Recalling the sublime: The logic of creation in Haydn's creation

Eighteenth-Century Music

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 41-57

  Kramer, Lawrence ^a  

^a FORDHAM UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77951086445     PISSN: 14785706     EISSN: 14785714     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1478570609001729     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Erhaben', in Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, Textlog.de: Historische Texte & Wörterbücher 〈http://www.textlog.de/sulzer-kuenste.html〉 (23 July 2008). All translations are mine unless otherwise noted
2. 'So müssen wir für jedes Erhabene ein Maß haben, nach welchem wir seine Größe, wiewohl vergeblich, zu messen bemüht sind' (Sulzer, 'Erhaben', in Allgemeine Theorie)
3. 'Also heißt die Natur hier erhaben, bloß weil sie die Einbildungskraft zur Darstellung derjenigen Fälle erhebt, in welchen das Gemüt die eigene Erhabenheit seiner Bestimmung, selbst über die Natur, sich fühlbar machen kann' (Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer, seventh edition (Leipzig: Meiner, 1990), 110 (§28))
4. 'So gibt auch die Unwiderstehlichkeit ihrer Macht uns, als Naturwesen betrachtet, zwar unsere physische Ohnmacht zu erkennen, aber entdeckt . . . eine Überlegenheit über die Natur, worauf sich eine Selbsterhaltung von ganz anderer Art gründet, als diejenige ist, die von der Natur außer uns angefochten . . . werden kann' (Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 107 (§28))
5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 145
6. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 156
7. Immanuel Kant, 'On Philosophical Exaltation', trans. Peter Fenves, in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 105
8. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 30 and 36
9. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 43
10. See 'Music and Representation: In the Beginning with Haydn's Creation', in Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 67-97
11. see also my 'Haydn's Chaos, Schenker's Order; or, Musical Meaning and Musical Analysis: Can They Mix?', in Lawrence Kramer, Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 237-262
12. Quoted by William Kerrigan, 'Atoms Again: The Deaths of Individualism', in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 97. Kerrigan outlines the persistence of atomism and examines its paradoxical incompatibility with the notion of the individual. He also notes a literary tendency, around the turn of the nineteenth century, to isolate sublime passages at the expense of the works that contain them. A similar tendency persists in the reception of The Creation. Lucretius describes the collision of elements as 'an unholy and gigantic civil war'; Ovid reiterates the metaphor (which would become standard) at the beginning of his Metamorphoses in a description of primordial chaos: 'seeds of matter at strife' (discordia semina rerum)
13. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe (De Rerum Natura): A New Verse Translation, trans. James H. Mantinband (New York: Ungar, 1965), 146 (book 1, line 381)
14. For more on the demand for a creator in this context see my 'Haydn's Chaos, Schenker's Order', 248-252
15. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin's, 1965), 519 (division 2, book 2, chapter 3, §6)
16. See Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis: Concertos and Choral Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 361-362
17. 'On Language as Such and on the Language of Man', in Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), 314-332
18. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1962), book 8, lines 352-354
19. the quotation from On Christian Doctrine is taken from Hughes's footnote to book 8, lines 320-338
20. Benjamin, Reflections, 314
21. Quoted and discussed in my Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 67-68. The review was written anonymously by Johann Triest
22. See in particular 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire', trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 313-355
23. In 'The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation', Critical Inquiry 9/1 (1982), 113-138, Hayden White suggests that nineteenth-century historiography witnessed an epochal conflict between the acknowledgment and 'suppression' of the 'historical sublime' - the conception of history, in Schiller's words, as 'the pathetic spectacle of mankind wrestling with fate' (126) - leading eventually to a disciplinary 'domestication of history' itself (130)
24. On the Beethoven cult see Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
25. on the construction of Haydn's reputation see my 'The Kitten and the Tiger: Tovey's Haydn', in The Cambridge Companion to Haydn, ed. Caryl Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 239-248
26. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005), 173-190 and 201-211
27. The best-known treatment of this topic isMichel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, trans. unattributed (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 125-166
28. Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 254-266