Music and the Transcendental

Abstract

This chapter deals with a particular manifestation of Beethoven and his genius celebrated in a unique event in the annals of the Vienna Secession, the avant-garde artist group led by Gustav Klimt, which broke away from the city's only official exhibiting body in 1897. Writing on Beethoven's late style, Martin Cooper described his music and its affect as an 'inarticulate sense of elevation and heightened awareness'. In particular, the analysis rests on Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), which in its first edition was dedicated to the music and ideas of Richard Wagner. As Guido Adler, Hanslick's successor at the University of Vienna, wrote in 1906, Austrian customs and its social structures were inextricably 'interwoven in the works of the classical composers of music'. Dreams were like music, only entering the world of vision through a form of consciousness elucidated from the mind to the outside world.