Hässliche Musik

Aesthetics in the second half of the 19th century (Carl Rosenkranz, Christian Hermann Weisse) never defines the ugly as an independent category, but rather derives it from the idea of beauty. Ugliness is either understood in a dialectic way as the negation of beauty or as a decadent transformation of beauty becoming funny or even ridiculous. Rosenkranz even comprehends lies and madness as deformations of a former beauty. Taking deformation as a criterion for musical analysis, however, can hardly be successful as any variational development of a motif entails a kind of deformation. In Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen musical ugliness is rendered by a variety of features. The figure of Mime seems to be least complicated for musical analysis in this respect, since Wagner creates a kind of self-analytical distance by designing Mime as an old-fashioned and anachronistic character, making him a precise counterpart to the modern genius incorporated into the musical idiom of Siegfried. The difference between craftsmanship on the one side and creation on the other side is, therefore, no longer a matter of style, it becomes more and more aporetic to separate a “beautiful” from an “ugly” idiom by an analysis of the musical score alone. The musical idiom of Alberich, through which the idea of Evil is probably articulated in the most obvious manner, may be analyzed under the perspectives of deformation as symbolized by the diminished chord which is a key element of this idiom. This article gives a number of further examples of Wagner’s musical conceptualization of ugliness in the Ring. Music aesthetics and music theory merge in the idea of a deficient beauty (“Negativ-Schönes”) which takes a significant role within this process.