Naive and Sentimental Art

[aeolium]

Prompted by a comment in one of the Proms interval talks, I wanted to explore further the distinction raised by Schiller between naive and sentimental poetry. His own essay Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung I found diffuse and unclear (it's available in translation here), but a much clearer elucidation of the distinction appeared in this short article by Isaiah Berlin on Verdi:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/91320/opera-verdi-isaiah-berlin

The article, in which Berlin argues that Verdi was the last great naive artist in Schiller's sense, makes a number of contentious claims. But I wondered whether, irrespective of whether one agrees with the categories in which Berlin places different artists, the actual Schillerian distinction between "naive" and "sentimental" was as clear as he makes out, or has value in the way we might look at the work of poets and musicians.

[french frank]

But I wondered whether, irrespective of whether one agrees with the categories in which Berlin places different artists, the actual Schillerian distinction between "naive" and "sentimental" was as clear as he makes out, or has value in the way we might look at the work of poets and musicians.

I can see (via Berlin, though I've rather skimmed it) what he's getting at. Naive/naïf comes from 'nativus' (as in natural/innate) and there's something of Rousseau's noble savage - in the context of art rather than philosophy - in what seems to be Schiller's concept of the naive.

Doesn't it become necessary to think of specific artists in order to test whether the division is purely theoretical? Has there been such a clear-cut distinction since the prehistoric cave artists … but maybe as separate constituents of art?

[Bryn]

What John Adams has to say on the subject.

[aeolium]

Yes, an interesting article by Adams. I wonder though if the deliberate act of writing music that explores the distinction between the naive and the sentimental (and then writing an essay about it, perhaps one of Berlin's "manifestos") can be anything other than sentimental in Schiller's sense. And Adams admits that "writing for orchestra at a time when the epoch of great orchestral music has already flowered and passed is itself a deeply sentimental act" and I'm not sure that his qualification, that for him it is instinctive and spontaneous, is convincing.

Doesn't it become necessary to think of specific artists in order to test whether the division is purely theoretical? Has there been such a clear-cut distinction since the prehistoric cave artists … but maybe as separate constituents of art?

Yes, I find myself thinking of particular examples to test this distinction. It's easier to understand the sentimentalisch idea than the naif one, at least for me. In the naif seems to be constituted the unselfconscious, the detached, the artist in harmony with the world or at least accepting the world as ordered, perhaps divinely ordered. Into which group did Schiller believe he himself fell? I would suggest he has to be in the ranks of the sentimental. Even the ode An die Freude is a kind of manifesto of hope and struggle, and I sense this in Beethoven's setting, that these things ought to be, that harmony ought to be brought to the fractured world, that "über'm Sternenwelt muß ein lieber Vater wohnen". Compare this with Haydn's Creation where there is a confidence that the world ordered by God is good and that whatever earthly troubles there are in man and the natural world they will be divinely resolved - the Schillerian difference between Haydn the naive artist and Beethoven the sentimental one.