rhythm and romanticism 99thinking. Music’s relationship to feeling, its temporal nature, and its
capacity to be meaningful without us being able determinately to state
what it means, are therefore closely connected to a philosophy of ‘eter-
nal seeking’. Such a search need not, though, be dominated by a sense of
futility. The ambivalent experience that one can both understand music
in affective and other terms, and not be able to say in words exactly what
it is that one understands, can be as much a source of pleasure as frus-
tration, because there is always more to say and do in relation to music.
This situation is congruent with Schlegel’s wise remark that ‘In truth
you would be distressed if the whole world, as you demand, were for
once seriously to become completely comprehensible’ (Schlegel 1988 :
2 , 240 ). Would having a philosophical answer to what music (or the
world) means necessarily make life more interesting than seeking ever
new ways to understand what music may convey in differing contexts?
The following passage on longing seems equally apt with regard both
to philosophical thinking and to the experience of certain kinds of
music: ‘Even in humankind longing is in its original form... a spiritual
expansion and extension to all sides in all directions, an indeterminate,
infinite drive which is not directed at a determinate object, but has an
infinite goal, and indeterminable spiritual development and forma-
tion, and infinite plenitude of spiritual completeness and completion’
(Schlegel 1964 a: 430 ). One of the most notable aspects of Romantic
thought about music was implicit in Dahlhaus’ remark that ‘Reflection
and compositional practice were widely divergent’ (Dahlhaus 1988 : 86 )
at the end of the eighteenth century. The passage just cited seems more
akin to Romantic music, from Schubert and Schumann, via Wagner, to
Mahler, than to the music that is contemporaneous with Schlegel’s text.
Analogously, when Schlegel claims ‘One has tried the way of harmony
and of melody; now rhythm is left to form music completely anew; the
way of a rhythm where melody and harmony onlyformedand ampli-
fied the rhythm’ (Schlegel 1988 : 5 , 86 ), he anticipates what Beethoven
was just beginning to do in music at the same time, which culminates
in the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, and, later, in passages such as
the manic rhythmic repetition in the scherzo of the String Quartet
Opus 135.^13
At the same time, the emergence of a philosophy in which transience
is constitutive, and the absolute cannot be positively attained is itself
made more likely by the Romantics’ experience of music’s temporality,13 Maynard Solomon ( 2003 ) claims that Beethoven employs Greek poetic metres for the
rhythms of the Seventh Symphony.