A standard-bearer of German romanticism, Hoffmann was born in 1776 at Königsberg and died in 1822 at Berlin. His talents were manifold: he was a poet, a critic, a composer, a theater manager, a draftsman, and a public servant. Best remembered for his fantastic novels, Hoffmann was deeply devoted to music and for some time made music his profession. Among his works for the stage the most important is the opera Undine (1813-1814). Hoffmann was one of the fathers of modern musical journalism and in this field opened the way to Schumann and Wagner. His literary works testify to the deeply musical nature of his poetic inspiration. In turn, Hoffmann's poetic visions have inspired musical works of the most disparate character. Schumann's Kreisleriana, Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Busoni's Die Brautwahl are cases in point.
When we speak of music as an independent art, should we not always restrict our meaning to instrumental music, which, scorning every aid, every admixture of another art (the art of poetry), gives pure expression to music's specific nature, recognizable in this form alone? It is the most romantic of all the arts -- one might almost say, the only genuinely romantic one -- for its sole subject is the infinite. The lyre of Orpheus opened the portals of Orcus -- music discloses to man an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the external sensual world that surrounds him, a world in which he leaves behind him all definite feelings to surrender himself to an inexpressible longing.
Have you even so much as suspected this specific nature, you miserable composers of instrumental music, you who have laboriously strained yourselves to represent definite emotions, even definite events? How can it ever have occurred to you to treat after the fashion of the plastic arts the art diametrically opposed to plastic? Your sunrises, your tempests, your Batailles des trois Empereurs,(2) and the rest, these, after all, were surely quite laughable aberrations, and they have been punished as they well deserved by being wholly forgotten.
In song, where poetry, by means of words, suggests definite emotions, the magic power of music acts as does the wondrous elixir of the wise, a few drops of which make any drink more palatable and more lordly. Every passion -- love, hatred, anger, despair, and so forth, just as the opera gives them to us -- is clothed by music with the purple luster of romanticism, and even what we have undergone in life guides us out of life into the realm of the infinite.
As strong as this is music's magic, and, growing stronger and stronger, it had to break each chain that bound it to another art.
That gifted composers have raised instrumental music to its present high estate is due, we may be sure, less to the more readily handled means of expression (the greater perfection of the instruments, the greater virtuosity of the players) than to the more profound, more intimate recognition of music's specific nature.
Mozart and Haydn, the creators of our present instrumental music, were the first to show us the art in its full glory; the man who then looked on it with all his love and penetrated its innermost being is -- Beethoven! The instrumental compositions of these three masters breathe a similar romantic spirit -- this is due to their similar intimate understanding of the specific nature of the art; in the character of their compositions there is none the less a marked difference.
In Haydn's writing there prevails the expression of a serene and childlike personality. His symphonies lead us into vast green woodlands, into a merry, gaily colored throng of happy mortals. Youths and maidens float past in a circling dance; laughing children, peering out from behind the trees, from behind the rose bushes, pelt one another playfully with flowers. A life of love, of bliss like that before the Fall, of eternal youth; no sorrow, no suffering, only a sweet melancholy yearning for the beloved object that floats along, far away, in the glow of the sunset and comes no nearer and does not disappear -- nor does night fall while it is there, for it is itself the sunset in which hill and valley are aglow.
Mozart leads us into the heart of the spirit realm. Fear takes us in its grasp, but without torturing us, so that it is more an intimation of the infinite. Love and melancholy call to us with lovely spirit voices, night comes on with a bright purple luster, and with inexpressible longing we follow those figures which, waving us familiarly into their train, soar through the clouds in eternal dances of the spheres.(3)
Thus Beethoven's instrumental music opens up to us also the realm of the monstrous and the immeasurable. Burning flashes of light shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we become aware of giant shadows that surge back and forth, driving us into narrower and narrower confines until they destroy us -- but not the pain of that endless longing in which each joy that has climbed aloft in jubilant song sinks back and is swallowed up, and it is only in this pain, which consumes love, hope, and happiness but does not destroy them, which seeks to burst our breasts with a many-voiced consonance of all the passions, that we live on, enchanted beholders of the supernatural!
Romantic taste is rare, romantic talent still rarer, and this is doubtless why there are so few to strike that lyre whose sound discloses the wondrous realm of the romantic.
Haydn grasps romantically what is human in human life; he is more commensurable, more comprehensible for the majority.
Mozart calls rather for the superhuman, the wondrous element that abides in inner being.
Beethoven's music sets in motion the lever of fear, of awe, of horror, of suffering, and wakens just that infinite longing which is the essence of romanticism. He is accordingly a completely romantic composer, and is not this perhaps the reason why he has less success with vocal music, which excludes the character of indefinite longing, merely representing emotions defined by words as emotions experienced in the realm of the infinite?
The musical rabble is oppressed by Beethoven's powerful genius; it seeks in vain to oppose it. But knowing critics, looking about them with a superior air, assure us that we may take their word for it as men of great intellect and deep insight that, while the excellent Beethoven can scarcely be denied a very fertile and lively imagination, he does not know how to bridle it! Thus, they say, he no longer bothers at all to select or to shape his ideas, but, following the so-called daemonic method, he dashes everything off exactly as his ardently active imagination dictates it to him. Yet how does the matter stand if it is your feeble observation alone that the deep inner continuity of Beethoven's every composition eludes? If it is your fault alone that you do not understand the master's language as the initiated understand it, that the portals of the innermost sanctuary remain closed to you? The truth is that, as regards self-possession, Beethoven stands quite on a par with Haydn and Mozart and that, separating his ego from the inner realm of harmony, he rules over it as an absolute monarch. In Shakespeare, our knights of the aesthetic measuring-rod have often bewailed the utter lack of inner unity and inner continuity, although for those who look more deeply there springs forth, issuing from a single bud, a beautiful tree, with leaves, flowers, and fruit; thus, with Beethoven, it is only after a searching investigation of his instrumental music that the high self-possession inseparable from true genius and nourished by the study of the art stands revealed.
Can there be any work of Beethoven's that confirms all this to a higher degree than his indescribably profound, magnificent symphony in C minor? How this wonderful composition, in a climax that climbs on and on, leads the listener imperiously forward into the spirit world of the infinite! . . . No doubt the whole rushes like an ingenious rhapsody past many a man, but the soul of each thoughtful listener is assuredly stirred, deeply and intimately, by a feeling that is none other than that unutterable portentous longing, and until the final chord -- indeed, even in the moments that follow it -- he will be powerless to step out of that wondrous spirit realm where grief and joy embrace him in the form of sound. The internal structure of the movements, their execution, their instrumentation, the way in which they follow one another -- everything contributes to a single end; above all, it is the intimate interrelationship among the themes that engenders that unity which alone has the power to hold the listener firmly in a single mood. This relationship is sometimes clear to the listener when he overhears it in the connecting of two movements or discovers it in the fundamental bass they have in common; a deeper relationship which does not reveal itself in this way speaks at other times only from mind to mind, and it is precisely this relationship that prevails between sections of the two Allegros and the Minuet and which imperiously proclaims the self-possession of the master's genius.
How deeply thy magnificent compositions for the piano have impressed themselves upon my soul, thou sublime master; how shallow and insignificant now all seems to me that is not thine, or by the gifted Mozart or that mighty genius, Sebastian Bach! With what joy; I received thy seventieth work, the two glorious trios, for I knew full well that after a little practice I should soon hear them in truly splendid style. And in truth, this evening things went so well with me that even now, like a man who wanders in the mazes of a fantastic park, woven about with all manner of exotic trees and plants and marvelous flowers, and who is drawn further and further in, I am powerless to find my way out of the marvelous turns and windings of thy trios. The lovely siren voices of these movements of thine, resplendent in their many-hued variety, lure me on and on. The gifted lady who indeed honored me, Capellmeister Kreisler,(4) by playing today the first trio in such splendid style, the gifted lady before whose piano I still sit and write, has made me realize quite clearly that only what the mind produces calls for respect and that all else is out of place.
Just now I have repeated at the piano from memory certain striking transitions from the two trios.
How well the master has understood the specific character of the instrument and fostered it in the way best suited to it!
A simple but fruitful theme, songlike, susceptible to the most varied contrapuntal treatments, curtailments, and so forth, forms the basis of each movement; all remaining subsidiary themes and figures are intimately related to the main idea in such a way that the details all inter-weave, arranging themselves among the instruments in highest unity. Such is the structure of the whole, yet in this artful structure there alternate in restless flight the most marvelous pictures in which joy and grief, melancholy and ecstasy, come side by side or intermingled to the fore. Strange figures begin a merry dance, now floating off into a point of light, now splitting apart, flashing and sparkling, evading and pursuing one another in various combinations, and at the center of the spirit realm thus disclosed the intoxicated soul gives ear to the unfamiliar language and understands the most mysterious premonitions that have stirred it.
That composer alone has truly mastered the secrets of harmony who knows how, by their means, to work upon the human soul; for him, numerical proportions, which to the dull grammarian are no more than cold, lifeless problems in arithmetic, become magical compounds from which to conjure up a magic world.
Despite the good nature that prevails, especially in the first trio, not even excepting the melancholy Largo, Beethoven's genius is in the last analysis serious and solemn. It is as though the master thought that, in speaking of deep mysterious things -- even when the spirit, intimately familiar with them, feels itself joyously and gladly uplifted -- one may not use an ordinary language, only a sublime and glorious one; the dance of the priests of Isis can be only an exultant hymn. Where instrumental music is to produce its effect simply through itself as music and is by no means to serve a definite dramatic purpose, it must avoid all trivial facetiousness, all frivolous lazzi. A deep temperament seeks, for the intimations of that joy which, an import from an unknown land, more glorious and more beautiful than here in our constricted world, enkindles an inner, blissful life within our breasts, a higher expression than can be given to it by mere words, proper only to our circumscribed earthly air. This seriousness, in all of Beethoven's works for instruments and for the piano, is in itself enough to forbid all those breakneck passages up and down for the two hands which fill our piano music in the latest style, all the queer leaps, the farcical capriccios, the notes towering high above the staff on their five- and six-line scaffolds.
On the side of mere digital dexterity, Beethoven's compositions for the piano really present no special difficulty, for every player must be presumed to have in his fingers the few runs, triplet figures, and whatever else is called for; nevertheless, their performance is on the whole quite difficult. Many a so-called virtuoso condemns this music, objecting that it is "very difficult" and into the bargain "very ungrateful."
Now, as regards difficulty, the correct and fitting performance of a work of Beethoven's asks nothing more than that one should understand him; that one should enter deeply into his being, that -- conscious of one's own consecration -- one should boldly dare to step into the circle of the magical phenomena that his powerful spell has evoked. He who is not conscious of this consecration, who regards sacred Music as a mere game, as a mere entertainment for an idle hour, as a momentary stimulus for dull ears, or as a means of self-ostentation -- let him leave Beethoven's music alone. Only to such a man, moreover, does the objection "most ungrateful" apply. The true artist lives only in the work that he has understood as the composer meant it and that he then performs. He is above putting his own personality forward in any way, and all his endeavors are directed toward a single end -- that all the wonderful enchanting pictures and apparitions that the composer has sealed into his work with magic power may be called into active life, shining in a thousand colors, and that they may surround mankind in luminous sparkling circles and, enkindling its imagination, its innermost soul, may bear it in rapid flight into the faraway spirit realm of sound.(5)
NOTES
1.
Text: Sämtliche Werke, ed. by C. G. von Maassen, I (Munich & Leipzig, 1908),
55-58, 60-61, 62-64. As published in 1814 among the "Kreisleriana" of the
Fantasiestücke in Callot's Manier (and earlier, anonymously, in the
Zeitung für die elegante Welt for December 1813), this essay combines and
condenses two reviews published anonymously in the Allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung (Leipzig) for July 1810 and March 1813.
2.
Perhaps Hoffmann is thinking of Louis Jadin's "La grande bataille d'Austerlitz,"
published in an arrangement for the piano by Kühnel of Leipzig in 1807 or earlier.
3.
Mozart's Symphony in E-flat major, known as the "Swan Song."
4.
The eccentric, half-mad musician from whose literary remains Hoffmann pretends to
have taken his "Kreisleriana." Schumann borrows the title of his Opus 16 from these
sketches of Hoffmann's (published in two groups as a part of his Fantasiestücke in
Callot's Manier).
5.
Hoffmann's essay was brought to Beethoven's attention in February or March 1820 by
someone who wrote, during a conversation with him: "In the Fantasiestücke of
Hoffmann there is much talk about you. Hoffmann used to be the music-director in
Bromberg; now he is a state counsellor. They give operas by him in Berlin." On the
strength of this, evidently, Beethoven wrote the following letter to Hoffmann on
March 23, 1820:
Through Herr _______, I seize this opportunity of approaching a man
of your intellectual attainments. You have even written about my humble
self, and our Herr _______ showed me in his album some lines of yours
about me. I must assume, then, that you take a certain interest in me.
Permit me to say that, from a man like yourself, gifted with such
distinguished qualities, this is very gratifying to me. I wish you the
best of everything and remain, sir,
Your devoted and respectful
Beethoven.