The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  This view was expanded during the 1790s. Schelling led the way in arguing that art and philosophy addressed the same basic issue, the link between the world of phenomena and the world of ideas. For him, sound was the “innermost” of the five senses; its very incorporeality meant that its “essence” was more ideal than the other senses. August Schlegel shared this view.29

  The link between Idealism and music without voices thus becomes clear, and this approach reached its apogee in what Mark Bonds calls “the most important piece of musical criticism ever written.”30 This was a review, published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1809, by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In this review, Hoffmann identified music as occupying “a separate realm beyond the phenomenal,” thereby endowing music with the capacity to provide “a glimpse of the infinite.” Instrumental music, he said, “discloses to man an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the external sensuous world that surrounds him, a world in which he leaves behind him all feelings that can be expressed through concepts, in order to surrender himself to that which cannot be expressed” in words, “a potential catalyst of revelation accessible to those who actively engaged the work by [their] creative imagination.”31 It followed that “the onus of intelligibility” now moved from composer to listener. Bonds again: “This new framework of listening was in effect philosophical, based on the premise that the listener must strive to understand and internalise the thought of the composer, follow the argument of the music and comprehend it as a whole.”

  Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was the first time such a philosophical approach had been applied to a specific composition. He claimed to have identified a “teleological progression from the childlike innocence of Haydn to the superhuman Mozart to the divine Beethoven…Listening to Beethoven we become aware, dimly, of a higher form of reality not otherwise perceptible to us…Art is no longer a vehicle of entertainment, but a vehicle of truth…The arts in general begin where philosophy ends.”32

  The very notion of explaining a work of instrumental music in depth was itself new. It grew out of the wider conception of Bildung but the link between Bildung and listening also had to do with the change in the understanding of listening itself. The symphony, for example, was associated with Kant’s notion of the sublime, a form of art defined by reference to its vastness of scope and its “oceanic” capacity to overwhelm the senses.33 Many philosophers and artists argued that contemplation of the infinite through the sublime offered insights that the merely beautiful could not provide. “The massed forces” of the symphony supported this idea.34

  When Hoffmann described music as “unfolding” from Haydn through Mozart to Beethoven he was also espousing a form of historicism, even a form of Hegelianism, accepting in effect the existence of a “world spirit,” evolving toward ever-higher states of human consciousness. Beethoven’s symphonies represented a culmination in music, a “moment of historical timelessness,” in which the composer had achieved Besonnenheit. This word, difficult to translate, attempts to describe a quality in which the artist has not so much created something, something almost divine, as that it has always been there, waiting to be uncovered, or realized. 35

  THE SYMPHONY AS SOCIOLOGY

  A separate element in the (wordless) symphony, particularly in the turbulent aftermath of the French Revolution, was its communal character, seen as contrasting markedly with the concerto. The symphony was communal and serious, whereas the concerto was showy and empty. It was this which, for a time, made the symphony particularly German. According to this view, culture arises from the relation between the individual and the state and Bildung; this process, whereby individuals come to find their creative role in a harmonious state, was seen as paralleled in the symphony. It was for this reason that singing in choruses was understood (by Goethe among others) as an appropriate training for citizenship.36 Social harmony, like the orchestra, could exist only among a group of individuals who had worked on themselves to achieve a minimum level of personal self-realization.37

  This was important because concepts of Germany changed decisively during Beethoven’s lifetime. When his Ninth Symphony was premiered in Vienna in 1824, Germany was still an abstraction, but the idea of a pan-German state was no longer implausible and it was during the early nineteenth century that music was first recognized as having a role in the establishment of German national identity.38 Friedrich Rochlitz, editor of the newly established Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, wrote an editorial in 1799 expressing his hope/expectation that music would be used in the “education [Bildung] of the nation.” “Without being accused of national pride,” said another writer in 1805, “the German can declare that he deserves first place among all the nations in the realm of musical composition.”39 Music was both a producer and a product of nationalism, underlined by the growth of music festivals. These were more important than they might otherwise seem because in Germany at the time the rights of assembly were severely curtailed and so festivals, spread over two or three days and devoted to the symphony and the oratorio, attracted hordes of “music lovers” who, while devoted to an aesthetic, were also drawn to a microcosm of what an imagined Germany might be—a state in miniature but also a cultural rather than a territorial power. Here too the symphony was seen as a parallel to an organic community, the ideal structure of society.40

  The symphony was the German genre par excellence for one final reason. Besides being “serious,” with a sound philosophical basis, it also comprised a counterweight to opera, long dominated by the Italians and the French. This attitude/belief was to have a long and important legacy. Wagner put into the mouth of one of his characters the idea that, in writing the Eroica Symphony, Beethoven, who was “no general,” nevertheless explored “the territory within which he could accomplish the same thing that Bonaparte had achieved in the fields of Italy.” For Wagner, Beethoven’s symphonies represented a stage in the progressive synthesis of the arts. Unable to deny Beethoven’s achievements with the symphony, Wagner neatly trumped him, arguing that the master himself had announced the culmination of the genre with his Ninth Symphony. By incorporating words into what was traditionally wordless, Beethoven, Wagner insisted, had implicitly conceded that instrumental music had run its course. It fell to himself, Wagner said, to take up where Beethoven had left off.41

  7.

  Cosmos, Cuneiform, Clausewitz

  Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817) was by all accounts an extremely eccentric man. At the School of Mining in Freiberg in Saxony, where he taught, he had a fire in the lecture room, “no matter what time of year.” He invariably “wore fur over his bowels,” fussed endlessly over the placements for his many dinner parties and the arrangement of the books in his library, and above all was “crazy about his stones.” According to one of his pupils, he had amassed a collection of 100,000 rocks, each one composed of different minerals. On one occasion, when the specimen tray was being passed around his class, someone jostled it and nearly spilled the contents on to the floor. “At which point…Werner turned pale and could not speak…it was seven or eight minutes before [he] could command his voice.”1

  This singular soul was the founder of modern geology. At the end of the eighteenth century the main concern in geology (not that the term was used as we use it now) was not with basic science but with reconciling the biblical account of earth’s origins with the record in the rocks.2 Germany was at the forefront of this because of its mining history.3 Silver provided the backbone of the money supply in Europe at that time, a period when a subsistence economy was giving way to a money economy. The explosive growth of silver mining in the German states—most of all in Saxony—stimulated the foundation, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, of entire towns such as Freiberg, Saint Joachimstahl, and Chemnitz. The discovery of silver in the New World caused a slump in the mid-sixteenth century, but the other abundant mineral resources in Germany—which included kaolin (the ra
w material for the growing porcelain industry, stimulated by the introduction of high-quality Chinese porcelain into Europe in the sixteenth century)—fostered a healthy demand for mineralogists. Freiberg was the busiest region and played a leading role in the development of mineralogy and geology. Besides silver, the introduction of high-quality Chinese porcelain into Europe produced a race to find the secret of its manufacture, a search that was a boon for mineralogists. The French installed the first works at St. Cloud at the end of the seventeenth century, but were outgunned when the Germans set up enterprises at Vienna, Höchst, and Nymphenberg, not to mention Berlin and Meissen. It was soon understood that kaolin, China clay, was the crucial ingredient, and so began the search for deposits of this new precious substance. By 1710, the Meissen works, founded by Friedrich August I of Saxony, was manufacturing porcelain, helped by the discoveries of J. F. Böttger (1682–1719), the first director, who showed that certain fluxes (alabaster, marble, or feldspar) made kaolin fusible. This discovery remained a closely guarded state secret, despite no fewer than 30,000 experiments being mounted.4 In this way, mining and chemistry became intimately related and helped determine the pre-eminence of German mineralogy.

  The German universities, which had a bias in favor of the humanities, were not regarded as the best places to encourage very technical matters, and as the eighteenth century wore on, the princes began to realize that technical institutes were called for. The mining academy at Freiberg was established in 1765 and Werner was appointed ten years later.

  Today, Werner is best known for his advocacy of the “Neptunist” version of the earth’s history, contrasted with the “Vulcanist” or “Plutonist” account, rival versions that were intimately bound up with religious beliefs. In the Neptunist account, the surface of the earth was formed by rocks deposited out of a giant primeval ocean, which had originally covered the earth. There were serious problems with this theory. It did not even begin to explain why some types of rock that, according to Werner, were more recent than other types, were often found situated below them. Still more problematic was the sheer totality of water that would have been needed to hold all the land of the earth in solution. It would have to have been a flood many miles deep, and in turn provoked an even bigger question: what had happened to all that water when it receded?

  The chief rival to Werner, though nowhere near as influential to begin with, was the Scotsman James Hutton, and his theory of Vulcanism, named for the god of fire.5 Hutton looked around him and concluded that weathering and erosion are even today laying down a fine silt of sandstone, limestone, clay, and pebbles on the bed of the ocean near river estuaries. He then asked what could have transformed these silts into the solid rock that is everywhere about us: his answer was that it could only have been heat. Where did this heat come from? Hutton believed it came from inside the earth and was expressed by volcanic action.

  There was no question but that Hutton’s Vulcanism fitted the facts better than Werner’s Neptunism. Many critics resisted it, however, because Vulcanism implied vast tracts of geological time, “inconceivable ages that went far beyond what anyone had envisaged before.”

  Recent scholarship has credited Werner with a second and more important idea, one that has fundamentally shaped modern geology and, unlike Neptunism, stood the test of time. This is the linking of rock stratification and elapsed time. The most influential view to begin with was that advocated by Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811), who identified primary, secondary, and tertiary sequences. On this account, all mountains were constructed in the same way. There were crystalline rocks that formed the center—the core—and went all the way up to their peaks. On their flanks were sedimentary rocks (limestones, marls, and shales), and finally, on the outside, lower down, looser deposits containing organic remains. These ideas were built on in Germany by J. C. Fuchsel, who identified specific stratigraphic formations, each layer having a characteristic fossil content. From this grew the idea of “formation suites,” layers in predictable sequences that were similar from location to location.6

  According to modern scholars such as Alex Ospovat at Oklahoma State University, it was Werner, living in Germany amid the rise of historicism and of evolutionism, who grasped that the essential difference between rocks was not mineralogy or chemistry but the “mode and time of formation,” that rock formation was the basic process in geology.7 Werner understood that there were only twenty to thirty of these “universal formations” and that they therefore reduced the chaos of mineralogy to “very distinct and determinable” proportions. It was now that fossil content rose in importance as a more specific indicator of age and sequence. Like others, Werner recognized that fossils became more varied and complex in later (higher) geological levels.8 From 1799 he identified paleontology as a discipline of the future and offered a course in it.

  This more sophisticated understanding of the meaning of stratigraphy was Werner’s main lasting contribution. Rachel Laudan of the University of Hawaii has now identified what she terms the “Wernerian radiation,” in which she says that Werner gave rise to a “movement” in geology, a “coherent lineage,” one strand of which accepted, developed, and modified his idea of rock “formations,” building on his ideas about fossils as the clearest way to understanding the past. The second branch of the Wernerian radiation was the causal school. This branch retained its interest in mineralogy but as an indication of causal processes, according an increasing role to heat in the earth’s economy and in the process amalgamating Werner’s and Hutton’s theories.9

  Laudan traces the Wernerian radiation, beginning in Freiberg but then, via the people who studied there, spreading to Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, France, the United States, and Mexico. She traces Wernerian textbooks and societies to France, Scotland, and Cornwall, Wernerian academic journals, Wernerian students as teachers in the École des Mines in France, the mining school in Mexico, and Wernerian courses at Oxford and in Edinburgh. There was also a Wernerian radiation away from geology. Goethe, for example, subscribed to Wernerian theory till the end of his life, as did many of the Romantics, some of whom—Novalis among them—even attended his courses.10

  THE FIRST MATHEMATICIAN OF EUROPE

  Everyone knows the name of Isaac Newton. There are few prizes in the modern world for coming second in anything, but Carl Friedrich Gauss, according to John Theodore Merz in his History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, was, with Newton, one of the two greatest mathematicians of modern times, though that other German-speaker, the Swiss Leonhard Euler, runs them close. Laplace called Gauss the first mathematician of Europe. Many think modern mathematics begins not with Newton but with Gauss. He in turn was much influenced by Kant, whose arguments implied that mathematics was an aspect of the imagination and, therefore, a form of freedom.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) was born into a laborer’s family in Brunswick and he was as precocious as Mozart. He made simple calculations before he could talk; at the age of three he was correcting his father’s arithmetic; and when he was nineteen he identified the formula that underlay the geometric construction of a 17-sided shape.11 The Greeks had shown how, with a compass and straight edge, a perfect pentagon could be constructed, but no one between the Greeks and 1796 had been able to show how to use these simple tools to construct other “regular polygons” with a prime number of sides. Gauss was so excited by his discovery that, there and then, he decided to become a professional mathematician, and for eighteen years he would compile a mathematical diary. His family kept this diary in their possession for a century, until 1898, and it comprises one of the most important documents in the history of mathematics. Among other things, it confirms that Gauss proved—but often failed to publish—many results that other mathematicians did not discover until much later.

  Gauss was, perhaps, much more than anyone else, the embodiment of the mathematical imagination. Understanding the behavior of numbers is as much an aesthetic matter as a utilitarian one. Number patterns don’t h
ave to be useful. The rest of us don’t always see the point of why prime numbers are so fascinating or why it is so important to understand their behavior. Partly because of this, mathematicians are perhaps destined to inhabit their own private, solitary worlds, and that was certainly true in Gauss’s case. He rarely collaborated, and worked alone for most of his life. His relationships with his wife and sons were less than ideal and he dissuaded his boys from a career in mathematics, it was said, so that there was no risk of the Gauss name being associated with inferior work. His wife died soon after bearing their third child, who also died, so Gauss spent much of his personal life stultified by despair and loneliness. Although he did not have an easy life, his entry in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography makes it clear that his ideas were influential in thirteen separate areas.12

  Gauss became famous for his method of least squares, which enabled him to predict the moving orbits of planets; for his ideas about the pattern of prime numbers (divisible only by 1 and themselves), which revealed a hidden order that had totally escaped everyone else and uncovered their relationship to logarithms; for his invention of “clock arithmetic,” which would eventually prove important for the security of the Internet; and for his invention of imaginary numbers, which would also transform understanding and link up, much later, with quantum physics.13 But it is his conception of non-Euclidean geometry, commutative algebra, and the electric telegraph that really shows the extent to which his imagination was ahead of his time.