Taken as a volume rather than as one isolated article, the source is a compact, edited reception history of Mozart’s philosophical afterlife. Its chapters move among named contributors and interlocutors—Friedrich Gundolf, the Enlightenment circle around Grimm, d’Alembert, Diderot, Holbach, and Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Hermann Cohen, Søren Kierkegaard, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Alfred Schütz—so that Mozart is approached through the changing vocabularies by which later writers hear his operas. Schütz’s contribution supplies the center of gravity, but the volume’s design is comparative and dialogic.
Vor mehr als 40 Jahren veröffentlichte ein hervorragender deutscher Autor, Friedrich Gundolf, ein Buch mit dem Titel Caesar, Die Geschichte seines Ruhmes.
English translation: More than forty years ago an eminent German author, Friedrich Gundolf, published a book entitled Caesar, the History of His Fame.
The opening frame establishes reception history as method. Gundolf’s model turns attention from Mozart “in himself” to the images produced by later interpreters. The volume is therefore not biography or music history alone; it is a study of intellectual mediation, asking what each philosophical tradition can hear in Mozart and what it distorts.
Meine Absicht ist jetzt in sehr gedrängter Form die Bilder zu untersuchen, die sich drei moderne Philosophen – Hermann Cohen, Søren Kierkegaard und Wilhelm Dilthey – von Mozart und seiner Kunst gemacht haben; und diese Vorstellungen, wie wir noch zeigen werden, sind auf Mozarts Opern beschränkt.
English translation: My intention now is to examine, in very condensed form, the images that three modern philosophers—Hermann Cohen, Søren Kierkegaard, and Wilhelm Dilthey—formed of Mozart and his art; and these conceptions, as we shall show, are restricted to Mozart's operas.
The Enlightenment chapter situates Mozart before Romantic metaphysics, in a world governed by nature, imitation, melody, taste, and theatrical plausibility. Grimm and Rousseau, together with the Encyclopedic milieu, represent the aesthetic assumptions against which later readings react. Schopenhauer then changes the problem: music becomes not merely representation, but privileged access to world, will, and transcendental experience.
Man könnte annehmen, daß die Philosophen, indem sie Schopenhauer folgen, sich der Musik Mozarts zuwendeten als einer Verkörperung des Universums und einem Ausdruck der transzendentalen Erfahrung als solcher.
English translation: One might suppose that the philosophers, following Schopenhauer, turned to Mozart's music as an embodiment of the universe and an expression of transcendental experience as such.
The chapters on Cohen, Kierkegaard, and Dilthey form the volume’s comparative core. Cohen reads Mozart through love and ethical-aesthetic reconciliation; Kierkegaard concentrates the philosophical drama in Don Giovanni and sensuous immediacy; Dilthey comes closest to a hermeneutics of opera, treating Mozart as a dramatist of relations and situations. Schütz coordinates these contributors while also showing how each subordinates Mozart to a prior system.
The concluding movement shifts from doctrine to operatic form. Mozart’s figures are not stable psychological portraits but voices in changing situations, disclosed by recitative, aria, orchestra, and ensemble. The volume’s strongest synthesis is phenomenological: opera joins visible action to musical inner time and makes social simultaneity audible.
Die Handlung auf der Bühne ereignet sich vor unseren Augen im äußeren Raum und in der äußeren Zeit. Die Musik jedoch ist ein Prozeß, der in der Dimension der inneren Zeit, in der Durée, wie Bergson sie nennt, stattfindet.
English translation: The action on the stage takes place before our eyes in outer space and outer time. Music, however, is a process that unfolds in the dimension of inner time, in the durée, as Bergson calls it.
Read as a collection, Mozart und die Philosophen stages a disciplined conversation about philosophy’s dependence on Mozart and its limits before him. Its contributors reveal Mozart not as a writer of concepts, but as a composer whose dramatic music discloses desire, misunderstanding, coexistence, and recognition.
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