Reading, Listening, and Performing in Wilhelm Heinse’s Hildegard von Hohenthal (1796)

Abstract

Early in Wilhelm Heinse’s eccentric novel Hildegard von Hohenthal (1796) his characters confront the problem of how music works on the senses. The novel’s hero, Kapellmeister Lockmann, tunes a piano—to an idiosyncratic temperament of his own invention—as he proposes an intensely physical model for musical listening. He uses this demonstration, while simultaneously trying to start a love affair with the novel’s heroine, Hildegard von Hohenthal, to reclaim older ideas about natural temperaments and key characteristics in an era of heightened interest in the anatomy of cognition. But Heinse’s own opinions are not always the same as those of his characters. Drawing on his notebooks, I trace how Heinse struggled to come to terms with opposing views of his friend and colleague, the anatomist Samuel Thomas Soemmering, and of the philosopher Immanuel Kant of how sound affects the body. Soemmering’s Über das Organ der Seele (1796) and Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790) both act as intertexts and paratexts to the novel, and Heinse more than once splits his own opinions about both books between his characters. The tuning scene addresses important questions about the hierarchy of the senses, the creation of musical meaning, and the freedom of performers and listeners to form their own interpretations of music. Heinse’s naturalist ideas about musical agency rub against the grain of a narrative—still current today—dominated by a transaction between heroic composers on the one side and awe-struck listeners on the other. To re-assess these ideas is to re-imagine a crucial hinge in music history.

‘Utile dulci’: modelos didáctico-musicales y género literario en las Investigaciones músicas de Don Lazarillo Vizcardi, de Antonio Eximeno (1729–1809)

“…Entre los escasos ejemplos de este tipo de literatura cabe destacar Hildegard von Hohenthal (1796), de Wilhelm Heinse, que presenta algunos paralelismos con Don Lazarillo 63 . La novela de Heinse da mayor cabida a los aspectos sentimentales y no culmina con la feliz unión de los protagonistas, a diferencia de lo que ocurre en Don Lazarillo 64 . Sin embargo, ambas novelas coinciden en su objetivo didáctico y en sus planteamientos estético-musicales.…”