Hoffmann was a two-sided, schizophrenic kind of man; by day a decent citizen and a lawyer, by night a fantasist with a strong penchant for the freakish and weird. Temperamentally he was an anarchic humorist, and this affected his daytime side: his final experience with the Prussian state and legal system in which he earned his living was an official inquiry into allegations that he had abused his membership of a judicial commission to satirize the commission’s proceedings. He took care of the split between bourgeois and artist by indulgence in what were in his day called ‘habits of intemperance’; when he was forty-six these in turn took care of him. He was laden with talent: his earliest ambition was to be a graphic artist and painter; he then attempted to exist as a composer and critic of music; and it was only in his thirties that he turned himself into a writer of fiction and became – with four novels and about fifty stories, most of them of novella length – among the best-known and most admired and influential authors of his time. Long before his death he was the kind of author anyone who reads at all reads. His two-sided, schizophrenic type of personality informs all his fictions. A high proportion of the central characters of his tales are demented, either permanently (as is, for example, Nathaniel in The Sandman) or temporarily, under the impact of events their minds cannot handle. Like the other German Romantic writers, he habitually allows his heroes to lose control of themselves and run raving; but, unlike most of his contemporaries, he has a sense of humour always at hand to puncture the pretensions of these hysterics. The Enlightenment too is the subject of gentle mockery: into naturalistic scenes, often set in Berlin and described with the aid of real street names, names of restaurants, etc., there obtrude supernatural and fantastic events which are left unexplained (often it is suggested that, since the Enlightenment does not allow them, they cannot have happened). The Establishment is the subject of mockery not at all gentle: lawyers, civil servants, businessmen and their wives are represented as idiots. However, Hoffman’s literary technique was not always equal to the demands he made of it, nor was his vocabulary always adequate to the depiction of the so-called abnormal psychological states (normal enough to Hoffmann, it seems) he wanted to portray.
Hoffmann was born in Königsberg on 24 January 1776 and baptized Ernst Theodor Wilhelm; he later substituted Amadeus for Wilhelm out of admiration for Mozart. His father was an advocate and his whole background that of the Prussian state service. When he was three his parents separated and he was brought up – or, as he himself says, not brought up – by an uncle. From 1792 to 1795 he studied law at Königsberg; he also gave music lessons – he had already studied music, drawing and painting – and fell in love with one of his pupils, Cora Hatt, who returned his love but was, inconveniently for both of them, married. This might not be a serious obstacle now, but in Hoffmann’s day it was a Berlin Wall and, after practising law in Königsberg for not much more than six months, he fled to Glogau in an effort to break with Frau Hatt. From Glogau he went in 1798 to Berlin, and in 1800 he was sent as a member of the Prussian governmental apparatus to Posen. Here Hoffmann’s Hyde persona made its first serious mistake: he drew a number of unflattering caricatures of the leading personalities of Posen, including the commandant of the military garrison, General von Zastrow. The general failed to see the humour of it and protested to Berlin about Hoffmann’s continuing presence; as a consequence, Hoffmann was re-posted to the village of Plozk on the Vistula – a demotion he regarded as a virtual banishment. Before leaving Posen, however, he married a Polish girl, Michaelina Trzynska.
He spent four years at Plozk; while he was there his first published work – A Letter from a Cloistered Monk to his Friend in the Capital – appeared anonymously in Kotzebue’s magazine, the Freimütige (Berlin, 9 September 1803). He was also working hard at painting and composition, and his application in these fields bore fruit when, having been transferred to Warsaw in 1804, he was able to complete, among other things, an opera to a text by Brentano, Die lustigen Musikanten (1804), and a symphony (1806), and to design and redecorate rooms in the restored Mniszeksche Palace (also 1806). On the title page of the Lustigen Musikanten he signed himself E.T. A. for the first time. On 28 November 1806 Warsaw was occupied by the French and Hoffmann became jobless and, when his house was requisitioned a little later by the occupying forces, homeless. His case was common among the members of the former Prussian bureaucracy, who had lost their livelihood through the victories of Napoleon; what was uncommon was that he could look for work in the artistic sphere, and especially in the theatre and opera house. In 1807 he completed a second full-length opera, Love and Honour, based on Calderon’s La Banda y la flor. Then, back in Berlin, he began a (fortunately brief) period of near-starvation: he wrote to his friend, Gottlieb von Hippel, on 7 May that for five days he had eaten nothing but bread; but he had already made contact with the theatre at Bamberg with the object of obtaining the post of musical director and in-house composer, and the director of the theatre, Count Julius von Soden, was favourably inclined towards him, though he had to compose an opera to a text by Soden, The Draught of Immortality, as a proof of his abilities. In September he went to Bamberg and was appointed musical director, but after the failure of the first production he conducted there – that of Berton’s Aline, Queen of Golconda – he relinquished the post and stayed on only as composer of stage-music and ballets.
He was again reduced to giving music lessons and again fell in love with one of his pupils, Julia Merc. This time it was Hoffmann who was married. His attachment to Julia Merc was pathologically serious, and he was led to thoughts of suicide by the insuperability of the difficulties in the way of making her his. But by this time he was definitely directing his mind towards authorship: Ritter Gluck appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung for 15 February 1809, and on 17 May the A.M.Z. published his first critical review (of Friedrich Witt’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies); other stories, mostly with a musical setting, appeared during succeeding years, and on 18 March 1813 Hoffmann signed a contract for his first book, Fantasie-stücke in Callots Manier, a collection of tales and musical reviews and fantasies.
Things were now at last beginning to look up for E. T. A. Hoffmann. During the historic year 1812 he began his opera Undine, which was to prove his only real success in the theatre and which still survives in Germany as a minor classic of the early Romantic period. In February 1813 the impresario Joseph Seconda offered him the post of musical director at Leipzig, a position he took up in May, at just the time Richard Wagner was being born there. Hoffmann indeed came to know the theatre-loving Karl Friedrich Wagner, the legal (though not, it seems, actual) father of Richard, and later established a firm and long-lasting friendship with Karl Friedrich’s brother Adolf Wagner, who, as Uncle Adolf, plays a significant role in the early biography of his nephew. Richard Wagner was, as a youth, an avid reader and boundless admirer of Hoffmann, whose stories, he said, gave him bad dreams, but he seems not to have known that Hoffmann and Uncle Adolf were close friends. In 1814 Hoffmann began his first novel, Die Elexiere des Teufels; and, when the government service revived in the wake of Napoleon’s retreat, he returned to Berlin and his Jekyll side resumed its career, though Hyde continued to write musical criticism under the pseudonym ‘Johannes Kreisler, Kapellmeister’.
The year 1816 was a decisive year: Undine was performed in Berlin to great applause, and through it Hoffmann acquired the friendship of Weber, who wrote a laudatory review; the first volume of Nachtstücke, the earliest collection of genuinely ‘Hoffmannesque’ tales, appeared; and Hoffmann was appointed a councillor of the Kammergericht (court of appeal). Fiction now followed in an unbroken stream of productivity, and by February 1819 he could bring out the first of the four volumes of his second and greater collection of stories, the Serapions-Brüder. His second novel, Klein Zaches, had already appeared, and at the end of the year he published the first volume of his third novel, Kater Murr.
In September 1819 the government instituted a Commission for the Investigation of Treasonable Organizations and Other Dangerous Activities, and Hoffmann was appointed to it. All went well until at the turn of the year 1821–2 Hyde again committed exactly the same kind of indiscretion that had got him thrown out of Posen: he told several of his friends that he had inserted into the novel he was then working on, Meister Floh, a satire on the proceedings of the Commission of which he was himself a member. This interesting intelligence came to the ears of the president of the Ministry of Police, Herr Karl Albert von Kamptz, who acted at once: at the request of Prussia, the manuscript of the book, the parts already printed and Hoffmann’s correspondence with his publisher, Wilmans of Frankfurt, were seized by the Frankfurt Senate and transported to Berlin, where, when he studied them, von Kamptz was unamused to recognize in ‘Geheimer Hofrat Knarrpanti’ the lineaments of his own important person. Hoffmann was now subjected to a judicial examination by the president of the Kammergericht, after which he dictated a detailed defence of what, to the official eye, looked very much like an attempt to undermine the work of the Commission by making it seem ridiculous. Prussia in 1822 was in many respects a liberal and free society, but Hoffmann’s offence was no laughing matter: if proceedings had gone forward, Hoffmann-Jekyll would almost certainly have discovered that Hoffmann-Hyde had ruined him. That they did not go forward was due entirely to the fact that Hoffmann was ill: his habits of intemperance, grown to the point at which they had become self-destructive, had brought on the inability to control the limbs known as locomotor ataxia, which was the formal cause of his death on 25 June. To have escaped prosecution by dying was a very Hoffmannesque thing for him to have done.
The first collected edition of Hoffmann’s writings was published between 1827 and 1839, and most of his fiction has never been out of print since. The eight stories in this collection are among his best-known. Mademoiselle de Scudery is often considered his masterpiece and has thus been placed first; the others are in order of publication.
Das Fräulein von Scuderi was written during 1818, published in September 1819 in the Taschenbuch der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmet for 1820 and reprinted in 1820 in the third volume of the Serapions-Brüder. It is a detective story, embodying most of the tricks of the genre supposedly invented by Poe in The Murders in the Rue Morgue twenty-two years later. Hoffmann came to learn of Cardillac from Wagenseil’s Nuremberg Chronicle and was probably drawn to him through recognizing in his double-sidedness a bloodstained reflection of his own.
Der Sandmann was written probably during 1815 and published in 1816 as the first story of the first volume of Nachtstücke. It forms the basis of the first act of Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann.
Der Artushof was written between 14 February and the beginning of March 1815, published in November 1816 in Brockhaus’s yearbook Urania and reprinted in 1819 in the first volume of the Serapions-Brüder. Traugott, the businessman turned painter, is again a self-portrait, though this time a happy and modestly self-deprecating one.
Rat Krespel was written in 1816 and sent on 22 September for publication in Fouqué’s Frauentaschenbuch, where it appeared in the edition for 1818 (Hoffmann was too late for the 1817 edition). In its original form the story was enclosed within a supposed letter and was published under the title A Letter from Hoffmann to Baron de la Motte Fouqué. It was reprinted in 1819, this time embedded in the conversation at the Serapion Club, as the first story of the first volume of the Serapions-Brüder. Hoffmann himself is again the central figure, now in grotesque caricature; Antonia is an idealized Julia Merc. The story forms the basis of the third act of Offenbach’s Contes d’Hoffmann.
Das Majorat was written in 1817 and published in the same year in the second volume of Nachtstücke. The sinister Castle R… is a real place: Runsitten, on the Kurisches Haff on the Baltic coast.
Doge und Dogaressa, written in 1817, was published in October 1818 in the Taschenbuch der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmet for 1819 and reprinted in 1819 in the second volume of the Serapions-Brüder. The story of the conspiracy of the Doge Marino Falieri is, of course, historical – ‘one of the most remarkable events in the annals of the most singular government, city, and people of modern history’ (Byron).
Die Bergwerke zu Falun was written during 1818 and 1819 and published in 1819 in the second volume of the Serapions-Brüder. The story is a fantasy founded on a real event: the discovery in 1719 at Falun in Sweden of the body of a miner buried in a mine-collapse nearly fifty years previously; it had been perfectly preserved beneath the earth and is supposed to have been recognized by an aged woman who claimed to have been the miner’s lover half a century before. Wagner had the idea of basing an opera on Hoffmann’s story and drafted a three-act scenario (March 1842) before being diverted, no doubt fortunately, to the subject of Tannhäuser.
Die Brautwahl, written in 1819, appeared in November that year in the Berlinische Taschen-Kalender; it was revised in mid-1820 and the revised version included in the third volume of the Serapions-Brüder published in the same year.
The English version of these eight tales of Hoffmann is a work of collaboration. Stella and Vernon Humphries translated Doge and Dogaressa. Sally Hayward translated Mademoiselle de Scudery, The Entail and The Mines at Falun, and I revised her translations. I translated The Sandman, The Artushof, Councillor Krespel and The Choosing of the Bride.
In helping to produce these new English versions of some of Hoffmann’s best stories, I have sometimes felt the need to ‘editorialize’. Hoffmann well knew how to evoke and maintain tension, but he did so, of course, in the idiom, and above all at the tempo, of his own age; this tempo was somewhat slower than ours, and it seemed to me that, for a story to produce, in modern English, the effect intended by the author, some speeding up and tightening up was sometimes called for. How far one should go in this interference can, I think, be only a matter of subjective judgement and ‘feel’ as one proceeds through the story; and its justification can lie only in whether or not it succeeds in its objective – whether, that is, the story affects the reader of today in the way in which, so far as one can tell, it affected Hoffmann’s many thousands of readers in his own day. His aim, as a writer of fiction, was to give pleasure; and ours is nothing else.
June 1980 |
R.J.H. |