E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Aesthetics.

Kramer, Elizabeth

E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Aesthetics. By Abigail Chantler. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. [xii, 202 p. ISBN 0-754-60706-2. $89.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

Given the fact that E. T. A. Hoffmann's writings have proved pivotal to discussions of music--musical listening, the idea of absolute music, the reception of church music, and above all, the music of Beethoven--readers may be surprised to learn that English-language music scholarship has lacked a book-length study of the musical thought of Hoffmann. Abigail Chantler's new account, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Aesthetics, puts forth a vision of Hoffmann's far-reaching significance that considers his writings and musical compositions and that is informed by over a century of previous scholarship on Hoffmann. Readers of German will recognize the influence of contributions by individuals such as Georg Ellinger (E. T. A. Hoffmann: sein Leben und seine Werke [Hamburg: L. Voss, 1894]), Peter Schnaus (E. T. A. Hoffmann als Beethoven-Rezensent der Allgemeine Musi-kalischen Zeitung [Munich: Musikverlag Emil Katzbichler, 1977]), and Gerhard Kaiser (E. T. A. Hoffmann [Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1988]). Others will note the shadow of David Charlton and Martyn Clarke's invaluable annotated translations (E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke [New York: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]).

Early Romanticism--a movement of ambiguity and ever-widening circles of thought--pervades every aspect of Chantler's account of Hoffmann's aesthetics. Introducing Hoffmann as a "polymath with eclectic interests" (p. vii), Chantler emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of her endeavor and draws on perspectives from the disciplines of religious studies, literature, music, and German history. The result is a fluid interchange of Hoffmann's ideas and those of his time, presented through a large selection of primary and secondary sources.

Chantler's first chapter, "Art Religion," acknowledges the wide-reaching nature of spiritual imagery in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century aesthetics. The permeation of ideas such as "spirituality," "divinity," and "religion" in literature of the time has been tied to contemporaneous phenomena of platonic idealism (by Mark Evan Bonds and John Neubauer) and romantic expressivism (by M. H. Abrams and Charles Taylor). For her exposition of spirituality in writings of the early nineteenth century, Chantler chooses the formulation of Carl Dahlhaus (Die Idee der absoluten Musik [Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1978]), who in his account of absolute music draws attention to a Kunstreligion or "art religion" that he cursorily traces as emerging from the writings of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel, and Hoffmann. Chantler's general survey--perfectly appropriate given her purposes--of spiritual ideas at the time does not address the larger conceptual issues circling around the idea of an "art religion," but it does introduce the reader to Schleiermacher's aesthetics and a diverse body of writings about genius. In particular, she draws the reader's attention to descriptions of genius as both active and passive in the writings of Wackenroder, C. F. Michaelis, and Hoffmann, an often neglected paradox that returns in her later arguments about Hoffmann's poetic language and hermeneutics.

Chapter 2, "Hoffmann's Romantic Poetry," highlights elements of early romantic thought in Hoffmann's fiction. The exploration of literary techniques such as the arabesque, authorial ambiguity, the fragment, and irony guides her consideration of Hoffmann's Kreisleriana and The Golden Pot, especially as they reflect the "self-detachment" of the author "facilitating the self-cultivation of the reader" (p. 45). Specific consideration of the musical subject matter of Kreisleriana in light of romantic literary techniques is conspicuously absent, and in this respect, Chantler's account differs markedly from Daniel Chua's reading of romantic instrumental music as portrayed as "absolute fragment" (Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 177) in Hoffmann's writings. Elements of self-detachment and active interpretation discussed here are loosely related to references to active and passive genius in chapter 1 and reappear as Chantler addresses Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in chapter 3.

Chantler's third chapter, "Hoffmann's Musical Hermeneutics Revisited," takes up the issue of musical organicism in light of Ian Bent's earlier work on the topic ("Plato--Beethoven: A Hermeneutics for Nineteenth-Century Music," in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 105-24). Chantler's argument might be summarized, albeit in a grossly simplified form, as follows: if we would only read Hoffmann in light of Goethe's theories of the Urtypen and Herder's theories about Shakespeare, we would better understand Hoffmann's conception of organicism. Chantler's direct approach to the issue, as she moves between the writings of Goethe and Herder and general observations about Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, is refreshing if somewhat under supported.

Chapter 4, "Hoffmann's Romantic Musical Historiography," abounds with ideas about Hoffmann's views on music, but its broader argument seems obscure. Chantler asserts that "Hoffmann presented a view of music history which, in its dialectical structure, was closely akin to Hegel's philosophy" (p. 90), leaving the more precise nature of this dialectic and its relationship to Hegel unclear. She draws dichotomies between the anciens et modernes, the sacred and the secular, the instrumental and the vocal, and the "classical" and the "romantic," but the question of their potential Hegelian Aufhebung receives little more than a footnote to accounts by individuals such as Dahlhaus and Sanna Pederson (Pederson, "Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800-1850" [Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995]). To take just one example: her suggestion, almost in passing, that Hoffmann evaluated "sacred vocal music and autonomous instrumental music on equal terms" (p. 99) functions as more of an assumption than argument. On one hand, what does she think about others' claims that Hoffmann's writings about vocal music should be read in light of his ideas about absolute music? On the other hand, to what extent does Hoffmann cordon off a separate world for church music, as James Garratt has recently proposed in his perceptive study (Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 54-55)?

Chapter 5, "Romantic Opera," stands as the most significant section of the book for Hoffmann studies. Keenly aware of the difficulties that Hoffmann's proclamation of instrumental music as "the most romantic of all the arts" can cause for any clarification of the critic's opera aesthetic, Chantler emphasizes the semantic indeterminacy common to romantic literature and music. She describes an opera aesthetic based on Hoffmann's beliefs about poetic language and his cosmopolitan tastes for the compositions of Gluck, Mozart, and eventually even Spontini. Her extensive footnotes contain observations about Hoffmann's ideas on the relationship between the librettist and composer that are well-worth perusing. Her reading of Hoffmann's writings about opera and her analysis of passages from Hoffmann's own operas support her claim that Hoffmann was a key figure in the emerging genre of German romantic opera.

In a final chapter, "Musical Taste and Ideology," Chantler argues that Hoffmann's music criticism can be understood as a "foil for a nationalistic agenda, redolent of that latent in the literature of writers of the Sturm und Drang movement" (p. 169). Perhaps to ward off attacks on her application of the idea of nationalism in literature from around 1800, Chantler invokes the "separability principle," formulated by Lydia Goehr in her account of the work-concept. For Goehr, the separability principle is the idea that the arts are "separated completely from the world of the ordinary" (The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosohpy of Music [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992], 157). Chantler suggests that the separability principle, most often used to create space for the aesthetic readings of nineteenth-century music, might also be seen as allowing Hoffmann to "create an aesthetics that was a vehicle for ideology" (p. 169). A bit harsh on Stephen Rumph's fine portrayal of Hoffmann as extending political language into music ("'A Kingdom Not of This World': The Political Context of E. T. A. Hoffmann's Beethoven Criticism," 19th Century Music 19, no. 1 [Summer 1995]: 50-67; revised in Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004]), Chantler reads Hoffmann in light of Herder and Goethe's evocations of nation in their writings and presents a convincing account of nationalism in the cultural sphere.

Taken as a whole, Chantler's book probes the reaches of Hoffmann's literary and musical compositions as they pursue poetic ideals while attempting to synthesize the old and new in his artfully-ordered, ironic chaos. We are presented with a musical aesthetics emerging out of Hoffmann's self-detachment and Hoffmann's reader's self-engagement. Placed on a spectrum, this is a sketch that lies opposite from Charlton's portrait of Hoffmann the lawyer (E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings, p. 46) and on the other side of Scott Burnham's arresting description of Hoffmann as the peculiarly German figure combining "officious Grundlichkeit with the capacity for boundless fantasy and abstraction" (review of E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings, ed. Charlton, trans. Clarke, 19th Century Music 14, no. 3 [Spring 1991]: 296).

One strength of her perspective is the prominent place she gives to the spiritual and even religious overtones of musical aesthetics in the early nineteenth century, ideas that have often been neglected. Also noteworthy are her discussions of Friedrich Schlegel's arabesque, Goethe's Urtypen, and Herder's Shakespeare, writings that have been noted in passing by scholars such as Joseph Kerman, Charlton, and Burnham but whose relevance for Hoffmann has not been fully examined. Finally, her parallel accounts of the cosmopolitanism of Hoffmann's opera aesthetic and of his opera output, taken together, provide a model for the integration of music and writings about music in the representation of one individual's aesthetics and ideologies.

A generalist with a proclivity toward German romanticism and its eclectic manifestations will delight in the arabesque and chaos, the subject-object dialectics, and the old and new of Chantler's account. For the specialist, Chantler's book offers a wealth of primary and secondary material that builds on previous Hoffmann scholarship. At times, the specialist may wish for a thicker and sharper engagement with Hoffmann's ideas than presented here. Chantler's emphasis on elusive, romantic poetic language, "always 'in the state of becoming'" (p. 34), so resonant with Hoffmann's prose, at times infiltrates her own style as well, leaving uncertainties as to what Chantler herself means in her evocations of ideas of spirituality, originality, passive genius, active interpretation, and organicism, ideas admittedly accompanied by footnotes to relevant literature but often lacking more direct consideration within her text. Similarly, her discussions of the complex issue of canon formulation are plagued with scare quotes and would have perhaps been better reserved for a fuller exposition elsewhere.

Some of the ambiguities of her account are perpetuated by the challenges inherent to any contextual and interdisciplinary method. Chantler wisely acknowledges potential pitfalls--she makes no pretense of tracing direct influences from earlier writers on Hoffmann's ideas (p. x) and registers the danger of the "historiographical redundancy of the notion of Zeitgeist" (p. 1). In both cases, however, one might wish for more than an assertion of the necessity of her broader cultural-philosophical approach. An outline of the social network of early romanticism, such as the sociologist Randall Collins has presented for philosophy of the time, might have given the reader a stronger sense of the historical relationships between Hoffmann's ideas and those of individuals such as Goethe, Herder, and Schlegel, while avoiding the problematic epistemological assumptions behind declarations of direct influence. And while any thick cultural-philosophical narrative might run the risk of tiring some, a fuller investigation of still under explored basic assumptions behind ideas often referenced in Hoffmann studies is bound to be welcomed by the more dedicated reader. Faced with the intricacies of the subject matter, he is probably more apt to ask himself: what if it is only his "inadequate understanding which fails to grasp the inner coherence"?

ELIZABETH KRAMER

University of West Georgia