The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  16. For his comments on the Apollo Belvedere, see Hans Zeller, Winckelmanns Beschreibung des Apollo im Belvedere (Zurich: Atlantis, 1955).

  17. Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism, p. 8.

  18. Ibid., pp. 19–20.

  19. Ibid., p. 6.

  20. Ibid., p. 10.

  21. Ibid., p. 6.

  22. Ibid., p. 20.

  23. Butler, Tyranny of Greece, p. 5.

  24. Horst Rüdiger, ed., Winckelmanns Tod: Die Originalberichte (Wiesbaden: Insel-Verlag, 1959).

  25. Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism, p. 1.

  26. Ibid., pp. 334–335.

  27. It is as if Goethe’s successors had taken very seriously his admonition that everyone should be a Greek in his own way: “Jeder sei auf seine Art ein Grieche, aber er sei’s.” Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism, p. 5.

  28. H. B. Garland, Lessing: The Founder of Modern German Literature (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 4.

  29. Gustav Sichelschmidt, Lessing: Der Mann und sein Werk (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1989); also Peter Pütz, Die Leistung der Form: Lessings Dramen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).

  30. Victor Lange, The Classical Age of German Literature, 1740–1815 (London: Edward Arnold, 1982).

  31. Gerhard Kaiser, Klopstock: Religion und Dichtung (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1963), pp. 133–160 (for the theory of genius) and 204ff.

  32. For Klopstock’s literary ambitions for Germany, see Robert M. Browning, German Poetry in the Age of Enlightenment: From Brockes to Klopstock (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), pp. 230–231. See also Adolphe Bossert, Goethe, ses précurseurs et ses contemporains: Klopstock, Lessing, Herder, Wieland, Lavater; la jeunesse de Goethe (Paris: Hachette, 1891).

  33. Garland, Lessing, p. 12.

  34. Sichelschmidt, Lessing, Chapters 5–8.

  35. Garland, Lessing, p. 83.

  36. Ibid., p. 69.

  37. Ibid., p. 32.

  38. Ibid., p. 159.

  39. Ibid., p. 142.

  40. Ibid., pp. 180–181.

  41. Pütz, Leistung der Form, pp. 242f.

  42. Garland, Lessing, p. 180.

  43. Ibid., p. 57.

  44. Ibid., p. 198.

  45. Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 26.

  46. The relatively small—but high-powered—world of the German intellectual community can be seen from the range of Wolf’s letters: Wiegfried Reiter, ed., Friedrich August Wolf: Ein Leben in Briefen. 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1935).

  47. Marchand, Down from Olympus, p. 19.

  48. Ibid., p. 20.

  49. Ibid., p. 21.

  50. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, p. 25.

  51. Ibid., p. 27.

  52. Ibid., p. 28.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Marchand, Down from Olympus, p. 31.

  55. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, p. 22.

  CHAPTER 4: THE SUPREME PRODUCTS OF THE AGE OF PAPER

  1. Peter Hall, Cities in Civilisation: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), p. 69.

  2. Ibid., p. 72.

  3. Bruford, Culture and Society, p. 59.

  4. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, pp. 236–237.

  5. Bruford, Culture and Society, p. 57.

  6. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, p. 244.

  7. Bruford, Culture and Society, p. 18.

  8. Regine Schindler-Hürlimann, Wielands Menschenbild: Eine Interpretation des Agathon (Zurich: Atlantis, 1963).

  9. Bruford, Culture and Society, p. 42.

  10. Jan Cölin, Philologie und Roman: Zu Wielands erzählerischer Rekonstruktion griechischer Antike im “Aristipp” (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998).

  11. Bruford, Culture and Society, p. 45.

  12. Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 2, Revolution and Renunciation (1790–1803) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

  13. Bruford, Culture and Society, pp. 62–63.

  14. Ibid., p. 11.

  15. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, p. 170.

  16. See Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, pp. 176f. for a comparison of Werther and Schiller’s The Robbers (1781) which, he says, was likewise the object of a Sturm und Drang cult. For Napoleon’s criticisms, see Gustav Seibt, Goethe und Napoleon: Eine historische Begegnung (Munich: Beck, 2008).

  17. Bruford, Culture and Society, pp. 13 and 18.

  18. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, p. 267.

  19. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Goethe als Intendent: Theaterleidenschaften im klassichen Weimar (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2006).

  20. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, p. 104. Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 38.

  21. Bruford, Culture and Society, p. 97.

  22. Ibid., p. 10.

  23. Boyle, Goethe, vol.1, pp. 592 and 145.

  24. Ibid., p. 156.

  25. Ibid., p. 164.

  26. Ibid., p. 259.

  27. Ibid., p. 420.

  28. Ibid., p. 443.

  29. Ibid., pp. 170–171.

  30. Ibid., p. 180.

  31. Ibid., p. 515.

  32. For Goethe’s works in English, see Derek Glass, Goethe in English: A Bibliography of the Translations in the Twentieth Century, ed. Matthew Bell and Martin H. Jones (Leeds: Maney Publishing, for the English Goethe Society and the Modern Humanities Research Association, 2005). See also Nicholas Boyle and John Guthrie, eds., Goethe and the English-speaking World: Essays from the Cambridge Symposium for His 250th Anniversary (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2002).

  33. Henry Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism and German Literature: From Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. x.

  34. Bruford, Culture and Society, p. 30.

  35. Ibid., p. 50.

  36. Boyle, Goethe, vol.1, 605.

  37. Bruford, Culture and Society, p. 47.

  38. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Introduction by David Luke, p. ix.

  39. David Hawke, The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007); John Gearey, Goethe’s Faust: The Making of Part 1 (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1981).

  40. Goethe, Faust, p. xiv.

  41. Ibid., p. xxxv.

  42. Ibid., p. vii.

  43. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, p. 346.

  44. Max Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik: Klopstock, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, Hölderlin. 3rd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1982); F. M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. xix.

  45. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought, p. 16.

  46. Ibid., p. 55.

  47. For Herder’s view of the difference between apes and men, see H. B. Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1970), pp. 250f.

  48. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought, p. 57.

  49. Ibid., p. 59.

  50. Ibid., p. 63.

  51. Ibid., p. 75.

  52. Ibid., p. 93.

  53. For Herder’s views on evolution, see Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy, pp. 210ff.

  54. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought, p. 120.

  55. Ibid., p. 124.

  56. Ibid., p. 147.

  57. Johannes von Müller, Briefwechsel mit Johann Gottfried Herder und Caroline v. Herder, 1782– 1808, ed. K. E. Hoffmann (Schaffhausen: Meier, 1962), 65, III, p. 109.

  58. Steven D. Martinson, ed., A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000), p. 3.

  59. Bernt von Heiseler, Schiller, trans. and annotated by John Bednall (London: Eyre & Spottis-wood, 1962), pp. 52ff. for the first performances. See also Peter-André Alt, Schiller: Leben— Werk—Zeit, 2 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000), pp. 276ff.

  60. Heiseler, p. 126.
>
  61. Ibid., p. 3.

  62. Ibid., p. 141.

  63. Ibid., p. 9.

  64. Rüdiger Safranski, Friedrich Schiller, oder, Die Erfindung des deutschen Idealismus (Munich: Hanser, 2004).

  65. Martinson, Companion, p. 11.

  66. Frederick Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-examination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 37.

  67. Martinson, Companion, p. 43.

  68. Ibid., p. 54.

  69. Ibid., p. 77.

  70. Ibid., p. 84.

  71. Ibid., p. 207.

  72. Ibid., p. 220.

  CHAPTER 5: NEW LIGHT ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE MIND

  1. Willibald Klinke, Kant for Everyman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 43.

  2. On Kant’s early opposition to Idealism, see Nova dilucidato, vol. 1, pp. 411–412. This may be found in Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, which was edited by the Royal Prussian (later German) Academy of Sciences, Berlin, and published by George Reiner, subsequently Walter de Gruyter.

  3. For Mendelssohn’s “philosophical preoccupations” see Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (London and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 1998), pp. 313ff. Mendelssohn is more fully situated in the history of philosophy in Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 92ff.

  4. Klinke, Kant, p. 254.

  5. Ibid., p. 202.

  6. Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 327.

  7. Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn. See also the same author’s Moses Mendelssohns Fruhschriften zur Metaphysik (Tübingen,: Mohr/Siebeck, 1969); and David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (London: Peter Halban, 1996), p. xl.

  8. Karl Ameriks, ed., The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 1.

  9. Ibid., p. 2.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Geschichte der Universität Jena, 1548/58–1958 (Jena: G. Fischer, 1958).

  12. Ameriks, Cambridge Companion, p. 4.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 640.

  15. Klinke, Kant, p. 78.

  16. Ibid., p. 81.

  17. Ibid., p. 83. See also Andrew Ward, Kant: The Three Critiques (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2006).

  18. Karl Ameriks, Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

  19. Klinke, Kant, p. 87.

  20. For the difficult idea of “ideality,” see Ameriks, Kant’s Theory, pp. 280ff, and Dieter Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, ed. David S. Pacini (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

  21. Klinke, Kant, p. 82.

  22. Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  23. Klinke, Kant, p. 91.

  24. Ibid., p. 97.

  25. Ibid., p. 114.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Falk Wunderlich, Kant und Bewusstseinstheorien des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005).

  28. Klinke, Kant, p. 128.

  29. Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 271–273.

  30. Cassirer, Kant’s Life, p. 288.

  31. Ibid., p. 303.

  32. Ibid., p. 320.

  33. Ibid., p. 323.

  34. Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).

  35. Cassirer, Kant’s Life, p. 333.

  36. Pinkard, German Philosophy, p. 88.

  37. Ibid., p. 89.

  38. Henrich, op. cit., pp. 96ff.

  39. Pinkard, German Philosophy, p. 95.

  40. Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, p. 113ff and 127ff.

  41. Pinkard, German Philosophy, p. 103.

  42. Ibid., p. 105.

  43. Russell, History, pp. 650–651. See also Robert Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).

  44. For the chronological emergence of Fichte’s ideas, see Walter E. Wright’s introduction to The Science of Knowing: J. G. Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, trans. Walter E. Wright (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2005).

  45. Pinkard, German Philosophy, p. 106.

  46. Dieter Henrich, “Die Anfänge der Theorie Subjekts,” in Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozess der Aufklärung, ed. Axel Honneth et al. (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 1989), pp. 106ff; also, in English, “Schulz and Post-Kantian Scepticism,” Chapter 10 of Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel. See also Beiser, Fate of Reason, pp. 226ff. (for Reinhold) and 266ff., for Schulze.

  47. Fichte’s works were collected as J. G. Fichtes sämmtliche Werke, edited by J. H. Fichte in 1845–46, and published by Veit of Berlin.

  48. Pinkard, German Philosophy, p.109.

  49. Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, pp. 206ff., also discusses Fichte’s theory of imagination, which, he says, is central.

  50. Pinkard, German Philosophy, p. 123.

  51. This has been much examined by specialist historians. For a bibliography, see Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, 1797–1800, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1994), pp. xlvff.

  52. J. G. Fichte, Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).

  CHAPTER 6: THE HIGH RENAISSANCE IN MUSIC:

  THE SYMPHONY AS PHILOSOPHY

  1. Wolfgang Victor Ruttkowski, Das literarische Chanson in Deutschland (Bern/Munich: Francke, 1966).

  2. Harold C. Schonberg, Lives of the Great Composers (London: Davis-Poynter/Macdonald Futura, 1970/1980), p. 616.

  3. Ibid., p. 618.

  4. Ibid., p. 620.

  5. It was felt that the popularity of the piano in the early 1800s threatened the health of other instruments. See David Gramit, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 136.

  6. Schonberg, Lives of the Great Composers, p. 622.

  7. Ibid., p. 624.

  8. For a musical comparison of Gluck’s work just before Alceste, see Jack M. Stein, Poem and Music in the German Lied from Gluck to Hugo Wolf (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 29–32. See also Hans Joachim Moser, Christoph Willibald Gluck: Die Lestung, der Mann, der Vermächtnis (Stuttgart: Cetta, 1940), p. 323.

  9. Schonberg, Lives of the Great Composers, p. 624.

  10. Ibid., pp. 625–626.

  11. For late Haydn, see Hans-Hubert Schönzler, ed., Of German Music (London: Oswald Wolff, 1976), p. 92, and Sieghard Brandenburg, ed., Haydn, Mozart & Beethoven: Studies in the Music of the Classical Period; Essays in Honour of Alan Tyson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

  12. Peter Gay, Mozart (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), pp. 109f. Also Robert W. Gutman, Mozart: A Cultural Biography (London: Secker & Warburg, 2000), pp. 668ff.

  13. Schonberg, Lives of the Great Composers, p. 628.

  14. For a comparison between Gluck and Mozart, see Adolf Goldschmitt, Mozart: Genius und Mensch (Hamburg: C. Wegner, 1955), pp. 288ff. And for Gluck’s influence on Mozart, see Gutman, Mozart, p. 571.

  15. Alfons Rosenberg, Die Zauberflöte: Geschichte und Deutung von Mozarts Oper (Munich: Prestel, 1964). Hugo Zelzer tells us that between the first night on September 30, 1791, and November 1792, there were more than 100 performances and that the work was performed in Weimar under the direction of Goethe. “German Opera from Mozart to Weber,” in Schönzeler, ed., Of German Music, p. 127. For a flavor of the reception of Mozart’s operas, see Cliff Eissen, New Mozart Documents: A Supplement to O. E. Deutsch’s Documentary
Biography (London: Macmillan, 1991).

  16. Schonberg, Lives of the Great Composers, p. 630.

  17. Ibid., p. 631.

  18. David Wyn Jones, The Symphony in Beethoven’s Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 264.

  19. Estéban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, trans. Richard Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). See also Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 8.

  20. Schonberg, Lives of the Great Composers, p. 632.

  21. For Schubert’s influence, see Scott Messing, Schubert in the European Imagination. 2 vols. (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2007). See vol.1, pp. 199f., for the responses to Schubert’s death.

  22. Charles Fisk, “What Schubert’s Last Sonata Might Hold,” in Jenefer Robinson, ed., Music and Meaning (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 179ff. See also Lorraine Byrne, Schubert’s Goethe Settings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Hermann Abert, Goethe und die Musik (Stuttgart: J. Engelharns Nachfolger, 1922).

  23. Some of his views are set out in the Königliche kaiserliche privilegierte Prager Zeitung, no. 293, October 20, 1815.

  24. Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. xiii. See also Wyn Jones, Symphony, pp. 11–33. For the hierarchy of music, see Gramit, Cultivating, pp. 23–24; and Robinson, ed., Music.

  25. Bonds, Music as Thought, p. 1.

  26. Ibid., pp. 7 and 17.

  27. For Beethoven’s earnings from his symphonies, see Ludwig van Beethoven, Briefwechsel: Gesamtausgabe, ed. Sieghard Brandenburg, 7 vols. (Munich: G. Henle, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 317ff. For the development of the concert, see Gramit, Cultivating, pp. 25 and 138.

  28. Bonds, Music as Thought, p. 16. For the “depth” of German music, the extent to which its “intellectual” properties set it apart, as a Sonderweg in itself, see Applegate and Potter, eds., Music and German, pp. 40–42 and 51–55.

  29. Applegate and Potter, eds., Music and German, pp. 51–52. Bonds, Music as Thought, p. 22.

  30. For a more materialistic analysis, see Franz Hadamowsky, Wien, Theatergeschichte von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs (Vienna: Wancura, 1994), pp. 308–310.31. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, the Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).