may 1, 1852 - Brendel's History of Music

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It places all facts relating to the history of music into an overriding system to give them meaning. The system Brendel used came from the idealist German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and is known as the dialectic.

As the first self-consciously Hegelian historian of music, Brendel cast his narrative in terms of successive emancipations, both of musicians and of the art of music itself. Before the sixteenth century all was primitive, mere "prehistory."To Brendel's ears, this music did not intelligibily express the ideas or feelings of individual creators. Musicians were slaves to teh mechanical rules of counterpoint, as people generally were enslaved by the dogmas of the early Church. The first great composer was Palestrina, who Brendel believed broke through to true spiritual expressivity, although not yet a personal one. The rise of opera around 1600 bore witness to fully human music freed from the sacred. The enxt stage came with the emancipation of music from words in the instrumental masterpieces of the German masters. Their music, now abel to realize its own essential spirit, was effectively a metaphor for the advancement of humanity toward self-realization.

For Brendel, the value of music was in how it embodied its own epoch's evolutionary synthesis and pointed the way to the next. The compsoer's job was to advance the tendencies inherent in the musical materials toward further autonomous evolution. It is hardly surprising that Brendel believed that the most advanced composers, hence the most valuable ones, were Germans: first Bach and Handel and then Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart. And needless to say, he resoundingly confirmed Beethoven's position as music's emancipator. To bring his story up to date, Brendel looked to Wagner's operas and to Liszt's orchestral music as the summit of musical achievement.

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