I am a useless heap of formless content, but here’s something: I was telling J. about how I always associate Schubert and Schumann with Schelling and Schlegel and Schiller and those guys, because of contemporaneity and my inability to tell all the damn kraut names apart, and all at once we realized that a lot of German philosophers pair up pretty intuitively with German composers (construing “German” a bit broadly). These were the obvious ones:
Bach :: Leibniz (each voice a monad, yet they synchronize by divine fiat!)
Haydn :: Spinoza
Mozart -> Beethoven :: Kant -> Hegel
Schubert/the Schumanns :: Schiller/the Schlegels/Schelling
Wagner :: Nietzsche
Frege -> Vienna Circle :: Schoenberg -> Second Viennese School
But we had plenty of unanswered questions. There wasn’t a clear Brahms in the running (Fichte? Novalis?). J. thought that Mahler should be Husserl; I thought he should be Schopenhauer; and then there’s Bruckner and Strauss to deal with. The twentieth century got completely hazy—is Henze Habermas? Is Adorno Stockhausen? Who’s going to be Wittgenstein and Heidegger? Dear web, your thoughts are welcome.
schopenhauer should clearly be wagner. nietzsche dumped him!
Ah yes - "Wagner as Educator!"
adorno ought to be his composition teacher, berg!
"No Teddie, it's not that there's anything wrong with your tone rows. You put it all together very correctly. There's just something... not there...."
no way, beethoven has to be kant. mozart is more of a wolff figure. I'm going to say Wagner is Hegel (though if we're being nasty, how about Liszt?), schopenhauer is bruckner, fichte is chopin (or maybe liszt). and spinoza is biber, for sure.
I like Wolff : Mozart :: Kant : Beethoven because that fixes up the chronology with the Sch guys. Hegel : Wagner gets both the influence and the pomposity lined up aright. Maybe Liszt can be Fichte and Chopin Novalis, though we're getting outside Germany there.
and frege really has to be reger
wittgenstein is webern, ain't he?
The Tractatus fits Webern like a right-handed glove turned around in four-dimensional space (though I think you need to keep Frege as Schoenberg then). But the later Wittgenstein? If Webern were somehow reincarnated in even stranger form after that bullet got him in Salzburg....
- i'd buy mahler as schopenhauer. we still need a nietzsche.
- scriabin
- who is schoenberg?
- carnap or ernst mach
in which case berg can be carnap
- husserl is tricky
alkan, maybe?
- hmm... and then a Heidegger to come after
- stravinsky
for sure
but then husserl can't really be alkan
he'd have to be debussy or something
but that doesn't really fit
well, if heidegger is stravinsky, then husserl should be rimsky-korsakov, i guess. hmm.
