Abstract

This chapter examines Gadamer’s critique of the aesthetic theory of the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden regarding the relationship between musical works of art and their interpretations. If, for Ingarden, all interpretation relates to the work as a schematic structure, this relationship also implies distinguishing between the musical work of art and its interpretation, by virtue of an aesthetic differentiation that Gadamer criticizes in depth in Truth and Method. In what sense, then, can one think of the unity of the musical work of art and its interpretations without falling back into the pitfall of aesthetic differentiation? It seems that only a hermeneutic of the work of art can answer this question.