Schumann's Music and E. T. A. Hoffmann's Fiction by John MacAuslan (review)

Twelve years following Erika Reiman's study of Robert Schumann and the literature of Jean Paul (Erika Reiman, Schumann's Piano Cycles and the Novels of Jean Paul, Eastman Studies in Music [Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004]), John MacAuslan offers a complement on the composer's four "E. T. A. Hoffmann works," examined in chronological order: Carnaval, op. 9; Fantasiestücke, op. 12; Kreisleriana, op. 16; and Nachtstücke, op. 23. Exceeding the narrow scope of Schumann studies, the monograph is no less significant as a metatheoretical contribution of broad relevance in critical musicology; it stages a call for an interpretive practice, described in terms borrowed from Novalis as fluid, which, like music itself, speaks through "an ultimately undifferentiated wash of the formal, the expressive, the associative and the resonant" (p. 190).

The book adheres to an interleaved plan, with odd-numbered chapters exemplifying the approach in specific works and, as much as possible, deferring theoretical reflection to the even-numbered ones. The first chapter examines Schumann's musico-literary awakening through his early immersion in a remarkably highbrow canon (William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, and Novalis). The composition of Papillons, op. 2, coincides with this formative stage, and MacAuslan expertly correlates the work's weaknesses, manifest especially as a stark and unconvincing imitation of Jean Paul's literary devices, with an imbalance of the young composer's aesthetic aspirations and compositional abilities.

If a single focal metaphor could be singled out in MacAuslan's theoretically noncommittal study, it would be that of "resonance," which he adopts "without pretensions to rigour" (p. 27). Resonances between music and literature, to rephrase and compress his essentially semiological argument, are not tantamount to full-fledged metaphor. Rather less invasively, music and literature resonate when each is abundant in features and affordances, and the two domains are let free to vibrate sympathetically, as it were, responding to each other at an essential distance. Once literary connections become a requisite for musical understanding—reduced to signifier–signified relations or "references"—resonance is lost. Therefore, for wider culture to serve as such an amplifier or "echo-chamber" (p. 6) of immanent content, musical processes and literary contexts must first be eloquent and valid in their own right. To MacAuslan's evocative naturalistic model we could add that any phenomenon of resonance involves not only the coupling of distant entities but also an element of distortion, which can be compelling even when transgressive or narcissistic. More specifically, the downside of the historical circumspection through which MacAuslan filters "resonance" is that it risks suppressing more radical yet earnest musico-literary associations, represented most famously by Roland Barthes's punctum, which transgress the "common sense" of historical-musicological evidence while scoring high, as Peter Kivy would say, in "personal authenticity" (Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995], 108).

The Italian carnival, as a space of social and semiotic transgression occupying a privileged place in German letters, is (alongside Hoffmann's Prinzessin Brambilla) the vantage point for MacAuslan's discussion of Schumann's Carnaval in chapter 3. Along the way, he introduces by example several of his interpretive values and patterns, which recur later in the volume. As with Davidsbündlertänze in chapter 6, the analysis here is largely by key area and does not consider the voice-leading processes that determine the significance of these areas, which could have pinpointed more precisely the tendencies aptly described as "centrifugal" on p. 130 (likely an allusion to M. M. Bakhtin). It is Carl Schachter who most effectively disseminated the unmistakable intuition, at least after Heinrich Schenker, that the primary agents of a tonal drama are pitches, not keys ("Analysis by Key: Another Look at Modulation," in Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis, ed. Joseph N. Straus [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 134–60...