VIII. MUSIC
Music was Germany’s pride in prosperity and her solace in desolation. When Mme. de Staël reached Weimar in 1803 she found music an almost daily part of an educated family’s life. Many cities had opera companies, and, since Gluck, they strove to depend less and less upon Italian works and arias. Mannheim and Leipzig had orchestras famous throughout Europe. Instrumental music was rising to public competition with opera. Germany had great violinists like Louis Spohr (1784–1859), celebrated pianists like Johann Hummel (1778–1837). King Frederick William II played the violoncello so well that he took part in quartets, sometimes in orchestras, and Prince Louis Ferdinand was so accomplished a pianist that only his royal descent kept him from rivaling Beethoven and Hummel.24
Germany also had a music master renowned throughout Europe as teacher, composer, and virtuoso on almost any instrument: Abt (i.e., Abbot) Georg Joseph Vogler (1749–1814). He early won fame as organist and pianist, learned the violin without a teacher, and developed a new system of fingering, well adapted to his sesquipedalian fingers. Sent to Italy to study composition with Padre Martini, he rebelled against one teacher after another, took a turn to religion, was acclaimed in Rome. Returning to Germany, he founded a music school in Mannheim, then in Darmstadt, finally in Stockholm. He rejected the laborious methods of composition taught by Italian teachers, and promised quicker perfection. Mozart and some others thought him a charlatan, but later consideration gave him high rank, not as composer but as teacher, performer, organ builder, and man. He toured Europe as an organist, attracting enormous audiences, earning enormous fees, and improving organs. He transformed the style of organ playing, and won a contest with Beethoven in improvisation.25 He was the honored teacher of a dozen famous pupils, including Weber and Meyerbeer. When he died they mourned him as if they had lost-a father. On May 13, 1814, Weber wrote: “On the 6th our beloved master Vogler was suddenly snatched from us by death…. He will ever live in our hearts.”26
Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) was one of the many children of twice-married Franz Anton von Weber. Of Anton’s daughters or nieces two have appeared in these volumes: Aloysia as Mozart’s first love and a famous singer, and Constanze, who became Mozart’s wife. Sons Fritz and Edmund studied with Joseph Haydn, but son Carl gave so little promise that Fritz told him, “Carl, you may become anything else you like, but a musician you will never be.”27 Carl took to painting. But in Franz Anton’s wanderings as director of a dramatic and musical troupe mostly composed of his children, Carl’s instruction in music was resumed by a devoted teacher, Joseph Heuschkel, under whom the boy quickly developed a talent that astonished and rewarded his father. By 1800, aged fourteen, Carl was composing, and giving public performances. Meanwhile, however, the hectic hurrying from town to town had some effect upon Carl’s character: he became restless, nervous, excitable, and changeful. He became so fascinated by the lithography invented by his friend Aloys Senefelder that for a time he neglected musical composition, and went with his father to Freiberg in Saxony to undertake lithography on a commercial scale. Then, early in 1803, he met Abt Vogler, took fire again, became Vogler’s pupil, and accepted a rigorous routine of study and practice. Vogler’s confidence in him spurred him on. Now he developed so rapidly that, on Vogler’s recommendation, he was invited to serve as Kapellmeister at Breslau (1804). He was only seventeen, but he accepted, and took his ailing father with him to the Silesian capital.
The youth was not fit for a post requiring not only diverse musical accomplishments but skill in the handling of men and women of all temperaments. He made devoted friends and dedicated enemies. He spent too avidly, rebuked incompetence too sharply, and drank too recklessly. Mistaking a glass of nitric acid for wine, he drank part of it before he realized that he was imbibing fire. His throat and vocal cords were permanently injured; he could no longer sing, he could with difficulty speak. He lost his position after a year; he supported himself and his father and an aunt by giving lessons. He was near despondency when Duke Eugen of Württemberg offered all three of them rooms in his Schloss Karlsruhe in Silesia (1806). But Napoleon’s disruption of Prussian territory and finances ruined the Duke, and Weber, to feed his trio, had to forget music for a while and serve as secretary, at Stuttgart, to Duke Ludwig of Württemberg. This duke was a lord of revelry, dissipation, and dishonesty, and Carl deteriorated under his influence. He developed a passionate attachment to the singer Margarethe Lang, and lost his savings and his health in losing her. He was rescued from debauchery by a Jewish family in Berlin—the Beers who were the parents of Meyerbeer. Marriage sobered him, but did not restore his health.
He won fame during the War of Liberation by putting to music the martial songs of Karl Theodor Körner. After the war he joined in another campaign—against Italian opera: he composed Der Freischütz (1821) as a declaration of independence against the roving and winning Rossini. It was first performed on June 18, 1821, the anniversary of Waterloo; it was carried high on the wings of patriotism; never had a German opera been so successful. It took its theme from the Gespensterbuch (Ghost Stories), and frolicked with the fairies who protected the “free-shooter”; Germany was, in those Grimm days, taking large helpings of fairies; soon (1826) Mendelssohn would offer his Midsummer Night’s Dream overture. Weber’s opera marked the victory of Romanticism in German music.
He hoped to continue his success with Euryanthe, which had its premiere in Vienna in 1823; but Rossini had just conquered Vienna, and Weber’s subtler music failed to charm. The failure, combined with worsening health, so depressed him that for almost two years he ceased to compose music. Then Charles Kemble, manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, offered him a thousand pounds to write an opera for Wieland’s Oberon, and to come to London and conduct it. Weber worked heartily on the task, and studied English so sedulously that when he reached London he could not only read but speak it well. At the premiere (May 28, 1825) Oberon was a wild success, which the happy author described that same evening to his wife:
I obtained this evening the greatest success of my life…. When I entered the orchestra the house, crammed to the roof, burst into a frenzy of applause. Hats and handkerchiefs were waved in the air. At the end of the representation I was called to the stage… All went excellently; everyone around me was happy.28
But further performances were not so well received, and a concert for Weber’s benefit, on May 26, 1826, was a sad failure. A few days later the depressed and exhausted composer took to his bed, stricken with acute tuberculosis; and on June 5, he died, far from home and family. The romantics die young, for in twoscore years they live their threescore and ten.
IX. THE THEATER
Nearly every German city had a theater, for man, harassed by fact during the day, relaxes into imagination in the evening. Some cities—Mannheim, Hamburg, Mainz, Frankfurt, Weimar, Bonn, Leipzig, Berlin—had resident theatrical companies; others relied on traveling troupes, and improvised a stage for an occasional visit. The Mannheim theater had the best reputation for performers and performances, Berlin for receipts and salaries, Weimar for classic theatrical art.
Weimar in 1789 had a population of 6,200, much of it engaged in taking care of the government and its aristocratic entourage. For a time the townspeople supported a company of players, but by 1790 this had died of malnutrition. Duke Charles Augustus took over the enterprise, made the theater part of the court, persuaded Councilor Goethe to undertake the management, and the courtiers to play all but the leading roles; for this they brought in a leading man or woman from the surrounding empyrean of floating “stars.” So the great Iffland came to Weimar, and the proud Korona Schröter (1751–1802), whose voice and form and glancing eyes nearly detached Goethe from Charlotte von Stein. The poet-statesman-philosopher himself was no mean actor, now as playing the tragic Orestes to Mlle. Schröter’s Iphigenia, and then surprisingly successful as a comic, even in farcical roles.29 He trained the actors to a Gallic style of speech, almost to declamation; it had the fault o
f monotony, but the virtue of clarity. The Duke strongly supported this policy, and threatened to reprove on the spot, from the ducal box, any fault of articulation.
The Weimar theater undertook an ambitious repertoire, ranging from Sophocles and Terence to Shakespeare, Calderón, Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire, even to the contemporary dramas of Friedrich and August Wilhelm von Schlegel, and reaching a proud triumph with Schiller’s Wallenstein (1798). Schiller came from Jena to live in Weimar, and, at Goethe’s urging, became a member of the company’s managing body. Now (1800) the little theater made Weimar the goal of thousands of drama-loving Germans. After Schiller’s death (1805) Goethe lost interest in the theater; and when the Duke, urged on by his current mistress, insisted on the company presenting a dramatic interlude with a dog as star, Goethe resigned his managerial post, and the Weimar theater disappeared from history.
Two actors dominated the German stage in this age. August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814) paralleled the triumphs of Talma, and Ludwig Devrient (1784–1832) repeated the career and tragedy of Edmund Kean. Born in Hanover, Iffland at eighteen, over parental prohibition, left home to join a theatrical company at Gotha. Only two years later he starred at Mannheim in Schiller’s Die Räuber. This radical period yielded to prosperity, and to sympathy with the French émigrés; soon he became an idol of conservatives. After an arduous career that covered most of Germany, he accepted Goethe’s invitation to Weimar (1796), and pleased his courtly audience with middle-class comedies; but he did not do well with such tragic roles as Wallenstein or Lear. He composed several plays, whose humor and sentiment won popular applause. In 1798 he reached the goal of his ambition—he was made manager of the National Theater in Berlin.
Shortly before his death he engaged an actor, Ludwig Devrient, who brought to the German stage all the sentiment and tragedy of the Romantic period. His French surname was part of his Huguenot heritage. He was the last of the three sons begotten by a Berlin draper in two marriages. His mother died in his infancy, leaving him miserable in a crowded home. He withdrew into a somber loneliness, consoled only by his handsome face and raven hair. He ran away from home and school, but was caught and returned to his father. Every attempt was made to make him a draper, but Ludwig proved so exasperatingly incompetent that he was released to follow his own bent. In 1804, aged twenty, he fell in with a theatrical troupe at Leipzig, and was given some minor part, from which he was suddenly propelled into a major role by the sickness of the “star.” Finding the role of a drunken tramp congenial to his taste, he did so well that he seemed perpetually condemned to the career of a traveling actor loving drink on and off the boards. At last, in Breslau in 1809, he found himself, not in Falstaff but in the Karl Moor of Schiller’s radical play. Into this part he poured all that he had learned of human evil, oppression, and hate; he let the robber chieftain take possession of him and find outlet in every movement of the body, in the mobile variety of facial expression, and the glare of angry eyes; Breslau had never seen anything so vivid or powerful; only Edmund Kean, in that age of great actors, could reach such heights and depths of histrionic art. All the tragic roles were now Devrient’s for the asking. He played Lear with such total surrender to that fragile mixture of wisdom and madness that, one night, he collapsed in midplay, and had to be taken home, or to his favorite tavern.
In 1814 Iffland, aged fifty-five, came to Breslau, acted with Devrient, felt his force and skill, and asked him to join the National Theater. “The only place that is worthy of you is Berlin. That place—I feel it too well—will soon be vacant. It is reserved for you.”30 In September Iffland died; in the following spring Devrient took his place. There he played himself out, living on fame and wine, spending happy hours exchanging tales with E. T. A. Hoffmann at a tavern near the theater. In 1828, victim of his renown, he accepted a challenge to play in Vienna. He returned to Berlin a nervous ruin. He died on December 30, 1832, aged forty-eight. Three gifted nephews, all bearing his name, carried on his art to the end of the century.
X. THE DRAMATISTS
After August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s masterly translation of Shakespeare (1798 ff.) the German stage provided a new home for the Elizabethan’s plays. Native dramatists, between Lessing and Kleist, usually aimed at the common denominator of the middle class; and their popular successes were lost in the detritus of time. Zacharias Werner put his mysticism passingly on the boards. August von Kotzebue (1761–1819) pleased one generation with his plays, and outdrew Goethe and Schiller even in Weimar; he is now a fading memory except for his assassination. But Germany remembers Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist with pity for the man, and respect for his pen.
Born (1777) in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, he was near-Slav in temperament as well as in geography. Like a good German he spent seven years in the Army, but later mourned those years as wasted. He studied science, literature, and philosophy in the local university, and lost his faith in both religion and science. He proposed to a general’s daughter, but he shuddered at the thought of marriage. He fled to Paris and then Switzerland, where he played with the fancy of buying a farm and letting the discipline of the seasons calm the instability of a mind dizzied with ideas. Relapsing into literature, he wrote, but never finished, an historical tragedy, Robert Guis-kard; and in 1808 he staged at Weimar a comedy, Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Pitcher), which a later generation ranked as a lasting classic. Staying in Weimar for a while (1802–03), he won friendly encouragement from the kindly old agnostic Christoph Wieland, who, after hearing bits of Guiskard, told the young dramatist that he held in him the “spirits of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare,”31 and that the genius of Kleist was destined “to fill the gap, in the development of the German drama, which even Schiller and Goethe had not yet filled.”32 This was enough to destroy the twenty-five-year-old Sophocles.
He went to live in Paris, felt its fever, and pondered hopelessly over the skepticism inherent in German idealist philosophy: if we know only so little of the world as comes to our consciousness after being transformed by our modes of perception, then we can never find the truth. Only one thing is certain: philosophers, scientists, poets, saints, beggars, lunatics, all are fated soon to be dust, or a memory fading in a mortal few. Kleist lost the courage to face, accept, and enjoy reality even as so precariously known. He concluded that his genius was a delusion, that his books and manuscripts were vanities. In a moment of wrath and despair he burned such manuscripts as he had with him, and tried to enlist in the army that Napoleon was gathering at the Channel. On October 26, 1803, he wrote to his sister, whom perhaps he loved beyond taboo:
What I am going to tell you may cost you your life; but I must, I must do it. I have perused again, rejected, and burned my work; and now the end has come. Heaven denies me fame, the greatest of earthly goods; like a capricious child I throw down before it all the rest. I cannot show myself worthy of thy friendship, and without thy friendship I cannot live; I choose death. Be calm, exalted one! I shall die the beautiful death of battle. I have left the capital of this country, I have wandered to its northern coast, I shall enter the French service; soon the army will embark for England; the ruin of us all is lurking over the sea. I exult in the prospect of the glorious grave. Thou, beloved, shalt be my last thought.33
His plan to be a German soldier in the French Army aroused suspicion. He was expelled from France at the insistence of the Prussian ambassador. Shortly thereafter France declared war on Prussia; in 1806 Napoleon destroyed the Prussian Army, almost the Prussian state. Kleist sought refuge in Dresden, but French soldiers arrested him there as a suspected spy; he spent six months in jail. Returning to Dresden, he joined a patriotic group of writers and artists, and collaborated with Adam Müller in editing a periodical to which he contributed some of his finest essays.
In 1808 he published a tragic drama, Penthesilea. Its heroine is an Amazonian queen who, after Hector’s death, comes to join the desperate Trojans against the Greeks at Troy; she sets out to kill Achilles, is vanquished by him
, falls in love with him, and then (following the law of the Amazonian women that each of them must prove herself by overcoming her lover in battle) pierces Achilles with an arrow, sets her dogs upon him, joins them in tearing him to pieces, drinks his blood, and collapses in death. The play is an echo of the Bacchic frenzy which Euripides had told of in The Bacchae—a. side of the Greek mythology and character not emphasized by Hellenists before Nietzsche.
Doubtless the anger aroused by Napoleon’s ruthless dismemberment of Prussia had raised the poet out of his own woes to make him one of the voices calling Germany to the War of Liberation. Toward the end of 1808 he issued a play, Die Hermannsschlacht, which, by telling of Arminius’ victories over the Roman legions of A.D. 6, sought to rouse the courage of the Germans in the apparently hopeless conflict with Napoleon. Here again the fervor of Kleist’s patriotism raised him to neurotic excesses: Hermann’s wife Thusnelda lures the German general Ventidius to an assignation with her, and leads him into the fatal embraces of a wild bear.
The years 1809–10 were the apex of Kleist’s genius. His poetic drama Das Käthchen von Heilbronn was staged to success in Hamburg, Vienna, and Graz; and the two volumes of short stories that he issued in 1810 marked him out as perhaps the finest prose stylist of the age of Goethe. Thereafter his spirit failed, perhaps through the breakdown of his health. Some strange affinity of suffering brought him into association, finally into a love romance, with an incurably sick woman, Henriette Vogel. His letters to her reveal a mind on the edge of sanity. “My Jette, my all, my castle, meadows, sum of my life, my wedding, baptism of my children, my tragedy, my fame, my guardian angel, my cherub and seraph!” She answered that if he loved her he would kill her, On November 21, 1811, on the banks of the Wansee, near Potsdam, he shot her fatally, and then himself.