music and romanticism 141sufficient. The early Nietzsche and Wagner think that music might give
the individual, private existential need a collective articulation of a kind
which the sciences and other aspects of modern culture cannot. Impor-
tantly, Hegel, as we shall now see, neither excludes this individual, pri-
vate level, nor does he preclude the possibility of it being universalised
in a new way in modernity.
Thephilosophicalpoint of Hegel’s view of music is the idea that music’s
true content is part of the transition to the rational determinacy of
thought which is engaged with the external world. However, Dahlhaus
reveals some interesting ambivalences in Hegel’s relationship to music
when he reflects on the absence of discussion in Hegel of Beethoven,
whose work he must have known. Hegel advanced the case of Rossini,
thus reinforcing a cultural trend which troubled Beethoven in later
life.^1 Dahlhaus thinks Hegel is probably reacting to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the hearing of which,
Hoffmann asserts, leads one to leave behind ‘all feelings that can be
determined by concepts in order to devote oneself to the unsayable’
(Hoffmann 1988 : 23 ):
Hegel regarded absolute music which tears itself away from a content of
feeling that is determinable by concepts, and for that reason lays claim as
pure form or structure to metaphysical dignity as language that is beyond
and above the level of words, as leading on the wrong path, on which the
‘universally human interest in art’ had to decline... Hegel probably
completely understood what was happening in the history of music and
manifested itself in Beethoven’s symphonies, but he resisted it.
(Dahlhaus 1988 : 239 )He does so because of his awareness of the gap which Beethoven’s
radical new music begins to open up between the composer and the
wider public, the sort of gap which was to become unbridgeable in some
areas of music in the twentieth century. The significance of that gap for
music’s relationship to philosophy cannot be overestimated.
One way to approach this issue is in terms of the relationship
of metaphysics 1 and metaphysics 2 to our self-descriptions in moder-
nity. Objectifying self-descriptions which develop in the nineteenth
century, particularly in the light of Darwin, and which lead to the
1 Criticism of this trend has less to do with Rossini as an undoubtedly masterly composer
than with the manner of his reception, which might be seen as an instance of the rise of
the culture industry.