L’Italie chez E.T.A. Hoffmann

Abstract

At the turn of the Enlightenment, the Italian language represented one of the topoi of German musical literature. While most philosophers and men of letters of the Romantic era were reluctant to consider Italy as the promised land of art, E.T.A. Hoffmann obviously represents an exception. The ‘yearning for the musical’ demonstrated in his literary language is the fruit of an incessant sound quest, a ‘search for a musical language’ with unexpected results. This study is largely centered on the Italian language, which represents for Hoffmann the language of music par excellence, and on the opposition between the delirium of the imagination and the reality of the Alltägliche. While using an intermedial comparative approach, which considers the texts in the Italian language used by Hoffmann as music-generating texts, we analyze here not only the relationship between music and language, but also the relationship between music and what one could define as the textus receptus of the Italian language in the Germanic context.

Keywords

• Hoffmann (E.T.A.)
• German romanticism
• musical language
• music
• musical lexicon
• Italian language