For Hegel, what characterizes music is that it gives form to feeling as feeling, that it manages to externalize our very inner being: Only poetry expresses it more fully, but at the cost of the autonomy of the artistic form.

Hegel (1770-1831) was, after Kant, the second major theoretician of the then-new philosophical field of "aesthetics." Unlike Kant, he does not try so much to define the subjective terms under which we say something is "beautiful," but rather primarily investigates the objective terms of this subjective feeling with a claim to universality.

For this reason, his traditions regarding each individual art, such as those concerning music, presented here by musicologist Markos Tsetos, are invaluable. In this largely foundational text, concepts and distinctions that have since been established in the aesthetics of music first appear, as well as others that would be worth developing in the future, as Tsetos emphasizes in his extensive commentary.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]