The German Genius

than the other senses. August Schlegel shared this view. 29
    The link between Idealism and music without voices thus becomes clear, and this approach reached its apogee in what Mark Bonds calls “the most important piece of musical criticism ever written.” 30 This was a review, published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1809, by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In this review, Hoffmann identified music as occupying “a separate realm beyond the phenomenal,” thereby endowing music with the capacity to provide “a glimpse of the infinite.” Instrumental music, he said, “discloses to man an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the external sensuous world that surrounds him, a world in which he leaves behind him all feelings that can be expressed through concepts, in order to surrender himself to that which cannot be expressed” in words, “a potential catalyst of revelation accessible to those who actively engaged the work by [their] creative imagination.” 31 It followed that “the onus of intelligibility” now moved from composer to listener. Bonds again: “This new framework of listening was in effect philosophical, based on the premise that the listener must strive to understand and internalise the thought of the composer, follow the argument of the music and comprehend it as a whole.”
    Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was the first time such a philosophical approach had been applied to a specific composition. He claimed to have identified a “teleological progression from the childlike innocence of Haydn to the superhuman Mozart to the divine Beethoven…Listening to Beethoven we become aware, dimly, of a higher form of reality not otherwise perceptible to us…Art is no longer a vehicle of entertainment, but a vehicle of truth…The arts in general begin where philosophy ends.” 32
    The very notion of explaining a work of instrumental music in depth was itself new. It grew out of the wider conception of Bildung but the link between Bildung and listening also had to do with the change in the understanding of listening itself. The symphony, for example, was associated with Kant’s notion of the sublime, a form of art defined by reference to its vastness of scope and its “oceanic” capacity to overwhelm the senses. 33 Many philosophers and artists argued that contemplation of the infinite through the sublime offered insights that the merely beautiful could not provide. “The massed forces” of the symphony supported this idea. 34
    When Hoffmann described music as “unfolding” from Haydn through Mozart to Beethoven he was also espousing a form of historicism, even a form of Hegelianism, accepting in effect the existence of a “world spirit,” evolving toward ever-higher states of human consciousness. Beethoven’s symphonies represented a culmination in music, a “moment of historical timelessness,” in which the composer had achieved Besonnenheit . This word, difficult to translate, attempts to describe a quality in which the artist has not so much created something, something almost divine, as that it has always been there, waiting to be un covered, or realized. 35
    T HE S YMPHONY AS S OCIOLOGY
     
    A separate element in the (wordless) symphony, particularly in the turbulent aftermath of the French Revolution, was its communal character, seen as contrasting markedly with the concerto. The symphony was communal and serious, whereas the concerto was showy and empty. It was this which, for a time, made the symphony particularly German. According to this view, culture arises from the relation between the individual and the state and Bildung; this process, whereby individuals come to find their creative role in a harmonious state, was seen as paralleled in the symphony. It was for this reason that singing in choruses was understood (by Goethe among others) as an appropriate training for citizenship. 36 Social harmony, like the orchestra, could exist only among a group of individuals who had worked on themselves to achieve a minimum level of personal self-realization. 37
    This was important because concepts of Germany changed decisively during Beethoven’s lifetime. When his Ninth Symphony was premiered in Vienna in 1824, Germany was still an abstraction, but the idea of a pan-German state was no longer implausible and it was during the early nineteenth century that music was first recognized as having a role