Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [33]
THE FIRST ENTRY in Johannes’s “Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein” comes from the mystical philosopher-poet Novalis, the second from Jean Paul (the most quoted writer in the “Schatzkästlein”), whose rhapsodic novels as much created as embodied the Romantic spirit. The opening citations in the “Schatzkästlein” are abstract, philosophical. Novalis: “Hypotheses are nets, and only he who throws them out catches something; was not America itself discovered through hypotheses?” And the second citation, from Jean Paul: “Many blooms open themselves to the sun; only one perpetually follows the sun. My heart, be like the sunflower; be not only open to God, but also obey Him.” And then Shakespeare, the Romantics’ preferred dramatist, from The Merchant of Venice: “Bring the musicians out. How sweetly the moonlight sleeps on the hills!”9
Rocked by events and feelings and ambitions he could not yet grasp, the aspiring artist seized on Jean Paul’s raptures to speak for his own:
O Music! Echo of a distant harmonious world! Sighs of the angel within us! When the word is speechless, and when the embrace, and the weeping eye, and our voiceless hearts lie lonely in our breasts: O, then only through you may men call to one another in their dungeons, and their faint sighs unite in the wilderness!10
The book is diary, aesthetics, and prophecy of what was to become of Young Kreisler after a marvelous and grueling education in sentiment and in life. Johannes quotes Herder: “Loneliness is to the unfortunate one as a peaceful harbor, outside which the sorrows of other men storm, without disturbing its waters.”11
The ecstatic images of Novalis turn up again and again: “Our life is no dream, but ought to be and perhaps will become one.”12 Novalis writes as if in anticipation of Brahms’s mature music: “Lucid intellect coupled with warm fantasy is the true, healthy food of the soul.”13 And again, foreshadowing the Alto Rhapsody, “Every sickness is a musical problem, its healing a harmonic resolution.”14
Yet even if less quoted in the “Schatzkästlein,” E. T. A. Hoffmann is the presence behind it. The title of Johannes’s notebook came from Hoffmann, and so did his alter ego.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century the Romantic spirit turned up the fantastic figure of Hoffmann as symptom and archetype. Among other endeavors, he wrote fantastic fiction, poetry, music, and music criticism. More than any other single figure he created the Romantic agenda as it applied to music, both as spiritual force and as architecture: he was the first to write about the “structure” of music. Across Europe, Hoffmann helped establish music as the most Romantic of arts in an era when the arts as a whole were regarded (by artists certainly, but often by the middle-class public as well) as the most important intellectual and spiritual endeavor of the human race. He claimed Haydn and Mozart for the Romantic movement, especially the demonic Mozart of Don Giovanni. The third initial in Hoffmann’s name stands for Amadeus, a name he gave himself in honor of Mozart. His gaze stretched back into what at the time was considered the distant past in music, to the sixteenth century and Palestrina. His magic opera Undine of 1816 was the first German Romantic opera, the beginning of a line that led to Carl Maria von Weber and Richard Wagner. His stories, meanwhile, helped establish themes and standards for fantastic and supernatural fiction. Jacques Offenbach’s fantasy opera Tales of Hoffmann was a natural subject for its era.
The first important music critic in a century when the critic would become a ubiquitous adjunct to the concert hall, Hoffmann was mainly responsible for elevating Beethoven to the status of demigod. He did that above all in his 1813 review “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music”; those pages, Carl Dahlhaus writes, “set the tone of musical discourse for an entire century.