ロマン主義の音楽思想にみる「ドイツ的なもの」の表象

―普遍性という名のポリティーク―

抄録

Paradoxically enough, modern German philosophers have often considered the Germanness in close association with the universal concepts: nature, freedom, or the purely human. This apparently paradoxical way of thinking, however, formed an essential feature of the modern German national identity, for the very reason that the German people never had a unified government and established national boundaries. The aim of this paper is to give a short sketch of how the paradoxical and therefore dynamic conception of Germanness was formulated and elaborated in the musical writings of the age of Romanticism. J. G. v. Herder's discovery of Volkslied was stimulated not merely by a deep interest in the purely human nature of the Nordic peoples but by a strong antipathy to the classical doctrines of art fully advocated by French neoclas- sicists. In a single idea of Volk, Herder intricately mingled a warning against the European cultural imperialism in the Baltic countries and a clear hostility towards the French hegemony in the West European culture. A veiled antagonism to French culture can also be detected in E. T. A. Hoffmann's aesthetics of instrumental music. He imputed the musical frivolity of his time to the atheistic trend originated in the French Enlightenment philosophy, which only led to the violent revolution. The developing idea of Germanness is finally molded by R. Wagner. In his operatic theory, he definitely pronounces the supremacy of German character and language over Italian and French nations. Radically reconciling the universal and the local, Wagner fearlessly identifies the purely human nature or the highest principle of aesthetics with the Germanness.