ABSTRACT
The impact of the rediscovery of the treatise on the sublime ascribed to Longinus, the importance of Edmund Burkes A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Kant's Critique of Judgement have been summarized aplenty. Theodor Adorno and Jean-Franois Lyotard famously declared the sublime to be the authentic aesthetic mode of modern art. The most famous example of this sublime in musical criticism is E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1810 review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Beethoven's symphonies, after Franois-Antoine Habeneck's 1828 performances, were raised as fulsomely sublime rather than empty form. The music of Francis Poulenc plays with such categorical ambiguities with particular subtlety. Poulenc's little piano Pastourelle at first presents a naive and carefree character an idyll of gentle comfort and delights. In a 1948 radio talk called Lexquise mauvaise musique, Poulenc said: In Tchaikovsky, between the pure and the sublime, there is room for this type of delicious music.
