Music and Its Images as a Source of a Creative Myth

Abstract

Music was commonly regarded as one of the most powerful arts. In line with a very long tradition reaching back to the Pythagoreans and to Plato and Aristotle, it was its blend of mathematical structure and unusual power of “expression of affects” that was particularly highly regarded. Although music was initially considered as belonging to the circle of imitational arts, it gradually obtained the incomparable status of an absolute art. In particular, Music played an exceptional role in the early Romantic theories of art, when it was perceived as an epitome of artistic creation and the highest possible extension of human cognition through pure activity of the imagination. This article attempts to describe chosen aspects of the myth of music as a fulfi lment of man’s imaginary strivings by drawing on examples of Novalis (poetry and music as utopian arts of an idealiter construction) and of Robert Browning (music as a source of poetical imagination activated as a faculty of historical understanding).