Arne
Stollberg: „Energieen des
Erhabnen“. Eine Theorie der Sonatenform bei Johann Gottfried Herder
The observation that
aesthetic commentary on music must by necessity rely on visual metaphors led
Johann Gottfried Herder to question whether music’s essence—art for
the ear—was thereby intrinsically misrepresented. His criticism was primarily
directed toward the prevailing convention of referring to musical form as
architecture, which he then substituted with metaphors such as
“stream” and “ocean” to more fittingly depict the
transitory nature of the music process. Interpreted in this context, a passage
from his Kalligone referring to
four “energies of the sublime” of “audible objects”
becomes a metaphorical representation of the sonata form. An analogous
reinforcement of this idea can be found in Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s
“Das eigenthümliche
innere Wesen der Tonkunst, und die Seelenlehre der heutigen
Instrumentalmusik.” Viewed
from today’s perspective, the theoretical achievement of Herder and
Wackenroder—their creation of a verbal narrative to describe musical
processes that sharply deviated from subsequent theories of sonata form erected
on abstract formal schemes (as propagated, by Adolph Bernhard Marx)—is
instrumental to an understanding of what is known in Anglo-Saxon research as
the “sonata principle.”
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