Dietrich von Hildebrand on the Appreciation of Music

Dietrich von Hildebrand was a convert to Catholicism whose parents were friends of Richard Wagner. He was a great lover of music, especially the "German Tradition" of classical music.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Michael De Sapio

In his lectures about three musical geniuses—Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert—Dietrich von Hildebrand shows how the integration of music with spiritual and philosophic insight can enrich our musical understanding.

Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, by Dietrich von Hildebrand, trans. John Henry Crosby (109 pages, Hildebrand Project, 2025)

When a distinguished Catholic philosopher discourses on three distinguished composers of Western classical music, we listen. And when that philosopher is Dietrich von Hildebrand, we expect wonderful insights. Here, von Hildebrand’s lectures about three musical geniuses—Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert—is appearing in English for the first time, courtesy of John Henry Crosby and his Hildebrand Project. To say that Hildebrand was a music lover would be true but woefully incomplete. Born in Florence, he grew up in a highly artistic and musical environment, his parents being friends of Wagner, no less, and his father a renowned sculptor. Music was deeply important to Hildebrand throughout his life—and when we say music, we should understand the Western art music tradition and, more specifically, the Austro-German branch of that tradition. This is clear from the range of composers Hildebrand discusses in these essays; besides the three composers of the title, the index shows references to Bach, Bruckner, Gluck, Schumann, Wagner, and Weber. The only non-Germans mentioned in the book are the Italian opera masters Verdi and Rossini (Hildebrand is obviously an opera fan, full of insights about the combination of music and drama).

There is, of course, an established tradition of seeing German music as to some extent synonymous with “classical music” itself. Probably many classical music fans today fall into this way of thinking, whether consciously or not. The German tradition (of course including Austria) is often considered to embody the most profound intellectual, philosophical, and emotional dimensions of music as such.

Now, I think there’s something to be said for the view of German music as bringing to fulfillment the deepest and highest aspirations of Western art music—but within a particular slice of Western musical history, i.e., roughly Bach through Mahler. This stretch of time is not the whole, but it is important and constitutes the majority of most listeners’ experience of what we call (for better or worse) “classical music.”

Even within this period, Germany’s dominance was not unchallenged—just think of Italian opera, French ballet, or the nationalist music of the Romantic era, especially that by Slavic composers attempting to break free from German influence. But it’s hard to argue with the depth and quality that Austrian and German composers contributed to Western music during this long stretch of time, including the three figures that Hildebrand examines in this book.

Although the supremacy of the German tradition seems an underlying assumption to Hildebrand’s reflections, he also has a generous spirit, free from ideology. Hildebrand insists that various artistic geniuses of the great tradition are complementary, not at war with each other. As someone who bemoans the critical tendency to pit great artists and styles against one another (something I’m sure I myself have been guilty of in the past), I appreciated this insight. More specifically, Hildebrand laments the tendency to take sides either in favor of Mozart against Beethoven, or the reverse. Such partisan attitudes should have no place in art, though they have provided the spark for aesthetic debate through the ages.

Hildebrand is not beholden to critical or academic fashion. He is a philosopher, not a musicologist, and his reflections are not limited to the technical side of music. As such, his essays will be appreciated by general readers interested in the true and the beautiful, as well as by those with musical training. Writing about music can fall into two extremes. On the one hand, musical scholars can concentrate on technical and historical details to the point where music’s soul, its spiritual import and emotional core, get lost. At the other extreme is the stuffy-Victorian school of program note-writing, which produces a lot of emotional effusion about “The Great Masters” without shedding any light on the nuts-and-bolts questions of what makes the music sound the way it does.

Hildebrand avoids both these extremes, playing in a different ballpark altogether—one in which both the spiritual and the aesthetic dimensions of music are honored. Hildebrand is an aestheticist, concerned with “the world of the specifically artistic.” Music is not subordinated to morality or philosophy; though it can of course express those things, it does so in a specifically artistic medium, namely that of organized sound. This means that understanding what makes music great will involve understanding the technical processes behind music’s composition (e.g., how Beethoven develops and expands his short thematic motifs). But the greatness is not limited, not entirely encompassed by, those technical features.

But no matter how you slice it, writing about music is hard work. Few things annoy more in music criticism than play-by-play analyses in which the critic tries to describe things that happen in the score (“The violins present a broad theme, garlanded by flute arabesques over a continuous diminuendo…”). Such writing means next to nothing unless you have actually heard the music, or are listening to it as you read. Hildebrand’s emphasis on capturing the aesthetic qualities that a work conveys strikes me as the right approach to take.

Hildebrand’s talent as a writer on music particularly shines in the middle chapter, on Beethoven. Beethoven has been needlessly pitted against Mozart and other composers, and Hildebrand debunks these false contrasts. I once read a glib aphorism: “Bach tells us what it’s like to be the universe, Mozart tells us what it’s like to be human, and Beethoven tells us what it’s like… to be Beethoven.” Hildebrand shows this to be plain nonsense. Beethoven is not the herald of prideful subjectivism in music, though some listeners misunderstand him this way. Rather, Hildebrand sees Beethoven as “the most universal of all composers,” one who gave us the “unsurpassed expression of the objective logos.” Beethoven’s music embodies the “world of values” (a key theme of Hildebrand’s) in a powerful way. Beethoven’s titanic power, his almost godlike spirit of creativity, is only one side of him, for he can also express a sense of “ultimate recollection and solitude” (the side of Beethoven that I have always found most appealing). Not least, with its originality and independent spirit, Beethoven’s art is opposed to all “bourgeois” mediocrity and mindless conventionalism.

If I feel that Hildebrand’s treatment of Mozart is just slightly weaker than his treatment of Beethoven, it’s because while Hildebrand tells us the qualities that make Mozart unique, he does not ground us in Mozart’s historical and aesthetic world in a way that would shed light on those qualities. It’s easy to de-historicize Mozart, to see him as a comet of genius that burst out of nowhere. The “gallant style” of the mid-18th-century Enlightenment is decisive to understanding who Mozart is and why he sounds the way he does. The changes that took place in Western art music from the death of Bach in 1750 to the emergence of the so-called Classical style were radical indeed—more radical, to my mind, than the transition from Classicism to Romanticism. Music began to expand out of aristocratic and church circles into the public square, and with this came a new secular and middle-class spirit. The Baroque contrapuntal way of composing gave way to a primarily homophonic (melody plus accompaniment) approach. The Enlightenment moved the arts toward simplicity and naturalness. In place of the serpentine complexity of a Bach fugue subject, the Classical era gave us themes consisting merely of the outline of a triad.

Yet in the process, the ground was laid for a new expansive musical structure, based on the principle of contrast and the dramatic dialectic that underlies sonata-allegro form and the symphony. Too, the rococo aesthetic brought a new kind of grace and charm, a childlike innocence, entirely characteristic of Mozart.

There is one Mozartian topic that I wish Hildebrand had treated in depth, though he does glance at it. It is the moral relativism that has transformed the hero of Don Giovanni from the dissoluto punito (dissolute man punished) of Mozart’s and Lorenzo da Ponte’s imagination into a bold existential hero. Critic James Altena has brilliantly exposed this travesty for what it is in Fanfare magazine, and I am sure Hildebrand, given his fine moral sensitivity, would have had much to say about it too, assuming the view was already in force when these essays were written.

Finally, we have Schubert. I must say upfront that Franz Schubert has played but a small role in my musical pleasure. In my teen years, my violin teacher assigned me Schubert’s Violin Sonatinas and had me listen to the last two symphonies, and my conclusion was that he sounded like a schmaltzier Beethoven. Although I have listened to a good deal more since then (and played the String Quintet in college), my impression essentially hasn’t changed. Twice I’ve attended a concert at which Schubert’s Octet was performed, and twice I was unable to make it through the hour-long masterpiece. I’m afraid Schubert and I just aren’t on the same wavelength. That is my loss. I know there are listeners for whom Franz Schubert is their favorite composer, and I have often speculated that had Mozart lived into the 1800s he would have composed music much like Schubert’s (or even that Schubert was in some mystical way Mozart’s continuation or doppelgänger, destined likewise to die young).

Hildebrand sees Schubert as poised between Mozart and Beethoven, having the angelic sweetness of the former and the monumental power of the latter (though I think Hildebrand misses the power in such Mozart scores as the “Jupiter” Symphony and, of course, Don Giovanni). Schubert is the embodiment of Vienna and the folkish side of Austria, the master of intimacy and of the Lied (or German art song). It occurs to me that seeing Schubert as the ideal amalgam of Mozart and Beethoven might be the most profitable way to view (and hear) him.

Moving further afield, I do wish that Hildebrand would leave a little more room for disagreement on Wagner. There are plenty of people—serious artistic listeners, not philistines—who do not join in acclaiming the master of Bayreuth. I appreciate that Hildebrand had close ties to Wagner through his family and background, and this must have predisposed him to be a Wagnerian. But there is no getting around the fact that Wagner is a controversial artist, in a way that Mozart and Beethoven are not.

It’s important to understand that Western art music (what we call, for better or worse, “classical music”) is a peculiar thing with no exact equivalent in other civilizations. “Classical music” has evolved into a historical repertoire requiring precise and extensive training and standards of execution, and with a distinctive history and culture of performance behind it.

Hildebrand is a man coming out of the 19th century, the era when the idea of “classical music” came into being. He sees, for instance, the Romantic symphony orchestra as the apex of musical history. The Baroque and early music revival is not really a part of Hildebrand’s picture, at least not in these essays. This is due, again, to the essentially 19th-century basis of his culture. He has a brief essay on “Sacred Music,” included here in an appendix, but hardly any composers are named. For Hildebrand, the supreme masterpieces of sacred music are Mozart’s (unfinished) Mass in C minor and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis—not Bach’s B-Minor Mass, which I find baffling. Might we suspect that perhaps Hildebrand’s deepest affinities lie with the Classical and Romantic eras, and not with the Renaissance and Baroque? The pioneering efforts of the generations succeeding Hildebrand’s to revive earlier repertoire would change this, enlarging the scope of our appreciation of Western music considerably.

The volume is graced by a foreword by Manfred Honeck, the distinguished Austrian-born conductor, currently of the Pittsburgh Symphony. I could think of no more apt person for the job, for Honeck is well known as a serious Catholic who imbues his music-making with an overtly spiritual dimension. As such, his introduction is complementary to Hildebrand’s text.

Hildebrand’s integration of music with spiritual and philosophic insight can enrich our musical understanding. We modern, analytical Westerners have become very good at pulling works of art apart to view their elements in detail. In the meantime, we have become less good at grasping their spiritual essence, something at which Hildebrand excels. He sees works of music as aesthetic wholes, and his bird’s-eye view is a refreshing contrast to books that take an overly granular approach, thereby missing the forest for the trees. We need more voices like Hildebrand’s that can take us beyond the notes to glimpse the larger meaning. Come to think of it, we need more Hildebrand, and I hope the Project that bears his name will unveil more writings on music for us to enjoy.

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The featured image is “Violinist in the Belfry Window” (1858), by Eduard von Steinle, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.