While the Rococo restriction of feeling to the polite varieties had been quite compatible with the Baroque aesthetics of imitation and the affections, during the second half of the 18th century sharply divergent views of feeling made their appearance in Germany that are associated with Romanticism and with the harbingers of Romanticism: the Empfindsamer Stil and the Sturm und Drang. The new views have various aspects: a humanistic conception of sympathetic understanding, nostalgia, and indefinable sadness, a fondness for strong and intense feelings, and a metaphysical and almost religious conception of reverence and of infinite longing. These conceptions have much in common. They all regard the feeling connected with music as vague, indefinable, and comprehensive rather than particularized; as an experience that eludes conceptual formulation and takes over where words fail; and they understandably look more to instrumental than to vocal music, and tend to disregard the specific meanings of the text when it is present. They also are connected more with tone itself than with music, or with music as such rather than with specific musical works or styles.
The characteristic Romantic conception of the feeling produced by music forms the sharpest possible contrast to the theory of affections found in Baroque musical poetics. Instead of particular affections that can be named by conventional rubrics and that are provoked by defined tonal and rhythmic patterns, there are vague, nameless, and indescribable feelings, or a composite of these, distinct from feelings known elsewhere. Doubtless the most typical experience is the feeling of infinite longing. In the music that produces it, which is almost always purely instrumental, the tones seem to come not from the instruments, but from the supernatural world of spirits, and the listener's attitude is one of religious reverence. Music is a kind of revelation, religious or metaphysical, in which we temporarily leave the everyday world.
This view of music is found in the decades from 1790 to 1820, in the writings of Jean Paul, Wackenroder, Herder, and Hoffmann. Like the "preromantic" views of sentimentality and compelling emotion, which characterize the preceding two decades (but also persist into the 19th century), the Romantic conception is found in literary works as well as in properly critical or aesthetic ones. Closely related to it is a retrospective and more explicitly religious outlook that is devoted to vocal music and that appears in Hoffmann's essay on church music and in Thibaut's Über Reinheit der Tonkunst (1825). The notion of purity here replaces the ideas of metaphysics and the supernatural, as the listener flees from the corrupt taste that surrounds him into the idealized historical style of Palestrina or Handel.
Introductory Remembrance
My beloved Joseph Berglinger, whose touching lifestory you have read in the Confessions from the Heart of an Art-Loving Friar, wrote down various fantasies on the art of music, primarily during the time of his apprenticeship in the episcopal residence, several of which I want to append to my book herewith. -- -- His views on art agreed with mine most extraordinarily and, through frequent mutual confessions of our hearts, our feelings became more and more intimately allied. Furthermore, in these little essays, which are the flowers of isolated beautiful hours, one will joyfully find that melodic harmony which we unfortunately miss with such bitter sorrow, when we survey the over-all tenor of his real life.
The Orient is the home of everything wondrous. Amidst the antiquity and childlike simplicity of attitudes there, one also finds very strange signs and puzzles which present a problem to the mind that considers itself to be more clever. Strange beings often dwell in the wildernesses there, beings whom we would call insane, who are however worshipped there as supernatural beings. The oriental mind regards these naked saints as the wondrous receptacles of a higher spirit which strayed away from the realm of the firmament into a human form and now does not know how to conduct itself in a human manner. Indeed, all things in the world are colored according to the way that we look at them; the intellect of the human being is a miraculous tincture, by means of which everything that exists becomes transformed according to our preference.
It happened that one of these naked saints was living in a remote cliff grotto, past which a little river rushed.(1) No one could say how he had come to be there; he had been noticed there for several years: a caravan had first discovered him and, since then, frequent pilgrimages had been made to his solitary abode.
Day and night this wondrous creature had no rest in his dwelling-place; it always seemed to him as if he were hearing the Wheel of Time make its howling revolution unceasingly in his ears. In the face of this uproar he could do nothing, undertake nothing. The violent anguish which fatigued him with endless toil prevented him from seeing or hearing anything but how the frightful wheel turned and turned again with a raging and a violent heavy-gale howling which reached to the stars and beyond. Like a waterfall of thousands of roaring torrents which plunged down from the sky, eternally, eternally poured forth without a momentary pause, without a second's peace, thus it sounded in his ears and all his senses were intently focused solely on this. His laboring anguish became more and more caught up and carried away in the whirlpool of this wild confusion; the monotonous sounds grew more and more ferociously wild; he was not able to rest but was seen day and night in the most strained, most intense activity, like that of a man who is struggling to turn an enormous wheel. From his disjointed, wild utterances it was discovered that he felt as if he were being dragged along by the wheel, that he wanted to assist the wild, daring revolution with the full force of his body, so that there would be no danger of time standing still even for a moment. Whenever one asked him what he was doing, then, as if in a fit, he shrieked out the words: "You wretched ones! Don't you hear the roaring Wheel of Time?" and then he again struggled and turned still more violently, so that his perspiration flowed down onto the ground and with distorted gestures he placed his hand on his beating heart, as if he wanted to feel whether the great wheel mechanism were in its eternal motion. He became enraged whenever he saw that the travelers who had pilgrimaged to him were standing very calmly and watching him or walking back and forth and speaking with each other. He shook in vehemence and pointed out to them the incessant rotating of the eternal wheel, the monotonous, measured progression of time; he gnashed his teeth that they didn't feel or notice anything about this motion, in which they would also become entangled and dragged along; he flung them away from himself when they came too close to him in his frenzy. If they did not want to place themselves in danger, then they had to imitate vigorously his strenuous movement. But his frenzy became much more wild and dangerous whenever it happened that any physical labor was undertaken in his surroundings, for example, whenever a person who didn't know him gathered herbs and felled wood near his cave. Then he tended to burst out laughing hysterically over the fact that someone was still able to think of these trivial earthly concerns amidst the frightful rolling on of time; at such moments he bounded from his cave in a single, tiger-like leap and, if he could snatch the unfortunate one, he smashed him to the ground dead in a single motion. He then jumped quickly back into his cave and turned the Wheel of Time more violently than before; however, he raged on for a long time and scorned in disjointed utterances how it was possible for human beings to work at something else, to undertake a tactless occupation.
He was not capable of stretching out his arm toward any object or reaching for anything with his hand; he couldn't take a step with his feet like other people. A trembling anguish flew through all his nerves whenever he wanted to try to interrupt the giddy whirlwind even a single time. But once in a while during beautiful nights, when the moon suddenly appeared before the entrance to his dark cave, he stopped abruptly, sank to the ground, threw himself in all directions and whimpered in despair; he also cried bitterly like a child that the rushing of the mighty Wheel of Time did not leave him the peace to do anything else on earth, to act, to be effective, and to create. Then he felt an all-consuming longing for unknown beautiful things; he endeavored to raise himself upright and bring his hands and feet into tranquil and composed movement, but in vain! He sought something definite, unknown, which he could seize and to which he could cling; he wanted to rescue himself from himself outside or in himself, but in vain! His crying and his despair rose to the highest pitch; with a loud roar he leapt up from the ground and again turned the violently rushing Wheel of Time. This persisted day and night for several years.(2)
There was once, however, a beautiful, moonlit summer night and the saint was again lying on the floor of his cave, crying and wringing his hands. The night was enchanting: the stars twinkled in the deep-blue firmament like golden embellishments on a widely arched, protecting shield and, from the bright cheeks of its countenance, the moon radiated tender light, in which the green earth bathed itself. The trees were hanging on their trunks like floating clouds in this bewitching light and the dwellings of the people were transformed into dark shapes of rock and dimly lit ghost palaces. No longer blinded by the sun's brilliance, the inhabitants were living with their eyes on the firmament and their souls were reflected in the heavenly luster of the moonlit night.
Two lovers, who on this night wanted to surrender themselves totally to the charms of nocturnal solitude, came floating in a light skiff up the river which rushed past the cliff grotto of the saint. The penetrating moonbeam had illuminated and opened to the lovers the innermost, darkest depths of their souls. Their most tender feelings flowed forth and surged away united in boundless torrents. Ethereal music floated up from the skiff into the open heavens; sweet bugles and I know not what other enchanting instruments brought forth a floating world of sounds and, in the harmonies which were drifting up and down, the following song was heard:
Sweetest thrills of expectation
Flow away o'er field and stream,
Moonbeams make the preparation
For the lovers' sensual dream.
How the waves whisper, O how they call
And reflect in their dark depths the heavenly All.
Love high in the firmament
Under us in quiet flow,
Starlight brilliance vainly spent
Were love not kindled by its glow:
Gently fanned by heaven's breath,
Smiled upon by sea and earth.
O'er all the flowers moonlight glows,
And all the palms are slumb'ring now,
In forest sanctuaries flows
The song of love and lovers' vow:
In all the sounds which drift above,
In the palms and the blooms lurks the beauty of love.At the first sound of this music and singing the roaring Wheel of Time had vanished from the naked saint. These were the first harmonies which had drifted into this desolate place; the unfamiliar longing was stilled, the spell broken, the lost spirit released from its earthly shell. The body of the saint had disappeared; an angelically beautiful phantom, woven of light vapors, floated out of the cave, stretched its slender arms longingly towards heaven, and ascended in a dancing movement from the ground into the sky, in rhythm with the sounds of the music. The luminous phantom floated higher and higher into the air, lifted up by the gently swelling sounds of the horns and the singing; -- with heavenly gaiety the figure danced to and fro here and there on the white clouds which were floating in the heavens; with dancing feet it vaulted higher and higher into the sky and finally flew around between the stars in serpentine turns; then all the stars sounded and droned through the air an intensely radiating heavenly chord, until the spirit disappeared into the infinite firmament.
Traveling caravans gazed upon this wondrous nocturnal apparition in amazement and the lovers thought that they were seeing the spirit of love and of music.
Whenever I so very fervently enjoy how a beautiful strain of sounds suddenly, in free spontaneity, extricates itself from the empty stillness and rises up like sacrificial incense, floats gently on the breezes, and then silently sinks down to earth again; -- then so many new, beautiful images sprout forth and flock together in my heart that I cannot control myself out of rapture. -- Sometimes music appears to me like a phoenix, which lightly and boldly raises itself for its own pleasure, floats upwards triumphantly for its own gratification, and pleases gods and men by the flapping of its wings. -- At other times it seems to me as if music were like a child lying dead in the grave; -- one reddish sunbeam from heaven gently draws its soul away and, transplanted into the heavenly aether, it enjoys golden drops of eternity and embraces the original images of the most beautiful human dreams. -- And sometimes, -- what a magnificent fullness of images! -- sometimes music is for me entirely a picture of our life: -- a touchingly brief joy, which arises out of the void and vanishes into the void, -- which commences and passes away, why one does not know: -- a little, merry, green island, with sunshine, with singing and rejoicing, -- which floats upon the dark, unfathomable ocean.
Ask the virtuoso why he is so heartily gay upon his lyre. "Is not," he will answer, "all of life a beautiful dream? a lovely soap-bubble? My musical piece is the same."
Truly, it is an innocent, touching pleasure to rejoice over sounds, over pure sounds! A childlike joy! While others deafen themselves with restless activity and, buzzed by confused thoughts as by an army of strange night birds and evil insects, finally fall to the ground unconscious; -- O, then I submerge my head in the holy, cooling wellspring of sounds and the healing goddess instils the innocence of childhood in me again, so that I regard the world with fresh eyes and melt into universal, joyous reconciliation. -- While others quarrel over invented troubles, or play a desperate game of wit, or brood in solitude misshapen ideas which, like the armor-clad men of the fable, consume themselves in desperation; -- O, then I close my eyes to all the strife of the world -- and withdraw quietly into the land of music, as into the land of belief, where all our doubts and our sufferings are lost in a resounding sea, -- where we forget all the croaking of human beings, where no chattering of words and languages, no confusion of letters and monstrous hieroglyphics makes us dizzy but, instead, all the anxiety of our hearts is suddenly healed by the gentle touch. -- And how? Are questions answered for us here? Are secrets revealed to us? -- O, no! but, in the place of all answers and revelations, airy, beautiful cloud formations are shown to us, the sight of which calms us, we do not know how; -- with brave certainty we wander through the unknown land; -- we greet and embrace as friends strange spiritual beings whom we do not know, and all the incomprehensibilities which besiege our souls and which are the disease of the human race disappear before our senses, and our minds become healthy through the contemplation of marvels which are far more incomprehensible and exalted. At that moment the human being seems to want to say: "That is what I mean! Now I have found it! Now I am serene and happy!" --
Let the others mock and jeer, who race on through life as if on rattling wagons and do not know this land of holy peace in the soul of the human being. Let them take pride in their giddiness and boast, as if they were guiding the world with their reins. There will come times when they will suffer great want.
Happy the one who, when the earthly soil shakes unfaithfully under his feet, can rescue himself serenely on airy tones and, yielding to them, now rocks himself gently, now dances away courageously and forgets his sorrows with such a pleasing diversion!
Happy the one who (weary of the business of splitting ideas more and more finely, which shrinks the soul) surrenders himself to the gentle and powerful currents of desire, which expand the spirit and elevate it to a beautiful faith. Such a course is the only way to universal, all-embracing love and only through such love do we come close to divine blessedness. -- --
This is the most magnificent and the most wonderful picture of the musical art which I can sketch out, -- although most people will consider it to be empty dreaming.
But from what sort of magic potion does the aroma of this brilliant apparition rise up? -- I look, -- and find nothing but a wretched web of numerical proportions, represented concretely on perforated wood, on constructions of gut strings and brass wire. -- This is almost more wondrous, and I should like to believe that the invisible harp of God sounds along with our notes and contributes the heavenly power to the human web of digits.
And how, then, did man arrive at the marvelous idea of having wood and metal make sounds? How did he arrive at the precious invention of this most exceptional of all arts? -- That is also so remarkable and extraordinary that I want to write down the story briefly,.as I conceive of it.
The human being is initially a very innocent creature. While we are still lying in the cradle, our little minds are being nourished and educated by a hundred invisible little spirits and trained in all the polite skills. Thus, little by little, we learn to be happy by smiling; by crying, we learn to be sad; by staring wide-eyed, we learn to worship whatever is exalted. But just as in childhood we don't yet know how to handle the toy correctly, so too, we don't rightly understand how to play with the things of the heart and, in this school of the emotions, we still mistake and confuse everything.
However, when we have come of age, then we understand how to employ the emotions, whether gaiety or sorrow or any other, very skillfully where they are appropriate; and sometimes we express them very beautifully, to our own satisfaction. Indeed, although these things are actually only an occasional embellishment to the events of our usual lives, yet we find so much pleasure in them that we like to separate these so-called emotions from the complex chaos and mesh or the earthly creature in whom they are entangled and elaborate them particularly into a beautiful memory and preserve them in our individual ways. These feelings which surge up in our hearts sometimes seem to us so magnificent and grand that we lock them up like relics in expensive monstrances, kneel down before them joyously and, in our exuberance, do not know whether we are worshipping our own human heart or the Creator, from whom all great and magnificent things come.
For this preservation of the emotions, various splendid inventions have been made and, thus, all the fine arts have arisen. But I consider music to be the most marvelous of these inventions, because it portrays human feelings in a superhuman way, because it shows us all the emotions of our soul above our heads in incorporeal form, clothed in golden clouds of airy harmonies, -- because it speaks a language which we do not know in our ordinary life, which we have learned, we do not know where and how, and which one would consider to be solely the language of angels.
It is the only art which reduces the most multifarious and contradictory emotions of our souls to the same beautiful harmonies, which plays with joy and sorrow, with despair and adoration in the same harmonious tones. Therefore, it is also music which infuses in us true serenity of soul, which is the most beautiful jewel that the human being can acquire; -- I mean that serenity in which everything in the world seems to us natural, true, and good, in which we find a beautiful cohesion in the wildest throng of people, in which, with sincere hearts, we feel all creatures to be related and close to us and, like children, look upon the world as through the twilight of a lovely dream. -- --
When, in my simplicity, I feel very blessed under open skies before God, -- while the golden rays of sun stretch the lofty, blue tent above me and the green earth laughs all around me, -- then it is fitting that I throw myself upon the ground and, in loud jubilation, joyously thank heaven for all magnificence. But what does the so-called artist among men do thereupon? He has observed me and, internally warmed, he goes home in silence, lets his sympathetic rapture gush forth much more magnificently on a lifeless harp and preserves it in a language which no one has ever spoken, the native country of which no one knows, and which grips everyone to the core. --
When a brother of mine has died and, at such an event of life, I appropriately display deep sorrow, sit weeping in a narrow corner, and ask all the stars who has ever been more grieved than I, -- then, -- while the mocking future already stands behind my back and laughs about the quickly fleeting pain of the human being, -- then the virtuoso stands before me and becomes so moved by all this woeful wringing of the hands, that he recreates this beautiful pain on his instrument at home and beautifies and adorns the human grief with desire and love. Thus, he produces a work which arouses in all the world the deepest compassion. -- But I, after I have long forgotten the anxious wringing of the hands for my dead brother, and then happen to hear the product of his sorrow, -- then I exult like a child over my own so magnificently glorified heart and nourish and enrich my soul with the wonderful creation. -- --
But when the angels of heaven look down upon this entire delightful plaything which we call art, -- then they must smile in tender sadness over the race of children on earth and over the innocent artificiality in this art of sounds, through which the mortal creature wants to elevate himself to them. -- --
It always seems strange to me when people who profess to love art constantly restrict themselves in literature, in music, or in any other art, to works of one genre, one coloration, and turn their eyes away from all other types. Even if Nature has for the most part endowed those who are themselves artists in such a way that they only feel entirely at home in one field of their art and only have strength and courage enough to sow and plant in this their native soil, nevertheless I cannot understand why a true love of art should not wander through all its gardens and enjoy all wellsprings. No one is born with only half a soul! -- But, to be sure, -- although I scarcely have the heart to defame all-bountiful Nature in this way, -- many of today's people seem to be so parsimoniously endowed with sparks of love that they can expend these only upon works of one type. Indeed, they are proud in their impoverishment; out of indolent presumption, they despise exercising the mind in the contemplation of other beauties as well, they regard their narrow confinement to certain favorite works as so much the greater virtue and believe that they love these the more nobly and purely, the more other works they despise.
Thus, it happens very frequently that some people seek pleasure solely in gay and comical things, others solely in serious and tragic things. But when I observe the fabric of the world impartially, then I see that Fate needs only to throw its weaving spool in this direction or in that, in order to bring forth a comedy or a tragedy in the same human souls within a moment's time. Therefore, it seems to me natural that, in the realm of art, I also willingly deliver myself from all bonds, sail with streaming pennants on the open sea of emotion, and willingly disembark wherever the heavenly breeze from above happens to carry me. -- If someone desired to raise the question: whether it is lovelier to sit in the parlor during winter, in the lamplight, amidst a splendid circle of friends, -- or lovelier to watch the sun shine down upon charming meadows in solitude on high mountains: -- what should one answer? Whoever preserves in his breast a heart which feels best when it can warm itself fervently and can pound and beat the harder, the better, that person will ecstatically seize every beautiful situation in order to exercise his precious heart in this trembling of supreme delight.
The blessed men who are predestined by heaven for the surplice and the priesthood are to me an excellent model in this. Such a man, for whom that upon which other mortals cannot bestow enough time (because the Creator has endowed the substance of the world all too abundantly), is made into a beautiful occupation, namely to direct his eyes steadily toward the Creator, -- so that the smaller streams of thankfulness and devotion come together from all the surrounding people into him as into a river which flows unceasingly into the sea of eternity, -- such a man finds everywhere in life excellent occasions to honor his God and to thank Him; he erects altars in all places and, to his rapturous eyes, the wondrous image of the Creator shines forth out of all the intermingled features in the things of this world. -- And thus, it seems to me, -- for the glory of art has reduced me into a bold simile, -- thus should he also be constituted, who would like to kneel down before art with an upright heart and offer to it the homage of an eternal and boundless love. -- --
In the glorious art which heaven benevolently selected for me at my birth (for which I shall be thankful thereto as long as I live), it has been the case all along that the type of music which I am just then hearing seems to me each time to be the best and most magnificent and causes me to forget all the other types. Just as I believe, in general, that the true enjoyment and, simultaneously, the true test of the superiority of an art work occurs when one forgets all other works because of this one and does not even think of comparing it with another. Hence it happens that I enjoy the most varied genres in the art of music, as, for example, church music and dance music, with the same love. Yet I cannot deny that the creative power of my soul inclines more to the first type and restricts itself to the same. I occupy myself most of all with it and, therefore, I now want briefly to express my opinion about it exclusively.
Judging from the subject, religious music is, to be sure, the noblest and most exalted, just as in the arts of painting and poetry the holy segment dedicated to God must be in this respect the most sacred to man. It is touching to see how these three arts storm the fortress of heaven from totally different sides and, in keen rivalry, compete with each other to come closest to the throne of God. I dare say, however, that the highly rational Muse of the poetic art and, particularly, the silent and serious Muse of painting regard their third sister as the most audacious and the most rash in the praise of God, because she dares to speak about the things of heaven in a foreign, untranslatable language, with loud resonance, with violent movement, and with harmonious union of a whole multitude of living creatures.
But this holy Muse does not speak of the things of heaven continually in one manner alone, but rather derives her pleasure from praising God in highly varied ways, -- and I find that each way is a balsam for the human heart, if one understands its true significance correctly.
Sometimes she moves along in lively, gay notes, lets herself be led by simple and pleasant harmonies or by decorative and elaborate ones into all sorts of delightful, melodious mazes, and praises God in the manner of children who deliver a speech or a dramatic presentation before their good father on his birthday, for the latter is very pleased when they demonstrate to him their gratitude with childlike, unconstrained liveliness and, in the course of thanking, simultaneously give a little sample of their skills and acquired arts. Or one can also say that this type of church music expresses the character of those individuals who like to express themselves with many light and artfully chosen words about the greatness of God, who are full of wonder and rejoice with affectionate smiles that He is so very much greater than they themselves. They know no other elevation of the soul than a gay and graceful one; in their naïveté they know no other and better language for the praise and worship of Him than the one they use toward a noble, mortal benefactor; and they are not embarrassed to pass with light agility from the smallest joys and pleasures of life to the thought of the Father of the universe. -- This type of church music tends to be the most frequent and the most beloved and it seems truly to represent the disposition of the majority of men.
Another exalted type is characteristic of only a few chosen spirits. They do not look upon their art (as most people do) as a mere problem of constructing out of the available notes many different, pleasing edifices of sound according to rules, and the edifice is not their highest goal; -- rather, they use large masses of sounds like wonderful paints, in order to paint for the ear that which is magnificent, exalted, and divine. -- They consider it unworthy to carry the glory of the Creator on the small, fluttering butterfly-wings of childlike gaiety, but beat the air with the wide, powerful pinions of eagles. `-- They do not arrange and plant the notes like flowers in small, orderly beds, in which we chiefly admire the skillful hand of the gardener; instead, they create huge peaks and valleys with hallowed palm forests, which elevate our thoughts, above all, to God. `-- -- This music moves along in powerful, slow, proud strains and thereby transports our souls to that intensified state of excitement which is generated by exalted thoughts within us and generates such thoughts in return. Or it rolls along more fervently and more magnificently amidst the voices of the full choir, like majestic thunder in the mountains. -- This music resembles those minds which are so filled beyond all measure with the almighty thought of God that they thereby totally forget the frailty of the human race and are audacious enough to announce to the earth in a loud, proud, trumpetlike voice the greatness of the Highest One. In the unconstrained delirium of ecstasy they believe that they have comprehended the being and the magnificence of God to the core; they make all nations acquainted with Him and they praise Him, in that they strive upwards to Him with all their might and exert themselves to resemble Him. --
But there are also some quiet, humble, constantly penitent souls to whom it seems a sacrilege to address God in the melody of earthly gaiety, to whom it seems rash and presumptuous to absorb His entire sublimity boldly into their mortal beings: -- that gaiety is also incomprehensible to them and they are lacking the courage for this bold self-elevation. These people remain on their knees continuously, with hands folded and eyes lowered, and praise God merely in that they fill and nourish their minds with the constant idea of their frailty and distance from Him and with melancholy longing for the music which sounds like an eternal "MISERERE MEI DOMINE!," the slow, deep chords of which creep along in deep valleys like pilgrims laden with sin. -- Its contrite Muse rests for long periods on the same chords; but each new change of the chords, even the most simple one, in this serious, weighty progression causes an upheaval in our entire souls and the gently advancing power of the sounds thrills through us with anxious shudders and exhausts the last breath of our taut hearts. Sometimes bitter chords intervene which overwhelm the heart with remorse, whereby our souls shrink up totally before God, but then crystal-clear, transparent sounds loosen the bonds of our hearts again and console and cheer up our inner selves. Finally, at the close, the progression of the music becomes slower than before and gripped by one deep, basic tone as by the aroused conscience; inner humility winds around in numerous, intertwined convolutions and cannot separate itself from the beautiful exercise of atonement, -- until it finally exhales its entire, dissolved soul in a deep, softly echoing sigh. -- --
-- Recently, dear Father, on the holiday I enjoyed a delightful evening. It was a warm summer evening and I was going out the gates of the city when gay music in the distance led me on with its enticing strains. I went in pursuit of it through the streets of the suburb and, in the end, was led into a large public garden, which was most elaborately adorned with hedges, avenues, and covered passageways, with grass lawns, basins, fountains, and pyramids of yew in between, and which was enlivened by a crowd of colorfully dressed people. On a green elevation in the middle was an open garden hall, which served as the focal point of the crowd. I walked back and forth in the square before the hall and here my heart was frequented by the happiest and liveliest emotions.
The players were sitting on the green lawn and were bringing forth from their wind instruments the liveliest, gayest spring melodies, as fresh as the new foliage which is bursting forth from the branches of the trees. They filled the air with the delightful fragrance of their music(3) and all the drops of blood exulted in my veins. Truly, whenever I hear dance music, it occurs to me that this type of music obviously speaks in the most meaningful and most distinct language and that it necessarily must be the most natural, the oldest and primordial music.
People of all different classes and ages were now walking along beside me on the wide avenues. The merchant had come there from his accounting table, the craftsman from his workshop; and several aristocratic young gentlemen in splendid clothes strolled rashly through between the slower pedestrians. Sometimes a large family came along with children of every size and occupied the entire width of the avenue; and then sometimes a seventy-year-old couple, who smilingly observed how the crowd of children tested their young lives in elated mischievousness on the green grass or how the older youths overheated themselves with lively dances. Each person had left his individual worry at home in his chamber; no worry was identical with the next, -- but here all were in tune with each other in the harmony of pleasure. And, to be sure, even if the music and the colorful scene did not cause everyone to feel as deeply joyful as I, -- nevertheless, for me this entire lively world was dissolved into a shimmer of joy; -- the sounds of the oboes and horns seemed to play around all the faces like bright beams and it seemed to me as if I were seeing everyone crowned with a garland or walking with a halo. -- My spirit, transfigured by the music, penetrated through all of the varied physiognornies into every heart, and the teeming world all around me seemed to me like a drama which I myself had created or a copper-plate which I myself had engraved: so well did I believe that I was seeing what each figure expressed and signified and how each was what it was supposed to be.
These pleasant dreams occupied my attention for a long while, -- until the scene shifted.
The bright warmth of the day gradually emptied itself into the dark chill of night, the colorful crowds went home, the garden became dark, lonely, and still, -- occasionally a tender song from a bugle floated along like a blessed spirit in the soft glow of the moon, -- and the entire, hitherto so lively natural scene was dissolved into a gentle fever of melancholic sadness. The drama of the world was over for this day, -- my actors had gone home, -- the tangle of the dense crowd was loosened. For God had withdrawn from the earth the light half of his huge cloak, decorated with sun, and had covered the house of the world with the other black half on which moon and stars are embroidered, -- and now all of His creatures were sleeping in peace. Joy, pain, toil and quarrel, everything was now observing a truce, in order to break out again tomorrow anew: -- and thus, on and on, into the most distant mists of the ages, where we can see no end. --
O! this constant, monotonous succession of thousands of days and nights, -- so that the whole life of the human being and the whole life of the entire world is nothing but an endless, strange game on a board of black and white fields, whereby in the end no one wins but cursed Death, -- this could drive one crazy at many an hour. -- But one must reach with a courageous arm through the heap of debris upon which our life has crumbled and cling tenaciously to art, which reaches beyond everything into eternity, -- which offers us its radiant hand from heaven, so that we float above the desolate abyss in a bold position, between Heaven and Earth! -- -- --
The sound wave or note was originally a crude material in which uncivilized peoples strove to express their undeveloped emotions. When their souls were deeply shaken, they also shook the surrounding air with screaming and the beating of drums, as if to bring the external world into balance with their inner spiritual excitation. However, after incessantly active Nature has, over many centuries, developed the originally stunted powers of the human soul into an extensive web of finer and finer branches, so too, in the more recent centuries, an ingenious system has been built up out of tones, whereby in this material too, just as in the arts of forms and colors, there has been set down a sensual copy of and testimony to the beautiful refinement and harmonious perfection of the human mind of today. The monochrome beam of sound has been broken up into a bright sparkling fire of art, in which all the colors of the rainbow glitter; this could not have occurred, however, had not many wise men first descended into the oracle caves of the most occult sciences, where Nature, begetter of all things, herself unveiled for the fundamental laws of sound. Out of these secret vaults they brought to the light of day the new theory, written in profound numbers. In accordance with this, they constructed a fixed, knowledgeable order of multitudinous individual notes, which is the plentiful fountainhead from which the masters draw the most varied tonal combinations.
The sensual power which the tone has carried within itself from its origin has, through this learned system, acquired a refined diversity.
The dark and indescribable element, however, which lies hidden in the effect of the tone and which is to be found in no other art, has gained a wonderful significance through the system. Between the individual, mathematical, tonal relationships and the individual fibers of the human heart an inexplicable sympathy has revealed itself, through which the musical art has become a comprehensive and flexible mechanism for the portrayal of human emotions.
Thus has the characteristic inner nature of today's music developed. In its present perfection it is the youngest of all the arts. No other is capable of fusing these qualities of profundity, of sensual power, and of dark, visionary significance in such an enigmatical way. This remarkable, close fusion of such apparently contradictory qualities constitutes the whole pride of its superiority; although precisely this same thing has produced many strange confusions in the exercise and in the enjoyment of this art and many a foolish argument between mentalities which can never understand each other.
The scientific profundities of music have attracted many of those speculative minds, who are rigorous and sharp-witted in all of their activities and who do not seek the beautiful for its own sake, out of an open, pure love, but treasure it only because of the coincidence that unusual, strange powers can be aroused by it. Rather than welcoming that which is beautiful, like a friend, on all pathways where it presents itself to us in a friendly manner, they regard their art as a dangerous enemy instead, seek to subdue it in the most perilous ambush, and triumph thereupon over their own strength. The inner machinery of music, like an ingenious weaver's loom for woven cloth, has been developed to a level of perfection worthy of astonishment by these learned men; their individual works of art, however, are often to be regarded no differently from excellent anatomical studies and difficult academic postures in the art of painting.
It is sad to behold, when this fruitful talent has gone astray into an ungainly and emotionally impoverished soul. Then, in a breast foreign to it, the inventive feeling, which is lacking eloquence in sounds, yearns for union, -- while Creation, which wants to exhaust everything, seems to enjoy initiating pitiful attempts with such painful tricks of Nature.
Furthermore, no other art but music has a raw material which is, in and of itself, already impregnated with such divine spirit. Its vibrating material with its ordered wealth of chords comes to meet the creating hands halfway and expresses beautiful emotions, even if we touch it in an elementary, simple way. Thus it is that many musical pieces, whose notes were arranged by their composers like numbers in an accounting or like the pieces in a mosaic, merely according to the rules, but ingeniously and at a fortunate hour, -- speak a magnificent, emotionally rich poetry when they are performed on instruments, although the composer may have little imagined that, in his scholarly work, the enchanted spirit in the realm of music would beat its wings so magnificently for initiated senses.
On the other hand, many internally rigid and immovable minds, who are not unlearned but are born under an unfortunate star, enter clumsily into the realm of tones, pull them out of their proper places, so that one hears in their works only a painful, plaintive outcry of the martyred spirit.
But, whenever benevolent Nature unites these separate souls of art in one mortal frame, when the emotion of the one who hears burns even more ardently in the heart of the highly learned master of art, and he dissolves the profound science in these flames, then an inexpressibly beautiful work emerges, in which emotion and scholarship are as firmly and inseparably commingled as stone and colors in a ceramic painting.(4)
Those individuals who regard music and all the arts only as institutions to provide their dull and coarse organs with the necessitous sensual nourishment, -- since, after all, sensuality is to be regarded merely as the most powerful, most penetrating, and most human language in which that which is exalted, noble, and beautiful can speak to us, -- these sterile souls are not to be mentioned. If they were capable of it, they ought to worship the deeply founded, immutable holiness which is characteristic of this art above all others, that in its works the fixed, oracular law of the system, the natural magnificence of the triad, cannot be destroyed and defiled even by the most infamous hands, -- and that it is not even capable of expressing that which is defiled, base, and ignoble in the human spirit but can, in itself, present no more than crude and harsh melodies, to which the quality of baseness must be lent by the earthly thoughts attaching themselves to these melodies.
Now, when the subtle reasoners ask: where, actually, the center of this art is to be found, where its true meaning and its soul lie hidden, where all its varied manifestations are held together? -- then I cannot explain or demonstrate it to them. Whoever wants to discover with the divining-rod of the investigating intellect that which can only be felt from within will perpetually discover only thoughts about emotion and not emotion itself. An eternally hostile chasm is entrenched between the feeling heart and the investigations of research, and the former is an independent, tightly sealed, divine entity, which cannot be unlocked and opened up by the reason. -- Just as every individual work of art can be comprehended and inwardly grasped by emotion: -- just as every individual color, according to the teachings of painters, reveals its true nature when illuminated by light of the same color. -- He who undermines the most beautiful and most holy things in the realm of the spirit with his "Why?" and with relentless searching for Purpose and Cause, is actually not concerned with the beauty and divinity of the things themselves but with the concepts, as the boundaries and husks of the things, with which he sets up his algebra. -- However, he -- to speak boldly, whose heart's desire carries him almightily through the sea of thoughts from childhood on, straight as an arrow like a daring swimmer, up to the magic castle of art, such a one pushes thoughts courageously from his breast like interfering waves and penetrates into the innermost sanctuary and is intensely aware of the secrets which rush in upon him. -- And, therefore, I venture to express from the depths of my being the true meaning of the musical art and say:
Whenever all the inner vibrations of our heartstrings -- the trembling ones of joy, the tempestuous ones of delight, the rapidly beating pulse of all-consuming adoration, -- when all these burst apart with one outcry the language of words, as the grave of the inner frenzy of heart: then they go forth under a strange sky, amidst the vibrations of blessed harpstrings, in transfigured beauty as if in another life beyond this one, and celebrate as angelic figures their resurrection. --
Hundreds and hundreds of musical works express gaiety and pleasure, but in each one a different spirit sings and toward each of the melodies different fibers of our hearts respond with trembling. -- What do they want, the faint-hearted and doubting reasoners, who require each of the hundreds and hundreds of musical pieces explained in words, and who cannot understand that not every piece has an expressible meaning like a painting? Are they trying to measure the richer language by the poorer and to resolve into words that which disdains words? Or have they never felt without words? Have they filled up their hollow hearts merely with descriptions of feelings? Have they never perceived within themselves the mute singing, the masked dance of invisible spirits? Or do they not believe in fairy tales? --
A rushing river shall serve as my image. No human art is capable of sketching for the eye with words the flowing of an immense river, following all the thousands of individual smooth and mountainous, plunging and foaming waves. -- Language can only inadequately count and name the changes, not visibly portray for us the interdependent transformations of the drops. And so it is also with the secret river in the depths of the human soul. Language counts and names and describes its transformations, in a foreign medium; -- the musical art causes it to flow past us ourselves. It reaches spiritedly into the mysterious harp, it strikes certain obscure, marvelous signals in the dark world in a definite succession, -- and the strings of our hearts resound and we understand their ringing.
The human heart becomes acquainted with itself in the mirror of musical sounds; it is they through which we learn to feel emotion; to many spirits, dreaming in hidden crannies of the mind, they give living consciousness, and they enrich our souls with entirely new, bewitching essences of feeling.
And all the resounding emotions are directed and guided by the dry, scientific system of numbers, as by the strange, miraculous incantations of an old, frightful sorcerer. Indeed, in a curious way, the system brings forth many wondrously new changes and transformations of the emotions, so that the mind is astounded by its own nature, -- just as, for instance, the language of words sometimes reflects new thoughts from the expressions and signs of thoughts and directs and governs the dances of reason in their movements. --
No art portrays the emotions in such an artistic, bold, such a poetic and, therefore, for cold minds such a forced manner. The essence of all art is the poetization of the emotions, wandering around lost in real life, into manifold, fixed masses; it separates what is united, unites firmly what is separated, and, in the narrower, more sharply defined boundaries, there beat higher, more surging waves. And where are the boundaries and leaps sharper where do the waves beat higher than in the musical art?
However, in actuality, only the pure, formless essence, the motion and the color, and also primarily the thousandfold nuances of the emotions flow in these waves; ideal, angelically pure art knows in its innocence neither the origin nor the goal of its excitations, does not know the relationship of its emotions to the real world.
And, despite all its innocence, nevertheless, through the overwhelming magic of its sensual force, it arouses all the wonderful, teeming hosts of the fantasy, which populate the musical strains with magical images and transform the formless excitations into distinct shapes of human emotions, which draw past our senses like elusive pictures in a magical deception.
There we see the leaping, dancing, breathless gaiety which perfects every little drop of its existence into a harmonious entity of joy.
The gentle, rock-solid contentedness, which spins its entire existence out of one harmonious, limited view of the world, applies its pious convictions to all situations of life, never alters its movement, smooths all roughnesses, and rubs away the color in all nuances.
The masculine, exulting joy, which sometimes passes through the entire labyrinth of musical tones in many a direction, like pulsating blood flows warmly and quickly through the veins, -- sometimes elevates itself to the heights as if in triumph, with noble pride, with verve and elasticity.
The sweet ardent yearning of love, the ever-alternating swelling and receding of desire, when with gentle boldness the soul suddenly soars out of its tender creeping through nearby musical strains into the heights, and sinks down again, -- turns from one unsatisfied striving to another with lascivious displeasure, rests willingly on gently painful chords, strives eternally for resolution and, in the end, only dissolves in tears.
The deep pain, which sometimes drags along as if in chains, sometimes moans interrupted sighs, then gushes forth in long laments, wanders through all types of pain, lovingly perfects its own suffering and, amidst the dark clouds, only infrequently catches sight of faint shimmers of hope.
The mischievous, liberated, gay mood, like a whirlpool that causes all earnest feelings to be shipwrecked and plays with their fragments in the gay vortex, -- or like a grotesque demon that mocks all human dignity and all human pain with farcical mimicry and delusively mimics itself, -- or like a restlessly floating, airy spirit, that tears all plants out of their firm, terrestrial soil and scatters them into the infinite breezes and would like to curse the entire world.
But who can count and name them all, the ephemeral fantasies which chase the musical strains through our imagination like changing shadows?
And yet, I cannot refrain from extolling, in addition, the latest highest triumph of musical instruments: I mean those divine, magnificent symphonic pieces (brought forth by inspired spirits), in which not one individual emotion is portrayed, but an entire world, an entire drama of human emotions, is poured forth. I wish to relate in general terms what hovers before my senses.
With easy, playful joy the resounding soul rises forth from its oracular cave, -- like the innocence of childhood, which is practicing a lustful opening dance of life, which unknowingly jests above and beyond the whole world and smiles back only upon its own inner gaiety. -- But soon the images around it acquire firmer contours; it tests its power on stronger emotion; it suddenly dares to plunge itself into the midst of the foaming flood-tides, moves lithely through all heights and depths, and rolls all emotions up and down with spirited delight. -- But alas! it penetrates rashly into wilder labyrinths; with boldly forced impudence it seeks out the horrors of dejection, the bitter torments of pain, in order to quench the thirst of its vital energy; and, with one burst of the trumpet, all frightful horrors of the world, all the armies of misfortune break in violently from all sides like a cloudburst and roll in upon each other in distorted shapes, frightfully, gruesomely, like a mountain range come alive. In the midst of the whirlwinds of despair the soul desires to elevate itself courageously and defiantly obtain for itself proud salvation, -- and is continuously overpowered by the frightful armies. -- All at once the madly bold power is shattered, the figures of horror have dreadfully disappeared, -- the early, distant innocence emerges in painful recollection, hopping sadly like a veiled child, and calls back in vain, -- the fantasy intermingles a host of images in confusion, dismembered as in a feverish dream, -- and with a few gentle sighs the entire, loudly resounding world full of life explodes, like a shining mirage, into the invisible void.
Then, as I sit there listening for a long while in more ominous stillness, then it seems to me as if I had experienced a vision of all the manifold human emotions, how they incorporeally celebrate a strange, indeed, an almost mad pantomimic dance together for their own pleasure, how they dance between each other impudently and wantonly, with a frightful spontaneity, like the unknown, enigmatical sorcerer-goddesses of Fate.
That mad spontaneity, with which joy and pain, nature and artificiality, innocence and wildness, jesting and shuddering befriend each other in the soul of the human being and often suddenly extend a hand to each other: -- what art presents those mysteries of the soul on its stage with such dark secret, gripping significance? --
Indeed, our hearts fluctuate every moment in response to the very same tones, whether the resounding soul will boldly despise all vanities of the world and strive with noble pride upwards toward heaven, -- or whether it will despise all heavens and gods and press with shameless striving merely toward one single earthly bliss. And precisely this mischievous innocence, this frightful, oracularly ambiguous obscurity, makes the musical art truly a divinity for human hearts. --
But why do I, foolish one, strive to melt words into tones? It is never as I feel it. Come, Thou musical strains, draw near and rescue me from this painful earthly striving for words, envelop me in Thy shining clouds with Thy thousandfold beams, and raise me up into the old embrace of all-loving heaven.
Alas! my deeply beloved, my venerable Father! I write to Thee this time with a highly disturbed mind and in the anxiety of an irresolute hour, which, as Thou well knowest, has come over me frequently in the past and now will not leave me. My heart is contracted by a painful cramp, my fantasies flutter into one another in confusion, and all my emotions dissolve into tears. My lustful enjoyment of art is poisoned deep in the bud; I wander around with sickly soul and, from time to time, the poison pours through my veins.
What am I? What am I supposed to do, what am I doing in the world? What sort of evil spirit has driven me so far off from all human beings that I do not know what I should consider myself to be? So that my eye is totally lacking the standard of reference for the world, for life, and for the human spirit? So that I merely roll about on the sea of my inner doubts, now lifted high above the other human beings on a mighty wave, now plunged into the deepest abyss? --
Out of the firmest foundation of my soul, the exclamation presses forth: It is such a divine striving of the human being, to create that which is consumed by no ordinary purpose and utility, -- which, independent of the world, is eternally resplendent in its own brilliance, -- which is driven by no wheel of the great wheel-mechanism and drives none in turn. No flame of the human heart rises up higher and straighter toward heaven than art! No substance so concentrates in itself the intellectual and spiritual power of the human being and makes him to such a degree an autonomous, human god!
But alas! whenever I am standing upon this presumptuous pinnacle and my evil spirit afflicts me with arrogant pride concerning my feeling for art and with a shameless air of superiority over other men, -- then, there suddenly open up all around me, on all sides, such dangerous, slippery abysses, -- all the holy, lofty images break away from my art and take flight back into the world of other, better men, -- and I lie stretched out, cast off, and, in the service of my goddess, I seem to myself like -- I don't know why -- like a foolish, vain idolator.
Art is a seductive, forbidden fruit; whoever has once tasted its innermost, sweetest juice is irretrievably lost to the active, living world. He creeps further and further into his own self-gratification and his hand totally loses the capacity to extend itself effectively to a fellow creature. -- Art is a misleading, deceptive superstition; in it we think that we have before us the last, innermost essence of humanity itself; and yet, it merely foists upon us a beautiful product of man, in which are set down all of the egotistical, self-satisfying thoughts and emotions which remain sterile and ineffective in the world of action. And I, imbecile, esteem this product more highly than the human being himself, whom God has created.
It is horrible, when I think about it! Throughout my entire life I sit there, a lustful hermit, and merely suck upon beautiful harmonies inwardly each day and strive to enjoy every last morsel of beauty and sweetness. -- And when I now hear the reports: how untiringly the history of the world of mankind rolls along vivaciously right around me, with thousands of important, great events, -- how men affect each other with unceasing activity and how, in the crowded tumult, the consequences, good and evil, follow after every little deed like huge ghosts, -- alas! and then the most shocking thing of all, -- how the highly inventive soldiers of misery torment thousands right around me with thousands of different afflictions in sickness, in grief and poverty, how, in addition to the horrible wars of nations, the bloody war of misfortune rages everywhere on the entire planet and each passing second is a sharp sword that strikes wounds blindly here and there and does not become tired, so that thousands of creatures scream pitiably for help! -- -- And, in the midst of this tumult, I remain sitting peacefully, like a child on his little chair, and blow musical compositions into the air like soap-bubbles: -- although my life will also close just as earnestly with death.
Alas! these cruel emotions are dragging my heart through a despairing anxiety and I am dying of shame because of myself. I feel, I feel bitterly that I don't know how to, don't have the capacity to lead a charitable life, pleasing unto God, -- that men who think very ignobly of art and contemptuously trample its best products with their feet accomplish infinitely more that is good and live in a manner more pleasing to God than I!
In such anxiety I understand how those pious, ascetic martyrs felt who, overwhelmed with sorrow at the sight of the inexpressible sufferings of the world, like despairing children subjected their bodies to the most highly selected mortifications and penances for their entire lifetimes, only in order to come into equilibrium with the dreadful excess of the suffering world.
And whenever the sight of misery now comes across my path and asks for help, whenever suffering individuals, fathers, mothers, and children stand before me, crying together and wringing their hands and screaming violently in pain, -- these are, to be sure, not gay, beautiful chords; this is not the lovely, merry playfulness of music; these are sounds which tear the heart, and the softened spirit of the artist falls into anxiety, does not know how to respond, is ashamed to take flight, and has no power to save. The artist torments himself with pity. -- He observes the entire group involuntarily as a product of his fantasy come alive and, even if he is ashamed of himself at the same moment he still cannot refrain from extracting out of the wretched misery something which is beautiful and suitable as artistic material.
This is the deadly poison which lies hidden in the innocuous bud of artistic feeling. -- It is this, that art rashly tears human emotions, which have grown firmly in the soul, out of the holiest depths of the maternal soil and carries on outrageous commerce and trade with these emotions, torn away and shaped artificially, and thus wantonly makes a mockery of the original nature of man. It is this, that the artist becomes an actor, who regards every life as a role, who looks upon his stage as the genuine model and normal world, as the impermeable core of the world, and regards ordinary, actual life merely as a wretched patchwork imitation, as the inferior, enveloping capsule.(5)
What good does it do, however, when I lie sick in the midst of these dreadful doubts about art and about myself, -- and some magnificent music springs up, -- ha! then all these thoughts take flight in tumult; then the lustful tugging of desire begins its old game again, then it calls and calls irresistibly back and the entire childish bliss opens up anew before my eyes. I become frightened when I consider to what foolish thoughts the wanton musical strains can catapult me, with their alluring sirens' voices and with their wild roaring and trumpet blazing. --
I eternally fail to reach firm ground with myself. My thoughts revolve and roll over each other unceasingly and I become dizzy when I want to attain beginning and end and definite peace. Many a time my heart has had this cramp and spontaneously, just as it came, it relaxed again and it was in the end nothing but a deviation of my soul into a painful minor key, which was in the proper place.
Thus I mock myself, -- and even this mockery is merely wretched play.
It is a misfortune that the man who is entirely dissolved in artistic feeling so deeply scorns reason and worldly wisdom, which are supposed to give man such firm tranquility, and cannot come to grips with them at all. The worldly wise man regards his soul as a systematic book and finds beginning and end and truth and falsehood separated in specific words. The artist regards it as a painting or musical composition, knows no firm conviction, and finds everything beautiful which is in the proper location.
It is as if Creation held all human beings, as well as all quadrupedal animals or birds, imprisoned in fixed species and classes of the natural history of the mind; each sees everything from his own prison and no one can escape his own species. --
And therefore, as long as I live, my soul will resemble the floating Aeolian harp, in the strings of which a strange, unfamiliar breath blows and changing winds flutter about as they please.(6)
NOTES 1. Wackenroder's "Oriental Tale" recalls the fairy tale motif of the hermit in his remote, isolated cave, a motif which also occurs in various other Early Romantic works, most notably in Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen. In Wackenroder's tale, however, there is a new, desperately negative and nihilistic tone, for the "naked saint," despite his retreat from the active world, is nevertheless possessed by the compulsive idea that he must unceasingly turn the raging Wheel of Time. For a discussion of this in relation to other German Romantic literature, see Wiora, in the Salmen Beiträge. (Annotations are from the Schubert translation.) 2. The consciousness of time -- and of its fleeting transitory quality -- entered into European thought during the sixteenth century and became intensified during the Thirty Years War. It is by no means a new thought in the Berglinger fairy tales. As Marianne Thalmann explains in Romantik und Manierismus (p. 18): "Schon im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert wird die Welt Eindruck und Erlebnis. Zeitbewusstsein zieht mit den unzähligen Wunderuhren, Weltreisen und Buchdruck in das europäische Denken ein. Was fasziniert, ist die Zeit. Der Raumzusammenhang, wie ihm die Renaissance gepflegt hat, wird in Raumteile aufgelöst. Jede Zentralisation ist aufgegeben." Klaus Weimar interprets the "Oriental Tale of a Naked Saint" as containing three types of experience of time. The pilgrim, the herb gatherer, and the wood cutter all experience time as the totally unproblematic medium of their lives; the naked saint is obsessed with the awareness of passing time to such a degree that time dominates him, becomes wholly problematic for him, and he hears the Wheel of Time raging on incessantly; the third experience of time is that made possible by music, which fills and orders time with its own unceasing rhythm (cf. K. Weimar; Versuch über Voraussetzung und Entstehung der Romantik, pp. 69-70). 3. Although Wackenroder does not employ the technique of synesthesia as frequently as his contemporaries, Tieck, Brentano, Hölderlin, et al., he does use it occasionally, particularly with reference to the description of music. This passage exemplifies his use of the technique, for Berglinger speaks of the musical sounds as if they had a lovely fragrance: "Sie füllten die ganze Luft mit den lieblichen Düften ihres Klanges an." 4. In his English introduction to the Herzensergiessungen (1948), A. Gillies suggests that the content of the essay is based to a large extent on the lectures of Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749-1818). Wackenroder attended the lectures of Forkel at Göttingen. He is known to have read the first volume of Forkel's Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (Leipzig, 1788) and although the second volume was not published until 1801, it is probable that he acquired much of its content in lecture form (cf. Gillies' edition of the Herzensergiessungen, pp. xxviii-xxix). 5. Wackenroder makes direct use of the theatrum mundi topos in this passage (cf. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, pp. 138-144). However, for Wackenroder it is the artist who creates his own theater through the aid of his creative imagination. The actors in the "real" world are a mere reflection of those upon his stage. 6. Here Wackenroder makes use of a popular Romantic metaphor, that of the Aeolian harp. However, he employs it in a new way, as an analogy for the poetic mind. The soul of the individual with artistic feeling resembles the floating Aeolian harp. (Cf. Shelley, Defence of Poetry," Shelley's Literary and Philosophical Criticism, ed. John Shawcross (Oxford, 1909), p. 121: Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alterations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody.")