Analysis 9 - Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776–1822)

Summary

Arguably the most celebrated document in the history of music criticism, this review, astonishing in its length and cogency, harbours beneath its richly Romantic imagery a formidable array of technicalities. Robin Wallace has suggested, indeed, that it ‘belongs in a textbook on theory’. Hoffmann's terminology, moreover, was modern for its day. When speaking of transition from key to key, for example, rather than the time-honoured Ausweichung he used Modulation and moduliren, German usages admittedly going back to Marpurg in 1760, but still unstable in 1810 and only to be established independently in the mid or late nineteenth century. He coupled it with chromatisch (‘chromatic modulation’), and used it alongside the perhaps even more modern Übergang (‘transition’), which twice happens by ‘enharmonic exchange’.

He also sports a battery of formal-structural designators: not only the all-purpose Satz (‘movement’, ‘phrase’, ‘subject’), but also Anfangssatz (‘opening phrase’), Hauptsatz (‘main subject’), Nebensatz (‘secondary phrase’), Schluβsatz (‘closing passage’), and also the fugally derived Gegensatz (‘countersubject’) and Zwischensatz (‘episode’); not only Thema (‘theme’), but also Hauptthema (‘main theme’), erstes Thema (‘opening theme’) and zweites Thema (‘second theme’). On the sub-thematic level, he uses Figur (‘figure’), Schluβfigur (‘closing figure’), Gedanke (‘idea’), Hauptgedanke (‘main idea’) and Nebengedanke (‘secondary idea’). On the other hand, Motiv, as an irreducible germinal unit in the nineteenth-century sense, is not used.