When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature 9783110232400, 9783110232394

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Katherine Hirt When Machines Play Chopin

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies Edited by

Scott Denham · Irene Kacandes Jonathan Petropoulos Volume 8

De Gruyter

Katherine Hirt

When Machines Play Chopin Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

De Gruyter

ISBN 978-3-11-023239-4 e-ISBN 978-3-11-023240-0 ISSN 1861-8030 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hirt, Katherine Maree. When machines play Chopin : musical spirit and automation in nineteenth-century German literature / by Katherine Hirt. p. cm. - (Interdisciplinary German cultural studies ; 8) Includes index. ISBN 978-3-11-023239-4 (hardcopy : alk. paper) 1. German literature - 19th century - History and criticism. 2. Musical instruments in literature. 3. Music in literature. 4. Music and literature - Germany - History - 19th century. I. Title. PT345.H55 2010 830.913578-dc22 2010013654

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ” 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements This book began as my dissertation project, and I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Diana Behler, and committee members Jane Brown and Eric Ames for their support, encouragement and suggestions for both the dissertation and the book. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Irene Kacandes for inquiring about my work for this series and the editors for their comments and Scott Denham for his careful editing. I thank Cornelia Saier, Manuela Gerlof and Doug St. John for helping me prepare the final version. Additional thanks go to Steven Rumph at the University of Washington’s School of Music for his suggestions on directions for research on late-eighteenth-century aesthetics, as well as Marshall Brown and John Rahn for their course on music and philosophy, particularly the discussions on Hegel. The ideas that went into this book are the result of many conversations, and I am indebted to Barbara, Wolfgang, and Friederike Samel, whose questions and suggestions helped shape the topic of the dissertation. In addition, I would like to thank the following people for their comments on the early drafts of the dissertation, which led to the chapters in this book; Morgan Koerner, Amy Emm, Viktoria Harms, Tim Gruenewald, Kevin Johnson, Geoffrey Cox, Gabi Eichmanns, Sabina Pasic, Verena Schowengerdt-Kuzmany, and Sunny Parrott. Neither the dissertation nor this book could have existed without support from many friends and extended family members, especially Heidi Tilghman, Michele Vanhee, Julie Fuglistahler, Rebecca Hirt, Helen Baker St. John and Deborah Lajiness. I am especially grateful to my son, Edwin, for being as easygoing as a four-month-old can be and to my husband, Doug, for his patience, understanding and continuous encouragement of my work.

Table of Contents Chapter One

Towards Autonomy: Imitation and Expression at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century........................................... 1 Chapter Two E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Aesthetics of Music and Musical Machines in “The Automata,” “The Sandman” and Music Reviews ....................................................................... 33 Chapter Three Schopenhauer and Hanslick: Toward a Definition of Instrumental Music as an Autonomous Art ..................... 65 Chapter Four Virtuosity and the Experience of Listening in Heinrich Heine’s Music Criticism and “Florentine Nights” ........... 92 Chapter Five Rilke’s Phonograph: the “Talking Machine” and Imagined Sound .................................................................. 122 Conclusions .................................................................................................... 149

Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 154 Index ................................................................................................................... 168

Chapter One Towards Autonomy: Imitation and Expression at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century The early nineteenth-century opposition between emotions and machines created problems in defining instrumental music as a sublime form of human expression. In German-language texts that explore music aesthetics and the relationship between music and poetry, descriptions of music as the natural expression of human emotions placed music aesthetics at odds with the physicality of musical sound and musical performance practices. Music’s perceived ability in the nineteenth century to communicate emotion more immediately than words or pictures leads to Schopenhauer’s claim of its supremacy above all other arts as the direct representation of the Will. However, as the literary works and music reviews show, this height can only be reserved for the abstract sense of music as a poetic aesthetic; it remains impossible to reach in musical practice. Frederic Chopin’s piano music offers an excellent example of the paradoxes that arise in music aesthetics between the sublimity of human expression through musical sound and the technical mastery needed to perform with machine-like accuracy. While lyrical and expressive, Chopin’s works are technically very difficult to master. Chopin’s compositions and his style of playing in the mid-nineteenth century thus show the contradictions of his time that existed in musical performance between mechanical aspects of learning technique and the emotional power of music. This book focuses on these contradictions in German prose works by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Heine, and Rainer Maria Rilke and explores the nexus of machines, musical performance practices, and the search for artistic genius in the nineteenth century. The relationship between mechanical means of practicing music and artistic expression does not occur as a contradiction until the end of the eighteenth century. Early Romantics attempted to separate expression, spirit, and poetic fantasy from reason (Schlegel), resulting in the separation of a mechanical “exterior,” the body, from the spiritual “interior,” the soul. However, music and machines have belonged together since long before the industrialization of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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Enlightenment thinkers such as La Metrie, Hobbes, and Descartes also connected the machine to the body and society, and in some cases to the irregularities of cognitive activity.1 The separation of emotions and spirit from the mechanical marked an attempt in the late eighteenth century to counter the Enlightenment idea that feeling is part of the body’s machine. Bonaventura’s Night Watches and Heinrich von Kleist’s “On the Puppet Theater” are two works that contain marionettes that mechanically perform specific tasks. Most often, these texts are read as satirical remarks on socially imposed mechanical movements. Enlivened marionettes, androids, and other dolls become figures of parody in some late eighteenth-century texts, mocking the belief that human cognition and creativity is also mechanical. The split between the mechanical and the emotional, however, becomes a problem in music because aspects of machine-like activity remain an integral part of musicianship. Every acoustic musical instrument has a mechanism that requires a certain amount of mechanical “muscle memory” to master. Kant’s difficulty categorizing music as either a craft or an art stems partly from music’s inherent need for mechanics in order to create sound and the pleasing result this sound can have on the ear. The mechanics in an instrument are especially obvious in the automated musical instruments, such as the keyboard or trumpet-playing mechanical dolls, the orchestrion and the large barrel organs that developed throughout the nineteenth century and were used in public as well as private spaces and sometimes concert halls. The pianoforte becomes for the nineteenth century the instrument that most mixes the mechanics of musical sound with expression. It evolved greatly in its breadth of sound possibilities from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries and became the favorite solo instrument of the nineteenth century. As a mechanically complex instrument, the newly developed piano of the 1830s provided a wealth of virtuosic solo concert pieces for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In turn, the technical skill needed to play these pieces led to automatic versions of the instrument, such as the player-piano, so that the music could be heard without having to practice drills for years. By the mid-nineteenth century, the contradiction of the machine and the sublime in musical performance transfers to the ideal of the artistic and technical genius versus the actual performer on stage. In spite of the close relationship between machines and music, there is little research done up to this point on their combined aesthetic in nine_____________ 1

For more detail on mechanics and Enlightenment philosophy, see Lieselotte Sauer, Marionetten, Maschinen, Automaten: Der künstliche Mensch in der deutschen und englischen Romantik (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983), 35-64.

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teenth-century literature beyond E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Automata.” Instead, automation and music aesthetics in literature tend to be treated as separate problems. Moreover, automated musical instruments that predate the phonograph have only just begun to regain attention for their contribution to musicology. Typically, they are considered a novelty in the cultural history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and remain separate from the study of classical music. In order to understand better what music means in the literature of the nineteenth century, it is important to consider how the aesthetics of the Romantics influences the treatment of musical performance and machines in later nineteenth-century texts. In prose works by Hoffmann, Heine, and Rilke, mechanical performances, automated musical instruments, and the quest for the sublime in music all come together in various ways that reflect both the traditions of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the performance practices contemporary to their time. The separation of music aesthetics from the aesthetics of poetry and other arts does not occur until the middle of the nineteenth century, with writings by music critics such as Eduard Hanslick. It is indeed a slow and complicated process that begins with the attempt around 1800 to define music as an autonomous art and results in a culture in which only those highly trained at an instrument or well-schooled in musicology feel qualified to talk about matters concerning music aesthetics. Such a reverence toward classical music did not exist throughout much of the nineteenth century, and many of the music critics, as Carl Dahlhaus states, were professional writers rather than musicians (Klassische 23). Aesthetic considerations in musical performance practices, therefore, became part of a literary aesthetic as writers determined what makes music good. Philosophers, too, joined this discussion, and Schopenhauer, Kant, and Hegel also influenced the way nineteenth-century writers talked about musical performance and instrumentation. A consideration of music aesthetics in literature requires a more substantial understanding of music than many literary scholars possess today. In order to provide the necessary background in music aesthetics, the first and the third chapter offer the philosophical definitions of what music meant in 1800 or after 1830, and how one can define an art that does not clearly communicate an idea as does a picture or a line of poetry. The nineteenth-century definitions of music also allow for further exploration into music played by machines, and what this machine-music means in the literary texts. Many of the trends in nineteenth-century music were influenced by those who wrote about music, regardless of their level of musical training. However, only authors who also composed or played an instrument are taken seriously in twentieth-century scholarship on writers’ contributions

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to music aesthetics. Of Hoffmann, Heine, and Rilke, only Hoffmann has had this musical training, and vast amounts have been written on Hoffmann and his musical stories. Yet scholars focus on music in connection to Hoffmann’s fiction only where it plays a central role in the story, for instance “Don Juan,” “Councilor Krespel,” or “Ritter Gluck.” “The Automata” is one of the few works where the combination of machines and music is obvious. All too often, the protagonists’ voices in “The Automata” about music and androids are read as Hoffmann’s own opinions, which ignores the many perspectives represented in Hoffmann’s narratives that is accepted as a given in other areas of Hoffmann scholarship. This study seeks to go beyond the singular character’s ideas about music in general or a particular musical performance or sound and instead focus on what the text says about music in the broader range of Hoffmann’s reviews and stories, given the social norms of performance practices and music education at the time. The analysis of “The Automata” in this book’s second chapter thus joins previous discussions about androids playing music, but it does so from an angle that reconsiders Hoffmann’s fascination with androids in connection with the aesthetic principles in his music reviews. In both reviews and fantastical tales, Hoffmann’s work concentrates on the idea of an inner spirit and nature in all aspects of music-making, including the instrument itself. How music relates to inner and outer realms, the instrument and the spirit becomes important in Heine’s “Florentine Nights” and Rilke’s “Original Sound” as well. Juxtaposed against the animation and vitality of characters who possess no particular artistic genius is the deathly stillness of the android-like musical artist in Heine’s novella, whereas Rilke’s essay focuses on the potential for a perfected art on the exterior of the human skull, in combination with the phonograph. Increasingly, as the following chapters will show, the sublime in music belongs to its role in nature, and music as an art becomes further removed from human ability. The role Schopenhauer gives music at the top of the philosophical hierarchy of the beautiful arts lasts only a short time in the literature of the nineteenth century—it begins to demise as soon as it reaches this level. In spite of obvious differences in musical practice between Hoffmann’s “The Automata” in 1814 and Rilke’s essay in 1919, scholarship on music in literature often overlooks the evolving musical culture that changes the meaning of music for writers during the nineteenth century. An analysis that considers more carefully all sides of the musical arguments presented in these texts allows for a new interpretation of meaning given musicians and musical androids, in order to lead to a more thorough understanding of what music means in nineteenth-century literature, especially as a partner art to poetry and storytelling.

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It is important to evaluate the shift from imitation to expression that happened around 1800 in order to understand better the aesthetic debates in which nineteenth-century writers engage when they write about music and machines. In relation to this change, this first chapter will provide a background into late eighteenth-century music aesthetics and culture that includes instrumental versus vocal music and the imitation of nature and human activity. As predecessors of recording instruments, musician androids and automated musical instruments also play a role here in their contribution to musicology and musical performance practices from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. While it is tempting to package aesthetics around 1800 into two opposing camps; imitation versus expression, emotions versus ideas, mechanical versus organic or mechanical versus spiritual, the apparent opposition of these terms is neither clear nor complete. Especially in regards to music, these terms often relate to one another in a much more complex manner than simple opposition. Mimetic theory, for instance, does not entirely leave out expression. Nor does the aim to express nature as it is exclude the possibility of imitation. However, the trends in the last decades of the eighteenth century moved away from an emphasis on imitation to an emphasis on expression, a shift that began with the break away from the Affektenlehre, a centuries-long tradition of using music to imitate and elicit human passions. The Affektenlehre, or theory of affects, governed musical aesthetics from the fifteenth through the end of the eighteenth centuries. Under this theory, music acted much like rhetoric in its aim to imitate human passions and through this imitation elicit a particular emotional response in the listener. The musician, much like an orator, determined which emotions ought to be felt by the audience. George Barth writes about the relationship between musical performance and oration in his book Pianist as Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style. As indicated in Barth’s title, the view of music as an oratorical art continued in Beethoven’s time, through the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Aesthetic principles that define music as imitation go back to Aristotle, who includes lyre and flute playing with poetry among the imitative arts. In his Poetics, Aristotle mentions that tragedy imitates human actions for the purpose of eliciting fear or pity in the audience (245). Aristotle’s definition and purpose of imitation in art later influenced mimetic theory and the imitation of affects in music. However, Baroque music practice only used part of Aristotle’s theory. As Dénes Zoltai argues in his book Ethos und Affekt, music, to most practitiners of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, imitated passions, while Aristotle

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focused more on the representation of human passions through the imitation of human actions (35-40). Most importantly, the listener’s role remains the predominant one in Baroque musical performance, for the success of the performer, like the success of the orator, depended on the musician’s ability to imitate human passions in such a manner that the audience themselves must experience them. One could argue that emotion and the heart were therefore not new elements to music at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This remains true insofar as the imitation of emotions in the Affektenlehre was also linked to the communication of human emotion from the performer to the listener, as seen in many of the treatises on keyboard playing, particularly from C.P.E. Bach. E.T.A. Hoffmann and Johann Gottfried Herder also focus on emotion in music, and, copying Herder, Johann Nikolaus Forkel describes music as a language of emotions. In spite of this emphasis on emotion and the human heart, the late eighteenth century saw a shift away from the Baroque understanding of Affektenlehre and music as an imitation of emotions. Some twentieth-century music theorists, such as Carl Dahlhaus see this era as a break away from mimetic theory (Klassische 17-18). For the first time in centuries, the practice of imitating emotions was called into question around 1800 as musicians and those writing about music sought to describe the emotionally powerful art as autonomous from any other art or skill. Yet as will be shown here in the subsequent chapters, the break was never complete, for music remained tied to emotion in the nineteenth century. The imitation of passions in music in the eighteenth century included the imitation of nature and language. Insofar as passions were understood as part of nature and the force that drives the need for language, the imitation of passions and language equals the imitation of nature. JeanJacques Rousseau and Jean Philippe Rameau both influenced late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century music aesthetics, with one emphasizing melody, the other harmony as the key component to music’s imitation of nature. Their disagreement on which aspect of music is most important represents one of the central conflicting themes in eighteenth-century theories about music. Many other writers also contributed to this argument, known as querelle des Bouffons, as Enrico Fubini explains in his collection of eighteenth-century essays about music (67). Rameau emphasized harmony as an essential part of nature’s order and considered music the best scientific means for discovering this (Rousseau xxiv), while Rousseau believed music grew from the primal need to express human passions and melody’s imitation of language is the best way to express these passions (xxiv). Rameau’s interest in harmony begins to foreshadow Hoffmann’s emphasis on consonance, based on his understanding of Palestrina, but as

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Zoltai mentions in Ethos and Affekt, Rameau’s idea of harmony is still an imitation of nature and in keeping with the Affektenlehre (165). In her work on late eighteenth-century music criticism, Mary Sue Morrow explains that late eighteenth-century mimetic theory mainly grew out of Rousseau’s arguments about music as an imitation of language (6). The role of imitation in the late eighteenth century, as derived from the Affektenlehre, already relegated music to an art, rather than merely a craft, in its emphasis on the imitation of nature. In Rousseau’s Essay on the Origins of Language (Essai sur l’origine des langues), he compares music’s imitation of nature to aesthetics in other arts such as painting. In his chapter on melody, Rousseau writes: Just as the feelings that painting arouses in us are not all due to colors, so the dominion music has over our souls is not at all the work of sounds. Beautiful colors, finely shaded, please the sight, but that pleasure is purely one of sensation. It is the design, it is the imitation that endows these colors with life and soul, it is the passions which they express that succeed in moving our own, it is the objects which they represent that succeed in affecting us … Melody does in music precisely what design does in painting; it is melody that indicates the contours and figures, of which the accords and sounds are but the colors (319-320).

Through the imitation of nature in the painting’s or melody’s design, the artwork expresses passion. Already Rousseau considers expression part of imitation. It is not the mere representation of human emotions in the musical performance, but the expression that allows the listener to experience them. Expression, however, does not exclude imitation, but happens in the process of music’s imitation of a design in nature. Rousseau attempts to counter Rameau’s theory here by emphasizing that chords alone do not imitate through a design, but are the tools for the design, as colors are to a painting. The chords allude to harmony, what Rameau considers the imitation of the passions. Rameau argues in his “Treatise on Harmony” (1722) that harmony is the principle sound from nature and melody comes from harmony (Fubini 135-138). Harmony is made up of certain chords that indicate and bring out a particular emotion, depending on the level of dissonance or consonance (139). In his later text, “Observations on Our Musical Instinct and on its Principle,” Rameau further explains his theory about harmony and emphasizes that eliciting feeling has more priority over the imitation of “movements and sounds” (141). Rousseau, however, attempts to dismiss the chords as mere sensation rather than the imitation of nature. As indicated in the above quote, music for Rousseau can not communicate the expression of passions to the listener without imitation. Both Rameau’s and Rousseau’s theories focus on the imitation of nature and draw on Aristotle’s concept of ethos

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in mimesis; the imitation of nature in music must evoke the inner life of the listener. Rameau’s and Rousseau’s separate emphasis on melody or harmony joins together around 1800 in the attempt to separate music from language and to focus on its expression of spirit in nature. Influenced by Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language, music theorist Johann Nikolaus Forkel separates music and language in his General History of Music (1788) (Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik) while still emphasizing the importance of imitation in music. Forkel is one of the last theorists of the eighteenth century to suggest so strongly that music must imitate emotion, but he does so in a way that emphasizes nature over emotions, for he stresses that the imitation of the passions is really the imitation of the natural feelings experienced in the audience at the moment of performance. In doing so, he closes the rift between Rameau and Rousseau, while also providing a practical means to imitate nature most fully. Music’s purpose to imitate nature allows for a more complex texture, for instance two or more melodic lines that work harmonically together. Since an audience represents a varied mix of passions, according to Forkel, a true imitation of nature would imitate all passions of the listeners. Forkel further explains that such a piece would then imitate nature better than a single melody that concentrates on one mood, because it would imitate the natural mix of emotions in the audience as a whole rather than one single feeling in one individual (§90-92). Forkel argues this in part to show his regard for J.S. Bach’s music at a time when a simple harmonized melody in a song piece was preferred to the double-themed fugues, canons, and passacaglia of the Baroque era.2 The imitation of nature through music is tied to the imitation of the body and human activity by building mechanical puppets, or automata. Many _____________ 2

For general information on late eighteenth-century “Classical” song style, see Donald J. Grout and Claude V. Palisca, History of Western Music, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 1988), 578, as well as Gluck’s preface to Alceste in Enrico Fubini, ed. Music and Culture in EighteenthCentury Europe, trans. Wolfgang Freis, Lisa Gasbarrone, and Michael Louis Leone (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1994), 364-6. Morrow indicates that the argument between polyphonic and homophonic styles was related to the debate about how many passions could be represented in one single piece in Mary Sue Morrow, German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 1011. Such arguments can be seen from the diverse points of view in Fubini’s collection of essays, but the idea of a simple harmonized melody with little ornamentation did influence composition in Germany, as can be seen most clearly in Reichardt’s strict adherence to this style in his compositions. Mozart’s and Haydn’s compositions, written in the same years Forkel writes the Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, also favor this more homophonic style, albeit with some ornamentation, as becomes clear when one compares their piano music to J.S. Bach’s fugues and inventions.

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of the automata built in the eighteenth century were androids designed to perform an activity usually associated with the intellect or heart as a way to show how the machine can capture irregularities and imitate aspects of life requiring the mind. The androids built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could play chess,3 speak, write, draw, and play musical instruments. However, such a combination of the mechanical and creative as displayed in these automata began to separate in a distinction between mind and body. Johann Gottfried Herder, for instance, viewed the faculty of the mind as disconnected from the body’s mechanism of feeling.4 Where machines and the mechanical represented cold reason in early-nineteenth-century texts, they were often held in juxtaposition to the organic nature music was supposed to imitate. However, as the eighteenth-century androids show, machines and organic nature, including human cognition, were not always polar opposites. Philipp Sarasin writes in his book on machines and the body that the machine and the organic were interchangeable in pre-Romantic thought (75). In another study on machines in human history, Herbert Heckman explains that the relationship between the body and the machine starts with the stone-age necessity to build tools as extensions of the body in order to survive (11). The nineteenth-century desire to separate the mechanical from the organic was a reaction to Enlightenment philosophy and an attempt to break away from this thinking in favour of an emphasis of expression and spirit over form. The concept of the body as a machine, as Heckman indicates, is not an Enlightenment invention, but part of Greek philosophical thought (1617). No doubt the Greek ideas about the machine and body influenced Enlightenment philosophy. In her book on marionettes, machines, and automata in German and English Romanticism, Lieselotte Sauer describes the machine as a prominent metaphor for the state and the body in the eighteenth century. The idea of the well-functioning machine evolved out of works such as Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Julien Offray de La Mettries L’homme machine (Sauer 43, 57). Sauer comments that La Mettrie went so far as to consider the soul part of the body’s machine, a thought, however, that did not represent common belief at the time, and L’homme machine was banned in France and harshly criticized in Germany (53, 58). The philosophical ideas that linked the body and state to a machine played _____________ 3

4

The most famous chess-playing automaton, built by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769 was actually controlled by a master chess player small enough to fit inside the chess table. Herbert Heckmann, Die andere Schöpfung: Geschichte der frühen Automaten in Wirklichkeit und Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Umschau, 1982), 258-261. See the first section of Part I in Johann Gottfried Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 5-24.

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a role in the attempt to build androids that showed the mechanisms of the bodily movements and functions. Three clockmakers, Jacques de Vaucanson and Pierre and Henri Louis Jacquet-Droz built some of the most famous and life-like androids of the eighteenth century. As Barth mentions, Vaucanson and Jacquet-Droz intended for their automata to show irregularities of organic functions (13). Vaucanson’s duck (1738), for instance, imitates the digestive tract. The duck could eat, digest its food, and then excrete its waste, displaying how the organic properties of the body function like a machine. Most of the Vaucansonian and Jacquet-Droz automata were musicians and are mentioned in most histories of automated musical instruments. In consideration of music, it is not only the cognitive faculty of the mind needed to improvise and play the instrument, but the slightly irregular rhythm which was part of eighteenth-century musical performance practices (Barth 13). David Fuller’s Mechanical Musical Instruments as a Source for the Study of Notes Inégales provides some examples of eighteenth-century music played by automated musical instruments but with the slight variations in tempo which matched the performing style of the time. At a time such as the late twentieth century when metronomic accuracy is an essential aspect of learning the rhythm of a piece, one could expect the machines to keep to a more regular tempo than the average human musician. Such accuracy, however, was not necessarily desirable, as can be seen in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” where Olimpia’s regular rhythm is seen as too measured and machine-like (Hoffmann Reclam 34). The Vaucansonian and Jacquet-Droz androids, therefore, were not meant to act with mechanical regularity, but to show how the life-like irregularities are included in the philosophical concept of the body as a machine. The musical androids built by Pierre and Henri-Louis Jacquet-Droz and Jacques de Vaucanson provide the best examples of real automata that influenced E.T.A. Hoffmann’s imagination and led to the portrayal of lifelike mechanical dolls in “The Automata” and “The Sandman.” Such music-playing dolls also influenced the metaphor of the virtuosic automaton that Heinrich Heine used to describe the weight of technical skill over expression in piano performance. The musical dolls from Jacques de Vaucanson were a flautist and a drummer. According to Jan Brauers in his book on automated musical instruments, the flautist had all the joints necessary on his fingers to play 12 brilliant (bravouröse)5 pieces which were played on the instrument rather than imitated by organ pipes elsewhere in _____________ 5

Heckmann, on the other hand, calls these simple pieces. Unfortunately, neither Heckmann nor Brauers mention the source of their judgment on the music (Heckmann, Die andere Schöpfung, 226). Jan Brauers, Von der Äolsharfe zum Digitalspieler: 2000 Jahre mechanische Musik, 100 Jahre Schallplatte (München: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1984), 18.

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the machine (18). The drummer, according to Heckmann, actually played a Basque tambourine rather than a drum and also had a pipe, but much about his music remains unknown (226). As Heckmann indicates, the lack of more detailed information about the Vaucansonian automata is due to their disappearance, so the only knowledge about them today comes from what was written during their popularity (231). Vaucanson’s androids, however, are mentioned in a number of literary texts that discuss automata. This is true not only for early-nineteenth-century authors such as Hoffmann, who mentions them in “The Automata,” but also for American works written at the turn of the twenty-first century, such as Steven Milhauser’s “The New Automaton Theater” (1998) and William Gaddis’s Agapē Agape (2002). A keyboardist, scribe, and a draftsman built by Pierre and Henri-Louis Jacquet-Droz, on the other hand, are currently in the musée d’art et d’ histoire in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where they are demonstrated once a month and provide an example of the attempt to imitate activity requiring thought. The Jacquet-Droz dolls are not life-size, but they are life-like, except that their talents in writing and drawing far exceed those of a typical threeyear-old. The keyboardist is a young woman who plays an eighteenthcentury keyboard instrument and like Vaucanson’s flautist, she has the proper joints on all her fingers to really play the keys. Her eyes follow the movement of her hands across the keyboard, her torso moves slightly inward toward the keys, and her chest moves up and down as if she’s breathing. As Brauers mentions, at the end of each piece, she gives a little bow (20, 112). The automated musical instruments contain the performance practices of the times they were built, especially, as Fuller shows, in regards to rhythmic irregularities (7), and the Jacquet-Droz keyboardist could also show the accepted practice of the proper amount of movement at the piano. Bodily movement in musical performance shows not only the pulse of the piece, but also emotion. The keyboardist’s subtle movement, in fact, shows more emotion and awareness of what she is playing than the accepted practice in twentieth-century piano performance.6 It is difficult today, therefore, to judge whether or not her performance would have been deemed “mechanical” in the late eighteenth century. Her movement is slight and does not follow the rhythm in a mechanical manner, but _____________ 6

The dominant style of performance in the United States as commonly taught in the late twentieth century emphasized as little bodily movement as possible. Movement in towards the keys, as the Jacquet-Droz doll demonstrates, should be used only if the upper-body weight is needed to help play very loudly. This can not be the case in Jacquet-Droz’s musician because the type of music that would require upper-body weight was not composed until at least a half century after she was built.

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rather seems to indicate an emotional response to what she is playing. This 230-year-old mechanical doll creates the illusion of life-likeness more successfully than many more musician androids included in exhibits on automated dolls and musical instruments. The music also lacks the vaudeville style most associated with such instruments and instead sounds very similar to eighteenth-century pieces played in concert today. Of the three Jacquet-Droz dolls, the keyboardist is the most interesting in her connection to Olimpia in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandmann.” Herself a work of art, she carries the illusion of being a talented musical artist. Through the mechanical imitation of a musician’s movements, the Jacques-Droz automaton also imitates emotions and shows the merging of mechanical and cognitive activity. In their imitation of cognitive activity and irregularity, the musician-androids deserve closer scrutiny as they come up in literary texts of the nineteenth century. Usually they are seen as satire in early romantic aesthetics that pits the mechanical against the spirit and creativity. However, if the mechanics were meant to be irregular and imitate the organic, then the art the android figures produce does not obviously mean art void of emotion. Movement away from imitation and the desire to show that the soul, thinking, and feeling were separate from the body and machine led to an art aesthetic that separated the mechanical from the organic. In music, this separation manifested itself in a split between two different languages, speech as the language of ideas and reason and music as the language of emotions. Rousseau’s insistence that art imitate nature through design, such as the form of a painting, includes his idea that melody imitates language. This aspect of his theory on music’s origin adheres to the Affektenlehre, in the attempt to stir the passions through imitation. In its imitation of language, however, music shares the same origins as language and becomes its own mode of expression. In his essay Rousseau writes, Melody, by imitating the inflections of the voice, expresses complaints, cries of sadness or of joy, threats, and moans; all the vocal signs of the passions are within its scope. It imitates the accents of languages, and the turns of phrase appropriate in each idiom to certain movements of the soul; it not only imitates, it speaks, and its language, inarticulate but lively, ardent, passionate, has a hundred times more energy than speech itself. (322)

Language here is tied to the passions and the soul. For Rousseau, inflections in speech communicate certain emotions to the listener, and language relays emotions naturally, whereas melody in music does this only by imitating the natural tendencies of language. It appears at first from this quote that music imitates human passions through imitating the aspect of speech (inflection) that best communicates human nature. On

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the contrary, Rousseau’s description of the relationship between music and language shows that their connection begins to reach beyond imitation. Music imitates language but surpasses language in its energy and ability to express emotion. Already, Rousseau points to the potential in music for the expression of emotion as separate from language. Rousseau’s theory hints at a movement away from imitation, but still draws heavily on the relationship between music and rhetoric as an aspect of the Affektenlehre. Other musicians at the time also pointed out the connection between music and language. Barth explains how C.P.E. Bach, a music theorist and son of Johann Sebastian Bach tried to show how music constructs rational ideas in its imitation of language by composing a “conversation” in 1751, an experiment, however, that failed to communicate thought in the same manner as language (29-32). C.P.E. Bach later gave up this project, but not without affirming that music has the power to elicit affect and in so doing speaks in its own manner separate but similar to language (33). Rousseau’s Essay on the Origins of Language was published in 1781, three decades after C.P.E. Bach’s “conversation” of 1751. Rousseau’s theory responds to Bach’s lesson: music has its own object and means of communication. As its own language, music begins to move away from imitation and toward expression. Rousseau’s own idea comes from previous statements in the eighteenth century about music and language, and influences later theorists such as Herder and Forkel. Rousseau, Herder, and Forkel all focused on the notion that spoken language emerges from poetry and music. As Rousseau explains, The first stories, the first harangues, and the first laws were in verse; poetry was discovered before prose; this had to be so, since the passions spoke before reason. The same was so for music: at first there was no music at all other than melody, nor any other melody than the varied sound of speech, the accents formed the song, the quantities formed the meter, and one spoke as much by sounds and rhythm as by articulations and voices. (318)

For Rousseau, reason belongs with prose and poetry with passion. At first glance, music comes from language since “there was no melody than the varied sound of speech.” However, Rousseau also claims that passions and poetry came before reason and prose. Rousseau thus reverses his theory here that music imitates language through melody. Instead, melody connects music and language together in their beginnings, for both music and speech began as melody. Rousseau’s argument about music’s imitative properties focuses on music’s imitation of speech— indicating speech’s existence prior to music. In the above passage, at the same time he still keeps music and language separate, Rousseau’s explanation reverses the logical order of which came first, primarily with the

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phrase “passions spoke before reason.” Since music speaks in passions, the more logical order for the origins of language and music would be that music precedes language. In fact, Rousseau’s choice of words implies that both originate at the same time, “one spoke as much by sounds and rhythm as by articulation and voices.” Music as an art imitates language, but when language began to develop as a tool to articulate ideas, it imitated melody as a form of expression. Music thus imitates this “original expression” in linguistic utterances that relay feeling to the listener. Johann Gottfried Herder, a philosopher and theologian, derives his philosophy of language’s origins and its connection to music from Rousseau, as Hans Dietrich Irmscher mentions in the afterward to Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772) (147). Herder quotes Rousseau but also refers to other earlier eighteenth-century philosophers who maintain that poetry and music were one at the beginning, and that poetry came before prose (52-53), indicating that Rousseau’s writings reflect a common belief in the eighteenth century about the relationship between music and language. Herder argues against his contemporaries’ desire to connect poetry and music because for him, this relationship does not fully explain the origins of language. Music and spoken language for Herder come from the same emotional outburst, or Urlaut (elemental sound), “Ach” or “O,” but Herder describes language’s development as separate from music and a necessary means to articulate feelings and experiences (70). Language for Herder is a natural part of the human soul (79) and, while emerging from feeling, is led by human reason to name the things in the world that do not sound, namely ideas. Furthermore, language, for Herder is what differentiates humanity from other animals and what, according to Irmscher, makes humanity’s own reality available and known (168). Herder thus separates language from music and poetry from song more so than his immediate philosophical predecessors and contemporaries, in attempts to show that the human capacity for reason is responsible for the development and creation of language rather than simply the instinct to sing. Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s explanation about music’s origins in General History of Music (1788) comes from both Rousseau and Herder. The implication in Rousseau’s essay that music and speech developed together from the expression of passions becomes the central focus for Forkel’s theories about music’s origin. At the same time, Forkel focuses on Herder’s separation of language from music, but as a musician, Forkel focuses more on the history of music than language, and says no more about language than that from the original emotive “Ach!” spoken language and music developed into two languages—one communicating ideas and reason (Sprache des Geistes), the other emotions (Sprache des Herzens) (§2).

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Like Herder’s theory, Forkel’s separation of spoken language from the language of music refutes any earlier attempts to equate music to speech, but emphasizes the properties of language inherent in music, for instance, that melody is a “connection of individual tones in a row as a sentence connects words” (§7).7 Otherwise, Forkel explains how the different aspects of a song, for instance harmony, modulation, and rhythm, are arranged to imitate various affects and the natural change of affects in a single person (§14, §85). Forkel’s theory represents a split from earlier eighteenth-century theorists in their insistence that music, in its imitation of language, represents rational thought. The separation of language and music in these three texts, however, still adheres to the Affektenlehre. Rousseau’s, Herder’s and Forkel’s theories emphasize the traditional role of Affekt in music as an imitation of passions and human nature. Their theories, however, began to move toward thinking about music as expression rather than imitation, for music as its own language became a tool used to communicate emotions more immediately than words. The connection between music and language and the subsequent attempt to separate them also led to another late eighteenth-century controversy in music aesthetics related to imitation and autonomy: vocal versus instrumental music. As Morrow states in her book, as long as eighteenthcentury musicians and theorists thought of music as an imitation of language, the voice was considered the most important instrument, and vocal reigned over instrumental music (5). Vocal music, or song, had text which was language, and the language was important for communicating the moral idea in the performance that went along with the human passions imitated in the piece. According to Johann George Sulzer, instrumental music played an inferior role to vocal music in communicating emotions, in spite of his explanation under the heading “Instrumentalmusik” in his dictionary Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (General Theory of the Beautiful Arts) (1771) that music is based on “the power to express the varying passions that already lie in inarticulate tones” (677). For Sulzer, certain types of instrumental music do not require words, such as marches and dances, because the necessary emotions for these occasions already exist in the music. However, in spite of music’s expression of emotions in its inarticulate tones, Sulzer maintains that language is needed whenever the “object of emotion” ought to be communicated in order to create a stronger effect (Wirkung). On the relationship between music and text, Sulzer concludes: _____________ 7

Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.

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From here we learn with complete certainty, that music only achieves its greatest effect if it is combined with poetry, when vocal and instrumental music are united. (677)

Since, as mentioned above, speech was considered a language of ideas and music (song) a language of emotions, it is the combination of the two that for Sulzer produces a stronger effect on the listener. This idea is echoed again in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Poet and the Composer,” in which Ludwig, the composer, explains that music and text come from the same source and are very closely related (Hoffmann, II 83). Sulzer’s wording however, does not allow the seemingly equal treatment which Hoffmann’s character gives music and language. Instead, Sulzer makes it quite clear in stating that music “only achieves its greatest effect when combined with poetry,” that music without text does not have the same strength as poetry. For Sulzer, poetry is part of vocal music, and the instrumental music is used merely to underline the desired emotions which match the character of the piece based on words of the song text. In spite of its inferior rank, instrumental music played an active role in the concert halls and courts of the late eighteenth century. Symphonic form, after all, reaches its peak in this period, with the symphonies of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Each of these composers, as well as many others, was also responsible for a considerable keyboard repertory consisting of solo music without a designed purpose, such as sonatas or a theme with variations. Fubini includes a section on instrumental music in his collection of eighteenth-century essays on music, stating “the numerous treatises on instrumental performance practice written in the second half of the eighteenth century leave not the slightest doubt that instrumental music was by then implicitly considered a powerfully expressive art” (299). However, the classical symphonic style Haydn used in 1771 was based on Italian opera overture, or sinfonia (Grout 588). This shows how prevalent vocal music still was over instrumental music by the late eighteenth century, for one of the most dominant forms of late eighteenthcentury instrumental music came from the instrumental section of an opera, which is generally considered vocal music. In spite of this, instrumental music appears to have gained popularity by 1800, if the number of concertos, symphonies, piano sonatas, and quartets that have survived from this period can testify to the desire at this time for such music. Vocal or instrumental, meaning was crucial to eighteenth-century music aesthetics. Most theorists and critics, according to Morrow, gave more weight to vocal music, because with a text, it was more obvious that it meant something (5). As will be shown in a more detailed discussion of their theories, Kant and Hegel both relied on meaning in art expressed in ideas, leading to their rather negative assessments of music, which they see

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void of ideas if not accompanied by words. Instrumental music rose almost by default, according to Dahlhaus, as critics attempted to make room for Haydn’s wordless pieces in their aesthetic preference for vocal music (74). Those who attempted to justify Haydn’s or Mozart’s instrumental music, for instance, still concentrated on the character of the piece—so if the piece did not clearly mean something (i.e. have a poetic idea), it had to at least be connected to some kind of emotion.8 According to Morrow, it was not until about 1800 when a new aesthetic began to emerge that allowed instrumental music not to mean anything specific, and gave it a place in the category of the sublime (14-15). The battle for abstract expression in instrumental music continued into the nineteenth century, as pieces such as Mendelssohn’s “Songs without Words,” or Liszt’s tone poems countered the new idea that instrumental music does not need to convey an idea or character. The eighteenth-century conception of the relationship between language and music helped form an aesthetic of music that relied more on the immediate expression of human emotion than imitation and gave rise to an aesthetic that highlights music without concrete meaning. The way in which instrumental music is defined in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century has interesting parallels to the production of automated musical instruments, the reception of their music and that mode of musical performance. The musician androids by JacquetDroz and Vaucanson not only demonstrate how organic nature can be reconstructed mechanically, they are also automated musical instruments. Often referred to as “mechanical” musical instruments, automated musical instruments have been around for thousands of years, the earliest known of such instruments, the Aeolian harp, dating back to 1000 B.C.E. (Brauers 9). As Brauers states in his introduction, the term “mechanical” is problematic when referring to musical instruments, because all musical instruments have some kind of mechanism which allows them to sound (8). “Mechanical musical instruments” appears to be the accepted English translation of the more common German “automatische Musikinstrumente,” as searches for information in English and in German in library catalogues and online have shown. Since all instruments, the piano, violin, the harp, the barrel organ and the phonograph are in some sense “mechanical,” what separates the “automated” musical instruments from the rest is the way they are controlled. The person controlling the automated musical instrument, for example, does not directly control the notes being _____________ 8

Different keys at that time had their own character because the keyboards were not tempered quite as evenly as they are today. See Mark Lindley, “Temperaments,” Groves Music Online ed. L. Macy. .

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played or their duration in the same sense as a violinist, pianist, or trumpeter. The pianist, for instance, presses black and white keys that determine which hammers will strike which strings. The instruments’ mechanism and material determine the type of sound that reaches the listener’s ear, and the performer controls this sound to produce the musical work of art. Automated musical instruments, on the other hand, often have gears like a clock, in which either a cylinder with raised dots or a perforated metal disk determines what notes are played when. Due to these clockwork gears, the instruments are often referred to as “mechanical musical instruments.” However, the gear type of mechanism is only one of the many ways to get an automated instrument to play music, and Ord-Hume devotes a chapter to the development of other methods, such as pneumatic action in his history of the Pianola.9 It is not necessary to read musical notation in order to play these automated musical instruments, which in the nineteenth century include barrel organs, mechanical organs, playerpianos, orchestrions, simple music boxes, hurdy-gurdies, and the gramophone or phonograph. Brauers reserves the term “automated” for instruments that truly play by themselves, without needing someone to turn a crank, as with a Drehorgel or use pedals, as with the Pianola, or player-piano. The German term Automat (automaton) derives from the Greek root autos, or self, and means, according to Johann Christoph Adelung’s dictionary of 1808, a machine that appears to control itself (column 674). Since “mechanical” could mean any instrument, emphasizing the physical properties that create the musical sound, “automated” is better suited to this study to define instruments which do not need to be played by someone who has had training on the instruments they imitate, such as the organ or piano because these instruments appear to control themselves. One of the most common automated instruments in the nineteenth century is the orchestrion, an instrument that contained the various instruments of a full orchestra and seemed to play by itself. The instrument generally looks like a large piece of furniture, a bit larger than a full upright piano and can have instruments such as horns, clarinets, and drums in view, although on some, these instruments are hidden inside the wooden case. Sometimes small automata will dance or “play” the instruments. The android ensemble Professor X. puts together in Hoffmann’s “The Automata” could be read as a type of orchestrion, with the exception of Professor X.’s own control over the instruments through his piano playing. According to Brauers, the orchestrion is often considered a midnineteenth-century invention, but there are records of it already existing in _____________ 9

For more information, see Ord-Hume’s chapter on the development of pneumatic action. Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume. Pianola: The History of the Self-Playing Piano (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), 79-104.

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the late eighteenth century (45). The instruments of this nature at the Musikautomaten Museum (Museum of Mechanical Music Instruments) in Seewen, Switzerland and in Berlin’s Märkisches Museum, most dating from the mid-nineteenth century and later, are controlled by either a cylinder or a paper roll. Often the instruments come with several rolls or cylinders that can be switched so that the instruments can play a larger variety of tunes. The earlier orchestrions demonstrated in the museums sound a lot like real orchestras because their sound comes from the instruments in the case, rather than the sound of simple music boxes we might be more familiar with today. In an aesthetic which places vocal music above instrumental, a paradox ensues when certain instruments are used to improve and correct the human voice. Both acoustic and automated instruments were used for this purpose in the late eighteenth century. The voice, for those who favored vocal music, was of course the purest instrument in its ability to add expression through words for a clearer moral message. Sulzer states in his dictionary under the heading “Instrumentalmusik”: Among all the instruments, on which passionate tones can be formed, the human larynx is without a doubt the most exquisite. Therefore one could look at it as a basic principle that the most exquisite instruments are those who are most able to imitate human song in all its tonal modifications. For this reason, the oboe is one of the most exquisite. (679)

Not only is the voice the best-regarded instrument, but instruments which share the same capacities of modulation and the same tones as the voice—in a sense instruments which can “imitate” the voice—are also highly praised. According to Müller-Sievers, the soprano voice was thought to produce the most optimal and purest tones in eighteenthcentury music because it defied the limitation caused by mathematical differences between the intervals, especially in the higher registers; the soprano voice could modulate freely without needing to be tempered like the piano, organ, or guitar (103). The oboe is a high-register instrument, which explains why Sulzer values it so highly. In his book on the connection between piano technique and psychology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Wolfgang Scherer provides a list of musical instruments that are supposed to imitate the Naturlaut, or Herder’s original expression of emotion, “Ach.” The instruments included as an “organ of the soul” are the voice, glass harmonica, Bogenflügel, Chladni’s Clavicylinder, and the clavichord, an early keyboard instrument (75). In Hoffmann’s “The Automata,” Ludwig adds the Aeolian harp and the harmonicon to this list, both of which are automated musical instruments. The instruments for imitation of the voice, however, become the tools to improve the voice. In her article on the glass harmonica, Heather

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Hadlock explains how the glass harmonica, popular at the end of the eighteenth century provides a good example of instrumental superiority over the preferred soprano voice in its use to help singers with the purity of their voices (509). This turns the imitation on its head: instead of the instrument imitating the voice, the voice imitates the instrument. Although vocal music is preferred, the instrument designed to imitate the voice soon supersedes the human voice, concentrating on the tone of the voice rather than the text, and relegating music from both acoustic and automated instruments superior to vocal music. The Danish author Hans Christian Andersen plays with the relationship between the automated musical instrument designed to imitate the voice and the natural voice in his mid-nineteenth-century tale “The Nightingale.” The story can be read as a critique of the perfectionism behind automated musical instruments. A nightingale is found in the emperor’s vast garden and asked to come to the palace to sing for the emperor. After awhile, the nightingale’s voice tires from overuse and the bird can no longer sing. To compensate for this loss, the emperor is given a mechanical bird that imitates the nightingale. The emperor and the royal subjects consider the mechanical bird even more beautiful than the real bird. The mechanical bird eventually wears out, and the real bird returns to sing again. By the time Andersen wrote this tale, the philosophical ideas that had connected the organic to the mechanical had given way to the Romantic separation of the two in attempts to show that the outer body has an inner spirit, an autonomous interiority separate from the soulless machine. Andersen’s tale also demonstrates the preference for instruments over human performers, although the real nightingale eventually triumphs over the mechanical bird. For the emperor, the mechanical nightingale perfected the tone and voice of the real bird. In Andersen’s story, the perfect tone, even in vocal music comes from the automated musical instrument rather than the singer’s body. Today’s assessment of nineteenth-century automated musical instruments would hardly allow for the perfection of tone and spirit shown in Andersen’s tale because the twentieth-century reception of such instruments has focused on their triviality. Such a bias is based on the notion of high and low culture10 and ignores the instruments’ contribution to music aesthetics at the time they were built. The instruments’ popularity in part spawns this twentieth-century judgment, in spite of the ability to trace automated musical instruments back to early Roman and Arab civilization. Twentieth-century studies on musical instruments often treat automated _____________ 10

For more information on the attitudes of “high” and “low” culture in the twentieth century, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988), 83-168.

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and acoustic musical instruments as separate cultural phenomena with distinct, albeit parallel histories. Most work on these instruments has come from scholars in fields of popular and material cultural studies, or by collectors and museums. Ernst Simon and David Fuller are two of the few musicologists whose work on automated musical instruments focuses more on the music preserved in the machines than on the instruments’ popularity.11 Simon challenges the contemporary notion about the triviality of these instruments and gives them a role in music history (11) while Fuller merits the value of music on automated musical instruments as an example of eighteenth-century performance practices, in particular, notes inégales. However, he joins many others in pointing out how trivial the music is because it was popular (7), following the common notion that an era’s popular music can not be serious art because it does not survive beyond its time. The twentieth century tends to treat popular and trivial as synonymous when it comes to art and opposes such work to serious art of the past. Such a point of view results in scholarship on automated musical instruments that automatically deems the instruments unworthy of serious consideration in music aesthetics. This twentieth-century notion of triviality in relation to automated musical instruments, however, proves inadequate when considering the reactions of composers of serious music had toward the instruments, or what was considered part of a serious concert repertoire at the time.12 In his article on the history of automated musical instruments, Dieter Krickeberg treats as a joke Beethoven’s remarks about the ability of a mechanical organ to play his overture better than the orchestra which had just practiced it (23). Brauers, however, interprets the same remark more seriously and uses it to emphasize the technical abilities of the automated instrument beyond the capabilities of the human performer (27).13 Neither Brauers nor Krickeberg indicate the source for their interpretation of Beethoven’s reaction to hearing his composition on an automated musical instrument, but if the instruments currently on display and still well-maintained at the museums offer any testimony to the quality of the sound, it could be difficult for someone to _____________ 11

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Most of the sources focus on the mechanism in the automata, rather than the aesthetic response, although Heckmann’s book does consider the aesthetics in literature. Others tend to emphasize the automated aspect of the instruments as a less desirable “mechanical” counterpart to human involvement in musical performance. According to Hanson, some composers viewed types of solo pieces, such as a theme and variations as nothing more than light entertainment. Alice M. Hanson, Musical Life in Biedermeier Vienna (London: Cambridge UP, 1985), 92. Today solo piano concerts often include a theme and variations. Brauers also notes that orchestras in the early nineteenth century rarely had time to practice before the performance (Brauers, Von der Äolsharfe zum Digitalspieler, 27).

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discern the difference between the instrument and a real orchestra by ears alone, except that the instrument would not have made mistakes and would have played the piece flawlessly every time. Showing how the automated musical instrument’s ability to add more difficult passages than what could be expected from a human musician is part of the project of Ord-Hume’s Joseph Haydn and the Mechanical Organ, a work on the merits of studying Haydn’s compositions for mechanical organ. However, even Ord-Hume, an instrument technician who has done extensive work on the history of automated musical instruments, particularly the player-piano, tends to look at the collaboration between Haydn and the clock-maker through the lens of twentieth-century understanding of musical culture. Towards the end of his book, he mentions that Haydn “himself more than likely considered the mechanical organ to be something of a whimsy – an amusing venture bordering on the novelty” (126). Considering Ord-Hume’s project, this is a curious speculation of Haydn’s own judgment of the musical worth of these instruments. Rather than reflect what Haydn himself really thought about the instruments, it instead shows how powerful the notion of high and low culture in the twentieth century has become, so that even an instrument technician feels compelled to reduce the object of his own work to “nothing more than a novelty.” A more honest statement about the quality of the music preserved in the automated musical instruments should take into account that Haydn was one of the many composers whose music is extolled today in concert halls who also composed for mechanical organs and other automated musical instruments. Automated musical instruments, while using mechanics to appear to operate alone, did not necessarily render a performance “mechanical.” The word “mechanical” takes on a variety of different meanings when referring to human physical and mental activity, but especially to the fine arts. In the eighteenth-century attempt to describe music as imitation, there was not yet the divide between the “mechanical” reason and the “expressive” art as in Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenäum-Fragmente (Zoltai 165, Schlegel). On the other hand, references to the machine, as in Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language represent two oppositional attitudes: feelings as part of the natural mechanical function of the body, and the machine lacking human emotion. Herder refers to the “feeling Machine” as part of human’s natural instinct to want to speak (22-23). However, the equation between human being and machine also has a less complimentary attribute. Herder argues that it is reason that enables humanity to create language and pits this ability against what he calls A large, clumsy, helpless machine, that is supposed to walk but can not walk with its stiff limbs, that should see, hear, and taste and with unmoving fluid in the eye,

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with a hardened ear and a tongue turned to stone can not do any of these things. (82)

Herder’s “feeling-machine” has, in this context, lost its ability to feel, or move. The undesirable machine here is the one that has no feeling or sensory capacity to acknowledge and experience the world. This single text thus shows two ways of looking at the body as a machine. On the one hand, the body is a machine that feels emotions as a mechanical aspect of the physical body, but on the other, the incapacity to employ reason leaves the human as a machine that appears broken because it can not move or sense anything. The philosophical link between the body and the machine therefore works positively in Herder’s text only insofar as the “mechanics” of sensory experience awaken feeling and the urge to describe this feeling through language. The “clumsy and helpless machine” of the body without reason defies the intricate mechanical workings of the human body and instead represents an empty and lifeless being, or rather, a poorly built automaton. Such opposing views of the machine and mechanical in connection to human cognition and emotion also exist in critiques of musical performance in literary texts of the nineteenth century, yet it is not always clear what “mechanical” means. The term “mechanical” in reference to art, especially to music, applies to different areas of production, depending on which authors use the word and how they define it. When referring to music in particular, terms dealing with the machine such as “mechanical,” or “mechanism” seem to be arbitrary in meaning. Today, a search in libraries or on the internet will often result in types of automated musical instruments or compositions using computer technology. With the android musicians and automated musical instruments of the eighteenth century previously discussed here, “mechanical” in music sometimes referred to the instrument, and sometimes to the technical means used to produce sound. Like Herder’s second definition, Adelung defines “mechanical” as action without thought in his dictionary in 1808 (131-2). However, the question remains whether or not “mechanical” in human activity was necessarily an antithesis to cognition, as Herder and Adelung seem to define it. If the machine and the organic are interchangeable, as Sarasin mentions they were in the eighteenth century (75), then the term “mechanical” must not always mean to come from a lifeless machine as Herder describes the body without reason. Neither would the mind act completely separately from the body-machine in a “non-mechanical” manner. In music specifically, the term often applies to the harmonic structure and form—aspects requiring a certain amount of creativity and reason to bring together. Words referring to the machine, however, also refer to technical

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skill needed to master the instrument and the type of performance in which the performer plays without spiritual expression, but not necessarily without thought. Although these applications of “mechanical”—which will be described in more detail below—differ greatly from one another, they share a common negation of the quality of the whole execution of the piece of music. A “mechanical” performance tends to be one void of human emotion where performers focus on technical skill, especially rhythm. As early as 1769, an article criticizing such a performance appears in a scientific journal, Mannigfaltigkeiten. Entitled “Mechanical Music,” it is written in the form of a letter, presumably written by the editor of the journal, the natural scientist F.H.W. Martini, to a composer, Kleemann. While the word “mechanical” is not actually used in the body of the letter in reference to the performance, the performers’ musical ability is denounced in their equation to machines: I saw now for the first time with conviction, what strange forms the most beautiful piece of music can receive as a result of bad practice and horrible performance … By the looks of it, the main concern in this matter depends on a rhythmically measured movement of the limbs, and the instruments seem to be mere machines on which the so-called musicians hold tightly, in order not to lose their balance from their healthy movements. 14 (154-5)

As the connection between the letter’s title, “Mechanical Music” and the content clearly shows, the author has witnessed a miserable performance. “Mechanical,” according to the author of this letter, means the lack of ability to portray a piece as the composer wrote it, as well as the lack of emotional communication between the performer and the listener. This is obvious in the way the author refers to the instruments as machines and concentrates on the performer’s movements rather than the piece. The performers appear here to have lacked the necessary “presence of heart” necessary to elicit emotions in the listener. The instruments and the “rhythmically measured movement of the limbs” appear to get in the way of a truer execution of the piece. Tempo in the eighteenth century was not as exact as it is today, and the performer’s body movements to keep time could have detracted from _____________ 14

“Ich sahe jetzt zum ersten male mit Ueberzeugung (ein, was) für seltsame Gestalten das schönsten Tonstück durch schlechte Ausübung und einen elenden Vortrag bekommen kann ... Dem Ansehen nach beruht die Hauptsache dabey auf einer taktmäßigen Bewegung der Glieder, und die Instrumente scheinen bloße Maschinen zu seyn, worann die sogenannten Tonkünstler sich vest halten, um bey ihren gesunden Bewegungen nicht aus dem Gleichgewicht zu kommen.” (original spelling)

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a more expressive variation in tempo, for it was not until the metronome was invented in the early nineteenth century that an exact time between notes could be determined. Rhythm, according to Barth, followed the natural pulses of the body, such as the heart, and even as composers like Beethoven began to use metronome markings, they also disliked the limited freedom such strict adherence to tempo gave to a piece (14, 48). The above review in Mannigfaltigkeiten shows an attitude toward the attempt to play with exact meter as overly “machine-like.” While keeping time, the performers are not free to use metric nuances to “feel” the rhythm. Rather than imitating passions, then, the performers described in this letter are imitating a machine and are thus “mechanical.” The sight alone of the instruments and the performance also contribute to its “mechanical” nature. The author equates the instruments to machines and describes more what he sees than what he hears. It is the visual spectacle of the motions of the instrumentalists that bothers him most and gets in the way of his enjoyment of the piece. Such sentiment remains in keeping with late eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century performance practices, and have been enhanced through the nineteenth century, particularly at the keyboard. The sight of music being played also draws attention to the technical skill needed to play the instruments. In the above article “Mechanical Music,” the techniques used become visually apparent in the “healthy movements,” the “rhythmic movement of the limbs,” and the artists who appeared to hang on to their instruments. All of these are visual effects of the instruments being played, and emphasize visually the sound being produced. In Herder’s Treatise, vision does not have the same immediate connection to feeling as the ear (57), so when the performance makes itself more a visual than aural experience, it lacks the same immediacy to emotions and becomes “mechanical” in the sense that it appears void of feeling. This idea also emerges towards the end of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, as the activity of listening to music is explained as one which should be carried out with the eyes closed. With closed eyes, the listener then avoids seeing the instrumentalists’ “mechanical efforts” the visual aspect of which would destroy the communication of emotion, because the “eyes follow the movements, not the feelings” (585). The term “mechanical” thus became attached to this visual element and came to mean playing without feeling. The performers in “Mechanical Music” concentrated on the technical aspects of the piece, such as the rhythm and made this visual. It is the combination of this concentration and the visibility of the musical efforts that removes the listener’s ability to feel the music using only the ear.

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The term “mechanical,” however, was not viewed by all as an antonym for expressing or eliciting emotion in music. Sometimes the mechanics of creating a piece of music are important in providing the correct expression, as Christoph Heinrich Koch explains in his discussion of the mechanics of composition in his Essay on the Instruction for Composition of 1787. Included in the mechanics are the Tonausweichungen, changes from key to key which lead to successful modulation between keys, as well as the form of the piece. Modulation in classical harmony is the moment the main key transfers to another. This is most commonly done using a chord belonging to both keys. Such switching from key to key, according to Koch, is essential “for expression and perceptible portrayal” of the song text (104). Again, it is worth mentioning here that different key signatures exhibited various characters or moods due to the way instruments were tuned. A Major, for instance, has a brighter and cheerier tone than B-flat Major. Modulation, for Koch, therefore, is an important “mechanism” in composition for the purpose of portraying moods and emotions. Form, on the other hand, has no influence on the character or expression of a piece. When overly repetitious, the form can even become boring, because it becomes too predictable (117). “Mechanical” for Koch has less to do with how the piece is performed than the way it is built, and it is an essential element for the expression of the piece. On the other hand, the “mechanics” of the piece should not be drawn out above the expressive elements. Dahlhaus discusses Koch’s connection between “form” and “mechanical” in regards to composition and emphasises that Koch and Rousseau defined form as simply something overly machine-like (339). For Dahlhaus, the allusion to “mechanics” of composition in Koch, Sulzer and Rousseau is an element, although necessary, inferior to the expression of human passion or emotion in music (339). The article “Mechanical Music” from Mannigfaltigkeiten, the visual aspect of instrumental music, and the harmonic rules in music all tend toward a meaning of “mechanical” that depicts the inferior quality of the piece in which the mechanical elements of its composition or execution are made obvious to the listener. Thus the automation from the apparently self-operating musical instruments demands a separate aesthetical meaning from the term “mechanical” in music. Except for a few cases in which the mechanic wished to show his work, the actual mechanism that played the automated musical instrument remains hidden. Unlike the performers in “Mechanical Music,” the musical automata built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are not enslaved by their instruments. An automated musical instrument, for instance, would not consciously have to keep time with the natural tendency to show rhythm with bodily movements. The

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mechanism inside the instruments keeps time instead. In spite of the critique against measured tempo present in “Mechanical Music” and Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” the rhythmic exactness the machines were able to display became the desired norm for pianists by the middle of the nineteenth century. At the same time, machines did not always measure time exactly, but instead presented ways in which the composers could hear their pieces played with all difficult trills and nuances of tempo intact—with greater accuracy than professional musicians were able to achieve. As can be seen in Brauers’s, Fuller’s, Ord-Hume’s and Simon’s work on these instruments, the general attitude today about automated musical instruments as pieces of nostalgia that once played trivial music at fair grounds does not match the value they had at the time they were built. Today’s assessment of these instruments ignores the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century aesthetics that searched for a way to imitate nature, language, and organic irregularity. At the same time, the way these instruments are viewed now also comes from the aesthetics around 1800 which broke away from imitation and divided the mechanical from the organic, thereby mixing the aesthetics of the machine with the banal and soulless performer of “mechanical” music. The separation of the organic and mechanical aspects of nature paralleled the break in thinking about music as an imitative art. These changes came at the turn of the nineteenth century in the works of romantic writers such as Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Friedrich Schlegel, Johann Gottfried Herder and E.T.A. Hoffmann (Morrow, Dahlhaus). The newer attempts to describe music as an autonomous art came from a reaction to Immanuel Kant’s writing on music in Critique of Judgment, which moves away from the Affektenlehre at the same time it endorses vocal music. Music, according to Kant, can be imitative and play if instrumental, or serious and mean something if it accompanies a song text. Kant divides art into two separate categories, the mechanical and aesthetical— the latter which is again divided into either the pleasurable or the beautiful (§44). Devoting a chapter segment on Kant, Dahlhaus writes that Kant’s theory of music should not really be given serious consideration in musicological study—neither as an influence on later theorists nor as a typical example of his time (49). It is apparent, however, that Kant’s categories of art and his difficulty in placing music within these categories deal with the way in which music was talked about in the eighteenth century—i.e. as its own language in tones meant to imitate emotions. Kant’s writing about music in contrast to poetry reflects the practice of Affektenlehre and the attempt to attribute meaning to music.

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What Kant says about art as imitation and nature is also important in the consideration of the automated musical instruments as art and as imitation of “living” musicians. In an anecdote about a singing bird, Kant explains that once it is known that that bird is not a bird at all, but a singer, nobody will be interested in its song anymore, for as soon as the observer realizes it is art, it is no longer beautiful (§42). In his explanation, Kant continues: It must be nature or be regarded as nature if we are to take an immediate interest in the beautiful as such, and still more is this the case if we can require that others should take an interest in it too. This happens as a matter of fact when we regard as coarse and ignoble the mental attitude of those persons who have no feeling for beautiful nature (for thus we describe a susceptibility to interest in its contemplation), and who confine themselves to eating and drinking—to the mere enjoyments of sense (§42 trans. Bernard).

The observer, in order to be interested in the work of art, must be deceived into thinking that the object in question is nature. Kant tries to separate the cognitive interest in nature here with sensorial pleasure, using the example of the taste of food while eating, in keeping with his separate categories of the pleasurable and the beautiful. The beautiful is found in the intellectual interest in the object, which occurs only with the deceptive imitation of the natural. Following Kant’s theory, the deceptive lifelikeness of the automata could be considered beautiful as long as the deception remains. Hoffmann plays with this deception in “The Automata,” where even the reader does not know for certain whether the singer is an automaton or living person, and in “The Sandman,” where this deception breaks down when Coppola and Professor Spalanzani fight over ownership of Olimpia and her mechanical nature is revealed. Music, however, becomes part of nature in many early-nineteenth-century texts, for instance in Novalis’s “Apprentices at Sais,” musical sounds come out of inorganic nature throughout the text, and songs and music come from the distance without an identified source. Here there is no deception, since music is part of the landscape, and no visual effect of people playing an instrument or singing reveals the deception that it is art and not nature. The presence or absence of interest in the object is an important aspect in Kant’s categories for art which are built from his discussion about the difference between the judgment of taste and the judgment of moral feeling. Kant’s description of moral feeling is based on the relationship between ethos and affect that came from Aristotle’s aesthetics. However, Kant begins to separate the part of the Affektenlehre that bases music on the imitation of emotions, especially the feelings that are supposed to be pleasurable. The judgment of moral feeling, according to Kant, is connected to the interest in the object which deceptively imitates nature (§42).

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The judgment of taste includes pleasure, but it must exist with spirit and an idea (§52-53). Music for Kant, when unaccompanied by a text and as it is understood as an imitation of the emotions, is too near a play of sensations without an idea and therefore falls into the category of the pleasurable arts which can not be beautiful or sublime (§51). As long as music is seen as a play on emotions with the simple result of pleasure, music becomes a pleasurable instead of a beautiful art. Combined with poetry, however, music can become a beautiful art; it has to involve a moral idea, which can only come from poetry, which for Kant is the highest art, results only from genius, and gives the reader or listener something to think about without expressly telling them what to think (§53). Kant splits the aesthetics of music popular at the end of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, his criterion that art must have an idea echoes the tendency to think of music as communicating something through its play on emotions, or as Sulzer put it, to support and strengthen the emotions in the text of the poetry. On the other hand, Kant’s theory removes the idea from the imitation of affects since it does not lead to cognition of the idea represented in the art, but “merely plays with sensations” (§53). Music, in the case that it represents many ideas in its portrayal of affects, yet at the same time offers only a pleasurable experience without the ability to understand the idea could either be a beautiful art in the ranks of poetry, or a pleasurable art. Kant’s difficulty with music comes less from his lack of knowledge about music, as Julian Young claims in Schopenhauer (105), than from his position on emotions and pleasure versus a moral idea necessary in art. Music had already been defined as one of the beautiful arts, as one can see in Sulzer’s dictionary two decades before Kant wrote the Critique of Judgment. As mentioned above, emotions and purpose played a large role in the way eighteenthcentury theorists and critics understood music. Kant’s structure is therefore based on already established ideas about music as a beautiful art and music as a play with emotions. Kant’s aesthetic does not differ that much from his contemporaries who had more experience in music, especially when one considers the importance Kant places in the idea. Since the words of the songs provide the idea, instrumental music, therefore, does not mean anything without a text. Even when music is combined with words, for instance in an oratorio, Kant doubts that the combination of music and poetry would make the piece more beautiful (§52). A possible consideration for music’s beauty, however, remains in its form as Kant continues: Yet in all beautiful art the essential thing is the form, which is purposive as regards our observation and judgment, where the pleasure is at the same time cultivation and exposes the spirit to ideas, and consequently makes it susceptible of

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still more of such pleasure and entertainment. The essential element is not the matter of sensation (charm or emotion), which has only to do with enjoyment; this leaves behind nothing in the idea, and it makes the spirit dull, the object gradually distasteful, and the mind, on account of its consciousness of a disposition that conflicts with purpose in the judgment of reason, discontented with itself and peevish (§52 trans. Bernard).

Through form alone, Kant argues, music can achieve meaning, an aesthetic criteria that echoes Kant’s contemporaries. As already described above, Rousseau, Herder, Sulzer, and C.P.E. Bach all emphasized the importance of meaning in music. For Rousseau, the meaning came in the melody, for Bach, each tone represented a letter that could express reason. Kant’s argument also comes out of the point of view, which was also seen in the text by Rameau, that art is nature. For Kant, this meaning and idea has to come from the text of the poem the music accompanies, for if in pure instrumental music, the musical material is emotions and therefore simply pleasure, the observer eventually loses interest in the object and is not invited to think. The idea is discussed further in Hegel’s and Schopenhauer’s texts, although they treat the idea differently, especially in regards to music. For the reason that a text conveys an idea more easily than sound, vocal music was as much the preferred music for many of Kant’s contemporaries as it was for Kant. The main difference between Kant and his contemporaries is that his difficulty in ranking music is due to his inability to see music’s idea in the emotions, the idea that others, such as Sulzer, Forkel, and Herder, have claimed it communicates. The influence of Kant’s philosophy becomes apparent in the desire in German-language music aesthetics to place music on a pedestal—as expression of the soul free from the mechanics of its creation. Kant acknowledges that there must be a certain amount of mechanism in the beautiful arts in order to give the spirit some sort of body (§43), such as the form or harmonic structure in a piece of music. This “mechanism,” however, gets in the way of the true genius necessary to create and appreciate art, as Wackenroder shows in “The Curious Musical Life of the Musician Joseph Berglinger” (452). Many of Schlegel’s Athenäum-Fragments are also a response to Kant’s aesthetics. Music in Schlegel’s fragments appears in two different contexts as well, on the one hand music is part of nature and language, on the other it is merely imitation and rhetoric. The fragments that seem to criticize music stress music’s imitation of language. Many compositions, according to Schlegel, “are merely translations of a poem in the language of music” (127) and a type of imitation “that concerns itself only with effect … in order to affect and show” and is rhetorical (109). Schlegel’s criticism of the imitation and the desire for effect in music shows a move away from thinking about music in terms of Affektenlehre. Music is still a language, but in Schlegel’s fragments, it is also part of

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nature, and as he quotes Plato, the art that harmonizes with an abstract idea. Music in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in Novalis and Schlegel, and in Schopenhauer, as will be shown here in chapter three, becomes nature and speaks an abstract idea of nature that only the poetic genius can understand. In many of the writings after Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the abstract language of music is a direct expression of the spirit of nature rather than its imitation. It is, however, giving Kant too much credit to claim that he alone influenced the break with mimetic theory that happened around 1800. The early Romantics did respond to his writings and wrote about music in a way that appears to challenge his assessment of the art, but as Dahlhaus mentions, they also responded to the main aesthetic argument of the time about whether or not music was mimetic or autonomous (17). Kant’s categorization of art in Critique of Judgment into mechanical and aesthetical, and under aesthetical pleasurable and beautiful, may have helped in the influence of seeing music as an autonomous art, but it is more likely that the former music director Johann Friedrich Reichardt provided a more direct influence. Reichardt was a musician and a writer, who, like Robert Schumann, also provided music reviews for several journals (Morrow), and, according to Dahlhaus, was one of the first of the musician-writers to propose a theory of music as an autonomous art detached from the purpose of imitation or rhetoric (93-94). He taught many of the early Romantic writers, including Tieck, Wackenroder, Novalis, and Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel (Naumann 24, Safranski 130). E.T.A. Hoffmann also participated in this group (Safranski 131), although in the 1790s he was composing music rather than writing stories. Reichardt thus influenced the break away from an aesthetic of music that included imitation, although as Safranski shows, it cost him his reputation as his followers and pupils critiqued his music (130). There is not very much published on Reichardt that talks about his aesthetics, save for a brief mention of his influence on Wackenroder and Hoffmann in Naumann, Safranski, and Dahlhaus. However, as most of these brief descriptions agree, his aesthetics lead to important changes through these writers in the ways one understood what music did and represented as an art. According to one of the few books on Reichardt’s aesthetics, by Paul Sieber, Reichardt viewed music as spirit rather than language. Music, in Sieber’s explanation of Reichardt’s definition, was an autonomous art that was also the greatest and most effective of all the arts; its meaning was vague and secret, as its effect and object remained in the unconsciousness (62-3). Sieber also describes Reichardt’s view that the inner life is the only object of music, and music becomes expression rather than imitation of emotions (63-4). Reichardt’s theory counters

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Forkel’s most in the consideration of imitation. Rather than imitate and through imitation evoke emotions in the listener, the composer, according to Reichardt, should express emotions. Reichardt’s influence on Hoffmann will become apparent in the next chapter, since Hoffmann also writes against imitation, criticizes the purpose of effect in musical performance, and emphasizes that music is an expression of the spirit from within—although for Hoffmann, not necessarily from within the composer. Thus the shift in music aesthetics around 1800 allowed a place for instrumental music. Morrow contributes this to Herder’s Kalligone (14), although the earlier examples by Novalis and Schlegel as mentioned above already show music as abstract tones and not always accompanied by poetry. Music stops being a mimetic art following the phrasing and structures of speech, as well as eliciting emotions in the listener as an orator is supposed to do, although it is still very much attached to poetry. The relationship between poetry and music in Hoffmann’s “The Poet and the Composer” has already been mentioned, and the ending of “The Golden Flower Pot” implies a similar instance, when the narrator is allowed to drink out of the same punch bowl, the source of artistic fantasy, as Hoffmann’s fictional music director and composer, Johannes Kreisler. Hoffmann is not the only one who combines music and poetry in this manner. In Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, for example, music and poetry are as one (104). Music’s relationship with language is no longer imitative and no longer tied to the rhetorical aim of eliciting emotions. The equation of music to poetry elevates music in the aesthetic hierarchy of the beautiful arts and shows how music, abstracted, becomes an art able to express its own idea separate from language and not bound to reason. This new way of looking at music begins to reverse the order: instead of poetry being the highest art, it is music, and poetry should strive to communicate nature with the same immediacy and spirit as music. Furthermore, if music comes directly from nature, then there are no instruments that need to sound in order for music to be heard. The aesthetics that remove music from its purpose to imitate language and emotions allow for the elevation of instrumental music, but at the same time, the abstract music removed from language is nature, and when nature needs an instrument to sound, the instrument, whether automated or manual, still produces mechanical music.

Chapter Two E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Aesthetics of Music and Musical Machines in “The Automata,” “The Sandman” and Music Reviews E.T.A. Hoffmann, a writer, composer and judicial official, occupies a rather unique place in music aesthetics and literary history. On the one hand, his writing is often considered “late Romantic” in histories of German literature, on the other, his music reviews and musical sketches have been credited with starting a Romantic music aesthetic. Carl Dahlhaus, partly responsible for this latter theory, attributes the Romantic music aesthetic to Hoffmann’s essay “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music.” As mentioned here in chapter one, Hoffmann was part of the group of writers who became Reichardt’s pupils; Tieck, Novalis, Wackenroder, A.W. and Friedrich Schlegel. Hoffmann’s own career as a writer began much later than his contemporaries, and his stories first appeared in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Many of Hoffmann’s works had been previously included as music reviews in the Leipziger Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (Leipzig General Music Journal). “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” for instance, is included in “Kreisleriana” and comes from two music reviews. Likewise, “The Automata” was first published in the music journal as a review of automata before the full story appeared in the collection Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brethren). Hoffmann’s musical training comes out of an era, as described here in chapter one, where musicians and writers begin to focus more on music’s power of expression in aesthetic considerations rather than the need for imitation. When read in the context of these aesthetical changes that happened around 1800, Hoffmann’s music aesthetics provide a new angle to the meaning of musical instances and their connection to the creative spirit in his stories about automata, particularly “The Automata” and “The Sandman.” In spite of his overwhelming oeuvre of stories about music and musicians, few scholars have considered how the history of musical aesthetics around 1800 influence how Hoffmann writes about music, with the result that Hoffmann’s music aesthetic appears to have taken an ahistorical place in literary, and sometimes music scholarship. Especially overlooked are the music aesthetics in those stories where music appears to play a minor

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role, if any at all, such as “The Sandman” or “The Golden Flower Pot.” A few scholars have combined the mixture of Hoffmann’s musical aesthetics with his interest in androids, particularly in connection to the story “The Automata,” and many interpret his interest for automata as apprehensive anxiety about the imitation of life. According to William Arctander O’Brian, such an interpretation stems more from Freud’s interpretation of “The Sandman” in his essay “The Uncanny” than from a close reading of “The Automata” (371). The interpretation of automata in Hoffmann narration as evil forces, however, tends to ignore Hoffmann’s aesthetical writings about music and the key issue of what makes music “mechanical.” “The Automata” appeared in the Allgemeine Musikalischer Zeitung (AMZ) in 1814, one year before Hoffmann wrote “The Sandman.” This chapter will attempt to look at these two tales from the chronological order of when they were written. The ideas about Olimpia in “The Sandman” (1815) will be based on the ideas about music, machines, virtuosity and “mechanical” art in “The Automata” (1814). Such an angle sheds new light on the placement of Hoffmann’s role in Romantic music, as well as the nineteenth-century attempt to move away from the limitations of the human performer and artist in the nineteenth century. “The Automata” was intended for print in a musical journal, and focused on the machines’ relationship not only to the imitation of the human activity of music-making, but also to musical performance and sound in general. O’Brien mentions how most documents about the story counter the intent of the musical essay with its original publication in part in the music journal1 in spite of Hoffmann’s and his editor’s view that it was a complete story (373). O’Brien considers it a combination of essay and story which marks a change in Hoffmann’s writing between essaywriting and fiction (391). “The Automata” is not the first of these inbetween stories, and was written at the same time the collection of fictional stories, Fantasy Pieces in the Manner of Callot was being published. The introduction to the story indicates to the readers that the content, an aesthetical discussion of musical automata and automated musical instruments, fits the musical focus of the AMZ, but a story like many of the pieces for Fantasy Pieces that were previously published as “essays” in the AMZ. It is the duality of the genre, somewhere between narrative fiction and essay that most likely causes Hoffmann’s writings to be read as expressions of his opinions. The conversation and narrative structure in “The Automata” provide differing opinions about machines and musical instruments. Ludwig and Ferdinand, the two main characters, had already appeared in Hoffmann’s _____________ 1

It was later published in full as part of Serapionsbrüder.

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“The Poet and the Composer,” as Hoffmann’s forward in the Leipziger Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung shows (93). In a lengthy discussion about androids and the imitation of life and human activity, the two friends often appear to agree, but there are many cases in which Ferdinand shows a different attitude towards the androids than Ludwig. Many scholars who have written on “The Automata,” especially those writing from the perspective of musicology or the cultural studies of automated musical instruments rather than from literary criticism, have understood Ludwig’s misgivings concerning music from machines as the direct voice and opinion of Hoffmann himself.2 However, the criticism in the story regarding the mechanical dolls does not seem to reflect Hoffmann’s own point of view. Some of Ludwig’s ideas in fact reflect eighteenth-century views about instrumental music and expression in performance and actually counter many of the opinions conveyed elsewhere in Hoffmann’s music reviews and stories. The common interpretation of Ludwig’s opinions as Hoffmann’s own ignores the breadth of aesthetic ideas presented in the text. The problems concerning instrumental music versus vocal music, the machine versus the heart or soul in performance, and Ludwig and Ferdinand’s own encounter with the sound of a soprano singing voice do not immediately denounce automated musical instruments and are much more complex than most scholars realize. “The Sandman” combines the problems concerning aesthetics of a musical machine addressed in “The Automata.” The android figure in “The Sandman,” Olimpia, speaks few words but can play the piano and sing with virtuosic skill. Although the musical performance is one small scene in “The Sandman,” it is an important aspect in Nathanael’s belief that the automaton he believes to be a real woman communicates to him visually and aurally. In a closer examination of the musical portion of this scene, it becomes evident that the nightmarish aspects of mechanical dolls need to be reconsidered with the relationship between music and poetry in the broader context of the story. Following ideas from earlier Romantics who influenced Hoffmann, both _____________ 2

Boie, Keil, Krickeberg and Müller-Sievers all do this to some degree in their various readings of “The Automata.” Bernhild Boie, “Die Sprache der Automaten: zur Autonomie der Kunst,” German Quarterly 54.3 (1981): 288-91; Werner Keil, “The Voice from the Hereafter: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ideal of Sound and Its Realization in Early Twentieth-Century Electronic Music,” Music and Literature in German Romanticism, ed. Siobhán Donovan et al, trans. Siobhán Donovan and Andrew Johnstone (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), 146; Dieter Krickeberg, “Automatische Musikinstrumente,” Für Augen und Ohren: Von der Spieluhr zum akustischen Environment: Objeckte, Installation, Performances, (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1-20 to 3-2 1980), 21; Helmut Müller-Sievers, “Verstimmung: E.T.A. Hoffmann und die Trivialisierung der Musik,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literatur und Geisteswissenschaften 63.1 (1989): 113-115.

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of these stories about automata tend to welcome an aesthetic of music and writing that allows for a non-human production of musical sound from a natural source. Ludwig, in fact, brings together the oppositional forces at work in artistic creativity with his expression of horror about the mixture of life and death: All such figures that emulate a person less then they mimic the human, these true statues of a living death or a dead life are abhorrent to me to the highest degree (322)

Here, Ludwig is talking about the prophet automaton dressed as a Turk that excited the townspeople in the story. Although applied in the context of one automaton, Ludwig expresses his distaste for all automata because they are imperfect imitations of human beings and represent a convergence between living and dead or organic and inorganic. This quote, cited often to point out Hoffmann’s thoughts on automata, provides an incoherent mixture of life and death. This tension, when applied to the deceptive nature of the androids as either non-living beings who appear alive or the attempt of living human beings to imitate the machine relates to other tensions so common in scholarship on Romanticism, such as organic and inorganic, nature and artificiality. In scholarship that considers Ludwig’s assertions the direct voice of Hoffmann, scholars often read Ludwig’s abhorrence to the ambiguity of life and death as Hoffmann’s attempt to break down these tensions on the side of living (Krickeberg), nature (Müller-Sievers, Boie), or the organic (Keil). Giving this quote too much weight in what the tale has to say about automata ignores the differences of opinion between Ferdinand and Ludwig and the various types of music-making machines they discuss. Few critics have given serious thought to the difference in aesthetic experience between the automated musical instruments which are made for the purpose of discovering nature, and the speaking and music-making androids used to imitate nature. Such a difference in the two experiences speaks both to debates in music in the early nineteenth century and to the early Romantics’ reaction to Kant in their attempt to split mechanical reason from organic fantasy and nature. Both the story’s plot and the friends’ discussion provide multiple layers of what the automated musical instruments do and how they maintain the tension between life and death, organic and inorganic, nature and artificiality. The tale’s narration also alludes to the mixture of machine and nature in producing a sublime musical sound. As the two friends mention automated musical instruments and the original sound of nature, they approach a garden intended for experimenting with machines and nature. That the garden belongs to the same Professor X. Ludwig deprecates in

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the friends’ earlier discussion of the “living-dead” automata indicates the complexity of opinion in the tale about machines, automata and their use for imitation or discovery. Ludwig’s and Ferdinand’s discussion includes automated musical instruments, imitation in performance, and the purity of natural sound, such as the voice. At heart in the discussion are two different types of automated musical instrument, the machines intended for the discovery of nature and the androids meant to imitate human activity. This relationship between the two functions of the machines comes out of early nineteenth-century music aesthetics and as Monika Schmitz-Emans emphasises in her article on the aesthetics of androids, the whole story, rather than just Ludwig’s statement the “living-dead” should be considered in an assessment about music and androids (252-3). The tension between machine and nature, or life and death exists only as long as the machines are used for the discovery of nature. The machines eliminate the tension when the artificiality becomes obvious through imitation. Multiplicity of opinion is common in Hoffmann’s writing and one of the main themes of the frame-narrative in Serapionsbrüder, the collection of tales that includes the second, longer version of “The Automata.” Hoffmann’s letter to his editor about the tale shows how complex the various arguments in “The Automata” turn out to be, because it explains the purpose of this story to present different ideas concerning mechanical dolls and automated musical instruments in relationship to music aesthetics. In the introduction to “The Automata,” Hoffmann writes: as little as the automata at first seem to adhere to the direction of the M.Z., I do believe that they are fitting for this journal because I found the opportunity to talk about everything concerning the automaton, and therefore also consider that type of musical artwork excellent, along with allowing the musical Ludwig to say something ppp about the most recent attempts of the mechanics—about the Nature-Music—about the most complete tone—harmonica—harmonichord, which could not find a better place than in the M.Z. (Briefwechsel 436)

Not only does Hoffmann defend the musical content of the piece, he also assures his editor that he has found “an opportunity to talk about everything concerning” automata. In scholarship which tends to focus on the automaton as a feared symbol of a distorted, non-human world, this line is often interpreted as justification for reading Ludwig’s statements as Hoffmann’s expression about his own misgivings. However, such an interpretation does not consider the following clauses in which Hoffmann stresses that even Ludwig does not denounce all automata as the horrifying living-dead or dead-living, but also mentions, albeit more softly, the mechanics who try to discover NaturMusik through automated musical instruments. It is this assertion which is most often ignored, and up to

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this point, it seems that only Schmitz-Emans has taken it into consideration in her writing about the poetics of androids, especially with her suggestion that the mysterious singer in the tale could also be read as an automaton (253). Ludwig, therefore, says all there is to say about automata, but his opinions are hardly one-sided or simple. Instead, they represent the conflicting points of view of a musician fascinated by the machine’s potential, yet dismayed by its use for imitation. That Hoffmann lets Ludwig talk about the aesthetic merits of certain automated musical instruments (ppp) indicates that what Ludwig says about the harmonica and harmonichord is an important part of the story. In music scores, p is shorthand for piano, or softly, pp means pianissmo, even more softly. PPP, a rarer marking but used in some nineteenth-century works as dynamics became more extreme, means very, very softly. Considering that it is a composer writing to an editor for a musical journal, it is only natural that this ppp in Hoffmann’s introduction to “The Automata” stands for that which is barely audible, yet still integral to the piece. In late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury music, the theme is often heard most obviously in the melodic line, whereas the softer bass notes indicate the harmonic relationships between the chords within a key or a change of key. Ludwig’s more loudly spoken statements, for instance his horror at the “dead-living” or “living-dead”, act in this story much more like the obvious melodic line, whereas the more softly spoken praise of the harmonichord acts like the softer yet continuous harmony in the bass that carries the piece forward. The underlying theme in “The Automata” is thus more related to the search for the expression of a “natural” musical sound, instead of its mere imitation, through automated musical instruments. Along with Ludwig’s loudly and softly spoken statements, Ferdinand’s initial reactions to the speaking Turk and the musical androids indicate the complexity of opinions voiced in the story. Ferdinand appears in many cases to agree with Ludwig, as he responds to Ludwig’s argument about the horror of the “living-dead” automata, “everything that you said about the insane mimicry of the human and the living-dead wax figures speaks straight from my soul” (322). Ferdinand’s reply reflects the artistic tie between the two friends that Hoffmann explains in the introduction for the 1814 AMZ version of “The Automata”: In that happy, peaceful time, when an equal sense for poetry and an equal, honest attempt at art at the University of Jena bound the two, an incredible incident befell them (AMZ 93)

Ludwig and Ferdinand are tied by their “sense for poetry” and appreciation for art. Thus they are able to talk about art and aesthetics equally. Ferdinand’s words “speaks straight from my soul” allude to a communica-

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tion of inner nature between Ferdinand and Ludwig, but that does not necessarily mean they share the exact same opinion about automata. Ferdinand’s professed agreement does not reflect the way he acts on his own, and instead points to the polite agreement one might use in a discussion of differing opinions. Ferdinand convinces Ludwig to visit the prophesying automaton and tries to find out more about the secrets of the android, in a sense to “save its reputation,” whereas Ludwig immediately derides the automaton, causing the machine to refuse to respond. In addition, Ferdinand’s initial response to Professor X.’s musical androids, “was that not artistic and nice” [war das nicht künstlich und schön],3 shows a bit more interest in the automata and less apprehension about them than what Ludwig conveys. As friends with an “equal sense for poetry,” Ferdinand’s and Ludwig’s individual opinions should also be considered equally. While there is some critique in the story about aspects of the musical androids that could no doubt be understood as Hoffmann’s voice, “The Automata,” like many of Hoffmann’s tales, contains many layers of opinion that are, like Ferdinand and Ludwig, equally important in what they have to say about aesthetics and automated musical instruments in general. Hoffmann, in fact, expressed his own fascination with androids in his first diary entry of 1803, more than ten years before writing “The Automata” and “The Sandman.” In this entry, Hoffmann writes: Sometime, when the time is right and profitable for all those in agreement around me to produce an automaton … Quod deus bene vertat!—the things I plan!—What another good thought!4 (Hoffmann, Tagebücher 53)

This is his first diary entry, and this future plan to build an android appears to have just come to him as he was writing, since his next sentence fragments seem to react to this idea, from the Latin phrase which means “may God allow this to go well” to “what a good thought!” Hoffmann never carried out this plan to construct an android in actuality (at least not that anyone knows of), but the literary androids he created in “The Automata” and “The Sandman” far surpass the real dolls’ abilities, especially the trumpeter he saw at a trade fair in 1813, as indicated in his diary entry for October 10 (Tagebücher 433). The trumpeter, made by Friedrich _____________ 3

4

Künstlich today translates best as artificial, but in the early nineteenth century, it still had a meaning tied to art, works of art, and artistic ability, synonymous with kunstvoll and kunstreich. Considering the pairing künstlich und schön, I would interpret Ferdinand’s adjective as pointing to the artistic merit rather than the artificiality of the instruments. For more information, see Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm. “Einmal wenn die gute Zeit da seyn wird zu Nutz und frommen aller Verständigen die ich bei mir sehe ein Automat anzufertigen ... Quod deus bene vertat! –Was nehme ich mir alles vor! – noch ein guter Gedanke!”

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Kaufmann in 1808 (see Heckmann) is now on display in the computer science section at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, a museum based primarily on the history of technology. The purpose of this automaton is not to deceive with its lifelikeness. Its torso is unclothed, showing the mechanical interior, emphasizing the importance of the machinery over the human-like skill of playing the trumpet. Although Hoffmann does not mention this detail in his diary entry, it can be inferred from a note from Carl Maria von Weber that it was shown in 1813 in that manner (quoted in Heckmann 266). Hoffmann was obviously familiar with the Vaucanson dolls since they are mentioned in “The Automata,” although he tends to combine the Vaucanson and Jacques-Droz dolls in his description of Professor X.’s music room. There is an interesting parallel to Hoffmann’s character Professor X. and the real-life collector who eventually bought the Vaucanson dolls and displayed them. The real collector, according to Heckmann, was an eccentric well-educated man who kept the dolls in his garden, where he showed them to anyone who wished to view them (228). Although it would be somewhat speculative to say that Hoffmann saw them there, O’Brien notes a similar situation where Hoffmann most likely became familiar with the Vaucanson dolls (381). The diary entries as well as the quote about the Vaucanson dolls show Hoffmann’s own interest in the machines rather than his misgivings about them. Interpretations of Hoffmann’s mechanical dolls as sinister warnings of an overly mechanical society, as many read “The Sandman” and, based on this, “The Automata” (O’Brien 370-371), thus fail to consider all sides of the argument and only focus on Ludwig’s loud and obvious statements. The following analysis of “The Automata” will concentrate on Ludwig’s much more softly spoken (ppp) statements about NaturMusik and its connection to the scene ending the fragmentary tale. All the machines mentioned in “The Automata”: the prophesying Turk, the mechanical dolls playing instruments, Professor X.’s machine-garden, and the singer bring two narratives into one. Ferdinand’s encounter with the singer and the visits to the Talking Turk and Professor X. act like two different themes intertwined as two melodies in a fugue, with modulations as the focus shifts from one automaton to the other. The prophesying automaton, the Talking Turk links the machines to one another and to Ferdinand and Ludwig’s conversation. The story begins with the friends’ visit to the mechanical doll they had heard so much about and the prophecy it whispers to Ferdinand. The doll’s prophecy, the combination of the automaton’s words and a gaze at the locket on Ferdinand’s chest, become the central plot of the story, leading to the further visit to Professor X.’s

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house, where he shows them musical automata. The ensuing discussion surrounds both the musical automata and the speaking Turk, and turns toward other types of automated musical instruments. As the discussion ends, the friends find themselves outside of Professor X.’s garden, where Ferdinand recognizes the singer’s voice, mixing the prophecy and Professor X. with Ferdinand’s adventure with the singer. At the same time, the singer’s melody acts like a leitmotiv, occurring during the prophecy, when Ferdinand first hears her, and again at the end in the garden. Many scholars separate the two different plots in the stories, and likewise the automated musical instruments from the prophesying Turk, as Boie does in “Language of the Automaton,” yet the musical motifs within the structure of the story itself offer the connection that points to the relationship between musical and speaking automata and the search for pure musical sound in nature. One might argue at this point that Ludwig and Ferdinand’s discussion of the prophesying Turk and the music-playing mechanical dolls does not praise the instruments in the same manner as the singer or the NaturMusik in Professor X.’s garden. Such a difference does exist, but it is based on the by 1814 old-fashioned aesthetic of music as imitation, especially at a time when instrumental music was pitted against vocal. At first glance, it would seem that Hoffmann’s story favors vocal music, since the singer’s melody is connected to the NaturMusik, but when one considers that the identity of the singer as a “living” human being is questionable at best, an interesting mixture of vocal and instrumental music ensues, echoed later in “The Sandman.” In other stories and music reviews by Hoffmann, the singer’s body appears as an instrument, stressing that song is also instrumental music. “Councillor Krespel” provides an obvious example, where the singer is a violin. In “On a Sentence by Sacchini and on the So-called Effect in Music,” Hoffmann writes that the melody should be song, should pour freely and effortlessly directly out of the human breast that is the instrument itself that tones in the most wonderful, mysterious sounds of nature. (112)

In this particular review, the “most wonderful, mysterious sounds of nature” become audible from the body as an instrument. This is the moment the aesthetics in Hoffmann’s writing most breaks away from the early Romantics. Novalis, Tieck, and Wackenroder, Hoffmann’s peers in music, having all been taught by Reichardt, all incorporate musical sounds in their stories that come from nature or the human voice rather than an identifiable instrument. Of course, at the time they were writing, a few decades before Hoffmann published most of his fiction, vocal music still held sway over instrumental music in most circles. Here in Hoffmann’s

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review of Sacchini, however, the body becomes an instrument, and the singer, like other instrumentalists, must bring out the naturalness of the melody from the interior of the instrument, i.e. the body. To do so, the singer must use the mechanisms of her body much in the same way the violinist learns to bow the strings or the pianist learns to press the keys. The sublime tones Ferdinand hears coming from the singer in “The Automata” thus originate from an instrument rather than from nature. The body-as-instrument offers a slight twist in the attempt to imitate the soprano voice with an instrument as both Helmut Müller-Sievers and Werner Keil describe. For Müller-Sievers, the tension between the mechanical and the natural have to do with a tension between instrumental and vocal music, and the inability to tune certain instruments perfectly, such as a piano or a guitar. Müller-Sievers compares Professor X.’s voice—described in “The Automata” as a “high-pitched, screechy, dissonant tenor” (Hoffmann, Werke II: 336)—to all of the automata in the story and argues that the invisible singer with the sublime glass-bell voice acts as a pure-tone counterpart to the automata and Professor X. (MüllerSievers 113). Müller-Sievers explains the problem with the machines and Professor X.’s voice: Since music is immediately connected to the human interior and the inner realm is in turn connected to nature, the contention between musical machines (so many of which were invented at the end of the eighteenth century) made the comma audible again that is at work within the instrument itself. (113-4)

The human voice here represents nature and is in conflict with the horrible music from the instrument that can not be tuned in perfect pitches. The human voice can sing these pitches, but an instrument such as the piano or guitar, when tuned to true pitches falls out of tune with itself in the higher registers, or with a change of key, providing an out-of-tune sounding difference, which was also referred to as “wolf” sounds. To avoid these “wolf” sounds, Renaissance instrument makers came up with methods to temper the tuning. Such methods varied and eventually resulted in the current equal 12-tone temperament that became standard practice in the nineteenth century. Such tuning methods are necessary on the piano, for instance, because enharmonic tones such as C-sharp and Dflat are played with the same black key, so that the pianist can not play the comma or diesis that naturally occurs between the two notes when all pitches are justly tuned.5 Not all instruments share the problem of temperament with the guitar and piano, and many instruments were built in order to imitate the purity _____________ 5

For more information on temperaments and the need to temper the tuning of keyboard instruments, see Ll. S. Lloyd and Hugh Boyle, Intervals, Scales and Temperaments, ed. Hugh Boyle (London: MacDonald, 1963).

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of the human soprano voice. As Scherer mentions in his book, these eighteenth-century instruments were referred to as the “organ of the soul [Organ der Seele]” or “tones of feeling [Empfindungslaute]” (75) and were similar in their purpose to the automated musical instruments Ludwig mentions ppp in “The Automata.” The mixture of the sublime sound with the artificiality of the machine does not become realized, according to Werner Keil, until the twentieth-century with the invention of the theremin, an instrument which sounds like the voice and is played by waving hands in the air near the antennae (“Mechanismus” 148, 150). In Hoffmann, this tension exists in the relationship between the performer and the instruments, and in the attempt to discover, by machine, this sound of nature said to be so close to the soprano voice. Yet in Hoffmann’s texts, the soprano voice alone is a tension between nature and the machine, for the singer’s body is also the singer’s instrument with which the singer must work in order to find the perfect sublime sound. The tension between nature and the machine occurs in all instruments, including the voice. The nature of the instrument is an important aspect of Hoffmann’s aesthetics, as will be shown here in more detail in this chapter, and rather than the juxtaposition between vocal and instrumental music, the tension between the natural and artificial occurs as a tension between the actual nature of the instrument and its tuning mechanism and the ideal nature of a soprano voice. For Ludwig, the use of machines and instruments such as the Aeolian harp to find and produce the original sound of nature, the tone most like the crystal sound of the soprano voice, presents a nobler quest for mechanics (Hoffmann, Werke II: 339). Keil’s description of the theremin helps explain the desired outcome of the experiments in “The Automata,” although such instruments already exist in tale, as evident in the sound Ludwig and Ferdinand hear as they near Professor X.’s garden. The garden represents Professor X.’s attempt to cultivate the mixture of machine and nature. At the same time, the uncanny figure in the tale, the professor, represents both the mechanics Ludwig criticizes for their attempt to imitate human life for effect and the mechanics he praises who use the machine to discover the essence of nature, hidden in an otherwise inaudible sound. Rather than holding its superiority over instrumental music, the soprano voice itself becomes mechanized in its displacement as inferior to the instruments originally designed to imitate it as the voice of nature. The glass harmonica is an example of such an instrument, and according to Heather Hadlock in “Sonorous Bodies, Women and the Glass Harmonica,” it has the property of not only imitating but correcting and improving the singer’s voice (509). An instrument which corrects and improves

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is no longer a mere imitation. The purest tone belongs to the instrument instead of the voice, and the sound of nature becomes inhuman. The singer’s glass-bell tones in “The Automata” resemble the sound quality of the glass harmonica and such high-pitched, pure tones also appear in Hoffmann’s “The Golden Flower Pot” and “The Sandman.” In each of these works, the protagonist hears musical sounds or the singers’ voice as crystal bells, but not all the characters in the stories hear this. The tones, while not obviously connected to an instrument in these three stories, are nevertheless extra-human. In spite of the suggestion in the “Sacchini” review that the human voice is the closest instrument to the sound of nature, the majority of Hoffmann’s writings imply that this type of sound is rare, even in the human voice, and that the glass bells or tones the sound is compared to has a higher value than the human voice itself. The voice-turned-instrument suggests the shift in the importance of instrumental music over vocal music. If instrumental music is closer to the sound of nature than vocal music, then Ludwig’s arguments against the automata as musical instruments can no longer be read as a mutually exclusive opposition between the machine and nature. As mentioned above, it is not the mechanical essence of the instruments Ludwig complains about or praises as much as their purpose in either imitation of human activity or for the discovery of nature. The scene which begins the most cited outbursts from Ludwig against automata is a visit to Professor X. who shows Ferdinand and Ludwig a room full of a collection of musical androids and other automated musical instruments: In the middle on top of a raised platform stood a large grand piano, to the right of the piano was a life-size figure with a flute in its hand, to the left a female figure sat at a piano-like instrument, behind which two boys stood with a large drum and a triangle. In the background the friends saw the orchestrion they were already familiar with and around the room on the walls more musical clocks and boxes (Hoffmann, Werke II: 336)

The entire room is actually one large ensemble of automated musical instruments, which Professor X. must have put together. Not only are the Vaucanson androids featured in the room (the trumpeter and flautist), but there are also many non-human shaped instruments (orchestrion and music boxes). The instruments in the room are varied in their shape and mechanics and Professor X. appears to have connected the automated musical instruments into a large mechanical ensemble, with no other purpose than the attempt to astound an audience. It is this desired effect of the performance that Ludwig finds most disturbing. In his critique of Professor X.’s display of the musical automata, Ludwig distinguishes between two different types of automated musical

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instruments. The professor’s piano-playing, and the musical instruments and androids attached to it he calls “mechanical”: Already the connection of people with the dead, the figures mimicking the human in form and movement to the same activity and work has for me something oppressive, uncanny, even appalling6 (337) ... For this reason, I find even the most complete machine by mechanical terms of that type to be the most contemptible and prefer a simple hurdy-gurdy that in its mechanism only attempts the mechanical to the Vaucansonian Flautist and the harmonica player (338)

The first section of these two passages appears at first glance to illustrate a fear of androids (and has been interpreted by many as doing so), but a closer look at Ludwig’s vocabulary points to Ludwig’s main concern with nachaffen, a more derogatory term for the verb “to imitate.” Ludwig focuses on the mechanics’ attempts to imitate human activity through machines, and it is this imitation that most bothers Ludwig because it mixes life and death in a manner that also mixes the artificial with the organic. At the same time, these machines are not only imitating human mechanical activity, such as the physical action of pressing black and white keys to make the piano sound, but also human creativity which is supposed to come from nature. Ludwig views the mechanical imitation of human activity, or the human imitation of machines as devoid of expression. The hurdy-gurdy is a simple mechanical musical instrument on which the music sounds while the player turns a crank. It has no other purpose than to mechanically play pieces of music on its cylinders. Showing its true nature, the hurdygurdy does not hide the fact that it is a machine, and does not try to deceive the audience as the human-like and life-like musician androids do. Without the deception mixing life and death, the hurdy-gurdy merely looks like the music box it is and is therefore a more worthy instrument than “the most perfect machine” imitating a human musical performance. On the one hand, Ludwig’s fear of mechanical imitation reflects the eighteenth-century public responses to the deceptive Jacques-Droz and Vauconson dolls considered to be linked with demonic powers (Brauers 20). On the other hand, this fear of imitation of life is carried over to an aesthetic of musical performance that shifts away from the eighteenthcentury focus on imitating human emotions in favor of expression from the nature of the instrument. _____________ 6

“Schon die Verbindung des Menschen mit toten, das Menschliche in Bildung und Bewegung nachäffenden Figuren zu gleichem Tun und Treiben hat für mich etwas Drückendes, unheimliches, ja Entsetzliches.”

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True art, for Ludwig, follows the inner nature of the instruments, much as the singer in Hoffmann’s “Sacchini” review, and does not imitate human activity for the purpose of effect. This explains how Ludwig criticizes Professor X.’s automated musical ensemble as an abhorrent trend in human-produced art, but looks at other types of automated musical instruments as laudable in their potential to produce a sound like the Naturlaut. Therefore, although the mechanical doll playing the harmonica disgusts Ludwig, he praises the harmonica itself for its potential to imitate the original sound of nature: It therefore seems to me that the harmonica certainly nears this completeness in regards to its tone, that can be measured in the effect on our mood, and it is even beautiful that just this instrument that so happily imitates this sound of nature and affects so wonderfully our inner life in the deepest relationship, doesn’t give in to the foolishness and shelled ostentation but rather claims its character only in the holy simplicity of its singularity. Also the newly invented harmonichord will be able to achieve much in this direction, which instead of bells, allows strings to vibrate and tone by means of a secret mechanism that by pressing the keys sets the rotation of a cylinder in motion.7 (341)

Ludwig’s praise of the harmonica for its effect on the listener also includes an element of imitation. Here Ludwig uses the less derogatory term nachahmen, and emphasizes that the imitation is that of nature, and the instrument has no other purpose. The sound comes from the “singular character [eigentümliches Wesen]” of the instrument—it is part of the “nature” of the instrument to be able to create this sound, as the sound that comes from the singer’s body in the “Sacchini” review. The harmonichord is an automated musical instrument which functions in the same mechanical way as an orchestrion or a player- piano: a cylinder is set in motion which eventually causes the strings to vibrate. However, this instrument, like the hurdy-gurdy, was not so obviously designed for imitating human activity, but rather with the goal to provide musical sound without human involvement. Not needing to play or control the instrument in order to produce sound, the musician can hear the harmonichord, and other automated instruments similar to it as if the sounds were coming from nature. _____________ 7

“Mir scheint daher, daß die Harmonika rücksichtlich des Tons sich gewiß jener Vollkommenheit, die ihren Maßstab in der Wirkung auf unser Gemüt findet, am mehrsten nähert, und es ist eben schön, daß gerade dieses Instrument, welches jene Naturlaut so glücklich nachahmt und auf unser Inneres in den tiefsten Beziehungen so wunderbar wirkt, sich dem Leichtsinn und der schalen Ostentation durchaus nicht hingibt, sondern nur in der heiligen Einfachheit ihr eingentümliches Wesen behauptet. Recht viel in dieser Hinsicht wird auch gewiß das neuerfundene sogenannte Harmonichord leisten, welches statt der Glocken mittelst einer geheimen Mechanik, die durch den Druck der Tasten und den Umschwung einer Walze in Bewegung gesetzt wird, Saiten vibrieren und ertönen läßt.”

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This follows Kant’s argument that art must come from nature, deceptively, in order for it to be received as art, otherwise, once the deception is known, it becomes artificial and ceases to be beautiful. Ludwig, however, stresses the imitation of nature, following the late eighteenth-century aesthetics from Rousseau, Herder, and Forkel. The imitation of nature is combined in Ludwig’s praise for the instrument with the expression of nature as he stresses that the mechanics’ aim in building these instruments was to search for the original sound of nature. Once found, the instruments’ sound would then be nature rather than merely imitate it. It is this potential that classifies the sounds from the automated musical instrument as art, according to Ludwig, but as soon as the performance focuses on the imitation of human activity rather than the production of pure sound, Ludwig classifies it as “living-dead” and “machine-music.” The performance and production of sound is another aspect of the “machine-music” which may clarify Ludwig’s distinction between what is “mechanical” and what is true art. Ludwig mentions that the androids can not possibly provide expression in the music, nor can they control the musical sound because they are not truly living beings (338). However, Professor X., a living figure in the story, participates in the androidorchestra, so that this orchestra is no longer purely “automated.” Not only does Professor X. flip the switches of the machines (thereby setting them in motion), his accompaniment on the piano provides mechanical control over the instruments and the music. Ironically, this is the type of control Ludwig thinks is important. The whole orchestra could be looked at as one huge instrument the professor plays and controls through the way he plays the piano, but Professor X.’s role in the ensemble appears mechanical to Ludwig, as he includes the professor in his tirade against the “mechanical” performance. Ludwig’s interpretation of the androidorchestra points to a contradiction in his distinction between useless and important musical machines. The harmonichord, although it also needs minimal control to set the gears in motion, does not appear to be anything other than a harmonichord, whereas the android-orchestra appears to be separate human musicians and automated musical instruments playing together. Ludwig’s critique of the imitation of human activity and praise for the imitation of nature suggests the antithesis between human activity and nature, as well as placing the perfect musical sound outside the human body and beyond human capacity to produce. Ferdinand and Ludwig’s arguments up to this point make a clear distinction between humanoid machines that imitate human action and automated musical instruments built for the purpose of imitating nature. Reading the singer as an automaton mixes the imitation of human action with the imitation of nature in the same machine. Neither Ferdinand nor

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Ludwig, however, recognizes the subtle possibility that the singer Ferdinand hears and who sings with a voice like crystal bells could be an android. Indeed, there is no clear indication for the reader that the singer is an android, although the ending leaves the possibility open, as SchmitzEmans also suggests (253). As Ludwig and Ferdinand discuss the merits of the instruments which copy the original sound of nature, they suddenly hear the same melody that Ferdinand first heard from the singer at a time previous to the events in the narrative. The way in which the singer begins, however, is actually quite mechanical: Directly in front of them a cute little girl sitting in the grass played unnoticed, she now jumped up quickly and said “Oh, how beautifully the dear sister sings again, I must bring her a flower because I already know that when she sees the colorful carnations she sings still more beautifully and for longer” (342)

The little girl gives the singer a flower, and that causes the singer to sing. This is very similar to a mechanical response, for instance when somebody puts a coin in a player piano and it starts to play. The trigger for the singer is to look at a flower. The mechanical and natural are thus combined, setting the scene for the immediate discovery of Professor X.’s “laboratory,” the walled-in garden. Ludwig and Ferdinand are able to see it momentarily as the little girl opens the gate to give “Schwesterchen” the flower. The odd sounds that emanate from the garden have the same effect on Ferdinand and Ludwig as the singer’s pure soprano voice. Professor X.’s laboratory is an attempt to discover the sound of nature, which in this case comes out of an exotic, albeit cultivated form of nature. The connection between Professor X.’s experiments with musical sound, nature, his “mechanical” performance, and his role in the production of the prophesying Turk also points to the possibility that the singer is an android, and one which meets Ludwig’s requirements for the “inner” purpose: i.e. she does not imitate a human performer, but rather she is the singer, and built for the purpose, as a singer, for imitating the sound of nature and not human activity. The singer as automaton in “The Automata” thus presents a paradox. On the one hand, her melody connects the musical and speaking machines in the story and resembles the original sound of nature which Ludwig and Ferdinand considered the purest musical sound. However, as an android, she imitates a human being singing. Just as Ludwig’s ppp statements indicate an important theme in the tale, so too does the implicit role of the singer in the narrative as an android and her inner connection to Ferdinand as prophesized by the speaking Turk. The intrinsic purpose of the automated musical instrument is what is most important for Hoffmann’s aesthetics. Rather than the imitation of the human singing, the android singer in “The Automata” represents an

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instrument that follows the aesthetics of music, poetry, and scientific discovery in Serapionsbrüder, the collection of stories in which Hoffmann later published the longer version of “The Automata.” As with the friends in the Serapionsbrüder who read the stories to each other and comment on them, it is the inner realm of the body and spirit with which Ludwig is most concerned. In “The Automata” and in other stories included in Serapionsbrüder, storytelling, music and other arts, and scientific discovery should come from within, and communicate to that which is within in someone else. This principle reappears throughout many of Hoffmann’s music reviews and is part of the Serapionistische Prinzip, based on the introductory tale in the collection about a hermit who believed he was St. Serapion. His comments perhaps most clearly define the ideas in Hoffmann’s stories about the distinction between mechanical and spirit: Is it not the spirit alone which allows us to conceptualize what exists around us in space and time?—Yes, what hears, what sees, what feels inside us?—perhaps the dead machines, that we call eye, ear, hand and so forth, and not the spirit?—Does the spirit then form in space and time its provisory inner world of its own accord and give this function to another principle within us?—How absurd! (27-28)

In this introductory tale, the hermit Serapion defends his assurance that he is in fact the St. Serapion who lives in a desert, by asserting that he knows and observes the truth as it is within him. In his argument, he divides bodily functions such as the mechanics of sensory perception with the understanding of what the body senses. The spirit, according to Serapion, is what forms the understanding through the senses, not the senses themselves. Serapion’s argument here echoes in part Herder’s distinction between the mechanical sensory perceptions and the mind that is needed to make sense out of what is seen, heard, and felt. At the same time, he takes his individual reasoning about the world around him to the extent that his understanding of the outside world does not match those of his visitors and to them he appears mad. His rather extreme stance on the separation of mechanical phenomenal experience and the spiritual understanding of that experience points to the inner life present in so many of Hoffmann’s stories—the life that poet-protagonists can not communicate to the outside world. In spite of the hermit’s madness, or even because of it, the friends devise the serapionistische Prinzip from Serapion’s argument. Lothar, one of the characters in the frame applies Serapion’s distinction between spirit and dead machine to poetry: In vain are the poet’s attempts to bring us to the point that we should believe in what he himself does not believe, can not believe because he has not seen it. What can the figures of such a poet be, who is not a true seer in every old word after the other, other than deceptive puppets, laboriously cemented together out of strange materials! (55)

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... Everyone verify well, whether he also really has seen what he plans to convey before he dares to tell about it. At least everyone should try really seriously to capture correctly the picture that has come up to him from within with all its forms, colors, lights and shadows and then, if he really feels inspired by this, then bring the portrayal to outer life.8 (56)

Lothar adds a new dimension to the machine/spirit opposition by introducing the verb “schauen” (to look). The eyes, metaphors for the eyes and “looking” are important motifs throughout Hoffmann’s works. Here, however, the physical “eye” does not carry the same meaning as “schauen.” The visual aspect of musical performance has already been discussed in chapter one, but here the visual is important to communicate spirit. Serapion also mentions eyes as one of the bodily mechanisms, and seeing as the spiritual activity. Lothar’s use of “schauen” is connected to the subjectivity of the artist: The artist must look into the self in order to produce a true work of art. Without this, the artwork can not be believable—it is a puppet. Thus the speaking Turk’s supposed gaze into Ferdinand’s heart is linked to Serapion’s principle of seeing, and as also happens in “The Sandman,” the eyes allow the communication from the interior of the object to the interior of the beholder. Without this communication, the eyes are merely a mechanical bodily function and resemble part of Herder’s clumsy machine. This formulation of the outer mechanical body and the spiritual interior shares similarities with Romantic ideas about form as the mechanical aspect of music, and Ludwig’s differentiation between Professor X.’s mechanical android-orchestra and the more spiritual capabilities within the harmonichord of sounding the tone of nature. “Mechanical” in Serapionsbrüder and “The Automata” has less to do with whether the work of art was produced by a machine than the lack of communication from the inner spirit of the artist to the inner spirit of the recipient. While Lothar’s formulation of the serapionistische Prinzip allows for the subjectivity of the artist, Hoffmann’s music aesthetic does not. Already in Hoffmann’s reviews, one can see the trends for instrumental performance which would later mark the early twentieth century with Schoenberg’s definition of the true performer. For Schoenberg, the ideal soloist does not add anything of him or herself into the work (152-3). The subjectivity _____________ 8

“Jeder prüfe wohl, ob er auch wirklich das geschaut, was er zu verkünden unternommen, ehe er es wagt, laut damit zu werden. Wenigstens strebe jeder recht ernstlich darnach, das Bild, das ihm im Innern aufgegangen, recht zu erfassen mit allen seinen Gestalten, Farben, Lichtern und Schatten und dann, wenn er sich recht entzündet davon fühlt, die Darstellung ins äußere Leben zu tragen.”

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of the artist in Serapionsbrüder becomes a spirit completely separate from, yet still within the self in Hoffmann’s reviews and stories about music. Perhaps one of Hoffmann’s most famous essays on music aesthetics is “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” a combination of two music reviews on Beethoven, one on a piano concerto, and one on the fifth symphony. Published as part of “Kreisleriana” in Fantasy Pieces in the Manner of Callot, the essay again holds that curious description of so many of Hoffmann’s musical writings of being partly a narrative fiction and partly a nonfictional music review. According to Carl Dahlhaus, it is the “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music” which coined the term “Romantic music” and defined it (111). Ulrich Tadday, on the other hand, disagrees with Dahlhaus, stating that romantic music really began with Schumann and ideas about landscape (2). These two opinions about Romantic music point to differing purposes of instrumental music, as “absolute” and as “program” music. Absolute music, generally speaking, refers to music that contains no words and follows no extra-musical ideas, for instance a sonata or a prelude. Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s music follows this line of thinking. Schumann’s music, on the other hand, can be described as program music. His piano cycles such as Karneval and Papillon, for example, present a musical interpretation of Jean Paul’s Flegeljahre. Dahlhaus concentrates on the music Hoffmann calls rein romantisch for its presence of spirit, although Tadday’s focus on Schumann’s music remains an important consideration for the mid-century critique of Romantic music. For Hoffmann, Romantic music is music composed (at any time in music history) from within, rather than for the purpose of effect and imitation. There are several aspects to musical performance discussed in Hoffmann’s music reviews. The critiques focus primarily on the compositions and the genius of the composer (rather than the performer), although the performance of the work is an important factor, especially when one takes into consideration that this is the essential part of communicating a musical composition. Unlike a painting, music must be displayed live through a third party to the audience. Sometimes this party (the performer) is also the composer, as was often the case among nineteenth-century piano virtuosos.9 Early-nineteenth-century performance practices often insisted on original improvisation as part of the concert. Hoffmann’s reviews tend to focus not only on the composer, but often also the performance itself. The following analysis of the use of the word Geist (spirit) in the reviews is based mostly on the performance of the piece through a third party, since this helps illustrate the ideas of the autonomy of a musical piece in Hoff_____________ 9

See Dieter Hildebrandt, Pianoforte: Der Roman des Klaviers im 19. Jahrhundert (München: DTV, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2004), 37-38, 49-51.

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mann’s writings, as well as the role of the performer in executing and “interpreting” the performance.10 Following the serapionistischem Prinzip, the point of performance is to allow the interior truth of the piece to sound. The difficulty of a Beethoven piano trio, for example, comes not in the technical skill of the runs and trills, but in understanding the work as Beethoven composed it (Hoffmann Schriften 146). For Hoffmann, the true artist “lives only in the work that he has grasped in the sense of the master and now performs. He disdains asserting his personality in any way” (147). The composition already has its own substance and has a life of its own outside the performance. The performer, therefore, should not add anything to the piece— in a sense, the piece should sound the same regardless of who is playing it (musicians, especially instrumentalists, know this is not the case, and sometimes not desirable, as stated in several papers in the conference proceedings Phonograph and our Musical Life). This review places instrumental music on a pedestal of absolute autonomous art (Dahlhaus 112) at the same time it characterizes the purpose of performance: rather than try to bring out certain passions in the listener, the piece exists outside of the performance, and the performer’s task is merely to allow that already existing piece to come into being aurally. This review already gives a sense for the desired lack of “extra” emotion in musical performance, which eventually becomes part of piano performance practice for the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time the performer must execute the piece as the composer intended it, the composer, too, must adhere to certain principles belonging to instrumentation. Each instrument has a different capacity for sound and what a composer/performer can accomplish with chords and nuances of tones. In a review of a Reichardt piano sonata, Hoffmann emphasizes the importance of the instrument in composition: With every high flight of spirit the instrumental music demands, as it exists now newly created, the deepest penetration into the singularity of the instruments in general, yes the recognition of the single, finest nuances of expression, of which this or that instrument is capable of, if it were to control itself … The essential requirements of every instrumental composition … are now … to show the instruments in their own singularity, in the fullest brilliance of their inner riches, in the highest power at their disposal. (Schriften 212-213)

As in “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” this review also emphasizes the importance of instrumental music, but with the extra emphasis on the instrument itself, as if the instrument were its own composer and artist. Hoffmann argues that after Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, it should be _____________ 10

The current German word for a solo instrumentalist, such as a pianist, is Interpret. Hoffmann, however, like many of his contemporaries often uses Künstler (artist).

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possible to explore every possibility of the instrument, as if the instrument could control itself and show all its possibilities for sound. This aspect of instrumental music comes in part of the critique of Reichardt’s sonata for pianoforte, which Hoffmann argues does not give justice to the instrument. Rather than concentrating on the nuances of sound available to him on the pianoforte, Reichardt’s piano sonata resembles too closely his compositions for voice. Hoffmann’s criticism here focuses on the physical differences between the voice and the piano that give each instrument its own unique possibilities in phrasing, harmony, technique, and tonal nuance. While Hoffmann perhaps humorously and exaggeratedly expounds on this issue in this particular review, the text indicates an important shift in the main component of music. Not only should the human subjectivity of the performer remain absent, but so too does the subjectivity of the composer. Musical sound comes from the inner workings (or mechanical capabilities) of the instrument, and the virtuosity comes from the ability to call forth the sound which already exists. This is a radical shift from the eighteenth-century way of thinking about music as a form of communicating the heart. Rather than coming from the human heart, music in Hoffmann’s texts comes from a source outside the human and sounds only with the combination of an instrument, an ingenious composer and virtuosic performer. The heart is still important, but as a vehicle through which to “catch” the interiority of nature contained in the instrument and then to express it to the listener. Virtuosity in this passage, however, is not linked to the technical skill of the pianist as it is later in the nineteenth century, but refers to the performer’s ability to draw out the spirit which already exists in the music. However, when the source of the sound is the human singer, it is difficult to maintain that the sound is outside the human as in an instrument. As mentioned above in reference to the Sacchini review, the human breast is for Hoffmann the instrument for vocal music, a music which, with the right voice, is also the “sound of nature.” Although this sound apparently comes from the “heart,” it does not arise from human passions, or from the purpose to articulate certain passions, as eighteenth-century theorists believed. Instead, in Hoffmann’s aesthetics, the human body acts as any other instrument. As an instrumentalist, the singer must also allow the natural tones within the instrument (the body) to sound “as if the instrument were to control itself.” A melody, “that can not be sung in this manner can only remain a row of single tones that try in vain to become music” (Hoffmann, Kreisleriana 112). The melody which can be freely sung from the interior of the instrument is an essential element of vocal music, and it also helps to distinguish between Naturmusik and “empty, meaningless tones,” which Ludwig calls mechanical in “The Automata.”

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The self-controlling instrument suggests automation. However, automated musical instruments are still somewhat controlled by an operator (someone has to turn on the switch to set the gears in motion), as well as a composer (again, someone had to write the cylinders or paper rolls). An automated musical instrument, therefore, does not technically control itself in the same manner Hoffmann’s review suggests the instrumental music should appear to do. It is the appearance of complete self-control, or automation, which is important in the review and part of the purpose of automated musical instruments. The self-control, however, is not mechanical in the sense that Professor X’s automata are mechanical. It is obvious that Professor X. controls the automata since he becomes part of the performance, whereas an automated instrument that appears to start and improvise on its own is able to fool its audience into thinking it acts alone. Such deceptive automation occurs in the android figure Olimipia in “The Sandman.” The relationship between the body and the instrument, the spirit which exists in each element of music, as well as the factor of automation are all present in the female automaton Olimpia. As an android, Olimpia is a work of art, and the moment she performs music, she is at once an artwork and an automated musical instrument. Olimpia’s musical performance in “The Sandman” is a central point in which the characters Nathanael and Olimpia can be seen as artists and as autonomous works of art. This particular scene is often overlooked in scholarship on “The Sandman,” except to emphasise the importance of the telescope lens and the eyes. While some have commented on Olimpia as a singer, few have really taken the musical aesthetics into account, or the aesthetic nature of the relationship between Nathanael and Olimpia.11 Unlike the androids in “The Automata,” Olimipia’s identity as an android is not obvious to the audience, least of all to Nathanael. Neither does anyone control her performance through accompaniment or by turning on a switch, as Professor X. does to the androids and instruments in his collection. Her musicianship is perfect precisely because she is an android that appears to work in full autonomy. _____________ 11

Mattli explains Olimpia’s ability to survive her own singing ability due to the fact that she is not actually alive. Christian Mattli, Der Tod der Primadonna: Der Mensch als Instrument im literarischen Werk ETA Hoffmanns (Bern: Lang, 2003), 24-5. Olimpia, however, does “die” when Coppola and Spalanzani pull her apart. Schroeder mentions the possible relationship between Nathanael and Olimpia as artists, although she does not really draw on the musical aesthetic which makes Olimpia’s musical skill and dance rhythm virtuosic. Irene Schroeder, “Das innere Bild und seine Gestaltung: die Erzählung ‘der Sandmann’ als Theorie und Praxis des Erzählens,” E.T.A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch 9 (2001): 31.

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In Olimpia, the issues of mechanical art versus the art which appears to come from the human spirit re-emerges in a more developed form than the various android figures and musical machines in “The Automata.” As Ludwig and Ferdinand illustrate in “The Automata,” the human spirit in the production of art remains outside of human subjectivity and separate from consciousness. The terms “spirit” and “mechanical” in Hoffmann’s texts can not be evenly divided into human or non-human sources. “Spiritual” music, with the example of the Naturlaut coming from the machines in Professor X.’s garden, can originate from an automated musical instrument instead of the human performer. Olimpia’s musical performance as well as the way in which Nathanael falls in love with her determines the type of music Olimpia produces as a singer/automated musical instrument, related to Nathanael’s poetic abilities (or inabilities). “The Sandman” presents at once the problem of the artist projecting his subjective self onto the artwork, the apparently soulless musical performer, and the communication of the interior between the artist and the recipient of the artwork. All of these are linked in the nightmarish aspect of the piece. It is difficult after Freud’s “Uncanny” to view “The Sandman” as anything other than a nightmare and most scholarship on the story interprets Olimpia’s deception of lifelikeness as the main reason for the nightmare. The nightmarish aspect of the story has more to do with the deception of reality, especially poetic reality, through the means of a telescope lens. The confusion of reality that results in this deception occurs in Nathanael’s perspective of Olimpia and Clara, and how he sees them (i.e., alive or as a puppet). The title figure Coppelius/Coppola, the sandman sells the telescope lens to Nathanael and appears to orchestrate the entire illusion of the lifelikeness of the android and the android-like behavior of the “living” characters. This deception in “The Sandman” also offers a closer look into the mechanical production of art, and the presence of spirit in the artwork. Nathanael’s feelings for Clara or Olimpia indicate successful communication between poet and listener. The nature of Nathanael’s relationship to either of the two female figures, as well as his “enlivenment” of one and “mechanisation” of the other depends on how he literally sees them. At the same time that it seems like an overly banal description of love in the connection from gazing into the heart through the eyes, this same relationship between the eyes and the heart is also the aesthetic connection between the artist and the artwork, the artist and the observer, and the artwork and the observer.12 The communication of the interior, _____________ 12

See the discussion on the role of love in Hoffmann’s tales in Detlef Kremer, Romantische Metamorphosen: E.T.A. Hoffmanns Erzählungen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 79-98, 103, 171-197.

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as Lee B. Jennings notes in his post-Freudian reading of “The Sandman,” is one of the main problems of writing and the primary theme of the tale (97). Schroeder also discusses the problem of writing and the metapoetic aspect of the tale in her article on “The Sandman.” Writing and problems with writing occurs on different levels: the narrator’s own difficulties telling the story and Nathanael’s failed attempts to write good poetry. The narrator’s feelings of inadequacy when faced with the task of relating Nathanael’s story resemble the enthusiast’s difficulties narrating the end of “The Golden Flower Pot” or Kreisler’s biographer’s scrambled writings mixed in with the straightforward autobiography of the cat, Murr. As in these tales and many others by Hoffmann, the artistic deficiencies in “The Sandman” are met with the failure to communicate to the listener. However, it is not only the poet, but the listener who plays a role in a successful communication between artist and observer in Hoffmann’s stories and music reviews. Clara’s and Olimpia’s reactions to Nathanael’s poetry (or in the case of Olimpia, perceived reaction), signify the poetic or nonpoetic nature of his beloved. Nathanael’s poetic problem stems from his denial of the role the interior plays in poetic inspiration. It is actually the more logical thinking Clara13 who tries to convince him that his ideas come from him rather than an outside source. Nathanael instead insists on the opposite: He went so far as to maintain it is foolish, when one believes one creates from self-acting arbitrariness because the enthusiasm, in which one is only capable of creating, does not come from the own interior, but is rather the impact of some kind of higher principle that lies outside ourselves.. (Hoffmann Werke I: 623)

Nathanael’s first mistake appears to be the way in which he interprets the source of poetic inspiration. Considering the other poet-protagonists and musicians in Hoffmann’s stories as well as Hoffmann’s music reviews, the creative force comes from the investigation of the interior, as in Serapionsbrüder, when each must look into themselves to ascertain whether or not their creation indeed comes from within them and reflects their own true spirit (II: 56). Nathanael denies this aesthetic principle and as a result, his poetry becomes more “dark, incomprehensible and formless” (I: 624). Clara, who previously listened to his “charming, lively” stories with “the most inward pleasure,” no longer wishes to hear his poetry and finds it boring (624). The “hostile principle [feindliche Prinzip]” which Nathanael attributes to the Coppelius/Coppola figure is “evil” because it reverses Nathanael’s understanding of how true poetry is created based on the aesthetic principles throughout Hoffmann’s oeuvre. Nathanael’s under_____________ 13

Both the name Clara and the German word klar (clear) originate from the Latin “clarus”. The name, according to many different sources on the meanings of names, means bright or clear.

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standing of poetic inspiration coming from an outside source also leads to the assumption that it is the poet’s job to simply write it down. This “spiritless” activity is the very mechanical sense of writing, which would render Nathanael a poet recording what comes to him from the outside as nothing more than a puppet, which he later turns into. The performer, even when playing music composed by someone else, must understand the music from within in order to communicate it to another person. As an android, Olimpia is the perfect musical performer, precisely because she does not interpret. In the most literal sense of “outer” and “inner,” the music in automated musical instruments comes from the gears, cylinders, or paper rolls—all in the physical space inside the instrument. Olimpia’s music also comes from within, although her human form hides her automated mechanism—a deception however, that follows the ambiguity of the singer rather than the musical androids in “The Automata.” Her technical musical abilities are emphasized in the description of her performance, “Olimpia played the piano with great skill and also performed a bravour-aria with a bright, almost cutting glass bell voice” (631). Olimpia’s piano playing “with great skill,” can be understood as technically virtuosic. However, it is her singing abilities which define her status as a musician. A “bravour-aria” itself is a technically difficult piece, but it is not just the technical difficulty of the piece but her voice, the “bright, almost cutting glass bell voice”—again the voice like crystal bells that also appears in “The Automata” and “The Golden Flower Pot” and indicates that her abilities are not only virtuosic, but also sublime. Olimpia masters the physicality of the music in her technical ability and voice quality at the same time she communicates this music to Nathanael through her eyes. “Ach!—then he realized how she looked over at him full of longing, how every tone clearly appeared in the love gaze which ignited and penetrated his inner being.” Olimpia successfully transfers the work of art to Nathanael with the vehicle of the eyes, from one interior to the other. Nathanael becomes in this passage the listener which he desires Clara to be; he looks into her eyes and is entranced by the spirit in her performance, which in turn is a reflection of the performer’s spirit (the instrument, as mentioned above, also has a spirit). Olimpia’s musicianship is a combination of technical skill and communicated spirit. She represents the epitome of a musical aesthetic present in Hoffmann’s music reviews and stories. As a singer, her body is an instrument, and the voice she is able to sing is the sought-after “glass bell voice,” the

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sound of nature.14 Not only is her technical ability superb, but so is her ability to communicate the spirit of the music to the listener. It can be argued that the technical skill comes from the fact that her body is not merely the instrument that a “living” singer’s body ought to be, but truly is an instrument. Spirit can be communicated through her technical skill precisely because she brings no human imperfections and added purpose to her performance. If one considers the questionable identity of the singer in “The Automata” and Serpentina’s identity as a green-gold snake in “The Golden Flower Pot,” then their ability to communicate spirit through the combination of gaze and musical sound also comes from their lack of human intent for effect. In each of these cases, it is a combination of hearing pure soprano tones like crystal bells and seeing the spirit within these musical sounds in the singer’s eyes. The Coppelius/Coppola character uses the eyes and the fear of “exposing” the eyes to control Nathanael. Nathanael’s first glimpse of Olimpia, without the telescope lens, results only in the observation that she has “a pretty figure,” and that she sits and stares out the window without engaging in any task or activity. His thoughts at that time are still with Clara. It is not until he gazes at her through the telescope that Olimpia’s still and staring gaze appears enlivened (Hoffmann Werke I: 629). Some scholars (Jennings, Annuß, von Matt) have attributed this to the projection of Nathanael’s desires through the lens on Olimpia which make her appear to be alive. In a different response to Freud’s “The Uncanny,” Stefani Engelstein points out that Olimpia and Nathanael are connected by their “transplanted and regenerated eyes” (33). The telescope lens allows Nathanael to “look more and more sharply through the glass” (Hoffmann, Werke I: 629) and sees things his friends do not, as they later try to point out Olimpia’s rather mechanical nature. However, the ability to see things differently from the other characters in the story is essential in Hoffmann’s texts for the poetic imagination, and it happens to Anselmus in “The Golden Flower Pot” as well as Fröbom in “The Mines at Falun.” Like these two characters, Nathanael longs to return to the same viewing experience, which for Anselmus meant meeting the greengold snake again, and for Fröbom the inner secrets of the rocks in the mine. The view of Olimpia through the telescope lens becomes an addiction, so that when he receives the invitation to Professor Spalanzani’s, he is already primed to desire to meet her. _____________ 14

In “The Automata” and “The Golden Flower Pot,” the sounds really do appear to come from nature. In “The Automata” it comes from a garden (and is triggered by nature, a flower), and in “The Golden Flower Pot,” the sounds appear to come from an elderberry bush.

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Most scholars who write on “The Sandman” argue that the eyes and vision are the most important aspects of the tale, an interpretation, as Jennings points out, that also seems to have been influenced by Freud’s essay, as well as von Matt’s The Eyes of the Automata (95-6). As previously mentioned here in connection to the character Serapion, the eyes, looking, and seeing are important in Hoffmann’s works. In “The Sandman,” the eyes are a means of communication as well as the perceptive force which influences Nathanael’s way of understanding the world around him. However, what has been mostly ignored in scholarship on metaphors for the eyes in Hoffmann is that the eyes and seeing are also connected with music or musical sound, hearing, and listening. This is especially true in “The Sandman” at the moment Nathanael falls in love with Olimpia. This happens as Nathanael is gazing through the telescope at Olimpia as she is singing: The concert began. ... Olimpia played the piano with great skill and even performed a Bravour-Aria with a bright, almost cutting glass bell voice. Nathanael was quite enchanted, he stood in the very back row and could not make out Olimpia’s features very well in the blinding candlelight. Quite unnoticed he therefore took out Coppolas’s glass and looked into it at the beautiful Olimpia. Oh!—then it became clear to him, how she looked over at him full of longing, how every tone only became clear in the look of love that ignited and penetrated his inner being. … The artful roulade seemed to Nathanael to be the heavenly jubilation of a declared love, and as after the cadence the long trill pierced through the hall, as if grabbed from burning arms, he could no longer help himself, he had to cry out loudly, out of pain and rapture, “Olimipia!” (631)

One may argue that it is primarily the magnification through the telescope lens that spurns Nathanael’s attraction to Olimpia, but it is actually the combination of sight and sound which is important. It is not the first time Nathanael looks at Olimpia through the telescope, but it is the first time that he does so while she is singing and apparently looking back at him. In fact, it is the music which first captivates him, and causes him to look into the telescope for a closer look at her facial expression. The sentence describing the exchange of gaze between Nathanael and Olimpia combines sight and sound, “how every tone first became clear in the look of love.” As Schroeder mentions, the love described between Nathanael and Olimpia is entirely through Nathanael’s perspective and what he believes to see (29-30), but the “look of love” Nathanael perceives from Olimpia is one “that ignited and penetrated his inner being” (Hoffmann Werke I: 631). Again, Olimipia does not look over at him through the lens until she is performing a work of art herself. The penetration of Olimpia’s gaze from outside to within is similar to the required communication between artwork and perceiver. Olimpia is an artwork (Schroeder 31),

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and at the same time an artist as she awakens poetic fantasy in Nathanael through her glass bell voice and gaze. A closer look at the language of the above passage in comparison to the language of the similar passages in “The Automata” and “The Golden Flower Pot” also sheds some light onto the type of character Olimpia is, or at least a new way of understanding what Olimpia represents. Rather than the nightmarish projection of Nathanael’s soul, as is the popular post-Freudian interpretation, Olimpia, too, is an artist and a muse. In her reading of the story as a projection of the difficulties of writing, Schroeder suggests that Olimpia, the projected interior of Nathanael and herself a work of art, acts as a muse and it is only through her that his true poetic ability surfaces (31-2).15 Evelyn Annuß reads Nathanael’s projection of his identity in Olimpia also as an artistic relationship, only she emphasizes that the mechanical properties point to Nathanael’s dilettantism (98-99). Olimpia’s simple word, “Ach!” relates her as a musician to the poet Nathanael in a similar way the composer, Ludwig and the poet, Ferdinand are connected in “The Automata” as two like-minded artists. While most scholars have attributed Olimpia’s overly laconic speech to the satire on the ideal woman of the early nineteenth century, the “Ach!” is the same emotive utterance which both Herder and Forkel described as the origin of language and music. As an automated musical instrument and the utterance, “Ach,” Olimipia reinforces the autonomy of music. Olimpia can not speak in creative, fluid coherent sentences, but she can sing, dance, and play the piano. Nathanael, on the other hand, talks uninterruptedly, yet can not match Olimpia’s sense of rhythm. Rhythm is an important aspect of music, and as Barth explains in Pianist as Orator, exact rhythm in music becomes more desirable later in the nineteenth century when metronome markings become more common. Through her musical capabilities, Olimpia represents more than just a vessel to hold Nathanael’s projected ego, she is the artistic counterpart to Nathanael, as a musician is to a poet. Although Hoffmann’s music reviews lean toward an aesthetic of music which allows music to stand as an autonomous art and separate from the rules of rhetoric which bind language, music is not entirely separate from poetry, nor is painting from poetry or music. The combination of the arts is a recurrent theme in Hoffmann’s oeuvre, and the opera was for Hoffmann a genre in which these arts could most successfully and naturally be combined, as Ferdinand and Ludwig argue in “The Poet and the _____________ 15

Concentrating on “Jesuitenkirche in G.” and The Life Views of the Tom Cat Murr, Drux also mentions that the artist’s promethian creation turns around as a muse and allows him to create. Rudolf Drux, “E.T.A. Hoffmanns Version der ‘Fabel von dem Prometheus,’” E.T.A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch 1 (1992-3): 88-90.

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Composer.” Fantasy Pieces in the Manner of Callot, for instance, is a title of a collection of tales which obviously have this project in mind—as one can see from the title itself. According to Woodgate, Fantasy Pieces more often referred to music rather than poetry (162), and Callot was a painter. So in a combination of all three arts, the collection is a narrative musical genre in the manner of a famous painter. The combination of poetry and music is also related to late eighteenth-century philosophical writings about their origins, as discussed in chapter one. Although music was supposed to be separate from language as an autonomous art by 1814 when Hoffmann writes “The Sandman,” the origin of music still had its roots with the origin of poetry. This origin is in “The Poet and the Composer” and “The Golden Flower Pot.” While it is explicitly stated in the conversation between the poet (Ferdinand) and the composer (Ludwig), it comes as a suggestion in the final scene when the traveling enthusiast (the narrator for the Fantasy Pieces) can not continue the story about Anselmus and Serpentina. The Archivarius provides him with an inspirational glass of punch—the same punch which Johannes Kreisler drinks for his inspiration. The same source of inspiration for Kreisler, Hoffmann’s music director figure and the main character of “Kreisleriana” and the jumbled biography in Life Views of the Tom Cat Murr, suggests that in these stories the two arts—music and poetry— come from the same source. This brings us back to the question of the interiority and spirit, especially between the “living” poet and the “mechanical” musician. Nathanael falls in love with Olimpia not through the spy glass alone, but through the simultaneous sound of her voice and the gaze which Nathanael, through the spy glass, interprets as full of longing and love. For Nathanael’s eyes and understanding, Olimpia is a real person, just as the snakes in “The Golden Flower Pot,” seen and heard only by Anselmus, are real to him alone. However, as the story of “The Sandman” unfolds, we know, along with Nathanael’s friends that Olimpia is nothing more than an android which Spalanzani and Coppelius pieced together. Unlike the conclusion to “The Golden Flower Pot,” Olimpia does not become real in the end and carry Nathanael off, rather she is torn to pieces by her creators, and her puppet identity is revealed. Nathanael himself also seems to be a puppet and the perfect performer. The combination of puppet-hood in Olimipia and Nathanael with the same metaphors for true artistic abilities as in other tales by Hoffmann emphasize the arbitrariness Hoffmann desires in music over the purposeful attempt to effect the audience. Nathanael’s perception of the absence of the interior in the creation of poetry parallels Hoffmann’s description of the proper attitude of the musical performer—that the “interpretation”

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of an already composed piece should not contain the subjective purpose of the performer—the performer should simply be a vehicle by which the already created artwork comes to life and is able to sound. Nathanael’s outburst when he recognizes that Olimpia as a mechanical doll, “twirl, puppet, twirl,” shows how he begins to see himself, and act as a puppet. His sense of his own puppetlike traits occurs most clearly when he looks at Clara through the lens and sees her as a puppet. The projection of Olimpia to the self happens again, only now instead of seeing an artistic connection, Nathanael recognizes that Clara is a puppet, and by projection, he is one, too. However, only Nathanael sees himself as a puppet. The friends who warn him about Olimipia’s mechanical mannerisms do not seem to notice that Nathanael exhibits these same characteristics. Thus his identity as a “living” person or a “dead” puppet remains ambiguous, albeit not as ambiguous as the singer in “The Automata.” Nathanael becomes a puppet-artist with the ability to perform someone else’s composition. In this sense, Nathanael is the performer of the Coppelius/Coppola figure’s already created artwork. In her article “Reproductive Machines in E.T.A. Hoffmann,” Engelstein mentions how Coppelius, his double Coppola, and Professor Spalanzani control Nathanael from his childhood on, and orchestrate his move to an apartment directly across from Olimpia’s window (182). The Coppelius/Coppola figure is an artist. He creates Olimpia, and he also has a hand in creating Nathanael. Coppelius catches the child Nathanael spying on his father and Coppelius while they are working on the android. Coppelius then “unscrews” Nathanael’s limbs and puts them “back again, now here, now there” (Hoffmann, Werke I: 614). Jennings reads this rather surreal occurrence as proof that Nathanael himself is a puppet (105-6). The Coppola figure visits Nathanael twice, but it is not until Nathanael is “placed” in an apartment directly across from Professor Spalanzani (another of Olimpia’s creators), that he agrees to buy something from him, and only after looking at Spalanzani’s daughter, Olimpia through the telescope lens. As Coppola leaves after selling Nathanael the lens, he gives Nathanael an odd look and laughs. Although Nathanael believes the peddler is laughing at the high price, Coppola’s look and laugh shows that he knows something Nathanael does not. Since the story is narrated from Nathanael’s perspective, the reader does not know why Coppola laughs either. Here Nathanael becomes just as much a part of Coppelius/Coppola’s creation as Olimpia since Coppola “directs” their meeting, and orchestrates Nathanael’s suicidal fall, as well. As the people of the town square show concern about the flailing Nathanael at the top of the tower, Coppelius, who had just arrived at the square, says “Ha Ha—just wait, he’ll come down on his own” and Nathanael

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obeys, jumping from the tower (Hoffmann, Werke I: 639-40). It is Coppelius/Coppola who is the real creator in the story, rather than Nathanael. Nathanael believes himself to be a poet, but he is the poet-protagonist in Coppelius/Coppola’s story and at the same time a performer of Coppelius/Coppola’s composition. Nathanael’s performance succeeds only when he writes down the story of Coppola/Coppelius, which comes to him in the form of a vague idea (Ahnung), rather than something he purports to write: The figure of the ugly Coppelius was, as Nathanael had to admit himself, paled in his fantasy and it often cost him effort to paint a lively picture of him in his poems, in which he appeared as a cruel bogeyman of fate. It finally occurred to him to make that dark intuitive feeling, that Coppelius would destroy his happy love the object of a poem. (625)

Nathanael’s protagonist and subject of his poetry is Coppelius, but when he tries to remember Coppelius to include him in his stories, he struggles with it. It is only when the vague idea appears to him that he is able to write about Coppelius, not just to describe him, but to truly make him an agent of Nathanael’s fate. In reference to the earlier discussion between Clara and Nathanael about the nature of his fear of Coppelius, it appears that the Coppelius figure does indeed come from outside of him. Nathanael does not seem to recognize his own voice in the poem when he reads it to himself, and asks “whose cruel voice is that?” (625). However, it is the purposeful, boring writing which comes from outside of him, while this vague idea, his true fear of what will happen comes from inside [das Innere]. This vague idea which comes to Nathanael reflects what is actually happening, as Clara and Nathanael “drifted … more and more apart from within, without noticing it themselves” (624). On the one hand, it would seem that Nathanael is the one creating the story, which comes alive at the end. On the other hand, the story narrated from this poet-protagonist’s perspective is actually the story composed and conducted by Coppelius. Nathanael believes himself to be acting autonomously, but his story about Coppelius’ control over his fate turns out to be the real story, which also comes through Nathanael’s inner spirit, as the composition should come through the performer to the audience. Nathanael’s poem also successfully reaches his audience. The poetry he had previously attempted to read to Clara and which caused them to separate from within, was not well-received by Clara. “Now his poems were dark, incomprehensible, formless, so that if Clara didn’t say it out of protection, he still felt how little she connected to them” (624). Just as in music, when the communication of the spirit of the artwork must happen through the spirit of the composer and the performer to the listener, the spirit in the poetry must also reach the listener and communicate to the

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spirit of the listener. Like many of Hoffmann’s musical protagonists who give up their humanity for the perfect performance (the singers in “Don Juan” and “Councillor Krespel” and the mysterious musician in “Ritter Gluck”), Nathanael also gives up his humanity to write the perfect poem. This was necessary to achieve the arbitrary spirit and creation without purpose. Nathanael’s more purposeful poetry, void of this necessary spirit, does not communicate to Clara effectively. It is only the poem about Coppelius that he allows to come from within and in doing so acts more mechanically, without purpose that suddenly catches Clara’s attention. Control over a work of art renders a performance and artist mechanical in “The Sandman” and “The Automata,” as soon as the control is made obvious to the observer. Just as Ludwig called Professor X.’s controlled performance of the automata “mechanical,” the autonomy which Nathanael and Olimpia share disappears as soon as Coppola/Coppelius’s control over his artwork is obvious. As mentioned above, Nathanael falls from the tower right after Coppelius asserts that he would. By this time, Nathanael has already begun acting like a puppet, as Coppola’s control with the eye glasses becomes apparent. Olimpia, on the other hand, is torn apart by her creators, Coppola and Spalanzani as they fight over the ownership of her, denying, in this sense, her autonomy as an artwork. As soon as Olimpia is revealed to Nathanael as an android, Nathanael recognizes his own “puppethood” and powerlessness as an artwork under Coppola’s control. As long as Olimipia and Nathanael see themselves as autonomous artists rather than artworks belonging to someone else, they are alive. The androids in “The Automata” are also mechanical because Professor X.’s control of the automata and the purpose in his own playing is obvious. However, the singer’s ambiguity points to the fact that her mechanism is not fully revealed—it is not obvious to either Ferdinand or Ludwig that she is an automaton, or that Professor X. controls her. This is only implied in the narrative, and she retains her autonomy as a singer/muse. The mechanical aspect of art performance is revealed in both these tales only when the artist tries to regain control of its creation, as the musical performance in which the performer attempts to “own” the piece becomes nothing more than mechanical playing.

Chapter Three Schopenhauer and Hanslick: Toward a Definition of Instrumental Music as an Autonomous Art By the middle of the nineteenth century, writers generally agreed that music was an autonomous art with its own means of communicating emotion. At the same time, the break from traditional ways of thinking about music as imitation around 1800 led to the later need to redefine music and to reconsider its relationship to other arts. Heinrich Heine, who wrote music reviews in addition to many poems, stories, and essays, summarizes the philosophical attempt of his time to define music in a question that focuses the issues. In the ninth letter of his On the French Stage (1837), Heine asks: But what is music? This question occupied me yesterday evening for hours before I fell asleep. With music there is a special relationship; I want to say, it is a wonder. It stands between thought and phenomenon; as a dawning medium it stands between spirit and matter; it is related and yet different from both: it is spirit, but spirit that needs the measure of time; it is matter, but matter that can be devoid of space. (284)

Heine’s own attempt to answer the question of what music is splits music into categories of spirit and matter that maintain a balance Heine hints is more unusual than in other arts. The split between spirit and matter also connects to the question of form versus content, a theme Koch addresses in his treatise on music theory and which the Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick deals with in On the Musically Beautiful. Arnold Schopenhauer also deals with the material and spiritual aspects of music, and seems to respond to the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who criticized music for its failure to balance subjectivity and objectivity in a work of art. Heine’s answer to his own question “what is music” illustrates the philosophical questions pertaining to aesthetics in the midnineteenth century, especially in attempts to define music as an autonomous art and describe how it behaves in terms of the balance between objectivity and subjectivity, matter and spirit, or form and content. Heine’s question also illustrates Hegel’s profound influence on nineteenth-century thought. Mark Burford mentions that Hanslick’s writing

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shows in part a reaction to Hegel (167), and the language in On the Musically Beautiful sometimes indicates a response to Hegel’s argument about music, whereas Heine’s question shows more the influence of Hegelian thought process. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, viewed Hegel as his opponent, although, as Julian Young mentions in his book on Schopenhauer, Hegel’s lectures were far more popular (11). Hegel’s popularity may have forced some influence on Schopenhauer in his attempts to counter Hegel’s claims, but Schopenhauer’s own response to Kant shows an independent, non-Hegelian thinking absent in later writings, including those by Hanslick and Heine. The impact of Hegel’s influence on nineteenth-century writers about music is curious, when one considers that Hegel had even less to say about music than Kant, and neither of them treats the art very favorably. However, both philosophers emphasize a notion in aesthetics, the idea, which seems to evade music’s more ethereal nature. The idea, Hegel, contends, has the potential to disappear in an all too subjective performance (Werke 153-4, 157-59). Heine’s description of music as “both related to and separate from matter and spirit” echoes the way form and content co-exist in Hegel’s introduction to the character of music. In music, spirit needs measurement, in this case time, whereas the matter, the sounds from the instruments, lack space. Heine hints therefore, that in music, one thinks of matter in the way one thinks of spirit and vice versa, giving music a special balance between the two that does not exist in other forms of art. Heine’s question, therefore, shows Hegel’s influence on the thought process more so than on the content of Hegel’s diatribe against music. Heine splits music into matter and spirit, but shows at the same time that both contain properties of the other. Spirit confined by time and matter that can escape the boundaries of space show that they are both “related yet different.” As Hegel shows in Phenomenology of Spirit, the dialectical thinking he is famous for works in that the two differing ideas are both related and different from one another, and the difference between the two is part of their unity (99-100).1 This aspect of Hegel’s thought process becomes obvious in Heine’s answer to his question “what is music?” in the way Heine stresses their relationship. In spite of his wide influence on nineteenth-century philosophy and aesthetics, Hegel does not escape Heine’s criticism. Heine immediately discredits his own answer and denies any known definition of music with his next line, “We don’t know what music is” (284). With this line, Heine, who had just pointed to the central issue in the nineteenth century sur_____________ 1

The unity/dis-unity relationship comes up often throughout the Phenomenology, this example from “Force and Understanding” is only one of many.

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rounding the definition of music, denies the clarity of earlier attempts to answer this, including his own Hegelian attempt. Heine’s writings about music pinpoint the problem of music in the nineteenth century—musical structure and technique versus spirit and emotion, or rather the combination in musical genius—but also make fun of the music aesthetics of his time that leaves out the more practical matters of making music (for it can not be realized if it is not performed). The philosophical attempt in the nineteenth century to define music ignores what music means in cultural practice, or what it means to the public who attends the concerts or to the musicians and children striving to become virtuosic instrumentalists. This discrepancy, between the reality of musical practice and the philosophical attempt to qualify only certain types of music as true art lies behind Heine’s question and forms the basis of this chapter’s inquiry. The search for a new definition of music as an autonomous rather than imitative art in the early and mid-nineteenth century focused on an abstract understanding of music aesthetics that contradicted contemporary preferred performance practices. Specifically, developments in automated and non-automated instruments and attitudes about the instruments led to a paradox between the ways in which musicians considered their art on the new instruments and the ways in which philosophers and theorists tried to define music. Schopenhauer and Hanslick offer two different approaches to an aesthetic of music that disavow imitation or representation of phenomena. Both Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music in The World as Will and Representation (first edition 1818) and Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (1854) influenced not only nineteenth-century ideas about music, but also the way music is considered in our own time, especially as it has been taught throughout much of the United States.2 Many scholars writing on music and philosophy quote Schopenhauer and many writing about the history of piano music or music aesthetics quote Hanslick. However, there has been very little scholarship on the connection between Schopenhauer and Hanslick, other than Lydia Goehr’s study that uses both writers to explain the tradition out of which Adorno writes (21), although she does not compare Hanslick’s and Schopenhauer’s aesthetics to each other. This lack of scholarship in music aesthetics on Hanslick and Schopenhauer is surprising, since Hanslick’s work was published just five years before Schopenhauer prepared his third edition of The World as Will and Representation in 1859, and both contradict what Hegel says about music in Aesthetics, albeit in different styles and for different reasons. _____________ 2

European music has influenced music in the United States since the nineteenth century, but especially during and after World War II, when many European musicians came to the U.S. and taught at American universities.

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Schopenhauer’s and Hanslick’s criticism of imitative music does not reflect the majority of the works that were composed in the early to midnineteenth century. Schopenhauer, for instance, criticizes Haydn’s The Creation (Die Schöpfung) and The Seasons (Die Jahreszeiten) as an imitation of ideas, and therefore not true music (and not a true representation of the Will) (379), but this criticism could be applied to various works by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and later post-romantic composers such as Claude Debussy, Modest Mussorgsky, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, and the list goes on. Much of the music composed throughout the nineteenth century is programmatic, meaning that it takes its ideas from paintings, literature, and scenes in nature. For example, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition describes musically a series of paintings at a museum exhibition. The piano cycle3 includes variations of the opening “promenade,” in which the viewer walks from one painting or sketch to the next. Each number recalls in sound the content of the picture, and as in a museum visit, there is not a promenade between every number, since some frames are close enough to each other that one does not have to walk in between them. The cycle is based on an actual museum exhibition and the music therefore imitates the act of walking and what one sees, thereby conveying an idea beyond the melodic line and harmonic structure. Other examples of instrumental program music include Robert Schumann’s Papillons for piano, based on the masked ball at the end of Jean Paul’s Flegeljahre, and Franz Schubert’s Trout Quintet, which uses trills to try to imitate the fish jumping out of the water. Less obviously programmatic are works whose titles suggest an idea for the piece, as is the case in some of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words and for a few of Beethoven’s symphonies and sonatas. All of these pieces are instrumental works, yet they all describe non-musical scenes or experiences, often referred to in musicology as an extra-musical idea. This type of composition was common practice in the nineteenth century, and Romantic music offers many examples. Yet it is precisely this attempt to tell a specific story through music or to imitate sights or sounds in nature through music against which E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote in his essays and tales on music. The famous line in “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music” that Dahlhaus claims has defined Romantic music concentrates on non-programmatic compositions. It is after all Beethoven’s fifth symphony and a piano concerto, neither of which have a title suggesting an extra-musical idea, that Hoff_____________ 3

Mussorgsky’s original score was for piano solo. However, today most people hear it as an orchestra piece, since many composers orchestrated the work. The most well-known orchestration played today is by Maurice Ravel.

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mann calls “rein romantisch.” Hoffmann’s definition of Romantic music, however, was not typical of nineteenth-century music, and “Romantic” meant something quite different to composers such as Robert Schumann (Tadday 2). Hanslick and Schopenhauer’s aesthetic writings about music follow Hoffmann’s strain and continue to criticize the popular program music in favour of an instrumental music that conveys only music. Hanslick’s and Schopenhauer’s definitions of music stand in juxtaposition to the mid-nineteenth-century music training, especially with its basis on industrialized means of learning music and the instruments such as the piano that require constant practice to achieve technical perfection. Schopenhauer’s and Hanslick’s emphasis on the importance of human spirit in musicianship offers a philosophical response to the growing popularity of music-making machines, particularly automated musical instruments such as the orchestrion and mechanical organs. Hanslick repeatedly refers to the musical clock or mechanical organ [Spieluhr] as an example against music that does not come from human spirit. By the late eighteenth century, as Dieter Krickeberg explains, automated musical instruments filled public spaces such as restaurants and theaters in addition to private homes of the nobility and upper middle class families (17, 22). Their shape also began to resemble box-like furniture rather than musician-androids by Vaucanson and Jacques-Droz as discussed here in chapter one. In the automated musical industry, the human element in imitation became less important in the nineteenth century as instrumentmakers sought ways to play music without a “living” orchestra.4 The eighteenth-century attempt to show how the spirit and body work as a machine gave way to the nineteenth-century desire to show off virtuosic finger dexterity and to compose technically difficult pieces. This technical skill was often better matched by a machine than by a human interpreter, and human performers themselves tried to train their hands as if they were machines (Wehmeyer, Tadday, Hildebrandt). In his book on the history of nineteenth-century piano music and performance, Hildebrandt explains how Robert Schumann ruined his fingers from lengthy mechanized practicing, in the attempt to perfect his skill at the keyboard _____________ 4

This general trend can be observed by the instrument collections in museums in Switzerland and Germany. The museums visited for this study include Musikautomaten Museum in Seewen, Switzerland, Deutsches Musikautomatenmuseum (im Barockschloss Bruchsal) in Bruchsal, Germany, Deutsches Museum in Munich, Märkisches Museum in Berlin, Musikinstrumenten-Museum in Berlin, and the Musée d’ art et d’histoire in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. While there are still a few instruments designed as mechanical dolls playing music dating to the mid-nineteenth century and later, they are often not life-like to the extent the JacquetDroz dolls are and most instruments dated mid-nineteenth century in these collections are orchestrions or mechanical organs.

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(164). In Hoffmann’s “The Automata,” Ludwig complains about the mechanical imitation of human activity, and includes the professor’s performance as this imitation. Imperfection in meter and mannerisms is also important in “The Sandman” and separates the human from the machine. As a mechanical doll, Olimpia is described to have been the perfectly mannered young woman, an identity that “living” women drop as soon as Olimpia’s true nature is revealed. In order to provide proof of their human nature, women in “The Sandman” are encouraged to yawn and knit rather than truly listen. In Hoffmann’s tales, only human nature could provide these imperfections. In piano performance practices, however, only the technically skilled virtuosos flourished as the public demanded more and more technical perfection at the keyboard, and the imitation of the machine became for some a necessary aspect of training the fingers. Of the writers who concerned themselves with music aesthetics in the mid-nineteenth century, Schopenhauer, Hanslick, and Heine focus on the spirit in music. Their written works about music try to reclaim the human in interpretation with the onslaught of automated musical instruments and their technical superiority. However, these works’ very attempt to define music as a human rather than mechanical art led to an impossible situation for the reality of how musical compositions come into being in time as an autonomous work of art before the ability to record and produce mass recordings of the same performance. Combining Schopenhauer’s sublimation of music beyond the realm of human understanding and Hanslick’s quest for rare musical genius, music became less attainable and more difficult to practice as an art. Music, in Schopenhauer’s and Hanslick’s writing, becomes more removed from human ability and becomes more of an art that is to be revered as otherworldly, in which only a select few have the capacity to indulge. Both of their theories thus contributed to music in ways that contradict the human element their theories actually claimed for music. Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music sets the stage for the largest paradoxes between aesthetic observations about music and musical practice in the mid-nineteenth century. In his book on Schopenhauer, Julian Young offers a lucid interpretation of Schopenhauer’s terms and discussion on aesthetics. Young explains how Schopenhauer set out to solve the problem of Kant’s Thing in itself [Ding an sich], and to show it as the Will (14), a philosophy he later retracts when he articulates that the Will can not be known (97-99). Young states that this difference in Schopenhauer’s philosophy is only subtle (14), but in fact it is vital to understanding Schopenhauer’s description of music in relation to the Will and in relation

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to other arts. When the Will can not be known, than neither can the direct representation of the Will, which for Schopenhauer is music. The removal of human cognition from musical arts allows “true” music to be performed by automated musical instruments, in spite of the aesthetic disavowal of this practice in an art which demands human spirit. Whether or not the Will can be known remains important in the way Schopenhauer sets music apart and above the other beautiful arts. In tackling the problem of the Thing in itself, according to Young, Schopenhauer follows Kant’s categories of art with the exception of music (Young 105, 107). In its relationship to the Will as Kant’s Thing in itself, art is for Schopenhauer the representation of a Platonic idea, the idea constituting an objectification of the Will. All of the arts, except for music, Schopenhauer writes, objectify therefore the Will only indirectly, mainly through the medium of Ideas: and since our world is nothing more than the emergence of the Ideas in multiplicity by means of entering into the principium individuationis (the structure of possible cognition for the individual) (370).

Art therefore does not represent the Will, but rather the world experienced through singular perceptions, which Schopenhauer calls Representation [Vorstellung] in Book Two. The inner nature of this world can not be known. While each separate representation, or idea, has as part of the Will an individual goal, the Will as a whole has no goal (250). As Young succinctly puts it, the Will is equated with being [Wesen], an existence based on many Ideas governed by an “overarching Idea in which all the individual Ideas are harmonized” (78). The idea art portrays is something in the world that one can see (a tree) or that one has experienced (a play). On their own, these ideas represent only part of the world and the work of art focuses only on this individual aspect of nature. In its representation of these singular ideas representing the Will, art objectifies the Will. However, the objectified Will in plastic and theatrical arts expresses only part of the Will through the objects they represent. Except for music, art remains further removed from the Will because the idea it represents in turn represents part of the Will rather than the Will as a whole. The whole of the Will in these arts can therefore not be known, regardless of whether one reads Schopenhauer’s earlier or later version. Music, however, has properties that allow it to act beyond the other arts and that make knowing the Will analogous to understanding music. Schopenhauer continues: So music, since it crosses over the Ideas is completely independent from the phenomenal world; music ignores it per se, could in a manner of speaking still exist even if the world was not there, which could not be said of the other arts. (370)

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Music, unlike the other arts skips the stage of representation of an Idea based on the perception of the phenomenal world and instead represents the Will directly. Schopenhauer thus empowers music with an ability to communicate nature and the meaning of the world itself in a more direct manner than any other art and since the phenomenal world does not need to exist for music to do this, music becomes an expression of nature beyond what humans understand they perceive. To bring Schopenhauer’s idea a step further, human cognition, as part of understanding the phenomenal world, does not need to exist in order for music to exist. Instead, music communicates the world beyond sense perception (beyond the Ideas) not only to the listener through the composer, performer, and instrument. Music stands apart from other arts in this ability, emphasizing its autonomy above and beyond any other art. Not only has music by this point achieved autonomy from its eighteenth-century dependency on poetry or linguistic structures, but in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, also from the human control of composition. Music becomes greater than the human spirit it is supposed to contain. Of course, the concept that music as an art is much higher than other arts or even bigger than the role humans play in the phenomenal world contradicts the need for human fantasy in art. While this idea is close to Hanslick’s attempt to understand music through its own terms rather than through poetic or pictorial ideas, it also denies humans the ability to understand music. However, Schopenhauer does not deny human participation in music; in fact it is rather important, since music’s power on the listener is so much greater than other arts. Music for Schopenhauer is not at all the image of Ideas like the other arts, but rather the image of the Will itself, whose objectivity is also the Ideas. Therefore the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than the other arts; they only speak of shadows, music speaks of essence. (370)

For Schopenhauer, the very thing which in practice can lead one away from human participation in musical sound (or music for pleasurable entertainment) is aesthetically that which allows music its force and power on the listener. Schopenhauer recalls Plato’s cave here, claiming that the ideas which the other arts represent are only shadows, whereas that which music represents is being itself, which we can not understand as whole, since we perceive only the outer frame of the interior being. Therefore, music, in its direct communication of this interior, becomes more powerful than other arts because it communicates the essence of the world that we can not know or understand through our senses. The inability to state clearly what music communicates is a key component of the ways in which Schopenhauer uses the word “language” in connection to music. For Schopenhauer, music is “such a great and

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wonderful art, affects so powerfully one’s inner being, is understood there by one so completely and deeply as a whole general language whose clarity goes beyond the concrete world itself” (368). Music is understood only in an interior manner, not through reason, because that which music wants to say is the Will, which can not be represented in its true form through signs. Furthermore, language is an inadequate means of expression in describing the Will exactly: The composer reveals the most inner being of the world and speaks the deepest truth in a language that his reason does not understand; the way a magnetic sleepwalker gives information about things they have no concept of when awake ... Even in the explanation of this wonderful art, the concept shows its poverty and limitations. (374)

The dream-like trance Schopenhauer describes here emphasizes the irrationality of the Will, and it is due to this irrationality that words and concepts can not describe music. Schopenhauer states this after a long analogy of different tones and organic and inorganic nature. He stresses that this is only an analogy, and claims that it is what he hears when listening to music. He uses language only as a metaphor, drawing on the Platonic distinction between the language of reason and the language of emotions, as Herder and Forkel did, except that he does not say that music is a language. Music expresses an irrational truth of the world’s existence; language only scratches at the surface of this truth through representation. Considering that Schopenhauer retracts the statement that the Will is knowable, as Young states, music, an art which directly represents the Will can not be understood cognitively, and therefore what music wants to communicate also can not be understood. Therefore the composer, although he uses the medium of this language, can not understand it. Music’s content is experienced and felt deeply, but not understood. Hanslick’s aesthetic treatise On the Musically Beautiful contributes to Schopenhauer’s argument that human understanding of the phenomenal world cannot grasp the content of music. Rather than focus on the more philosophical side of the issue, Hanslick writes a more pragmatic aesthetic that sets out to further define musical content. Schopenhauer and Hanslick focus on different musical textures and aspects of composing, interpreting or perceiving music; both texts show music’s autonomy from language, human experience in the phenomenal world, and imitation of other arts, although they come from two different disciplines and write out of diverse perspectives. Schopenhauer stresses music’s ability to skip the representation of the knowable world and to represent the abstract way that the world is and strives to be. Hanslick in turn focuses on this non-

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representational aspect of music to establish a criterion for judging music which can be found within music itself, rather than comparing music to ideas, language, or to the imitation or expression of specific emotions. Each text defines music as an autonomous art to a greater extent than earlier nineteenth-century attempts to break away from the traditional understanding of music as an imitative language of emotions. The content of music is a key element in both texts because in claiming that music does not represent any specific idea, the texts show that musical content is itself autonomous, abstract, and particular to music alone. The argument in Hanslick’s texts about form and content follows an earlier tradition of viewing form as the outer structure and content as the inner message, idea or expression of a work of art. Romantic aesthetics, for instance, concentrates on the interior in art, which is part of Schopenhauer’s explanation of music’s quality; it communicates the inner essence of being in its direct representation of the Will. As discussed here in chapter two, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Serapionsbrüder addresses the importance of looking inward to discover what is real and bringing this inner truth outward into the work of art or scientific investigation (Werke II: 55). In addition, Wackenroder’s musician Berglinger in Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk) (1797) complains about the necessity of understanding the outer mechanics of the instrument and musical structure in order to bring out the inner expression of a musical composition. The interior remains more important for Berglinger as the space of the artist’s expression. According to James Garratt’s Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music, the nineteenth-century ideas about form and content in a work of art are largely dependent on Hegel’s critique of Romanticism because of the tendency to split form and content, a necessary balance Hegel claims only exists in Greek classicism (29). In Hegel’s Aesthetics, the imbalance between form and content in music comes from the need for the subjective content to become the object in the performance, a situation where “the subjective side may be isolated as a one-sided extreme, with the result that subjective virtuosity in the production may as such be made the sole center and content of the enjoyment” (Knox, trans. 909). Music’s extreme subjectivity, according to Hegel, folds in on itself, and the form becomes empty and meaningless. Hanslick’s and Schopenhauer’s texts both mention the content of music in a way that addresses at least part of Hegel’s claims about the inadequacy of objectivity in music. Schopenhauer focuses on the direct objectification of the Will that allows music to be a more sublime art than other arts that first represent an idea and constitute an indirect objectification of the Will. Hanslick, on the other hand, focuses on Hegel’s claims about

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empty form and shows how form has both idea and spirit. According to Burford, some of Hanslick’s critique comes out of the literature from the 1840s and 50s, which reacted against Hegelian idealism and influenced Hanslick’s writing (167, 171). Burford explains that anti-Romanticism in the mid-nineteenth century led to a more general movement away from the value of music as an art, due to its non-material nature (170). However, this general movement, led by those adhering to Hegelian idealism (170), was not the only or even prevailing movement at the time. On the contrary, music’s ability to exist without a concrete idea led others to try to define music based on music’s own properties, and both Schopenhauer and Hanslick address issues of objectivity and content in music in their attempts to reclaim a space for music as an art. Berthold Hoeckner mentions in his book Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment, that even some of Hegel’s students, such as Christian Hermann Weiss, also “propagated…. the freedom of music from subject matter, nature, human voice, and language as the absolute or modern ideal” (165). Hegel’s theory about music is hardly favorable to music as an art, but it is important in its influence as a movement away from thinking about music as an autonomous art at the same time that other theorists are still trying to define it as such. Ideas about instrumental music in the nineteenth century that respond to Hegel or could have influenced Hegel seem to combine the problem of the philosophical concepts of “idea” and “spirit” with the outer material of music to define music as an autonomous art. Such responses to Hegel’s complaint that music has no inner idea revalidate instrumental music as an art form. As Burford argues, Hanslick’s work On the Musically Beautiful responds to both Hegel’s influence and to anti-Hegelian materialistic influences (167). However, the more materialistic side of On the Musically Beautiful has led later nineteenth and twentieth-century theorists to read Hanslick as a formalist, a reading still accepted in scholarship on Hanslick today.5 The tendency to read Hanslick as a formalist comes from theories in the text that attribute the beauty in music to melody and harmony, aspects which were considered structural elements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Heinrich Christoph Koch discusses in Essay on the Instruction for Composition in 1787. Koch contributes to the understanding of music as a split between mechanical form and expressive content _____________ 5

Carl Dahlhaus argues against this reading in “Eduard Hanslick und der musikalische Formbegriff.” Carl Dahlhaus, Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber: Laaber, 1988), 291-294. Mark Burford takes up Dahlhaus’ argument in “Hanslick’s Idealist Materialism,” 19th-Century Music 30.2 (2006): 174. Most other works on the subject, however, rely on the earlier reading of Hanslick as a formalist.

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although he maintains that the form is necessary for the content. It can be argued that Hegel’s “empty form” comes from these later eighteenthcentury writings. The formalistic aspect of Hanslick’s text, however, not only leads to a misreading of his theories about form, content and human spirit in music, but it also steers the reader away from the main project at hand, that is to define music by a new criteria. Hanslick’s new definition of music is therefore not based on looking at music as a language of emotion or expression of specific feelings. In a response to late eighteenth-century ideas about music, which Hanslick shows were still dominant in the midnineteenth century, On the Musically Beautiful sets out to rupture the centuries-long connection between music and feeling and to provide a way to judge music that denies the validity of any remnants of the Affektenlehre and allows music its autonomy in relation to other arts and language. While most critics draw attention to the connection between Hegel and Hanslick and Hanslick’s attention to musical form, few question the structure of Hanslick’s treatise itself, which starts with a list of quotes from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musicians and philosophers about music and feeling, emotion, or passion. The abundance of quotes from late eighteenth-century theorists such as Mattheson, Forkel, and Sulzer to mid-nineteenth-century musicians and theorists, among them Richard Wagner, shows how the desire to affect emotions in the listener still dominated musical aesthetics in the mid-nineteenth century, at least to the degree that music still contains more emotions and feelings than any other art. Hegel refers to this line of thinking in the Aesthetics, and although one could argue that Hanslick is again merely responding to Hegel’s unfavorable remarks about music, it can be argued that Hegel himself looks at music based on the traditions that came out of the Affektenlehre when he states that the content of music is feeling. Hanslick, however, does not distinguish between musicians who focused on the imitation of emotion from those who argued for expression. Interestingly enough, some of the theorists Hanslick quotes, such as Mattheson, had themselves attempted to define music as an art having a separate purpose other than emotional influence on the listener. Hanslick desired instead to separate emotion as a criterion for judging music. Feeling and emotion were still part of musical aesthetics, as the quote from Hanslick’s contemporary, the music historian A.v. Dommer reveals: “‘Purpose of music: music should arouse feelings in us and through feeling arouse our imagination’” (Hanslick 23, trans. Payzant 91). The project of Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful has little to do with responding to Hegel’s Aesthetics and instead offers a response to a much larger definition of music steeped in a very long tradition of connecting music to passion, and drawing out the

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emotional effects of music as the content of a specifically musical and thereby emotional language. Feeling remains part of art for Hanslick, but not as the aesthetic criterion or content of music. Hanslick adds Richard Wagner to his list of citations that connect music to emotions or define it as a language of emotion, but later admits that Wagner drops his earlier attempt to connect music to emotions and explains music in a way that shows Schopenhauer’s influence on Wagner, “For Wagner music is just ‘art of expression’ in general. … it appears to him to qualify as ‘Idea of the World,’ ‘The essence of things grasped in its most immediate manifestation’” (Hanslick 23, trans. Payzant 91). As the “art of expression,” Hanslick points out how Wagner interprets what Schopenhauer says about the relationship between art and emotion. Feeling is for Schopenhauer part of human experience and therefore part of the Will. Since music communicates the Will directly, music also has a more powerful effect on human emotion than the other arts. Music, according to Schopenhauer, tells accordingly of the history of the Will lit up from sobriety, whose mold in reality is cast as the row of its deeds but music says more, it tells of the Will’s most mysterious history, paints every impulse, every aspiration, every movement of the Will, everything that reason summarizes in the broad and negative term feeling and can no longer absorb its abstractions. For this reason it has always been said that music is the language of feeling and passion just as words are the language of reason. (373)

Schopenhauer alludes to a general negative value of “feeling” in opposition to reason in this passage, yet he does not shy away from using it in connection with music. Music succeeds in communicating those elements of human existence of which reason terms “feeling.” Reason gives “feeling” this negative connotation because feeling is an aspect of human life that reason alone can not communicate. Music, on the other hand, is able to objectify the Will directly, thereby communicating feeling in a more immediate manner than reason. In its connection to feeling, music is an important part of the Will; it is that left-over part of the world that reason—and through reason, language—can not define. Feeling is therefore an important aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy about music, but it is not the purpose of the musical composition, to which Dommer refers in Hanslick’s quote, and feeling does not work for Schopenhauer the same way it does for Hanslick. In the lines quoted from Dommer, it is music’s purpose to awaken the imagination through feeling, but in Schopenhauer, as Hanslick shows through his explanation of Wagner, it works the other way around—music awakens feeling through its direct representation of the Will.

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Likewise, Hanslick also shows that feeling is part of music, as it is part of any type of art, but it can not be used to judge aesthetic value—it is not, as the title of the second chapter of On the Musically Beautiful states, the content of music. As Hanslick explains, Every genuine artwork stands in some kind of relation to our feeling, but none in an exclusive relation. Thus we say nothing at all concerning the crucial aesthetical principle of music if we merely characterize music in general, according to its effect upon feeling. … Thus, instead of clinging to secondary and vague feelingeffects of musical phenomena, we would do better to penetrate to the inner nature of the works and try, from the principles of their own structure, to account for the unique efficacy of the impressions we receive from them. (Transl. Payzant 6)

Hanslick’s main argument in this passage points to the essential relationship between every type of art and feeling. Aesthetic criteria can not be related to feeling alone, since all art in some way or another elicits certain feelings in the observer. Therefore, the feeling that music arouses in the observer should not be considered the main means by which to judge the value of music as an art, since that is not what sets it apart from other arts. Just like other arts, however, music should have its own set of criteria for aesthetic judgment based on its content and the materials used to create it. At the same time Hanslick removes one of the primary Romantic elements of music, feeling, from aesthetic judgment, he does so using Romantic language of “inner” and “outer.” Goehr mentions Hanslick’s use of Romantic theories of absolute music in her essay “Doppelbewegung: The Musical Movement of Philosophy and the Philosophical Movement of Music,” stating that Hanslick does so in order to bring the reader to appreciate music for its own sake rather than trying to describe what it represents (29, 28). Hanslick’s suggestion in the above quote to “penetrate to the inner nature of the works,” resembles a similar wording in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s writings, especially the music reviews which stress the interior in communication between the composer, instrument, performer, and listener. Hanslick’s language is similar in regard to music: one must look into the work of art in order to understand its power from, or “out of” its own laws. The “outward” part of this concept is hidden in the German preposition aus, (translated in the English sentence as “from”). The interior of the work reveals to the outside the criteria by which one should judge music, much like the artist’s attempt in many of Hoffmann’s works to examine the interior before revealing the truthful content to the world. Hanslick does mix Romantic theory and influences from mid-nineteenth-century materialist writing, as Burford also mentions in his article (174, 177). In spite of using language reminiscent of earlynineteenth-century works and through this language draw on the theory in Hoffmann’s texts of penetrating the interior to bring some sort of truth to

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outside attention, Hanslick expects the readers to understand what the penetration into the interior of the work reveals—the musical elements which make up the artistic material and in themselves have no connection to feeling. Hanslick’s use of “outer” and “inner” also emphasizes a way of looking at music that challenges the earlier nineteenth-century tendency, which includes Hegel, of looking at the form of a work of art as the outer shell which is filled with content. The properties of music that Hanslick addresses as suitable criteria for judging music are properties of music that most musicians consider form. Form, however, does not necessarily oppose content in On the Musically Beautiful. Hanslick considers as extramusical the programmatic idea that many nineteenth-century musicians considered the content, such as a literary work (Schumann’s Papillons), an idea based on nature (Schubert’s Trout Quintett) or experience (Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition). For Hanslick, what is “specifically musical” includes: The material out of which the composer creates, of which the abundance can never be exaggerated, is the entire system of tones, with their latent possibilities for melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic variety. Unconsumed and inexhaustible, melody holds sway over all, as the basic form of musical beauty. Harmony, with its thousandfold transformations, inversions, and augmentations, provides always new foundations. The two combined are animated by rhythm, the artery which carries life to music, and they are enhanced by the charm of a diversity of timbres. If now we ask what it is that should be expressed by means of this tone-material, the answer is musical ideas. (Payzant 28)

The melody, harmony and rhythm are largely what Hanslick focuses on as the material in music. The composer then shapes this material into a “musical idea,” the term “idea” stemming from the philosophical discussions about art and aesthetics. “Idea” in Hegel’s writing about music is the cognitive filling of the work of art that gives it its objectivity and allows it to be a work of art—which is missing in music (Aesthetics). In Schopenhauer’s writing about music, however, the lack of an “idea” is what gives music its supremacy over other types of art, since the Idea is only part of the Will and music is able to skip the representation of an Idea. While Hegel’s, Schopenhauer’s, and Hanslick’s descriptions of music agree that music does not exhibit a concrete idea in the same sense that a painting might show a person or landscape, only Hanslick argues that music does have a content-based idea, and this idea is based on the arrangement of tones into a form, particularly the melody. Hanslick’s definition of an idea in art agrees with other formulations, however, in insisting that the musical idea is not from an image, nature or experience

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(25-32). The use of the term “musical idea” to describe what the creative arrangement of melody, harmony and rhythm expresses places the content-based “idea” of a work of art into a musical form. Hanslick addresses the concepts of form and content and the habit James Garratt claims Hegel started (29) of thinking of form as an empty shell and content as the idea. Just as Hanslick argues that music can not be defined by the same aesthetic principles as other arts (3), he shows that this same way of looking at form and content in a painting, for instance, also does not apply to music. Hanslick defines what the term “form” applies to in music: In music the concept of “form” is materialized in a specifically musical way. The forms which construct themselves out of tones are not empty but filled; they are not mere contours of a vacuum but mind giving shape to itself from within.6 (Payzant 30)

Hanslick argues two main points here in the definition of “form” in music; it is the spiritual content of the piece, and “filled” form is a characteristic unique to music. Thus Hanslick is able to argue that form and content in music are one and the same. This claim counters Hegel’s critique of music as empty form because it emphasizes that while form is essential in music, it is also part of the musical content. Hanslick uses one term to define the other, thus removing the more conventional way of understanding inner and outer as polar opposites. The idea of form as the content and spirit of music surfaces in twentieth-century writings, particularly in Arnold Schoenberg’s performance instructions for Pierrot Lunaire and Theodor Adorno’s writing on Schoenberg in Prisms. As Adorno writes, the necessary musical expression exists in the notes themselves, their distance from one another (interval relationships), and their arrangement (10: 157). Hanslick sees form as the content of music, as his much quoted (and misread) one-sentence paragraph proclaims: “The content of music is forms moving in tones” (74). Hanslick emphasizes the importance of form in judging the beautiful in music, which has lead to the tendency to read his aesthetics as formalistic, meaning they draw more on the importance of the form than the content of a work of art. For Hanslick, however, musical form is not an empty shell or even in opposition to musical content. Instead, form is the same as the spiritual content in music. The above discussion of Hanslick’s treatment of terms used in philosophical writing on aesthetics is important to understand the paradoxes surrounding nineteenth-century musical aesthetics and the practice of _____________ 6

Payzant translates “Geist” as “mind” here. My interpretation of “Geist” in this passage is more in keeping with its other meaning in English, “spirit.”

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virtuosic contests on the violin and the piano. Hanslick’s way of seeing form as the content of music contributes in a manner differing from Schopenhauer’s to an aesthetic supremacy of a mechanical musical instrument at the same time that it disdains machine-like performance that lacks human spirit. Form, as the content of music, is “the spirit shaping itself outward from within.”7 Whereas Schopenhauer mentions that music could exist, if necessary, outside of the phenomenal world—and beyond human experience, Hanslick maintains that spirit in music comes from human fantasy. This problem, as far as it concerns composition, opens up the possibility for an aesthetic advantage in music composed for a machine. Such a possibility is not immediately obvious in Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful and one could easily argue the opposite, since his reviews of virtuosic performances tend to criticize machines because they lack human spirit. In On the Musically Beautiful, Hanslick claims the mechanical organ has no spirit, since “the most skillfully made mechanical organ can not move the listener, yet the simplest musician can do it when his soul is completely with his song” (128). Hanslick ties feeling to spirit here in a way that at first appears to contradict his earlier claim that feeling can not be a criterion for judging music. The mechanical organ lacks spirit because it can not move the feeling of the listener. Another critique of the mechanical organ or music box8 appears in a review of a virtuosic piano performance, where Hanslick complains that the pianist played Schumann’s Traumeswirren “like an etude that is to be played with the greatest speed and finest pianissimo, almost in the manner of a music box” (Concerte 126). Feeling, in these two passages is an effect of music, as it is in other arts, although not necessarily music’s content. Where feeling is tied to spirit, however, it becomes an important element in communication between artist and observer. Spirit for Hanslick is essential in music, in both the composition and the performance. For Hanslick, “Every genuine artwork stands in some kind of relation to our feeling, but none in an exclusive relation” (Payzant 6). Spirit is therefore a necessary element in musical form because it allows “relationship to feeling,” which, as Hanslick points out, differentiates a true artist from a mechanical organ. Spirit in music, according to Hanslick, is tied to the composer’s fantasy and the creative arrangement of notes which results in the melody. Every art has as its goal to externalize an idea actively emerging in the artist’s imagination. In the case of music, this idea is a tonal idea, not a conceptual idea which has first been translated into tones. The starting point of all the creative

_____________ 7 8

“Sich von innen heraus gestaltender Geist.” Spieluhr, the term Hanslick uses, could be translated as either “mechanical organ” or “music box.” The mechanism for both instruments is very similar.

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activity of the composer is not the intention to portray a specific feeling but the devising of a particular melody. (Payzant 31-32).

Again, Hanslick describes the origins of musical creativity not as a certain philosophical or pictorial idea, but an idea of tones. Such a description underlines the attempt for music’s full autonomy from all other arts, but in its autonomy, it behaves like other arts by drawing out an abstract feeling during the perception (either as listener or viewer) of the work of art. The rules for this tendency in music are, however, specific to music and what Hanslick calls the “musical idea,” the arrangement of the melody, harmony, and rhythm. For Hanslick, the melody is the most important element in music which holds the composer’s creativity in its arrangement. The melody says nothing more than what it is in tones, but the melody is full of spirit that awakens an abstract, individual feeling in the listener. It is this type of melody, however, which can also be found in a mechanical organ, since the compositions these instruments used also came from human fantasy. So while Hanslick criticizes the machine-like performance for its lack of imagination and spirit, the composition itself remains human, whether it is on the cylinder in the mechanical organ or as notes on the page. Although Hanslick tends to use language that draws on Romantic theory in his aesthetics of music, he moves away from Romantic theory and differs most from Schopenhauer when he describes how music does not share a relationship with nature. In spite of his attempt to define an aesthetic of music based on musical elements, Hanslick, as Lydia Goehr mentions, admits that music can not be described adequately because it does not follow any known pattern in nature or represent any idea that can be expressed in words (26-27). Hanslick’s trouble with giving music complete autonomy—to the extent of not being able to describe it as he would like—shares affinities with Schopenhauer’s use of nature as an analogy only to describe how music represents the Will. Like Schopenhauer, Hanslick stresses that although he uses language to describe music, his description is inadequate because of the limitations of language. For Hanslick, the areas in which the “musical material” constitutes an aural work of art have nothing in common with the abilities and properties of language. Schopenhauer bases the limitations of language on language’s need to represent an idea, which is in turn a representation of the Will. Language, therefore, can not adequately describe music because its content and purpose are unrelated to the content and purpose of music. Hanslick’s stance on the relationship between music and nature departs from theoretical writings about Romantic music and nature, as well as from theories of Romanticism that consider music the voice of nature. As mentioned earlier, both Schumann and Hoffmann have been credited

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with coining the term “Romantic music.”9 If these two early to midnineteenth-century writers began Romanticism in music, then musical Romanticism occurred long after the literary Romantics stopped writing and concurrently with anti-Romanticism in literature. Regardless of whose writing began a Romantic aesthetic in music, both Schumann and Hoffmann use nature—usually cultivated nature as in a garden—as a means to describe music. For Hoffmann, musical sounds themselves are found in nature, and the triad is itself a natural musical phenomenon because it imitates the overtones that one would hear if the bass of the triad were played by itself (based on Tartini’s theory). In “The Golden Flower Pot,” for example, everything happens in triadic form, including the combination of words, sights and sounds during Anselmus’s first encounter with the green-gold snake. Not only music, but painting and poetry come out of nature in Hoffmann’s works. This relationship between nature and art is also apparent in Novalis’s “The Apprentices of Saïs,” where harmonic tones seem to come from the grass, and in G.H. Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Views from the Night-Side of Science), where humanity’s original connection to nature is through musical tones. Where the Schopenhauerian Will is connected to nature, Hanslick diverges from Schopenhauer’s placement of music as the direct expression of the Will. For Hanslick, music does not express anything but human fantasy and spirit. However, certain ideas Hanslick has about music’s relationship to nature and to the emotions tend to echo Schopenhauer, particularly the notion that music does not represent anything singular in nature.10 Hanslick alludes to this in his discussion about other arts representing something in nature that music cannot (154). However, Schopenhauer sees an analogy, an expression of nature through the different tones in the scale, starting with the deeper bass tones and rocks to the quicker movements in the higher registers as individual moving life forms (373). While this seems to make a claim for the relationship between music and nature, music in this analogy clearly does not emerge from nature. For Schopenhauer, it offers its direct expression, as far as nature is an Idea of the Will, and for Hanslick, it offers the materials out _____________ 9

10

Dahlhaus credits Hoffmann’s “Beethovens Instrumentalmusik” as being the first work to call music “Romantic,” (Dahlhaus, Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik, 98-99), whereas Tadday argues that musical Romanticism really began with Robert Schumann’s use of the term in relationship to literature, love, and landscapes. Ulrich Tadday, Das schöne Unendliche: Ästhetik, Kritik, Geschichte der romantischen Musikanschauung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999), 2. Dale Jacquette explains this in more detail in The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2005), 151, 154-159.

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of which instruments for musical sound can be made and eventually melody and harmony thought out by the artist. Hanslick backs up his argument that music does not represent nature or even have a relationship by using an example that reverses his previous statements against the mechanical organ: the automated musical instrument now is more capable of producing music than a songbird: That of which we become aware in nature either is or is not music. The decisive factor can only be the commensurability of tones, but throughout his book Hand emphasizes “spiritual inspiration,” “the expression of inner life, inner feeling,” “the power of spontaneity through which an inner self is able to articulate itself externally.” According to this principle, bird song must be called music and the mechanical music box must not. But precisely the opposite is the case. (Payzant 72)

In this passage, Hanslick maintains that machines make music more so than a songbird, and in doing so, reorders his earlier connection between mechanical organs and spiritless performance. Now the mechanical organ is music whereas the songbird is not. For Hoffmann and Novalis and other nineteenth-century writers, the nightingale represented one of the loveliest songbirds and therefore one of the best examples of music in nature. The nightingale’s prominence as an essential source of music in nature in the nineteenth century occurs in Andersen’s fairy tale discussed in chapter one, “The Nightingale.” Hanslick, however, denies the songbird this lofty musicianship when he maintains that the bird does not really compose the music it “sings” and is therefore not a natural musician. In claiming that a mechanical organ is more art than the birds’ call, Hanslick also denies elements in the composition or performance which he previously attributed to spirit in the piece. On the one hand, he states that the work of art should move the listener, but on the other hand, this feeling and spirit is not what makes the piece music. Hanslick also maintains that one should not perform like a mechanical organ, but a mechanical organ is more music than a nightingale. So music moves the listener without containing or communicating any specific feeling, idea, or spirit, yet it is not mechanical in the sense that it is empty form. What makes music an art and not nature is that it is a product of human fantasy, and the spirit that moves the listener comes from this fantasy rather than from the notes themselves. Hanslick moves away from the Romantic idea that the sublime musical sound comes from within anything in nature, including a songbird. Yet his critique in his reviews that pianists play with too much emphasis on technical skill and that a mechanical organ contains music whereas a songbird does not

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points to a paradox that shows a nineteenth-century ambiguity toward music composed for and played by automated musical instruments.11 The only element of music Hanslick admits as found in nature is rhythm—an element also most easily measured with machine-like precision. Measured rhythm became mechanized through the metronome (as Barth mentions in Piano as Orator), as the demand for more exact rhythms also grew. The problem of rhythm can be seen in Grillparzer’s “The Poor Fiddler,” written in the 1840s. The old fiddler creates his own rhythms based on consonances and dissonances (i.e. the consonances being longer, dissonances very short), thereby rendering dances, such as the waltz, unrecognizable. On the other hand, while rhythm is very important in music, the natural pulse of the heart and dance step was not quite as steady as one might think, hence the critique in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” that Olimpia dances too regularly, so that Nathanael, who always thought he was a good dancer, feels lost. Olimpia’s dance represents an ideal rhythm, the steady rhythmic machine, the true musician which is Nathanael’s projected counterpart to his idea of himself as a poet. Mechanically exact rhythm, it can be argued, makes an ideally construed piece possible only on a machine. The machines therefore presented in themselves an ambiguous meaning. On the one hand, they played music mechanically, devoid of extra human emotion a performer might add to the piece. On the other hand, because they lacked this extra emotion and focused only on the strictly musical, i.e. the melody, harmony and rhythm, they offered a way to transfer musical notation to an ideal performance exactly as the composer intended the music to sound. Hanslick’s sudden support of the machine occurs only without the human performer in the equation. The technical exactness which delighted clockmakers and composers alike (Haydn, for one), removes the ability and the qualification away from the human that Hanslick and Schopenhauer both try to maintain. However, instead of emphasizing the need for the human participation in musical production, they both emphasize music’s otherworldliness. While it is safe to say that a machine has music in it (music that was composed for it), whereas a nightingale does not, the same can not be said of machines and humans. Hanslick’s statement that music from a mechanical organ is art whereas a songbird’s natural singing is not emphasizes the importance of human creativity in music as a work of art. It is human fantasy in the composition, after all, _____________ 11

Payzant points out in his notes that Hand’s argument was actually very similar to Hanslick’s in that the mechanical organ, an instrument created out of human skill and fantasy was more music than a songbird, who merely responded instinctively to sexual desire. Geoffrey Payzant, trans. and ed. The Musically Beautiful: Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, by Eduard Hanslick (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), 113.

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which is the most important element of music and what makes it an art. The songbird sings without human fantasy, but the music composed for a mechanical organ is still composed by humans, even if it is played by a machine. However, the performances Hanslick criticizes as being too much like a machine point to a fear of the mechanization of the human performer. The body as machine in the eighteenth century, to the desire to become the machine in Hoffmann becomes a feared development for Hanslick, but one that his texts do not necessarily ignore. Hanslick’s and Schopenhauer’s theories about music emphasize music as an autonomous art. Schopenhauer’s definition of music as an art that alone directly expresses the Will (II 582) and Hanslick’s emphasis on the need to describe music in musical terms exemplify two influential attempts to define music as a singular art lacking a comprehensible idea, yet having a powerful effect on the listener and being, in this sense, deeply human. Hanslick’s insistence that music come from human fantasy and not feeling also breaks away from the earlier nineteenth-century trend, mostly from Romantic writers, to consider songbirds such as the nightingale as pure musicians. However, the idea of the songbird as the true singer does not die with the anti-Romanticism of the mid-nineteenth century. Andersen’s tale the “Nightingale,” which was written in 1844 and features the real and mechanical songbird as a gift for the emperor, allows the real bird to triumph in the end rather than the mechanical bird which must of contained the human-composed imitation of the bird’s song. The bird’s attraction in Andersen’s tale was that same “natural” music the earlier nineteenth-century German writers mentioned in their stories—a pure song of nature. The music is part of the songbirds’ nature and sounds without effort or purpose. Purposelessness is part of Professor X.’s experiments in the garden in Hoffmann’s “The Automata” and arises again in the form of the android singer and pianist, Olimpia. At the outset, Hanslick’s and Schopenhauer’s theories appear to move away from the thinking that purposeless music must come from nature by maintaining the human element in music-making, but they also allow for an aesthetics of the mechanical—music that is still composed by humans, but supersedes human talent. By the mid-nineteenth century, the aim of mechanical musical instruments appeared to be to imitate, and at times replace, an orchestra rather than one instrumentalist. Herbert Heckmann ends his study on androids with Mälzel’s trumpeter in the early part of the nineteenth century, claiming that the time of the android had then passed. To support this statement, his book concludes with a quote from Heinrich Helmholtz’s from February 7, 1854, “We are no longer trying to build machines that com-

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plete the thousand different tasks of one person, but desire the opposite, that one machine carries out one task in place of a thousand people” (281). Although Heckmann implies that nineteenth-century industrial needs changed the way in which mechanical inquiries were expressed in art forms, human shapes did not altogether disappear from automated musical instruments. However, as can be seen today in various museums, the majority of the instruments made in the second half of the nineteenth century seemed to be geared toward different mechanical effects of technical precision in music. Perfection in performing all the technical nuances of a composition became emphasized in musical machines more so than the ability to imitate mechanical responses in organic nature, such as the digestive system in Vaucanson’s duck or the human hand in the finger joints of the keyboard-player by Jaquet-Droz. By the midnineteenth century, the mechanics of art, rhythm and sound became more important than the mechanics of the human body. Of course, automated musical instruments without human form existed at the same time Jacquet-Droz and Vaucanson built their masterpieces, mechanical dolls whose music-playing mechanism also focused on the technology of producing sound. Haydn’s Spieluhren, or mechanical organs, which usually had a clock somewhere on the case (Ord-Hume Haydn 28-9), are examples of instrumental music composed directly for an automated musical instrument, where the focus is to portray the music with technical accuracy rather than imitate human interpreters through imitating the human body. This type of composition seems to leave out the need for the interpreter, without suggesting that the interpreter is a mechanical doll performing better than a human interpreter, as the androids in “The Automata” and “The Sandman” tend to do. By the time Hanslick wrote his reviews in Vienna, Haydn’s and Mozart’s Spieluhren had been around for almost a century. Hanslick often mentions the Spieluhr rather than other types of automated musical instruments, in spite of the development of newer instruments later in the nineteenth century such as the orchestrion. As Brauers mentions, new developments in automated instruments allowed for mechanics to use a variety of techniques and build larger instruments that could produce the sound of a full orchestra (45). The larger automated musical instruments, intended to replace or imitate an entire orchestra, for instance, the orchestrion or such gigantic organs such as the Welt-Philharmonie-Orgel currently in Berlin’s music instrument museum, became, according to Brauers, more common in the second half of the nineteenth century (45). Krickeberg mentions in his essay that these instruments not only occupied private residences, but public spaces, as well (22). Most of the mid-nineteenth-century instruments in museum

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collections look like a cabinet or wardrobe whose melodies are determined by either a visible disc with holes punched in them or a cylinder with raised dots as one still finds in music boxes today. Much later in the century, paper rolls determined the piece in the player piano (often pianola). The instruments typically came with an assortment of discs and rolls that could be changed so the instrument could play different pieces. While the shift between public and private spheres perhaps parallels the change in role of musicians, from members of the royal court to freestanding artists or members of independent orchestras, this shift also points to the difference in public use of the instrument and how the instrument is viewed artistically and in its ability to replace a full orchestra, or in the case of a player piano, record or replace the virtuosos. The attempt to replace the orchestra in one instrument such as the orchestrion coincided with developments in the piano that brought the instrument to its present state. Indeed, in Rantner’s view, the piano reached the height of its development by the mid-nineteenth century, maintained a central role in Western music, and because of the ability to play the full chords and ranges of instruments, could replace an orchestra (31). The piano and the automated instruments thus had the same property of accessibility to the public, and the ability to play ensemble works without needing to hire many instrumentalists. There seems to be a widespread belief that automated instruments were economically more accessible than human orchestras or soloists, as it is mentioned in most works on automated musical instruments. In an essay for a conference on music and machines, Andreas Ballstaedt points out that the Pianola was in fact far more expensive than a regular piano (98). The piano is one of the few instruments that became a popular parlor instrument, could replace an orchestra without being an automated instrument, and became a prominent solo instrument in concert halls. As mentioned in Hildebrandt’s novel about the instrument, the piano was one of the most forgiving instruments, especially for beginners (10). If a note is played in the wrong way, it is not quite as painful to the ear on the piano as it can be on the violin. The instrument Olimpia excels at in “The Sandman” is likewise a piano, and Hanslick’s and Heine’s reviews of instrumentalists include many pianists. The piano, furthermore, is one of the instruments which later became “mechanized”—that is, automated musical instruments were developed much like the orchestrion, whose keys would play seemingly on their own accord. One of the trends that coincided with the developments in the fortepiano and inventions of the player-piano was technical virtuosity at the keyboard. Hanslick’s reviews often critique virtuosity too focused on technical skill, a critique he was not alone in. Heine’s reviews, as will be

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shown in the next chapter, also focus on the “mechanization” of the spirit of performance and music through technical virtuosity. Olimpia’s finger dexterity in “The Sandman,” for instance, shows not only the machinelike technical accuracy which fascinates the poet Nathanael, but also the combination between technical skill at the keyboard and the communication of the spirit that signals the true musical artist. The conflict about the connection between virtuosity and the machine remains unresolved throughout the nineteenth century. The problems surrounding virtuosity remained the musician’s relationship to the instrument, the body and soul of the machine. The changes that led to the rise of piano virtuosity in the middle of the nineteenth century occurred not only with the instrument itself, but with the ways in which musical education was understood and practiced. The trend of virtuosic performance also led to new schools of pianoplaying, many which are used today, as well as methods that are more harmful than helpful. In Klavier-Spiele: Die psychotechnik der Klaviere im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, Wolfgang Scherer explains the role the clavichord and pianoforte played at the turn of the nineteenth century: The piano…was the instrument of domestic musical reproduction and…the instrument of discourses about music that opened significant access to the musical by means of its playing mechanism. Simultaneously, the possibility arose to subject the musical to all necessary discursive operations. At the piano all the routines of discourse, from writing down the music to the varied ways of playing (its reproduction and its psychodynamic functionality) could be coordinated and controlled in their effectiveness at the state’s commission of self-education. (12)

Scherer describes here Türk’s contribution to music education and with Forkel, the push to make musicology a university degree. The keyboard instrument, the clavichord, later became the pianoforte, (after the aforementioned changes in the early nineteenth century), and allowed a new type of musical training, as well. Scherer goes on to explain Türk’s new pedagogical experiments, which seem to enable his daughter to play difficult pieces with amazing skill after only a short time (13). Scherer then suggests that the changes in pedagogy allowed for the belief that musicality is not necessarily inherited from musical parents, but a physical skill that can be taught to any child. Such a belief about the abilities for anyone to learn musical skills allows room for many more children to learn music with as great a chance of success as those who grow up as the sons and daughters of professional musicians. These pedagogical experiments most often targeted children, as Grete Wehmeyer states in her book on Carl Czerny and piano skill in connection to the work ideology of the industrial era (91), although the pedagogical texts themselves were aimed at any person, child or adult, who wished to

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learn to play the piano. The idea that anyone can learn to play the piano as well as the push to train anybody, even to teach the self to play, undermines the idea of genius in the work of art and suggests that musicmaking is largely learning mechanical drills and perfecting technique, and exercising the finger muscles more than communicating expression. With so many children and adults learning to play the instrument (even teaching themselves), the piano becomes as much a popular entertainment instrument as a solo concert instrument. By the end of the nineteenth century, a type of piano could be found in virtually every middle class home. It provided a medium with which to show off the musician’s dexterity and long hours of machine-like training became an important part of a child’s, especially a girl’s education. Although virtuosity is not a new development in the nineteenth century, the type of virtuosic playing, the instrumentation, and the attitudes about virtuosity change in relationship to the emphasis on technical skill over musical expression. According to Marc Pincherle in The World of the Virtuoso, the term “virtuosity” evolved in the nineteenth century from its previous meaning of a well-rounded musical genius to the technical skill of the interpreter (16). Susan Bernstein alludes to this definition in Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt and Baudelaire, adding that the term did not really apply to music until the eighteenth century, where it also began to take on the more negative meaning of showing off “technical skill for its own sake” (12). Bernstein notes, however, that this negative meaning of virtuosity appears only in English and German dictionaries, rather than French or Italian (12), an interesting consideration when regarding Heine’s music criticism which dealt largely with virtuosos on the Parisian stage. In reviews by both Heine and Hanslick, the term “virtuoso” itself does not carry a negative meaning unless the performer exhibits technical skill without expressing human spirit. Hanslick’s and Schopenhauer’s aesthetical definitions of music, along with Hanslick’s and Heine’s music reviews, also paved the way for an aesthetic honoring the automated musical instrument. The musical composition inside the instrument contains the spirit from the human composer, as Hanlick maintains, and music played by automation can exist, in a sense, outside of human experience, as it does in the case of the Aeol’s harp, revered by early Romantics for its connection to nature when the wind vibrates the strings. The Aeolian harp, however, plays nature rather than a human-composed composition. Although it follows Schopenhauer’s idea that it can exist without human cognition, it is more closely linked to Hanslick’s critique of the songbird being nature and not music. The automated musical instruments of the late nineteenth and early

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twentieth centuries resemble more the type of instrument that demands a composition, in Hanslick’s terms, an arrangement of notes in melody, harmony and rhythm that human fantasy creates. Automated musical instruments had the potential for some in the early twentieth century of solving the problems of virtuosity and interpretation—especially problems when the performance lacked the expression expected from the composer. As they ceased to imitate the human body and activity in the last half of the nineteenth century, they also stopped imitating individuals and large orchestras. Instead, they represented a medium for which to focus on the composer’s art and the human fantasy that goes into the creation of the musical work of art rather than its interpretation through performance. Without the need for human performers, the automated musical instruments present not only an art that fully stands apart from other arts in its matter and relationship to human spirit, but also an autonomous performance. Schopenhauer’s insistence that music can exist on its own, and Hanslick’s insistence that music’s content is its form and spirit, both show up in Stuckenschmidt’s and Adorno’s early-twentieth-century writings, which seem to attempt to eliminate the possibility of failure in transforming the written notes into artistic sound.

Chapter Four Virtuosity and the Experience of Listening in Heinrich Heine’s Music Criticism and “Florentine Nights” Heinrich Heine’s music aesthetics have been given very little attention in Heine scholarship in spite of his influence on the reputations of various musicians and on musical performance practices. The reason for the small amount of scholarship on Heine’s music criticism is twofold: on the one hand, Heine’s contemporaries claimed that he did not know much about, or even like music (Mann, Wehrmann), and on the other, music and music criticism has evolved between the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries to eliminate reviews by listeners such as Heine who have no or very little background in music. In order to convince current scholars, a study today on music reviews by someone with minimal background in music, such as Heine, would have to question the validity of the aesthetic statements in the reviews. The way scholars treat Heine’s music criticism contrasts greatly to their attitudes about Hoffmann’s writings. Writing about Hoffmann’s music aesthetics does not pose a problem for twentieth-century and present-day critics because Hoffmann was a known composer and had substantial music training before beginning his writing career. Unlike scholarship on Hoffmann, most studies on Heine and music deal with song-settings to his poems and do not focus on what Heine himself has to say about music in his reviews and stories. The few twentieth-century studies that do exist on Heine’s music aesthetics (Bernstein, Betz, Müller, Wehrmann) focus on other themes in the writing that have very little to do with the music heard on stage. Twentieth and twenty-first century decisions about whose criticism is most important points more to the shift in attitudes about credibility in music criticism between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than the validity of the critics’ aesthetic judgments. Dahlhaus and Wehrmann both emphasize that influential and respected critics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often had very little musical training (Dahlhaus 23; Wehrmann 79). As Albrecht Betz indicates in his essay on Heine’s reviews and the Parisian music culture, the music critics represented the majority of the audience whose understanding of music was based on the

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sounds they heard rather than the technical knowledge of how the composition fits together (159). Musical training actually could invalidate a music critic’s assessment about a performance. To avoid this, as Dahlhaus explains, well-known composers such as Robert Schumann and Hoffmann would write under a pseudonym or express in their reviews how little they know about music, so that their concentration would be on an aesthetic rather than technical judgment about the composition or performance (23). That Heine’s music criticism has been met with such skepticism due to his contemporaries’ claims about his distaste for music shows the change in attitudes in the mid-nineteenth century about who can critique performances. It is unfortunate that Heine’s music aesthetics in his reviews and in combination with the Paganini review in “Florentine Nights” has been so overlooked because the reviews and the novella have much to say about musical developments in the nineteenth century, particularly in performance practices and the relationship between mechanical aspects of creativity and artistic genius. Heine’s exile in Paris and events in Paris at the time contributed much to the content of his reviews and the social environment in which he wrote. In general, the relationship between music and the machine in literature of the nineteenth century tends to cross borders, limiting a discussion of place. Paris, however, is an exception, since in the 1830s it became the cultural, industrial and economic center of Europe and a vital stop for virtuosos from all over Europe who wanted to further their careers. Heinrich Heine was one of many artists, musicians, and writers to settle in the French capital, ahead of numerous immigrants who would almost double the population within two decades, as Jörg Aufenanger describes in Heinrich Heine in Paris (24). The city’s popularity, according to Aufenanger, came about by social and cultural changes in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830 and the rise in wealth of the middle class (23-24). Aufenanger views these changes as responsible for the city’s magnetic effect on thousands of people from the French countryside and other parts of Europe, including a large influx of German-speaking exiles (24). Heine thus joined thousands of others from German lands in Paris and wrote for German and Parisian audiences alike. It was in Paris that Heine wrote about performers and composers such as Meyerbeer, Paganini, Rossini, Liszt, Chopin, and Berlioz, as well as reviews about theater productions in On the French Stage and Lutezia. As is evident in Heine’s comments about the many virtuosos who come to Paris, the Parisian stage influenced performance and performance practices in other parts of Europe and, a little later, in North America. Most of Heine’s reviews dealt with in this chapter are collected from two series of letters about the Parisian stage, On the French Stage, published in 1837 in

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the General Theater-Review, and Lutezia (the Latin name for Paris) published in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung and Zeitung für die elegante Welt (Paper for the Elegant World) from 1840-1846. Both collections also have French translations (Galley 650, 662), with a somewhat wider readership in France than in Germany after 1848, due to the pre-1848 revolutionary themes of his journalism (662). Heine’s writings about performers and musicians had a wide influence on music journalism,1 music aesthetics, and the nineteenth-century discussions about creative expression and mechanical exercise in art production. The social and political changes in Paris in the 1830s and 40s paralleled changes in musical performance culture. As Betz explains, the rise of the middle class in the mid-nineteenth century is responsible for a shift in performance practices; music became a “consumer good for a middle class that became wealthy,” and the culture of performers as stars grew (158). Not only the improving financial situation of the middle class, but the changes in the ways musicianship was seen as a profession in addition to the emphasis of the individual artist in composition or performance also resulted in the rise of famous virtuosos. Composers and performers no longer had to hold a position as a court musician or music director in order to secure their livelihood. In the eighteenth century and earlier, professional musicians usually either played in a court orchestra or had the title of Kapellmeister, or court music director. J.S. Bach held this title for some of his various court appointments, and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s most common musical character, Johannes Kreisler, also holds this title. Joseph Haydn was one of the last of the still well-known composers to work for a noble family. His success and livelihood depended on the musical tastes of the Esterhazy princes that ruled during his lifetime, and he was also one of the few to remain with the same royal family throughout his career. As Dahlhaus comments, the practice of noble families sponsoring musicians in their courts more or less died out by the end of the eighteenth century (175-6, 184), and as Betz indicates, was taken over by the rising middle class (158). The musicians were no longer at the mercy of the ruling member of the nobility, but aimed to please the wealthy middle class in private and public concerts. In addition to the rise of independent musicianship in the early nineteenth century, the aesthetics expressed in Schopenhauer’s and Hanslick’s writings, as explained more thoroughly here in chapter three, led to an emphasis on instrumental music away from vocal music, in spite of the _____________ 1

See Michael Mann, Heinrich Heines Musikkritiken, ed. Manfred Windfuhr (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, Heinrich Heine Verlag, 1971), 34-42 and Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 10-35.

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growing popularity of opera. Both Schopenhauer and Hanslick claim that a true description of music can not come from words. For Schopenhauer, language can not adequately describe music because language is an idea of the Will, whereas music represents the Will directly. For Hanslick, music can not communicate in ideas as language can because the ideas of music are melodies and do not signify anything. The claim that tones and words are separate in material and the type of art they produce came from a tradition of philosophical and literary early-nineteenth-century writings based on the trend to set music higher than poetry, and removed, to some extent, from phenomenal experience. In their aesthetics of music, both Hanslick and Schopenhauer concentrate on the merits of instrumental music because unlike vocal music, it does not attempt to imitate words or poetic ideas. Their praise for music without words or programmatic ideas contradicts claims by both Kant and Hegel about instrumental music: it is simply play and not beautiful (Kant) and is trivial precisely because it lacks an idea (Hegel). The emphasis on instrumental music as the quintessence of an autonomous art for its lack of concrete signification, coupled with the changes in professional musicianship, helped pave the way to a culture of solo performances on technically demanding instruments such as the violin and the piano. Such performances, however, also opened the critical focus of concert reviews on a solo instrumentalist’s highlydeveloped technical skill. The piano, or pianoforte as it was previously called, was arguably the most popular solo instrument of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Various keyboard instruments, the forerunners of the piano evolved greatly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The mechanics of the newer instruments allowed for a wider dynamic range, stressed in the name pianoforte, mixing the Italian words for soft (piano) and loud (forte). A harpsichord, for instance, the previous favourite of keyboard artists, does not exhibit the same nuances between loud and soft, nor does it have as wide a dynamic range. Hanslick explains in one of his articles dated around 1900 that Mozart’s keyboard instruments were much lighter and quieter than the pianoforte of the late nineteenth century (Aus neuer und neuester Zeit 111-112).2 As Gerig mentions in his history on the development of the pianoforte, the modern-day piano’s mechanism resembles more _____________ 2

Hanslick points out here that the musicians could actually carry the instrument with them to the next engagement Eduard Hanslick, Aus neuer und neuester Zeit. The Collected Musical Criticism of Eduard Hanslick, vol. 9 (Westmead: Gregg Int’l Publishers Ltd, 1971) 111-112. This is not possible for a small grand piano today, built very similarly to the nineteenthcentury instruments. Gerig also notes this, stating that Mozart’s Walter piano only weighed 140 pounds, whereas a modern Steinway weighs about 1000 pounds. Reginald Gerig, Famous Pianists and their Technique, new ed. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2007), 40.

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closely that of the clavichord rather than a harpsichord, although the technique on both instruments evolved to standard technique on the pianoforte (10). J.S. Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Haydn all used both the clavichord and the harpsichord, and both instruments remained in use at the turn of the nineteenth century, although the clavichord, according to Gerig, continued as the favored instrument, especially in Germany (45-6). By 1830, as Ratner writes, changes in the physical structure and mechanics of the pianoforte resulted in a large difference in sound and mechanical capability between what Beethoven learned on and Liszt’s concert instrument (30-33). The pianoforte soon became the most popular instrument in the nineteenth century, and according to Hildebrandt, by 1900, the market for making and selling pianos was saturated (367). The later nineteenth-century pianos closely resemble the acoustic pianos we play today, which indicates that the mechanics of the instrument reached their peak in development at about the same time Heine wrote his reviews in Paris. Along with the changes in dynamics and nuances, the piano demanded a higher level of technical skill than earlier keyboard instruments. Technique became one of the most important aspects of learning keyboard instruments, with treatises on how to play springing up already for the clavichord and harpsichord. There were many different ideas about how to play the piano (Gerig 121), with C.P.E. Bach’s treatise from the mid-eighteenth century among the most famous and influential for nineteenth-century keyboardists. Different positions of the hand and arm and press and release strategies of the keys result in different sounds, and no one technique works with all keyboard music. These earlier treatises were used on different instruments, such as the clavichord, harpsichord, or cembalo, since, as Scherer states, it was not until the nineteenth century that music educators used the piano as the primary instrument for learning music (35). The rise in popularity of the instrument and its technical demands on the performer influenced the rise of virtuosic playing and virtuoso contests throughout the nineteenth century. One of the most influential keyboard pedagogues of the nineteenth century and beyond was Carl Czerny, Franz Liszt’s teacher. Czerny is famous today, or, as Gerig puts it, infamous, depending on one’s memories of childhood piano exercises, for his many finger drills and etudes for the sole purpose of improving technique (108). In her book on Carl Czerny and the industrial work ideology, Greta Wehmeyer parallels the constant keyboard drilling for young children as part of their musical education to the machines of the industrial era. She writes: Music education, especially training at an instrument did not move in the direction of creativity at all, but in the form of drills, effort, and flawlessly playing readily composed rather than self-invented pieces. The commitment to the work

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ideology of the early industrialization in all areas of life was inevitably tied to the abdication of creativity. (91)

Music education, for Wehmeyer, moved away from the creative spirit in producing art. The young pianists focused much more on pieces other musicians had written, and piano performance became less a creative output than a physical and mechanical exercise. Although there were many who wrote about keyboard technique, there was no one music school in which teachers were trained (105), and Czerny, like many others concentrated on virtuosity and taught his pupils with virtuosity in mind (93-4, 100, 105). The constant drilling, therefore, was a practice set up to produce piano virtuosos, and the dominant practice in the early part of the nineteenth century. Given the large number of virtuosos in Vienna in the early part of the nineteenth century, it is clear that a culture of perfectionism in technique surrounded the piano from the beginning of its development as a major solo instrument. Wehmeyer indicates that the trend to constant drilling occurs at the expense of creativity, but at the same time, there was still demand for the intangible aspect of art bordering on subjectivity which supposedly separates artistic creativity from mechanical production. Furthermore, the lack of creative composition at the keyboard becomes more pronounced much later than Wehmeyer maintains if the repertoire for twentieth-century pianists can attest to the trends in musical creativity. Many of the famous pianists to emerge from the virtuosic drilling of the mid-nineteenth century, including Franz Liszt, Czerny’s star pupil composed pieces played in twentieth and twenty-firstcentury piano recitals. Hanslick’s and Heine’s reviews show various attitudes about instrumental virtuosity that reflects the diversity of opinion in the nineteenth century about how music ought to be performed. Later nineteenthcentury pedagogues, according to Scherer, tried to remove the focus from the technical skill and added that the piano student must know something about music (151). However, in “The Battle Against Instrumental Virtuosity in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Dana Gooley mentions that reviews such as Heine’s and Hanslick’s that criticize the performer’s lack of musicality in showing off technical bravura often did not reflect popular opinion: “opponents of instrumental virtuosity were engaged in social and professional competition. They came principally from a small class of composers, performers, critics, and teachers whose tastes hardly corresponded to those of the majority” (76). Gooley’s study shows how critiques of virtuosity came out of an attempt to moralize the symphony, thereby contrasting it to other forms of instrumental music (77). According to Gooley, the anti-virtuosity sentiment was not as harsh in Paris or Vienna as it was in Berlin, Leipzig, or London (77). This is an interesting

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consideration in the context of Heine’s and Hanslick’s music reviews, written in Paris and Vienna respectively, both cities in which virtuosity and contests of technical skill flourished. In the 1830s and 1840s, Paris, more so than Vienna, was the center for keyboard protégés to gain international fame. In Pianoforte: Der Roman des Klaviers im 19. Jahrhundert, Dieter Hildebrandt devotes a chapter to famous pianists such as Felix Mendelssohn, Clara Wieck, Franz Liszt, and Frederic Chopin and their attempts to win the Parisian public. The city’s popularity for keyboard artists is obvious in one of the letters in Lutezia where Heine criticizes not only the performance of particular pieces, but of the culture of piano virtuosity itself: Like herds of grasshoppers the piano virtuosos come to Paris every winter, less in order to earn money than to make a name for themselves here that supplies them with a richer pecuniary harvest in other countries. (497)

The line about “herds of grasshoppers” is quoted in much scholarship on Heine and music, and usually used as proof for his dislike of music. Seen in the context of piano virtuosity, however, this line instead comments on the vast number of pianists who arrived in Paris to become famous there, in order to improve their chances of fame at home. Heine writes against the piano for its popularity and the resulting attempt for numerous musicians to become known for their virtuosity. Heine’s writing about music thus gives readers a sense of the cultural developments surrounding musical performance in an international setting where major social changes took place and coincided with the newness of the modern piano. At the same time, Heine’s reviews also promote just as impossible aesthetic demands on the instrumental performer—the search for spiritual as well as virtuosic genius removes music from the human just as much as the overly machine-like precision of the virtuosos. Heine’s music criticism influenced musicians in Paris as well as later music journalism (Mann, Bernstein). Liszt, for example, is one of the musicians known to request a favorable remark from Heine’s pen (Mann 34). Others also demanded this, and in Lutezia, Heine remarks on the power journalism had over those who wanted to become famous in Paris: One speaks of the venality of the press, one is quite mistaken. Just the opposite, the press is habitually duped and this applies especially in connection to the famous virtuosos. Famous they all are actually, mainly from the fliers that they print themselves or have their brothers or mothers print for them. It is hardly believable, how humbly they beg in the newspaper offices for the least praise, how they buckle and writhe. (497)

This passage shows how many of the virtuosos who came to Paris not only tried to win over the Parisian public in concerts, but also in the office

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of the musical journals, in hopes the critics would help persuade the public of their talents. Heine speaks here of one of the musical journals where some of his reviews appeared, the Gazette musicale (497), and the scene he paints is one where the virtuosos are at the mercy of the press. The virtuosos come to attempt to bribe the press, and this act, Heine points out, shows how dependent they are on the concert reviews to gain the public’s favor and thereby more engagements in their homeland. The virtuosos, as Heine writes here, were not only at the mercy of their competitors’ relative incompetence at the keyboard, but also the music critics’ tastes. As mentioned earlier, Heine as a music critic causes problems for twentieth-century scholars due to his lack of in-depth musical training. As some studies show, Heine’s influence on his pianist contemporaries is colored by vengeful musicians like Berlioz and competitive journalists such as Ludwig Börne who claimed Heine knew nothing about which he wrote (Mann, Wehrmann, Bernstein). So it is that the reception of Heine’s music reviews as valid music criticism has been mostly unfavorable up to now. Michael Mann, the first major and influential scholar on Heine’s music criticism, works around the earlier critiques about Heine’s lack of musical understanding to concentrate on the role his reviews have on literary history and the history of ideas [Geistesgeschichte] (11). Mann’s attempt to do so, however, is undermined by places in his text which, uncommented, seem to support the virtuosos’ assertion that Heine lacked musical knowledge and was an “enemy of music” (38-42), or Heine’s own assertion about his dislike for the “musicomania [Musikomanie]” as a reason for his unfavorable reviews of some of the more popular virtuosos in Paris (32-33). Mann quotes others, mostly Heine’s contemporaries or scholars from the first two decades of the twentieth century, to show where the argument against Heine’s authority in music criticism arises. More recent scholars, such as Wehrmann, Müller, Betz and Bernstein, cite Mann’s work with the same purpose: to show Heine’s previously questioned authority and to counter it. At the same time, their work on Heine’s music reviews tends to focus on other things Heine may be trying to communicate beyond the musical performance. Gerhart Müller, for instance, concentrates on the political scene in his forward to his volume of collected musical writings Heinrich Heine and Music, and reads Heine’s musical writings and poetry about song as messages for communism. Albrecht Betz sees Heine’s reviews as a critique of art and society together (159), and Bernstein focuses on Heine’s virtuosity in writing and the equation he makes between virtuosity and mechanical effect at the expense of the poetic idea (Virtuosity 60-81). Bernstein likens Heine’s reviews of the composer and the performer to poetry and prose, thus

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reading a critique of writing and virtuosity of the press through his critique of composers and virtuosic performers (69-70). Such readings of Heine’s music reviews are less about what Heine has to say about music than part of his overall political and social critique. Although the above scholars aim to find some merit in Heine’s music reviews, they do so from a point of view that espouses the necessity of thorough knowledge about the subject matter one critiques, especially in music. As Wehrmann mentions, such a consideration, even the need to point out Heine’s lack of knowledge about music, raises the interesting question of who is allowed to write about music (79). This need shows how influential the musicians themselves were in opposition to Heine and brings light to a possible trend that started in his time and grew to the twentieth-century emphasis on the importance of a strong musical background for a credible music critic. In looking at Heine’s music reviews through the lens of twentieth-century music criticism, it seems almost necessary, therefore, to apply what Heine does say about music to a different field—sociology, politics, or language and poetry. One must consider, however, that before recordings became commonplace, live performance was a necessary aspect of bringing a musical composition to the listener. The fields in which one places Heine’s music reviews, especially sociology and politics, belong to the culture of live performance. Musical performance in the nineteenth century was closely connected to social events, and in many ways political. The twentiethcentury focus on the social critique Heine attempts through his music reviews seems to forget that music in the mid-nineteenth century had to be social, for there was no other way to hear virtuosos except through live performance. Even the automated musical instruments discussed in previous chapters, such as the orchestrion, were not widespread until later in the nineteenth century,3 and, as Andreas Ballstaedt maintains, these expensive and large instruments were rarely seen in private homes other than the nobility or upper middle classes who could afford them (98). It was not until the gramophone/phonograph became accessible to middleclass families that the production and reception of a musical work of art could be achieved without a gathering of performers and listeners. That social critique is part of Heine’s music reviews is therefore not surprising. Some degree of social commentary can not be separated from the aesthetics of musical performance in the nineteenth century, since musical _____________ 3

Brauers mentions the history of the orchestrion in his book, although he does not mention its popularity directly (Brauers, Von der Äolsharfe zum Digitalspieler, 45-51). That these instruments became more popular in the second half of the nineteenth century is evident from the dates of the instruments collected in the various museums in Switzerland and Germany.

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performance, by its very nature, was a social act. Bernstein mentions that Heine’s focus on more aesthetic matters defines Heine’s belief in the importance of the “subjective impressions that are directly contiguous with the musical experience they render” (60). Heine, according to Bernstein, thus focuses on the aesthetics of the subjective experience of listening to music as opposed to technical aspects of the music and thereby keeps to a tradition of writing about music in line with Jean-Jacque Rousseau, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Franz Liszt (60). Heine’s comments about society in his music reviews are very much tied to his music criticism and his comments on the aesthetics of musical performance. Heine’s music aesthetics are not merely metaphors for social and political critique or for language, but rather the social and political critiques are inherent in the aesthetics of the music itself. The music review still critiques music. Heine has much to say about music and musical aesthetics, especially concerning the rising popularity in the virtuosic performance style and a new instrument on which virtuosity could be learned and displayed, the modern pianoforte. The act of performing, the moment which makes music real for the listener, remains at the center of the aesthetic information in Heine’s reviews. In Lutezia, Heine echoes Hoffmann in his reference to the importance of communication of spirit between the composer and performer when he writes: Not just a piece of music composed in the fullness of self-consciousness, but the mere performance of the piece can also be seen as the highest art, if out of it that wonderful breath of infinity drifts to us that immediately manifests that the executor stands on the same free spiritual height as the composer who is also free.4 (499)

Heine’s terminology in this passage sheds some light on the way he views the role of the performer, the third party between the creative artist and the listener who makes the work known to the audience. The term Exekutant (executor), possibly borrowed from the French exécutant currently means, according to the L.E.O. Online dictionary, Erfüller or Befehlsempfänger in German. This meaning does not seem to have changed much since the German word Exekution also meant the “carrying out of an order” until it became attached to the death penalty in the seventeenth century (“Exekution”). For Heine, the performer is the one who executes _____________ 4

“Nicht bloß ein Musikstück, das in der Fülle jenes Selbstbewußtseins komponiert worden, sondern auch der bloße Vortrag desselben kann als das künstlerisch Höchste betrachtet werden, wenn uns daraus jener wundersame Unendlichkeitshauch anweht, der unmittelbar bekundet, daß der Exekutant mit dem Komponisten auf derselben freien Geisteshöhe steht, daß er ebenfalls ein Freier ist.”

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the piece, or follows the composer’s instructions rather than creating an individual work through the moment of performance. Heine’s use of the word implies the specific purpose of the performance to carry out the composer’s instructions that today’s Interpreten no longer emphasizes. This current German term for performing artists views the act of following the composer’s instruction as an interpretation of the work of art. The English “perform” means “to do,” and while synonymous with “execute,” “perform” does not have the same meaning of “to carry out an order” like the German cognate for “execution.” Heine, like Hoffmann, constructs an aesthetic of performance which does not allow for individual interpretation by the artist. At the same time, this aspect of music is an important part of what makes music an art because it is the performing artist who brings the composition to the listener’s ear in the absence of recording devices or the ability to compose the piece directly onto a machine. As for Hoffmann, for Heine, the non-interpreting Exekutant must show the same level of spirit in the performance that the composer had put into the piece. One might argue, however, that Heine’s critique of E.T.A. Hoffmann and other Romanticists in The Romantic School does not seem to leave room for such aesthetic agreement. On the contrary, Heine’s writings about E.T.A. Hoffmann and Novalis in The Romantic School provide insight into his attempt to include materiality in an aesthetic that still echoed Romanticism. Much of Heine’s criticism against the early Romantics focuses on their apparent lack of realism, and Heine uses this theme to pit Hoffmann and Novalis against each other: The former [Novalis] with his idealistic images always floats in the blue air while Hoffmann with all his bizarre grimaces still clings tightly to the worldly reality….so the poet is also strong and forceful as long as he does not leave the ground of the real and he becomes unconscious as soon as he lyrically floats around in the blue air. (98)

At first glance, Heine appears to lean in Hoffmann’s favor. Hoffmann is not a Romantic, as Heine writes a few lines prior to this passage, and Hoffmann, in spite of his more “bizarre” ideas, still writes about reality. Novalis, on the other hand, is too idealistic. In such a contrast, Heine ignores the influence Novalis had on Hoffmann. Hoffmann quoted Novalis’s “The Apprentices of Saïs” in “The Automata” and based much of “The Mines of Falun” on the Klingsohr episode of Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. It is, however, not the historical influence Novalis had on Hoffmann with which Heine concerns himself, but the juxtaposition of reality and idealism. Nor is it a true contrast. Although Heine begins the passage in favour of Hoffmann, he combines Hoffmann and Novalis through disease and, focusing on their readership, shifts the two. Novalis,

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in spite of his “hovering in the blue air,” seems to appeal more to those “truly rich with spirit” and the “poetic natures,” readers who wanted nothing to do with Hoffmann (98). Furthermore, Heine, now ill, states that their works are more the domain of the doctors rather than the critics to judge (98-9). Through reference to past and present poetry as illness, Heine compares Novalis and Hoffmann to himself. Many Heine scholars read The Romantic School as Heine’s attempt to separate himself from Romanticism, which would include Novalis.5 However, Heine’s discussion about Hoffmann and Novalis can be read as an attempt to combine the realist with the idealist, or as Heine puts it in his definition of music in the ninth letter of On the French Stage, matter and spirit. The modern poet, musician, or artist is one who can combine the material with the ideal. In “Florentine Nights,” matter and spirit in art are further manifested in metaphors of life and death: marble statues that appear alive, an erotic attraction to death-like figures and abhorrence for vitality, and demonic figures such as vampires and devils. “Florentine Nights” is one of Heine’s lesser known works, and, like his music criticism, has not been given much attention in Heine scholarship until fairly recently. “Florentine Nights” carries on the theme of the not-quite-alive and not-quite-dead character present in many other Romantic works. Tieck’s, Hoffmann’s, and Eichendorff’s stories are filled with ghost-like characters whose vitality or death is not clear. As discussed here in the second chapter, Hoffmann’s character Ludwig from “The Automata” most criticizes the androids because they represent a muddied border between life and death. Since Heine had criticized these authors in The Romantic School, Bernstein argues, “Florentine Nights” has been received mostly as “Romantic drivel” by scholars unable to reconcile Heine’s anti-Romanticism writings and the Romantic themes in the story (“Q” 373). Only the section on Paganini, according to Bernstein, receives scholarly attention, and mostly in the field of musicology rather than literary criticism. However, the motifs of life and death, while borrowed from earlier nineteenth-century works, persist throughout “Florentine Nights” and illustrate Heine’s musical aesthetics as narrative techniques in the description of Paganini’s concert. _____________ 5

See Susan Bernstein, “Q or, Heine’s Romanticism” Studies in Romanticism 42.3 (2003): 373 and Jürgen Fohrmann, “Heines Marmor” Heinrich Heine: Neue Wege der Forschung, ed. Christian Liedtke (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), 274. In her article, Mielke points out Heine’s participation in Romanticism with “Florentine Nights.” Christine Mielke, “‘Der Tod und das novellistische Erzählen. Heinrich Heines Florentinische Nächte,’” Heine Jahrbuch 41 (2002): 71-2.

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“Florentine Nights” is a novella based on Arabian Nights and Bocaccio’s Decameron (Mielke 58; Bernstein “Q” 379). Christine Mielke draws on the genre to emphasize the theme of oral storytelling, which she reminds us is the most primitive form of literature (56). The storytelling itself, according to Mielke, is related to the theme of life and death because the reason for telling stories in all three of these works is to ward off death (56). But in the first night of “Florentine Nights,” the aim of storytelling to keep the teller and listener alive appears to fail. The protagonist, Maximilian, is supposed to tell “all sorts of stories” to his dying friend, Maria. The result of the stories is supposed to be quiet and stillness, which the doctor hopes will prolong her life. However, instead of keeping her alive, sleep carries with it the characteristics of death. Maria, to keep alive, is supposed to listen without the excitement and interaction of a living person, and her constant interruptions remind both the reader and Maximilian of the danger of her death. So while the doctor orders storytelling to keep Maria alive as long as possible, the threat of death is constant, either in the doctor’s orders to lie still, or in her inability to listen quietly. The storytelling, therefore, instead of keeping its listeners and tellers alive, brings them to the border between life and death. Death and life are not in direct opposition with one another, but closely connected in the same performance act of telling a story. Following the metaphors of death and life throughout the story, the relationship between the performer and listener in storytelling works the same way in “Florentine Nights” as for a musical performance. In the storytelling of the novella’s first night, marble statues are important figures that embody the combination of life and death in the production of art. The death-like character of the artist is first drawn out in Maximilian’s preference for marble statues over living women, which he describes to Maria. Maximilian begins his stories with his memory of an erotic encounter with a fallen statue and the equation of that picture to the sleeping Maria. The statue, however, does not appear entirely lifeless to Maximilian, as he relates: The beautiful goddess also lay motionless in the green grass but a still sleep rather than a stone death seemed to have captured her lovely limbs and as I neared her I was very afraid that I could wake her out of her slumber with the slightest noise…finally I kissed the beautiful goddess with fervor, with tenderness, with despair, as I never have kissed again in this life. Neither have I been able to forget this gruesomely sweet feeling that flowed through my soul as the blissful cold of those marble lips touched my mouth. (562)

The statue lay in the grass because it had fallen off its pedestal. The fallen statue is part of the entire landscape and hints at the former life of a dilapidated house called “the castle” and an overgrown garden. Much has

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been made in Heine scholarship of the decaying house and garden, itself the picture of the dead past (see Hosfeld, Breymann, Fohrmann, Bernstein). Maximilian, however, does not see the statue of a Greek goddess lying in the grass as dead. The theme of statues coming to life is an old literary motif and Maximilian’s experience shares obvious similarities to Florio’s Venus in Eichendorff’s “The Marble Statue” (Hosfeld 7980; Fohrmann 284). Statues, especially of women appear in many other works as well, as both Thomas Breyman’s and Marlies Janz’s work on the subject indicates. The motif also appears in opera, particularly in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, when Don Juan invites the statue of a man he killed to dinner, who then comes to life and accepts the invitation, admittedly with some gruesome consequences. Unlike Mozart’s statue, however, the marble figure in Eichendorff’s “The Marble Statue” shares more affinities to Maximilian’s statue because of its comparison to a living woman. As Hosfeld points out, the ruined house acts as a setting in both stories and Heine seems to quote Eichendorff in its description (80). In both Eichendorff’s and Heine’s stories, the mixture of death and life plays a role in the man’s view of the statue, albeit unlike Florio, Maximilian remains clear as to which figure is the real woman and which is the statue. The statue’s lifelikeness in “Florentine Nights” is only the appearance of life, and it is clear to the reader that its vitality exists only in Maximilian’s imagination. In this sense, the statue shares more affinity to the automaton Olimpia in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” than Florio’s Venus in Eichendorff’s “The Marble Statue” because Nathanael, like Maximilian, projects lifelikeness into the non-living figure by means of imagination. Not only is the lifelikeness an extension of the beholder’s fantasy, Maximilian and Nathanael actually kiss their in reality lifeless beloved figures. Florio, on the other hand, never attempts to act on his attraction to the statue (Hosfeld). For both Maximilian and Nathanael, life appears in the non-living through means of attraction and imagination. The power of the imagination is crucial, however, to creating art, as Hanslick emphasizes often in On the Musically Beautiful. Human fantasy here is used to enliven a work of art, although for Maximilian and Nathanael, it is the beholder’s imagination that is important, rather than the artist’s. The imagination’s potential in regards to the “sleeping” statue conjures not only the appearance of lifelikeness, but this lifelikeness reveals an “inner spirit” in the marble for the observer. Maximilian describes this potential in his explanation of an encounter with a marble statue, also of a woman, more recent to the time of Maximilian’s visit with Maria: I stayed there a whole hour sunk in the sight of a marble woman whose forceful figure was conceived by Michelangelo’s skillful craft; meanwhile the whole form is surrounded by an ethereal sweetness that one normally does not look for with

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this master. The entire dream world is spellbound in this marble with all its still bliss, a tender peace lives in these beautiful limbs, a soothing moonlight seems to run through their veins.6 (563)

Heine uses a well-known metaphor of dreams, or the world of dreams, to describe a seeming vitality in the marble. Dreams, night, and sleep are often associated with imagination in Romanticism, and Heine’s usage of this older metaphor makes this connection clear. However, Maximilian’s description of the world of dreams [Traumreich] remains bound in still, physical matter, the marble, and gives it life as Maximilian views the statue. This dream world seems at first to bind the stillness of a death-like sleep with the immobility of the stone figure. The verbs wohnen and rinnen contrast this stillness Maximilian associates with dreams and instead denote life and movement. The sleep “lives” and moonlight “runs” through the veins, giving the semblance of vitality through this world of dreams. The world of dreams, in Michelangelo’s statue is related to the still sleep of the Greek goddess. Dream and sleep render both marble statues lifelike and through the metaphors of dream and imagination and the physical appearance of the marble give the stone figures a lifelike spirit. Sleep offers for Maximilian an ambiguity between life and death and an imaginary spirit in something lifeless. This imaginary spirit, however, exists within the stillness of the marble material and represents the balance of spirit within matter, which echoes Hegel’s need for balance between idea (content) and form (from Aesthetics), and which Heine emphasizes in The Romantic School in his comparison to realism and idealism in Hoffmann and Novalis. Heine’s definition of music in the ninth letter of On the French Stage “it stands between thought and phenomenon; as a dawning mediator it stands between spirit and matter” (284) is similar to the way Maximilian describes the statue in the museum. The stillness, an attribute of the marble material out of which the statue was made appears to run through the veins in the marble. Heine’s language likens the veins of the marble to veins in a living person. The statue’s veins are at once a material aspect similar to that of a living human and part of the statue’s imagined spirit. Moonlight acts like Heine’s description of music as the “dawning mediator” between matter and spirit as it runs through the statue’s veins. _____________ 6

“Eine ganze Stunde blieb ich dort versunken in dem Anblick eines marmornen Frauenbilds, dessen gewaltiger Leibesbau von der kühnen Kraft des Michel Angelo zeugt, während doch die ganze Gestalt von einer ätherischen Süßigkeit umflossen ist, die man bei jenem Meister eben nicht zu suchen pflegt. In diesen Marmor ist das ganze Traumreich gebannt, mit allen seinen stillen Seligkeiten, eine zärtliche Ruhe wohnt in diesen schönen Gliedern, ein besänftigendes Mondlicht scheint durch ihre Adern zu rinnen.”

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In Maximilian’s assessment of living women, the imagined spirit within the marble statue becomes equated with truth, an element Maximilian finds lacking in women who are without doubt, alive. In response to Maria’s jocular remark concerning his taste for art figures rather than real people, “And you’ve loved only chiselled or painted women?” Maximilian complains that a living woman’s vitality is full of purpose and therefore false: The living women with whom I came into unavoidable contact with at that time, how they tortured me, tenderly tortured, with their sulking, creating jealousy and constantly keeping busy! At how many balls have I had to trot around with them, how often I had to mix myself in their gossiping! What restless vanity, what joy at lies, what kissing betrayal, what poisonous flowers! (565)

The women who he mentions as “living,” in contrast to the marble statue he fell in love with at the age of twelve, show, in their vitality, a conscious purpose in their actions. Maximilian focuses here on their activity in social gatherings, their attempts to betray one another and lie for a certain effect. Acting for a particular purpose or effect, especially in social settings, is also a prominent characteristic in Hoffmann’s stories, usually of the bourgeois pedant. Creating art for the purpose of effect is problematic in Hoffmann as well, and goes back to the eighteenth-century understanding of music as a rhetorical craft meant to produce a certain effect on the audience. Maximilian’s preference for living women over marble statues plays on the problem of the artist’s intent in performance and the purpose of effect on the audience, although this eighteenth-century practice in music had died out by the time Heine wrote “Florentine Nights.” Instead of providing a specific moral lesson by awakening passions through music, virtuosos, particularly pianists, aimed to please an audience expecting to observe a display of technical prowess. Although not for the same purpose as eighteenth-century musicians, the attempt to show off technical skill was also a way of playing with purpose. This intent, which could only exist in a living person, thus gets in the way of communicating the true spirit of the work of art for both Heine and Hoffmann. As it does in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” erotic attraction in “Florentine Nights” occurs when the protagonist perceives truth in the imagined soul of an in reality lifeless figure. Maximilian’s discussion of the lifelike statue in opposition to living women mirrors Olimpia’s potential in “The Sandman” to provide a perfect performance. Although neither the statues nor the living women in “Florentine Nights” are artists, they display the border between life and death important to the performance of a work of art. In the same manner that Olimpia is the perfect artist because she lacks a sense of self and through that sense the desire to

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impress an audience, the statues, in their stillness, also lack a living desire to act in a way society expects. In the living women, however, Maximilian only sees lies. “Florentine Nights,” like “The Sandman,” equates spirit within a work of art as a true expression of the artist’s spirit. Life brings consciousness to the performer, and real vitality, as Maximilian sees in the living women he encounters, becomes false in comparison to the imagined possibility of life in a marble statue. Maximilian, however, as an observer, is also easily deceived in matters of living and lifelike figures, as seen in his attraction to Maria. The sight of Maria sleeping awakens in Maximilian the memory of the marble statue, and Maximilian desires to kiss her as he did the statue, which he admits to Maria: And look Maria, as I just now stood in front of you and saw you lying on the green sofa in your white muslin dress, the sight of you reminded me of the white marble statue in the green grass. Had you slept longer, my lips would not have resisted… Max! Max! the woman screamed from the depths of her soul—Appalling! You know, that a kiss from your mouth… O, be quiet now, I know, that would be something appalling for you!...I have never been allowed to press my mouth on your lips….(562)

Quite humorously, Maximilian describes the memory of the white statue lying in the green grass and likens that to the image of the white-clad and pale Maria against the backdrop of the green sofa. However, it is the sleeping state more so than the white against green Maximilian finds attractive, since sleep is the position between the life and death which makes the statue appear alive and the sleeping woman resemble a statue. The close proximity between sleeping and the statue becomes more pronounced when Maximilian requests Maria’s death-mask from the doctor while she is sleeping, and the doctor recommends that a mask be made from a living rather than dead face. The mixture of death and life then remains in the mask, according to the doctor, more so than if the mask were taken from the person after they had died. The doctor’s recommendation to Maximilian maintains the tension between life and death in the novella, but for the doctor, the tension is only present if there is still some spirit—or life—in the person’s face when the mask is made. The same tension in his still living patient, however, scares the doctor as much as it is aesthetically pleasing to Maximilian. In her sleep, Maria is still alive but appears dead, as the statue appeared to be sleeping and alive. Most who have written about “Florentine Nights” comment on Maria’s impending death and attempts to prolong her life. Mielke sees the threat of death as a reason for Maximilian’s story-telling. It is in the moment of her dying that his search for the living-dead figure is fulfilled

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(68). In his article “Heines Marmor,” Jürgen Fohrmann sees the figure of Maria as part of a metamorphosis between the marble statue, Venus, the Catholic figure of Mother Mary, and Maria’s death-mask (285). Through the metamorphosis with the death-mask, according to Fohrmann, Maximilian can kiss Maria, since the living woman would then be like the marble statue (285). Like Mielke, Bernstein focuses on Maria’s dying as a reason for the narrative. Maria’s shift between asleep and awake, according to Bernstein, marks the shift in animation between Maximilian’s listener and the images he describes (“Q” 385). What Bernstein refers to as animation is Maria’s display of life as she wakes up and interrupts Maximilian’s stories. As a dying object of Maximilian’s affections, Maria represents at once the living woman Maximilian despises and the death-like figure he finds attractive. She sleeps and reminds him of a statue, wakes up and is urged to “lie still.” For Maria, a display of vitality is linked to the immediacy of death. However, unlike the statue Maximilian saw in the grass, Maria is alive enough to refuse the kiss; Maximilian’s motion wakes her up in the same way he was afraid he would wake up the statue as he approached it. A kiss from Maximilian would mean Maria’s death, since, as she teases, Maximilian only loves “chiselled” or “painted” women. Such a kiss would not only act as a “death stamp,” but would deny the memory of Maria’s existence as a living woman, the same danger the doctor warns Maximilian about in regards to the death-mask. The paradox of preventing death exists in the doctor’s orders to Maximilian to keep the patient still and Maximilian’s desire to kiss her. Maria is able to avoid Maximilian’s kiss and the denial of her life by acting alive, at the same time that this vitality endangers her life. Thus, Maria never does become one of the statues or dead women Maximilian finds attractive, in spite of Maximilian’s attempts to see her that way. Maximilian, in this sense, fails in his storytelling, since he also has a goal—to paint a picture of Maria as a statue. As Maria alternates between sleeping and waking, she not only escapes the transformation into a statue, but also manages, through her activity as a listener, to stay alive, the intended purpose, at least from the doctor’s perspective, of Maximilian’s storytelling. Music in “Florentine Nights” mediates between the vitality of the living and the stillness of a marble statue. Maximilian expresses the beauty he sees in the faces of the women in the audience at the opera by relating them to marble statues. For Maximilian, the living women resemble marble statues only when: The music lights up their faces. I say lights up because the effect of the music that I notice on the faces of the fine ladies in the opera strongly resembles that

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light and shadow effect that amazes us when we look at statues at night by torchlight. These marble statues reveal to us then, with shocking truth their innerliving spirit and their eerily quiet secrets. In the same way the entire life of the beautiful Italian women are revealed when we see them at the opera; thereupon the changing melodies wake in their souls a row of feelings, memories, wishes and annoyances that momentarily express themselves in the movements of their features, in their blushing, in their paling, and even in their eyes. (569)

Through music, living faces become marble or screens for a light and shadow play. The figures the music creates with this light thereby “enliven” the audience. This life, however, is far different from the purpose in acting in a social setting Maximilian complained of earlier in the women he had met. Also a social setting, the opera provides through its music an arena that releases the living women from their contests with one another for a desired position in society. In the act of listening to music, the inner life absent in active social settings comes to life in the faces of the listeners. The visual aspect of musical sound Maximilian sees on the faces of the women in the audience recalls the moonlight running through the veins of the statue in the museum. Music and light play a role in revealing the inner truth of the statuesque faces of the listening audience. However, the tension of vitality and stillness exists in listening, for, as Hanslick and Hoffmann both show in their aesthetics, in order to appreciate wholly a musical work of art, listening to music must be active. Therefore the women whose faces become statuesque express both stillness and activity through listening. This visual view of the audience reflects most Maximilian’s own listening experience and what he wants to see and interpret through music and light. Responses to music in the listener, according to Hanslick, are subjective and individual, shown in Maximilian’s response to the music in the opera. It is Maximilian’s subjective response, rather than the women’s own experience at the opera that transforms their faces into the marble statues. The true lives Maximilian imagines in the faces of the women have the opposite effect of Maximilian’s attraction to marble statues. Just as Maximilian imagines the statues are alive, only sleeping, Maximilian sees the living and supposedly listening audience as a group of marble statues who only in Maximilian’s interpretation, brought about by his individual response to musical sound, reveal their inner lives to him. The women’s perspective and experience listening to the opera remain absent, and the reader is left with Maximilian’s subjective reaction to the music that imposes the tension between the statuesque and the living in his notion of beauty. The theme of the border between life and death in “Florentine Nights” carries over from the discussion of marble statues to the figure of Paganini in the first night. Here, Heine, like Hoffmann uses a fictional

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setting for a concert review. The difference, however, is that where Hoffmann makes up characters such as Ludwig, Ferdinand, and Johannes Kreisler to illustrate his music aesthetics, Heine takes a historical figure and uses elements from German literature, such as the Faust legend, to describe a historical concert. Heine’s “Florentine Nights” acts in this sense like a concert review and provides a poeticized version of a concert that mixes the mechanical, the living, the demonic, and the dead. When read separately from the context of the rest of “Florentine Nights,” the account of Paganini seems ambiguous at its most favorable towards the musician. Otherwise, the motifs of life and death, including automata and demons, as well as the scenes Maximilian imagines during Paganini’s performance, provide a review of the performance that separates Paganini’s technical virtuosity from his musical genius. Maximilian connects sight and sound in his description of Paganini’s concert, as he had done when describing the ladies’ faces at the opera. His ability to visualize sound transfers his listening experience to a row of images. Rather than tell Maria what happens musically, Maximilian focuses on what he sees in connection to the music. Each piece Paganini plays has a different image, and the entire concert, filled with demons, is what Hosfeld calls “a journey to Heaven via Hell” (82). The vertical movement Hosfeld mentions illustrates well the different moods Maximilian’s imagery conjures, based on the music he hears. The different scenes resemble the analogy Schopenhauer uses to describe how music directly represents the Will, from the deeper tones of the slower moving earth to the faster moving life forms in the higher pitches. Schopenhauer makes it clear that this is merely an analogy to show how music works as the direct representation of the Will. Maximilian, on the other hand, relies on his visual response to musical sound as part of his listening experience and it is just as important as the vertical and horizontal organization of tones. Maximilian’s description of the music questions Schopenhauer’s and Hanslick’s assertions that language can not adequately describe music. The Paganini episode in “Florentine Nights” pits Maximilian’s fantasy against the more prosaic, technically oriented concertgoer beside him, who claims to play the violin and therefore knows “what it means to master this instrument in this way” (583). As mentioned here in chapter three, Eduard Hanslick worked to free music from associations with imagery, poetic ideas, or scenes in nature. Schopenhauer also criticized “program music,” or those compositions that sought to imitate a certain idea or part of nature, drawing on Haydn’s Die Schöpfung (The Creation) as an example. Although both Schopenhauer and Hanslick refute such attempts, the description of music using images in Heine’s novella is not the same as describing with words what happens musically by analyzing

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the harmonic or formal structures; instead, Maximilian’s fantasy offers images conjured by the sounds he hears. In telling the story of his response to the music, he is able to use language to describe indirectly the experience of listening to music. A connection between human imagination and Maximilian’s visions becomes more apparent when one considers the concert neighbor’s response. The fellow concertgoer, a fur dealer [Pelzmakler] and an amateur violinist, comments on the pieces and techniques Paganini uses. In relaying the concert to Maria, Maximilian interrupts his verbal depiction of his visions by inserting the more prosaic explanations of the concert from his seat neighbor. With phrases such as “Divine…this piece alone was already worth two Talers” (580) or “What a pity, a string broke on him, that comes from the constant pizzicato” (581) between movements or numbers, the fur dealer directs the reader through the concert and explains what happens on stage. He signals that the piece is over and gives the judgment that Paganini played it well enough to justify the entrance fee for the whole concert. His comments also indicate to the reader that what Maximilian saw as demons breaking the music was the string on the violin due to Paganini’s constant plucking rather than bowing the strings. As commentator, the fur dealer focuses on the outer aspects of the concert; the technique, the type of piece, and the value of the performance and seems to represent the audience’s desire for the spectacular display of technical skill. In his focus on Paganini’s technical skill, the fur dealer does not tell the readers anything about the music either. In spite of appearing more knowledgeable about music, the fur dealer’s comments lack the fantasy of Maximilian’s images. Human fantasy was for Hanslick the essential content of music, and as Maximilian’s description of the concert shows, fantasy is also important in listening. Maximilian’s nonmusical images focus on the subjective nature of the communication between performer and listener. The images Maximilian experiences in connection to musical sound from Paganini’s violin characterize Paganini as an artist capable of portraying the spiritual or inner aspect of a musical composition. At the same time, the description of his physical appearance on stage and the fur dealer’s praise also describes him as a popular virtuoso. Maximilian’s and Maria’s conversation about Paganini in “Florentine Nights” allude not only to the music, but also Paganini’s public appearance. In the observance of Paganini’s stroll with his companion, along with Paganini’s stage entrance, Maximilian describes Paganini as a mechanical vampire figure and an artist who, following a Faustian theme, sold his soul to the devil to become the world’s greatest violinist. Paganini’s physical appearance and stage presence present an important part of his overall performance.

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However, Paganini’s physiognomy proves very difficult to capture accurately. The best likeness of Paganini, according to Maximilian, is a sketch by a deaf painter because the deaf painter’s ability to see the music in the face of Paganini allowed him to draw more of Paganini’s character in the “garishly black, fleeting strokes” than in the “sunny living world” of a colorful portrait (575). At the same time, Maximilian’s preference for a sketched outline of Paganini’s face over a colorful portrait points again to a play with the border of life and death. As the statues are given a living soul, so the “geistreichen” artist (artist rich with spirit) is given a death-like appearance. The life and death attributes the deaf painter gives Paganini transfer to the real image of the artist in concert. As Maximilian describes Paganini’s entrance onto the stage, it appears that the drawing rather than the real person has emerged: Finally, however, a dark form that seemed to have climbed out of the underworld appeared on the stage. That was Paganini in his black gala. The black tails and the white vest were of a horrible cut, as the hellish etiquette at the court of Proserpine perhaps dictated to him. The black pants shook anxiously around the thin legs. The long arms seemed still longer since he held the violin with one hand and the bow with the other lowered and almost touched the earth with it when he unearthed his unheard of bow before the audience. (577)

Paganini’s form is dark, and like Lyser’s (the deaf painter’s) sketch, made more pronounced by his dark dress suit and angular form. Maximilian’s description seems to be a caricature in itself, only in words rather than an image, and he describes Paganini’s stage entrance is if coming from the Underworld. He refers to this again with Proserpine, the queen of the Underworld, to explain the possible reason for Paganini’s appearance (her etiquette dictated the dress code to him). In this first encounter with Paganini, Maximilian explains a death-like figure. If one links Maximilian’s preference for marble statues and ghosts to live women to this first impression of Paganini, then Paganini’s concert begins well for Maximilian. Paganini appears to come out of the sketch drawn by Lyser and from the Underworld, or the land of the dead. Both origins point to Lyser’s earlier assertion (recounted by Maximilian), that Paganini sold his soul to the devil to become the world’s greatest violinist. However, while the origins allude to the death-like nature of the artist, it is impossible for Maximilian to tell what kind of figure Paganini represents on the stage: In the angular bending of his body lay an eerie woodenness and at the same time something foolishly animalistic that a strange desire to laugh had to come over us; but his face that appeared even more deathly white in the harsh lighting of the orchestra had thereupon something imploring, something so stupidly humbling that a horrible sympathy suppressed our desire to laugh. Did he learn these

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compliments from an automaton or a dog? Is this the pleading look of the fatally ill, or does a sly miser’s mockery lurk behind it? Is that a living person who is aware he’s about to pass away and who shall amuse the audience with his convulsions like a dying fencer? Or is it a dead person who has risen from the grave, a vampire with the violin who, while he may not suck the blood from our hearts, will at any rate suck the money from our pockets? (577-8)

The long description of Paganini compares him to a marionette, an animal, an automaton, and a vampire. Calling the stage artist a wooden puppet is a reference to Kleist’s “On the Puppet Theater” and shows the potential for the artist to outperform the human because the artist as a puppet has no individual purpose, but is propelled by the puppeteer. In Hoffmann the “puppeteer” is the stage director or conductor, and in “Florentine Nights” it is the composition and to a large extent the expectations of the audience. Paganini’s artistic potential first seen in the puppet immediately transfers to an animal. As a living being, the animal does not have the same border of life and death that the life-like puppet or puppet-like artist exhibits. On the other hand, the animal was considered by Schopenhauer and Kant as a non-reasoning being (see Jacquette on Schopenhauer). As an animal, Paganini portrays the same character traits as a puppet—at once blindly following an outside force without the egoistic purpose of the typical human artist. It is not certain to Maximilian if the artist is imitating an automaton, has a desire, as a living being (although about to die) to produce a certain effect on the audience, or has risen from the grave. None of the descriptors Maximilian uses to describe Paganini attest to a human being on the stage, except for the figure of the dying fencer, who wants to entertain his audience before he dies. As a puppet, animal, automaton or vampire, Paganini’s presence retains that of the non-human, and thereby lacks human ego. Heine thus mixes the ideas of Kleist, Hoffmann, and Schopenhauer in using all of these metaphors in the same figure of the artist. The nonhuman factors will best allow the genius of the natural music to flow from the performer’s violin, while the human ego gets in the way of the performance, concentrating on impressing the audience with technical bravura. The mixture of the living, purposeful and the non-human performing artist in the same figure indicate the double nature of Paganini as a popular technical virtuoso on the one hand, and an artistic genius on the other. Maximilian’s different ways of describing Paganini attest to his assertion that no painter other than the deaf Lyser can capture Paganini’s physical characteristics properly, for neither can Maximilian, the storyteller, do so with words. Just as it is impossible to define music (On the French Stage), so it is also impossible to characterize the musician. Heine’s music aesthetics, however, do not lack a human element. The violin, Paganini’s instrument, becomes the human in the performance

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when we consider Heine’s letter in Lutezia about the value of the violin versus the piano. According to Heine, The violin is an instrument that has almost human moods and maintains a socalled sympathetic rapport with the mood of the violinist. The slightest discomfort, the softest change in mind, a breath of feeling finds an immediate echo here, and that comes surely from the fact that the violin, pressed so near our breast, also hears our heartbeat.7 (498-9)

The violin identifies with the human performer, rather than the other way around, and it is the human nature of the instrument that lends the human element to the performance. Heine’s wording is merely suggestive with “almost” and “so-called,” but his assertion that the violin follows the player’s mood carries with it the idea that the performer should control emotional changes in order to be able to control the instrument. The instrument, however, does not identify with everybody who tries to play it, and in the following continuation of the above passage, Heine suggests that not only does the violin “immediately echo” the performer’s emotion, but the performer should not wish to control this: This, however, is only the case for artists who actually carry a heart in the breast that beats, those that actually have a soul. The more sober and heartless the violinist, the more monotonous his execution will be and he can count on the obedience of his fiddle at any hour, at any place. But this prized certainty is really only the result of a spiritual limitation. (499)

Without a heart, or with complete control of emotions, the violinist can count on the complete obedience of his instrument. Heine implies here that the emotions the violin picks up otherwise, that is if the player “actually has a heart” occur without the violinist’s knowledge, since the violinist’s execution of the piece would not be controlled and monotonous. At the same time, the violinist who has no control over his emotions while playing the violin will also lose control of the instrument. The challenge of the violinist, therefore, is to master any unwanted variance of feeling, yet not play with the technical precision of the wooden puppet—a balance most of the pianists in Gerig’s Famous Pianists and their Techniques, including Franz Liszt, strive to find, and which seems so essential to instrumental music today to render it obvious. If the problems Wehmeyer and Scherer both mention with technicality at the keyboard give us any evidence as to performance practices in the nineteenth century, it is clear that the balance weighed more in the direction of technical bravura. The _____________ 7

“Die Violine ist ein Instrument, welches fast menschliche Launen hat und mit der Stimmung des Spielers sozusagen in einem sympathetischen rapport steht: das geringste Mißbehagen, die leiseste Gemütserschütterung, ein Gefühlshauch, findet hier einen unmittelbaren Widerhall, und das kommt wohl daher, weil die Violine, so ganz nahe an unsre Brust gedrückt, auch unser Herzklopfen vernimmt.”

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violin’s almost human nature, however, could help the violinist avoid the wooden puppetdom of technical virtuosity, as long as the performer allowed the violin to identify with him. The violinists who do not allow the instrument to adjust to their feeling appear to control the violin with the greatest of ease, but there is no human element in the music. Paganini, as a violinist, therefore, masters the instrument in that the emotion comes from the violin, rather than the persona of the performer. The human qualities missing in Maximilian’s description of Paganini transfer over to the instrument, and the violin, as the human element provides the images Maximilian experiences. The piano, however, lacks this human element. Heine distinguishes between the human and the machine in his comparison of the violin to the piano, two of the most common solo instruments of the nineteenth century. On the piano, technical skill becomes the element of virtuosity and artistic genius, but this, Heine writes, is a falsely perceived condition of art. When we consider the growing popularity of keyboard instruments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, especially the piano, Heine’s taste in music does not match popular tastes of the time. His dislike for the piano is most apparent in what he has to say about the piano craze of the mid-nineteenth century: Pianoforte is the name of the instrument for martyrs with which the genteel society is now afflicted and chastised for all its usurpation … This unending pianoplaying can be tolerated no longer! These shrill clinking tones without a natural echo, these heartlessly twangy gongs, these arch-prosaic, hollow sounds and pecking, this fortepiano kills all our thoughts and feelings, and we become silent, stunted, and stupid. This prevalence of piano-playing and even the triumphant parades of the piano virtuosos are characteristic for our time and quite simply attest to the victory of the machine-essence over the spirit. The technical dexterity, the precision of an automaton, the identification with the stringed wood, the toned transformation of people into instruments is now given the highest praise and celebration. (497)

Heine touches on several aspects here about the rise of the popularity of the piano in the mid-nineteenth century, commenting not only on the growing popularity of the instrument itself, but also on its sound. Since one can play many voices at once, the piano has the capability to substitute for an orchestra. Many of today’s popular songs for the piano are keyboard reductions of larger ensemble pieces, a trend started with the rise of the piano and carried out by pianists who, like Franz Liszt, transcribed many known orchestral pieces for the piano, such as Beethoven’s fifth symphony. But while the piano is capable of acting as an orchestra, as a keyboard instrument, its tuning is always slightly off pure pitch. According to Ll. S. Lloyd’s book Intervals, Scales and Temperaments, it is part of the nature of keyboard instruments that they need to be tempered

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slightly in tuning, so that the instrument is not constantly out of tune with itself. Müller-Sievers mentions this phenomenon in his article on E.T.A. Hoffmann and Johannes Kreisler’s out-of-tune guitar (101). Heine’s description of the tones from the piano as “shrill clinking tones without natural echo” or “these heartlessly twangy gongs” alludes to the “new” dominant sound.8 The sound, as can be seen by Heine’s metaphor of the machine, is far from complimentary, and removed from the human. It represents the machine rather than the spirit, and allows for higher demands of technical precision such that it turns its controllers into automata. The juxtaposition between the piano and the violin as the “machine” and the “spirit” seems based on the industrialization of music and music education. The violin has human character, whereas the piano does not, in spite of the fact that when viewed quite objectively, both instruments are essentially “stringed pieces of wood,” as Heine refers to the piano. The violin, however, had been around in its fully developed form and sound for over a century before Heine wrote this letter. Heine plays with the different histories of these instruments to some extent. He mentions that the piano is the popular instrument. The piano had just barely evolved into its present state by the mid-nineteenth century, and pianomaking seems to have replaced violin-making. In presenting a case for the violin over the piano, Heine draws on the older tradition and criticizes the new, using the metaphor of the android or puppet as Ludwig understands it in Hoffmann’s “The Automata.” As in others of Hoffmann’s texts, Heine’s vocabulary describes the piano’s sound as displeasing. The phrases “shrill clinking tones without natural echo,” or “these heartlessly twangy gongs” resemble mediocre musical sounds in Hoffmann’s texts, such as the attempt to serenade Clara in “The Sandman” as “vorquinkelieren,”9 and the shrill tones mentioned throughout “The Golden Flower Pot.” Heine’s differentiation between the piano and the violin shows the android-like mediocrity of the performer; the piano lends itself well to mediocrity, whereas the violin needs a musician who understands the “human” nature of the violin. As a violinist whose instrument evokes passionate images in Maximilian’s fantasy, Paganini escapes mediocrity, although as a popular virtuoso, _____________ 8

9

Up to at least Beethoven’s time, the tuning system still allowed for differences in mood between keys, as Beethoven expected to the key of B-flat to have a much more somber tone than A-Major (Lindley, “Temperaments,” Groves Online). The violin, in contrast to the piano, can play in pure pitches. There is no good English equivalent for this word and is perhaps a word of Hoffmann’s own invention. Given the context and the sound of the word, however, it can be interpreted to mean playing (in this case singing) badly and out of key in front of somebody.

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he is in danger of focusing on the technique alone and becoming as wooden as the instrument to please his audience. In Lutezia, Heine describes Paganini as a true artist in a more direct manner than he does in “Florentine Nights”: Even the greatest masters’ playing did not seldom depend on outer and inner influences. I have never heard anyone play better, but also at times worse than Paganini … No, Paganini did not have a pupil, could not have had one because the best of what he knew, that which is the highest in art, can not be learned or taught. (499)

Paganini is the best and worst violinist Heine has heard because Paganini does not control the violin with heartless precision, as Heine’s claim about his excellent and poor playing indicates. As a violinist, Paganini has additional weight over any of the pianists (Franz Liszt in particular) because he plays what Heine considered the superior instrument. His instrument allows him to play in a way that is not merely technical precision and a show of finger dexterity, but also an expression of spirit. Heine’s sentiment about Paganini here is similar to Hanslick’s insistence that the human spirit remain in the performance. Heine shows this spirit in his comparison of the violin to the piano, and by drawing out an excellent violinist as an example of someone who understands “the highest in art.” It is this understanding, however, that points away from the pedagogical exercises at the keyboard with the intent that anyone can learn to play, and emphasizes the idea of a virtuoso as a rare genius whose musicianship “can neither be taught nor learned.” For Heine, Frederic Chopin presents a musician who holds the tension between the machine-like virtuoso and the spiritual artist. Chopin’s instrument is the piano, which would render him a mechanical musician following Heine’s thesis about the piano and violin. The opposite is true, however. Even as a pianist, Chopin’s compositions arrive to the level of poetry, surpassing the then sometimes virtuosic, sometimes spiritual violinist Paganini. While Heine attributes Paganini with the artistic genius “that can neither be taught nor learned,” Chopin “must be called a genius, in the full meaning of the word; he is not merely a virtuoso, he is also a poet and can bring the poetry into view that lives in his soul” (Heine Schriften 302-303). What Heine finds most important about Chopin’s music is that the listener is able to “forget completely the mastery of piano technique, and sink into the sweet abyss of the music” (503). It is clear that Heine finds Chopin superior to all the other virtuosos, including Sigismund Thalberg who Heine praises in opposition to Liszt. Heine’s praise for Thalberg and Chopin comes from their improvisation and ability to play music in such a way that does not render the most difficult technique obvious, and merits them with a genius above what he reserves

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for the violinist Paganini. In the reversal of ingenuity and spirit in music based on the instruments in question, Heine’s description of Chopin’s music adds to the tensions already present in the novella and the music reviews between the machine and spiritual, living and dead musician. Heine’s writing about music, both in his fiction and journalism, draws from different trends in the nineteenth century while concentrating on the phenomenon of the ever more popular solo concert. If scholars tend to use the most critical quotes by Heine, especially concerning virtuosos and pianists, as evidence for Heine’s general distaste for music, then the same distaste could then be applied to Hanslick, who also criticized the popularity of the piano and the rising number of virtuosos. In an 1859 letter, for example, Hanslick writes a similar critique of the rise of technical virtuosity that Heine criticizes, especially in reference to pianists: A quiet anxiety overcomes me with all these innocent names. ... Do they really hope to entice mortals in order to excite an audience with their piano-playing, an audience that itself largely consists of pianists? Do they honestly still see today a glittering role of exception in being virtuosos, when half of Europe’s population has this galloping virtuosity? To speak in bitter seriousness, the sight of the virtuoso fliers makes one sad. It makes one sad that so many young people still sacrifice their time, energy, meager savings and higher education in order to devote their lives to skill at a box of strings … In acquiring a small, pretty skill, they come out into the public that still only has respect for the technical accomplishment and not even for that anymore. Would one who has not brought an integral artistic nobility to the world, a highly increased ability to think and feel musically, with all the technique still be sought after and celebrated, even if he were the most flexible acrobat? ... Play less piano, learn something! (189)

Fifteen years of concerts span the time between Heine’s letter in Lutezia of 1843 that compares the piano to the violin and comments on the widely popular piano as the mechanical instrument that turns its players into machines and results in technically skilled virtuosos who arrive in Paris “like swarms of grasshoppers.” Both Heine and Hanslick focus here on the display of technical virtuosity over musicality which comes, in many cases, from the popular notions of keyboard pedagogy. The piano, Heine’s review tries to show, has the mechanical aspect of an automated musical instrument because it turns its players into machines and automata so that they can perform the technically difficult passages properly. We have already seen this idea of the machine at the piano in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Automata” when Ludwig judges Professor X.’s pianoplaying as mechanical as the androids. The attempt to educate every child at the keyboard and turn them all into virtuosos caused, according to Hanslick, such a large number of pianists that the audience, themselves virtuosos, could only expect rare perfection. Unless a budding pianist could outshine every member of the

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audience, he or she had no chance in becoming a successful pianist. The popularity of the piano and the mechanical skill necessary to play it brought virtuosity to new levels, so that, as Hanslick mentions in a 1875 review of Anton Rubinstein, pianists who composed their own pieces to show off their virtuosity were generally the only ones able to play them, with the danger that their virtuosity and compositions died with them (Concerte 149). Thus in spite of the mass industrialized drilling at the piano, keyboard music became, through its vast popularity, increasingly difficult to master and reserved for select individuals. Through his reviews, Heine criticizes social aspects of music and music concerts as part of his overall critique of society. This is apparent through the critique of the living women in “Florentine Nights” and the juxtaposition between the insincerity of the woman trying to make a social place for herself and the integrity of the life-like statue of a female figure as a work of art. In his novella, Heine develops the tension between life and death as a means to talk about the cultural phenomenon of the virtuoso in concert. Ludwig in Hoffmann’s “The Automata” also refers to musical automata and Professor X.’s piano playing as the dead-living or living-dead, which emphasizes the mechanical and technical over the spirit for both Hanslick and Heine. Heine, like Hoffmann critiques the musician who desires to impress the audience through technical skill or produce a certain emotional effect on the audience as dead, “mechanical” music, but where Hoffmann focuses on music’s objectivity in performance, Heine shows the subjectivity in listening to music. Maximilian’s inability to characterize Paganini on the stage distances the performer from the listener, so that Heine’s relationship between performer and listener lacks Hoffmann’s ideal and more objective communication between the two. Paganini’s opaque character, on the other hand, also separates the musician from the music and leaves out the performer’s personality, thereby showing an objective musical genius beyond the quest for the display of technical bravura. A show of technical skill is the intended purpose Heine sees in budding pianists, and what makes the piano “mechanize” the performer. The separation of the musician’s personality from the music occurs however, insofar as Paganini, like the female statues, is not truly a live person. In the same sense, Heine denies Chopin a specific characteristic or nationality, and names him in the posthumous class of famous musicians with Mozart and Beethoven. In the case of the performer, it is not the artist who bordering between death and life brings integrity into the work of art, but the instrument that draws out the performer’s humanness. Only where improvisation as composition outweighs technical accomplishment does Heine forgive the piano its mechanical nature because only then is the instru-

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ment secondary to the music being performed. Heine’s definition of music as a tension between matter and spirit in the ninth letter of On the French Stage follows the apprehension of life in the veins of the lifeless marble statues in “Florentine Nights” and is connected to Maximilian’s ability to mix sight and sound. The music’s tonal material enlivens a visual story in the listener’s imagination.

Chapter Five Rilke’s Phonograph: the “Talking Machine” and Imagined Sound Heine’s and Hanslick’s complaints about the piano, the attempt to turn middle-class children into virtuosos and the instrument’s potential to mechanize musical performance are also related to the activity of writing on another machine, the typewriter. In Eric Kästner’s poem “Young Woman’s Choir,” the first two lines, “We are hammering on the typewriters/Just as if we played piano”1 point to the relationship between learning to play a keyboard instrument, such as a piano, and learning to type on what in German is called a “writing machine” (Schreibmaschine).2 Focusing on these two lines alone, the relationship between the piano and the machine that Heinrich Heine criticizes in Lutezia becomes clear. Just as Heine fears the piano turns its musicians into machines, the same could be said for the typewriter because the essential activity of pressing keys with all ten fingers is similar. Today’s computer keyboard is based on the layout of the typewriters, and to avoid injury while using either the piano’s or the typewriter’s keyboards, one should sit up straight, relax the wrists, and use the finger muscles. By pushing keys, one either releases a lever that types a letter on a page or allows a hammer to hit a string, causing it to vibrate and produce a sound. In general, the successful typist or skilled pianist does not think about each individual key pressed, but looks at groups of keys as a whole, as words, chords, or clusters. The skill needed to type parallels the skill needed to play the piano, and when these activities are looked at apart from the words and notes they produce, neither one is creative. The creativity comes only when one interprets the piece or rewrites the document based on notes (out of either musical notation or letters) someone else has scribbled down. In Kästner’s poem, the activity for playing and writing is “hammering.” The secretaries are copying someone _____________ 1 2

“Wir hämmern auf die Schreibmaschinen / Es ist genau als spielten wir Klavier.” Eric Kästner, “Chor des Fräuleins,” Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1 (Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1959), 40-41. The first syllable in Schreibmaschine comes from schreiben, which means “to write.”

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else’s document in type-setting rather than handwriting, using the very same skills they learned in translating someone else’s musical composition into sound on the piano. The “hammering” connects the keyboard drills between the piano and the typewriter, writing and musical performance. This connection has been made beyond Kästner’s poem but in the opposite direction: the writing instrument is used as a musical instrument. Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter, a short orchestra piece that includes a typewriter as a musical instrument and the Boston Typewriter Orchestra are two examples where the clicking keys and ding of a typewriter act as a musical instrument and are played within a rhythmic form. Such a mixture of musical instrument and typewriter combines language and music, writing and composing in the same device. Long before Anderson’s composition or even Kästner’s poem, language and music came together in the phonograph. Music education had, by the end of the nineteenth century, been largely relegated to the piano and made a mechanical exercise, to the extent that the art in music became removed from interpretation, save the few “poetic musicians.” Heine’s assessment of Chopin’s music as poetic, in contrast to his complaint about piano virtuosity as the “Victory of the machine essence over the spirit,” already foresees what Eduard Hanslick later describes as the newer demands for expression in addition to masterful technical dexterity. The different ways Heine and Hoffmann treat poetry and music illustrate the changes in how the relationship between the two arts was viewed in the mid-nineteenth century. Where Hoffmann and his contemporaries often use music as a metaphor for good poetry, Heine reverses this order and uses poetry to describe the musical genius, the one who masters the instrument with both expression and technical prowess. However, in both Heine and Hoffmann, the two arts remain related, yet separate. Rilke’s writing about music further mixes poetry and music in a way that reflects the believed potential of such late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century musical machines as the phonograph and the reproducing piano. Rilke’s experiment with the phonograph in his 1919 essay “Original Sound (Ur-Geräusch)” provides an instrument that combines writing and music, vision and hearing. This experiment takes over the role of creativity from the composer as well as the performer and describes an outcome that can occur as a complete poem only if it remains unrealized in the imagination or as a technical experiment. Such experiments grow from the attempt to meet rising performance standards and to return expression as an aesthetic criterion for playing a musical composition. The number of virtuosos continued to grow in the nineteenth century, as Hanslick’s

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later essays show. In “Piano-Playing Madness,” written in the late 1890s,3 Hanslick emphasizes the popularity of the piano in private spaces and addresses the still growing trend to have the instrument in the home as a Klavierseuche,4 likening the social expectation on middle class children to learn to play the piano to an epidemic. Musical training has thus become an illness, bringing with it problems in unwanted noise, too many virtuosos, and the impossibility to meet ever-rising performance standards, which all lead to the ideas surrounding the ideal uses of the gramophone, the use of reproducing pianos in concert, and Rilke’s and Heine’s emphasis on poetry to show expression in music. The growing number of children learning to play the piano in the late nineteenth century also led to a musical noise pollution. In “PianoPlaying Madness,” Hanslick focuses on the overbearing sound in the streets and houses due to the large number of pianos in the bourgeois apartments. In response to Johannes Brahms’s complaint about the many pianos, Hanslick points out music’s egotistic nature: “We want to make music ourselves, often and to the heart’s content,--but we consider it outrageous that our neighbor would nourish the same passion” (105). The desire to play music is widespread, but the discomfort comes when others nearby begin to play, especially if their playing is less than perfect. One does not hear one’s own mistakes as much as the wrong notes through the wall or the open window across the street. The art’s egoism comes from the inability to block unwanted sounds, the large number of pianos available, the insistence that keyboard training is an essential part of a child’s education, and a lot of wrong notes. Mistakes become the dreaded sound by pianists, but mistakes are also necessary in learning to play, for very few musicians can sit down at the piano, without ever having touched a keyboard, and play a Beethoven sonata brilliantly and flawlessly. Error in music is made even more pronounced at the end of the nineteenth century than in the late eighteenthcentury article “Mechanical Music” or Hoffmann’s “Ritter Gluck” because around 1900, the musicians’ poor playing penetrated private spaces. Even in private homes, the unwilling listener can not escape the neighbor’s music as it comes through the wall or window. By contrast, Hoffmann’s narrator and the writer of “Mechanical Music” are in a restaurant or pub, and the music is confined to this space. City and village dwellers in the late nineteenth century, as we can see from Hanslick’s article, had to hear others playing the piano, regardless of where they were. _____________ 3 4

Both “Piano-Playing Madness” and “Piano Concerts and No End” (mentioned here on page 125) are included in Aus neuer und neuester Zeit. Seuche means epidemic.

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The overwhelming piano-sound is due in part to developments in the piano’s mechanism that made it possible to play very loudly, as well as the drills children were supposed to practice. As Hanslick points out, earlier nineteenth-century pianists did not bother their neighbors because their instruments were lighter, quieter, and not as many people had one in their home (112). In her book on Czerny and industrialization, Wehmeyer quotes Hanslick’s statement about the Klavierseuche and comments that the children most likely were practicing the piano the way Czerny instructed in his publications: “loudly, quickly, and staccato” (94). When the loudness of the drilling piano students is coupled by the dynamic capabilities of the instrument, one can imagine the amount of noise one would hear (and as one hears walking around a music school with poorly insulated practice rooms). In Hanslick’s article, the poorly played and loud piano music takes over the typical cacophony of wheels, horses’ hooves, and pedestrians on the streets, providing the greater part of city noise. In addition to the large volume of piano sound in the city streets, the increased quantity of piano virtuosos drove the competition to high levels of expectation from the audience. Many members of the audience, when one considers they were mostly members of the middle and upper classes, were well-trained in music themselves, and as Hanslick tells us in “Piano Concerts and No End”; the many budding pianists passed out concert bills all over Vienna in order to play in front of an audience consisting largely of piano virtuosos (189). The fur dealer at Paganini’s concert in Heine’s “Florentine Nights” also represents the trend towards a widespread training in music because he claims as an amateur violinist inside knowledge about the difficulties of the instrument. However, the roles between the professionals and the dilettantes5 appear to switch between Heine’s and Hanslick’s treatment of the problem. In “Florentine Nights,” the dilettante is the fur dealer, a member of the audience observing the virtuoso, Paganini on stage. In “Piano Concerts and No End,” Hanslick implies the opposite: the virtuoso pianists sit in the audience while dilettantes attempt to become professionals through their concerts. Keyboard training had become so popular in Vienna that Hanslick points out in his concern for the budding pianists that it would be easier to pursue any other instrument, including the also popular violin and still have hopes of making a career out it (115). The audience’s expectations for virtuosity, _____________ 5

Hanslick uses the term dilettante here to mean one who has mediocre ability. As mentioned in chapter one, the term did not necessarily mean mediocre at the beginning of the century. It is not clear exactly when the shift takes place, but Hanslick’s use of the word is much clearer as mediocre rather than simply “unprofessional.” His use of the term does separate the dilettantes from the professionals, but it also implies the difference between mediocrity and great skill and talent.

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Hanslick implies, makes it impossible for most to succeed, either as performers or as teachers, since virtuosity alone is no longer enough—one needs to also play with expression (114-5, 188-9). Thus the demand in the early nineteenth century for perfection shifts from the search for the perfect tone, as seen in Hoffmann’s stories, to the early-twentieth-century search for technical skill that brings out expression in the piece, a demand nearly impossible to meet, saving musical performance for the rare genius.6 Not only the audience, but also the composers placed higher demands on performers. In the forward to Robert Rimm’s The Composer-Pianists: Hamelin and the Eight, Steven Hough writes: “Composers often have a greater understanding of the works they play than do those who have never written music” (9). This comment, however, only begins to pinpoint the difficulties in the position between performer and composer, especially in the early twentieth century as the two parts of musical production belonged to two different people, and essentially two different skills and arts. Rimm writes about the role of the performer as interpreter, The performer, together with the composer and the audience, is a crucial part of the triangle needed for the full expression of music … The narcissists among pianists may choose to impose far more of their will on a composition than the work can reasonably sustain. On the other hand, slavish adherence to the printed note without the necessary addition of artistic personality usually results in a bland, mechanical performance. (209)

Rimm indicates here the importance of a threefold relationship in musical production, the composer, the performer, and the listener. Rimm’s argument implies that the performer’s contribution to the piece is separate from the composer’s yet just as important for the overall work of art. The nineteenth-century performer as composer, as Hough argues, begins to unravel with such figures such as Franz Liszt whose solo piano recitals demanded the performer’s ability to learn a large repertoire by other people, breaking away from the tradition that pianists play largely pieces they had composed themselves (9). With this unravelling, the performer’s role in the triad of musical production begins to be an art of interpretation, as someone who translates somebody else’s written notes into an aural work of art. However, Rimm’s role for the performer carries with it a delicate balance between the egotistic purpose both Hoffmann and _____________ 6

Although this seems obvious to us today, since successful concert pianists still need to have this rare genius, this was not always the case, as we can see fom Hanslick’s essays and from the large number of concert critiques in Paris and Vienna. Furthermore, Stuckenschmidt also implies that the demands on performers are greater than they ever have been (9-10), and separates performance and composition, a combination which used to be selfexplanatory. H.H. Stuckenschmidt, “Die Mechanisierung der Musik,” Die Musik eines halben Jahrhunderts: 1925-1975 Essay und Kritik, (München: Piper, 1976), 9-15.

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Heine criticize (whether personality or display of technical skill) and the non-imaginative, mechanical playing Hanslick mentions in some of his reviews. Thus, although Rimm seems to give the performer more freedom to interpret the work of art, the separation of the performer and composer led to more exacting demands on the performer since the composers no longer played their own pieces in concert. Composer’s instructions, as most scholars on automated musical instruments will point out, began to demand more precise interpretations from the artists in order to maintain their authority about the work of art. In The Recording Angel, Evan Eisenberg claims that it is for this reason that Debussy, who normally did not like music from automated musical instruments, recorded rolls of his playing—to show other pianists how it ought to be played (107). Ravel also recorded his compositions. In At the Piano with Ravel, Marguerite Long quotes Ravel’s demands that performers play the piece the way he intended, or not play it at all (16-18). The Urtext edition of Ravel’s piano cycle Mirroirs, for example, uses Ravel’s piano roll in the notes as an indication of how to play certain passages. Ravel’s and Debussy’s insistence that performers play exactly what they have in mind counters Rimm’s notion that the performer must allow some personality into the work of art. Instead, the performer had to figure out what personality the composer wanted, even more so than Hoffmann’s spiritual communication between instrument, composer/performer, and listener. According to Gerig, Ravel himself did not cultivate his own keyboard skill (326), also an example that the age where composers often performed was rapidly ending. In his chapter on music criticism, Rimm quotes Bernhard Shaw’s response to Busoni’s talents “there is not room enough in a single life for more than one supreme excellence,” remarking how critics denied musicians their masterful talents at both composition and performance (202). Part of the reason for this “dual” talent was the exacting demands on performers. Composers rendered their pieces more and more difficult to learn as performers attempted to adhere to both the composers’ instructions and the musically well-trained audience’s expectations. The division between composer and performer also led to a concentration on singular aspects of one art, splitting these aspects into almost two separate arts. The drive for perfection in all areas of music leads to specific roles to master rather than the multiple aspects of music the performer/composer/conductor exhibited in the same concert, as was more common in Mozart’s time. A contemporary of Debussy and Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg is wellknown as a composer who does not allow freedom of interpretation. In 1925, two theorists, Theodor Adorno and H.H. Stuckenschmidt, feature him in Pult und Taktstock, a magazine primarily for conductors, as a com-

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poser whose works get lost in the performer’s interpretation. The articles these two authors wrote offer a glimpse at Schoenberg’s authority as a composer, although Schoenberg’s own exact instructions to the performer can be seen clearly in the notes to his song cycle Pierrot Lunaire (1912). Adorno and Stuckenschmidt base their comments on Schoenberg’s ideas about interpretation and composition and emphasize that added expression does not have its place in the interpretation of a musical composition. Years later, in 1949, Schoenberg blames himself for the apparent lack of expression in contemporary music, referring in “It is my Fault” to Pierrot lunaire, where he instructs the vocalist not to add any extra interpretation to the text other than what was already in the musical score (152-3). Schoenberg’s own writing provides the reason why Adorno and Stuckenschmidt use him for an example of how composers such as Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky and Mahler attempted to leave precise instructions for their performers. Adorno in particular focuses on Schoenberg to show the greater amount of subjectivity in early-twentieth-century music. In “On the Problem of Reproduction” (1925), Adorno stresses that the subjectivity in the music as well as in Schoenberg’s intentions reduce musical realisation to the exact rendering of a text, an objective exercise in Adorno’s view (16: 442). The subjectivity in Schoenberg’s music, Adorno explains, as well as other music new in the 1920s, takes away the possibility for subjectivity in the interpretation, requiring complete objectivity in performance in order for the work to be understood (442-3). The reason for this, according to Adorno, is the absence of a known, traditional form that exists in Beethoven’s music, but not Schoenberg’s, because there is no longer a distinction between inner and outer with which the performer can work (443). Adorno applies here a wider phenomenon in music— composer’s strict instructions—to Schoenberg, whose break with traditional harmony is perhaps more pronounced with his invention of the twelve-tone row in the early 1920s and use of serial music. If making up one’s own forms is the determining factor for a musical artwork’s subjectivity to come from the composer, then Adorno’s attempt to pit Schoenberg’s music against traditional nineteenth-century music excludes the composers whose works have survived because they break with a former tradition. Beethoven’s music, in comparison to Schoenberg’s does seem more traditional in the sense that it remains within the harmonic and formal structures it aims to stretch. The twentieth-century ear was quite used to Beethoven, but the early-nineteenth-century ear was not. Thus, Beethoven’s contemporaries viewed even his first symphony, written with, for Beethoven, adherence to classical style as new music (Solomon 137). Adorno’s view of new music causing the lack of freedom

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for interpretation has more to do with the performance practices contemporary to the performers. As George Barth notes in The Pianist as Orator, Beethoven’s playing style left much to the performer’s sense of the “form of feeling” (52), following the performance traditions of his time. Likewise, Schoenberg composes much like his contemporaries, beyond the limits of traditional tonality and with strict instructions to avoid an interpretation different from their own ideas for their works. The demands on the performer reach a level of precision in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that, due to its incomprehensibility by anyone other than the composer, ruins the music at the moment of its realization. This high level of precision reaches beyond human capabilities, according to H.H. Stuckenschmidt, whose 1925 article in Pult und Taktstock, entitled “The Mechanization of Music” concentrates on the human impossibility of meeting the higher demands of the composers: The human interpreter is, like every person, susceptible to the limits and imperfections of body and mind. (11) … The growing need of our times for precision and clarity elucidates more and more the intrinsic inability of people to be regarded as interpreters of artworks. (12)

Not only is the interpreter given very little freedom, as Adorno mentions, but according to Stuckenschmidt, performance becomes impossible due to composers’ demands. The interpretation of the artwork, Stuckenschmidt implies here, is colored by the humanness of the interpreter, and since the interpretation can no longer show the wishes “that the composer expressed with his (up to now admittedly inadequate) notation” (12), humans are no longer able to meet performance demands. Stuckenschmidt goes on to explain that even musical notation is not exact enough, for musical elements that one interprets, such as dynamics, phrasing and tempo are all relative (12-13). The inadequate notation, according to Stuckenschmidt, leaves too much freedom for interpretation, leading to imprecision in performance not only from two separate artists, but between two different performances by the same musician (11-12). In his article, Stuckenschmidt does not seem to allow for freedom of interpretation of any piece of music, although he, like Adorno, also draws on new music for examples of unreasonably high performance standards. Instead, Stuckenschmidt applies this to older music as well, indicating “The more ‘objective’ the interpreter, the better the interpretation” (12). Stuckenschmidt and Adorno thus disagree on performance practices for older compositions. While Adorno saves the need for precise instruction for new music with

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unfamiliar forms, Stuckenschmidt makes the argument that false interpretation is a problem in all music. Neither theorist, however, deviates much from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s aesthetics, but carries Hoffmann’s ideas about the impossibilities of avoiding the plan for effect in a musical composition and performance to the problem of precise reading of the score. As Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” and “The Automata” show, the true realisation of sound and spirit can only happen on a machine. Machines provide for Stuckenschmidt, and with newer compositions also Adorno, a means of meeting the composer’s intentions. By the early twentieth century, mechanics and instrument builders had experimented with several types of action for automated musical instruments, as well as different systems to control which notes would be played, how, and when. Stuckenschmidt mentions two types of automated musical instruments, one which produces sound mechanically on an acoustic instrument,7 such as a violin, flute, piano, or a drum. Examples of these types of automated musical instruments include everything from the eighteenth-century mechanical dolls discussed in chapter one, and the orchestrions, barrel organs, or player pianos of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stuckenschmidt’s second category fits the phonograph or gramophone, a reproduction of sound made without the machine playing an acoustic instrument (13). These two types of instrument also have different ways of translating musical notation onto the cylinder, paper roll or other such device which commands the instrument what notes to play and when. Machines in which paper cylinders, discs, or paper rolls are set up by hand based on the composer’s notation are called “design rolls” according to Kent A. Holliday’s Reproducing Pianos Past and Present (3). The need for such a term as “design rolls” rose with the invention of recording rolls in the early twentieth century, for until the invention of the reproducing piano and the use of perforated cardboard, all controlling devices for the musical work in automated musical instruments were made in this manner. Josef Haydn’s compositions for mechanical clocks and the mechanical devices used in the Jacques-Droz automated keyboardist of the late eighteenth century were prepared based on a musical score and later added to the instrument. Reproducing pianos, gramophones and phonographs, on the other hand, relied on live performance, which they recorded and then played back. _____________ 7

By acoustic, I am referring to an instrument that is played in the traditional manner, i.e. bowing a violin, pressing keys or blowing air through a valve. Stuckenschmidt uses the term “wirklich”—real or actual, a term which is difficult to understand in today’s context, since many “real” instruments are also electric or digital. I chose “acoustic” since it is used today to distinguish between an electric and a non-electric guitar.

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At first glance, it would seem that the recording instruments do little to solve the dilemma of human limitation Stuckenschmidt presents. As seen in the case of Haydn’s mechanical clocks, “designing” the cylinders allowed composers to add ornamentation beyond the abilities of most skilled musicians.8 This method was also the most common method until inventors began to discover how to record sound. The most successful of recording instruments were the reproducing pianos, an invention surpassing the sound quality of the phonograph or gramophone. Brauers points out that the phonograph was more of a technological-scientific curiosity than a practical machine for recording important information or music, and the sound quality of the early phonograph and gramophone was not very good (90). The reproducing pianos, therefore, offered a higher quality of recorded sound because they recorded directly onto an acoustic instrument. In spite of the superior sound, reproducing pianos offer a very narrow scope of instrumentation, namely piano music only. Thomas Edison’s phonograph and Emil Berliner’s closely related gramophone, however, captured the imagination in the 1925 issue of Pult und Taktstock because of their potential to not only record all kinds of music, but to play back with the most minute detail the composer’s artwork. Edison’s phonograph, invented in 1877 was one of the first machines to record the human voice, although Edison is not the first to invent a recording device. Others, such as F.B. Fenby and M. Charles Cros, had also come up with ideas for similar machines.9 David J. Steffen mentions in From Edison to Marconi that Edison is generally given credit for the invention, since he was the first one to patent a completed version of a recording machine that also played back what was recorded (21-2). Although meant at first for use in business offices for instance to aid dictation, the “talking machine,” as it was sometimes referred to, was also quickly applied to music. Edison’s choice of music seems to have influenced the phonograph’s role as a novelty item, limiting consideration for its use with more serious art at the time of its invention. In their histories of the phonograph, Steffen, Evan Eisenberg, and Roland Gelatt all attribute Thomas Edison’s deafness to his lack of musical taste that resulted in the vaudeville tunes he recorded on phonograph rolls, including his first quotation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The deafness factor probably had less to do with Edison’s apparent non-musicality and more with Edison’s original intent with the machine. Edison was an inventor _____________ 8 9

See Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume, Joseph Hayden and the Mechanical Organ (Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press, 1982), 31-32, 76. See David J. Steffen, From Edison to Marconi: The First Thirty Years of Recorded Music (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005), 21 and Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph 1877-1977. 2nd ed. (New York: Collier, 1977), 23-4.

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rather than musician, and as Brauers mentions, left the phonograph project after its patent to continue with his next, the light bulb (91). Furthermore, the story behind the invention retold in many sources relates that the idea for the phonograph came when the telegraph machine ran too quickly, causing a side noise which sounded like the human voice. The original idea, then, was to record the human voice rather than music. The gramophone is a very similar instrument, understood as Emil Berliner’s improvement on the phonograph. As Steffen and Brauers indicate, the improvements that led to Berliner’s invention, through competition with A.G. Bell, replaced the foil on the cylinder Edison originally used with wax, allowing the phonograph needle to record and pick up greater subtleties of sound with a longer playback time (Steffen 28; Brauers 91). Berliner then began to use discs instead of cylinders, and became responsible for the ability to mass-produce the recordings (Brauers 93, Steffen 29; Eisenberg 41). Part of Berliner’s fame, according to Brauers, comes from Berliner’s foresight to immediately record music (93). Edison quickly followed this idea, attempting to sell his newly improved phonograph in Germany, thus changing the phonograph’s purpose as it became seen as a machine to record music as well as voice. According to Eisenberg, the two very similar machines were seen as nothing more than a music box, a toy “and not the sort of thing with which a gentleman amateur of music ought to concern himself” (144). In aesthetical and literary writings about the two instruments, the machines provoke the imagination for their potential to play all instruments, including voice, automatically on a designed cylinder or disc, thus removing the need for the immediacy of a human interpreter. The invention of these recording devices led to the invention of another recording instrument, the reproducing and player piano. While the phonograph and gramophone could record music for private use in the home, the player-piano offered the possibility to play the piano at home without having to practice the drills and scales for years to learn to do so. In his history of reproducing pianos, Holliday describes the playerpianos as cabinet-like instruments placed at a piano keyboard. The performer would pedal the instrument or turn a crank that would push the piano keys according to the holes in the paper rolls (3). The reproducing piano punched holes in the paper as the piano was played, and the paper roll could then be inserted into a player-piano. Such instruments were used in concert halls, as can be seen in a picture Holliday includes from the music instrument museum in Berlin of a pianolist10 performing with _____________ 10

Pianola was the name of the company and later became used as a general term for playerpiano.

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an orchestra (19). Ord-Hume also adds many pictures and advertisements in his book Pianola, one of which shows the instrument in concert in 1912 (38). Thus the recording and player-pianos were considered more serious musical instruments than the gramophone or phonograph, in spite of the low rating automated musical instruments are often given today. Due to the need to use pedals, however, the earlier player-pianos are not entirely automated. Furthermore, it requires skill and practice to learn how to pedal the instrument, as Rex Lawson remarks in his essay for a conference on machines and music (110). In his essay, Lawson claims that the Pianola requires just as much practice as the piano because one has to practice the expression for a “human” tone, although one does not have to learn the notes (110). The advertisements in Ord-Hume’s book, however, stress this as a positive feature; with the pianola, one is able to play with the right technique and the right expression—the combination late-nineteenth-century audiences had come to expect and that so few pianists could actually achieve (358). The player-piano and the recording piano, invented in the first decade of the twentieth century (Ord-Hume 32), were considered an improvement to the phonograph because of the faithful recording of all aspects of the sound made by the pianist. Ord-Hume quotes an account of a phonograph recording session by Ferruccio Busoni, in which Busoni complains that the result is not his playing (34). The pianola and reproducing pianos offered a type of musical instrument that while not entirely automated, allowed for virtuosic performances with the authenticity in the sound of the instrument of an actual piano being played. The recording piano, therefore, acted as an instrument between Stuckenschmidt’s two categories of instrument. On the one hand, it had a mechanism that played an actual instrument, but on the other hand, it also recorded and played back someone else’s performance, much like a phonograph or gramophone. Yet in spite of the reproducing piano’s superiority in recording piano music, writers like Rilke explore the imagined potential behind the gramophone and phonograph’s ability to record all types of music and voices. Stuckenschmidt and Adorno also emphasized the potential for the gramophone, although it was still considered a novelty rather than a serious recording device, as an answer to the problem of compositions which leave no room for interpretation. Only as a way of keeping a master interpreter’s art immortal does Stuckenschmidt value the reproducing piano, although he emphasizes the superior quality of the recording, confirming the belief that it is impossible to tell whether it is the original artist or a reproduction (13). Recording devices emphasize the performer’s authority over the work of art, rather than the composers, and do

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little to solve the problem of false interpretation. Furthermore, the reproducing piano can only record and play piano music. In an attempt to combine the two types of instruments in an instrument that could replace an orchestra as well as a piano, Stuckenschmidt writes: But the essential meaning of these machines lies in the possibility of writing authentically for them. This means that after a short study of this relief script one can compose directly onto it, as earlier in notes with all imaginable nuances, with tempi defined with mathematical exactness, dynamic signs and phrases. The problem of authentic notation has already been solved flawlessly in the musical machines today; there only needs to be the slightest effort to learn and test the script in its smallest detail. A few composers did it—in 50 years this knowledge will be part of elementary music education. ... Considerable richer perspectives open the possibility to compose authentically onto a gramophone disc. ... The authentic gramophone has the great advantage over the mechanical piano and the orchestrion, to unify all conceivable tone colors in one extremely simple and small device. ... The variety of tones would make the old orchestra appear completely primitive. (13-15)

Stuckenschmidt’s suggestion to compose directly onto a gramophone disc offers an almost utopian vision of musical composition. This type of composition is more possible on computer programs today than the gramophone disc, given the small size of the disc and the microscopic nuances of sound. Stuckenschmidt’s futuristic gramophone (which Adorno refers to as the “ideal” gramophone) offers a potential instrument that would solve the problems of interpretation and human imprecision. Stuckenschmidt’s ideas are not new. He takes the age-old practice of composing music onto automated instruments and applies this to the gramophone. As mentioned in chapter one, Haydn and Beethoven both noticed how the machines played their pieces better than the orchestra. Composers were also able to add more ornamentation onto the cylinders for mechanical organ. However, it has been argued that these machines were not considered serious instruments, and Krickeberg comments that Beethoven meant this satirically. Hanslick for one values the human interpreter above the mechanical organ in On the Musically Beautiful, and Heine rues the piano for its mechanical nature, claiming its tendency to

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produce technical virtuosos removes human expression from musical performance. Stuckenschmidt’s vision for the gramophone, however, emphasises the potential machines can have in enhancing what by the twentieth century had become a mathematically precise art and can hardly be interpreted as satirical or critical of the use of machine in music as many today interpret Kleist’s “On the Puppet Theater” or Olimpia’s ability to deceive so many in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman.” The differences in attitude about the machines here show the parallel appreciation for and fear of automated musical instruments throughout the nineteenth century. The gramophone disc, when designed as the cylinder or disc for an automated musical instrument like the orchestrion, could play all types of music, and would have the advantage over the orchestrion in that it would not have to contain all the instruments to replace the orchestra successfully. If one is able to design a gramophone disc in the same manner as the cylinders of an orchestrion or player-piano, then there would be no need for a human interpreter, and the musical work of art would be entirely the composer’s creation. The possibility of placing the music of a large orchestra onto a relatively small machine must seem obvious to musicians today who use computer programs for composition purposes. Stuckenschmidt’s suggestion takes away the “recording” principle of the gramophone and phonograph. In a recording, it is the performer’s art that is made more permanent, but without the need to record an interpreter, the art is purely the composer’s. With the aid of such a mathematically precise machine, a composer’s artistic creation no longer would have the limitations of a human interpreter, and music could be composed with almost the same immediacy as a painting, using needle and tones on a disc as brush and colors on a canvas. Similarly, Rilke envisions the poetic potential of the imperfect phonograph over the reproducing piano or other musical machines to combine the senses and uncover the original sound of music. In his essay “Original Sound,” Rilke talks about the phonograph in a manner that combines several factors: an imprecise material and method for making the phonograph, the idea of a primitive sound which is music, and the designed, rather than recorded roll. Divided into three parts, the essay describes a childhood experiment in physics class to build a phonograph and the children’s impressions when they hear their own voices. The “text” the needle writes while recording then connects to the narrator’s medical studies and the association between that text and the coronal suture (the seam connecting the front and two sides of the skull). The essay then ends in a discussion of the five senses and their connectedness in poetry. Written in 1919 with the author’s original title ‘Experiment’, this short

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prose work receives little scholarly attention, especially in the field of literary criticism. Except for a recent work by Katja Stopka, most of the few authors who have written on this essay look at it from an angle other than literary criticism. Rilke himself wanted “Original Sound” to be directed at scientists, possibly to test his association between the seam and the phonograph text, according to few references to the text in HansJoachim Barkening’s biographical book on Rilke’s stay in Soglio, where he wrote the essay. Rather than an actual scientific experiment, the text lends itself well to a poetic rendering of the physicality of musical sound and the technological possibilities to realize sound beyond the capabilities of human aural perception as lenses enhance normal vision to include very small or distant objects. In the tradition of a poetics of music, machine, and nature, music in “Original Sound” exists outside of human experience or creative fantasy. Instead, it is the physical result of a needle tracing a line, without the need for a recording, a composer, and, as we shall soon see, without the possibility of a listener. The poetic context of Rilke’s experiment takes the nineteenth-century aesthetic and practical considerations about music, coupled with the newest inventions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and creates the physical space of the nineteenth-century imaginary original sound. Where Hoffmann’s Ludwig and Ferdinand look for this sound in new automated musical instruments such as the harmonium, Rilke’s “Original Sound” tries to find it in a physical space within an uncontrollable and hidden part of the living human body—the seam that connects different parts of the skull. In “Original Sound,” the roles between art and machine have switched. The precise becomes improvisation and the result of a creative arrangement of reverberating sounds demands careful attention to detail in its realisation. In a memory of a physics experiment, the narrator describes the inexact manner in which his class assembles a phonograph made from everyday materials: For that, nothing more was necessary than what I enumerate in the following: a piece of flexible cardboard, bowed together into a funnel, on whose narrower round opening one immediately glued a piece of impermeable paper of the kind that one uses to close jars of canned fruit, in this manner improvising a swinging membrane in whose middle, with the next hold, was plugged with a vertically standing bristle from a strong clothes brush. The one side of the machine was produced with these few things…there was even some cylinder that we, as well as we could, covered with a thin layer of candle wax.11 (699)

_____________ 11

“Dazu war nicht mehr nötig, als was ich im Folgenden aufzähle. Ein Stück biegsamerer Pappe, zu einem Trichter zusammengebogen, dessen engere runde Öffnung man sofort mit einem Stück undurchlässigen Papiers, von jener Art, wie man es zum Verschlusse der

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This description illustrates a simple process that does not require exact measurements or materials. The pupils used household items such as baking paper, candle wax, and a clothing brush and, as the narrator points out at the beginning and ends of the list of items for the ear and mouth piece, that was all one needed. Furthermore, the scientific nature of the physics involved in recording and playing back the sound remains a mystery in the narrator’s description of how they built the phonograph. Edison, for example, had used a metal cylinder with fine spiralled grooves over which he attached a piece of foil (Gelatt 20). Rilke uses the improved version of the phonograph, in replacing the foil with wax, but leaves the physics behind the recorded sound a mystery, as the “some” cylinder just happens to be there. The improvisational manner in which the funnel [Trichter] is put together and the wax poured on the cylinder “as well as we could” emphasizes an amateurish rendering of a machine that still produces successful results. A machine which records sound, and in so doing depends on precisely following tiny nuances of the grooved lines to play it back accurately, can be put together in a most imprecise manner that resembles creative improvisation in art. The phonograph mixes writing, music, and language by transcribing a sound—either a tone or spoken word—into a very precise text, and the text back into sound. The line the phonograph needle draws acts as a text taken from the physical nature of the sound as it is being recorded, and acts as the moment of mystery for the machine. Stuckenschmidt’s description of the gramophone grooves shows how precise this text must be, “The tone colors, pitches and volume are depicted by infinitely small variations in the wave-line” (14). Rilke’s machine thus “writes” an exact text onto the wax in order to play back the same sound it recorded. Sound and text are mixed in the narrator’s fascination with the machine, as he describes in his recollection of its impression: In a manner of speaking, one stood across from a new, tender place of reality out of which something far superior yet inexpressibly neophytic and quasi searching for help appealed to us children. At that time and through the subsequent years I thought it would be just this independent sound pulled away from us and stored outside that would remain unforgettable … Not that, not the tone from the funnel had more weight, as will be shown, in my memory, but those drawings engraved on the cylinder remained far more peculiar to me. (275)

_____________ Gläser eingekochten Obstes zu verwenden pflegt, verklebte, auf diese Weise eine schwingende Membran improvisierend, in deren Mitte, mit dem nächsten Griff, eine Borste aus einer stärkeren Kleiderbürste, senkrecht abstehend, eingesteckt wurde. Mit diesem Wenigen war die eine Seite der geheimnisvollen Maschine hergestellt....es fand sich eben irgendein Zylinder, den wir, so gut und so schlecht uns das gelingen mochte, mit einer dünnen Schicht Kerzenwachs überzogen.”

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The pupils’ initial fascination with the sound of their own voices shifts to the text that remains in the narrator’s memory, in spite of the new phenomenon of recorded sound. The superiority of the played-back voices can be explained in an earlier text by Rilke, “Notes on the Melody of Things” (1898), in which he uses the term “melody of the background” to describe the world and things in the world as if it were the gold background of a medieval painting. In this text, the melody comprises everything in life, and one must recognize it in order to understand the world. The biggest mistake people make, Rilke maintains, “comes from how the people search for the common within them instead of in the things behind them, in the light, in the landscape, in the beginning, and in death” (112). The “common,” one learns in the text, is the melody that connects all aspects of human life “in the things and smells, feelings and pasts, dawns and longings” (107), and things as well as nature “Be it the singing of a lamp or the voice of a current, be it the breath of evening or the groans of the ocean” (106). This melody is not to be found in the interior of the self or things, as “content” to the form of the body, but rather as a part of that body’s background, as if in a painting. Like the “melody of the background” that stands behind one, the recorded voices that come from the funnel are no longer in the pupils, or a point of expression from within, but rather come to them from outside, as a background. Such a sound offers the children a version of their own voices superior in its outer position to that they normally hear within them. The sound is mixed with sight as the line becomes a text for the realization of voices. Instead of the mysterious sound the narrator expects to remember, he remembers the sight of the line that stores the sound. Of the few who have written on this essay, both Kittler and Stopka, albeit with differing analysis of what it means, mention the relationship between text and sound in “Original Sound” as a form of intermediality—speaking, writing, music, and reading (Kittler 69, Stopka 200). The line acts as a text and bundles in its own physicality sound which otherwise appears ephemeral. According to Kittler, the technically encoded line on the phonograph cylinder does not signify a subject until it is realized, through a machine, into sound (71). As Eisenberg mentions with regards to the phonograph, sound becomes a thing as soon as it is recorded (13). The “thingness” in sound, which could be described physically in the way the waves travel in certain spaces, is related to sight as a result of the phonograph impression. The phonograph does not make a sound in the same manner as a traditional instrument, but “reads” and “writes” a text based on the words or music someone records. In the indentation the phonograph needle leaves behind in the wax as it records, spoken words be-

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comes transcribed, stored in a visible and tangible object, within a text as abstract as a musical tone. The visual rather than the aural memory of the classroom experiment connects the moments of the narrator’s association of the technologically traced line with a naturally occurring one. The line in the phonograph’s wax cylinder comes to the narrator’s mind again as he examines a human skull in pursuit of his interest in anatomy: The skull’s coronal suture ... has — let’s say — a certain similarity to the dense, sinuous line that a phonograph needle engraves in the device’s receiving and rotating cylinder. Now, if one deceives this needle and, when it should play back, drives it over a track that does not originate from the graphic translation of a tone, but something naturally existing in and of itself — alright, let’s say it: even if it were (for example) the coronal suture — : what would happen? — A tone would have to result, a sequence of tones, a music … (702)

The narrator associates the two lines and exchanges one for the other. However, the lines are not identical—the event of sound, either through speaking or singing, determines the line the phonograph needle etches into the wax on the rotating cylinder, whereas the coronal suture, as the narrator points out, “naturally exists in and of itself.” As a naturally occurring object, it offers an expansion of the technological possibilities in (re)producing sound. When the machine plays back the sound saved in the wax cylinder, the phonograph needle follows the line it had previously transcribed. The coronal suture, imagined as a “sound text” on the skull, however, already exists and has not been created or composed from a known word or tone. By removing the phonograph from the line transcribed from a sound previously made for the very purpose of that transcription to a line already present on the human skull, the narrator replaces the “artifical” text with a natural text that is part of the form and structure of the body. Its placement on the outer part of the skull and therefore outside the mind also challenges nineteenth-century ideas between outer and inner. As described in “Notes on the Melody of Things,” one could not possibly find this text mixing language and music in the interior realms—the content of the mind and body, but outside, as part of its form, and almost literally, in the background of creativity. The text “Original Sound” itself is musical in its structure. Fifteen years lapse from the time the narrator and his classmates assemble a phonograph and the narrator’s close examination of a human skull. The same period of time again lapses before the narrator describes the association in the text, resulting in the essay. Time as it relates to rhythm is a natural part of music, as Hanslick emphasizes in On the Musically Beautiful, and a common topic in many other texts about nineteenth-century music, pointing to the influence of Schelling’s philosophy (see Krell). Exact

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tempo for one thing is the main goal for the metronome and one of the aspects of music Stuckenschmidt believes can be perfected through machines. Rhythm can be described as a natural part of the physics of music, when one considers that tones are movements of sound waves through time and space. The narrator’s idea to exchange the coronal suture for the technologically composed line develops in his mind, as he describes it as “a rhythmic singularity of my imagination” (701), from the visual impression of the line, the association of that line to the coronal suture, and the mediation of that association in the form of a prose text. In addition to time, the structure also resembles different arrangements of a melody. The idea comes to him during these thirty years in a “stubborn recurrence by which it surprised me now here and now there in the most varied relationships without any connection to my other tasks” (701). The narrator’s thinking pattern allows the line to recur as a leitmotiv that changes and develops in different relationships at each entrance, as a melody is developed throughout a piece in different keys and inversions. His mixture of machine and nature, mind and form, comes to him periodically, the active development of the idea from acquaintance with the phonograph line, acquaintance with the coronal suture, and the communication of his association, expressed as a steady rhythm of fifteen-year intervals, the idea itself a combination of a musical thought and a resulting text. Nature, just as it did in the early nineteenth century, plays an important role in Rilke’s essay. The prefix Ur, meaning “original” in the context of Ursprung (origin), in the title Ur-Geräusch (original sound) brings up a host of associations with philosophical ideas about nature and origins, from G.H. Schubert’s Views from the Night Side of Science and Darwin’s Origin of the Species to Nietzsche’s version of Schopenhauer’s Will and Kant’s thing in itself as the “primeval one” (Ur-Einen) (from Birth of Tragedy). In many early nineteenth-century texts, music as abstract tones comes from everywhere in nature, such as the surrounding countryside in Novalis’s “The Apprentices at Saïs,” or Lindhorst’s garden in Hoffmann’s “The Golden Flower Pot.” This trend continues throughout the nineteenth century, including tones from the woods in Georg Büchner’s “Lenz” and the singing telegraph wires as the musical part of the landscape in Gerhart Hauptmann’s “Bahnwärther Thiel.” In all of these prose works, nature’s musical sounds can best be described as a random, abstract sound which has not been “artfully arranged into a melody,” Hanslick’s requirement for tones to become music. Nevertheless, the tones in prose works of the nineteenth century that emanate from plants, gardens, rocks, and landscapes stem from the idea of an original sound of nature, most prominent in the philosophy of Schelling, Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language,

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and also taken up in Forkel’s General History of Music. In Hoffmann’s “The Automata,” both Ludwig and Ferdinand discuss the potential certain instruments, such as the early piano, may have in recreating the sound of nature, (Laut der Natur or Naturlaut). By naming the result of a phonograph needle following the natural line on a human skull Ur-Geräusch, Rilke places this nineteenth-century idea of original sound in a very physical aspect of nature, most importantly, an aspect of our own nature we can not reach ourselves. Such a placement of the original sound of nature sets music’s origin outside of phenomenal experience. The location of Rilke’s melody [TonFolge] in the skull refers to the “melody of the background” in “Notes on the Melody of Things” as an example against the, for Rilke, mistaken search in the nineteenth century for the self in the interior of things, because in doing so, people “only lose themselves” (112). Such an understanding of music and nature echoes Schopenhauer’s assessment of music’s ability to exist independent of human perception of the world (370), and shows how this can happen with the aid of a machine. The earlier nineteenth-century search for the original sound of nature, as Ferdinand and Ludwig described in “The Automata,” is a search for a musical tone inherent in nature that, when sounded, communicates with the human spirit. In Hoffmann’s texts, this tone exists in interiority as much as in gardens, plants, and automata, and the mere sounding of the tone awakens the tone within the listener. Rilke’s texts, on the other hand, place pure musical sound outside of human experience—more profoundly than G.H. Schubert, whose Views from the Night Sides of Science indicated humans are merely out of touch with a once understood harmony with nature. In “Original Sound,” the idea of an original music removes the sound of nature from human experience in a manner that denies one the ability to hear one’s own melody—for although the sound exists and is already “written” in the skull, it requires a machine to make it audible and its location lies beyond the limits of aural perception. In replacing the cylinder with the skull, the text also exchanges the imperfect “living” sound with the poetic potential of the sound of a “dead” object. The relationship between death—or lifelessness, and the artist becomes more obvious here than in Heine’s “Florentine Nights,” where the metaphors of non-living such as marble statues reveal their inner truth more readily than vital figures and artists who mask their inner selves. The sound from the skull, as the children’s voices, would remain outside the individual it belongs to. An attempt to trace the phonograph needle on the coronal suture implies the necessity for death in the creation of a “true” art. This should not be understood literally, but rather as Schopenhauer also indicates in The World as Will and Representation (375),

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the separation of the individual from the whole in musical terms. As a metaphor for truth in art, death, a separation of human intent from the work of art allows the lack of purposefulness that comes out of the deathlike as it occurs the way Maximilian describes his preference for marble statues in Heine’s novella. The composition lacks a living composer and the realization from a living performer. The moment of art shows up only in the still creation of a machine on a skull. Furthermore, it is a machine that, unlike Heine’s depiction of Paganini or Hoffmann’s automata, does not have any human form or mimic life yet allows for the caprice that Hoffmann’s aesthetics demands from musicians. The music in Florentine Nights that turns the ladies in the audience to marble, thereby revealing their inner life, comes from death and the machine in Rilke. It becomes a potential poetic answer to Heine’s fear about the piano—the “machineessence,” the phonograph—brings out the hidden melody of the skull, which reveals the “melody of the background,” or the spirit of all things in life and nature. Rilke’s “Original Sound” mixes the hunt for the elemental sound of nature in Hoffmann’s texts with the dead or death-like artist in Heine’s “Florentine Nights.” In its ability to record the human voice, the phonograph takes on the human spirit Heine sees in the violin in Lutezia. The combination of a phonograph and the human skull produces a sound found in nature, assuming that the coronal suture would produce such a sound, and this sound is part of nature rather than an imitation. The tension between life and death present in Hoffmann’s and Heine’s texts dissolves in Rilke’s essay. The root of musical art is no longer a product of the living and conscious genius, nor is listening a living experience; both take place within the realm of objects and death. Rather than the activity of the mind, it is the sound itself that comes alive, and only with the aid of a machine capable of playing music. The sound inheres in the physical space within the skull, but outside the space reserved for the soul, mind or heart in the nineteenth century. If the natural object, the coronal suture, only preserves sound, then original music in Rilke’s experiment is not entirely autonomous, but belongs to both the natural and the mechanical worlds. As we have shown in the analysis of “The Automata” and “The Sandman” in chapter two, the machine already becomes part of the ideal organic sound in Hoffmann. In Hoffmann’s texts, the ideal music is not the human voice, and does not come from the human’s interior, but is nature written onto the strings of the musical instrument. Only those musicians who pacify their own egos to perform the music as nature brings it to the instrument have true poetic talent, as Heine mentions in his preference for the violin over the piano and Chopin’s poetic nature as a musician over Liszt’s more

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boasting style. The aspect of music which renders performance mechanical is the human’s attempt to show off virtuosic skill, artistry, and to elicit certain emotions in the audience. Death or lifelessness is therefore necessary in Hoffmann and Heine to avoid the performer’s narcissism. For Hoffmann, the performers, regardless of how “pure” their voices sound, for example, in “Councillor Krespel” and in “Don Juan,” die as soon as ownership clashes with their talent. The android Olimpia also “dies”— she is torn apart as the result of the artist’s attempting to claim ownership, thereby denying their work of art its autonomous spirit. The phonograph needle in Rilke’s “Original Sound” likewise becomes part of the organic, as the “singing lamps” are part of the “melody of the background” and has the advantage over the human artist in its lack of ego. Thus although the sound itself must have the machine to make its existence known, it is autonomous from human creativity. The coronal suture, acting as a text, becomes the “magic word” in Eichendorff’s poem12 that triggers the world’s song. Since the narrator imagines the sound the phonograph needle awakens as music rather than simply a “noise,” music succeeds the voice through the mixture of machine and outer frame. In Rilke’s experiment, there exists neither ego in performance nor human expectations in listening. Live composition, performance, and listening remain excluded from the production of this original personal melody, a potentially perfect music. In its ability to record all sounds, be it musical performance or a person talking, the phonograph technologically brings music and language together. Both spoken words and musical tones could be recorded from nearly identical phonographic texts that resemble neither musical notation nor words. Rilke’s “Original Sound” mixes language and music in two ways, by connecting the voices the children hear as language to the imaginary organic sound as music, and describing the poet’s task to uncover the “melody of the background” in the equal combination of the senses. The line on the human skull represents only the potential of musical sound, rather than its actuality. Here, Rilke’s texts, “Original Sound,” “Notes on the Melody of Things,” and “Marginalia on Friedrich Nietzsche” take a more philosophical approach to music aesthetics than Heine’s and Hoffmann’s stories. In “Marginalia on Friedrich Nietzsche,” all art, including music, represents this all-encompassing melody that unites everything (172), yet music itself, insofar as it relates to feeling, is a “betrayal” of people rather than the things of the world, where the melody of the _____________ 12

“Und die Welt hebt an zu singen/Triffst du nur das Zauberwort” (and the world begins to sing/If only you find the magic word) from Eichendorff’s poem “Wünschelrute.” Joseph von Eichendorff, Gedichte (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997), 32.

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background is to be found. Poetry [Lyrik] then bridges the feeling with the things and connects people to the world (171). In reverse of the earlier nineteenth century, poetry in Rilke’s text is the unifying art, rather than that which realizes and shows music, the unifying force of people and nature. While music still exists in the background, it is poetry in Rilke’s texts about music and poetry that connects what one thinks music represents (feeling), with what it actually is (things and the world). “Original Sound” shows the poet’s task to unify the melody of the background instead of music as an art with people. In order to do this, the poet should follow the example of Arabic poetry in its “seemingly” equal treatment of all five senses. The narrator criticizes the European focus on sight, leaving out the other four aspects of sensorial experience: ... it first occured to me how unequal and singular the present European poet helps himself to these informers out of which almost only one, sight, overburdened with the world constantly dominates him; how narrow the contribution that the inattentive ear wafts toward him, not to speak of the lack of participation of the other senses that only work in aloofness and with many interruptions in their areas of limited usefulness.13 (702)

In the context of the phonograph experiment, the word Gesicht, given its opposition to Gehör and the combination of sight and sound on the cylinder, translates as “vision,” although it also means “face.” In regard to the large amount of early-nineteenth-century poems with music, this seems to discount the weight tones may have in a poem. Novalis’s Heinrich in Heinrich von Ofterdingen hears music on his way to his song contest, and Eichendorff’s poetry is full of musical references. However, hearing, the sense perception necessary for music, is translated into sight in many ways, such as the connection between the eyes and the musical sound in Hoffmann’s tales, the scenes Heine’s protagonist Maximilian imagines as he listens to Paganini, the deaf painter Lysander’s ability to “see” music, and the uncle’s attempt in Goethe’s Lehrjahre to isolate the sounds of the instruments from the sight of the musicians by closing his eyes while listening. Sight occurs in music in non-literary ways, too, such as notes on the page, relationship between tones and colors, and as stressed in “Original Sound,” the line on the phonograph. Sight thus overpowers the other senses, including hearing, in Rilke’s assessment of European poetry, his _____________ 13

“… fiel es mir zuerst auf, wie ungleich und einzeln der jetzige europäische Dichter sich dieser Zuträger bedient, von denen fast nur der eine, das Gesicht, mit Welt überladen, ihn beständig überwältigt; wie gering ist dagegen schon der Beitrag, den das unaufmerksame Gehör ihm zuflößt, gar nicht zu reden von der Teilnahmslosigkeit der übrigen Sinne, die nur abseits und mit vielen Unterbrechungen in ihren nützlich eingeschränkten Gebieten sich betätigen.”

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own poetic tradition, and leaves taste, smell, and feeling to play a marginal role, if at all. The complete poem, however, can only exist under the condition That the world grasped simultaneously with the five arms appears under one particular aspect at that supernatural level that is that of the poem. (702-3)

It must encompass all senses and treat them with equal importance as a way to experience the world and the things of the world. Not only does the poet have the task of combining the five senses simultaneously, the poet should, in his or her elevated stance, provide insight into experience beyond the immediately perceivable: If one depicts the entire region of phenomenal experience, including the areas beyond us, in a complete circle, it would immediately become obvious just how much larger the black sectors are that illustrate what we can not experience, measured against the unequal light sections that correspond to the spotlights of sensuousness. (703)

The shadowed section of Rilke’s model represents the things in the world that exist, but that we can not perceive, such as the coronal suture, and this section is far larger than the “uneven light areas” within human sensory experience. As Stopka mentions in her study on noise, Rilke’s aim for poetry in this passage is to bring out the background melody he describes in “Notes on the Melody of Things,” because this melody encompasses all things and all life (182-3). Rilke’s metaphors of light and shadow to describe these areas refer back to earlier nineteenth-century perceptions. The shadowed area beyond human perception goes back to Plato’s analogy of the cave in the Republic, the basis for Kant’s thing in itself and Schopenhauer’s art as representation of ideas of the Will. The darker sector, what lies outside the cave, represents the truth of what exists in the world that we do not know through the senses, like the deaf painter in “Florentine Nights” who is able to capture the true likeness of Paganini in a light-and-shadow drawing. In “Notes” and “Marginalia,” Rilke suggests that the things of the world we do not know have their own melody, which some of us can hear, but many never recognize. The completed poem, according to “Original Sound” allows us to experience the things in the world we can not immediately encounter with our own senses. Technological advancements to enhance sense perception, according to Rilke, are limited because they focus only on expanding the abilities of one sense at a time. Stopka relies on this to show Rilke’s scepticism toward technology and the use of technology as a way of perceiving the world, whereas the artist is the better technician (180-81). Stopka bases this interpretation on the following passage in “Original Sound”: The question arises here whether the researcher’s work is able to further substantially the extensiveness of these sectors at the levels we accept? Whether the ac-

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quisition of the microscope, the telescope, and so many mechanisms that maximize or minimize the senses, come to rest in a different layer, since most of the thusly gained augmentation can not be penetrated by the senses, therefore can not be really “experienced.” (704)

Rilke’s question focuses on the ability of scientific research to expand phenomenal experience beyond the “light sectors” of his model. Stopka’s focus remains mostly on the sceptical nature of the question and the doubt whether or not this is possible, but she does not seem to consider the essay’s beginning experiment with the phonograph as a suggestion for the poet rather than the scientist. Even the artist could not realize in concrete terms such an extension of the conventional boundaries of human perception, as Rilke writes, because they would not be able to chart the “personal gain in area on the open, general map” (704). The artist’s imagined sense perception, therefore, is personal, and does not reflect the general model for human perception. The scepticism is as much toward the artist’s as the scientist’s work. The mixture of art and technology, however, provides the potential for the general enhancement of more than one sense organ and allows these senses to mix. Such is the vision for the phonograph experiment at the beginning of the essay, as the text answers the question about the enhancement of senses through technological instruments, Now if one looks about for a means to establish the ultimately exigent connection between the oddly separated areas, what could be more promising than that experiment suggested in the first pages of this recollection? (704)

The phonograph experiment, to which the above quote refers, mixes sight and sound, two of the five senses, as well as technology and art, and imagines a resulting music from the phonograph’s funnel that goes back to the original sound of nature and Rilke’s “melody of the background,” encompassing all things—organic and artificial. However, the instruments listed, the microscope and telescope are ones which concentrate on vision, the sense the narrative voice in Rilke’s text states is most important to European poetry. The poet in “Original Sound” must also attempt to treat the five senses equally rather than emphasizing vision. The text itself magnifies this reliance by turning the phonograph, a machine used to capture sound and enhance hearing, into a “sight” machine. It focuses on the visual objects the machine produces, namely the machine’s materials, the line on the cylinder, the coronal suture, and even the irregular cylindrical shape of the skull itself. The key part of the association between the classroom experiment and the coronal suture is vision, and the narrator concentrates on the line, a visual effect of the process of recording and playing back sound, instead of concentrating on the voice, the recorded sound as he believed he would remember.

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Furthermore, the narrator is unable to imagine with the same clarity the resulting sound from the visual connection between phonograph needle and coronal suture, because the narrator, caught in the European poetic tradition, can not grasp the other four senses with the same force as vision. The experiment, therefore, remains for the narrator too “narrow and specific” to carry it out in the “free movements of the fantasy” (704). It is not the technology itself, as Stopka maintains, but the way the scientist or artist uses that technology. Just like art music in “Marginalia,” technology has the problem of focusing too much on one aspect of life and magnifying this aspect to mistakenly mean all of life. The experiment remains in the fantasy, but even in the poet’s fantasy, the idea is too limited to two of the five senses, and too specific in its identification of the “melody of the background” coming only from the one source, the human skull. Thus the original music should remain untried in order to preserve its ephemeral and autonomous nature, autonomous not only from other arts and human creativity, but also from scientific discovery. Such a discovery would further confine the vaguely imagined sound to only one specific domain—the combination of sight and sound. Even the imagined result would limit it to a certain type of sound. Therefore the vagueness in defining the nature of the sound remains: a noise, a tone, a sequence of tones, a music. The poetry of that moment remains in its imagined potential, rather than the real or imagined object which would be produced in the outcome of such an experiment. In potential, it is allowed to reach beyond the limits of sensory experience and become the imaginary original sound of nature, the “melody of the background.” Music, therefore, must remain in the fantasy, for as a communication of all things in the world, it itself becomes a thing and too limited in our sensory perception. Only in the imagination does music cross sensory barriers, and as it remains unrealized by human performance or machine, it allows the poet to perceive the world beyond the human being’s limited phenomenal experience. Rilke’s ideal phonograph and Stuckenschmidt’s and Adorno’s ideal use for the gramophone present an opposite viewpoint for which sense becomes stronger, sight or sound. Rilke concentrates on the text the phonograph imprints as it records, whereas Stuckenschmidt entertains the idea of creating that text without a musical performance—writing the imprints into the miniscule grooves of the disc rather than letting the needle react to live sound. Although both ideas provide the machine with an abstract text which is not recorded, Rilke’s focus on the line as the main association for his ideas bring out the importance of sight, whereas Stucken-

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schmidt’s outcome as a “perfect” interpretation of the composer’s work emphasizes sound as a result of the text. With the invention of the phonograph, music no longer has to be a social event, whether a concert in front of a large audience or a small group in a private home. Recordings can be done in the closed space of a studio and listened to at home without having to invite the musicians to play. The player-piano, on the other hand, offers a more perfect sound but still remains a visible object and still requires a player. With the phonograph or gramophone, for the first time, one could listen to all sorts of musical sounds caused by the same mechanics, namely the needle following the microscopic nuances in the grooves of the disc or cylinder, whether one hears a voice speaking, singing, a piano, a flute, or a violin. It is no longer necessary to close one’s eyes as the uncle in Goethe’s Lehrjahre does in order to block the exact mechanics of musical sound being made. The concept behind the phonograph or gramophone in its more practical application to music is thus a machine that takes away the “sight” and allows, in the absence of the visual movement of the bows or hammers on the strings, a musical performance to appear truly nonmechanical. The art usually written on the phonograph cylinder and realized again as sound is a performance that limits musical experience to the ear in the moment of the realization of the recording. Likewise, a story, when spoken aloud into the machine’s horn and played back, is also limited to the ear; two arts which were first joined as sight become the sole domain of the ear. In spite of the overriding emphases in “Original Sound” on vision with regard to a machine made to capture and “eternalize” sound, hearing without vision becomes the dominate factor in the phonograph. Although Rilke focuses on the visual aspects of the machine’s text, it can only offer the imagined potential for meaning that disappears once the text is realized as sound.

Conclusions Throughout much of the nineteenth century, music in German-language texts is a communication of spirit from performer to listener, but the definitions of spirit change with the developments of new musical instruments, particularly machines that play more or less by themselves. Kant argues in his Critique of Judgment, that all beautiful arts go through a mechanical process in its production, “without which the spirit that must be free in art and enlivens the work on its own, would have no body and would completely evaporate” (§ 43). In order for the art to be free, seemingly capricious, and full of spirit, there has to be a certain feeling of work or mechanism involved. Kant uses as an example correct language, prosody, and meter for mechanism in poetry, which he considers the highest of all arts (see §53). Music, in its inherent need to be related not only to work in its production, but to instruments, presents an interesting dilemma in the role early Romantics give it as an organic and sublime art. In an understanding of the mechanical versus the organic such as one finds in Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenäums-Fragmente1 (122) or Wackenroder’s Berglinger, the mechanical means of producing music gets in the way of the communication “from one spirit to the other” as Nathalie explains to Wilhelm in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wackenroder 452, Goethe 585). Instrumental music must be played on some type of instrument, whether it is as mechanically simple as a flute or harp, or as complex as a modern piano. However, when that instrument plays on its own, a paradox ensues between “mechanical” playing, when the performer merely goes through the motions of playing it without expression, and the potential for automated musical instruments, by means of their interior mechanisms to elicit a perfected, sublime performance with the composer’s intended expression intact. The literary texts of Hoffmann, Heine, and Rilke in this study show how in many cases, only the machine, lacking a human performer’s intent could produce the desired outcome for the full potential of the instrument, whereas those who actually played like a machine brought little to the performance. Music, as an art dependent on instruments and formal guidelines such as melody, harmonic structures, _____________ 1

“Verstand ist mechanischer, Witz ist chemischer, Genie ist organischer Geist.”

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rhythm and phrasing, is perhaps one of the most mechanical arts, but as I have tried to show in the previous chapters, machines in these literary works are less inclined to give a “mechanical” performance than the living human interpreter. Two problems human interpreters add to musical performances in these texts are their own intentions in expression and their desire to show off their technical virtuosity. A certain amount of technical skill is required to play any instrument or to sing, but developments in keyboard instruments such as the piano brought a surge in technical training, particularly for young children. Technical skill became a dominant factor in music education by the mid-nineteenth century, and writers and music critics searched for a balance between technical prowess and the expression of human spirit in abstract tones. For many, the necessary criterion to meet this balance was to perform in a way that hid intentions toward a desired effect on the audience or to play without exhibiting too much the flexibility of fingers and wrists on the keyboard or the strings and bow of the violin. Instead, the performance was supposed to appear free and capricious to the listener. Caprice is one of Hoffmann’s main criteria for well-performed and composed pieces, at a time when improvisation—composing while playing—was standard musical practice, especially for solo keyboard artists such as Mozart and Beethoven.2 Yet if the act of improvisation is based on recognized harmonic rules and strict formal structures, then the machine, which could improvise on these rules, offered a type of performance that appeared without plan and technically perfect. Music, therefore, comes from the outside in an android’s improvisation and communicates to the listener. In Hoffmann’s puppet-machine of the performer-composer, it reconnects the human with poetic fantasy with the world. The poetic fantasy and inclination allows the listener-poet to recognize this outside musical spirit enough to internalize it, as happens in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s idealized machines and the poets’ responses to them in “The Sandman” and “The Automata.” Improvisation begins to die out by the mid-nineteenth century in musical performance, but in Heine’s and Rilke’s literary texts, it exists in another element tied to the production of musical sound. In “Florentine Nights,” improvisation occurs in seeing the mechanical means to produce music and listening to the music. Maximilian sees shadows and light move across the faces of the female members of the audience, revealing more of their inner life in their appearance as marble statues than outside _____________ 2

See Hildebrandt, Der Roman des Klaviers, 37-38 and Gerig’s chapters on the various lateeighteenth and early-nineteenth-century composer-pianists (Gerig, Famous Pianists and Their Technique, 40-67).

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the concert hall. In addition, Maximilian’s own fantasy is a visual response to the music, shifting the capricious element of the performance from the actual music to the listener’s subjective and visual reaction to the music. Improvisation linked to playing music or listening to it has no room in interpretations of late nineteenth and early-twentieth-century compositions with strict instructions in regards to tempo, dynamics, or phrasing. Rilke’s memory of the phonograph, however, includes the “free and capricious” art music represents in Hoffmann. The manner in which the narrator and his classmates assemble the phonograph allows for approximate experimentation and the possible mistakes no longer acceptable in a musical performance. A machine made through improvisation, therefore, was used to record and provide a perfect performance to the masses. Strict rules for performance eliminated the criterion of caprice, because the late nineteenth and early-twentieth-century performer had to play with caution and purpose in order to avoid false interpretation. In the midst of nineteenth-century trends in technical virtuosity, music was still seeking its place as an autonomous art in the Platonic hierarchy of the beautiful arts, and philosophers, such as Schopenhauer, as well as music theorists, such as Hanslick, attempted to provide a definition of music that separates it from its apparent dependency on other arts, especially poetry. Music, however, remains in the literary works by Hoffmann, Heine, and Rilke an art with an inherent connection to poetry and language. In Hoffmann, music and poetry come from the same source, although they are separate arts. Music, for Hoffmann, expresses spirit and emotions without imitating them. Imitation of emotions came from a long tradition that some late-eighteenth-century theorists, Hoffmann’s instructor Johann Friedrich Reichardt among them, attempted to change. Music was no longer merely the rhetorical art intended to arouse certain passions in its listeners but an autonomous art similar to poetry. For Schopenhauer, music is still a language of emotions, but is not represented in ideas humans can understand and can not be described adequately in words—an idea Hanslick takes further, claiming music does not communicate anything but a creative arrangement of tones, and is therefore not a language at all. In an anecdote in On the French Stage, Heine claims that the best “argument” he once heard about aesthetical matters in music was sung (285), thereby separating music from language, but his novella “Florentine Nights” shows a connection between musical performance and storytelling. In Rilke, music and language are combined in one machine where the phonographic text for words is as abstract as that for music, and the poet’s job is to reveal the Ur-Musik in its ability to encompass everything beyond what humans can perceive.

152

Conclusions

Music loses its ideal connection to poetry once the performer emphasizes the mechanics of the piece, from the intentions to imitate affects or to show off a run of octaves played legato and fortissimo to at times the visual aspect of the instrument being played. The paradox between the human element in music and human limitation in reaching these aesthetic ideals led to a situation in the early twentieth century in which theorists such as Stuckenschmidt could envision a musical world without interpreters and the ideal original sound of nature, the source for musical composition in literature of the nineteenth century, can not be heard even in the imagination. Music, and the role of musicians, thus changes throughout the literature of the nineteenth century, from the outpouring of the spirit from one interior realm to the representation of everything beyond human perception. While Hoffmann’s, Heine’s, and Rilke’s texts are by no means exemplary of all texts about music in the nineteenth century, they do point to a trajectory of what happens in music aesthetics, technological developments, and the literary relationship to music, by looking at trends and developments in music aesthetics, musical performances, and musical instruments. Music and its relationship to writing and poetry thus go through many changes in the nineteenth century. In Hoffmann’s texts, music and poetry, when communicated together, provided a true art. The musicians, for instance Johannes Kreisler, Ritter Gluck, or Ludwig, are composers who try to come to terms with the human element in machines and instruments much better equipped at producing the sound closest to nature than the human voice. Rilke’s phonograph also attempts to find that harmony in nature, but in Rilke, this original music, a combination of machine and the unreachable part of the human body, would only limit the poet’s ability to treat all five senses equally beyond human sensorial capacity if it were realized. Human limitation thus becomes a disadvantage to musical performance, in spite of Hanslick’s insistence that human spirit must remain in the music in order for it to be an art. Heine, like Rilke and many other writers about music, was not a musician. His critiques nevertheless point to the rising trend in piano virtuosity and the effects of the piano on the more poetic aspects of music. Like Hoffmann’s Johannes Kreisler, Heine views the piano as an instrument which produces machines, in contrast to the violin, which still requires a human interpreter. His critiques against Liszt may be at the heart of his anti-piano statements, but the way he criticizes the virtuosic pianists as automata does not encompass all machines or all pianists. Chopin, for instance, escapes this judgment and instead becomes for Heine one of the most “poetic” of his contempora-

Conclusions

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ries. Here Heine listens in his critique with the same subjective style Maximilian uses in “Florentine Nights,” pointing to the connection in the listener’s reaction to the piece, even though Maximilian wonders at Paganini’s automaton-like appearance on stage. Both Chopin and Paganini provide a “poetic” performance for the listener in a connection that also alludes to their skill beyond other musicians, including the most celebrated virtuosos of the time. Virtuosos such as Franz Liszt push the limits of human ability on the piano, turning it into a machine to be pounded on much like a typewriter, as in Kästner’s poem, and create a situation, as Hanslick describes, in which only the rare talent can meet the audience’s expectations in technique and expression. Stuckenschmidt, Adorno, and some of the earlytwentieth-century composers viewed machines that recorded musical sound in a positive light. In spite of the reproducing piano’s popularity among composers, the gramophone held the potential for yet greater control over the performance, making the piece of music entirely the composer’s art. By the twentieth century, the philosophical “original sound” is no longer simply natural in the capabilities of the machine, but a perfected musical art which performers strive to achieve but must fail, like Caribaldi’s circus troupe in Thomas Bernhard’s play Force of Habit. Instead of the players bringing together a rehearsal of Schubert’s Trout Quintet, Caribaldi and the audience hear the music over the radio. With recording, listening to music has become a private rather than social act. In the performer’s failure for perfection, music becomes mechanical, taken over only by the machine where the listening protagonist can truly experience the perfected realization of musical sound. As we have seen in these texts, the human struggle to achieve the perfect art, music, begins its demise as soon as music wins its autonomy from poetry and language.

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Index absolute music, 51, 78 Adorno, Theodor W., 67, 80, 91, 127-30, 133, 134, 147, 153, 154, 155 Aeolian harp, 17, 19, 43, 90 Affektenlehre, 5-7, 12, 13, 15, 27, 28, 30, 76, 154 Andersen, Hans Christian, 20, 84, 86 android, 4, 12, 18, 35, 39, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 57, 61, 62, 64, 86, 117, 143, 150, 160 automated musical instruments, 17, 18, 20-2, 26, 37, 46-8, 54, 55, 60, 84, 87, 90, 91, 119, 135 automaton, 9, 10, 12, 18, 23, 28, 35-7, 39, 40, 47, 48, 54, 64, 105, 114, 116, 153 Bach, C.P.E., 6, 13, 30, 96 Bach, J.S., 8, 94 beautiful arts, 4, 29, 30, 32, 71, 149, 151 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 5, 16, 21, 25, 33, 51, 52, 68, 96, 116, 117, 120, 124, 128, 129, 134, 150, 154, 166 Bernhard, Thomas, 153 Busoni, Ferruccio, 127, 133, 156 Chopin, Frederic, 1, 93, 98, 11820, 123, 142, 152, 153 Czerny, Carl, 89, 96, 97, 125, 167 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 103, 105, 143, 144, 155, 156 emotions, 1, 2, 5- 8, 12, 14-16, 2332, 45, 73, 74, 76, 77, 83, 115, 143, 151

Exekutant, 101 expression, 1, 2, 5, 7-10, 12, 1315, 17, 19, 24, 26, 30, 31, 33, 35-8, 45, 47, 52, 59, 72-4, 76, 77, 80, 83, 84, 90, 91, 94, 108, 118, 123, 126, 128, 133, 135, 138, 149, 150, 153 Forkel, Johann Nikolaus, 6, 8, 1315, 30, 32, 47, 60, 73, 76, 89, 141, 157 Geist. See spirit Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 25, 144, 148, 149, 156, 158 gramophone, 18, 100, 124, 130-5, 137, 147, 148, 153 Grillparzer, Franz, 85, 158 Hanslick, Eduard, 3, 65-70, 72-91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 105, 110-12, 118-20, 122, 123-7, 134, 139, 140, 151-3, 155, 158 harmonium, 136 Haydn, Joseph, 8, 16, 17, 22, 52, 68, 85, 87, 94, 111, 130, 131, 134, 163, 165 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 16, 30, 65-7, 74-6, 79, 80, 95, 106, 159, 167 Heine, Heinrich, 1, 3, 4, 10, 65-7, 70, 88, 90, 92-4, 96-103, 105-7, 110, 111, 114-25, 127, 134, 141-4, 149-5, 157, 159-64, 166, 167 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 6, 8, 9, 13-15, 19, 22, 23, 25, 27, 30, 32, 47, 49, 50, 60, 73, 140, 159

Index

Hoffmann, E.T.A., 1, 3, 4, 6, 1012, 16, 18, 19, 27, 28, 31-44, 46, 48-64, 68-70, 74, 78, 82-6, 92-4, 101-3, 105-7, 110, 111, 114, 117, 119, 120, 123, 124, 126, 127, 130, 135, 136, 140-4, 149-52, 154-6, 158-67 hurdy-gurdy, 18, 45, 46 imitation, 5-8, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, 22, 27-31, 33-5, 37, 38, 41, 448, 51, 65, 67-70, 73, 76, 86, 142 instrumental music, 1, 15-17, 26, 29, 30, 32, 35, 41, 43, 44, 51, 52, 54, 69, 75, 87, 94, 97, 115 Jacquet-Droz, Pierre and Henri Louis, 10-12, 17, 69, 87 Jean Paul, 51, 68, 155, 165 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 3, 16, 27-31, 36, 47, 66, 70, 71, 95, 114, 140, 145, 149, 160 Kaufmann, Friedrich, 40 Kempelen, Wolfgang von, 9 Kleist, Heinrich von, 2, 114, 135, 164 Koch, Christoph Heinrich, 26, 65, 75, 161 language (and music), 1, 6, 7, 8, 12-17, 22, 23, 27, 30-2, 60, 61, 66, 72-8, 82, 95, 100, 101, 106, 111, 112, 123, 137, 139, 143, 149, 151, 153 Liszt, Franz, 17, 68, 90, 93, 96-8, 101, 115, 116, 118, 126, 142, 152, 153, 155, 158, 161, 167 machine, 1-3, 9-12, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25-7, 35, 36, 38-40, 43-5, 47, 49, 50, 69, 81, 82, 85, 87, 89, 90, 93, 98, 102, 116-19, 122, 123, 130-2, 135-43, 146-53 matter, 24, 28, 30, 65, 66, 75, 91, 100, 103, 106, 121 mechanical music, 24, 32, 124

169 mechanical musical instruments. See automated musical instruments Mendelssohn, Felix, 17, 68, 98 Milhauser, Steven, 11 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 8, 16, 17, 52, 87, 95, 105, 120, 127, 150, 159 music critics, 3, 92, 99, 150 music reviews, 1, 4, 31, 33, 35, 41, 49, 51, 56, 57, 60, 65, 78, 90, 92, 98-101, 119 musical performance, 1-5, 7, 10, 11, 17, 21, 23, 32, 34, 35, 45, 50-2, 54, 55, 64, 92, 94, 98-100, 104, 122, 123, 126, 135, 143, 147, 148, 150-2 Mussorgsky, Modest, 68, 79 Naturlaut, 19, 46, 55, 141 Naturmusik, 37, 40, 41 Novalis, 28, 31-3, 41, 83, 84, 102, 103, 106, 140, 144, 163 orchestrion, 2, 18, 44, 46, 69, 87, 88, 100, 134, 135 organic, 5, 9, 10, 12, 17, 20, 23, 27, 36, 45, 73, 87, 142, 143, 146, 149 Paganini, Niccolo, 93, 103, 11014, 116-20, 125, 142, 144, 145, 153 Paris, 93, 94, 96-9, 119, 126, 154 performance practices, 1, 3, 4, 11, 16, 21, 25, 51, 52, 67, 70, 93, 94, 115, 129 phonograph, 3, 4, 17, 18, 100, 123, 130-3, 135-44, 146-8, 151, 152 piano, 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 16-19, 21, 22, 35, 38, 42, 44-8, 51-3, 57, 59, 60, 67-9, 81, 88, 89, 95-8, 115-20, 122-7, 130-5, 141, 142, 148-50, 152, 153 pianoforte, 2, 53, 89, 95, 101 Pianola, 18, 132, 133, 161, 163 player piano, 88

170 program music, 51, 68, 111 Rameau, Jean Philipppe, 6, 7, 8, 30 Ravel, Maurice, 68, 127, 128, 1602, 164 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich, 8, 313, 41, 52, 53, 151, 165 reproducing piano, 123, 130, 132, 133, 153 reproducing pianos, 124, 131-3 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1, 3, 4, 122-4, 133, 135-8, 140-52, 154, 155, 164 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6- 8, 1215, 26, 30, 47, 101, 164 Schelling, F.W.J., 139, 140, 161 Schlegel, Friedrich, 1, 22, 27, 303, 149, 156, 165 Schoenberg, Arnold, 50, 68, 80, 127-9, 165 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1, 3, 4, 2931, 65-75, 77, 79, 81-3, 85, 86, 90, 91, 94, 95, 111, 114, 140, 141, 145, 151, 160, 162, 167 Schubert, Franz, 68, 79, 83, 140, 141, 153, 165 soprano voice, 19, 20, 42, 43, 48 spirit, 1, 4, 8, 9, 12, 20, 29-33, 4958, 61, 63, 65-7, 69-72, 75, 76, 80-4, 89-91, 97, 101-3, 105-8,

Index

110, 113, 116-21, 123, 130, 141-3, 149-52 storytelling, 4, 49, 104, 109, 151 Stuckenschmidt, H.H., 91, 126-31, 133-5, 137, 140, 147, 148, 152, 153, 166 sublime, 1-4, 17, 29, 36, 42, 43, 57, 74, 84, 149 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 15, 16, 19, 26, 29, 30, 76, 166 technical skill, 2, 10, 24, 25, 52, 53, 57, 69, 84, 88, 90, 95-7, 107, 112, 116, 120, 126, 127, 150 technique, 1, 19, 53, 67, 90, 96, 97, 112, 118, 119, 133, 153 temperament, 42 Tieck, Ludwig, 27, 31, 33, 41, 103 Urlaut, 14 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 10, 11, 17, 40, 44, 69, 87 violin, 17, 41, 81, 88, 95, 111-19, 125, 130, 142, 148, 150, 152 virtuosity, 34, 53, 74, 88-91, 97-9, 101, 111, 116, 119, 120, 123, 125, 150-2 vocal music, 5, 15, 16, 19, 20, 27, 30, 35, 41, 42, 44, 53, 94 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 27, 30, 31, 33, 41, 74, 149, 166