Markus Rathey: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs Donnerode

Zur politischen Funktion des ‚Erhabenen‘ in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts

The communicative function of music underwent a significant paradigm shift in the second half of the eighteenth century. This transformation, resulting partly from a new understanding of the sublimity of nature and of the sublime as an aesthetic category, was triggered by the devastating earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, which shook the foundations of European philosophy and its worldview. One musical manifestation of both the response to the earthquake and its aesthetic ramifications was Telemann’s Donnerode (1756), an oratorio frequently performed in Hamburg in the following years. Its influence is evident in two oratorios C.P.E. Bach composed for meetings of the Hamburg militia in the early 1780s. In the case of Bach’s oratorio from 1780, the correspondence to Donnerode is particularly striking, since Bach’s work refers directly to another disastrous natural catastrophe—the earthquake in Messina that same year. An analysis of the similarities, however, also highlights the primary difference: Bach functionalizes the aesthetic category of the sublime in order to support a political agenda.

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