We may begin, as Beethoven did, with hovering open fifths, pianissimo, a missing third, a sense of expectancy, soon to be fulfilled by a quickening into life and the forceful emergence of a theme and a definite tonality. The opening of the Ninth Symphony functions, like similar rhetorical gestures in the Seventh Symphony, the "Hammerklavier" Sonata, and several of the late quartets, to raise a curtain so that the action may begin, or so that we may witness the unveiling of a distant universe. More than a gesture is involved. There is a sense in which this passage foreshadows in nuce the whole of the future action, inasmuch as it represents "an initial ambiguity leading to clarification."' At this stage, however, though we know that we have begun, we cannot imagine where Beethoven intends to take us: we do not know what to expect, we do not know how, or even if, the cluster of harmonic, thematic, and rhythmic riddles offered in these measures will be solved. We do not know why this oversized orchestra and massed choruses and soloists are assembled before us. We may even discover that each step toward clarification opens upon a new ambiguity, in a constant interchange of questions and answers. Thus, although we have come to know that the Ninth Symphony is implicit in its opening measures, we cannot predict the Ninth Symphony from them. As the work unfolds, we soon 19th-Century Music X/1 (Summer 1986). ? by the Regents of the University of California.

The shape of German romanticism

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: A Search for Order

“Reflexivity” is the generic name for all kinds and species of circularity. It includes the self-reference of signs, the self-appplication of principles and predicates, the self-justification and self-refutation of propositions and inferences, the self-fulfillment and self-falsification of predictions, the self-creation and self-destruction of logical and legal entities, the self-augmentation and self-limitation of powers, circular reasoning, circular causation, cyclic and spiral recurrence, feedback systems, mutuality, reciprocity, and organic form. It includes the fallacious, the vicious, the trivial, and the question begging, but also the sound, the benign, the useful, and the inescapable. It ranges from the prosaic to the numinous, from the paradoxical to the self-evident, from science to religion. It is reality and appearance, native to the processes of the world and to our knowledge and discourse about them.

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A Bibliography of Works on Reflexivity

Introduction 1. The idea of cyclic form 2. Musical history and self-consciousness: the Octet, Op. 20 3. Returning home: the E major Piano Sonata, Op. 6 4. In search of lost time: the A minor Quartet, Op. 13 5. Overcoming the past: the E flat Quartet, Op. 12 6. Cyclicism in Mendelssohn's mature music.

Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form

Early German Romanticism sought to respond to a comprehensive sense of spiritual crisis that characterised the late eighteenth century. The study demonstrates how the Romantics sought to bring together the new post-Kantian idealist philosophy with the inheritance of the realist Platonic-Christian tradition. With idealism they continued to champion the individual, while from Platonism they took the notion that all reality, including the self, participated in absolute being. This insight was expressed, not in the language of theology or philosophy, but through aesthetics, which recognised the potentiality of all creation, including artistic creation, to disclose the divine. In explicating the religious vision of Romanticism, this study offers a new historical appreciation of the movement, and furthermore demonstrates its importance for our understanding of religion today.

Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion: The Reconciliation of German Idealism and Platonic Realism

The centrality of fantasy to French literary culture has long been accepted by critics, but the sonorous dimensions of the mode and its wider implications for musical production have gone largely unexplored. In this book, Francesca Brittan invites us to listen to fantasy, attending both to literary descriptions of sound in otherworldly narratives, and to the wave of 'fantastique' musical works published in France through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, including Berlioz's 1830 Symphonie fantastique, and pieces by Liszt, Adam, Meyerbeer, and others. Following the musico-literary aesthetics of E. T. A. Hoffmann, they allowed waking and dreaming, reality and unreality to converge, yoking fairy sound to insect song, demonic noise to colonial 'babbling', and divine music to the strains of water and wind. Fantastic soundworlds disrupted France's native tradition of marvellous illusion, replacing it with a magical materialism inextricable from republican activism, theological heterodoxy, and the advent of 'radical' romanticism.

The shape of German romanticism

Citations

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: A Search for Order

A Bibliography of Works on Reflexivity

Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form

Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion: The Reconciliation of German Idealism and Platonic Realism

Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz