Musical Offerings, Spring 2019

Musical Offerings ⦁ 2019 ⦁ Volume 10 ⦁ Number 1 31 Traditionally, line was promoted as more important than color; after all, line alone had the ability to communicate real intellectual meaning, while color could only communicate vague sentiments. Painter Roger de Piles challenged this assumption by giving equal weight to color in his paintings, thus drawing more attention to the surface than to the story, to the aesthetic qualities rather than intellectual ideas. 6 French philosophers such as Abbé Dubos in 1719 began to tie Empfindsamkeit to “the perception of beauty through the external senses.” 7 The beauty referred to was a kind of beauty that transcended intellectual beauty and spoke directly to the heart. Thus, Empfindsamkeit began to take on more emotional connotations, most often referring to gentler emotions like love and tenderness. In the late eighteenth century, critics further refined their definition of sentiment to distinguish it from the old Baroque ideas of passions and the Doctrine of Affections. Passions were explicit, objective emotional states, while sentiments were the heart’s subtle, subjective responses to sensory stimuli. In music, passions would be dictated by the text and made clear in the music, while sentiments would be up to the listener’s interpretation. Johann Matheson in 1721 and Alexander Baumgarten in 1750 further helped connect Empfindsamkeit to music. They argued that music cannot be judged by reason but should be perceived solely through the sentiments, since reason cannot judge aesthetic beauty. 8 To summarize thus far: Empfindsamkeit is not just a musical style, but a philosophical movement. It prefers subjectivity over objectivity, and subtle beauty over traditional forms. It values individual emotional expression as well as individual subjective interpretation, and cares more about aesthetics than about intellectual meaning. Hopefully by now, the reader will begin to see parallels between the Empfindsamkeit movement of the eighteenth century and the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century. Both movements were driven by the same underlying philosophical ideas: the rebellion against traditional rules as the arbiters of aesthetic value, the usurpation of objectivity by subjectivity, and the increased value of individual emotion and expression. The philosophers who taught these ideas, and subsequently 6 Cowart, “Critical Language and Musical Thought,” 24-25. 7 Ibid., 21. 8 Ibid., 21-22.