E. T. A. Hoffmann, Cosmopolitanism, and the Struggle for German Opera by Francien Markx (review)

Francien Markx's volume on Hoffmann and the opera, the first of its kind, offers a great deal to an extremely broad range of academic readers. I find it to be one of the most rewarding books I have read in recent years, not only because of the quantity of information it contains but also for the quality of Markx's writing; clarity and concision remain prime concerns throughout the text. In addition to presenting a vivid picture of Hoffmann and the opera, she also performs (to use her own term) a "balancing act" of the most difficult variety: she successfully draws together materials from the realms of history, literature, and musicology to present a well-integrated picture of Hoffmann's amazing talents, while she manages to capture and hold the reader's attention for 440 pages. I have read few critical works that are as successful at so many endeavors.

The main body of her study examines the relevant writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann to focus on intersections of culture, art, literature, and the theoretical concerns and practicalities of producing and staging operatic works. As Markx reminds us often, Hoffmann boasted credentials in virtually every aspect of the production of opera, including composing, writing librettos, directing, conducting, acting, singing, and playing instruments, as well as supporting the business end of operatic performance. She orders things essentially chronologically and presents them in two parts and seven chapters, with an additional (appropriately musical/theatrical) introductory Prelude, a historical Prologue, and a summarizing Postlude. The first major part (Act I) examines Hoffmann's work on opera while he was contributing to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Hoffmann produced several very significant pieces on opera and instrumental music for the AMZ from roughly 1808 to 1814, a period in which he initially resided in Berlin and then in Bamberg, Dresden, and Leipzig). Act II presents Hoffmann's later Berlin years (1814–22) as a "balancing act" between his vocations as artist and critic and his primary career as a lawyer and justice for one of the highest Prussian courts.

The sixty-eight-page Prologue provides a brief but informative history of various attempts to establish a homegrown German opera and National Theater, endeavors on the part of numerous talented and illustrious musicians, writers, and entrepreneurs that nevertheless proved notoriously difficult. Act I contains chapters on the stories "Ritter Gluck," "Don Juan," and "Der Dichter und der Komponist," all of which first appeared in the AMZ, and illustrates Hoffmann's significant role in fostering in his audience an awareness of what constitutes good opera. The first of these pieces, "Ritter Gluck," provides the earliest example of Hoffmann's considerable talent for writing fiction, as well as his view on the role of genius in musical composition and his opinion regarding the state of opera in Berlin, which, according to Markx, Hoffmann found lamentable. In her following chapter, on "Don Juan," Markx illustrates Hoffmann's treatment of Mozart's opera through an analysis of examples taken from the score, showing how the Traveling Enthusiast, Hoffmann's narrator in this tale, appreciates the opera from a position firmly within the music itself. She explains how this kind of critical writing is unlike anything previously published in musical-review literature. The final chapter of Act I, an analysis of "Der Dichter und der Komponist," delves more deeply into Hoffmann's thinking on the opera between 1813 and 1814, an era for Hoffmann of personal trouble, professional uncertainty, and incipient literary-artistic brilliance. In his essay Hoffmann presents a dialogue between two opera devotees, whose discussion portrays the status of the art in Berlin with respect to, especially, the contemporary composition of text and music.

Act II commences with a brief Prelude on the roles that Count von Brühl and the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel played in the revival of theater in Berlin. The following...