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E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Romantic Aesthetics Revisited: Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1810)

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1이화여자대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

This paper focused on several aspects of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in order to understand it’s philosophical, aesthetic and historical importance. First of all, the difference between the listening attitude in his review and that of previous centuries as well as the reason for that change were investigated. The listening aesthetics before Hoffmann was based on the rhetorical framework which considered music as a language. It was composer’s responsibility to make his music readily comprehensible. On the contrary, the romantic music aesthetics considered music as a means of finding the truth or the absolute like philosophy. Accordingly, music became an object of contemplation rather than that of understanding. The romantic aesthetics urged a listener to participate actively in constructing a meaning of music through his imagination. After that, we looked into the important concepts such as the sublime and the infinite in the review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and tried to find out how these concepts were related to contemporary philosophical issues. The sublime was perceived by many writers as an epistemological means toward the integration of the finite and the infinite. It was also acknowledged that the sublime could be most strongly generated in the genre of symphony. Accordingly, the reason why Hoffmann emphasized various aspects of the sublime in his review was not only a personal outpouring of his passionate feelings but also a broader strategy reflecting the epistemological tendency of idealism.

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