience.”[45] Through such a feedback loop, the audience supports the development of both the expressivity of the real-time performance and the performer’s expressive ability.

Re-Enacting These Aesthetic Ideas and Mindsets in Musical Performances

Ludwig van Beethoven: String Trio in G Major Op. 9 No 1, Adagio ma non tanto e cantabile. Karin Berggren, Magnus Persson and Frida Bromander, 2021.
Franz Schubert: String Trio in B-flat major, D581, Allegro Moderato. Karin Berggren, Magnus Persson and Frida Bromander, 2021.

In the performances documented in these two video recordings, the musicians Karin Berggren (violin), Magnus Pehrsson (viola) and Frida Bromander (cello) as well as the listeners aim at re-enacting the aesthetic ideas and mindsets of the early Romantic performance discussion briefly presented in this essay. Seven listeners took part in the performances, one of which was me. The lines added as subtitles are excerpts from the thoughts, feelings and associations of mainly the listeners but also the performers during the performance. Each participant is represented by a specific colour. These subtitles can be read as private, individual, free-wheeling thoughts or as an unspoken conversation among the people in the room. My goal in presenting these thoughts and feelings in this way is to re-create the sense of the performing space with some of its atmospheric qualities, point out the unseen listeners’ mental presence in the room and their participation in the performance, and make some of the participants’ experiences accessible as a contribution to the music video.

The performances took place on 13 September 2021 at Jonsered Herrgård outside Gothenburg, the mansion seen at the beginning of the videos, photographed by Håkan Berg. That day, the entire String Trio in B-flat major by Schubert and Beethoven’s Trio Op. 9 No. 1 in G major were performed, movement by movement. It was filmed by Kristoffer Sandberg and audio was recorded by Erik Sikkema. The musicians and the listeners had prepared similarly for the performances. Our previously established knowledge of and familiarity with early nineteenth-century music and music aesthetics provided a basis for the preparations. After reading about the early Romantic ideas on musical performances, the bulk of our preparation consisted of practical exercises. The musicians rehearsed and workshopped with formulated metaphors, invitations and prompts to incorporate these ideas and mindsets in themselves and the sounding music. The listeners practised a corresponding listening attitude by using similarly formulated invitations and prompts when listening to early nineteenth-century music. In the performances at Jonsered Herrgård, we all used the same versions of the formulated prompts, one for each movement. After each movement, the listeners made short notes about the thoughts and feelings that we experienced. Over the next few months, the listeners wrote more detailed reflections using the video recordings to recollect our impressions, and to indicate the precise timing of the feelings and thoughts we had noted down as we experienced them. The musicians also reflected orally and in writing on their experiences using the video recordings. Quotes from these written reflections appear as the subtitles.

The metaphor of the performer becoming the composer is not regularly used today.[46] The perception of the composer’s thoughts as one’s own can expand the performer’s artistic and expressive self-confidence and support the feeling of being the music’s co-creator, or real-time creator. It challenges the conceptions of distance and hierarchy between the historical composer and the living performer. The researcher and musician Elisabeth Le Guin asserts the possibility for the performer to have a physically reciprocal relationship with the dead composer. She shows how, for the performer, a genuine and sincere understanding of a piece of music, together with extensive tactile experience of practicing it, can create a feeling of unification with the composer.[47]

The musicians taking part in this study experienced it as both intense and artistically rewarding. Karin Berggren said that working in this way—spending time on entering the music in another way, exploring the music through images and feelings and one’s inner self, being inside the music and aiming at finding the essence of the music—developed her understanding of it. Frida Bromander reflected afterwards that “[t]he different ways of thinking and tools that we worked with during the workshop have helped me communicate the music in a freer way. The music is allowed to reach greater heights and I, the musician, am allowed to become one with it.” Magnus Pehrsson agreed that using the metaphor of identifying with the composer while playing gave him confidence, authority and freedom as a musician.

As several authors point out, discussing listening attitudes or modes is a challenging task. “Listening” can be understood in many ways: it is highly subjective, and a listening attitude depends not only on aesthetic culture, social structures and etiquettes, but also on the individual person’s passion for and interest in music, musical training, mood and agency.[48] Discussing a specific listening aesthetics, even within a defined time, place and musical genre, can thus be misleading. To re-enact a particular listening aesthetics or mindset is arguably even more challenging. A substantial number of musical works composed in the early nineteenth century are well known in today’s classical music culture, as are some nineteenth-century aesthetic ideas and ideals. As Deirdre Loughridge observes, however, our self-recognition and feeling of shared realities with the early Romantic era is combined with the opposite: differences and “otherness”.[49] In our performances at Jonsered Herrgård, this “otherness” was especially experienced by the listeners. As one of us reflected afterwards,

when encouraged to adopt an early Romantic mode of listening, the task involves not only an attempt to adopt a particular listening attitude on the basis of evidence from the period, but it also involves a reimagining of the self according to different historical understandings of the human and of aesthetic experience… we must try to embrace historical understandings of what constitutes us as humans, of how we experience the world, and how we connect to other humans. Encouraged to connect to the soul of a composer through listening, for example, we must first entertain a belief in the idea of the soul.

However, as another listener observed, “[t]he early Romantic music-aesthetic ‘paradigm’, if we can even call it that, is a flexible one, plural and even at times self-undermining or contradictory.” Listeners also commented upon the multi-sensorial aspects and subtle forms of communication and connection. One listener wrote that listening in this way “does take a certain inner focus; but it is far from solipsistic, and it can be enhanced by subtle forms of communication or felt connection […] which can only be experienced live in the room with performers.” Another listener noted, “[w]e see the body feeling the music as it produces the music and this does have an impact upon its reception.” At the end of the day at Jonsered Herrgård, the string trio played a sequence from one of the movements by heart. This created a different, and at least for some participants, more gripping experience, as well as more direct interactions. One listener observed that “[t]he barriers have changed between the performers and us, between the performers and each other, and my personal barrier has somehow also shifted.” Another listener noted, “I perceive the music as an act of creation that just happens here, in front of our eyes and ears. It feels like fresh water, pouring right out from its source.” Magnus Pehrsson also commented that when playing this section by heart, it was “significantly easier to focus on images, feelings and ideas.”

Discussing and exploring musical expressivity as part of a particular aesthetic context deepens our understanding of the performance discourse in question and the connections between the expressive tools of performance and the philosophical and aesthetic thinking of the period or culture. This understanding can, in turn, support the use of expressive tools such as metaphors and ideas that are rooted in the aesthetic thinking in question, and thus expand the performer’s expressive capacity and their sincere participation in the performance.

 

Footnotes

  1. Research for this essay was supported by the Swedish Research Council, reg. no. 2018-01942. I want to express my gratitude to my colleagues in the project and thank Jonsered Herrgård for their kind cooperation. An earlier version of the essay was published in Bania, Maria. Becoming Beethoven: Re-Enacting Aesthetic Ideas and Mindsets from an Early Romantic Discourse of Musical Performance. Gothenburg: Artmonitor. 2023.
  2. See Doğantan-Dack, Mine. “Philosophical Reflections on Expressive Music Performance”. In Expressiveness in Music Performance: Empirical Approaches across Styles and Cultures. Ed. Dorottya Fabian, Renee Timmers and Emery Schubert. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014. pp. 5–8; Williamon, Aaron. “Feedback Learning of Musical Expressivity”. In Musical Excellence: Strategies and Techniques to Enhance Performance. Ed. Aaron Williamon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004. pp. 247–270; Juslin, Patrik and Timmers, Renee. “Expression and Communication of Emotion in Music Performance”. In Handbook of Music and Emotion. Ed. Patrik Juslin and John A. Sloboda. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010. p. 454.
  3. See, for instance, Doğantan-Dack, “Philosophical Reflections”, pp. 5–10; Clarke, Eric. “Expression and Communication in Performance”. In Music and Mind in Everyday Life. Ed. Eric Clarke, Nicola Dibben and Stephanie Pitts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010. pp. 33–47; Williamon, “Feedback learning of Musical Expressivity”, pp. 251–55.
  4. Doğantan-Dack, “Philosophical Reflections”, p. 8.
  5. Lindström, Erik, Juslin, Patrik, Bresin, Roberto and Williamon, Aaron. “‘Expressivity Comes from Within Your Soul’: A Questionnaire Study of Music Students’ Perspectives on Expressivity”. Research Studies in Music Education. vol. 20. no. 1. 2003. pp. 30–31.
  6. Williamon, “Feedback Learning of Musical Expressivity”, p. 252.
  7. Milson, David and Da Costa, Neal Peres. “Expressiveness in Historical perspective: ‘Practices’”. In Expressiveness in Music Performance. Ed. Dorottya Fabian, Renee Timmers and Emery Schubert. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014. p. 81.
  8. Doğantan-Dack, “Philosophical Reflections”, p. 8.
  9. See Skowroneck, Tilman and Bania, Maria. “Re-enacting an eighteenth-century method for reinforcing musical expression”. ÍMPAR: Online Journal for Artistic Research. vol. 6. no.1. 2023.https://doi.org/10.34624/impar.v6i1.28312
  10. See Hosler, Bellamy. Changing Aesthetic Views of Instrumental Music in 18th-Century Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press. 1978. pp. 125–32.
  11. Ibid, pp. 177–88.
  12. Rochlitz, Ferdinand. “Eine flüchtige Worte über Verbindung der Musik mit der Poesie”. Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung. no. 28. 1799. p. 434.
  13. See Hosler, Changing Aesthetic Views, pp. 189–209.
  14. “Ce que la langue musicale a en elle-même de vague et d’indéterminé rentre dans son domaine et tourney ainsi au profit de l’art. L’expression s’en empire et y trouve une source de beautés.” Domnich, Heinrich. Méthode de Premier et de Second Cor. Paris. 1808. p. 93. Trans. Tilman Skowroneck.
  15. See, for instance, Bonds, Mark Evan. Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2006. p. 10; Bowie, Andrew. “Music and the Rise of Aesthetics”. In The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music. Ed. Jim Samson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001. p. 31.
  16. Vorübergehend also ist jeder Augenblick dieser Kunst und muss es seyn: den eben das kürzer und länger, stärker und schwächer, höher und tiefer, mehr und minder ist seine Bedeutung, sein Eindruck. In Kommen und Fliehen, im Werden und Gewesenseyn liegt die Siegskraft des Tons und der Empfindung. Wie jener und diese sich mit mehreren verschmelzen, sich heben, sinken, untergehn und am gespannten Seil der Harmonie nach ewigen, unauflösbaren Gesetzen wieder emporkommen und neu wirken, so mein Gemüth, mein Muth, meine Liebe und Hoffnung… Auf leichten Tönen kommt und flohet ihr davon, ihr wandelnden Luftgeister, bewegtet mein Herz und liesset nach in mir, durch euch, zu euch eine unendliche Sehnsucht.” Herder, Johann Gottfried. Kalligone. Von Kunst und Kunstrichterei. vol. 15. Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch. 1800. “Von Kunst und Kunstrichterei” IV “Von Musik”, pp. 224–25. Trans. Mark Evan Bonds. Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1991. p. 168, and Tilman Skowroneck (second part).
  17. See Bonds, Music as Thought, pp. 12–28.
  18. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 2. 5 March 1800. pp. 401–07. Quoted in Bonds. Mark Evan. “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century”. Journal of the American Musicological Society. vol. 50. nos. 2–3. 1997. p. 411.
  19. Charlottenhof Palace, via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=Caspar+David+Friedrich%2C+Gartenterrasse&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image (accessed 2024-03-11).
  20. See Watkins, Holly. Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E.T.A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schönberg. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2011. pp. 22–118.
  21. Sallis, John. “Soundings: Hegel on Music”. In A Companion to Hegel. Ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. 2011. p. 376.
  22. See Goldberg, Louise. “Editor’s Introduction”. In Baillot, Pierre. The Art of the Violin. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1991.
  23. “communiquer toutes les sensations qu’il éprouve”. Baillot, Pierre. L’art du violon: Nouvelle méthode. Paris. [1834]. p. 267. Trans. in Baillot. The Art of the Violin. p. 480.
  24. See, for instance, Fröhlich, Joseph. Vollständige Theoretisch-pracktische Musikschule für alle beym Orchester gebräuchliche wichtigere Instrumente. Bonn: N. Simrock. 1811. p. 48.
  25. “Ausdruck bezieht sich unmittelbar auf das Gefühl, und bezeichnet im Spieler die Fähigkeit und Fertigkeit, was der Komponist für dies, für das Gefühl, in sein Werk gelegt hat, und der Spieler ihm nachempfindet, nun auch in sein Spiel und dem Zuhörer an’s Herz zu legen”. Hummel, Johann Nepomuk. Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Pianoforte-Spiel. Vienna: Haslinger. 1828. p. 426. Trans. Tilman Skowroneck.
  26. “C’est lui [genie d’éxecution] qui […] faire passer dans l’âme de l’auditeur le sentiment que le compositeur avait dans la sienne;” Baillot, Pierre, Rode, Pierre and Kreutzer, Rodolphe, Méthode de violon. Paris. 1803. p. 163; Baillot, L’Art du violon, p. 266. Trans. in Baillot, The Art of the Violin, p. 479.
  27. Fröhlich, Vollständige Theoretisch-pracktische Musikschule, p. 3.
  28. “so gehört zum richtigen, bequemen Vortragen B.scher Composition nichts geringeres, als dass man ihn begreife, dass man tief in sein Wesen eindringe, dass man im Bewusstseyn eigner Weihe es kühn wage, in den Kreis der magischen Erscheinungen zu treten, die sein mächtiger Zauber hervorruft”. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. “Recension Deux Trios pour Pianoforte, Violon et Violoncelle”. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. 1813. sp. 153–54. Trans. Tilman Skowroneck.
  29. Hoffmann. [Review of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 5th Symphony]. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 12. no. 40. 1810. sp. 633.
  30. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=E.T.A.+Hoffmann&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image (accessed 2024-03-11).
  31. “Bey [der Vortrag des wirklichen Quartetts […] alle vier [Instrumente] auf gleiche Weise in die Idee des Komponisten eingehet und sie zur Anschauung bringen.” Spohr, Louis. Violinschule. Wien. [1833]. p. 246. Trans. Tilman Skowroneck.
  32. Baillot, L’art du violon, p. 146.
  33. “C’est lui [genie d’éxecution] qui saisit d’un coup d’oeil les différens caractères de la musique, qui, par une inspiration soudaine, s’identifie avec le génie du compositeur, le suit dans toutes ses intentions et les fait connaître avec autant de facilité que de precision,” Baillot, Méthode de violon, p. 163; Baillot, L’art du violon, p. 266. Trans. slightly revised from Baillot, The Art of the violin, p. 479.
  34. Baillot, Méthode de violon, p. 163; Ballot, L’art du violon, p. 266.
  35. “le génie de l’exécution, car il dépouille son moi, pour être tour-à-tour Haydn, Boccherini, Mozart et Beethoven.” Fayolle, François. Paganini et Bériot, ou, Avis aux Jeunes Artistes qui se destinent a l’enseignement du violon. Paris: Legouest. 1831. p. 41. Trans. in Hunter, Mary. “To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer’: The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics”. Journal of the American Musicological Society. vol. 58. no. 2. 2005. p. 371.
  36. “Nun betrat ein junger Violinist das Podium […] Während des Tutti, mit welchem das Beethovensche Violinkonzert beginnt, hatte ich volle Zeit, ihn zu betrachten, aber bei den ersten Klängen seiner Geige vergass ich alles andere, den Konzertsaal, das Publikum, sogar Herrn Joachim. Der Adel und die Fülle des Tons, die vollendete Technik, die geistvolle Auffassung nahm mich ungeteilt in Anspruch. Erst im Adagio blickte ich wieder hin, aber von der Gestalt des Geigers konnte ich nichts mehr bemerken, sie war mir durch eine andere ganz und gar verdeckt. Ich erkannte sie wohl, diese gedrungene, nachlässig gekleidete Gestalt mit ihren wirren, emporstehenden Haaren, der hohen Stirn, auf der die erhabensten Gedanken ihre leuchtenden Spuren hinterlassen, mit ihren tiefliegendenden Augen, aus denen der kühnste Geist und die wärmste Menschenliebe hervorschauten, mit den Lippen, um die der Schmerz seine schärfsten Linien und falten gezogen […] Er war es selbst, der Schöpfer der ‘neunten Symphonie’, den ich von Angesicht zu Angesicht zu schauen wähnte.” Gumprecht, Otto. National-Zeitung. Quoted in Moser, Andreas. Joachim: Ein Lebensbild. Berlin: B. Behr’s Verlag. 1898. pp. 100–01. Trans. Tilman Skowroneck.
  37. Beethoven House, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=beethoven&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image (accessed 2024-03-11).
  38. Izenberg, Gerald N. Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1787–1802. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1992. p. 50.
  39. Hunter, “To Play as if from the Soul”, p. 387.
  40. “et le génie fait de lui son plus noble interprète; initié, par de continuelles étreintes, à tous les mystères du coeur, il respire, il palpite avec lui.” Baillot, L’art du violon, p. 5. Trans. in Baillot, The Art of the Violin, p. 8.
  41. “le Violon n’est plus un instrument, c’est une âme sonore; parcourant l’espace, il va frapper l’oreille de l’auditeur le moins attentive et chercher au fonds de son coeur la corde sensible qu’il fait vibrer.” Baillot, Méthode de violon, p. 164; Baillot, L’art du violon, p. 267 . Transl. in Baillot, The Art of the Violin, p. 480.
  42. “le récit de sa vie; il chante ses souvenirs, ses regrets, les plaisirs qu’il a goûtés, les maux qu’il a soufferts […] la mélodie est son interprête, son amie fidèle, elle lui donne la plus pure de toutes les jouissances en lui révélant le secret de communiquer toutes les sensations qu’il éprouve, et d’intéresser ses semblables à sa destinée.” Baillot. Méthode de violon. pp. 164–5; Baillot, L’art du violon. p. 267. Trans. in Baillot, The Art of the Violin, p. 480.
  43. See Dreyfus, Laurence. “Beyond the Interpretation of Music”. Journal of musicological research. vol. 39. nos. 2–3. 2020. pp. 161–86.
  44. See, for instance, November, Nancy. “Theater Piece and Cabinetstück: Nineteenth-Century Visual Ideologies of the String Quartet”. Music in Art vol. 29. nos. 1–2. 2004. pp. 137–40.
  45. “et l’artiste ne peut se passer de savoir l’auditeur ainsi placé sous l’influence de son expansion, puisque ce n’est que par l’échange continuel des sensations qu’il fait naître contre celles qu’il reçoit lui même de l’effet qu’elles ont produit, que de nouvelles inspirations viennent lui donner de nouveaux moyens pour émouvoir.” Baillot, L’art du violon. pp. 255–6. Trans. in Baillot, The Art of the Violin. p. 463.
  46. Although Dreyfus suggests that it is resonating up to the present. See Dreyfus, “Beyond the Interpretation of Music”, pp.170, 176.
  47. Le Guin, Elisabeth. Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2006. pp. 18–26.
  48. See Bashford, Christina. “Learning to Listen: Audiences for Chamber Music in Early-Victorian London”. Journal of Victorian Culture. vol. 4. no. 1. 1999. pp. 25–28; Bonds, Music as Thought, pp. 5–6.
  49. Loughridge, Deirdre. Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2016. p. 24.