Why Was Music Considered by Eta Hoffmann to Be the Most Romantic of All the Arts?
If you've watched The Nutcracker, listened to Schumann'due south Kreisleriana, or read Edgar Allan Poe, you lot've encountered the influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), the man who dreamed many features of the Romantic movement. "Mozart, Schumann, & the Tales of Hoffmann," a recent concert and lecture at Bohemian National Hall in Manhattan, traced Hoffmann'southward development and later artistic bear upon through quintets by Mozart—the composer who inspired much of Hoffmann's work—and Schumann, that quintessential Romantic whose own fine art was, in turn, straight informed by Hoffmann'southward writing and music.
Many writers and musicians in the nineteenth century distilled their Romanticism from this anarchistic Renaissance man. Born in Prussia to a family unit of jurists, Hoffmann was compelled to study law, but in his commencement position as a clerk in Berlin, he began to find his ain manner—or ways—in the world as a composer and an artist. In a typically bold move, he sent his start operetta to the Queen of Prussia near the turn of the century. Afterwards, he took a job in the Prussian provinces, where his creativity was less productive to his career: he got himself "relocated" in 1802 for cartoon caricatures of military officers. Just exile must have been stimulating. He began writing essays and plays, and he eventually moved back to Berlin, where he dabbled in theater, limerick, fiction, and music criticism. He wrote what has been called the definitive review of Beethoven's Fifth—working from the musical score alone.
The fictional composer Johannes Kreisler continued to crop up in art and music as the effigy of the mad creative genius pervaded the Romantic mood and temperament.
Hoffmann'due south artistic pursuits always spilled over into one some other. Early in his career every bit a writer, he created Johannes Kreisler, a fictional composer whose inventiveness is both helped and hindered by his extremes of personality—Jekyll and Hyde long before Jekyll and Hyde. After his first mention in newspaper reviews, Kreisler featured in three of Hoffmann's novels, but he became much more than an imaginary graphic symbol. He served as Hoffmann's pen name, inspired Schumann'southward Kreisleriana, and connected to crop up in fine art and music every bit the figure of the mad creative genius pervaded the Romantic mood and temperament.
Hoffmann is remembered as a writer commencement. His "uncanny stories" set the tone for much of the Romantic profusion of Gothic horror tales in the later nineteenth century. Information technology is often said that Poe wrote the first detective story, only it was Hoffmann'south 1819 novella Mademoiselle de Scudéri, about a woman attempting to runway downwards a murderer with something confronting men delivering jewelry to their mistresses,that inspired "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" more than 2 decades after. Ghost tales and horror stories were Hoffmann's forte: he tiptoed betwixt the natural and the supernatural, dreams and reality and explored the places where expert and evil spirits come across and monsters prey on innocent children. A well-known instance is "The Sandman" , from the 1817 brusque story collection Die Nachtstücke (The Night Pieces), which stars a human being who steals the eyes of children who stay upward by their bedtime and feeds them to his own children on the moon. Today Hoffmann's best-known tale is his 1816 "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King," which was the inspiration for Tchaikovsky'southward much tamer musical version. In homage, the prelude to the concert under review was Tchaikovsky's "Trip the light fantastic toe of the Sugar Plum Fairy."
Only Hoffmann's fiction was as much a musical inspiration every bit it was a literary 1, for both himself and others. Hoffmann considered music the highest form of art and renamed himself later on Mozart—Ernst Theodor Wilhelm became E. T. A. (for Amadeus)—claiming that when listening to the rex of classical composers, he heard "the mysterious language of a afar spiritual kingdom." Hoffmann'southward story "Don Juan" was inspired by Don Giovanni, and Mozart's sound runs through Hoffmann's ain compositions. He enjoyed composing Mozart-style sonatas, and he adopted Mozart's musical idiom in operas similar Undine.
Non only were Hoffmann'southward teachers musicians, but so was his nigh famous follower, Robert Schumann.
Fittingly, then, first on the plan at Maverick National Hall was Mozart's Quintet in 1000 pocket-sized (K 516), a piece composed in 1787, decades before Hoffmann jump-started the Romantic period. But its audio is almost Romantic in its tragic tone, colored by its key of G small, which Mozart saved for his nearly dramatic Kreislerian moments. Mozart is also proto-Romantic in the way he manipulates the fix quintet form (for example, past placing two pocket-sized-mode Adagios side by side instead of moving into a major-mode Scherzo or Allegro movement) for an emotional effect, leaving listeners with a sense of yearning every bit the musical tensions are never quite resolved. The boundary of the form is subtly and disturbingly breached with a whisper of the "mysterious language," the sense of constrained passion, that Hoffmann so adored in Mozart.
Not just were Hoffmann's teachers musicians, but and then was his most famous follower, Robert Schumann. "One hardly dares exhale when one reads Hoffmann," Schumann wrote. He claimed that Hoffmann was at the heart of his music, and the titles of some of his well-nigh famous pieces bear witness it: Fantasiestücke, Nachtstücke, and Kreisleriana are all Hoffmann vintage.
The story of Kreisleriana reveals how similarly Schumann's and Hoffmann's art infused each of their lives. Both were reluctant lawyers, right-brained men in a left-brain profession, with personalities subject to extreme moods that bordered on mental affliction. Schumann's music famously spans the creative continuum between mild and wild, and in his compositional method, he was like Hoffmann's Kreisler: "sometimes mad, sometimes lucid." He wrote the eight-motion Kreisleriana, a representative work of Romantic-menstruation piano music, in four days in 1838.
Schumann'southward music famously spans the creative continuum between balmy and wild, and in his compositional method, he was like Hoffmann'south Kreisler.
Yet both men were enlightened of the dangers of creative passion. Schumann was a genius, just an unstable one. He oft went into creative depressions in which he could inappreciably function, let lone make music. Haunted by the thought that inventiveness and madness came from the same identify, he said his greatest fear, which increased along with his musical mastery, was of losing his mind. But information technology was a fate he couldn't escape; in 1856, at the historic period of twoscore-six, he died of syphilis. In a coincidence that seems to vest in one of his "uncanny stories," Hoffmann had died at the aforementioned age, and of the same disease (though more than than 3 decades earlier).
The concert at Bohemian National Hall demonstrated the way Schumann, through Hoffmann's inspiration, defined the music of the Romantic period. The second selection tied together Mozart, Hoffmann, and Schumann with the latter's Piano Quintet in E apartment major, Op. 44, a slice that shaped the Romantic quintet past adding a piano in the place of the traditional second viola. Only the governing emotion of the slice is in no way triumphal: the theme, taken from Mozart, sounds like a funeral march, winding from part to part like a procession through the rainy streets of Schumann's Bonn or Hoffmann'south Berlin.
For Hoffmann and Schumann, the tension between inspired madness and virtuosic lucidity was the source of the immortality of their music, but also of the brevity of their lives. So the selection was fitting: the quintet was both eulogy and celebration. From Hoffmann, through Schumann, and beyond, the Romantic, Kreislerian spirit continues to inspire—and, at times, to terrify.
Source: https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/the-man-who-made-romanticism
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