Music as daemonic voice in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century German culture

Abstract

In its representation as an ambivalently powerful voice in the German literature and music criticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, music aligned itself with the re-emerging concept of the daemonic.  Goethe’s contemporaneous formulation of the daemonic consequently has wide-ranging significance for our understanding of the music and music aesthetics of that period.

Literary representations of music establish the basic functions of and the key ideas associated with the daemonic: mediation of the supernatural and mundane realms, the possession of a human conduit, seduction and the violent relocation of the listener.  Fundamental to such narratives is the frequent female gendering of Music, a move that variously serves to mediate supernatural revelation and to threaten the implicitly masculine listener and the social stability he polices.

Music thus acquired its own powerful agency, bringing with it the need to consider the implications of the daemonic for both composer and performer.  In both cases the result is a fluid relationship between submission to and mastery of an otherworldly musical voice.  The composer both possesses the genius that works within him and is possessed by it, whilst the performer remains at once the embodiment of agency and an empty shell.

The complex function of the daemonic within instrumental performance is investigated through Ernst’s ‘Erlkönig’ caprice.  Transferred onto Music writ large and executed on the violin, the daemonic Erlking of Goethe’s ballad and Schubert’s setting exists in and comments on the matrix of the diabolic, the daemonic and violin playing.

Nineteenth-century music criticism serves to elaborate many of the key ideas of the daemonic within the context of specific musical works.  E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Beethoven reviews exemplify the interaction of the daemonic and the sublime and the challenge of the daemonic to the heroic paradigm in Beethoven’s instrumental music.

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