- Autumn Semester: «Traces of Time and Witnesses to Time»
- Spring semester: «Shifts in Time»
“Time is a strange thing,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal has the Marschallin say at the beginning of Der Rosenkavalier, after a night with her young lover. Richard Strauss’s music poignantly underscores the melancholy of these words. Although, in the context of the opera, they refer to a particular situation and thus to the human experience of aging, on closer examination these words have a much broader significance. “When one simply drifts through life, it is nothing at all. But then, all of a sudden, one feels nothing but time,” Hofmannsthal continues. Perhaps aging is indeed the strangest aspect of time for human beings. Yet if one pauses for a moment and does not simply “drift through life,” a wealth of different—and much more universal—aspects of this phenomenon begins to emerge.
Among the arts, music seems to be particularly affected by time. It is an art form that simply does not exist without time! It is created in order to sound and unfold in time. Of course, Goethe’s Faust is also intended for the stage, but it can also be read “merely” as a text. With Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, this is far less evident. The Mona Lisa continues to smile even after the Louvre has closed; the Ride of the Valkyries, on the other hand, has come to an end after five minutes at the latest. And this immediately raises a whole host of further questions about this “strange thing”: How much time should Beethoven’s Ninth actually take? How long exactly should the Valkyries ride? Can—and may—this span of time vary? The Mona Lisa has not changed her smile since Leonardo da Vinci painted her, so why should the Valkyries suddenly ride faster or slower, or Beethoven’s Ninth take a few minutes more or less of our time? An entire abyss of questions about time suddenly opens up.
And this immediately raises a whole host of further questions about this “strange thing”: How much time should Beethoven’s Ninth actually take? How long exactly should the Valkyries ride? Can—and may—this span of time vary? The Mona Lisa has not changed her smile since Leonardo da Vinci painted her, so why should the Valkyries suddenly ride faster or slower, or Beethoven’s Ninth take a few minutes more or less of our time? An entire abyss of questions about time suddenly opens up.„And then, all of a sudden, one feels nothing but time.”
In the 2026/27 academic year, we want to approach this abyss and attempt to reflect on this “strange thing” from a wide variety of perspectives. In the autumn semester, we will take an in-depth look at traces of time and witnesses to time. What do historical documents of every kind tell us about how people dealt with time in the past? How can they help us understand historical time at a later point in time? Perhaps they cannot help us at all, but if one simply “drifts through life,” one will never know.
In the spring semester, we will examine more closely the pitfalls of historical time, for here too the abysses are no less deep: the French Revolution, for example, presents such an obviously profound rupture in time that hardly anyone could deny the abruptness of its social significance and the changes that resulted from it. But what about the many quiet upheavals in historical time, of which Eichendorff so clearly warns us with the words, “Beware, stay awake and alert!”? Are these much quieter shifts in time not sometimes even more consequential than the supposedly loud ones?
We will, of course, only be able to touch upon the complex “thing” that is time in a modest number of aspects; anything more would be too “strange.” But developing an awareness of the different problems and complexities of time, particularly in the case of music, is certainly a good idea—before one comes to feel “nothing but time.”