Così fan tutti i compositori: The Cephalus-Procris Myth and the Birth of Romantic Opera in Hoffmann’s Aurora

Via, via passaro i tempi

Da spacciar queste favole ai bambini.

—Da Ponte/Mozart, Così fan tutte

The German Romantic call for a “new mythology”—for a return to a mythic sensibility that would revitalize a world desiccated by scientific revolutions, secularization, and presumed hyperrationalism—cannot be understood as implying that myth was wholly absent from the previous centuries. The most cursory review of eighteenth-century artworks would readily demonstrate that myths hardly failed to persist throughout the Age of Enlightenment. Rather, Romantic theorists were avid for a different relation to myth, arguing for the active production of meaning out of the hidden resources of the human imagination, for an original creation grounded in the self that would distinguish itself from the merely intellectual manipulation of inherited stories. According to Friedrich Schlegel, Romantic poets shared a fundamental problem that plagued writers of the prior era, namely a lack of an authentic mythology. Such was modernity’s fate. Yet, whereas eighteenth-century artists tended to compensate for this deficit by applying ancient characters and plots to contemporary concerns, Schlegel believed that latter-day poets should plumb “the deepest depths of the spirit” in order to create fresh narratives.¹ Instead of employing classical myths to represent moral matters, the new mythology would, after Kant, gesture toward the noumenal origin of phenomenal existence and thereby aim toward achieving a lost unity of poetry and philosophy—the “literary absolute.”²

The force of Schlegel’s theories is by now a familiar characteristic of all avant-garde movements, which betray an intention to destroy outmoded forms of expression in order to make way for the new³ Around 1800 the first generation of German Romantic writers would elaborate this initiative: the former neoclassical adoption of a primarily Latin heritage, closely associated from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing onward with the French tradition, must be abandoned for a return to roots that would better (more originally, more authentically) express the singularity of cultural experience outre-Rhin. Accordingly, in Schlegel’s Gespräch über die Poesie (1800), the adjective “classical” is nearly always pejorative, designating a falsifying poetics that would only cripple a nation’s expressive potential—“a modern sickness” that might be cured by considering instead more specifically Germanic material from fairy tales, from the feudal Middle Ages, and the like.⁴

Nonetheless, Schlegel’s lengthy dialogue curiously concludes with a move toward a classical theme. The text’s final paragraph abruptly suggests that poets take up “the old story of Apollo and Marsyas [whose] time apparently has come” (scheint . . . an der Zeit zu sein).⁵ The sudden intrusion of a Greco-Roman myth is at first striking, especially given this story’s frequent role in the predominantly Latinate discourse of the Renaissance. Yet this closing proposal is perfectly reconcilable with Schlegel’s vision, provided one focuses on the implications of this eminently musical fable. If the neoclassical tradition would celebrate the victory of Apollo’s rational lyre by extolling the instrument that easily accompanies, enhances, and ultimately serves lyric expression, the Romantic spirit would call for a rematch by siding with Marsyas’s defeated woodwind: that is, with the aulos, whose fascinating, irregular, and dangerously alluring sound overrides verbal production.⁶ In brief, for Schlegel, it would seem that the time had come to reject Apollonian form in favor of the spontaneous, hyperventilated spiritus exuding from the ugly but impassioned satyr.

Schlegel’s programmatic statements and their subscription to idealism’s transcendental aspirations were more or less corroborated by Novalis and Friedrich Schelling and would come to be adopted and modified by E. T. A. Hoffmann, who relied on similar conceptions for his own theories of artistic inspiration. It was Hoffmann, moreover, who explicitly picked up on the Marsyan hint that closes Schlegel’s Gespräch. For him, Romanticism’s transcendental component was consistently allied to music, whose nonverbal properties were capable of irradiating quotidian experience. As Hoffmann famously formulated it in his seminal essay on “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music” (1813), “Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world...