Ernst Theodor Amadeus (E.T.A.) Hoffmann (1776 - 1822) was a Prussian Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. His stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's famous opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffmann appears (heavily fictionalized) as the hero. He is also the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppélia is based on two other stories that Hoffmann wrote, while Schumann's Kreisleriana is based on Hoffmann's character Johannes Kreisler. Hoffmann's stories highly influenced 19th-century literature, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement.
Hoffmann was a champion of Ludwig van Beethoven's music. In July of 1809, Hoffmann received a copy of the score to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Earlier that year he had begun publishing in what at the time was the most respected journal for music criticism in the German-speaking world, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AMZ). At the end of the year, he published a review of the Fifth Symphony that would not appear until a year after he received the score, in July 1810. It is not clear whether or not Hoffmann had ever heard Beethoven's Fifth Symphony performed.
Thus does Beethoven's instrumental music open up for us the realm of the monstrous and the immeasurable. Glowing rays shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we become aware of giant shadows that wave up and down, close us in more and more narrowly, and annihilate everything in us except for the pain of infinite yearning, in which every pleasure . . . sinks down and founders, and only in this pain, which, consuming within itself, but not destroying, love, hope, and joy, wants to burst open our breast with a full-voiced harmony of all passions, do we live on, enchanted spirit-seers [Geisterseher].
Hoffmann continues with a comparison between Beethoven and his predecessors:
Romantic taste is rare; even rarer is romantic talent, and it is for that reason that there are so few who know how to strike up the lyre that unlocks the wondrous realm of the infinite. Haydn romantically grasps the human in human life; he is more commensurable with the majority. Mozart draws upon the superhuman, the miraculous that dwells in the inner spirit. Beethoven's music sets in motion terror, fear, horror, pain and awakens the infinite yearning that is the essence of romanticism. Beethoven is a purely romantic (and therefore a truly musical) composer, and it may be for this reason that his vocal music, which does not allow for undetermined yearning but represents from the realm of the infinite only those emotions that are designated by means of words, is not successful and that his instrumental music rarely speaks to the multitude.
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