Secular Formations of Sacred Music: Schleiermacher, Romanticism, and Devotional Media in Germany

Theologians and musicologists alike have often disregarded the material and technical facets of devotional scenes such as the one meticulously described in Schleiermacher’s Christmas Eve Celebration: A Dialogue (1806). More recent musicologists have highlighted more concealed technologies that helped to facilitate Romantic aesthetic experiences – a form of methodological unmasking that at once denies and reclaims a Schillerian notion of disenchantment. This essay argues that both types of studies perpetuate secularization narratives that displace a Christian religiosity into public artforms and social practices in Romanticism, and secular modernity by extension. As a proposed alternative, a media history of sacred music can sidestep historical musicology’s deep-seated rhetoric of secularization and disenchantment by showing how certain expressions of religious aesthetics – specifically Schleiermacher’s, but more broadly, German Romanticism – are conditioned in part by the materials of a devotional practice, particularly Protestant domestic devotion. The transcendental aesthetics that have often linked Romantic music and religion, then, are not examples of discrete sacred/private and secular/public spheres traversing one another, but several religious practices reconstituted and merging through emergent media – the magazine and the keyboard reduction, but also the novella, Romantic criticism, and the north German salon. As an example of this new historiography, Schleiermacher’s Dialogue is reconsidered with an emphasis on its musical materials and devotional practices.