The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 3 of 3) — Schopenhauer — John Shaqi
The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 3 of 3)
Schopenhauer · en
a building is connected and rounded off by its symmetry. Only in the
latter that is exclusively in space which in the former is exclusively in
time. The mere feeling of this analogy has in the last thirty years called
forth the oft‐repeated, daring witticism, that architecture is frozen
music. The origin of this can be traced to Goethe; for, according to
Eckermann’s “Conversations,” vol. ii. p. 88, he said: “I have found among
my papers a page on which I call architecture a rigidified music; and
really there is something in it; the mood which is produced by
architecture approaches the effect of music.” Probably he let fall this
witticism much earlier in conversation, and in that case it is well known
that there were never wanting persons to pick up what he so let fall that
they might afterwards go about decked with it. For the rest, whatever
Goethe may have said, the analogy of music and architecture, which is here
referred by me to its sole ground, the analogy of rhythm with symmetry,
extends accordingly only to the outward form, and by no means to the inner
nature of the two arts, which is entirely different. Indeed it would be
absurd to wish to put on the same level in essential respects the most
limited and the weakest of all the arts, and the most far‐reaching and
powerful. As an amplification of the analogy pointed out, we might add
further, that when music, as it were in a fit of desire for independence,
seizes the opportunity of a pause to free itself from the control of
rhythm, to launch out into the free imagination of an ornate _cadenza_,
such a piece of music divested of all rhythm is analogous to the ruin
which is divested of symmetry, and which accordingly may be called, in the
bold language of the witticism, a frozen _cadenza_.