Since George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published their seminal study Metaphors We Live By in 1980, music scholars have rallied to the call to identify and consider the function and influence of conceptual metaphors in musical thinking.Footnote ¹ Although Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought by Holly Watkins appears in the Cambridge University Press series ‘New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism’, the sub-discipline of metaphor studies as an integral part of musical hermeneutics is now well established. Nicholas Cook, Lawrence Zbikowski, and Michael Spitzer, among others, have all developed applications of Lakoff and Johnson's theory to musical discourse.Footnote ² Recognition of the pervasiveness of conceptual metaphors such as that of organic unityFootnote ³ and musical shape/shapingFootnote ⁴ are leading to a reassessment of the cultural contingency of musical values, but Watkins's book is one of the first large scale studies of a single conceptual metaphor in musical discourse to reach publication. That having been said, the importance of the depth metaphor has already been recognized by Robert Fink, whose preliminary enquiry into the cultural work that surface-depth metaphors perform lays some of the groundwork for this study.Footnote ⁵ Watkins's stated purposes are to uncover the provenance and meaning of German musical depth (Tief) and, by situating this research in specifically German notions of the Romantic, she is able to demonstrate the indeterminacy of the depth metaphor, its proliferation in Romantic thought, and its continued influence on evaluations and re-evaluations of this repertoire.

Musical depth draws on the container, journey, and orientation schemata of Lakoff and Johnson to create a complex of meanings with a variety of emotional, temporal, and structural aspects. It prioritizes generative processes over surface consequences and can connote both profundity and distant origins. By carefully exposing the etymology and multifarious uses of the depth metaphor, Watkins sensitizes the reader to its still powerful influence in musical discourse. Following an introduction to its critical origins, Watkins sets up a number of illuminating, interdisciplinary, textual pairings that explore its different functions. These pairings include the pedagogical writings of A. B. Marx and the German Idealist philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte; Robert Schumann's poetic stance and the early Romantic literature of Jean Paul; perceptions of the depths of time in Richard Wagner's music-dramas set alongside the work of physiologist and fellow Dresdenite Carl Gustav Carus; Heinrich Schenker's theories coupled with the spatial philosophy of Henri Lefebvre; and Arnold Schoenberg's career, Watkins's account of which is blended with an interpretation of the architecture of Adolf Loos as a case study of modernist interiority.

Depth as a critical trope first appeared around the start of the nineteenth century. Metaphors of depth can be traced etymologically to the dual sources of German Pietism and the mining industry. Aspects of religious transcendence melded with German mythology and the new reality of subterranean precious metal extraction, resulting in a profusion of figurative images that began to be used to invoke images of German cultural prestige and Romantic notions of self-exploration. In this context, biographical notes, such as the facts that Novalis trained as a mining engineer and Goethe was briefly a supervisor at the Ilmenau silver mines, take on an added significance. In relation to music, depth is invoked with increasing frequency through the writings of Herder, Wackenroder, and E. T. A. Hoffmann to describe the paradox of an art form that promotes self-knowledge but at the same time fails to disclose full knowledge about itself. Depth as applied to music comes to mean something that is profound, mysterious, and quite frequently dark. Watkins's interpretation of Hoffmann's play, The Mines at Falun as articulating a desire for the deeper penetration of the mysteries of music and what that says about the disposition of the listener is a convincing introductory illustration of the developing aesthetic value of depth.

The historical chronology indicated in the title and chapter organization of this book might suggest a rather straightforward, diachronic survey of the depth metaphor, but the approach here is more subtle: each case study also reveals facets of the depth metaphor that contribute to a variety of analytical approaches. This review focuses primarily on the last two chapters of the book, as these deal with specifically twentieth-century phenomena. A concluding summary of the preceding chapters will hopefully demonstrate to interested readers the scope of Watkins's methodology, its potential application to other repertories, and the still potent influence of the depth metaphor in twenty-first century musical discourse.

In Chapter 5, entitled ‘Schenker and the Apotheosis of Musical Depth’, Schenker's theoretical texts are presented as both the epitome of German Romantic discourse and as an ideological foreshadowing of Modernism in their conceptualization of deep musical structure as a spatial (rather than organic) abstraction. Historically, this tipping point is considered to be a necessary reaction to the excesses of metaphysical ineffability in the Romantic aesthetics of mid-nineteenth-century discourse, an appeal already made by Hanslick as early as 1854. Hanslick and Schenker can be seen to have had the common aims of promulgating a more objective, structural understanding of music.

As in the previous chapters, Watkins's arguments are contextualized by references to non-musical concepts of depth, but the choice of Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space as the comparative track to Schenker's theories is bold. Unlike the philosophical and literary companions chosen in previous chapters, Lefebvre is French not German, his The Production of Space was published in 1974 and is therefore not contemporaneous with Schenker's career, and he wrote from a Marxist socio-philosophical standpoint which is opposed to Schenker's cultural conservatism. The value of appealing to Lefebvre's thinking in qualifying our understanding of Schenker is founded on his concept of an absolute, heterogeneous space organized by symbolic co-ordinates, which exists in a dialectical relationship with the Newtonian vision of an abstract, homogeneous, and empirically organized space. Lefebvre's model accommodates the top-down/bottom-up dialectics of Schenkerian thinking: the hierarchical relationship of foreground and background, processes that are simultaneously reductive and projective, and the accommodation of figurative and theoretical meanings. The problem with this pairing is that Schenker's theories are not always differentiated from the reception of Schenker's theories. It is well known that Schenker himself did not view his graphs as metaphorical but as a literal presentation of the work under analysis, even if Nicholas Cook and others have chosen to read them metaphorically. A fairly cursory search for ‘depth’ terminology in Schenker's diaries, documents, and letters (an online primary source that is notably absent from Watkins's bibliography) provides evidence that Schenker's use of depth as a metaphor in music is restricted primarily to non-theoretical contexts.Footnote ⁶ As one might expect, Schenker's German masters are praised for their incalculable depth of genius, while Bruckner and Kurth are criticized for, respectively, their lack of and simplistic approach to depth. It is only in a letter dated 9 November 1927 addressed to Felix-Eberhard von Cube that he describes the Urlinie as ‘a primeval mother at the very deepest background level’.Footnote ⁷ Acknowledging Schenker's objections to interpretations of his work as metaphorical analysis would help to redress the balance here.

Watkins does go on to show how the reception of Schenker's theories has impacted on a terminology of musical spaces that has become commonplace but almost exclusively of the abstract, empirical type. She is particularly critical of theories of transformational mappings in musical space which she suggests, in line with Lefebvre' s view of a ‘semantic void’, present an impoverished and repressive approach to analysis, as they abolish former meanings and divorce musical representation from practice. One could counter that the recent burgeoning of the subdiscipline of performance criticism, along with the growth of culturally sensitive analysis, is beginning to fill the gap between structural and figurative ‘deep’ understandings of music. For example, Schenkerian theory is being adapted by multimedia analysts such as Timothy Koozin.Footnote ⁸ His animated renderings of layered analyses temporalize the spatial orientation of the ‘depth’ metaphor and allow the user to change perspective from a top-down to a bottom-up approach. Koozin is explicit in his acknowledgement of the function of appropriate metaphors in developing these new tools.

The final and most ambitious chapter of Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought is devoted to outlining a gradual convergence in the aesthetic stance of Arnold Schoenberg with that of his fellow Austrian contemporary and self-professed modernist, the architect Adolf Loos. Loos had published in 1908 a polemical essay entitled ‘Ornament and Crime’, in which he condemned ornament as a simulation of luxury, the cheap commoditization of modern urban living at the expense of the inner social and psychological realms. Watkins articulates a disjunction between, on the one hand, the ideals of privacy expressed in Loos's architectural theory and practice and, on the other, the impression of a permeable flux between outer and inner being that finds voice in Schoenberg's atonal works, Erwartung especially. Thereafter, her decision to present Die Jakobsleiter as a metaphor not only for spiritual questing and a metaphysical joining of heaven and earth from a specifically urban perspective feels rather contrived, and the connection with Loos becomes tangential. The blending of musical and architectural metaphors of depth as modernist interiority becomes more convincing with reference to Schoenberg's reformation of his ideas into a theory of ‘composition with twelve tones’. Ideas of verticality and horizontality, formerly used in the Wagnerian sense as descriptive metaphors for simultaneity and succession, become integrated into a holistic concept of a unified, multi-dimensional space. Here the analogy with Loos's architecture is compelling to the point that Watkins suggests (without any apparent specific evidence) that Loos was the stimulus behind Schoenberg's redesign of musical space; some readers may feel that this is an interpretative step too far. However, the blending of the aesthetic values of Loos and late Schoenberg to expose a further facet of the depth metaphor appears fully justified in the final pages of this chapter. A new strategy for listening to Schoenberg's twelve-note music emerges in which the music is not heard in order to be fully comprehensible on the surface. Rather, we learn to value a design which conceals and protects an interiority that is in danger of being violated by urbanism and can be appreciated as such. ‘Like […] the visitor wandering the corridors of a Loos villa, the listener is projected through the musical work, inundated by motivic material expressing a multiplicity of perspectives’ (243).

In the earlier chapters Watkins uses a variety of citations from contemporaneous writing on psychology, aesthetics, and national polemics to demonstrate a widespread culture of German aggrandizement during the nineteenth century. The development of depth as a pedagogical principle in the writings of A. B. Marx is considered in Chapter 2. For Marx, musical form evolves from an inner source or ‘idée’ which is ontologically prior and ethically superior to social convention and the sensuality of sound. The burgeoning of empirical psychology (Watkins draws interesting comparisons with the work of Johann Friedrich Herbart in this field) influenced Marx, whose methodological approach was to justify the fragmentary or contradictory surface behaviour of a work through the ‘deep’ processes of a dynamic, musical logic. This is evidenced through a discussion of Beethoven's Sonata in G major, Op. 31, no. 1, where Marx's slippage between composer-genius as the agent of musical poiesis and the musical masterwork as volitional in its own right is acutely apparent. In a revealing epilogue Watkins traces the assumption – from Marx to a cohort of highly respected, present-day Beethoven scholars – that Beethoven infused a sentimental Italian style with Germanic profundity. If, as she suggests, we are prepared to dispense with the hegemonic view of Beethoven as hero achieving a stylistic synthesis then a reassessment of ‘Beethoven buffo’ becomes both desirable and possible.

In Chapter 3 Watkins tackles the significance of figurative thought in the compositional aims of Robert Schumann. Schumann is often presented as the classic case of Romantic interiority, the genius imploding into insanity. Paratextual statements, such as ‘songs of the poet are only the echo of the flower-speech of nature’, are shown to be indebted to the writings of Jean Paul, the composer's favourite author, and encourage a figurative interpretation of music that moves from surface allure to the reconstruction of deeper meanings. Watkins's analysis of Nachtstücke focuses on Schumann's treatment of a dotted quaver–semiquaver motif across the four movements. She interprets its figurative function as a consequence not of rhythmic troping but of changing context: as a staging of a reconciliation of body and spirit. The launch point for this interpretation is Schumann's titling of the individual movements (given by Watkins in English translation only): ‘Funeral Procession’, ‘Curious Company’, ‘Nocturnal Revels’ and ‘Roundelay with Solo Voices’ – which suggest ‘a broad trajectory from march to song, body to voice – or body to spirit’ (108). The depth metaphor, as a reconciliation of body and spirit, is read as a symbol of Schumann's retreat from the commercial environment that was replacing the old system of patronage into the realm of artistic autonomy. These movement titles were later excised from the score, possibly as a result of Clara Schumann's discomfort at the marketability of title inscriptions. As Gerard Génette has indicated, one of the functions of thematic titles is to tempt or entice the intended recipient to procure a literary work but, like Clara Schumann, he too is wary of those instances in which a seductive title works at the expense of the text.Footnote ⁹ Metaphorical titles are common in post-1945 repertoire and this sort of analysis offers new ways of assessing compositional aims and cultural encoding.

Wagner's operas provide fertile ground for metaphor hunters, and there is already a considerable literature in this field.Footnote ¹⁰ In her fourth chapter Watkins re-examines familiar Wagnerian symbols of depth – the pure underwater realm of the Rhinemaidens, the Nibelungs' mines, Erda's chasm, Fafner's cave, forest depths – not as erotic (or homoerotic) metaphors but as metaphors of time, claiming that Wagner's aesthetic vision of ‘deep time’ informs the creative fusion of symbols of subjective depth with the temporal depths of a mythical past. Time is an indeterminate concept, as is shown by the complex of spatial mappings undertaken here. Against the conventional conception of time as horizontally linear, Wagner's temporal depth is presented as a simultaneous projection of vertically linear and cyclical concepts. The ‘depths of time’ thesis is explored through the role of Siegfried and Sieglinde's so-called ‘love’ or ‘flight’ leitmotif in Die Walküre, which Watkins renames as the ‘recognition’ motif to suggest that, rather than functioning as a reductive, narrative signpost, it acts as a carrier of past events and an influence on present and future events. Recent studies in the temporality of twentieth-century repertoires call for new analytical tools, and Watkins's methodology might usefully be employed in relation to the cyclical and mythological operas of Birtwistle and Tippett.Footnote ¹¹

The book ends with a rather vertiginous cliffhanger, as the author faces the prospect of postmodernity. At this point an assessment of the various ways in which the accumulated meanings of musical depth might influence our current musical perceptions and evaluations would be of interest. Does a lack of correspondence with the various aspects of depth identified by Watkins presuppose a judgement of superficiality (a point which Robert Fink had already begun to address in relation to modernist repertoire)? Given this new awareness of the hidden potency of the depth metaphor, how do we interpret the work of composers writing in the twenty-first century who choose to adopt, and continue to develop, the aesthetics of German Romanticism? Is the very idea of a postmodern perspective just another reorientation of the depth metaphor? The fact that these questions arise in response to reading Watkins's research is a tribute to her ability to reinvigorate the depth metaphor, to make us aware of its pervasive use in everyday musical discourse, and to alert us to its covert meanings.