Resounding the Sublime: Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670-1850

By Miranda Eva Stanyon

What does the sublime sound like? Harmonious, discordant, noisy, rustling, silent? Miranda Eva Stanyon rereads and resounds this crucial aesthetic category in English and German literatures of the long eighteenth century from a musical perspective and shows how sonorous sublimes lay at the heart of a central and transformative discourse. For Enlightenment and Romantic era listeners, the musical sublime represented a sonic encounter of the most extreme kind, one that tested what humans were capable of feeling, imagining, thinking, and therefore becoming.

The sublime and music have not always sung from the same hymn sheet, Stanyon observes. She charts an antagonistic intimacy between the two, from the sublime's rise to prominence in the later seventeenth century, through the upheavals associated with Kant in the late eighteenth century, and their reverberations in the nineteenth. Offering readings of canonical texts by Longinus, Dryden, Burke, Klopstock, Herder, Coleridge, De Quincey, and others alongside lesser-known figures, she shows how the literary sublime was inextricable from musical culture, from folksongs and ballads to psalmody, polychoral sacred music, and opera. Deeply interdisciplinary, Resounding the Sublime draws literature into dialogue with sound studies, musicology, and intellectual and cultural history to offer new perspectives on the sublime as a phenomenon which crossed media, disciplines, and cultures.

An interdisciplinary study of sound in history, the book recovers varieties of the sublime crucial for understanding both the period it covers and the genealogy of modern and postmodern aesthetic discourses. In resounding the sublime, Stanyon reveals a phenomenon which was always already resonant. The sublime emerges not only as the aesthetic of the violently powerful, a-rational, or unrepresentable, but as a variegated discourse with competing dissonant, harmonious, rustling, noisy, and silent strains, one in which music and sound illustrate deep divisions over issues of power, reason, and representation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812299564

Book preview

Resounding the Sublime

SOUND IN HISTORY

Emma Dillon, Series Editor

RESOUNDING THE SUBLIME

Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670–1850

Miranda Eva Stanyon

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-5308-5

For Matthew

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Note on Translations and References

Introduction

PART I. HE RAIS’D A MORTAL TO THE SKIES; SHE DREW AN ANGEL DOWN: ENGLISH LITERATURE, CIRCA 1670–1760

Chapter 1. Music as a Bastard Imitation of Persuasion? Power and Legitimacy in Dryden and Dennis

Chapter 2. What Passion Cannot Musick Raise and Quell! Passionate and Dispassionate Sublimity with the Hillarians and Handelians

PART II. HISSING SNAKES AND ANGELIC HOSTS: GERMAN LITERATURE, CIRCA 1720–1770

Chapter 3. Reforming Aesthetics: Bodmer and Breitinger’s Anti-Musical Sublime

Chapter 4. Klopstock, Rustling, and the Antiphonal Sublime

PART III. SUBLIME BEAUTY AND THE WRATH OF THE ORGAN: ENGLISH AND GERMAN LITERATURE, CIRCA 1770–1850

Chapter 5. The Beauty of the Infinite: Herder’s Sublimely-Beautiful, Beautifully-Sublime Music

Chapter 6. The Terror of the Infinite: Thomas De Quincey’s Reverberations

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND REFERENCES

Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. The original text is given alongside translations only where particularly relevant. For ease of reference to some poems, references are given to line numbers within each stanza; for example, s.ix.3 is line three of stanza nine. Translations of Peri hypsous, unless noted, are from Arieti and Crossett’s edition.

Introduction

Once again, arose the swell of the anthem—the burst of the Hallelujah chorus—the storm—the trampling movement of the choral passion—the agitation of my own trembling sympathy—the tumult of the choir—the wrath of the organ. Once more I, that wallowed, became he that rose up to the clouds.

—Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de profundis (1845)

The flute … seems to carry them away and fill them with divine frenzy.… Why, the very tones of the harp, themselves meaningless, by the variety of their sounds and by their combination and harmonious blending often exercise, as you know, a marvellous spell. (Yet these are only a bastard counterfeit of persuasion, not … a genuine activity of human nature.)

—Longinus, Peri hypsous (first century C.E.)

In the later seventeenth century, a new translation of Pseudo-Longinus’s first-century treatise Peri hypsous (On the Sublime) by Nicolas Boileau (1636–1711) revitalized interest in the sublime.¹ Discussed in hundreds of essays and treatises, and driving innumerable scenes of astonishment, transport, and elevation across media and genres, the sublime became the central category of aesthetic innovation in the long eighteenth century—the period that witnessed the development of aesthetics itself as an explicitly defined domain. A response of pleasure springing from extremity and excess, the sublime was not just about art but about how we make sense of the world, and how we negotiate the limits of our knowledge and powers.² But what does the sublime sound like? Is it the lush and giddy dissonances of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde? The masses of harmony in Handel’s Messiah? Does the sublime sound like the roaring of a train—perhaps the blurry mass of iron in Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed? The deep rushing voice of the Greek poet Pindar, evoked centuries after his death by Horace? Or is it like the silent stones under the feet of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist? The answer traced in this book is that dissonant, harmonious, discordantly concordant, noisy, and silent sublimes all played their parts in the varied discourse of the sublime. Music has typically been regarded as marginal to the sublime’s history, or a latecomer to a literary and philosophical feast. This book shows how integral music was to forming and transforming the sublime on its home turf, in rhetoric, philosophy, and literature.

Focusing on English and German texts and the intricate relationships between them, I seek to reread—or, perhaps better, re-sound—sublimity through the lens of music, from the sublime’s rise to prominence in the later seventeenth century, through the upheavals associated with Kant in the late eighteenth century and their reverberations in the nineteenth century. Closely reading a series of canonical and little-known literary and critical texts in dialogue with musical cultures, the book offers new perspectives on the sublime as a transdisciplinary, transmedial, and transcultural phenomenon. In doing so, it argues for the importance of sonic models to the sublime; it traces harmonious, discordant, and resolutely silent varieties of sublimity; and it suggests resonances between past sublimes and current aesthetics and ethics.

My account is based on a particular understanding of the chronology of the musical sublime, and its disciplinary and medial situations. Music did not enter the sublime with Haydn, Beethoven, or even Handel. Instead, seventeenth-century writers always already considered music in formulating their reemergent Longinian sublime. We also misunderstand the history of the sublime if we approach it from within narrow disciplinary boundaries: the sublime did not emerge as a rhetorical-philosophical discourse and then jump like a supervirus from one species (literature) to another (music). This means questioning the assumption that the musical sublime came into its own when a bond between music and rhetoric waned toward the end of the eighteenth century, and autonomous instrumental music came to the fore, or music itself broke free of the shackles of language.³ To question this view of music also means challenging still-common ideas of the sublime as essentially inimical to representation and resemblance. Ironically, music, the art modernity supposes most remote from representation, and the sublime, an aesthetic now associated with unrepresentability, repeatedly joined forces in early modern literature to create hyperrepresentations, so vivid that they overwhelmed the boundaries between the senses. This sublime transported its recipients over sensory and medial thresholds.

Yet music and the sublime have not always spoken with one voice: music sits in a generative tension with the sublime in many of its foundational texts. From Longinus to Boileau, Dryden, and Dennis, through Bodmer and Breitinger, to Burke, Herder, and Kant, music has epitomized the sublime, and been a thorn in its side. Longinus uses the flute and lyre to evoke the overpowering effects of the fifth source of the sublime—arrangement or composition—before turning on music’s images and bastard imitations of persuasion and excluding it from the sublime.⁴ But is Longinus not begging the question, since his sublime itself oversteps persuasion? For, the opening of his treatise famously claims, our persuasions are usually under our own control, while these [sublime] things exercise an irresistible power and mastery, and get the better of every listener.⁵ The critic and dramatist John Dennis (1658–1734), an early champion of the Longinian sublime in Britain, similarly forms his sublime by both including and excluding music. The sublime Alps make such a Consort up for the Eye, as that sort of Musick does for the Ear, in which Horrour can be joyn’d with Harmony.⁶ But when he defines poetry, Dennis rejects the common notion that Harmony or the Musick of numbers is essential to poetic excellence: Passion, not musical arrangement of sound, generates sublimity, and makes even inharmonious language poetic.⁷ Although Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) barely classifies music as a fine art, he nonetheless names the oratorio as one of three possible presentations of the sublime in the beaux arts.⁸ And when he describes the psychological operation of the sublime as an Erschütterung (shock, agitation, shattering, related to schüttern, to vibrate or tremble), a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction of one and the same object, he evokes terms from nerve theory themselves developed through images of vibrating strings.⁹

The antagonistic intimacy between music and the sublime rests on conventional if contradictory understandings of music in the classical and European traditions.¹⁰ Music has been something like an essentially contested concept: the most and least sensuous art, trivial tinkling, or the music of the spheres.¹¹ It can raise or purge the passions; model harmonious order or create uncontainable tumult; be the mate or nemesis of language and logos; offer a pure play of form or the unmediated content of feeling. Transient, intangible, and invisible, defined by Augustine as a science of good measuring rather than an object, music often seemed to lack a fixed essence.¹² In early modern Europe, its supposed lack of solid essence could associate music with fleshly transience and diversion (as in vanitas iconography), or with the fleeting inspirations of a higher order. Interest in music as underdetermined continues all the way through nineteenth-century ideals of incorporeal, infinite music into postmodern celebrations of sound as materialist—yet itself immaterial—vibration.¹³

Scholarship has often portrayed music or the sublime as undermining imitative and representational paradigms in the long eighteenth century, accompanying new ways of thinking about what art and human creativity were all about.¹⁴ This book investigates the combined workings of music and the sublime, but it also complicates more traditional accounts of aesthetics. Music in classical thought often functioned as a mediator between higher and lower orders—following the canonical account by the Christian Neoplatonist Boethius, its ratios and correspondences connected the disparate spheres of sound, humans, society, cosmos. This apparently static cosmic framework in fact lent music to a Longinian-Boileauian sublime foregrounding energetic transmissions of power and elevation, a dynamism core to the modern aesthetic of the sublime. We often imagine the sublime as shadowy, infinite, immeasurable, and unrepresentable. Yet musical sublimes did not emerge at the expense of music’s strong connection with ratio, measure, resemblance, and, by extension, representation. These connections persisted even as theories of cosmic order governed by the music of the spheres were put under severe pressure by heliocentrism, by growing belief in an indefinitely or infinitely large and complex cosmos, and by discomfort with analogical thinking.¹⁵ And they persisted even though eighteenth-century discourses on the imagination and beaux arts, where they sought to unify their object under the rubric of imitation or representation, often had little time for music or puzzled over how and what it represented.¹⁶ A tenacious thread linked music and harmony with resemblance and mimesis into the late eighteenth century, and a similarly tenacious thread linked resemblance and mimesis with sublimity—through figures of harmony and music—well into the nineteenth century, where we might expect imitation to be eclipsed by principles of expression, organicism, or autonomy.

The sublime crossed many forms of cultural production and inquiry. Nonetheless, its center for early moderns was Longinus’s rhetorical treatise on supremely effective verbal composition. The rhetorical tradition broadly conceived was the heartland of the sublime. This made music particularly important because it was not easily separable from those qualities that made language sublime in the first place. Classical rhetoric and poetics closely aligned language and music. Summarizing earlier opinions, Quintilian noted that early poetry was sung; that music education was preparation for rhetorical training; that some authorities ranked music above poetry; and that music and literature were once united arts.¹⁷ (Early modern education drew music and language still closer together, moving music from the medieval quadrivium of mathematical arts to the linguistic trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric.) In this tradition, the music of language could, on one hand, indicate formal harmony, or the ordering of sounds and ideas, including the harmonizing of sound with sense that was held to intensify language’s ability to transport meaning and to transport listeners. On the other hand, music could indicate language’s sounding, material qualities, along with their sometimes overwhelming effects on embodied listeners. From this perspective, the problem of music was internal to Longinus’s sublime, and it has helped to crystallize debates about the nature of sublimity ever since: debates over form and formlessness; reason and matter; order and chaos; passion and tranquillity; infinity and limitation; transmission and transgression; power and violence.

To take a key example, we can interpret John Dryden’s ode Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Musique (1697) as celebrating music’s irresistible power or castigating the too easily moved listener, depending on how we value powers—like the sublime or music—that seem to exceed reason, transporting us above normal human limits and leading us to transgress normal standards of morality. Does a true sublime always ultimately involve reflection and reason? If so, in Dryden’s narrative perhaps only Timotheus, the musician who manipulates Alexander the Great’s passions, qualifies as sublime. Or does the sublime gain its very legitimacy by violently surpassing reflection—since the sublime does not properly persuade but bestows a certain noble vigour, an invincible force which carries away the soul of anyone who hears us?¹⁸ These alternatives both assume that music transgresses limits and affects the listener’s body and passions at the expense of reason. What, then, should we make of the way writers such as the critic Johann Gottfried Herder (1704–1803) and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) couple sublime music with limits, order, and reflection?

Evidently, the antagonistic intimacy between music and the sublime has been enduringly important to literature, but in very different ways. By engaging with interlocking networks of writers who illuminate the musical sublime in literary culture, this book draws out the particular and divergent uses to which musical sublimes were put. Odes like Alexander’s Feast—which both represents music and was destined to be heard as music—sit alongside theories of the sublime that stumble across music as metaphor or as practice, and reflections on music that less explicitly activate the sublime—like Herder’s insistence that the psalms gain irresistible power from their musicality, carry[ing] jubilation and sound with them in all their limbs.¹⁹ Writers’ interactions with musicians and music sit alongside theorists’ approaches to problems like musical representation, poets’ deployments of concepts like harmony and dissonance, or of literary topoi about the legendary violence and immediacy of music, and alongside literary engagements with experiments on sonic phenomena like vibration, resonance, and reverberation.

All of these literary and critical texts belong, on my reading, to what is sometimes called musicking: the social and cultural activity that is called music.²⁰ This is because media exist relationally, as "recurring effects of intermedial forces and historically specific configurations of sounding and non-sounding phenomena.²¹ This is as true for literature as it is for music. Music not only shaped critical reflection on literature and the making of literary texts, it indeed helped to establish literature itself—an institution whose modern contours emerged during the eighteenth century. The development of literature is indexed by vogues for criticism (encountered in this book with Dennis, Pope, Bodmer, Breitinger, and Herder, but also with the music criticism of Avison), by the establishment from the 1760s–70s of philology in German universities, and of the first chair in rhetoric and belles lettres in Britain (occupied by Hugh Blair, chief eulogist for the bard Ossian), by new reading practices (pedagogical, affective, and imaginative), by changing divisions between nonimaginative and imaginative literatures (De Quincey will term the latter literature of power), and not least by growing literacy and print markets, accompanied by nostalgia for supposedly lost oral immediacy and crazes for primitive" song, ballads, and improvisation.²²

As a result, music relates to literature in very varied senses in this book, and I avoid treating some texts as belonging to music proper and others to mere commentary on music. Variety and specificity are thus keynotes of the book.²³ But there are patterns within this variety. A first critical intervention is to argue that music brings into focus three broad conceptualizations of sublimity: as predominantly discordant; as harmonious; or as a complex concordia discors (concord of discords).²⁴ A second key argument is that music plays various roles within the characteristic narrative of the sublime. It can act as:

1.  a site where the sublime is represented or dramatized, as in an opera whose characters are overwhelmed by a sublime revolution, flood, or volcano, or a symphony evoking a passage from astonishment, fear, and violence, to final elevation or joy;

2.  the overpowering sublime object itself, the occasion for an experience of the sublime by a listening or performing subject (either because of the music’s formal qualities, processed by the mind, or its effects on the body);

3.  that which is sublimed, the lowly or abject agent that undergoes a strange elevation, for instance, through music’s contact with the loftier power of language;

4.  a boundary of the sublime, separating true from false sublimity;

5.  a model or explanation for the workings of the sublime, where music figures some defining characteristic of sublimity, be that harmony, passion, or penetrating oscillations passing through the nerves as through vibrating strings.

These roles overlap and are not exhaustive. But articulating them draws attention to the fact that studies to date largely treat music as a site of the sublime (1), albeit generally on the understanding that music dramatizing the sublime was intended to induce listeners to experience sublimity (2). Such dramatizations of the sublime within compositions are more peripheral to this book. My focus on other deployments of music reveals a variety of broad historical patterns and transformations. One is that over the course of the eighteenth century music increasingly forms the occasion for the sublime (2), through its overpowering physiological or emotional effects (a power to move body and psyche), its cognitive effect (a capacity to formally model infinitude or otherwise arouse reflective astonishment), or its power to trigger sublime memories and associations. Conversely, music becomes less likely to need subliming (3) or to form a boundary policing the sublime (4), as it had for Longinus. Critics more often position language as aspiring to music’s sublimity than imagine a verbal sublime triumphing over mere music, or a poetic sublime jeapordized by musical qualities within language. Music thus helps to constitute oratorical, poetic, and literary power in different ways over time and between cultures and situations. Yet the boundary-policing function of music found in many accounts, from Longinus, to Dennis, to Bodmer and Breitinger, remains crucial to understanding the sublime. Music is not unimportant in such accounts because it is excluded from sublimity proper, anymore than madness is unimportant to sanity, conceptually or socially. Music here might be said to form a constitutive or relative outside, part of "a set of exclusions that are nevertheless internal to that system."²⁵

The sublime has long been ubiquitous in literary studies. But while musicological interest has grown in recent decades, Resounding the Sublime is one of the first monographs dedicated to the musical sublime, and the first devoted to the musical sublime in literature. Sustained attention to the topic beyond musicology is rare, and case studies often treat Romantic and nineteenth-century literature.²⁶ Musicologists have focused on particular composers, compositions, or trends in musical listening and criticism.²⁷ While in-depth studies are eagerly awaited from Keith Chapin (on eighteenth-century German music) and Sarah Hibberd (on French Revolution-era opera), Kiene Brillenburg Wurth’s theoretically oriented Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability (on which more soon) remains the only major monograph devoted to the topic since the Wagnerian Arthur Seidl’s dissertation, Vom Musikalisch-Erhabenen. Ein Beitrag zur Æsthetik der Tonkunst (Of the Musically Sublime: A Contribution to the Aesthetics of Music [Ph.D., Regensburg, 1887; Leipzig, 1907]).²⁸

What explains this relative scarcity? The reasons are complex but partly explained by debates over ideology and method rooted in disciplinary history. In the 1980s, the West German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus drew attention to the musical sublime in two studies of Beethoven, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and contemporary comparisons between the symphony and the Pindaric ode.²⁹ These, however, were overshadowed by Dahlhaus’s immensely influential 1978 monograph, Die Idee der absoluten Musik (The Idea of Absolute Music), which subsumed musical sublimity to so-called absolute music (roughly, both nothing but music and music evoking the idealist Absolute).³⁰ Absolute music powerfully linked music theory and practice, especially the rise in status of instrumental music, with German idealism and nonrepresentational trends in aesthetics. Musicological enthusiasm for the sublime as an independent subject has waxed especially as enthusiasm for absolute music has waned. Dahlhaus’s term was identified as anachronistic and romanticizing, an unsavory relic of his attempts to divorce music from Marxist-influenced social and material history in Cold War Berlin.³¹ Concerted musicological work on the sublime consequently began several decades after the sublime flourished in critical theory and literary studies. The sublime perhaps offered an appealingly historically grounded and apparently critically progressive alternative to absolute music—although a taint of aesthetic elitism and spiritualizing romanticism persisted, not least given Adorno’s diagnosis that the sublime was a defunct aesthetic expressing the Kantian-bourgeois subject’s grandiose elevation of its autonomous spirit above nature.³²

Related to this historiography is a methodological problem. The belated attention to the sublime in twentieth-century musicology sometimes seems to be projected onto the development of the musical sublime itself. That is, early modern music is represented as receiving the sublime as a hand-me-down from literature and philosophy. This has some plausibility. For Longinus, the sublime happened in verbal composition. The eighteenth-century fascination with the sublime accordingly is assumed to begin in literature and related philosophical and critical writings. Sublimity was then recruited as an already well-formed youth into the services of music. Thus Claudia Johnson influentially claimed that the very notion of the musical sublime emerges for the first time in mid-century criticism on Handel, which adapts truisms about the sublime in literature for the first time to an exclusively musical context.³³ Johnson’s landmark article set the Handel debate and its apparent debt to a purely literary sublime in the broader context of music’s rise in status, its recognition as a genuine art: Eighteenth-century British music critics appropriate the sublime in literature … to dignify music itself as a medium for original genius.³⁴ This account, however, downplays the history of the religious sublime, which often braided together music and exultation, spiritual elevation or enthusiasm. It further suggests a sharp division between music and other pursuits, and consequently between musical and nonmusical disciplines, overlooking the role of music in texts not exclusively musical. Reconsidering criticism on the sublime, and literature taken to exemplify the sublime, uncovers a more integral role for music. Eighteenth-century writers, moreover, frequently noted that music’s borders were fluid: Greek music, as the critic Aaron Hill reminded his readers, also included words, dance, and acting.³⁵ The close connection between mousikê and education helped key music into broader desires for national cultivation and reform in a polite (Whig) sublime, desires also coupled with the sublime in German-speaking lands with their reform discourses.

Disciplinary boundaries have fragmented approaches in other ways, too. Passing over Johnson’s arguments about eighteenth-century Britain, published in a largely literary-historical journal, the musicologist James Webster could argue vis-à-vis Germany that the musical sublime … developed in the period bounded roughly by the mid-1790s and the death of Beethoven.³⁶ These parameters suggest a reading of the sublime with Kant as its telos. For Webster, eighteenth-century aestheticians, stymied by mimetic theory, "were no more capable than philosophers of imagining a genuine musical sublime; they remained wedded to the rhetorical concept of the sublime."³⁷ Like Johnson, Webster suggests a well-developed literary-philosophical theory belatedly entering music, this time through the Kantian C. F. Michaelis.³⁸ Changes in ideas about imitation and expression around 1800 certainly affected both music and the sublime, making the two close allies in post-Kantian thought. But if we took Webster at his word, ultimately no one could have imagined any kind of genuine sublime before Kant: the sublime in the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries was an illusion; the true sublime was invented by the sage of Königsberg.

Similar issues are vividly illustrated by Wye Allanbrook’s Is the Sublime a Musical Topos? (2010).³⁹ Too closely identifying the sublime with the Kantian sublime, Allanbrook concluded that even explicit references to the sublime in music writing before Kant were references to nothing much at all (sublimity merely meant loftiness, ceremony, seriousness). The musical sublime, if it existed, was a nineteenth-century phenomenon: Truth be told, she confides, all these efforts to back the sublime into the late eighteenth century make me a little queasy. There isn’t all that much evidence for the musical sublime in this period.⁴⁰ However, as Allanbrook almost concedes when she paraphrases Kant, the musical sublime exists … in the mind of the beholder, and eighteenth-century beholders and behearers clearly found music sublime.⁴¹

Composers like Purcell, Handel, Gluck, Haydn, and C. P. E. Bach, ancient and modern bards, Davidic prophets, and Pindaric lyricists, even acoustic phenomena that tested the boundaries between music, sound, and noise—bagpipes, bells in the night, rushing wind—all could be sublime. The sublime here is not cordoned off from greatness of soul or high solemnity—indeed, Kant continues to blend these kinds of loftiness with his transcendental subjectivized sublime—but this impurity is no reason to doubt its existence.⁴² James Beattie indicates the range of the eighteenth-century sublime when he writes in 1783: Music is sublime, when it inspires devotion, courage, or other elevated affections: or when by its mellow and sonorous harmonies it overwhelms the mind with sweet astonishment: or when it infuses that pleasing horror aforementioned which, when joined to words descriptive of terrible ideas, it sometimes does very effectually.⁴³ Characteristic here is Beattie’s composite interest in the affective and ethical effects of art; in passive, suspended rapture (astonishment) as well as object- and action-directed responses (like courage); in sweetness and horror; and in music as both an independent play of sounds and an element in a composite verbal art. Beattie’s suggestion that it is words which lend music the specificity of ideas and enable feelings of horror does not inauthenticate this account of music as sublime but rather reminds us that the sublime is always situated in complex, changing skeins of meaning.

Recognizing this kind of conceptual messiness, Brillenburg Wurth took quite a different tack to that of many musicologists. Her study offered a critical theory of the musically sublime as a modality of this aesthetic, distinct from perceptions of music as sublime. It sought through dialogue with, especially, Lyotard’s postmodern sublime and through readings of her own listening experiences to critical[ly] rewrite the categories of the Kantian sublime as specifically musical experiences.⁴⁴ The historical narrative provided by Brillenburg Wurth begins in the late eighteenth century, when instrumental music, construed as an empty sign, became a symbol and bearer of sublime in-definity (indeterminacy and infinity).⁴⁵ For her, instrumental music’s inability to resolve into referential meaning, representation, and closure grounds a nascent or fragmentary counter-sublime that opposes the stable narrative of the legitimate sublime and that thrives in postmodernity. While the legitimate sublime follows a passage from confusion to mastery, fear to pleasure, heterogeneity to homogeneity, the counter-sublime is aporetic, mingling pleasure and pain, mastery and subjection in an experience that refuses closure and transcendence.⁴⁶ Something specifically musically sublime emerges in full only with Wagner.⁴⁷

While benefiting greatly from Brillenburg Wurth’s approach, the present book offers a significantly different genealogy, conceptualization, and method. Music’s alignment with an aporetic sublime is persuasive, especially for the nineteenth century, but ultimately too partial, resting on post-Romantic assumptions about music.⁴⁸ Music frequently embodied resolution, order, and harmony, not irresolvability. Moreover, a legitimate sublime is not so easily separated from the counter-sublime: simultaneous experiences of pleasure and pain, and elements of irresolution, unmasterable excess, and aporia, mark canonical treatments of sublimity.⁴⁹ Finally, the issue of transcendence deserves revisiting. Transcendence has been a fraught concept since the Enlightenment, falling under suspicion along with enthusiasm and mysticism as an appeal to unmediated knowledge and experience that transgresses the individual subject’s proper authority and limits. A strong part of the sublime’s appeal is that it can help carve out alternatives to such forms of transgression and supposed escapism, not in spite of but through its thematizing of the liminal and transgressive.⁵⁰ Yet instrumental music does not necessarily defy transcendence while texted music promotes it. Lacking concrete and humanly conceived referents, instrumental music could be particularly open to the charge of offering listeners delusions of transcendence.

As the foregoing suggests, critics have often responded to the untidy history and elusive content of the musical sublime with somewhat misleading intellectual clarity. This response belongs to an age-old game in theorizing sublimity, one difficult to avoid: distinguishing true from false sublimes, policing the boundaries of a phenomenon itself characterized by testing limits. The difficulty began with Longinus. His fragmentary treatise opens without defining sublimity, and its very title may be an accident of scribal history rather than the author’s designation of his topic.⁵¹ Longinus himself set the true sublime against bombast and Corybantic intoxication (both figured by music). Boileau scorned those who searched for the sublime in the sublime—who looked for the real sublime in the rhetorical genre of the high style (stile sublime).⁵² Of course, thinking involves abstraction, but this need not mean reducing the sublime to a singular concept or searching for a pure, unambiguous essence—the sort of virgin form of radiant white, disclose[d] by Celestial clouds, that John Townshend uncovered in his Ode to Music (1791).⁵³

In this book, then, the sublime is approached as a variegated discourse, enmeshed with understandings of sublimity that precede Boileau’s translation, mingling with and defined against objects ranging from ecstasy, enthusiasm, and transcendence to epic greatness, encomium, and satire. Equally, the musical sublime is not aligned with dissonance or harmony, irresolvability or resolution, order or passion, rhetoric or idealist autonomy. It is better imagined as