Musical Offerings, Spring 2019

34 Dellaperute ⦁ Emanuel Bach Empfindsamkeit and Sturm und Drang Empfindsamkeit was closely related to another pre-Romantic movement around the same time period known as Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress). This movement was most prevalent in poetry and song and reached its peak in the 1770s. One could argue that Empfindsamkeit and Sturm und Drang are not two entirely separate movements, but rather are two manifestations of the same ideals. 16 In fact, some artists—including Emanuel Bach—were a part of both movements. 17 Margaret Stoljar attempts to demonstrate this very point in her book Poetry and Song in Late Eighteenth Century Germany : “Both Sturm und Drang and Empfindsamkeit are shown not as distinct phenomena but as complementary to the Enlightenment, themselves contributing to its differentiated character as special and relatively limited moments arising out of the complex currents of eighteenth-century thought and social change.” 18 Like Empfindsamkeit , the Sturm und Drang movement can be seen as a rebellion against rationalism, with heavier emphases on individualism and emotion. The movement was inspired largely by the writings of French philosopher Rousseau. 19 Goethe and Schiller were the pioneers of the Sturm und Drang style in literature; their dramas contained themes of individualism, freedom, reliance on emotion for guidance, and rebellion against the artificiality of culture. Goethe inspired a group of artists that included Friedrich Maximillian Klinger, whose drama Sturm und Drang gave the movement its name. 20 Stoljar shows how an overlap occurred between literature and music in Sturm und Drang when poets and composers who wrote in the style collaborated to write songs. Such is the case with Emanuel Bach, who began setting the poems of Friedrich Klopstock to music in the Sturm und Drang style in the 1770s. Stoljar notes that Klopstock and Emanuel Bach were ideal counterparts because 16 Stoljar, Poetry and Song , xii. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid, xii. 19 Paul F. Marks, “The Rhetorical Element in Musical Sturm und Drang : Christian Gottfried Krause's ‘Von Der Musikalischen Poesie,’” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 2, no. 1 (1971): 54, doi : 10.2307/836470 . 20 Barry S. Brook, “ Sturm und Drang and the Romantic Period in Music,” Studies in Romanticism 9, no. 4, (1970): 271-72, do i: 10.2307/25599772 .