Hearing the Sublime: Signification of the Sublime in Solo Piano Literature of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Though many philosophers and music theorists have admitted the signification of the sublime in music as a possibility, the nature and mechanism of that signification has not yet been treated at length with a methodology familiar to musicians or native to music theory. Within this dissertation I have conducted a survey of the philosophy of the sublime as understood by Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805), and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), with references to other contemporary philosophers and writers. The broader influence of the sublime in regards to German-speaking regions and certain musical composers was also considered. I then gathered from the above philosophers’ categories and definitions of the sublime a constellation of objects, qualities, and emotional states associated with the sublime. These functioned as signs or signifiers of the sublime, whose paths of signification were considered or determined with use of semiotics and topic theory, with reference to the work of Danuta Mirka, Raymond Monelle, and Leonard Ratner. Making reference to score examples listed in the list of figures, I implemented these techniques in analyses of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109 and Sonata No. 32 in C, Op. 111 as well as Franz Liszt’s “Mazeppa,” from the Études d’exécution transcendante, “Funerailles” from Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses III, S. 173, and “Marche funèbre, En mémoire de Maximilian I, Empereur du Mexique” in from Années de pèlerinage III, S.163.