What Goethe Heard: Special Section on Hearing and Listening in the Long Eighteenth Century

The three essays in this special section ask a deceptively simple and seldom addressed question: What did Goethe (and his contemporaries) hear? While there are numerous monographs and essays on Goethe and visuality, sound and the acoustic dimension have not been explored in the same focused, sustained way in Goethe studies. Indeed, the acoustic dimension has often been marginalized in Goethe scholarship and in eighteenth-century studies more generally, in which the Enlightenment "hegemony of the visual" tends to reproduce itself.¹ Both in the cultural production of the "long eighteenth century" and in latter-day scholarship, the acoustic appears as the marginalized other of both textuality and visuality. In eighteenth-century poetological texts and works of criticism, for example, an overemphasis on the acoustic performance of literature is often characterized as potentially inimical to the autonomy of the literary work. Such biases can be seen to be at work, for example, in Schiller's 1789 essay Über Bürgers Gedichte (On Bürger's Poems), in which Schiller distances himself from the oral performance of literature through mildly pejorative references to "Gesellschaftsgesänge" (convivial songs) and "die Musikliebhaberei unserer Damen" (the musical amateurism of our ladies) as well as more explicitly dismissive allusions to Gottfried August Bürger's onomatopoeic excesses—"das Klinglingling, Hopp, Huhu, Sasa, Trallyrum larum u. dgl (the klingaling, hopp, huhu, trallyrum larum and the like)."² A simultaneous distrust of and longing for the acoustic dimension, particularly music and its sensual associations, is a recurring theme throughout German literary history: written many years before Thomas Mann's Wagnerian obsessives emerged on paper, the fateful reading of Ossian in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther offers an early example of how Romantic orality can precipitate unhealthy excesses of emotion and unwholesome collisions of life with art. It is easy enough to contrast the Romantic obsession with reviving the "dead letter of print" through oral performance with Goethe and Schiller's seemingly more mature fascination with the visual and classicist literary forms; if the classical is "healthy," to paraphrase Goethe's own famous line, it is because it has healed itself from the "sick," irrational and regressive longings of Romanticism for primitive orality.³ In more recent years, Goethe scholarship has again shifted towards an increased emphasis on visuality and spatiality.⁴ A reluctance among Goethe scholars to embrace sound can perhaps be interpreted as a response to the poststructuralist critique of phonocentrism.⁵

Yet, there is no doubt that the acoustic was a central site of scientific inquiry and aesthetic speculation during the long eighteenth century. The era in which Goethe lived saw tremendous strides and transformations in acoustic science, music theory, musical and declamatory performance styles, and instrument building. And Goethe himself engaged throughout his life and career with questions of hearing and listening, both in theory and in practice. He was an enthusiastic teacher of recitation and declamation and a gifted reader of his own literary texts, integrating his reading practice into his own creative process.⁶ As the director of the Weimar Hoftheater, Goethe devoted a great deal of thought to the practice of theatrical recitation and declamation, which he, like many of his contemporaries, interpreted as consisting of "tones" similar to those of music.⁷ He attended countless readings of literary works, both Autorenlesungen by fellow authors and declamatory concerts by professional performers such as Carl Friedrich Solbrig and Elise Bürger, who read popular poems with musical accompaniment. Music was equally important to Goethe, as a source of enjoyment, a score for social interaction (whether as "Andacht oder Tanz," religious worship or dancing), and as an element of theater: for over thirty years, Goethe corresponded with the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter, who set many of his poems to music and wrote music for Goethe's theatrical performances, such as the memorials held for Schiller in Bad Lauchstädt.⁸ Moreover, as a scientist, Goethe took an interest in contemporary discussions about acoustics and the anatomy of the human ear. In January 1803, Goethe met the pioneering acoustician Ernst Florens...