"It is a new shudder, but not an old fear." Jean Paul's sentence contains an aesthetic of the fantastic in nuce. It is based not least on the philosophy of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and aims at the essence of Romanticism. In addition to works by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Wagner, the Romantic magic opera by Spohr, Weber and Marschner are placed in the centre of interest against this background, as well as the music-aesthetic discourse accompanying them, which was led by Tieck, Hoffmann and Horn, A. B. Marx, Brendel and Pohl, are analysed. Contrary to the tradition of musicological research, which, if not taboo, at least trivialised the fantastic, Kämpf arrives at a new understanding of musical Romanticism, according to which it does not lose its affiliation with modernity and its impact on the present because of the fantastic, but only gains it.

Christian Kämpf studied musicology, theology and journalism in Leipzig, Halle/Saale and Jena and received his doctorate in cultural studies from the University of Bremen in 2019.