Sounding Values

Selected Essays

Scott Burnham

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351898997
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Categoria: Musica

For several decades, Scott Burnham has sought to bring a ready ear and plenty of humanistic warmth to musicological inquiry. Sounding Values features eighteen of his essays on mainstream Western music, music theory, aesthetics and criticism. In these writings, Burnham listens for the values-aesthetic, ethical, intellectual-of those who have created influential discourse about music, while also listening for the values of the music for which that discourse has been generated. The first half of the volume confronts pressing issues of historical theory and aesthetics, including intellectual models of tonal theory, leading concepts of sonata form, translations of music into poetic meaning, and recent rifts and rapprochements between criticism and analysis. The essays in the second half can be read as a series of critical appreciations, engaging some of the most consequential reception tropes of the past two centuries: Haydn and humor, Mozart and beauty, Beethoven and the sublime, Schubert and memory.

Part One

Theories and Practices

CHAPTER 1

Review Essay E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings

E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism. Edited, annotated, and introduced by David Charlton. Translated by Martyn Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. xvi, 476 pp.

Judged by its cover alone, David Charlton’s edition of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s musical writings is immediately prepossessing. A detail from the seventeenth-century artist Jacques Callot’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony portrays the piously steadfast saint surrounded by fantastical demons of Boschian invention. The name of the artist is familiar from Hoffmann’s Fantasie-stücke in Callots Manier; the style represents a central aspect of Hoffmann’s musical and artistic thought. In the prefatory essay to the Fantasiestücke, Hoffmann explains his fascination with Callot:

No master has known so well as Callot how to assemble together in a small space such an abundance of motifs, emerging beside each other, even within each other, yet without confusing the eye, so that individual elements are seen as such, but still blend with the whole … his drawings are but reflexes of all the fantastic apparitions called up by the magic of his exuberant fantasy. … Even the commonest subjects from everyday life … appear in the glow of a certain romantic originality, so that one’s thoughts are surrendered to fantasy, and engaged in the most amazing way. … Callot’s grotesque forms … reveal to the serious, deeper-seeing observer all the hidden meanings that lie beneath the cloak of absurdity (pp. 76–77).¹

Anyone even passingly familiar with Hoffmann’s Beethoven criticism will recognize here the same apotheosis of abundant and engaging variety, overarching unity, hidden meaning, and preternatural fantasy. Hoffmann continually sought these qualities in the art and music of others; together they form the essence of Romanticism, which he understood more as a synchronic mode of all art than as a historical development peculiar to his own age. These were the same qualities Hoffmann strove to embody in his own work as writer, artist, composer, conductor, and critic – for there was no one domain within which this irrepressible scribbler could give complete rein to his imagination. Add to these endeavors his vocation as a successful member of the Berlin legal establishment, and the result is a character whose very life seems to have been composed by a Callot. The music, drawings, tales, and essays of E. T. A. Hoffmann form the myriad antic traces of a bifocal and twilight existence tethered between the myopic daylight of the Prussian judiciary and the sweeping night vision of German Romanticism.

As the author of the first chapter of Romantic music criticism and the charter member of the musico-literary coalition which created the mythologization of Beethoven, Hoffmann also exercises an unsurpassed fascination for all those who attend to Western musical culture in the early nineteenth century. German scholars have long held sway in the continuing critical engagement with this aspect of Hoffmann’s work, the perceptive interpretations of Carl Dahlhaus and, more recently, Klaus-Dieter Dobat, being but the present face of a rich tradition of exegetical studies.² With the appearance of the present volume we may well expect a resurgence—for which Charlton’s work cannot fail to be the starting point – of English-language scholarship on the subject of Hoffmann the musical thinker.

Contained in this volume are translations of Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer (from Die Serapionsbrüder), and most of Hoffmann’s critical reviews.³ In addition, Charlton provides introductory essays to Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, and to the general subject of Hoffmann as a writer on music. As we shall see, these essays reveal Charlton’s broad familiarity with the most important and influential strains of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary production and a no less impressive command of the musical life of the time. He also offers a helpful, if not especially comprehensive, bibliography at the end of the volume, referring readers instead to Gerhard Kaiser’s E.T.A. Hoffmann (1988) for a more recent and complete critical bibliography.

I

The presence of the translator, Martyn Clarke, is curiously downplayed in the prefatory materials to the volume. The only references to him outside of the title page are found in Charlton’s claim that “the translations in this book are the result of collaborative work between the translator and the editor” and in a line in the acknowledgements. I would like to bring him out of the shadows somewhat and walk a piece of his way with him, by looking closely at a representative sample of his work. The following paragraph may serve not only as a demonstration of some of the problems and triumphs of this type of translation but will also initiate a line of thought about Hoffmann’s music aesthetics. Taken from Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Mass in C, op. 86, the excerpt proceeds from a simile claiming that the old church music of the Italians is to modern German church music as St. Peter’s of Rome is to the Strasbourg Cathedral:

Die grandiosen Verhältnisse jenes Baues [St. Peter’s] erheben das Gemüt, indem sie kommensurabel bleiben: aber mit einer seltsamen, inneren Beunruhigung staunt der Beschauer den Münster an, der sich in den kühnsten Windungen, in den sonderbarsten Verschlingungen bunter, phantastischer Figuren und Zieraten hoch in die Lüfte erhebt; allein selbst diese Unruhe regt ein das Unbekannte, das Wundervolle ahnendes Gefühl auf, und der Geist überlässt sich willig dem Traume, in dem er das Überirdische, das Unendliche zu erkennen glaubt. Nun, und eben dies ist ja der Eindruck des Rein-Romantischen, wie es in Mozarts, in Haydns phantastischen Kompositionen lebt und webt!

The magnificent proportions of St Peter’s elevate the spirit while preserving a balanced relationship, but it is with a strange inner disquiet that the observer stares at the cathedral rising high into the air with its audacious convolutions and extraordinary interplay of fantastic figures and flourishes. This very unease, however, arouses presentiments of unknown wonders, and the spirit willingly surrenders to the dream in which it seems to recognise celestial infinities. Now this is precisely the impression given by the pure romanticism living and moving in Mozart’s and Haydn’s fantastical compositions! (p. 328).⁴

Clarke’s translation alters the exclamatory nature of Hoffmann’s rhapsodic observations by replacing the superlatives “kühnsten” and “sonderbarsten” with the Latinate adjectives “audacious” and “extraordinary,” and by translating the verb “anstaunen” (to gape at with astonishment) with “stare.” A literal rendering of these superlatives in conjunction with a verb denoting astonishment would sound somewhat overwrought in English: “but with a strange inner disquiet the astonished observer gapes at the cathedral rising into the heavens with the boldest convolutions and the most singular interplay of fantastic figures and flourishes.” Although it is true that German superlatives are more easily swallowed within the flow of a sentence than their English equivalents, Hoffmann’s use of them generally goes beyond even ordinary German usage. This accords not only with his own rhetorical disposition but with that of his age. The attenuation of this feature in translation is not a decision to be taken lightly, and it points to one of the many treacherous passes in an always difficult crossing.

This is not to claim that Clarke ignores entirely the effect of Hoffmann’s superlatives. His word “audacious” certainly has more bite than “bold.” But its Latinity bespeaks a certain quality of thoughtfulness, of the chosen word; this effect is approximately the same in German as in English (notice the retarding effect of Hoffmann’s term “kommensurabel”). The upshot is that Clarke’s translation, while protecting the English reader from a rhetorical enthusiasm that may indeed seem childish, distances itself from the impassioned blatancy of the original. Much of the force of Hoffmann’s rhetoric depends on the contrast between the stately, unperturbed language used to describe St. Peter’s – “grandiose,” “Verhältnisse,” “Gemüt,” “kommensurabel,” “bleiben” – and the Gothic proliferation of clauses and superlatives reaching into “das Unendliche.”

Clarke’s rendition of this latter part of the paragraph also deserves comment. His phrase “unknown wonders” is a tidy and not unpoetic way of accounting for those weighty abstract nouns, “das Unbekannte” and “das Wundervolle,” especially since they appear in Hoffmann’s original as embedded objects of the adjectival gerund “ahnend.” But when this same strategy merges “das Überirdische” and “das Unendliche” into “celestial infinities” at the end of the sentence, the entire thought seems to be trivialized just at that point in the passage where Hoffmann’s original reaches its final term, its non plus ultra. For what kind of infinity can be pluralized? In the original, the balanced apposition of the four abstract concepts stands out in relief: “das Unbekannte” and “das Wundervolle” are revealed as “das Überirdische” and “das Unendliche.” Can we feel the same resolution between “unknown wonders” and “celestial infinities?” No, because such commonplace adjective-noun constructions are so smoothly worn as to let the reader slide right over them. In contrast, Hoffmann’s abstract nouns stand as monoliths which give the reader pause. Each adds, as with an intake of breath, to the general feeling of astonishment elicited by the Gothic grandeur of the cathedral.

Yet even this interpretation is offered from an English-speaking point of view. The German language traffics incessantly in such nouns; normative literary discourse makes no ceremony in its use of such conceptual portmanteau words. And it would no doubt be ludicrous to carry such an interpretation over into a translation; there’s simply no way that English can bandy about such intractable concepts and maintain the ease of expression exemplified in Hoffmann’s prose. Here is a possible solution which preserves the adjectival genesis of these nouns yet does not link them into harmlessly smooth adjective-noun combinations: “yet this very unease arouses a presentiment of things unknown and wondrous, and the spirit surrenders willingly to the dream in which it seems to apprehend that which is supermundane [celestial] and eternal.”⁵

Some of the words used in the passage above appear repeatedly in Hoffmann’s writings about music. Perhaps the most telling is Verschlingungen, which Clarke translates here as “interplay.” In the essay on Beethoven’s instrumental music, the term is rendered as “intricacies.”⁶ Later in the same essay Clarke transforms Hoffmann’s “Wendungen und Verschlingungen” to “twists and turns” (p. 100). Although a compilation of these and similar instances would no doubt allow us to construct a multidimensional understanding of the word “Verschlingungen,” Clarke’s differing, contextual readings hide from the reader the talismanic effect such rich words have for an author like Hoffmann. From this one word alone we can tease out an entire nexus of related concepts: the ornamental convolutions of the arabesque, rich contrapuntal textures, pleasing confusion, Gothic intricacy, playful intertwining, and music as a life form – as a winding, vinelike continuity (that which “lebt und webt”).

Through familiarity with a large amount of the author’s writings, the translator must decide which words have this kind of importance. S/he is then faced with the dilemma of either repeatedly using the nearest (and undoubtedly inadequate) equivalent, or, as Clarke has done, of picking that facet of the word which seems most relevant to the given context.⁷ What Clarke gains through his approach is readability; this is a professional translation designed to make the reader forget about the original. That is to say, the original is not always disturbingly perceptible in the background, like a backstage parent prompting a stammering child – the fate of so many translations which attempt to stay too literal. One can read pages of Clarke’s work without remembering that it is in fact a translation; this is rare, and commendable.

II

The Gothic imagery of the passage I have been belaboring emphasizes the role of the fantastic and the ornamental. More often than not, Hoffmann makes the same emphasis with imagery suggesting prodigious vegetation. Contrapuntal musical textures are subject to metaphorical interpretation, appearing as strangely proliferating growths and mosses;⁸ the continuity of Beethoven’s instrumental music is likened to the labyrinthine pathways of some fantastical park.⁹ Such imagery represents something of an aesthetic category in Hoffmann’s musical thought and, it has been argued, forms a central pattern in his work as a whole.¹⁰

Hoffmann glories in the apparent chaos of visual, musical, or literary artworks, a chaos which manifests itself in crowded surfaces teeming with life. And he invests such ingratiating chaos with a higher significance than that of mere sensory delectation; this type of art is somehow associated with the “spirit-realm,” a magical domain revealed most directly by Romantic music. For Hoffmann, the fantastic convolutions of a Romantic musical work symbolize this realm of the unknown, which in turn symbolizes the infinite. This is the progression which he makes explicit in the paragraph cited above. How is such a progression conceivable for Hoffmann?

One approach ...