Composed Composers: Subjectivity in E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Rat Krespel" (Critical Essay‪)‬

1 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).