(Ger.).
A musical aesthetic associated with north Germany during the middle of the 18th century, and embodied in what was called the ‘Empfindsamer Stil’. Its aims were to achieve an intimate, sensitive and subjective expression; gentle tears of melancholy were one of its most desired responses. The term is usually translated as ‘sensibility’ (in the 18th-century or Jane Austen sense, which derives from the French sensibilité). ‘Sentimental’ is another translation, sanctioned by Lessing when rendering Sterne’s Sentimental Journey as Empfindsame Reise. One modern scholar, W.S. Newman, gives ‘ultrasensitive’ as an English equivalent.
German ‘Empfindsamkeit’ was part of a wider European literary and aesthetic phenomenon, largely British in origin (e.g. Shaftesbury’s cult of feeling, and Richardson’s novel Pamela, 1741), which posited immediacy of emotional response as a surer guide than intellect to proper moral behaviour. C.P.E. Bach (henceforth called simply Bach), who was close to Lessing and other progressive literary figures, best embodied the ideals of ‘Empfindsamkeit’ with respect to music. In his Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (1753) he stated that music’s main aims were to touch the heart and move the affections; to do this he specified that it was necessary to play from the soul (‘aus der Seele’). The style of music he chose was often indistinguishable from the international idiom of finely nuanced, periodic melody, supported by light-textured accompaniment: it was a reaction to the ‘strict’ or ‘learned’ style and elsewhere was apt to go under the name ‘galant’. A main difference was that the north Germans tended to avoid lavish decoration: both Bach and Quantz cautioned against the over-use of embellishments. Before them, Marpurg had written approvingly of the Berlin school, saying ‘The performances of the Grauns, Quantz, Bach, et al., are never characterized by masses of embellishments; impressive, rhetorical and moving qualities spring from entirely different things, which do not create as much stir, but touch the heart the more directly’. The most easily identifiable ‘rhetorical’ device was instrumental recitative. It evolved in imitation of the elaborate or obbligato recitative in opera seria, of which Hasse and his circle at Dresden were the most admired exponents in Germany. Bach provided a fine example in his ‘Prussian’ Sonatas, written in 1740. The so-called ‘redende Prinzip’ of Bach departs from recitative, but goes far beyond it in his keyboard and chamber music, for example, in the trio representing a ‘Dialogue between a Sanguinary and a Melancolic’ (1749). Another fundamental element in Bach’s style, related to recitative by its freedom of rhythm, was the rhapsodic manner of the keyboard fantasy, as evolved by Frescobaldi and Froberger, kept alive by German organists, and passed on by Bach’s father. While Bach’s friends increasingly saw the need to make explicit by words or programme the rhapsodic and ‘speaking’ elements in his music (e.g. Gerstenberg’s fitting of Hamlet’s monologue to the music of the final Probestück accompanying the Versuch), Bach himself held back from verbalization.
In literature the most influential model of ‘Empfindsamkeit’ was provided by Klopstock’s Messias (1748), a redefinition of the epic in which internal, subjective events predominate and the external drama exists only as a point of reference. The poet Ramler wrote the Passion cantata Der Tod Jesu in imitation of Klopstock. As set by C.H. Graun in 1755, it immediately became the most central and successful monument of musical ‘Empfindsamkeit’. The drama is expressed mostly through the reflections and emotions of anonymous devouts, who use the present tense. Their musical speech is fashionably modern, relying on the aria types as well as the obbligato recitative of opera seria, of which Graun was the most important German master, after Hasse. His setting of ‘Gethsemane!’ (ex.1) shows this conjunction of sentimental meditation and theatrical musical language. The plethora of melodic sighs, the augmented 6th chord with Phrygian cadence for questions, the iterated quavers or semiquavers to express trembling, are all operatic clichés; more individual and expressive are the choice of darker flat keys and the easy enharmonic manoeuvring.
A critic writing in Cramer’s Magazin der Musik in 1783 (i/2, p.1352) still preferred Graun’s Der Tod Jesu to a more recent setting, saying that ‘Gethsemane! Gethsemane!’ ‘brought one to tears because of its touching, heart-rending feeling’. Yet, even very early, voices were raised against the sentimentality that made Graun so popular. In the article ‘Oratorio’ for his Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4), Sulzer, writing with advice from J.P. Kirnberger and J.A.P. Schulz, took exception to Der Tod Jesu, saying ‘most arias are not differentiated enough from opera arias; precisely this softness and the exaggerated, almost voluptuous polish of the melodies, and in some places even playfulness kill the feeling [Empfindung]’. In the same way Lessing, the man who founded sentimental, bourgeois tragedy in Germany, ironically condemned Klopstock’s lyrics, saying that they were ‘so voller Empfindung, dass man oft gar nichts dabey empfindet’ (Sämtliche Schriften, iii, Brief 51). Schiller took a similar line when surreptitiously reviewing his own play, Die Räuber (1782), and saying that its incredibly sentimental heroine ‘has read too much Klopstock’. Goethe pronounced judgment on the movement when, looking back at his Werther, he admitted its sentimentality was indebted to Sterne, and concluded ‘there arose a kind of tender–passionate aesthetic which, because the humorous irony of the British was not given to us, usually had to degenerate into a sorry self-torment’.
Writing generally of ‘Musik’ in his encyclopedia, Sulzer put a finer point on the relationship of modern German style to the galant idiom: ‘that music in recent times has the nice and very supple genius and fine sensibility [Empfindsamkeit] of the Italians to thank is beyond doubt. But also most of what has spoilt the true taste has also come out of Italy, particularly the dominance of melodies that say nothing and merely tickle the ear’. Schulz, who contributed music articles from the letter S onwards, spelt out this criticism further: ‘The sonatas of the present-day Italians are characterized by a bustle of sounds succeeding each other arbitrarily without any other purpose than to gratify the insensitive ears of the layman’ (article ‘Sonata’). In order to give an example of music that went beyond such lowly aims, Schulz resorted to the keyboard sonatas of Bach, praising them because ‘they are so communicative [sprechend] that one believes oneself to be perceiving not tones but a distinct speech, which sets and keeps in motion our imagination and feelings [Empfindungen]’. Bach’s own remarks about the difference between his art and that of the modern Italians (among whom he included Schobert and his younger brother, Johann Christian) are in a letter of 1768: ‘Their music falls upon the ear and fills it up, but leaves the heart empty; in Italy now, as Galuppi himself told me, the mode no longer tolerates Adagios, but only noisy Allegros, or at most an Andantino’. The implication that Galuppi, greatest master of the galant keyboard idiom in Italy and a personal friend of Bach’s, was in sympathy with his ideals, lends further credence to the existence of a galant-‘empfindsam’ symbiosis; another implication is that the aesthetic ideals of the mid-century were yielding ground by about 1770 to a showier and stormier phase, so-called ‘Sturm und Drang’.
Some historians have posited ‘Empfindsamkeit’ as a musical parallel to ‘Sturm und Drang’. The dramatic fluidity sought by both encourages such a parallel. Bach wrote that he wanted to express many affects, closely following upon one another; and emphasis upon a fluid, transitional discourse, ranging quickly from one emotion to another, can be found in many of his pieces. Yet the intimate, almost private, aspect of Bach’s art represents a quality that helps define ‘Empfindsamkeit’ and set it apart as a parallel phenomenon, one that anticipates and runs alongside the more popular appeal of ‘Sturm und Drang’. Bach’s favourite instrument was the clavichord. The boundaries of his artistic world and the ideals of his generation were not such as could embrace all the revolutionary visions of young Herder, Goethe and Schiller. The difference was more of degree than of kind. Even as late as about 1785 Schubart, a typical ‘Stürmer’, wrote in the Ideen praising the clavichord as the ‘empfindsame’ instrument par excellence, calling it ‘this lonely, melancholy, inexpressively sweet instrument … whoever does not prefer to bluster, rage and storm, whose heart overflows often and readily in sweet feelings, he passes by the harpsichord and the piano and chooses – a clavichord’. Bach, unlike his friend Benda, drew back from melodrama, and even resisted attempts made by literary friends like Gerstenberg to set texts under his fantasies. They may be easily enrolled under the banner of Sturm und Drang; by his caution, his reluctance to indulge in theatrics beyond the scope of his keyboard, Bach may not.
See also Classical; Enlightenment; Galant; Rococo; Sturm und Drang.
MGG2 (W. Hirschmann)
NewmanSCE
J.H. Campe: ‘Von der nöthigen Sorge für die Erhaltung des Gleichgewichts unter den menschlichen Kräften. Besondere Warnung vor dem Modefehler die Empfindsamkeit zu überspannen’, Allgemeine Revision des gesammten Schul- und Erziehungswesens (Hamburg, 1785)
C.F.D. Schubart: Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Vienna, 1806/R)
E.F. Schmid: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und seine Kammermusik (Kassel, 1931)
A. Schering: ‘Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und das “redende Prinzip” in der Musik’, JbMP 1938, 13–29
H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Das Ausdrucksprinzip im musikalische Sturm und Drang’, Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte, xxix (1955), 323–49
L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht: ‘Sturm und Drang in der deutschen Klaviermusik von 1753–1763’, Mf, x (1957), 466–79
W.J. Mitchell, ed. and trans.: Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (New York, 1959)
R. Wyler: Form- und Stiluntersuchungen zum ersten Satz der Klaviersonaten Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs (Biel, 1960)
P. Barford: The Keyboard Music of C.P.E. Bach (London, 1965)
W.S. Newman: ‘Emanuel Bach’s Autobiography’, MQ, li (1965), 363–72
G. Kaiser: Von der Aufklärung bis zum Sturm und Drang (Gutersloh, 1966, 3/1979 as Aufklärung, Empfindsamkeit, Sturm und Drang)
F.R. Bosonnet: ‘Die Bedeutung des Begriffs “Empfindsamkeit” für die deutsche Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts’, GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 352–5
E. Helm: ‘The “Hamlet” Fantasy and the Literary Element in C.P.E. Bach’s Music’, MQ, lviii (1972), 277–96
G. Sauder: Empfindsamkeit, i: Voraussetzungen und Elemente (Stuttgart, 1974); ii: Quellen und Dokumente (Stuttgart, 1980)
U. Karthaus, ed.: Sturm und Drang und Empfindsamkeit (Stuttgart, 1976)
P. Hohendahl: Der europäische Roman der Empfindsamkeit (Wiesbaden, 1977)
DANIEL HEARTZ/BRUCE ALAN BROWN