“Rastrierte Blätter, aber mit keiner Note beschrieben”: The Musical Sublime and Aporias of Inscription in Hoffmann's Ritter Gluck

Abstract

Hoffmann's Ritter Gluck portrays music as sublime. Overwhelming and violent, music both engulfs and empowers the subject. Hoffmann's musical sublime works through a dialectical relationship with script: music exists at the opposite end of a spectrum to a finite, material, textual world, yet paradoxically also has form in the physical world. This paradox illuminates the artist's dilemma and the curious status of written music in Ritter Gluck. In its unstable, slippery, self‐reflexive dramatizations of the musical sublime, the tale becomes an account of the aporias of relating the ideal to the real. This points towards an understanding of Hoffmann's engagement with Idealism, and suggests an interpretation of the story's climax, Gluck's sublime performance from an empty score. Inscribing music becomes a figure for representing and embodying the sublime in the finite world and in signs—a task impossible, yet imperative.