Abstract
In his essay ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic’ in Either/Or, Volume 1, Søren Kierkegaard pseudonymously presents an aesthetic theory of music and a curious misinterpretation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. My article comprises literary and musicological analyses of this essay to argue that Kierkegaard is intentionally setting forth through his pseudonym a clichéd Romantic distortion of the opera. Thereby I will suggest that Kierkegaard’s aesthetic treatise may be understood negatively as satire against a certain brand of Romanticism that secularises and even vulgarises religious materials, and that through a variety of ironies he might be positively conveying the possibility for music to be a proper medium for expressing what he calls the higher immediacy of religious passion.
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