When Machines Play Chopin / Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies Bd.8 (PDF)

Chapter Four Virtuosity and the Experience of Listening in Heinrich Heine’s Music Criticism and “Florentine Nights” (p. 92-93)

Heinrich Heine’s music aesthetics have been given very little attention in Heine scholarship in spite of his influence on the reputations of various musicians and on musical performance practices. The reason for the small amount of scholarship on Heine’s music criticism is twofold: on the one hand, Heine’s contemporaries claimed that he did not know much about, or even like music (Mann, Wehrmann), and on the other, music and music criticism has evolved between the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries to eliminate reviews by listeners such as Heine who have no or very little background in music. In order to convince current scholars, a study today on music reviews by someone with minimal background in music, such as Heine, would have to question the validity of the aesthetic statements in the reviews. The way scholars treat Heine’s music criticism contrasts greatly to their attitudes about Hoffmann’s writings. Writing about Hoffmann’s music aesthetics does not pose a problem for twentieth-century and present-day critics because Hoffmann was a known composer and had substantial music training before beginning his writing career. Unlike scholarship on Hoffmann, most studies on Heine and music deal with song-settings to his poems and do not focus on what Heine himself has to say about music in his reviews and stories. The few twentieth-century studies that do exist on Heine’s music aesthetics (Bernstein, Betz, Müller, Wehrmann) focus on other themes in the writing that have very little to do with the music heard on stage.

Twentieth and twenty-first century decisions about whose criticism is most important points more to the shift in attitudes about credibility in music criticism between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than the validity of the

Katherine Hirt, Seattle, USA.