Temporality and Mediation: W. H. Wackenroder and E. T. A.

Hoffmann as Literary
Historicists of Music
Author(s): Steven Paul Scher
Source: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 75, No. 4, [E. T. A. Hoffman
Today] (Oct., 1976), pp. 492-502
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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 TEMPORALITY AND MEDIATION: W. H. WACKENRODER
AND E. T. A. HOFFMANN AS LITERARY HISTORICISTS OF
MUSIC

Steven Paul Scher, Dartmouth College

Among the ingenious inventions of Romanticism, none transformed

more radically the predominant modes of speculative thinking and
had more lasting consequences for the modern human condition than
the idea of history. It need hardly be rehearsed that the nineteenth
century witnessed the rise and rule of historical consciousness in the
writing of history proper as well as in philosophy, literature, and the
arts. Until today we have not ceased to groan under the heavy burden
of what classic theorists of widely diverging persuasions like Herder,
Ranke, Hegel, Nietzsche, Meinecke, and Troeltsch have said about it
all.
Although it is difficult to resist the temptation to continue in this
melancholy vein and reassess the relevant statements and attitudes, as
has been customary in the scholarship dealing with historicism, I shall
not succumb. For when we contemplate the problematic and elusive
symbiosis of "History and Music," it becomes obvious that such a
catalogue of warriors and their views would not get us very far. Not
that we cannot confirm the existence of a body of texts, however slim,
which constitutes musical historiography.1 In matters of music, what
we lack has not been its history, but the music itself. About the begin
nings of music as an artistic product of the imagination we are still
very much in the dark; and even the earliest reliably documented mu
sical compositions and events in music history do not emerge until
relatively late in Western civilization. There is simply no Homer in
music: no scores are preserved which would be comparable in histori
cal significance to surviving examples of Greek and Roman architec
ture and sculpture, or to the wall paintings of Pompeii. Music that is
two or three hundred years old, say Bach or Palestrina, still today we
regard without hesitation as old; and it is really hard for us to conceive
of the acoustic or iconic representations of anything much older than

*For initial orientation see Warren Dwight Allen's Philosophies of Music History. A Study
of General Histories of Music 1600?1960 (New York, 1962).

492

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 Temporality and Mediation 493

plainsong. The rest remains subject to speculative prehistory or, liter

ally, silence.
If the music-historical horizon is this limited today, it is not surpris
ing that it was even more limited throughout the nineteenth century.
As late as 1894 a competent musicologist like Eduard Hanslick could
confess in all earnestness:
F?r die Geschichte beginnt mir unsere lebendige Musik mit Bach und
H?ndel. F?r mein Herz beginnt sie erst mit Mozart, gipfelt in Beet
hoven, Schumann und Brahms.2

Even Nietzsche in his eloquent attack on historicism?a designation

he scrupulously avoids, preferring instead to talk about "historische
Krankheit" and "?berma? des Historischen"?even Nietzsche can
still recommend music as a panacea against the attitude of contempo
rary architects and sculptors who tend to see
keine neuen Gestalten vor sich, sondern immer nur die alten hinter sich;
so dienen sie der Historie, aber nicht dem Leben, und sind tot, bevor sie
gestorben sind ... Wahres, fruchtbares Leben, das hei?t gegenw?rtig al
lein: Musik.3

Here, as so often elsewhere, Nietzsche displays no willful ignorance of

history, but rather betrays himself as a direct descendant of Rousseau
and early Romantic aestheticians like Wackenroder, Novalis, and the
Schlegels.
Statements such as Hanslick's and Nietzsche's should not discour
age us, however, from asking the fundamental question: Can we have
a meaningful discussion of historicism in music comparable to histori
cism in literature and in the visual arts? I believe we can. To be sure,
while its early stages may be traced back to around 1800 and before, a
broader awareness of music as history is a more recent development
and does not come to full bloom until after Wagner and Nietzsche.
Musical compositions since 1900 attesting to such an awareness
readily come to mind: Pfitzner's opera Palestrina (1917), Prokofiefs
Classical Symphony (1917), and numerous works by Mahler, Reger,
Stravinsky, Ives, Ravel, or even by such living composers as Carl Orff,
Shostakovich, or George Crumb. But renewed attempts to ascertain
specific points of tangency between romanticism and historicism have
drawn attention at last also to the pre-Wagnerian period. As far as I
can see, only during the last decade or so has modern musicological
research begun to explore systematically the origins of historicism in

2Eduard Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben (Berlin, 1894), 11, 307.

3Friedrich Nietzsche, Unzeitgem?sse Betrachtungen (Leipzig: Kr?ner, 1930), p. 334.

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 494 Scher
music.4 Apart from heated debates on applicable terminology and
problems of definition uncannily familiar from other disciplines, the
discussion centers on major trends and events reflecting growing
preoccupation with older music such as the early nineteenth-century
Palestrina renaissance and Bach revival, Mendelssohn's legendary
1829 performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and the launching
after 1820 of the so-called "historical concerts" all over Europe, in
addition to which there were more and more organized concerts de
voted exclusively to the music of an emerging canon of great compos
ers of the last eighty years, above all Bach, H?ndel, Gluck, Mozart,
Haydn, Beethoven, and Weber.5 The growing sense of history on the
part of nineteenth-century composers is likewise of recent scholarly
interest.6 Louis Spohr's Sixth Symphony of 1839, entitled Historische
Sinfonie im Styl und Geschmack vier verschiedener Zeitabschnitte, constitutes
perhaps the most striking document attempting to integrate a pro
nounced historicist attitude into an actual piece of music. Preoccupa
tion with the historical method of inquiry is here effectively translated
into musical practice. Spohr's obsession with chronology and his
strictly diachronic imagination become apparent in the titles assigned
to the individual movements: "Erster Satz: Bach-H?ndelsche Periode,
1720; Larghetto: Haydn-Mozartsche, 1780; Scherzo: Beethovensche,
1810; Finale: Allerneueste Periode, 1840." Not surprisingly, Spohr's
Concertino for orchestra?also composed in 1839?consists of two
movements and bears the title: Sonst und Jetzt. Finally, in the area of
music history proper, more and more critical light is being shed on
the work of nineteenth-century historiographers of music like
Raphael Georg Kiesewetter, Carl von Winterfeld, August Wilhelm
Ambros, Fran?ois-Joseph F?tis, and some later authors.7
Reading in what seems to be the only book so far on the history of
musical historiography claiming comprehensiveness, Warren Dwight
Allen's Philosophies of Music History. A Study of General Histories of Music
1600-1960 (first published in 1939 and reissued in 1962), I came
across the following overstatement:

4See esp. Walter Salmen, ed., Beitr?ge zur Geschichte der Musikanschauung im ig. Jahr
hundert (Regensburg, 1965) and Walter Wiora, ed., Die Ausbreitung des Historismus ?ber
die Musik (Regensburg, 1969).
5Cf. Monika Lichtenfeld, "Zur Geschichte, Idee und ?sthetik des historischen Kon
zerts," in Wiora, pp. 41-53.
6Cf. Erich Doflein, "Historismus in der Musik," in Wiora, pp. 9-39.
7Cf. Bernhard Meier, "Zur Musikhistoriographie des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Wiora,
pp. 169-207.

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 Temporality and Mediation 495
No musicological research worthy of the name was carried on from For
kel's history in 1788 to Kiesewetter's in 1834?roughly equivalent to the
period of Beethoven's creative life.8

While Allen's study is in need of extensive revision, his remark de

serves serious reflection and substantiation. Even if it is only partially
true, I believe it is no coincidence that the time span conspicuously
lacking genuine historiographical activity in music roughly corre
sponds to the period we customarily associate with German literary
Romanticism and philosophical idealism. Two distinct lines of de
velopment may be discerned during this period. First, under the for
midable shadow of the two monumental narrative histories of music
by Burney and Hawkins (both published in London beginning in
1776 and promptly translated into German), reliable positivists like E.
L. Gerber and H. C. Koch resorted to compiling useful l?xica and
dictionaries of a biographical and bibliographical nature.9 More aes
thetically and critically oriented theorists like Sulzer and Herder, on
the other hand, adopted and further cultivated the late eighteenth
century British trend in aesthetics: speculation about the corre
spondences among the fine arts. The culmination of this trend came,
as M. H. Abrams has shown, with the emergence of early romantic
"melomaniacs" such as Wackenroder, Tieck, Novalis, Schelling, the
physicist Ritter, and a little later E. T. A. Hoffmann: they were
enamored of the expressive power of pure instrumental music and
convinced of the supremacy of music over the other arts. Having
discovered in music "the art most immediately expressive of spirit and
emotion,"10 these melomaniacs upset the well-established eighteenth
century hierarchy of art forms and dislodged the hegemony of ut pic
tura poesis, only to declare their belief in ut m?sica poesis.x 1
When we attempt to account for the postulated historiographical
hiatus, therefore, it seems to me crucial to focus on Romantic theories
of music as they evolved along with Romantic theories of poetry in
relation to conceptions of the historical process and to the function of

8Allen, p. 85.
9Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the earliest ages to the present period, 4
vols. (London, 1776-1789); John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of
Music, 4 vols. (London, 1776); Ernst Ludwig Gerber, Historisch-biographisches Lexikon der
Tonk?nstler (Leipzig, 1790?92); and Heinrich Christoph Koch, Musikalisches Lexikon
(Leipzig, 1802).
10M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
(N.Y., 1953), p. 50.
xlFor a detailed discussion see Steven P. Scher, Verbal Music in German Literature (New
Haven and London, 1968), pp. 156-59.

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496 Scher
temporal experience for the individual works themselves. Far from
being merely ephemeral, time-bound modes of aesthetic perception,
the types of historical consciousness inherent in Romantic attitudes
toward music proved paradigmatic for theorists and historians of
music throughout the nineteenth century. Two prominent Romanti
cists occupy key positions in our context: W. H. Wackenroder and E.
T. A. Hoffmann; I find the interplay of historicism and musical
aesthetics as reflected in their views particularly illuminating. The
choice of these two authors is appropriate, I believe, since both pos
sessed a high degree of competence in musical matters, unlike Tieck,
Novalis, Schelling, and the Schlegels, who nevertheless did not hesi
tate on occasion to include music in their aesthetic theorizing. Though
not concurrently, both Wackenroder and Hoffmann studied with
Johann Friedrich Reichardt, a leading musical personality of the
period and a storehouse of historical information, albeit superficial.
Wackenroder attended Johann Nikolaus Forkel's lectures in G?t
tingen, was intimately familiar with Forkel's two-volume history of
music, and could conceivably have become a professional musician
himself, had he not died at the age of 24 in 1798.12 Hoffmann's
musical credentials, of course, have long been established beyond
question: he was a composer of considerable merit and?with his
unsurpassed blend of professional expertise, poetic imagination, and
writing skill?the founder of modern music criticism.13
Although their ideas about music and music history were in many
ways similar, ultimately Wackenroder and Hoffmann may be re
garded as representing two different approaches which prove to be
not only characteristic of the early stages of musical historicism but
are also easily traceable in the ideology behind later manifestations of
musical aesthetics and historiography.
What are some of the views they share? First of all, they believe
with Novalis that the world must be romanticized in order to regain
the original sense of harmony. Thus, like most Romantic thinkers,
Wackenroder and Hoffmann firmly endorse a larger scheme of his
tory, consisting of three periods: (1) the original state of innocence
and equilibrium, characterized by the gentle rule of poetry over
the human condition. What follows is (2) a process of depoetization
which they experience in their desolate present as a loss of ideal
values, an inescapably time-bound state of being. The final period,

12Cf. A. Gillies' introduction to W. H. Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Herzensergies

sungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Oxford, 1966), esp. pp. xxviii-xxix.
13See E. T. A. Hoffmann, Schriften zur Musik. Nachlese, ed. Friedrich Schnapp (M?n
chen, 1963).

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 Temporality and Mediation 497

then, is Utopian and transcendental: (3) the belief in the possibility

of "repoetization" (A. W. Schlegel's coinage), regeneration, and r?in
t?gration which would mean a return to the original, ideal state;
that is harmony reestablished.14 Robert Schumann's programmatic
policy statement introducing the second volume of his Neue Zeitschrift
f?r Musik illustrates how deeply rooted the notion of this triadic histor
ical scheme still was in 1835:
Unsere Gesinnung ... ist diese: an die alte Zeit und ihre Werke mit allem
Nachdruck zu erinnern, darauf aufmerksam zu machen, wie nur an so
reinem Quelle neue Kunstsch?nheiten gekr?ftigt werden k?nnen?
sodann, die letzte Vergangenheit, die nur auf Steigerung ?usserlicher
Virtuosit?t ausging, als eine unk?nstlerische zu bek?mpfen?endlich,
eine neue poetische Zeit vorzubereiten, beschleunigen zu helfen.15

For Wackenroder, thinking about music means myth-making and

not policy-making. In a unique piece of Romantic mythology in mini
ature, called "Ein wunderbares morgenl?ndisches M?rchen von
einem nackten Heiligen" (1799)16 and identified as a musical essay
attributed to his fictitious musician figure Joseph Berglinger, Wak
kenroder successfully renders his philosophy of time, history, and
music in the condensed form of a poetic allegory.
Living in a cave adjacent to a little river rushing by, the naked saint
seems to hear the roaring revolutions of the Wheel of Time ("das Rad
der Zeit") and feels compelled to turn it with his own hands day and
night, "damit die Zeit ja nicht in die Gefahr komme, nur einen Au
genblick stillzustehn." He cannot endure the sight of people going
about their business nearby, gathering herbs or felling wood. He is
unable to comprehend how human beings find it at all possible to
work at something else, to take on a "taktloses Gesch?ft," to remain
preoccupied with earthly trivialities while Time keeps rolling on. No
matter how desperately he wants now and again to free himself ("er
wollte sich ausserhalb oder in sich vor sich selber retten"), he cannot
but continue to turn the Wheel of Tim? feverishly for years on end.
One moonlit summer night, however, the naked saint perceives
"?therische Musik" emanating from a light skiff floating up the
stream: two lovers sing of the beauty of their love. The power of this
"schwimmende Welt von T?nen" breaks the spell at last: the roaring

14Cf. Walter Wiora, "Die Musik im Weltbild der deutschen Romantik," in Salmen, pp.
11-59
15Robert Schumann, Neue Zeitschrift f?r Musik (Leipzig), n (1835), 3.
16Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Werke und Briefe, ed. Friedrich von der Leyen
(Jena, 1910), 1, 156-62. The quotes from this tale in the subsequent paragraph are
taken from these pages.

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 498 Scher
Wheel of Time disappears, together with the Saint's earthly frame. A
phantom of angelic beauty is seen ascending "in tanzender Be
wegung" out of the cave into the sky; and it appeared to the lovers
that they were beholding the "Genius der Liebe und der Musik."
The Oriental setting intimates symbolic, universal dimensions, and
the immediately obvious tripartite structure allows for an interpreta
tion of Wackenroder's tale as a variation of the familiar triadic con
ception of history in which the problem of temporality and Romantic
notions of time-consciousness and self-consciousness are inextricably
intertwined with the idea of music as a redemptive, metaphysical
force.17 Accordingly, I discern three distinct modes of temporal con
sciousness. First, we have the situation of the herb gatherers and wood
cutters for whom the experience of time is totally unproblematic. As
they are independent of time-consciousness, their human condition
can be described as an unmeditated and therefore un-self-conscious
state of being-in-time. Unaware of their own historicity, they exist in a
state of blissful timelessness, as it were, which assures for them an
illusion of freedom. The second mode is represented by the naked
saint for whom time becomes a problematic, inescapable notion to
such an overpowering extent that his self-consciousness becomes con
fined to his time-consciousness: he can no longer conceive of reality
except in terms of his awareness of being-in-time. A captive of time,
he is totally paralyzed by the sense of his own historicity. The third
mode offers the only solution for the saint's existential dilemma: rec
onciliation between self-consciousness and time-consciousness which
is possible only through the combined redemptive power of love and
music. A means of salvation and liberation, music is seen by Wacken
roder as a corrective measure, a unique temporal system which is ca
pable of superseding the rigid monotony of time's rhythmic structure
by shaping it into music's own rhythmic structure of infinite variety.
The implication is clear, however, that such a metaphysical operation
restoring the lost sense of freedom to the human condition can be
conceived only in a realm beyond time and history, in the realm of
music which Wackenroder elsewhere calls "das Land des Glaubens."18
Novalis proclaims the need for a "romanticization" of the world;
Wackenroder calls for "musicalization" and means the same.
Wackenroder's conception of temporality and the historical process

17For recent critical literature on this tale see esp. Elmar Hertrich, Joseph Berglinger.
Eine Studie zu Wackenroders Musiker-Dichtung (Berlin, 1969), pp. 163-92, and Klaus
Weimar, Versuch ?ber Voraussetzung und Entstehung der Romantik (T?bingen, 1968), pp.
63-71.
18Wackenroder, 1, 164.

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 Temporality and Mediation 499

as it emerges in this remarkable tale is unusually specific; in his other

writings he tends to resort to vague generalizations. At best he would
acknowledge the superiority of what he calls "das eigent?mliche in
nere Wesen"19 of new music?that is the purely instrumental compo
sitions of his own time by Haydn or Mozart?over whatever little he
knew of older music, especially older church music. But music to
Wackenroder always means absolute music; that is, symphonic, in
strumental music. Although in his discourses on the visual arts he
often names his favorite Italian and German masters and their
achievements, in his musical reveries he never mentions specific com
posers or works. Precisely because he conceives of music in the
abstract temporal sense and virtually equates it with religion, this
highest of all arts is for him not only sacrosanct, but also beyond the
need of mundane comparisons.
Along with Herder, Reichardt, Tieck, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, in
his own enthusiastic manner Wackenroder clearly belongs to those
intellectuals who prepared the aesthetic climate for the early
nineteenth-century Palestrina renaissance. Yet, he would hardly have
subscribed to typical later manifestations of the enthusiastic critical
trend like Alexandre Choron's "Palestrina c'est le Racine, c'est le
Raphael, c'est le Jesus-Christ de la musique."20 In his book ?ber
Reinheit der Tonkunst (1825), A. F. J. Thibaut even goes as far as men
tioning Palestrina and Homer in one breath and calling H?ndel the
Shakespeare of music.21 Unlike Wackenroder, Hoffmann would have
approved of such hyperbolic glorifications. He himself hailed Mozart
as the Shakespeare of music, and Palestrina as the founding father of
music who is "einfach, wahrhaft, kindlich fromm, stark und m?chtig,
echt christlich in seinen Werken wie in der Malerei Pietro von Cor
tona und unser Albrecht D?rer."22
Despite the legitimate charge of occasional impressionism that
might be leveled at the author of such sweeping comparisons,
Hoffmann nevertheless exhibits a thoroughly conscious historicist at
titude in musical matters. Ample evidence of his preoccupation with
the historical process can be found throughout his musical writings;
and there is never any doubt that Hoffmann speaks in the capacity of
the experienced, practicing musician who is firmly grounded in

19Wackenroder i, 182.
* 20Quoted in Abb? Daniel, Rapport sur le concours ouvert pour l'?loge de Choron (Paris,
1845), P- 2.
21 A. F. J. Thibaut, ?ber Reinheit der Tonkunst (Heidelberg, 1825), p. 95 and p. 83.
22E. T. A. Hoffmann, "Alte und neue Kirchenmusik," in Hoffmann, Schriften zur
Musik. Nachlese, p. 216.

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 500 Scher
theory as well as in compositional and performance techniques. Be
cause he invariably commences his reviews with short historical
sketches combined with critical reflections on the respective musical
genres, he not only places the analyzed works in a historical
framework, but also paves the way for their future reception. His
pioneering review essays between 1810 and 1814 in the Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the two Piano Trios
op. 70, the Coriolanus overture, the Egmont music, and the C-Major
Mass, for example, were in large measure responsible for the com
poser's subsequent image as a quintessentially Romantic artist. It is
less well known that Hoffmann also had a considerable share in break
ing ground for the Palestrina and Bach revivals. His influential pro
nouncements, admittedly based more on a healthy critical instinct
than on an extensive knowledge of the actual works by these past mas
ters, must be seen in the proper context of contemporary intellectual
currents. It is instructive in this respect to trace the tortuous history of
the familiar comparison of Bach's music to the Strassburg cathedral, a
comparison usually attributed to Hoffmann. In 1782, Reichardt was
the first to cite Goethe's 1772 essay "Von deutscher Baukunst" in
connection with his efforts to substantiate Bach's greatness.23 No
doubt inspired by Reichardt's text, as well as by Wackenroder's piece
entitled "Die Peterskirche" in the Phantasien ?ber die Kunst of 1799,
Hoffmann in 1814 combines the disparate sources in one striking
thought:
Sebastian Bachs Musik verh?lt sich zu der Musik der alten Italiener
ebenso, wie der M?nster in Stra?burg zu der Peterskirche in Rom.24

And in 1821 Carl Maria von Weber adds the universalizing touch by
directly equating Bach's "Grossartigkeit, Erhabenheit und Pracht"
and "k?nstliche kontrapunktische Verflechtungen" with a "wahrhaft
gotischen Dom der Kunstkirche"25: the image has now become an
expression of affinity between specific musical and architectural
styles. This simple example may serve to illustrate the powerful role
that transmutation and assimilation of intellectual property, involving
a genuine interp?n?tration of the various arts, assumed in shaping
historical consciousness.
The clearest and most significant expression of Hoffmann's con

23Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Kunstmagazin (Berlin, 1782), p. 196 f.

24E. T. A. Hoffmann, "H?chst zerstreute Gedanken," in Hoffmann, Fantasie- und
Nachtst?cke (M?nchen, i960), p. 50.
25Carl Maria von Weber, S?mtliche Schriften, hrsg. Georg Kaiser (Berlin and Leipzig,
1908), p. 342.

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 Temporality and Mediation 501

tribution as both critic and mediator may be found in his analytical

treatise entitled "Alte und neue Kirchenmusik" (1814). Hoffmann of
fers here nothing less than a severely critical mini-history of church
music as a genre, a panoramic view of its evolution interspersed with
individual portraits of its most meritorious representatives, past and
contemporary. Predictably, Hoffmann finds his hero in Palestrina,
followed at a considerable distance by lesser though still positively
evaluated Italian composers like Allegri, Alessandro Scarlatti, Be
nedetto Marcello, and Leonardo Leo; and H?ndel and Bach are still
included as the last great figures of the Golden Age of Church music.
In broad outlines, Hoffmann, too, adheres to the familiar triadic con
ception of history, except that with his many references to specific
names and compositions one no longer senses the vague, predomi
nantly subjective stance so typical of early Romantic visionaries such
as Wackenroder. But it is especially fascinating to observe how skill
fully Hoffmann manipulates this scheme to fit his own ideology of
history, according to which the history of church music is a history of
gradual decline. In his view, the Golden Age of church music as an
expression of a truly "religious cult" reached its peak with the works
of Palestrina and came to an end after the middle of the eighteenth
century. At this time a deplorable tendency toward "Ver
weichlichung" and "ekle S?sslichkeit" set in which banished all se
riousness, all dignity from church music.26 Among contemporary
works only Mozart's Requiem receives unconditional praise. Otherwise
not even the religious compositions of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven
escape Hoffmann's condemnation. For the future of the genre
Hoffmann sees little hope; and it is here that he assumes the role of
mediator between the old and the new styles. Tacitly, however, he
comes to an important realization. On the one hand he is firmly con
vinced of the impossibility of returning to Palestrina's "Einfachheit
und Grosse," while on the other hand he believes that "die Instrumen
talmusik sich in neuerer Zeit zu einer H?he erhoben hat, die die alten
Meister nicht ahnten."27 The only way Hoffmann can reconcile these
convictions is to advocate regeneration rather than mere restoration
in the form of a progressive synthesis of old and new approaches.
Thus Hoffmann's constructive recommendations for influencing mu
sical progress in the right direction transcend the genre of church
music and reflect unequivocally the attitude of a mediating historicist:
present-day musicians must learn from the grand old masters but

26Hoffmann, Schriften zur Musik. Nachlese, p. 227.

27Hoffmann, Schriften, pp. 230-31.

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 502 Scher
must also assimilate and make creative use of innovative contempo
rary practices.
Even from this brief discussion, I hope it has become apparent how
differently Wackenroder and Hoffmann viewed the interaction be
tween music and history and how each in his own way prepared the
ground for major interpretive trends of modern historicism in music.
Accordingly, I suggest that we term Wackenroder a visionary histori
cist of temporality and Hoffmann a critical historicist of mediation.
That Hoffmann must have been aware?and also somewhat afraid?
of the modernity of his own mediating historical perspective is evident
in the reserved concluding paragraph of "Alte und neue Kirchen
musik," which is curiously out of tune with the rest of his essay. Sud
denly he lapses back into a Wackenroder-like rhetoric of temporality
that sounds an unexpectedly hesitant note:
Immer weiter fort und fort treibt der waltende Weltgeist; nie kehren die
verschwundenen Gestalten, so wie sie sich in der Lust des K?rperlebens
bewegten, wieder: aber ewig, unverg?nglich ist das Wahrhaftige, und
eine wunderbare Geistergemeinschaft schlingt ihr geheimnisvolles Band
um Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft. Noch leben geistig die
alten, hohen Meister; nicht verklungen sind ihre Ges?nge: nur nicht
vernommen wurden sie im brausenden, tobenden Ger?usch des aus
gelassenen, wilden Treibens, das ?ber uns einbrach. Mag die Zeit der
Erf?llung unseres Hoffens nicht mehr fern sein, mag ein frommes
Leben in Friede und Freudigkeit beginnen, und die Musik frei und
kr?ftig ihre Seraphsschwingen regen, um aufs neue den Flug zu dem
Jenseits zu beginnen, das ihre Heimat ist, und von dem Trost und Heil
in die unruhvolle Brust des Menschen hinabstrahlt.28

28Hoffmann, Schriften, p. 235.

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