Hoffmann's Musical Modernity and the Pursuit of Sentimental Unity

Abstract

Around 1800 a group of critics worried that new music was in danger of losing its social relevance. In their eyes music had become severed from the religious practices which had formerly provided its purpose and now exhibited a mercurial style that threatened its intelligibility, leading to a host of anxieties about its role in the contemporary world. This article argues that these concerns form the basis of an elegiac discourse of musical modernity, one resonating with broader philosophical concerns of the period. Taking Hoffmann's ‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’ as the central text, my narrative explores how he and others sought to rehabilitate modern music in the wake of a perceived social upheaval. This rehabilitation chiefly occurred at the hands of critics, who approached the complexities of new musical works by attempting to elucidate them through analysis. Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony belongs in this narrative as a characteristic attempt to secure new music's meaning.

Ideology, False Consciousness, and Beyond: The Marxian Critique of Ideation

“…This sense unified prominent writers such as the playwright and poet Friedrich Schiller, the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and the music critic E.T.A. Hoffmann (Schiller 1993;Winckelmann 2006;Comen 2018). These and other thinkers idealized antiquarian culture (often, Ancient Greek art), and they shared a belief that modern humankind stood at a distance from the cultural heights of the past.…”