Musical Improvisation in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck 297 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 Musical Improvisation in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck Len Cagle Lycoming College Abstract: Readers of Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck have long focused on the ambiguity of the final sentence and its invitation to solve the mystery of the protagonist’s identity. However, the declaration of the stranger in response to the question of the first-person narrator: “Wer sind Sie? ” ignores the first part of the narrator’s double question: “Was ist das? ” Taking a cue from later evaluations of Ritter Gluck , I argue that Hoffmann’s text is far more interested in the answer to the narrator’s first question than in the second and that this answer involves a consequential rupture in the history of classical music performance: the veneration of the composer at the expense of the performer, as represented by the decline of musical improvisation in the concert hall and the opera house. Ritter Gluck thus marks in literature the division between baroque and early classical improvisational music-making and Romantic-era fealty to the text as inscribed by the composer. Keywords: E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ritter Gluck, music, improvisation Careless or even willful misreading of E.T.A. Hoffmann is a time-honored tradition 1 with its fair share of notable practitioners. Consider Freud’s famous essay “Das Unheimliche” (1919), remarkable as much for its groundbreaking explication of the uncanny based on an analysis of Der Sandmann (1815) as it is for the author’s failure to properly quote or summarize Hoffmann’s text, as Samuel Weber detailed in his 1973 essay “The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment.” The crucial moment of Freud’s misreading is the one preceding the tragic death of Nathanael, the doomed protagonist of Hoffmann’s text. According to Freud, Nathanael looks through the small telescope (“Perspektiv”) he has purchased from the peddler Coppola and sees what his fiancé Clara sees: the approach of his childhood nemesis Coppelius (who may or may not also be Coppola). As Weber makes clear in his meticulous comparison of Freud’s text 298 Len Cagle DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 with Hoffmann’s, however, what Nathanael actually sees through Coppola’s glass is not Coppelius, who Freud understands to be the figure of the castrating father, but rather Clara herself: Freud, it seems, has eyes only for the Sand Man: fascinated, he stares at him and simply refuses to see Clara. Not so poor Nathanael […] In such details, which Freud either ignores or repeats as mechanically as Nathanael reaches—not into his pocket (Freud), but into his side -pocket (Hoffmann), the text of the Sand Man displays more of the nature of castration than Freud himself is prepared to acknowledge. (1121) Weber’s analysis of Freud and Hoffmann reveals the potential of a misreading to open up the text in unexpected ways, by revealing the way in which Hoffmann’s often slippery language can misdirect and possibly trick the reader into a misinterpretation that ironically underscores precisely what the text is up to. Weber’s reading of Freud misreading Hoffmann has the oddly satisfying effect of strengthening Freud’s theory of the uncanny: by pointing out Freud’s inability to recognize what Nathanael actually sees through Coppola’s glass, Weber catches Freud in the act of inadvertently demonstrating precisely how the uncanny works. A less spectacular but no less consequential misdirection occurs in the final pages of Hoffmann’s first published work of narrative fiction, Ritter Gluck . Much has been made in the secondary literature of the tale’s final sentence: “Ich bin der Ritter Gluck! ” 2 These inscrutable words form the response to a question posed by the tale’s narrator: “Wer sind Sie? ” That a fixation on the identity of the stranger identifying himself as long-dead composer Christoph Willibald Gluck should long dominate criticism of the text is not surprising. As Gunther Oesterle has demonstrated, the origins of the tale trace in part to Hoffmann’s attraction to the idea that such an utterance cannot possibly be factual (58—61), 3 unless the reader is prepared to accept that they have been unwittingly reading a ghost story, one that oddly chooses to reveal itself as such only on the final page. Indeed, the text frames itself with the stranger’s spectral declaration at the back end, and at the front end with a date: 1809, years after the real Gluck’s death, an inconsistency that Hoffmann’s contemporary readers would certainly have been aware of. The problem, however, with this fixation on the stranger’s identity, that is, with the answer to the question “wer sind Sie,” is that it ignores or elides the other question posed by the narrator: “Was ist das? ” Hartmut Steinecke, editor of the Hoffmann edition cited here, proposes a focus on the first part of this “Doppelfrage,” that is, a focus not on the stranger’s identity but rather on what actually takes place in the narrative: “Es ginge dann nicht mehr nur um die Mehrdeutigkeit der Gluck-Figur, sondern des gesamten Geschehens; damit rückte das poetische Verfahren in den Mittelpunkt” (Hoffmann 616). 4 In DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 Musical Improvisation in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck 299 the rush to ascertain the identity of “Ritter Gluck,” readers consistently fail to fully appreciate “das poetische Verfahren,” or to put it in narrative terms: what the stranger does to prompt the narrator to ask “was ist das? ” before he asks “wer sind Sie? ” 5 What the stranger “Gluck” does, of course, is perform the overture and the final scene of one of Gluck’s operas, Armida , for the narrator, with almost complete fidelity-“fast ganz dem Original getreu”-but incorporates “viele neue geniale Wendungen” as well as “viele melodiöse Melismen” (30). Readers who understand the text principally as music criticism in narrative form often consider the stranger and the historical composer to be at some level one and the same and to view the stranger’s performance as a development or augmentation of the composition. For example, Miranda Stanyon’s 2010 essay on the relationship between inscription and the musical sublime in Ritter Gluck recognizes both aspects of the act of musical creation on display in this passage by implicitly identifying the stranger as both composer and performer: “Gluck … transforms his own written music in performing Armida […] The performance revitalizes and transforms its player” (420). Francien Markx, in her monograph E. T. A. Hoffmann, Cosmopolitanism, and the Struggle for German Opera (2016) reads the tale in the context of the previous century’s “Gluck controversy” (79) as well as the state of operatic performance and music criticism in early 19 th century Berlin and considers the stranger’s performance an extension of the composition that implicitly expresses the text of the libretto (111), concluding that “the rejuvenated, ‘modern’ versions that the stranger presents demonstrate the ability of an older tradition to thrive in the present” (117). In this essay I argue that the final performance in the stranger’s apartment would seem to have much less to do with the composer Gluck than with Hoffmann’s mysterious protagonist “Gluck,” who confidently takes liberties with Gluck’s text, suggesting a reading of the stranger that privileges his role as a performer as opposed to that of composer. Moreover, in the context of the time, it is also further possible to call the stranger’s embellishments-his “Wendungen” and “Melismen”-by another name: improvisation, which was common in classical music well into the 18th century but began to disappear during Hoffmann’s lifetime. Indeed, Hoffmann himself plays a role in this disappearance, not least by marking in literature the division between what he referred to as “old” music 6 and the new, Romantic music of Beethoven. What the narrator of Ritter Gluck hears in the stranger’s apartment is therefore not merely an innovation, nor an extension or confirmation of the composer’s will, it is a throwback to an earlier time, a time when the ability to improvise musically was not only common amongst musicians but even required of them. In sum: Ritter Gluck marks in literature the beginning of a new era in musical performance, an era in which improvisation in classical 300 Len Cagle DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 music begins to disappear. This new age will be dominated not by the performer, but by the composer, a radical shift in performance practice that is consonant with early Romanticism, most apparently with respect to Friedrich Schlegel’s best-known expression of Romantic theory, the Athenäum fragment 116. In the new age of performance, the will of the composer is supreme. This supremacy requires an end to improvisation. Improvisation, in the context of Ritter Gluck and of the early 19 th century generally, should be understood as the baroque period use of the figured bass 7 or continuo, 8 as well as the freedom afforded performers, especially singers, to embellish or ornament the music they performed. 9 Use of the figured bass as well as the presence of any form of improvisation in performance was essentially dead by 1809, the year in which Ritter Gluck is set. Musicologists who study improvisation as well as improvising musicians themselves often observe that classical musicians-with the exception of organists-no longer improvise, and the blame for this regrettable circumstance, and in the literature of improvisation it is generally seen as regrettable, is usually assigned to Romanticism, if not more broadly to the entire 19 th century. Stephen Nachmanovitch, for example, laments that “The rise of the formal concert hall in the nineteenth century gradually put an end to concert improvisation,” a consequence of the growing professional specialization begun during the Industrial Revolution. “Composition and performance became progressively split from each other, to the detriment of both […] We entered a period in which concert goers came to believe that the only good composer was a dead composer” (8). Period performance 10 musician Bruce Haynes, in his ominously titled volume The End of Early Music , bemoans the fact that “classical musicians have evolved in a curious way: they’re so good now at reading music that their natural ability to improvise has atrophied” (3). Free improvisation pioneer and guitarist Derek Bailey explains in Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music that One reason why the standard Western instrumental training produces non-improvisors (and it doesn’t just produce violinists, pianists, cellists, etcetera; it produces specifically non-improvisors, musicians rendered incapable of attempting improvisation) is that not only does it teach how to play an instrument, it teaches that the creation of music is a separate activity from playing that instrument. Learning how to create music is a separate study totally divorced from playing an instrument. (98) In his chapter on Baroque music, Bailey quotes the following from William J. Mitchell, translator of C.P.E. Bach’s Versuch über die wahre Art Clavier zu spielen : 11 “The extemporaneous realization of a figured bass is a dead art. We have left behind us the period of the basso continuo and with it all the unwritten DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 Musical Improvisation in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck 301 law, the axioms, the things that were taken for granted: in a word, the spirit of the time” (26). 12 This turn toward fealty to musical notation, that is to say, the text written down by the composer, and away from improvisation describes less a gradual decline than it does a dramatic break. 13 For pre-Romantic keyboardists and others expected to play the continuo, improvisation was a job requirement, not to mention a standard component of any decent musical education. 14 Musicians learned to read and improvise from the figured bass or basso continuo, a series of numbers and symbols inscribed below the staff that suggested rather than specified inversions of a given chord, 15 similar to the chord symbols from which jazz musicians improvise. In both cases, the composer specifies a framework; the musician is expected to add the rest. “Baroque notation,” says Haynes, “is like shorthand” and deliberately so (4), in that musicians-especially those who played the continuo on instruments such as the harpsichord-were, prior to the 19 th century, required to be improvisers rather than to always play only the notes printed on the page. J.A. Westrup comments indirectly on this break in these remarks on periodization: “it is preferable to speak of the ‘baroque period’ than to follow Hugo Riemann and speak of the ‘figured bass period’” (54)-plainly indicating that the baroque has indeed been separated by some music historians 16 from what came after by specific reference to improvisational practice. Clearly, the line separating baroque performance practice, which persisted in the form of the basso continuo until late in the 18 th century, and the music of the 19 th century is well marked. The Romantics made the figured bass and other forms of improvisation obsolete, among other things by embarking on a massive project of canonization. To quote again from Haynes: “Composers became the heroes, promoted to the status of geniuses. Musical pantheons were erected, and plaster factories geared up to create busts of composers, like so many ancient Roman emperors, the resemblances to the actual composers a matter of chance” (5). The culture of the concert hall developed, according to which listeners were required to sit quietly in designated seats and listen reverently to virtuosos performing the revered works of (mostly) dead geniuses, as preserved in text and often endlessly debated by musicologists with access to the original manuscripts, letters, journals, and sketchbooks of the composers, all with the aim of establishing the master’s true intentions. Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that the concert hall has become a place where improvisation is rarely heard. Ernst Ferand’s classic anthology Improvisation in Nine Centuries of Western Music confirms this Romantic break from improvisation. Ferand describes the beginnings of the written cadenza with C.P.E. Bach, 17 the celebrated improvisational skills of Mozart, Clementi, Beethoven 18 and others (19), but notes that while many great 302 Len Cagle DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 mid-late 19 th century pianists such as Liszt and Chopin still improvised in public, by the mid-20 th century improvisation was mostly confined to the music of “Gypsy bands” and other marginalized or non-Western cultures, as well as jazz and popular musicians (21). Ferand indicates in the preface of his anthology that his focus on improvisation is a refocusing on the performer, whose work has long been eclipsed by the composer, by declaring that his work “aims to show, in examples from the music-making of past times, the creative contribution of the performers to the process of shaping music - a contribution hardly ever considered at all” (3). To be sure, improvisation and the basso continuo had been in decline even before the rise of the Romantic genius composer, not only due to new compositional practices such as the written cadenza but also because of the increasing importance of patronage. “Aristocratic taste,” says Westrup, contributed to both simplification and standardization of compositions: “The patrons of music were not necessarily educated music-lovers: they preferred music which was simple and direct in its appeal but at the same time elegant and refined in its expression.” One casualty of this change in compositional practice, according to Westrup, was the decline of the continuo since this tended to complicate performances by allowing for a measure of unpredictable complexity (142). Clearly, however, such developments were mere preludes to the dramatic shift toward the primacy of the composer that occurred early in the Romantic period. If one were to search in German literature for this break-between improvisation as a common and indeed expected practice on the one hand, and extreme fidelity to the written musical text on the other-Hoffmann’s early fiction, still very much in touch with his music criticism, would be an obvious place to start. Indeed, Hoffmann’s role as an influential music critic as well as a composer in the first quarter of the 19 th century suggests a possible position as a transitional figure, one who was deeply familiar with the music of the past but seriously and enthusiastically interested in the music of the present, as his well-known essay Beethovens Instrumental-Musik 19 makes plain. This text, which is perhaps more than any other responsible for the popular conception of Romantic music in the 19 th century, 20 heralds ecstatically the arrival of Beethoven as a Romantic composer, on the strength of the Symphony in C Minor and the Opus 70 Piano Trios. It is here that Hoffmann declares music to be “die romantischste aller Künste, beinahe möchte man sagen, allein echt romantisch, denn nur das Unendliche ist ihr Vorwurf ” (52). The text establishes Beethoven, referred to multiple times in the essay as “der Meister,” possessed of great “Genius” (54), as unquestioned ruler of the work (“In Wahrheit, der Meister, an Besonnenheit Haydn und Mozart ganz an die Seite zu stellen, trennt sein Ich von dem innern Reich der Töne DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 Musical Improvisation in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck 303 und gebietet darüber als unumschränkter Herr,” 55). The performer, according to Hoffmann, is a mere transmitter of the work of the Romantic genius: Der echte Künstler lebt nur in dem Werke, das er in dem Sinne des Meisters aufgefaßt hat und nun vorträgt. Er verschmäht es, auf irgend eine Weise seine Persönlichkeit geltend zu machen, und all sein Dichten und Trachten geht nur dahin, alle die herrlichen holdseligen Bilder und Erscheinungen, die der Meister mit magischer Gewalt in sein Werk verschloß, tausendfarbig glänzend ins rege Leben zu rufen, daß sie den Menschen in lichten funkelnden Kreisen umfangen und seine Fantasie, sein innerstes Gemüt entzündend, ihn raschen Fluges in das ferne Geisterreich der Töne tragen. (61) This conception of the performer-who is a true artist (“der echte Künstler”) only if he refrains from any expression of his own Persönlichkeit -leaves no room for improvisation. As Joanna Neilly notes in an article on Hoffmann’s negative disposition toward Turkish effects in orchestral music, this “distaste” derives from Hoffmann’s well-established “musical aesthetics, and their relation to an overarching Romantic problem: the longing to experience the divine on earth. For artists, this longing takes the form of an often-frustrated effort to create ‘das Ideal’, a work of art with the potential to raise its observer, or listener, to a higher plane” (146). The goal of a composer attempting to create the ideal is necessarily at odds not only with musical effects such as those that form the subject of Neilly’s essay but also with improvisation. For Hoffmann, a performance of Beethoven’s work transports or elevates the listener, but only in the sense that the heroic achievements of the master are properly conveyed as written, without embellishment or ornamentation. 21 The language of Beethovens Instrumental-Musik echoes the work of early Romantic critic and theorist Friedrich Schlegel, whose best-known literary fragment, Athenäum 116, defines Romantic writing/ poetry as “eine progressive Universalpoesie,” which, among other things, means that it is always becoming and never fully complete: Die romantische Dichtart ist noch im Werden; ja das ist ihr eigentliches Wesen, daß sie ewig nur werden, nie vollendet sein kann. Sie kann durch keine Theorie erschöpft werden, und nur eine divinatorische Kritik dürfte es wagen, ihr Ideal charakterisieren zu wollen. Sie allein ist unendlich, wie sie allein frei ist und das als ihr erstes Gesetz anerkennt, daß die Willkür des Dichters kein Gesetz über sich leide. Die romantische Dichtart ist die einzige, die mehr als Art und gleichsam die Dichtkunst selber ist: denn in einem gewissen Sinn ist oder soll alle Poesie romantisch sein. (91) I would like to briefly draw attention to the apparent conflict in this and other Athenäum fragments between, on the one hand, the authority of the author over the work of art, and on the other hand the organic, spontaneous devel- 304 Len Cagle DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 opment of the work of art. Schlegel 22 seems to want to have it both ways: to insist that nothing restricts the absolute will of the poet (“daß die Willkür des Dichters kein Gesetz über sich leide”), while consistently describing the poem as something that just happens, that grows, that becomes all on its own: “Was in der Poesie geschieht, geschieht nie, oder immer. Sonst ist es keine rechte Poesie” (88), he says in another fragment; while elsewhere declaring the fusion of intention and instinct as necessary for the production of the naïve ideal: “Das schöne, poetische, idealische Naive muß zugleich Absicht, und Instinkt sein,” Schlegel states, explaining further down the page that “Absicht erfordert nicht gerade einen tiefen Calcul oder Plan” (82). Athenäum 22 begins with this observation: “Ein Projekt ist der subjektive Keim eines werdenden Objekts. Ein vollkommnes Projekt müßte zugleich ganz subjektiv, und ganz objektiv, ein unteilbares und lebendiges Individuum sein” (78). The fragment stresses on the one hand the organic nature of the work in progress, as a living seed that is becoming and entirely objective, but which is also somehow entirely subjective. 23 This tendency to think of Romantic art as something that auto-generates or develops organically, while somehow also being absolutely beholden to the will of the artist, appears in the Kreisleriana of the Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (1814) as well, and not only in the revised Beethoven essay. In one of the final critical texts in volume IV of this collection, Über einen Ausspruch Sachini’s, und über den sogenannten Effekt in der Musik , Hoffmann (or his fictional alter-ego Kreisler) privileges the musical text as repository for the composer’s genius: Mit einem Wort: der Künstler muß, um uns zu rühren, um uns gewaltig zu ergreifen, selbst in eigener Brust tief durchdrungen sein und nur das, in der Extase bewußtlos im Innern Empfangene mit höherer Kraft festzuhalten in den Hieroglyphen der Töne (den Noten) ist die Kunst, wirkungsvoll zu komponieren. (442) The process of composition is here alleged to be one of capturing subconsciously (“bewußtlos”) ideas that arise from deep within the composer and committing them to text (“den Noten”). The opera composer, for example, should read and fully concentrate on the libretto, identify fully with all of the characters, and let the composition of the music take care of itself: “in dem Feuer der Begeisterung, das deine Brust entflammt, entzünden sich Töne, Melodien, Akkorde, und in der wundervollen Sprache der Musik strömt das Gedicht aus deinem Innern hervor” (442). 24 The final step is transcription: und so empfängst du mit der Wirkung auch zugleich die Mittel, die du nun, wie deiner Macht unterworfene Geister, in das Zauberbuch der Partitur bannst.—Freilich heißt das alles nur so viel, als: Sei so gut, Lieber, und sorge nur dafür, ein recht musikalischer DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 Musical Improvisation in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck 305 Genius zu sein: das Andere findet sich dann von selbst! aber es ist dem wirklich so und nicht anders. (442) As in Schlegel’s Athenäum 116, the process of artistic creation is presented here as something that happens organically but is also dependent on the will of the artist. The ideas accessed in a state of ecstasy by the composer must be physically captured, even restrained. Hoffmann is careful to add to this formula of musical composition that a great deal of work is involved, work described in mystical terms, the struggle of a sorcerer binding ( bannen ) unruly spirits to the magical tome ( Zauberbuch ) of the score. For the Romantic composer and music critic Hoffmann, composition and performance are clearly two separate and distinct activities. In the hierarchy of musical creation, the performer is subordinate to the composer, whose genius tolerates no personal expression on the part of the performing musician. The tension generated by this unequal relationship is at the heart of Ritter Gluck . Ritter Gluck first appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1809 and was later republished as the first text of the Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier . In the following I draw attention to a conflict in the text between two modes of music making: on the one hand, a disposition to improvise in the pre-Romantic (baroque) sense, and on the other a Romantic tendency to demand absolute fidelity to the work as it was intended to be performed by the composer. The goal is not to reconcile these two competing modes, but rather to suggest that Ritter Gluck offers a literary view of the split of improvisation from developing modern standard performance practices at more or less the historical moment at which this split occurred. The tale is set in Berlin in 1809. The narrator meets a stranger at a café, who claims to be a composer. After a long and curious conversation about music and art, in which the stranger reveals himself to be either a genius, a synesthete (he describes music partially in visual terms), a lunatic, or some combination of the three, he disappears. Several months later, the narrator finds the stranger standing outside the theater as Gluck’s opera Armida is being performed. The stranger leads the narrator to his apartment off the Friedrichstraße, and there performs the overture to Armida , reading from a bound volume of Gluck’s collected works, the pages of which are blank. The baffled narrator asks: “Was ist das? Wer sind Sie? ” The stranger leaves the room, returns several minutes later in clothing from the last century, and responds: “Ich bin der Ritter Gluck! ” As mentioned, much of the attention given to this text has focused on the problem posed by this final sentence: “Ich bin der Ritter Gluck,” with readers accepting the challenge to try and puzzle out the identity of the title figure (not least be- 306 Len Cagle DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 cause in 1809 the composer Gluck was long dead). Hartmut Steinecke (in the “Aspekte der Deutung” of the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag edition of the Fantasiestücke cited here) summarizes the tale’s reception in the following fashion: Das größte Interesse der Erzählung hat von Beginn an für die meisten Leser und Forscher der Titelheld auf sich gezogen: Immer wieder wurde versucht, die Schlußfrage des Ich-Erzählers: „wer sind Sie? “ zu beantworten. Drei Hauptrichtungen der Deutung haben sich herausgebildet […] Der Sonderling sei Gluck selber; er sei ein Phantasiegebilde des Ich-Erzählers; er sei ein Wahnsinniger, der sich einbilde, Gluck zu sein. 25 (615) Rather than potentially misread the text by focusing on the identity of “Gluck,” as many previous readers have done, I propose (as does Steinecke) a reading that largely ignores the question of the stranger’s identity and focuses instead on what he says and, more importantly, how he performs music, thereby revealing the early 19 th -century split between pre-Romantic improvisation and what we have come to accept in classical music today as standard (non-improvising) performance practice. I argue that the stranger embodies both the old (baroque and classical) propensity to improvise, extemporize, and embellish and the growing Romantic tendency to treat the musical work as the product of genius, an exalted and static object from which no deviation on the part of the mere performer is tolerated. It is the narrator who first alludes to improvisation, in an exchange that tells us much about his musical experience and critical judgment. Early in their first conversation, the narrator reveals that he studied piano and basso continuo “wie eine Sache, die zur guten Erziehung gehört” (21), emphasizing the 18 th -century ubiquity of training in improvisation, even for those whose musical education, like the narrator’s, is incomplete. The conversation had begun with the narrator’s irritated declaration against parallel octaves in response to the small and (to his ears inferior) orchestra playing outside the café. As several readers have pointed out, the remark reveals that the narrator understands less of music theory than appears to be the case, and in any event admits that he cannot hear the inner voices and is therefore perhaps unable to accurately evaluate the performance; Steinecke remarks, for example, that it is notable that the narrator is only able to formulate the counterpoint and voice-leading injunction against parallel octaves imprecisely (Hoffmann 619—620). Or to quote the narrator himself: “da sagte man mir unter anderm, nichts mache einen widrigern Effekt, als wenn der Baß mit der Oberstimme in Oktaven fortschreite. Ich nahm das damals auf Autorität an und habe es nachher immer bewährt gefunden” (21). “Da sagte man mir unter anderm” is not exactly a strong appeal to authority, undermining from the start the narrator’s reliability as a commentator on musical matters. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 Musical Improvisation in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck 307 The stranger’s response is to encourage from the orchestra an effective performance of the overture of Gluck’s Iphigenie in Aulis , which features a powerful tutti section that by its nature requires parallel octaves. The narrator describes the moment toward the end of the overture, at the return of the tutti : “das Tutti kehrt wieder, wie ein Riese hehr und groß schreitet das Unisono fort, die dumpfe Klage erstirbt unter seinen zermalmenden Tritten” (22). The stranger, that is, does not dispute or correct the narrator’s imperfect or poorly remembered understanding of the rules of counterpoint; he shows polite deference and then effectively demonstrates the narrator’s error. The rest of the tale is essentially concerned with the identity of the stranger and his relationship to the music and career of Christoph Willibald Gluck. I set aside, for now, the stranger’s lengthy description of his time in the “Reich der Träume,” which is perhaps best read as a metaphor for musical insight, inspiration, and composition that, to be sure, connects in interesting ways to Hoffmann’s own thoughts on the matter; his self-described banishment to Berlin, a city that he claims does not properly appreciate good music; and the numerous indications that he might be insane or a revenant, and focus instead on the stranger’s curious position between improvisation and Romantic fidelity to the work as written. The first improvisation occurs in the café. After revealing that he is a composer, the stranger approaches the window and softly sings a chorus from Gluck’s Iphigenie in Tauris . The narrator remarks: “Mit Verwundern bermerkte ich, daß er gewisse andere Wendungen der Melodien nahm, die durch Kraft und Neuheit frappierten” (23). The stranger reveals a disposition to deviate from the original, to embellish effectively, to decorate. He also criticizes, however, the current state of musical composition in Berlin by attacking the tendency to over-compose, to write and revise and yet fail to create: “Sie kritteln und kritteln—vertiefen alles bis zur feinsten Meßlichkeit; wühlen alles durch, um nur einen armseligen Gedanken zu finden; über dem Schwatzen von Kunst, von Kunstsinn, und was weiß ich—können sie nicht zum Schaffen kommen” (26). This expression recalls the Kreisleriana texts cited above, both the Beethoven essay and Über einen Ausspruch Sachini’s . In this context, the criticism that composers “kritteln und kritteln” but produce nothing certainly implies that they are not doing the work Hoffmann describes in the latter, that is, immersing themselves in the material in order to allow the work to express itself so that it can be bound by the composer to the score. The stranger thus appears to endorse or represent spontaneity, reveals an openness to improvisation, and unleashes a critique of the modern composer as a too-high-minded creator, one who talks endlessly about art, spends far too much time attempting to perfect the few meager ideas he has, and too little time actually creating (or inscribing) anything. 308 Len Cagle DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 That said, the stranger’s liberal attitude toward innovation and experimentation has its limits, namely when the work of a great artist is at stake. He claims to have left the theater during the overture of Mozart’s Don Giovanni because of the orchestra’s inferior playing (“ohne Sinn und Verstand abgesprudelt,” 27), even though he had prepared for the performance with fasting and prayer-a detail that anticipates the deification of the composer in the 19 th -century concert hall. He criticizes a performance of Iphigenie in Tauris because the conductor saw fit to replace the overture of this Iphigenie opera with that of the other one. This tendency to demand humble fidelity to the godlike composer is revealed again during the second encounter with the narrator. Standing outside the theater during a performance of Armida , the stranger listens and watches through the window and delivers to himself a running commentary on all that is wrong with the performance. The climactic performance of Armida in the stranger’s apartment precedes the curious revelation that he is “Ritter Gluck.” The impulse for this performance occurs at the encounter outside the theater. “Sie sollen jetzt Armida hören! Kommen Sie! ” the stranger declares, and the narrator soon finds himself in what appears to be a very baroque salon: “der Anblick des sonderbar ausstaffierten Zimmers überraschte mich nicht wenig. Altmodisch reich verzierte Stühle, eine Wanduhr mit vergoldetem Gehäuse, und ein breiter, schwerfälliger Spiegel gaben dem Ganzen das düstere Ansehn verjährter Pracht. In der Mitte stand ein kleines Klavier” (29). The room belongs to the last century; the narrator has stepped back in time. The stranger shows off his handsomely bound collection of Gluck’s complete works; taking a volume from the shelf, he approaches the piano and opens the book: “wer schildert mein Erstaunen! ” the narrator declares; “ich erblickte rastrierte Blätter, aber mit keiner Note beschrieben” (29). The appearance of the book promises a certain authority or authenticity, an access to “the work,” the music bound by the composer to the score in the form of musical notation. The narrator’s reaction to seeing “Glucks Meisterwerke,” the “Reihe schön gebundener Bücher […] mit goldnen Aufschriften” is unmistakable; it is the awe of the enthusiast for the work of the great artist. This gesture toward reverence is, however, immediately arrested by the appearance of blank pages. There is no text, but there is music, a performance characterized by both fidelity to the written work and improvisation. Telling the narrator to turn the pages at the correct moment, the stranger begins to play the overture to Armida : [N]un spielte er herrlich und meisterhaft, mit vollgriffigen Akkorden, das majestätische Tempo di Marcia, womit die Ouvertüre anhebt, fast ganz dem Original getreu: aber das Allegro war nur mit Glucks Hauptgedanken durchflochten. Er brachte so DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 Musical Improvisation in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck 309 viele neue geniale Wendungen hinein, daß mein Erstaunen immer wuchs. Vorzüglich waren seine Modulationen frappant, ohne grell zu werden, und er wußte den einfachen Hauptgedanken so viele melodiöse Melismen anzureihen, daß jene immer in neuer, verjüngter Gestalt wiederzukehren schienen. (30) The words “herrlich und meisterhaft” suggest both facility and authority, as well as a certain fidelity, as the stranger’s interpretation of the beginning of the overture is, according to the narrator, “fast dem Original getreu.” The adverb “fast,” however, leads to the conjunction “aber,” and this almost-but-not-quite turns out to be crucial to the narrator’s as well as the reader’s reception of the stranger’s rendition of Armida . Indeed, the balance shifts from fidelity toward innovation following the colon, as the almost-but-not-quite faithful rendition of the work tips toward something approaching a reinvention: 26 the allegro is “nur mit Glucks Hauptgedanken durchflochten” as the stranger brings “so viele neue geniale Wendungen hinein.” Moreover, the passage contains the word “frappant” to describe the stranger’s modulations; as Oesterle points out, this “Stichwort” recalls “die im späten 18. Jahrhundert beliebte Mode des Klavierfantasierens” (71), a classical period improvisational practice that, like the basso continuo, largely disappeared in the 19 th century. These “many ingenious expressions” are followed by “so viele melodiöse Melismen,” ornaments common in baroque performance, that appear to rejuvenate the main ideas (“Hauptgedanken”) of Gluck’s original. Concluding his performance, the stranger leafs through several empty pages and says: “Alles dieses, mein Herr, habe ich geschrieben ” (30, my emphasis), mysteriously nodding toward the authority of composition as writing, but only momentarily: “Nun sang er die Schlußszene der Armida …. Auch hier wich er merklich von dem eigentlichen Original ab: aber seine veränderte Musik war die Glucksche Szene gleichsam in höherer Potenz” (30—31). This vocal augmentation perpetuates and strengthens the improvisational spirit of the performance even as it improves on the original: in the hands (and voice) of the improvising stranger, Gluck’s masterpiece achieves a greatness that the published score does not reflect, even as the stranger insists on compositional authority-an insistence that conflates improvisation with inscription. “Was ist das? ” The narrator’s first question addresses not the stranger’s identity, but rather what the narrator has just seen and heard, but what he sees and hears does not fit neatly into either past (baroque) or present (early 19 th century, Romantic) conceptions of musical performance and composition. The ornate room in which the final moments of the narrative are set seems to suggest a return to baroque sensibilities; in such a context, the stranger’s near-extempore performance, marked as it is with improvised ornaments and “geniale Wendungen” seems quite at home. But the stranger did not promise extemporization, 310 Len Cagle DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 he promised Gluck’s opera Armida , in the context of his own critique of an inferior-because unfaithful to the composer-performance of the same. The appearance of Gluck’s collected works in the stranger’s home further strengthens the narrator’s expectation of fidelity to the original, but the pages are blank; and yet the stranger plays as if reading from the page, and his playing-according to the narrator, whose musical judgment, we must recall, is questionable-appears much less than faithful to the original, and yet somehow superior: “seine veränderte Musik war die Glucksche szene gleichsam in höherer Potenz.” The answer to the question: “was ist das? ” is therefore neither composition nor improvisation, neither old music nor new music, neither a privileging of the performer nor a glorification of the composer, but rather some sort of hybrid creation that allows both performer and composer to collaborate in the interest of some higher potential. The narrator, of course, only asks the question; he does not solve the riddle. Moreover, he invites the reader to misread the tale by concluding with a devious misdirection that draws attention away from the “what” of his final two-part question and towards the “who”-resulting in a dramatic and nearly inscrutable ending that invariably discourages or at least delays a full appreciation of what has taken place in the stranger’s apartment, even as it subtly shifts the focus from the performer (the stranger) to the composer (“der Ritter Gluck”). As we have seen, Hoffmann’s own contributions to music criticism, in particular his widely recognized influence on the early Romantic tendency toward a veneration of the composer at the expense of the performer, should encourage us to reconsider the divide embodied by the stranger in Ritter Gluck : between the utterly faithful reproduction of the work as the composer intended, and the impulse to improvise: to use the original as a basis for something new and perhaps more powerful than the text as written. The stranger’s declaration that he is “Ritter Gluck” may be nothing more than a dodge, a distraction from this process, that is, the work of thinking about and performing music that takes up most of the text. What really matters is not what the stranger says, or who he is, but rather what he does , and while it is not possible to determine with certainty who “Ritter Gluck” is, we can say with some confidence what he does: he extemporizes, he augments, he ornaments, in a word: he improvises. Notes 1 John Ellis documents several instances of such misreadings and points out that Hoffmann’s critics “neigen immer noch dazu, auffallende Ungereimtheiten und Folgewidrigkeiten in seinem Werk zu finden und sie als Flüchtigkeitsfehler eines Schriftstellers abzutun, den seine überreiche DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 Musical Improvisation in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck 311 Erfindungsgabe zuweilen irregeführt habe” (31). See also Victoria Dutchman-Smith on the notoriously problematic early reception of Hoffmann by Walter Scott, Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, and others. 2 For a useful and recent summary see Schmidt (23). 3 See also Steinecke (90—91). 4 Elsewhere Steinecke notes that the structural complexity of the text leaves the discussion of the question as to the identity of the stranger “an der Oberfläche” (Steinecke 98). 5 Xaver von Cranach similarly emphasizes the first of the narrator’s two questions and suggests that the “das” should ultimately be read more broadly still, as “die gesamte bisher geschilderte Erfahrung des Erzählers” and a “Frage nach der Beschaffenheit des Textes selbst” (7—8). 6 See for example the essay Alte und neue Kirchenmusik of 1814, which in its first sentences notes that many music critics in Hoffmann’s day cite the decline of “das tiefe Studium des Kontrapunkts” as the cause of a dearth of high-quality modern music for the church (Hoffmann 503). 7 For a brief history of the early baroque origins of the figured bass and its connection to early opera, see Headington (92—93); see also Westrup, who indicates the early adoption of the figured bass as a tool for church organists that spread to secular forms and to other instruments (84—85). 8 “The accompaniment was the figured bass, also called continuo […] The keyboard player filled in the texture above his bass part, and musicians skilled in this improvisatory art were praised by connoisseurs (Headington 111). 9 For a sense of the ubiquity of aspects of the baroque style well into the 18 th century, see the chapter on embellishment (“Manieren”) in C.P.E. Bach’s classic Versuch über die wahre Art Clavier zu spielen. 10 Or HIP (historically informed performance). See Haynes viii. 11 Westrup points out that works such as Bach’s were still needed in the late 18 th century: “By now the practice of playing from figured bass was 150 years old; but since it was a part of the necessary equipment of all musicians there was still room for the publication on new works on the subject” (41). 12 For the Romantics baroque music was considered the music of the past, as musicologist Charles Rosen points out: “For an early nineteenth-century musician, Bach was anachronistically like a Gothic cathedral” (220). 13 Haynes 5. 14 Haynes 4. 15 Westrup: “The practice of using figured bass […] was a great practical convenience and saved composers a great deal of time” (25). 312 Len Cagle DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 16 See also Ferand: “In the entire musical practice of the Baroque the art of playing the thorough-bass achieves over-riding importance, so much so that the period from 1600 to 1750 is sometimes simply called the ‘thorough-bass period’. The fact is that with the single exception of purely solo music, thorough-bass practice participated essentially in all forms of Baroque music” (18). 17 The written cadenza remains a common practice even among period performers, according to Haynes-contrary to the original intention of the cadenza: “We even write out our graces and cadenzas (which were originally developed as fenced-off areas reserved for improvisation)” (1). 18 See, for example, Headington on Beethoven’s first meeting with Mozart, “who was impressed by (Beethoven’s) powers of improvisation” (158). 19 Cited here is the version published in the Kreisleriana of the Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (1814). This text is an amalgamation of two reviews originally published in 1810 and 1813. 20 See Schmidt 21. 21 Dutchman-Smith stresses Hoffmann’s privileging in the Beethoven essay of structure as well as Besonnenheit , both of which might be seen to be at odds with improvisation (73). This concern for structure applies as well to other tales and critical pieces in the Kreisleriana (Charlton 25—27). 22 Regarding Schlegel and music: See Hall for a recent (2009) evaluation of “Schlegel’s musical aesthetic” that “tended toward philosophical abstraction and, ultimately, contradiction” (425). 23 Patricia Stanley’s application of Schlegel’s theory of the arabesque to Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke identifies similar tensions in Schlegel’s Brief über den Roman as well as in other texts (401—402). 24 Interestingly, the next sentence lays out the requisite musical education and technical training for such musical transmission of the idea (442). This aspect of Hoffmann’s description of the compositional process will resonate with musical improvisers, i.e. full command of the tools required to compose anything at all. 25 See also Oesterle (among others): “Die Forschung hat sich zu immer neuen Enträtselungen verführen lassen. Ist der ‘Ritter Gluck’ in der Erzählung von 1809 ein Wahnsinniger, ein Revenant, ein Gespenst, der ewige Jude in Berlin oder eine Allegorie, der Geist der Gluckschen Reformoper? “ (60) 26 Oesterle uses the word “innovatorisch” to describe the stranger’s engagement with Gluck, referring here to the first meeting between the narrator and the stranger, in words that conjure an image of a masterful musical improviser, one who uses available and even inferior materials to make something new and exciting out of something old and established: “Nicht DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0014 Musical Improvisation in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck 313 konservatorisch, sondern innovatorisch geht die befremdliche Gestalt mit Gluckschen Kompositionen um: sie zieht ein geistvolles und intuitiv richtiges musikalisches Spiel, und sei es das fragmentarisch umrißhafte Spiel einer Kaffeehausmusikantengruppe, dem perfekten, aber geistlos-pedantischen Abspielen eines Gluckschen Musikstücks in der Berliner Oper vor” (59). Works Cited Bach, Carl Philip Emanuel. Versuch über die wahre Art Clavier zu spielen. Mit Exempeln und achtzehn Probe-Stücken in sechs Sonaten . Berlin, Christian Friedrich Henning, 1753. Bailey, Derek. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music . Da Capo Press, 1993. Charlton, David, editor and Martyn Clark, translator. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings. Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism . Cambridge UP, 1989. Cranach, Xaver von. “Die Tiefenstruktur des Ritter Gluck - Mit Orpheus durch das Brandenburger Tor.“ E.T.A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch. Mitteilungen der E.T.A. 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E.TA. Hoffmanns Leben und Werk . Berlin: Insel Verlag, 2004. Stanyon, Miranda.“‘Rastrierte Blätter, aber mit keiner Note beschrieben’: The Musical Sublime and Aporias of Inscription in Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck .” The German Quarterly 83, No. 4 (2010): 412-—30. Weber, Samuel. “The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment.” MLN 88, No. 6 (1973): 1102—1133. Westrup, J.A. An Introduction to Musical History . London: Hutchinson University Library, 1955.