The Serapion Brethren, Vol. I.

by E. T. A. Hoffmann

"Ferdinand. 'Because I think it the most thankless labour imaginable. You must allow that no demands could be more exacting than those which you composers make upon us; and if you say that a musician can't be expected to acquire the technical skill which the mechanical part of poetry-writing demands, I, again, think that it is too much to expect of a poet that he should be continually harassing himself about the precise structure of your terzettes, quartettes, finales, etc., so as not to run the risk of transgressing against some of those forms, which you look upon--Heaven knows why--as so many matters fixed and established for ever and ever, like the laws of the Medes and Persians. After we have expended our best efforts with extremity of mental tension, in trying to apprehend all the situations of our story in a true poetical spirit, and to express them in the most eloquent language, and the smoothest and most finished versification, it is quite terrible how you run your pens through our finest lines, in the most relentless manner, and spoil our happiest ideas and expressions, by inverting them, or altering them, or drowning them in the music. I say this merely with reference to the uselessness of spending time and labour on elaborate finish. But then, many admirable plots, which have occurred to us in our poetic inspiration, and which we bring to you, all pride, expecting you to be delighted with them, you reject in a moment, as being unsuitable, and unworthy to be clothed in music. But this must often be sheer caprice, or I don't know what else it can be; because you often set to work upon texts which are absolutely wretched and----'

"Ludwig. 'Stop a moment, my dear friend! Of course there are composers who have as little idea of music as many rhyme-spinners have of poetry, and they have often put notes to plots which really are wretched, in all respects. But real composers, who live and move and have their being in true, glorious, heavenly Music, always choose poetic texts.'

"Ferdinand. 'Do you say so of Mozart?'

"Ludwig. 'Mozart--however paradoxical it may appear to you--never chose any but poetic texts for his classical operas. But, leaving that on one side for the moment, my opinion is that it is always quite easy to know what sort of plot is adapted for an opera, so that the poet need never be in any danger of making any mistake about it.'

"Ferdinand. 'I must confess I never have really gone into this: and indeed I know so little about music that I don't suppose it would have been of much consequence if I had.'

"Ludwig. 'If by the expression "knowing about music" you mean being thoroughly versed in the so-called "school routine" of music, there is no necessity for your being that, to be able to know what composers require. It is quite easy, altogether apart from the school routine, so to comprehend, and have within one, the true essence of music as to be, in this sense, a much better musician than a person who, after studying the whole, extensive school-routine in the sweat of his forehead, and labouring through all its manifold, intricate mazes and labyrinths, worships its lifeless rules and regulations as a self-manufactured Fetish, in place of the living Spirit: and whom this Idol-cult excludes from the happiness of the higher realm of bliss.'

"Ferdinand. 'Then you think the poet might enter into this inner sanctum without the preliminary initiation of the "school"?'

"Ludwig. 'I do, certainly. And I say that, in that far-off realm which we often feel,--so dimly, but so unmistakeably,--to be so close about us, whence marvellous voices sound to us, awakening all the tones which are sleeping in our hearts, cabined, cribbed, confined, so that those tones, awakened and set free, dart aloft in fiery streams, gladsome and happy, and we taste of the bliss of that paradise whence the voices come--I say that, in that far-off realm, the Poet and the Musician are intimately-allied members of one and the same Church: for the "secret" of poetry and of music is one and the same, and opens to both the portals of the Inner Sanctuary.'

"Ferdinand. 'I hear my dear old Ludwig trying to formulate the laws of art in dim and mystic phrases; and I must say, that the gulf which seemed to lie between poet and composer, begins to look much narrower than it did.'

"Ludwig. 'Let me try to express my idea about the true essentials of Opera in as few words as possible. A proper opera, in my opinion, is one in which the music springs directly out of the poem, as a necessary sequence, or consequence.'