ABSTRACT
Music is our most abstract of art forms. As a metaphor, music affords talk of spirit and structure, of the transcendent and world, of estrangement and home, of insatiability and finitude, idealism and reality. Along with existential death comes another melancholy mood, anxiety, which in the Heideggerian register at least reveals how everything in our world can become insignificant, or to which we can become indifferent and detached, given our reflections on existential death. Melancholy is the beginning of philosophy: by acknowledging one's melancholia through boredom, one is opening oneself to thinking philosophically about the world and one's executions in it. The two main scholars of Romanticism of the present age are Manfred Frank and Frederick Beiser. Frank contends that German Romanticism was a realist movement, and is opposed to any form of absolute whatsoever. Beiser, on the other hand, believes that the idealists and Romantics held many similar views.
