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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2021

Beethoven und die Philosophie. Musik, Dialektik und freie Improvisation

Beethoven and Philosophy: Music, Dialectics and Free Improvisation

Beethoven et la philosophie : musique, dialectique et libre improvisation

Résumé

Can we compare a musical work and a philosophical work? Are they two similar manifestations of the mind? 2020 marked the anniversary of Beethoven's birth and the anniversary of Hegel's birth. The musician and the philosopher lived through the same historical situation marked by the French Revolution and the advent of modernity. It may seem paradoxical to speak of a correspondence between Hegel's philosophy and Beethoven's music, for they never met and there is no evidence that they were aware of each other's work. Hegel mentions most of the composers of his time in his aesthetic lectures, but he never mentions Beethoven, even though, for the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, this very silence is "telling". Moreover, even if Hegel had not known Beethoven's music, or if he had not managed to understand it, this does not prevent us from establishing a correspondence between the logic at work in his philosophy and that which is present in Beethoven's music, in particular between the structure of dialectical logic and the structure of tonal music. Theodor W. Adorno wrote that between Beethoven's music and Hegel's logic, it is not only a question of establishing a relationship of analogy. According to him, it is the thing itself that is at stake. (Beethovenian) music would not merely borrow contingent traits of identity from (Hegelian) philosophy, but would be the logical concept itself presented in musical form. According to Adorno, if this analogy exists, one should not look for its formulation in the lectures on aesthetics, in what Hegel says about music, because he would not have any competence in this field, but rather in the Logic or the Phenomenology of Spirit. Adorno and Dahlhaus, however, rely on a corrupted version of H. G. Hotho's posthumously edited Aesthetic lectures. The study of the sources, which we carried out in the context of the work with A. Gethmann-Siefert at the Fernuniversität in Hagen, shows that although Hegel does not explicitly quote Beethoven in his lectures, he does intervene in the debate on instrumental music, and certain passages, on the notion of theme, for example, can be interpreted as allusions. There is an insight into the dialectical nature of sonata form. But it is less the analysis of the thematic work that makes the link with Beethoven in the lessons than the theory of the artist musician and the conception of free improvisation. For Hegel, it is Rossini's singers and Paganini's improvisations that constitute the experiences of musical improvisation. One could say that for him they are manifestations of the absolute spirit. But these descriptions could also apply to Beethoven's music, since free improvisation was, according to his contemporaries – and to W. Kinderman – an essential dimension of his art. This principle of improvisation has gradually disappeared from Western art music. Today it is rather in the theory of so-called popular music that the analogy between music based on improvisation and the dialectic of philosophy is constructed. If one listens to Beethoven's music and at the same time reads the theory of improvisation produced by Hegel, then one could come to very different conclusions from Dahlhaus and Adorno concerning the relationship between music, the dialectic and the principle of freedom. And if one considers that music also reflects the society in which it is produced, this conception could also open up possibilities to think about freer forms of life, as Beethoven taught us to do.

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Philosophie
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halshs-03398790, version 1 (23-10-2021)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-03398790 , version 1

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Alain Patrick Olivier. Beethoven und die Philosophie. Musik, Dialektik und freie Improvisation. 10th Virtual Bonn Humboldt Award Winners' Forum "Beerthoven's 'Empire of the Mind': Artistic 'Effigies of the Ideal' and the Cultural Politics of Resistance, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung; William A. Kinderman; Christine Siegert; Federica Rovelli, Nov 2021, Bonn, Germany. ⟨halshs-03398790⟩
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