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79 ◆ AustriA in the Mirror of its LiterAture ◆ In “Austria in the Mirror of Its Literature,”1 Hofmannsthal describes a broader concept of German culture that evokes a dualism between Austria and a larger sense of “German” that goes beyond temporary forms of Prussian Germany or the possibilities of the 1860s. This description of German history is in many respects more accurate than conventional narratives of German nationalism, and it accounts for much of the ambiguity in the way Hofmannsthal writes about Germans and Austria in this and other essays. Austria first became spirit in its music, and in this form it has conquered the world. Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, also Strauss and Lanner,2 these names speak for themselves, and before you who are Austrians, I need only name them in order to awaken something immeasurable in you. The most endearing serenity, bliss without ecstasy, the joyfulness, almost merriness, in Haydn’s masses, the breath of the Slavic, the luster of the Italian in this music that was created out of the profoundest Germanness, but Germanness without yearning, without restlessness, greatness without the titanic—these criteria of our music, which has become the music of the world, are familiar to you. You know the anecdote that the aging Zelter3 told Goethe: As an old man, Haydn had been asked why his masses were so joyful and not ceremonial and solemn. He replied: “Well, when I think of the dear God, of course I am happy.” And you also know that Goethe, when Zelter told him about this quality of deeply natural ingenuousness, began to weep. You recall how Goethe’s songs take on a greater sense of connection to the people—I do not know what it is—in Schubert’s version, and so just in these names it is clear and evident to you that the life element of the educated, of sensitive people in Austria at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must have been music, just as it was intellectuality at the same highly energized time in Germany. In this atmosphere the Austrian poetic art awakened. In this atmosphere it emerged as distinctive form, as a popular form even in its greatest representative , the art-poet Grillparzer, even closer to the people in the actor Raimund, in the actor Nestroy, in the peasant-son Anzengruber,4 in the forest peasant-child 80 ◆ Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea Rosegger,5 in Stifter, the son of the Bohemian forest. If we think of all the strongest representatives of our literature, we can speak of a poetry of peasant-sons and contrast this with the filiations of pastors’ sons, who have given the German people so many spiritual and intellectual treasures. Grillparzer learned to read on the lap of his nursemaid from the libretto to The Magic Flute. There are no accidents, whether in world history or in individual biographies. This text of The Magic Flute, what a remarkable thing! Naive, childlike, disdained by later cultural epochs and yet indestructible; and it was worthy of a Goethe that he considered, and even carried out, a continuation. One might think—and it is indeed very probable—that this nursemaid, this wet nurse [Amme]6 on whose lap Grillparzer learned to spell from the libretto to The Magic Flute, was half or entirely of Slavic blood, that Grillparzer drank in from her something of the breath of the sagas of Drahomira, of Duke Krok and his daughters,7 which throughout his life hovered over him and nourished his own imagination with a characteristic twilight breath of half-barbarian imagination. “One senses in my works that in my youth I was captivated by the ghost stories and fairytales of Leopoldstadt,”8 Grillparzer himself once remarked; and in fact this is always the canvas on which he embroidered the best that he created; there was something in his works, or beneath them, of knights and robbers and ghost stories, of dramatized fairytales. You need only think of his Ahnfrau [The Female Ancestor], which is a ghost story, of Traum ein Leben [Life is a Dream],9 which is a piece of elevated spectacle, or of Libussa, which is a comedy of transfiguration and magic. But think now even of Raimund and the use he makes of popular expressions and allegories! And of Nestroy with his suburban farce driven to the point of genius, Anzengruber with his peculiar melodramatic aspect with which he again distinguished himself from the style of dramatic...

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