Form as reasoned freedom: Adolph Bernhard Marx's theoretical and critical writings in the context of German Romantic philosophy

This dissertation centers on the writings of A. B. Marx, the German music theorist and critic best known for his naming and codification of sonata form. While the broad outlines of Marx's Sonatenform are now commonplace, the details of his discussion are seldom considered. Marx's seemingly arbitrary and unrigorous application of his own theories---and especially the fact that he provides no complete movement that exemplifies sonata form---have given him an undeserved reputation for empty formalism. Moreover, his frequent perorations on broad topics such as freedom or reason often appear to modern theorists as subjects of limited analytical use. However, when Marx's theories are recontextualized and read more closely, it emerges that his original formulation has been too easily criticized in isolation. His frequent invocations of poets and philosophers can be seen as a means of treating music, and music theory, as vital parts of the same intellectual sphere as philosophy, literature and aesthetic criticism. Marx's concept of musical form constantly balances its rules with the composer's freedom of musical choice, creating a microcosm of the much larger issue of how human freedom in general negotiates with the constraints of reason. For Marx, music is a variety of philosophy that demonstrates the essence of our better selves. The very peculiarities of Marx's theory then emerge as marks of a complex and erudite approach to music and form, in which there is more at stake than musical form or music theory, and which both depend and shed light on literary and philosophical precedents.;Chapter 1 provides an overview of Marx's career, the concepts central to his thought, and surveys the reception of his ideas in German and Anglo-American scholarship in the twentieth century. Chapter 2, through a close reading of one of Marx's early reviews of Beethoven, explores Marx's conception of musical form as the concretion of a work's Idea. In addition, the ways in which Marx both differs from and draws on Hegel's lectures on aesthetics provide a philosophical framework for Marx's thinking that is crucial to understanding his theories of form. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to Marx's composition treatise and his discussion of Rondo and Sonata forms, from which it becomes clear that these forms are far from being templates for musical construction. Marx's examples constitute a constant negotiation of the relationship between generalized formal types and the individual works taken to embody them. Form emerges as a particular kind of coherence that Marx sees as a relationship of cause and effect, or more emphatically as a variety of reason; in Marx's words, form is "the incarnation of thought in the art-work." Chapter 5, the final chapter, examines Marx's ambitious claim that the task of his treatise is to lead to freedom and places that claim in a broader intellectual context, in particular the treatment of freedom and history in writings by Schiller and Hegel. Once seen through this frame, Marx's ideas on musical form begin to touch on larger issues, since form offers us freedom in a variety of ways: through the mastery of past and present forms, and especially through a form's unfolding in time, which offers us a model for living and governing ourselves freely and rationally, by appearing free but not irrational, and reasoned but not constrained by the despotism of rules.