Ironia romantica, 'stile classico', rappresentazione

Abstract

The Romantic definition of “irony”, as deduced from Friedrich Schlegel's Fragments and Solger's Lectures on Aesthetics, has many points in common with the “humour” that Jean-Paul indicates as an essential component of the “Romantic comic” in his Vorschule der Ästhetik: a quality that is philosophical rather than rhetorical; a kind of paradox; an ambiguity in the use of representation, with part-involvement and part-detachment. What distinguishes irony and humour for the Romantics, and also later right down to Pirandello and Jankélévitch, is the nothingness in which irony also plunges the self (until its inevitable resurrection); humour, on the other hand, in spite of the bitterness, always ends up by dissolving into a smile. The ideal place of irony (or of the humour that is similar to it) is naturally art, and the instruments used to express it are fragmentation and those stylistic shifts that traumatically shape the artistic idea and trigger that wavering of thought that we call paradox.
Thanks to the harmonic strategies of the tonal system and the formal articulations of the 'classical style', the instrumental music of the late 18th century can establish itself as a mirror of subjective intimacy. The level of simulation is the highest and most unsettling that can be reached: one that involves in its unfolding not only the world and the idea, but also the self. Hence the fact that the Romantics speak of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as “true humourists” is due neither to chance nor even to a misunderstanding. It is above all in Mozart's three great Italian operas that we find both the idea of representation, with its ironic ambiguity of deception and revelation, and the use of the classic style as a simulation of the new role played by the artist's self. This viewpoint – the author of the article suggests – adds yet another small piece to the hermeneutic mosaic that accounts for their unequalled appeal.