Christopher Parton Guest Lecture

Christopher Parton (Princeton University) will give a talk entitled "The Irony of Musical Transcendence in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana"

E.T.A Hoffmann’s writings on Beethoven have long been central to the study of nineteenth-century musical aesthetics, especially those essays included in his Kreisleriana (1814). One of the most alluring aspects of Hoffman’s writing is the way he depicts the transcendence of the material world, in which the ‘spirit kingdom of the infinite’ is revealed through Beethoven’s music. Musicologists have seized on Hoffmann’s approachable yet unsystematic metaphysics as representative of the nascent concept of absolute music and Romantic music philosophy. Yet few have acknowledged how Hoffmann’s language of transcendence echoes contemporaneous and historical discourses on idealized femininity, even within Hoffmann’s own writing. The female beloveds of Western poetry from Dante to Goethe famously have led male poets to the divine or otherworldly. This paper therefore offers a comparative reading of transcendence through music and the feminine ideal in Hoffmann’s writing. What emerges from this comparison is a realization that the type of transcendence outlined in Hoffmann’s essay is elsewhere metaphysically, and ironically, impossible. I will suggest an ironic reading of ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’ that questions the established reception of this essay as a sincere exordium to nineteenth-century music aesthetics.