The late seventeenth century saw the creation of a new affective category, ‘tender passions’ or ‘sentiments’, by female writers such as Madeleine de Scudéry in the salons of Louis XIV’s France. From here into the eighteenth century, sentiments were developed through airs, novels and drama. Contrary to prevalent images of eighteenth-century communicative clarity, sentiments were more socially complex and less easily legible than the ‘passions’ of the Baroque. Their expression on stage required a new realistic dramaturgy, building on the flexible use of ensemble, gesture and mime in comic opera. A characteristically sentimental conception of the dramatic ‘tableau’ resulted. Theorized by Diderot and Rousseau in the 1750s, tableaux aimed to evoke and sustain ‘tender’ sentiments of pity, affection and social solidarity through dramatically heightened moments in the action. These relied on a more spellbinding theatrical illusion, intended to absorb the audience within its all-engrossing atmosphere, and to which music contributed by supporting and highlighting gestures over rhetorical set pieces.

At the other end of the philosophical spectrum from Saint-Simonian ‘materialism’, though sharing its rhetoric of progress, was Hegelian Idealism. It influenced not only critics such as Franz Brendel and A. B. Marx, but also the ‘New German School’ of Liszt and Wagner. Though Hegel opposed Romanticism, applications of his aesthetics to music by Marx and Liszt remained closer to it, noting the convergence of music and literature on Romantic subjectivity and responding with the new genre of ‘programme music’. Another Romantic project, the ‘new mythology’, was realized in Wagner’s operatic Gesamtkunstwerk. Its more ‘realist’ approach to feeling was derived from Feuerbach’s post-Hegelian philosophy and little changed by Wagner’s later enthusiasm for Schopenhauer. Though overshadowed by his universalizing and exclusionary goal of a ‘purely human’ art (one that had no space for Jewish artists), Wagner’s aesthetic technique remained faithful to the idea of theatrical illusion inaugurated a century earlier by Rousseau and Diderot.

Though not often highlighted in literature on music aesthetics, the Saint-Simonians, a group of French Romantic socialists, exerted widespread influence on politics, philosophy and the arts after 1830. Their conception of music as a political-affective tool in the hands of an artistic avant-garde impacted the aesthetics and practice of musique populaire, a category embracing ‘popular’ and ‘folk’ music. Pierre-Jean de Béranger, the most popular writer of chansons in this period, declared his sympathy for the cause of radical social change in song, while his friend the working-class socialist philosopher Pierre Leroux influenced music aesthetics through his alliance with the novelist George Sand (Aurore Dupin). Drawing on Leroux’s writings for its philosophy of history, Sand’s major ‘music novel’, Consuelo, advocated for musique populaire, as its operatic singer heroine finally abandons the stage and becomes a travelling folk musician.

A gap divides modern ideas of genius from the sentimental conceptions of the 1760s and 1770s. Though talent was a common feature, musical genius for Rousseau and Diderot was integrally related to expression, affective identification with a community, and an orientation towards ‘the people’. Also important was ‘enthusiasm’, originally a type of religious inspiration fostered after 1700 within radical Protestant groups such as Count Zinzendorf’s Moravians, who radically challenged contemporary ideas of masculinity, sexuality and religious faith. Enthusiasm’s secularization with Goethe and Herder initiated the countercultural ‘period of genius’ (Genieperiode) later known as the Sturm und Drang. Its composers, such as J. M. Kraus, Neefe and Reichardt, lavished attention on popular, commercial forms such as German comic opera and ‘popular song’ (Volkslied) – priorities only challenged when the movement’s opponents such as J. N. Forkel tactically redefined ‘genius’ to centre it on technical mastery rather than inspiration and expression.

The establishment of an objectivist, anti-Romantic tradition in early twentieth-century aesthetics was no purely philosophical breakthrough, nor (as some have argued) a resigned response to the disasters of twentieth-century history, but in significant part an expression of elitism, fascism, and contempt for the masses, one already prominent before 1914. Writers from Schenker to Adorno insisted aggressively on the immanent structural virtues of master-composers’ scores and the irrelevance, or danger, of listeners’ own feelings. The same music-analytical prejudices still vitiate many contemporary attempts within the so-called ‘affective turn’ to theorize emotions and their history in music, not just in musicology but also in psychology. The very end of the book turns toward popular music and cultural studies as more productive embodiments of affective relationality, showing the resonances and continuities these possess with the sentimental-Romantic traditions explored in the book’s chapters.

The Introduction critiques the dominant critical-musicological picture of Romanticism as a nineteenth-century aesthetic paradigm emphasizing artistic autonomy and escape from the social, and posits an alternative. Romantic ideas of sociality in art and music differed from modern materialist accounts in highlighting the mediatory role of emotion or feeling alongside further ‘ideal’ or imaginative factors in listeners’ experience. Such ideas converge with recent contributions in sociology, music studies, anthropology and philosophy which frame affect in social, holistic terms as atmosphere, Stimmung (mood or “attunement”) and correspondence. These are summarized in the term ‘affective relationality’. In both musicology after Carl Dahlhaus and the recent history of emotions, a watershed c.1800 has separated the Romantic paradigm from its eighteenth-century predecessors, instead of paying attention to the continuity between eighteenth-century sentimentality and Romanticism. This ‘sentimental-Romantic’ continuum is exemplified by Mme de Staël, whose writings’ resonances with the book’s chapters are explored.

Eduard Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (1854) constitutes the nemesis of the sentimental-Romantic ‘aesthetics of feeling’. It did not however completely expel emotion from music, as some thought, but from music aesthetics, framed as a new ‘science’ equally removed from historical and political context. This position differed radically from the Left Hegelian politics and Romantic aesthetics Hanslick had espoused a few years earlier. His change of heart was prompted by the revolution of 1848 and the subsequent growth of ‘Herbartianism’, an Austrian ‘state philosophy’ synthesized from the anti-Idealist thinkers J. F. Herbart and Bernard Bolzano. Hanslick’s own Herbartian programme had a direct impact on the Viennese tradition of musicology, and a more indirect influence over late Romantic thought on music, pushing toward a more analytical, ‘objective’ concept of music’s dynamic processes. By World War I, ‘energetic’ aesthetics had replaced Romantic emotions with an unsentimental vocabulary of forms, lines and energy-flows.

The ‘idea of absolute music’ proposed by Carl Dahlhaus has encouraged a view of German Romantic music aesthetics as preoccupied with instrumental music, and more interested in lofty metaphysics than emotion. Yet writers such as Novalis and Hoffmann saw the ‘Absolute’ precisely in emotional terms, and argued that its presentation was the task of a new, socially accessible genre of national opera. This would draw its subjects from the popular mythological and ‘romantic’ realm of fairy tale and fantasy, while ‘pure’ music – instrumental and church genres – was imagined in the sensational contemporary terms of the gothic. When instrumental genres were eventually revaluated above opera, it was because they were held to embody another popular trait valued by Hoffmann – humour. Strongly promoted by German critics in the 1830s, humour and the ‘humoristic’ posited the exploitation of emotional contrast as the highest aim of instrumental music after Beethoven.