music and romanticism 143manner of his review of the Fifth Symphony, that ‘in the midst of this
unlocked realm of spirits the delighted soul listens to the unknown
language and understands all the most secret intimations by which it
is seized’ (Hoffmann 1988 : 121 ). In the essay ‘Old and New Church
Music’ of 1814 , however, Hoffmann presents the conception of music
as the conceptless means of access to a metaphysical realm, not in terms
of wordless instrumental music that is free of the obligation to relate to
what words may say, but instead in terms of the church music tradition
deriving from Palestrina, which relies on the setting of liturgical texts.
How is the metaphysical significance attributed to Beethoven’s music to
be squared with the idea of the ‘religious substance’ (Dahlhaus 1988 :
247 ) realised in the tradition from Palestrina to Bach, which Hoffmann
regards as lost to the modern era?
Dahlhaus uses this question in relation to the assertion, attributed
to Hegel on the occasion of Mendelssohn’s performance of the redis-
covered BachSt Matthew Passionthat he attended in 1829 , that ‘that’s
not proper (‘rechte’) music; we’ve now got further than that, although
nowhere near the real thing’ (ibid.: 245 ). In the light of what Hegel says
about such Protestant oratorios in theAesthetics, this assertion, which is
not confirmed by any direct sources, is surprising. There he claims that
the oratorios’ combination of text and music transcends the subjective
feeling of the individual and has to do with the ‘substantial content
of all feeling or with the universal feeling of the congregation as a
whole’ (Hegel 1965 : 2 , 318 ). In old church music, such as a Crucifixus,
the listener should not ‘look at’ (‘anschauen’) the events, but should
‘live through in his innermost self the most inward part of this death
and of these divine pains’ (ibid.: 304 ), so transcending mere subjective
inwardness and approaching the ‘thing itself (‘die Sache selbst’)’ as part
of a congregation. Dahlhaus suggests that if one relates Hoffmann’s
problem to Hegel’s attributed remark on theMatthew Passionit could
mean that at the end of his life Hegel ‘weighed up the possibility that
the religious substance of music was not exclusively contained in older
church music, whose main Protestant work obviously disappointed him
as a musical experience, but might be able to be restored in terms of the
premises of Beethoven’s instrumental music whose metaphysical inter-
pretation by Hoffmann had earlier been suspect to Hegel’ (Dahlhaus
1988 : 248 ).
Whether Hegel really made his remark about theMatthew Passion
or pondered this possibility is perhaps less important than the paradig-
matic significance of the underlying issue. From the beginning of his