Sonatas and Essays:

Frederick II’s Sonata as Experienced Through the Lens of Kantian Aesthetics

Paul Dzekunov

The 18th century was, by all accounts, an explosive one. Be it the development of technologies such as the steam engine that would rapidly usher in the industrial revolution; the marked transition within the realm of music from the Baroque to the Classical (featuring increasingly recognizable names such as Johann Christian Bach, Joseph Haydn, and both Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart); or the burst of scientific, mathematical, and philosophical thinking that would both stamp this period as “The Age of Enlightenment” and play its part in inciting decades worth of revolutions and redrawing of political lines; it seems that it was within this pivotal century that modern European history truly began to set its roots. Yet one must remember that none of the aforementioned developments and innovations occurred within a vacuum. Even by the sheer virtue of a shared cultural “climate” of thought and affect, seemingly disparate fields and topics in history have demonstrated intriguing correlations. One of the most interesting of these relationships was between philosophy and music.

Before the 18th century, the relationship between philosophy and music was a tenuous one. While philosophers would certainly ponder music, and musicians would have their personal philosophies, music within traditional philosophical discussions often served more as a device for advancing larger arguments and theories concerning “Natural Law” than as a proper subject of discussion within its own right. Likewise, within the musical sphere, proper discussion of the implications of philosophy within compositional and performance practice was often limited to the most well-trained and/or educated of musical professionals, rendering these discussions as distinctly academic in nature and lacking a sense of contemporaneity with larger trends in music. However, it was within the burst of enlightenment-era thinking that dedicated and rigorous considerations of aesthetic (both within and outside of the arts) began to flourish, with philosophers like Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Christian Wolff setting the groundwork in aesthetic theory that would later be developed to great effect by the likes of Immanuel Kant. By a similar token, the increasing ease of publication and improving public literacy allowed for critical and artistic discourse to develop a more public presence and appeal, allowing these newfound theories to find an audience amongst common practitioners, as well as reinvigorate topics of discourse amongst the aristocracy.

Flute Concert with Frederick the Great, by Adolph von Menzel, 1852

Within this aristocracy, one of the most fascinating figures to consider is none other than King Frederick II of Prussia, who - after inheriting the throne to a still very young Kingdom of Prussia - made large strides in support of the arts, development of public infrastructure and education, political reformation, and expansion of the country through military conquest. These actions both cemented him in history as a great general and enlightened monarch and earned him the epithet “Frederick the Great”. While many know of Frederick II for his political achievements, fewer are familiar with the full extent of his involvement within the arts, namely that he did, in fact, possess some notable merit as both a composer and performing flautist. A good example of this merit can be seen in his Sonata in E minor (SpiF 154).

Concerning this piece itself, initial impressions render some interesting observations. It comes in three movements (a Grave, an Allegro, and a Presto) with the slowest of the three starting off the piece - an intriguing decision, seeing as how the majority of sonatas at the time had a general fast-slow-fast organization to their movements - before gradually becoming more energetic and technical across the performance. The overall texture is notably simple and focused, featuring an often-virtuosic solo flute accompanied by a continuo line that would have likely been played by cello and/or harpsichord. Throughout these movements, one can notice a prevalent usage of triplet and/or dotted sixteenth rhythmic patterns that feel evocative of the rhythms out of the French opera and Galant traditions. Moreover, given the general “attitude” of the piece in highlighting the solo flute and its interaction with the accompanying instruments, it’s also strongly evocative of an instrumental solo concerto, with an arpeggiated ascent in m. 12 of the Allegro being especially reminiscent of some of the patterns used in Antonio Vivaldi’s violin concertos. It's possible that such forms and patterns were directly impressed upon Frederick II by his teacher Johann Jaochim Quantz, who was known to have studied Vivaldi’s solo concertos.

On the surface, all of these aforementioned qualities may simply come across as simple products of their time, either reflective of the growing popularity of styles such as the Galant or the Italian concerto, or simply the result of an aristocrat wanting both to show off his skills as a composer and musician and entertain at the ever-popular soirée. Yet these same qualities can invite some intriguing considerations when one begins to adopt a perspective relevant to the developing aesthetic philosophy of the time, namely the rationalist ideas exploring judgements of aesthetic and beauty, as outlined in Immanuel Kant’s seminal publication, The Critique of Judgment (1790).

"All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason."

- Immanuel Kant

The Critique of Judgement is an expansive philosophical publication featuring dozens of chapters that elaborate upon and clarify points in Kant’s prior works, those being the “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781) and the “Critique of Practical Reason” (1788). Thus, it is within the Critique of Judgement that we find his most developed arguments toward his overarching attempt to reconcile a relationship between the experience of aesthetics and beauty, as well as more metaphysical concepts pertaining to theology and moral theory. However, for our purposes here, it will be sufficient to merely cover his definitions pertaining to judgments of taste, as outlined in the section of Critique of Judgement titled “Analytic of the Beautiful.”

Left: Title page for the first edition of Kant's Critique of Judgement, 1790

Kant starts off this section with the postulation that there are four primary “moments” (with the fourth one being ignored here due to redundancy with the second) that are implicitly contained within a simple judgment of an object to be “beautiful.” Within the first “moment,” Kant describes an initial development of two types of judgements, those being judgments of agreeableness and judgements of good, with judgements of agreeableness being how an object may appeal to or “gratify” our senses, and judgements of good being how an object appeals to our sense of rationality. Concerning both of these judgements, Kant emphasizes that, in their purest forms, these judgements originate from a position of disinterest, i.e., that the aesthetic properties of the object are self-evident to the viewer and effectively compel said viewer into making that judgement:

We wish only to know if this mere representation of the object is accompanied in me with satisfaction, however indifferent I may be as regards the existence of the object of this representation. We easily see that in saying it is beautiful and in showing that I have taste, I am concerned, not with that in which I depend on the existence of the object, but with that which I make out of this representation in myself (Kant 1790, §2, 5:205).

The second of these moments is characterized by the recognition that the pleasure we possess in an object is a universal one, and that if one declares something as beautiful “he supposes in others the same satisfaction—he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things” (Kant 1790, §7, 5:212). Kant also goes on to make an important addition to this idea, suggesting that truly universal beauty is capable of what he refers to as the “free play” of “cognitive powers,” where our understanding and imagination stimulate one another. For example, the imagination can pick out new patterns for our understanding to ponder, while our understanding of a work of art can, likewise, provide alternative perspectives that excite the imagination. This interplay of the imagination and understanding, Kant argues, is universal to everyone and, as a result, any sense of pleasure that is derived from this interplay is, likewise, a universal experience.

Within the third moment Kant outlines what is arguably the most important concept directly relevant to his views of aesthetics within the arts, that being the recognition of “purposiveness.” He goes on to explain that for all the colors, textures, and generally pleasing qualities that a work of art may have, such qualities are limited to being mere sensations relevant to our aforementioned judgements of agreeableness, and that, due to it being so rooted in our subjective experience, “we can hardly say that the pleasantness of one colour or the tone of one musical instrument is judged preferable to that of another in the same way by everyone” (Kant 1790, §14, 5:224). Thus, he argues, it is through the “purposiveness” of the formal structures one finds within the arts - such as the spatial organization of a painting, or the harmonic structures of a musical composition - that these qualities can be unified into something that incites the aforementioned “free play of cognitive powers” and ultimately serves a more objective and universal sensation of beauty:

It is not what gratifies in sensation but what pleases by means of its form that is fundamental for taste. The colours which light up the sketch belong to the charm; they may indeed enliven the object for sensation, but they cannot make it worthy of contemplation and beautiful. In most cases they are rather limited by the requirements of the beautiful form (Kant 1790, §14, 5:225).

One may notice that throughout all three of these definitions Kant consistently emphasizes the importance of there being some form of rationale within our judgements of taste before we can even begin to consider an experience to be one of actual beauty. In many ways, this is to be expected. The 18th century was, after all, greatly characterized by the developments of scientific and rationalist thinking that effectively permeated all disciplines within art and philosophy, with Kant hardly being the exception. However, even within a more holistic perspective, this criterion for a rationale behind beauty is still intuitive in the sense that it can be interpreted as the requirement that a work of art is, to some extent, capable of engaging with the more conscious processes of its audience. After all, any work of art is doomed if it cannot engage with its audience, and arguably one the most intuitive measures of this engagement is the degree to which audience members think they understand it.

Portrait of Immanuel Kant by Johann Gottlieb Becker, 1768

Frederick the Great of Prussia Being Taught to Play the Flute By Johann Joachim Quantz, artist unknown. Royal Academy of Music.

Within the context of Frederick II’s Sonata, all of these aforementioned ideas reveal themselves in innumerable ways, yet I shall focus on but a couple of them. For starters, in terms of the judgments of agreeableness, I think it is safe to say that its simple existence as a cohesive musical composition already affords it the sonorous appeal to the senses that music is generally known for, that being the simple pleasure of patterned sound that we don’t get to hear in our day to day environments. Moreover, I’d argue that the texture of the piece - accomplished through the combination of dynamic flute playing over some form of string instrument - in and of itself provides an additional appeal to the senses through relative timbral novelty and a certain sense of “impressiveness” that is only possible through skilled performance.

Related to this sense of impressiveness, recall how I mentioned the arrangement of the movements within the piece to be relatively peculiar by starting with the slow Grave movement? Well, there are some interesting thoughts that occur to me upon reviewing this observation.

First, this judgement of such a structure as being “peculiar” is only possible under the assumption that I possess at least some sort of understanding concerning the common practices in 18th century Sonatas and how this piece deviates from it. Thus, if I permit myself to claim such an understanding, then this observation can be interpreted as that same understanding fulfilling its role within my “cognitive free play” by providing the needed perspective for noticing such discrepancies that my imagination can now speculate upon.

Second, concerning this imagination, there comes the speculation that the movements are arranged Grave-Allegro-Presto (effectively “Slow-Medium-Fast'') in order to create an “interest ramp” that grows in energy and technicality with each movement. Moreover, this speculation is accompanied by the thought that Frederick II would have been incentivized to organize his sonata like this in order to effectively “one-up” himself via performing increasingly impressive passages and make for a more entertaining performance overall within one of his Soirées.

Finally, this contribution from my imaginative speculation is itself capable of inspiring me to continue to leverage my musical understanding and ponder whether other observed elements - such as the supposed French and Italian influences reflected within the rhythm and arrangement of the piece respectively - confirm or contrast this newfound interpretation, which (in turn) is bound to surface new perspectives that feed yet more speculations in an endless feedback loop that, ultimately, is the essential form of that ever-important cognitive interplay.

All of that said, regardless of Frederick II’s true motives behind his compositional decisions, and regardless of what level of actual understanding and creativity I may bring with me to the experience, what I’ve described here is merely my experience as dissected by Kant's ideas; an experience that is, ultimately, the same process that Kant describes as available to anyone and everyone who wishes to engage with art. Though I may come across as technical and verbose in describing this experience, I must note that all of the aforementioned thoughts and speculations occurred rather spontaneously and intuitively. This, in turn, goes to suggest that, as per Kant's description of disinterested judgements, the piece does, in fact, possess an ability to invite a cognitive interplay within me, outside of whatever conscious effort I may make. As per Kant’s theory, my grappling with the underlying “purposiveness” of the musical elements I presumed to understand is what ultimately drives my engagement with the piece and elevates my aesthetic experience therein to a point where I can in fact claim this sonata to possess beauty; and now that I’ve shared just such perspectives with you dear reader, I’m confident that you too will benefit from exploring the dynamics behind your intuitive sense of aesthetics and that you too are subject to this same beauty within your own sense of play between some (hopefully) newfound perspectives and your own brand of creativity.

Bibliography

AccademiaOttoboni. “Frederick II the great flute sonata e minor SpiF154.” December 22, 2014. YouTube video, 8:38. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QTodPVrHoM.

Frederick II. Sonate Nr. 154. Ed. Loïc Chahine. 2012. International Music Score Library Project. Last Accessed February 25, 2021. https://imslp.org/wiki/Flute_Sonata_in_E_minor,_SpiF_154_(Frederick_II).

Helm, E. Eugene and Derek McCulloch. “Frederick II, King of Prussia [Frederick II; Frederick the Great].” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Last Modified July 25, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.10176.

Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Trans. J. H. Bernard. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. 2015. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48433/48433-h/48433-h.htm.

Matherne, Samantha. "Kant's Expressive Theory of Music." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72:2 (2014), 129-45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43282321.

Weber, William. "The Contemporaneity of Eighteenth-Century Musical Taste." The Musical Quarterly 70:2 (1984), 175-94. http://www.jstor.org/stable/742209.

Paul Dzekunov

Paul Dzekunov majored in Music Technology at UMBC and is an aspiring polymath who, outside of being an odd musician, also partakes in:

Cooking and baking “advanced” recipes
Being an absolute synth nerd
Recreational discrete mathematics
Practicing being a “card cheat”
TTRPG game design

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