Metaphor and Analysis in Hoffmann’s Beethoven Criticism

new conception of art, emancipated from the classical doctrines of mimesis. Among the many profound consequences of the Romantic philosophy of art was a re-evaluation of the status of music. In the eighteenth century, instrumental music had been considered mainly as entertainment, inferior to the other arts because it lacked concepts, and therefore failed to be mimetic. But around 1800, the writers Wackenroder and Tieck vividly portrayed it as the highest, most independent form of art, thus inspiring the semi-religious worship of music that was to be characteristic of the nineteenth century. Music was praised as a medium of transcendence into higher realms of spirit, revealing truths which were ineffable in words. The writer, composer and conductor E.T.A. Hoffmann, who explored the aesthetics of Jena Romanticism both in his stories and in his musical criticism, played a central role in this fundamental re-evaluation of music. The prime example is his famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony from 1810. The extensive introduction to the review is one of the main texts in the aesthetics of Romanticism, and it had an immense impact both on the idolization of Beethoven as a genius and on the reappraisal of instrumental music as a privileged, transcendent art form. Because of its meticulous attention to musical detail, Hoffmann’