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As the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart were resounding throughout the late eighteenth-century concert halls of Berlin, Dresden, and Jena, a twenty- five-year-old Friedrich Schlegel was scribbling fragments in his literary notebooks about music with "erhabne[r] Frechheit" [sublime audacity] (KA, 24:31).1 Although Schlegel never developed these fragments into a comprehensive theory of musical aesthetics, numerous remarks on music can be found scattered throughout his aesthetic, literary, and philosophical writings. Unlike for the early Romantics Friedrich von Hardenburg (Novalis), Ludwig Tieck, and Heinrich Wilhelm Wackenroder, for Schlegel music never served as a key theoretical axis of his philosophical project. However, contrary to the contentions of earlier scholarship, Schlegel was quite aware of music's inherent aesthetic potentiality.2 Even though he was never, strictly speaking, a music aficionado, Schlegel was familiar with contemporary debates on music. While studying classical Greek culture, he carefully read the first volume of Johann Nicolaus Forkel's Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik [General History of Music] (1788). In letters to his older brother, August Wilhelm, in 1795, Schlegel caustically dismisses Forkel's ahistorical reduction of music into rhetorical strategies as inherently flawed (KA, 23:226, 251). This negative evaluation of rhetorically deducible effects soon resonated throughout his cultural critique.
Two years later, Schlegel began writing his fragments on instrumental music. Although they were mostly private entries in his literary and philosophical notebooks, these fragments identify Schlegel as an early proponent of absolute music.3 In an oft-cited notebook entry of 1799, he proclaims that music is "eigentlich die Kunst dieses Jahrhunderts" [in fact the art of this century] (KA, 16:258). This statement complements a series of notes that articulates music's privileged relationship with philosophy. Schlegel's observations on music were largely in- fluenced by philosophical insights and, for this reason, his reflections tended to be fundamentally theoretical. In a previous entry, he had already stressed that "[a]lle reine Musik muß philosophisch und instrumental sein (Musik fürs Denken)" [all pure music must be philosophical and instrumental (music for thought)] (KA, 16:178). Because of music's infinite perfectibility, Schlegel recognized its important affinity with philosophy: he believed that music's indeterminate signifiers made it an ideal medium for transcendental reflection. Resembling philosophical inquiry itself, musical signifiers activate a process of hermeneutic inexhaustibility that potentiates music's truth content into new semantic constellations.4 This affinity...