ABSTRACT
Johann Georg Sulzer's encyclopedia of the fine arts, Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Kunste, was one of the most widely consulted and frequently cited works on aesthetics of the German Enlightenment. It was invoked as an authority on aesthetic matters by writers on music such as Kirnberger, Koch and Forkel. This chapter reassesses Sulzer, setting his comments on music in the context of his overall philosophy of the fine arts, and avoids the problem of joint authorship by concentrating on passages which are easily identified as his own work rather than that of his colleagues. Moreover, the thorny issue of instrumental versus vocal music can be safely left aside for the present purposes. Sulzer may not have praised 'Instrumentalmusik' in the way that the Romantics were later to do, but he certainly praised 'Musik', and his arguments in support of that judgement make reference solely to the effect of musical sounds, not words.
