Abstract

Chapter One explains Goethe's theory of archetypes as presented in the letters of the Italian Journey, the meeting with Schiller , and the essay "Doubt and Resignation." It traces the evolution of the Urpflanze from a plant that Goethe actually hoped to find among the "new and renewed forms" in a garden in Sicily, to a "model" that, for Goethe, was neither a static type in the Platonic sense nor an idealized abstraction in the Kantian sense, but rather a dynamic form present within every plant. ;Chapter Two explores the parallels between Goethe's theories of the archetype , polarity , and intensification , and the theories of Adolf Bernhard Mars, Moritz Hauptmann, and Heinrich Schenker. It pays particular attention to the similarities and differences between Goethe's modifiable type and Schenker's Ursatz and Urlinie, and to the evolution of Schenker's views on causality and organicism in music. ;Chapter Three explores Arnold Schonberg's theories of the Grundgestalt and Igor Stravinsky's views on polarity in music, from the standpoint of the nineteenth-century organicist theories that preceded them. It explores Schonberg's disagreement with Schenker on repetition and on the nature of the motive. ;Chapter Four introduces the writings of Thomas Clifton, and proposes a theory of the archetype that includes aspects of Clifton's "formal a priori," and aspects of Schonberg's Grundgestalt. It applies this theory of the archetype, and Hegel's concepts Aufhebung and Moment, to analyses of the opening of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and Nacht from Schonberg's Pierrot Lunaire