La oss snakke om musikk: Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroders og Ludwig Tiecks musikalske fantasier

In this article, I take as my starting point an opinion that many share: it is difficult to talk about music (Barthes, 1977). This opinion is rooted in the romantic ideal of autonomy (Dahlhaus, 1994), leading to the emancipation of music from language (Neubauer, 1986). I discuss some aspects of this tension between language and music through close readings of the essays in Phantasien über die Kunst [Fantasies on Art] (1799/2000) by the Early German Romanticists Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798) and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853). They emphasize music’s distinctive ability to convey various forms of transcendental experiences and insights that language falls short of. At the same time, their essays on music demonstrate an inner tension between a rich and literary experimental discourse discussing the limitation of language in relation to music’s transcendental meaning. In the essays in Phantasien, Wackenroder and Tieck constitute an innovative art-critical discourse that in many ways deals with art by making itself a work of art (Naumann, 1990). The literary-poetic approach to music exemplified in these essays changed the understanding of music itself, and enabled hearing music as an ideal for poetic language. I argue that the tension between language and music, as a historical legacy from the Romantic period, enables us to recognize language’s co-constitutive significance for our musical experience while at the same time making us attentive to language’s own musicality. The effort to say something about what we hear enriches and expands our linguistic involvement with music, as well as other parts of our lives.