Andante in D Major.
"If we desire to enjoy ourselves, it is not of so much consequence how
we do it, as that we really do it. From gravity we turn to gaiety;
then, weary of gaiety, return to gravity; but let us observe ourselves
too closely, in either case have our aim too constantly in view, and
there's an end as well to real seriousness as to unaffected gaiety."
Piano.
"But are reflections such as these appropriate in a symphony? Why
begin so sedately? No! no indeed! I will rather at once set all the
instruments to play together."
_Crescendo._
"I have only to will, but to will with intelligence; for the storm does
not rise all at once, in a moment; it announces itself, it grows, thus
awaking sympathy, awe, fear, and joy; otherwise it would but occasion
empty amazement and fright. It is difficult to read at sight, how much
more difficult, then, to hear at sight. But now we are right in the
midst of the tumult. Bang, ye kettle-drums! Trumpets, crash!"
_Fortissimo._
"Ha! the turmoil, the onslaughts, the desperate strife of sounds!
Whither are ye rushing? Whence do ye come? They plunge like heroes into
the thickest of the fray; these fall, and expire; those return, wounded
and faint, seeking consolation and friendship. Hark, the galloping,
snorting horses! The organ rolls, like thunder among the mountains.
There is a rush and a roar as when a cataract, despairingly seeking its
own destruction, flings itself over the naked ledge and rages down,
deeper and ever deeper down, into the bottomless abyss."
***************************
_Violino Primo Solo._
"What! It is not permissible, not possible, to think in sounds, and to
make music in words and thoughts? Were it so, how hard would be the
fate of us artists! What poor language, and still poorer music! Do ye
not think many thoughts so delicate, so spiritual, that in despair they
take refuge in music, there at last to find rest? How often does a
whole day spent in racking thought leave nought behind but a buzz and a
hum, which time alone changes into melody?"
***************************
_Forte._
All is in order, the stage is arranged, the prompter in his place, the
audience has arrived. Expectation is aroused, curiosity stirred; but
few think of the end of the piece, and how they will then say, "Was it
anything out of the ordinary?" Give good heed! You must, or 'twill all
be confusion. Yet be not too eager, lest you should see and hear more
than is meant! Hear and give heed! But give heed as you ought! O hark!
Hark! Hark!! Hark!!![8]
One sees that Kierkegaard, in his well-known essay on _Don Juan_ (in
the concluding chorus of which we seem to hear the footsteps of the
Commandant--"Hör, hör, hör Mozart's Don Juan!"), is merely going a
little farther in the direction indicated by Tieck; and it is very
evident how close the relation is between Tieck's first conception of
the romantic ideal and Hoffmann's transformations of music into the
emotional outbursts and weird visions of _Kreisleriana_.
But Hoffmann, who possessed such great and original musical gifts
that he can hardly be considered an author pure and simple, but must
be treated as a poet-musician, was far more in earnest than Tieck in
this matter of making music in words. He lived and moved and had his
being in music; he was as fertile a composer as he was an author, and
many of his writings are fantasies on the subject of music or of the
great composers. When ill he was wont, in his feverish wanderings,
to confuse his attendants with musical instruments. Of one who had a
soft, languishing voice, he said: "I have been tormented to-day by the
flute." Of another, with a deep bass voice: "That insufferable bassoon
has been plaguing me the whole afternoon."
When he introduces Gluck into his _Fantasiestücke_, he makes him speak
of the intervals as if they were living beings. "Once again it was
night. Two giants in shining cuirasses rushed upon me--the Keynote
and the Fifth! They seized me, but their eyes beamed mildly on me: 'I
know what fills thy breast with longing; that gentle, winning youth,
the Third, will soon appear among the giants.'" Kreisler too is made
to talk of stabbing himself with a gigantic Fifth. What in the other
Romanticists is fantastic sentimentality, in Hoffmann becomes weird
burlesque.
In the sketch entitled _Kreisler's musikalisch poetischer Klub_, he
gives to the characteristic qualities of certain notes the names of
colours, and thereby produces a picture of a connected series of mental
impressions. He had the keen perception peculiar to certain delicately
organised, nervous temperaments, of the relationship which undoubtedly
exists between sounds and colours.
As an example of Hoffmann's advance on Tieck's attempts to express pure
music in words, note the passage which describes how, after Kreisler
has played, a marvellous rush of magnificent chords and runs is heard
within the pianoforte itself. There is a genuinely Romantic blending
of the impressions of the different senses in the attempt made to
give some idea of this music: "Its fragrance shimmered in flaming,
mysteriously interwoven circles." On this follows a representation, in
emotional language, of the various keys and chords, a thing hitherto
unattempted.
_Chord of A Flat Minor_ (_mezzo forte_).
"Ah!--they bear me away to the land of eternal longing; but as they lay
hold of me, anguish awakes and rends my breast."
_E Major Sixth_ (_ancora piu forte_).
"Stand steadfast, my heart! Break not, struck by the scorching ray that
has pierced my breast. Be of good courage, my soul! Mount high into the
element which gave thee birth and is thy home!"
_E Major Third_ (_forte_).
"They have crowned me with a glorious crown, but the sparkles and
flashes of its diamonds are the thousand tears I have shed, and in
its gold gleam the flames that have consumed me. Courage and power,
confidence and strength befit him who is called to reign in the
spiritual realm."
_A Minor_ (_harpeggiando dolce_).
"Why wouldst thou flee, lovely maiden? Thou canst not, for thou art
held fast by invisible bands. Nor canst thou tell what it is that has
taken up its abode in thy breast. 'Tis like a gnawing pain, yet it
makes thee tremble with joy. But thou wilt know all when I talk to
thee fondly in that spirit language which I can speak and thou canst
understand...."
_E Flat Major_ (_forte_).
"Follow him! follow him! His raiment is green like the green of the
forest; the sweet tones of the horn echo in his wistful words! List to
the rustling in the bushes, list to the horn blasts, full of rapture
and pain! It is he! Let us hasten to meet him!"
Then finally we have the parody of all this in _Kater Murr_, where
Hoffmann reproduces caterwauling in verse, a glossary of the different
sounds being provided.
It is in this entirely musical poetry that Wackenroder's idea of
art attains to its truest and highest expression. The vigorous
pantheism which in Goethe's case is plastic, and finds expression
in the creation of the _Diana der Epheser_, here becomes musical. In
all Tieck's early works, with their piety, their sensuality, their
reminiscences of Wackenroder and of Goethe, we feel the rush of a
strong, broad wave of Romantic pantheism. In _Sternbald_, for example,
he writes: "We often listen intently and peer into the future, in
eager expectation of the new phenomena that will soon pass before us
in motley, magic garb. At such times we feel as if the mountain stream
were trying to sing its melody more clearly, as if the tongues of the
trees were loosened, that their rustling might be to us intelligible
song. Soon the flute-like notes of love are heard in the distance; our
hearts beat high at his coming; time stands still as if arrested by
a magic word; the shining moments dare not flee. We are enclosed, as
it were, in a magic circle of melody, and rays of a new, transfigured
existence penetrate like mysterious moonlight into our actual life."
And again: "O impotent Art! how stammering and childish are thine
accents compared with the full swelling organ tones that well forth
from the inmost depths, from mountain and valley, forest and stream!
I hear, I feel how the eternal World Spirit sweeps all the strings of
the terrible harp with constraining fingers, how all the most diverse
forms are born of his playing and speed throughout nature upon spirit
wings. My little human heart in wild enthusiasm takes up the contest
and fights itself weary and faint in its rivalry with the highest....
The eternal melody, jubilant and exultant, storms past me."
Both life and poetry are here resolved into music.
In all ages, and in every domain of art, the artist has at times been
tempted to display his mastery over his material by defying it while
using it. In the history of sculpture came a period when, irritated
by the heaviness of stone, sculptors endeavoured to compel it to
express lightness and airiness; or else, like the mannerists of the
rococo period, imitated the art of the painter. In like manner the
Romanticists would fain have language regarded only as a thing akin to
music; their endeavour is to use words more for their sound than their
meaning. They tried to make word-music, much as the prose authors of
our own day try, with more or less success, to make word-pictures. It
is not difficult to see what led to this particular crotchet. Their
antipathy to purpose, their devotion to irony, naturally induced the
desire not to be bound by, not to be responsible for, their words. They
use them ironically, in such a manner that they can retract them. They
will not have them standing solidly before them, indicating an aim, a
purpose. Just as, by conceiving of liberty as licence, they succeeded
in returning to a point where it was possible for them to do this, or
to do that, as the fancy took them, so they succeeded, by conceiving of
language simply as sound, in making it the vehicle of emotion without
tendency, that is, without relation to life and action. They did not
really escape tendency; that is an impossibility; but, as theirs was
not the tendency upwards and onwards, they gravitated downwards and
backwards. And, since they were perpetually compelling words to declare
themselves incompetent and to abdicate in favour of music, it was only
natural that the musical composers also, influenced by the spirit of
the times, should endeavour to express the Romantic ideal in their art,
with those means to which the poets in their impotence had constantly
attempted to recur.
Tieck's dramatised fairy-tales, of which _Bluebeard_ may be taken as a
specimen, have a great resemblance to opera libretti. The fantastic,
legend-like productions of the Romanticists are, indeed, precisely
the sort of thing demanded by opera. There would have been a future
for Tieck as a writer of opera libretti. As a matter of fact, he
only wrote one, and that one was never set to music. The theories
of Romanticism nevertheless found due expression in music. E. T. A.
Hoffmann represents the transition from Romantic authorship to Romantic
musical composition. As an operatic composer, he is not only the
musical interpreter of Calderon, the poet of past days most admired by
the Romanticists, but also collaborates fraternally with contemporary
Romanticists. He writes music for Brentano's _Die lustige Musikanten_
and Zacharias Werner's _Das Kreuz an der Ostsee_, and bases an
excellent three-act opera on Fouqué's _Undine_.
As an operatic writer he is, however, less the musical genius than the
gifted translator of poetry into the language of music. In the opinion
of the most competent judges, he was only thoroughly successful with
subjects which harmonised with his own literary leaning to the terrible
and the supernatural. We have him at his best, for instance, in the
songs of the wild, inhuman Teutons in _Das Kreuz an der Ostsee_, with
their expression of untamable passions, and in the fairy tale-like,
supernatural scenes of _Undine_, which produce a feeling of agreeable
eeriness.
No less an authority than Karl Maria von Weber bestowed hearty praise
upon the last-mentioned opera. And Weber himself is, beyond comparison,
the greatest of the composers who succeeded in giving expression in
music to the Romantic theory of art. In his choice of themes he follows
closely in the track of the Romanticists. In _Preciosa_ the joys of a
free, vagabond life are extolled, just as they are in Tieck's _Franz
Sternbald_ and Eichendorff's _Leben eines Taugenichts_ ("Life of a
Ne'er-Do-Well"). In _Oberon_ we are transported into the fairy world
of Shakespeare's _Midsummer Night's Dream_, the play which served as
the point of departure for all Tieck's fantastic comedies. And in _Der
Freischütz_, Weber, like the Romanticists in their later periods, has
recourse to the popular in his art, makes use of national, popular
melodies, just as the Romanticists of Germany and Denmark made use
of national, popular songs, and, like them, introduces popular
traditions and superstitions. No one witnessing a performance of
_Der Freischütz_ in a German theatre could be for a moment in doubt,
even though he were deaf, of its being a Romantic opera. He sees the
gloomy ravine where the spirits of nature dwell, the weird moonlight
dance (scenes that remind one of the temptations of St. Anthony in
old Dutch paintings), and, finally, the wild chase in which, with
a marvellously illusive effect, shadows projected by a species of
magic lantern pursue each other through the air. But to the listening
connoisseur the real interest lies in the attitude of the composer to
all these external conditions. He feels that Weber treats his subject
much as the Romanticists do theirs, only with greater genius. He
too drives his art to one of its extremes. Just as the Romanticists
are inclined to conceive of speech as only sound and rhythm, he is
inclined to treat music as if it were simply rhythm. Samiel's _Motiv_,
for example, is more rhythmic than melodic, and consequently produces
a coarser, more realistic, but also more picturesque effect. The
Romanticists write musical poetry; Weber composes pictorial music.
While Beethoven presents us with a purely psychological picture,
represents nothing tangible, nothing but his own soul, Weber gives
us physical characterisation. He always relies upon unmistakable
outward phenomena, on something of which his audience already have a
preconceived idea, as, for instance, fairies. Except in the Pastoral
Symphony, Beethoven only paints the impression; Weber paints the thing
itself. He imitates the sounds of nature. He makes the violins moan to
represent the moaning of the trees; the rising of the moon is announced
and depicted by a chord. When he gives us a rhythmic succession of
non-resonant beats instead of waves of sound, i.e. makes a perfectly
arbitrary abstract use of the vehicle of his art; when he confines
himself to song and the simplest of harmonies, i.e. elects to be naïve
and popular; or when, in order to obtain a grotesque, wild, or spectral
effect, he gives instruments parts which lie outside their natural
province and compass (for instance deep tones to the clarinets), i.e.
employs the mediums of his art in a more strange and eccentric manner
than they had ever been employed before--in all these cases he is
a thorough-going Romanticist, one who, with his greater genius and
far more suitable medium, supplies the shortcomings of which we are
invariably conscious in the works of the Romantic poets.[9]
[1] Hettner, _Die romantische Schule_, 48.
[2] "The children of those Indian jugglers who swallow swords do not,
my son, learn the art by gulping down confectionery; they are trained
to swallow the sharp points of the bamboo, and by degrees arrive at
swords. If it be your desire, as a man, to digest the sword of science,
you must not, as a youth, feed on art confectionery."
[3] Köpke: _Tieck's Leben_, i. 177.
[4]
"Far behind us lies Rome.
My friend too is grave,
The friend who returns with me to Germany,
After devoting all his powers
To the study of ancient and modern art--
The noble Rumohr,
To whose friendship I have owed comfort and cheer
In many a suffering hour."
[5]
"Honoured Herr Hofrath!
I pray you to excuse me, but,
With the best will in the world
I cannot find,
In ancient or in modern poetry,
Anything to match this lyric outburst
Except perhaps
My own weak imitation of the same."
[6] "Our spirit, which is azure blue, transports thee to blue
distances. Sweet tones allure thee, a mingling of many sounds. When
the others sing bravely, we chime sweetly in, telling softly of blue
mountains, clouds, fair skies; we are like the faint, clear background
behind fresh green leaves."
[7] "Love thinks in melodious sounds; thoughts are too far to seek;
'tis with sweet sounds it beautifies its longings. Therefore love is
ever present with us when sweet music speaks; it needs no language, but
is helpless till it borrows the voice of music."
[8] Tieck, v. 285.
[9] Cf. George Sand: Introduction to _Mouny Robin_.
X