WACKENRODER, BERGLINGER-NOVELLA

In the late 1790s, two boyhood friends and aspiring writers in BerlinLudwig
Tieck and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroderworked to develop a new literary
style devoted to romantic enthusiasm. Tieck and Wackenroder worked
together on two major projects: Tiecks plan for a multi-volume novel (Franz
Sternbalds Wanderungen) and Wackenroders Herzensergieungen eines
kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an art-loving Friar). Each
friend contributed substantially to other.
In the winter of 1798, Wackenroder, who had always been sickly, died
suddenly of a high fever at the age of 25. Uncannily, Wackenroders major
figurethe musical composer Joseph Berglingerwas portrayed as a sickly
youth, who succumbed to a high fever in his early twenties.
True to his friends memory, Tieck published both the first volume of the
Franz Sternbald novel and the Herzensergieungen later that year. He moved
from Berlin to Jena, and there met Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm
Schlegel (Friedrichs older brother) and Friedrich von Hardenberg. The four
young men established a literary circle, which would eventually come to be
known as the Romantic Movement.
The movement became public later that year (1798) with the appearance of
the journal Athenum, edited by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel.
Wackenroders fictional biographyThe strange musical life of the composer
Joseph Bergllingercompleted the year before his death, establishes most of
the principal terms for the German Romantic conception of music.
The discourse owes much to late-18 th century notions of the sublime: that
which exceeds human cognition, that which is unrepresentable, occasioning a
loss of subjective control, and profound feelings of ecstatic transport. The
musical sublime implies that music conveys a kind of experience that is
irreducible to verbal language.
The immediacy of musical experience powerfully resists conceptual
comprehension and subjective reflection. On the one hand, this experience is
exhilarating. On the other hand, it can be perceived as perilous.
The Berglinger novella is the final piece in Wackenroders collection,
fictionally written by an art-loving friar; but exhibiting many traits from
Wackenroders own life.
Whereas the previous pieces reflected on art and artists from the past, the
narrating friar here turns to personal experience. The composer, he explains,
was his closest friend (146).
Despite this turn to the present day, and despite this close personal
relationship, the story of Berglingers life describes an impulse that strains to
escape the here and now. Tellingly, Joseph Berglingers life begins in death:

His mother departed from the world while placing him into it (147). This
motif probably alludes to Rousseaus Confessions: I cost my mother her life,
and my birth was the first of my misfortunes.
Joseph never knew his mother, which may explain why he is in search for
some maternal union in the heavens. Later in the novella, we see how he is
drawn to saintly feminine figures: Saint Cecilia and the Virgin Marya desire
to melt into the non-existent zone where he can reunite with his mother,
before birth and after death.
The friar quickly relates the young life of his friend. He was a misfitsomeone
who failed to conform to his fathers expectations, someone who seemed
incapable of performing any social duties. Rather than study medicine, as his
father recommended, he felt compelled to something higher: namely,
religiously sublime music.
The study of medicine would have required dealing with the messy and
repulsive materiality of the human body. Medicine comes face to face with
human finitude: with human disease, decay, and death. Young Berglinger not
only strives for something more ethereal, more incorporeal, he also wants to
flee the human condition.
No one could fit into this family less than Joseph, who was always existing in
a realm of beautiful fantasy and divine dreams (147).
Josephs father abhorred all the arts as servants of unrestrained desires and
passions (150). Wackenroders father was also highly suspicious of artists
and musicians. He urged his son to study law, to prepare for a career in
government, but instead he studied musical composition.
While struggling to work through his medical textbook, Joseph dreams of the
oratorio he recently hearda piece of sublime music that had made a very
strong impression on him. The melody that haunts him in particular is the
Stabat mater dolorosathe image of Mary, weeping at the foot of the
Cross.
In the cathedral, the music transports Joseph from the quotidian chatter of
the common people (148).
The description is emphatically Catholic. It is noteworthy that the story
unfolds in Southern Germany, which is opposed to the Lutheran and nearly
secularized Berlin where Wackenroder lived.
For the first generation of Romantic poets, Catholicism offered an attractive
alternative to the over-rationalized service of the Lutheran Church. In their
view, colored by Rousseaus descriptions, the south invited mindless
participation, while the north encouraged analytical and critical reflection.
The cathedral episode plunges Joseph into a mystical state, where his
personal identitythe identity forged and encouraged by his fatherbegins

to dissolve. With the music, Josephs mind and mission gradually melt away.
The hymn to Saint Cecilia speaks of derangement (Verrcktheit). (152)
However, Berglinger does not surrender to insanity. The first half of the
novella is interrupted by a caesura: when the second half opens, we learn
that Berglinger had trained professionally in music and consequently gained
the post of town conductor.
He learned to bring music beneath his subjective control: to transform
sublime musical experience (an experience felt like a continuity) into
mathematical relationships (a process of discontinuity).
In a letter to the narrator, Berglinger describes his present situation as a time
of disenchantment. The mathematical rules that he was required to master
the entire grammar of arthave formed a cage that prevents his soul
from flight.
Berglinger has given music a place: it is now a servile means of
entertainment for the populace, obeying the whims of the court. As a result,
he can no longer stir up emotions, neither for his audience nor for himself. In
becoming socially useful, music has become spiritually useless.
It is only when Joseph learns of his fathers impending death that he is able to
rekindle an earlier passion. During his last visit with his father, the two men
communicate without many words (158)an almost inward exchange,
uncontaminated by everyday language.
This proximity to death reawakens a feeling of life. He pours his heart out into
a Passion Massand its performance has a profound effect.
The sublime mass, however, is too powerful. It leaves Berglinger fatally weak,
and before he long, he succumbs to a fever. As the friar concludes: His lofty
fantasy destroyed him (159).
The sublimity of music cured Josephs impotence, but only by robbing him of
life. The ecstasy of creativity reveals that everyday life is hardly a life at all.
In this Romantic conception of music, art negates life. (Joseph is able to
make a living only when he turns music into a non-art, i.e., into a
grammar.)
The heart wants to pour out its emotions, but in pouring itself out, it ceases
to beat.

THE MARVELS

OF MUSICAL ART
Music rejuvenates like a cold spring. It obliterates pain like the cool waters of
Lethe, giving new life: a liberation from thoughts and ideas. Music as askesis:
a turning away from the world. A healing by means of incomprehensibility.

The experience of music transports the listener to a land of peace. A

liberation from rational analysis, where everything is dissected, rendered
discontinuous: toward an experience of synthesis: an expansion of the spirit,
borne by the currents of desire (38), toward universal love and divine
blessedness.
Music is a supermundane experience: transcending the human realm,
revealing an incorporeal form (39).

HEGEL, INTRODUCTORY LECTURES

ON AESTHETICS
For Hegel, aesthetic theory is bound up with the emergence of free
subjectivityan unfolding that requires overcoming the limitations of space.
1. The first art is monumental, exemplified by architecture: an artistic
ordering of external nature, built of inert material, subject to mechanical
laws.
Law (nomos) and mechanism: The temple shields the human community from
natural threats. It domesticates the external world, brings it into lawful order.
This art is symbolical insofar as its material, soulless existence can only refer
to soul as something apart from itself. Soul is housed in architecture, but
cannot inform it or infuse it.
2. When Spirit does come to inhabit inert material, the result is
anthropomorphic sculpture. External, soulless matter receives soul. The
external gains an internal dimension.
This art is classical insofar as the soulless and soulful parts of the artwork, the
material and the spiritual element, exist in balanced proportion. The perfect
complementarity of external shape and inward life is reflected in classical
repose.
Sculpture represents a humanization of art and also the first step toward despatialization. Sculpture stands in an abstract space, as opposed to the
concrete layout of architecture. Human subjectivity becomes the sole object
of artistic representation. The heavy material must adapt to its demands.
3. Ultimately, the demands of subjective spirit require an abandonment of
sculpture. The Romantic arts (painting, music, and poetry) represent a
gradual liberation of the spirit from materiality.
The first stage is painting: color permits visibility to appear in an ideal form.
The two-dimensional plane represents liberation from three-dimenstional
space.

The physical appearance (Erscheinung) of sculpture is replaced with the

shining glimmer (Schein) of the paint. This allows for increased inwardness.
Statues are indifferent to the particularities of the spectator, but a painting is
created, from the outset, with the spectators particular perspective in mind.
Moreover, in identifying the pictorial with color and light, rather than with the
reproduction of objects, painting opens onto the possibility of nonreferentiality. Erwin Panofsky names this a purely formal expression a
focusing on color, lines, and volume, without regard for what they signify.
The second Romantic stage is music: music constitutes an art that is even
more subjective, more ideal: sound cancels space altogether. Music is a point
one-dimensionala spaceless space or even the negation of space. This
positive negation is the introduction of temporality into art.
Music occupies the central moment of Romantic art: situated between
abstract sensuousness (painting) and abstract spirituality (poetry).
As a language of passion, music resists cognition and conceptualization, but
as a physical phenomenon of tones, it conforms to the laws of understanding.
Music can therefore communicate particular feelings, while also being
understood conceptually.
The affective and the conceptual aspects of music exist simultaneously and
yet each seems to remain irreducible to the other.
This dual quality of music may introduce irony (the trope of duplicity), e.g., in
the Lieder tradition, where the musical setting contradicts the semantic
content of the lyric (Schubert).
Music would appear to demonstrate the transience of all determinations:
once the intended feeling is ascertained, it is invalidated by the conceptual
meaning, which in turn is contradicted by another feeling, and so on.
Both mathematical and affective, music may provide a model for the
reconciliation of the universal and the particular, of necessity and freedom.
Music thereby becomes a political issue.
In the lectures devoted to music, Hegel explains how notes derive their
meaning by way of differential relations. The single note has its sense only
in the connection with another note and with the sequence of other notes. A
c-note is a tonic in C major, but a dominant in F major, and a subdominant in
G major, a flat-seventh in D major, and so on.
Harmony, then, becomes a model for the concept: a single empirical
phenomenon (like the sounding of a single note) acquires its meaning by
being related to precedent and subsequent phenomena.
Furthermore, this differential view of music anticipates Saussures differential
view of language (no positive terms: cat means not a dog, not a cow, not a

horse, etc.). Like Saussurean language, music is not semantic (meaning by

way of reference), but semiotic (meaning by way of difference).
The final stage of Romantic art is poetry. Poetry corrects the non-conceptual
aspect of music. Here, sound becomes word. Poetry does not merely
represent feelings and emotions, it also represents ideas.
The individual subject adopts the de-spatializing, temporal energy of music
and creates words, which may articulate his or her particularity and freedom
(no longer bound to natural laws).
Although Hegel must, in the end, subordinate music to the conceptual power
of poetry, his views on music intersect with an important philosophical trend
in play since Kant, namely that musical meaning could contest the exclusive
validity of propositional truth.
The semiotic (non-semantic, non-referential) aspect of music suggests that
there is more to existential meaning than the kind furnished by cognitive
processes.
Friedrich Schlegel: If feeling is the root of all consciousness, then
the direction of language has the essential deficit that it does not grasp
and comprehend feeling deeply enough, only touches its surface
However large the riches language offers us for our purpose, however
much it can be developed and perfected as a means of representation
and communication, this essential imperfection must be overcome in
another manner, and communication and representation must be
added to; and this happens through music which is, though, here to be
regarded less as a representational art than as philosophical language,
and really lies higher than mere art.
Feeling is the subjects realization of its own finitudethe source of all desire.
It is specifically a realization of the lack that comes with time (no longer, not
yet).
In this case, the non-representational aspect of music is not viewed as deficit,
but rather as a way of revealing something crucial about the world. Music
clearly has meaning (it is not, for example, noise), but its mode of meaning is
not representational or merely designative. To use Heideggers term: it is
world-disclosive.
The cognitive subject invariably subjugates the world it encounters. It
imposes conceptual form upon the manifold of experience and thereby
transforms difference into sameness. As a world-disclosive experience, music
offers the possibility of encountering difference without subsuming it, without
overwhelming its alterity.