"A merry song cheers up a sad heart - a tender song soothes its wounds"

Abstract

Anton Martin Slomšek (1800–1962) is regarded as one of the most outstanding personalities of the first half of the 19th century in the Slovenian lands. With his expressly nationally oriented agenda he characterized the Slovenian national identity of his time, and as a musically sensitive teacher he also emphasized the importance of music in the formation of both an individual and the nation. The paper attempts to find answers to questions of how a pronounced extra-musical function conforms to the notion of the autonomous beauty of music that was gaining ground during Slomšek's lifetime; what the impact of these ideas was on him; and to what extent his writings reflect the aesthetics of past centuries, from ancient and early Christian writers onwards.