Note H — Front matter

How strongly notation influences style in music, and fetters imagination, how “form” grew up out of it and from form arose “conventionalism” in expression, is shown very convincingly and avenges itself in tragic wise in E. T. A. Hoffmann, who occurs to me here as a typical example.

This remarkable man's mental conceptions, lost in visionary moods and revelling in transcendentalism, as his writings set forth in oft inimitable fashion, must naturally—so one would infer—have found in the dreamlike and transcendental art of tones a language and mode of expression peculiarly congenial.

The veil of mysticism, the secret harmonies of Nature, the thrill of the supernatural, the twilight vagueness of the borderland of dreams, everything, in fact, which he so effectively limned with the precision of words—all this, one would suppose, he could have interpreted to fullest effect by the aid of music. And yet, comparing Hoffmann's best musical work with the weakest of his literary productions, you will discover to your sorrow how a conventional system of measures, periods and keys—whereto the hackneyed opera-style of the time adds its share—could turn a poet into a Philistine. But that his fancy cherished another ideal of music, we learn from many, and frequently admirable, observations of Hoffmann the littérateur.