The Possessor and the Possessed: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and the Idea of Musical Genius
Peter Kivy
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0300087586
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The concept of genius intrigues us. Artistic geniuses have something other people don't have. In some cases that something seems to be a remarkable kind of inspiration that permits the artist to exceed his own abilities. It is as if the artist is suddenly possessed, as if some outside force flows through them at the moment of creation. In other cases genius seems best explained as a natural gift. The artist is the possessor of an extra talent that enables the production of masterpiece after masterpiece. This book explores the concept of artistic genius and how it came to be symbolised by three great composers of the modern era: Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven.
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in the soul at the apprehension of them.’’ 12 In Burke’s far more detailed and elaborate picture of the sublime, the idea of greatness remains. But a very significant new element has entered the picture: that of terror. For Burke, and for Kant later, the experience of the sublime is not an unalloyed pleasure, as it appears to be for Addison. Terror, the perception of potential danger, and other such usually unpleasant as well as unwanted reactions to the great or terrifyingly powerful have worked
acknowledged and powerful effects of instrumental music.’’ 17 And although Burke is appealing here to the familiar notion that music can arouse any of the passions or affections—as Dryden put it, ‘‘What Passion cannot music raise and quell!’’—it is, manifestly, the ‘‘passion’’ of sublimity that is the subject here. 30 BREAKING THE RULE The importance of the question of whether music can be sublime will become obvious enough in the next chapter, when we discuss Handel’s ascendency to the Pantheon
belongs to objective sensation, as the perception of an object of sense; but its agreeableness to subjective sensation, by which no object is represented: i.e. to feeling, through which the object is regarded as an Object of delight (which involves no cognition of the object).’’ 7 For subjective sensation Kant reserves the term ‘‘feeling.’’ Now the crucial difference between objective and subjective sensation is that in the former, an object is posited beyond the sensation (in the present
and reward listening. His earliest ventures into opera, on the other hand, are display pieces, startling examples of precocity but hardly worth staging, with the exception, perhaps, of Bastien und Bastienne, whose childlike plot and simple characters were easily accessible to the twelve-year-old who composed it. Hegel, as I have said, shared Goethe’s opinion that the composer is the artist in whom talent shows itself at the earliest age because no experience of the world is required, at least
constituting part of God’s Creation, any more than was Newton’s machinery of the Cosmos so seen; but nor need it have been seen by Gerard to be inconsistent with divine intervention, in the form of artistic inspiration. For, presumably, Gerard, as a theologian, could hardly have shared Hume’s skepticism in regard to the possibility of the miraculous; and if miraculous was what divine inspiration was, then so be it. Kant, as I have already remarked, knew Gerard’s account of genius and was
