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COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University
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A ROMANTIC IDEE FIXE THAT E. T. A. HOFFMANN AFFIRMS REPEATEDLY throughout his astute and often forward-looking music criticism is that music characteristically opens avenues into the sublime. This is especially the case when the music in question is that of an accomplished composer, one capable of commanding all the musical ideas, elements and forces at his disposal, say, the Mozart of Don Giovanni or the Beethoven of the Opus 70 trios and, crucially, the Fifth Symphony. Witness the fourth article of the first part of Hoffmann's famous collection of music related writings known as Kreisleriana, "Beethoven's Instrumental Music," which adapts Hoffmann's landmark review of Beethoven's Fifth. (1) There Hoffmann develops his claim that "Beethoven's music sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain, and awakens that infinite yearning which is the essence of romanticism." (2) Hoffmann's diction--"awe," "fear," "terror," "pain," "infinite yearning"--immediately thrusts Beethoven's music into the topos of the sublime, a place that would have been commonplace to his early nineteenth-century readers. (3) Hoffmann goes on to argue that while in outward appearance Beethoven's music may seem uncontrolled, unorganized, however abounding in wealth of ideas and "vigour of imagination" [reichen, lebendigen Phantasie], that is only because one has not grasped the "inner coherence" [der innere tiefe Zusammenhang] that characterizes every Beethoven composition. For Hoffmann, Beethoven is pre-eminently the composer who displays the touchstone quality of Besonnenheit, which Charlton translates as "rational awareness" but which, of course, can also mean assurance or, with richer implications, self-possession. In his compositions, Beethoven separates his "controlling self" [sein Ich] from the "inner realm of sounds" and rules it in "absolute authority" (98). Beethoven's mastery induces in the hearer a state that Hoffmann describes, again, in terms customarily associated with the musical sublime: "... Beethoven's instrumental music unveils before us the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable. Here shining rays of light shoot through the darkness of night and we become aware of giant shadows swaying back and forth, moving ever closer around us and destroying us but not the pain of infinite yearning, in which every desire, leaping up in sounds of exultation, sinks back and disappears. Only in this pain, in which love, hope, and joy are consumed without being destroyed, which threatens to burst our hearts with a full-chorused cry of all the passions, do we live on as ecstatic visionaries" (97).
Especially crucial here are the notions that music can comprehend and even consume the listening subject and subjective emotions without destroying them--it can annihilate the subject but not the pain of infinite desire--and that the music transforms the listener into an "ecstatic" visionary, by definition one who sees himself or herself as part of the vision. The articulation and activation of the musical score's texture animates a spirit-realm that seizes and absorbs the listener, subsuming the listener's subjectivity in its transcendent play: "... within this artful edifice there is a restless alternation of the most marvelous images, in which joy and pain, melancholy and ecstasy, appear beside and within each other. Strange shapes begin a merry dance, now converging into a single point of light, now flying apart like glittering sparks, now chasing each other in infinitely varied clusters. And in the midst of this spirit realm that has been revealed, the enraptured soul perceives an unknown language and understands all the most mysterious presentiments that hold it in thrall" (102). The phenomenological signals of the onset of the synaesthetic musical sublime--musical sounds spur dancing shapes, converging lights, flying sparks--echo those marking the advent of transcendent or supernatural experience for the protagonists in Hoffmann's tales (e.g., the watersnake fireworks of The Golden Pot, Nathanael's "circle of fire" in "The Sandman") and thus may not seem surprising. More remarkable is Hoffmann's further notion, a condition of music's realizing the character and effects he evokes here, namely, that the "true artist" who performs music like Beethoven's "disdains to let his own personality intervene in any way; all his endeavors are spent in quickening to vivid life, in a thousand shining colours, all the sublime effects and images the composer's magical authority enclosed within his work, so that they encircle us in bright rings of light, inflaming our imaginings, our innermost soul, and bear us speeding on the wing into the far-off spirit realm of music" (103; my emphasis). Tension, animation, passion and exhilaration all arise from the composition and in the listener, but they are all at the composer's--and in this case also the performing artist's--command.
Thus, easily visible through the scrim of Hoffmann's near mythic description of Beethoven's powers shines the spectre--again, familiar to readers of Hoffmann's tales--of the artist-as-sorcerer, magician, Mesmerist: Herr Drosselmeyer of "Nutcracker and Mouse King," Archivist Lindhorst of The Golden Pot, or even Berklinger of "The Artushof." One implication, therefore, of the similarity of Hoffmann's hypostasized Beethoven and the later, masterful enchanter figures of the tales is that here the composer is imagined as invulnerable to the tensions, uncertainties, illusions and mediations of subjectivity: Hoffmann's analysis of the force of Beethoven's music acknowledges tension, but only as one element among others sounding in the music and arising within the listening subject; the composer himself comprehends it. If the place of the listener before the self-possessed compositions of Beethoven is that of the "ecstatic visionary," yearning to be caught up in the composer's musical vision yet only too well aware that he or she falls farther from that ideal even as he or she surrenders to it, as the music asserts its hold or "thrall," the composer's domain is fantasized as that of the transcendent demiurge. Moreover, just as the figure of Beethoven parallels that of the consummate, though sometimes also diabolic and always ambivalent masters of the tales, so the entranced but torn, enraptured but ruptured listening subject finds its counterparts in Hoffmann's familiar divided protagonists (e.g., Nathanael in "The Sandman," Elis Frobom in "The Mines at Falun," or Anselmus in The Golden Pot), who always yearn for the transcendent, occasionally appear to realize it, but more often fall grotesquely far from it.
Hoffmann's "Rat Krespel" offers an intriguing variation on this characteristic opposition between the sorcerer-artist and the apprentice-subject. It is a tale with at least two subjects, double protagonists, both of them artists: the musician-narrator, Theodor, and his "subject," the eccentric Krespel, a councilor and amateur violinist. Unlike other tales by Hoffmann in which the distinction between artist and apprentice, master and novice subject seems more clear cut, "Rat Krespel" presents a complex narrative in which neither protagonist can be said exclusively to be the subject, whether "subject" is understood to imply being either firmly in control of or decisively subject to the forces activated in the representations the tale opens: the tale subtly negotiates a dialectic between subjectivity and forces that both express and mediate it. In other words, "Rat Krespel" presents the reader with a scenario that foregrounds the question of whether its artist-subjects will control or be controlled by those forces or, in other words, a situation in which artistic self-possession always risks dispossession, where the composer is always at risk of being composed as a figure in the story he is at pains to tell.
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"Rat Krespel," though originally published in the Frauentaschenbuch fur das Jahr 1818 in the autumn of 1817, was later nested by Hoffmann as the second, untitled story in the first 1819 volume of Die Serapions-Bruder, where Hoffmann eventually was to publish many of his stories and miscellaneous writings in four volumes that appeared through 1821. (4) The framing device of this collection is a conversation, extended over several meetings, among four friends--Lothar, Theodor, Ottmar and Cyprian--who decide to share stories and who name their association after a character in the first story told (by Cyprian), the (arguably) mad hermit, Serapion. Theodor relates the untitled story usually known as "Rat Krespel" (but which has been variously titled in English as "Councillor Krespel," "Antonia's Song," or "The Cremona Violin"), he says, "to effect a smooth transition from insanity through spleen to completely healthy rationality." Theodor had argued that Ottmar had gone "too far" in his "distaste for every expression of feeling which takes any rather peculiar or unusual form." (5) Theodor wants, instead, to distinguish from the insane person those persons who are more properly labeled sensitive or susceptible: "The incongruity which the susceptible [reizbare] person feels between his inner self and the outer world [des inner Gemuts mit dem aussern Leben] drives him to exceptional grimaces, which calm faces, over whom pain has as little power as pleasure, can't grasp, and are only annoyed with." (6) Theodor then introduces his account of Krespel to elaborate this distinction.
Since point of view is always a determining issue in Hoffmann's tales, it is essential to point out that Krespel's story is told exclusively from Theodor's perspective; he narrates it but also involves himself as a participant in the events related. Theodor includes, as significant portions of his narration, anecdotes about Krespel offered to him by a Professor M. and an extended account from Krespel himself, whose uninterrupted narrative, as recounted by the narrator, makes up the last third of the tale and in fact closes with the tale's close. Though critics disagree as to the extent of the narrator's reliability, the narrator certainly is not impartial: his growing desire for Antonia and specifically his longing to hear her sing to a great extent motivate the tale's action and directly provoke Krespel's autobiographical account. (7) The narrator should be seen as a persona distinct from Theodor, even though Theodor is telling the story to the Serapion brothers, and, of course, from Hoffmann himself, though he unabashedly shares one of Hoffmann's names and some of Hoffmann's enthusiasms, especially for music. Before he begins the tale, in fact, Theodor warns his listeners that he is afraid he is going to have to talk a lot about music and that he therefore risks opening himself to the criticism that he himself had made in regard to the story of Serapion, namely, that he will fantastically embellish his subject and interject too much of himself. Critically, he insists this will not be the case. These qualifying remarks warrant at least provisional distinction between the subjects of his tale.
Nevertheless, throughout the range of modes and perspectives by which we receive Krespel's complicated story, in all registers of the tale, key questions...
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