Note 357 — Chapter VIII · MUSIC AND PLASTIC

It has never been sufficiently noticed that the few sculptors who came after Michelangelo had no more than a mere workaday relation with marble. But we see at once that it is so when we think of the deeply intimate relation of great musicians to their favourite instruments. The story of Tartini’s violin, which shattered itself to pieces on the death of the master—and there are a hundred such stories—is the Faustian counterpart of the Pygmalion legend. Consider, too, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Johannes Kreisler the Kapellmeister”; he is a figure worthy to stand by the side of Faust, Werther and Don Juan. To see his symbolic significance and the inward necessity of him, we have only to compare him with the theatrical painter-characters in the works of contemporary Romanticists, who are not in any relation whatever with the idea of Painting. As the fate of 19th-Century art-romances shows—a painter cannot be made to stand for the destiny of Faustian art.

(E. T. A. Hoffmann, the strange many-sided genius who was at once musician, caricaturist, novelist, critic, wit, able public official and winebibber, at one time in his career wrote in the character of “Johannes Kreisler.” See his Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier and Der Kater Murr, also Thomas Carlyle’s “Miscellanies” and the biographical sketches of Hoffmann in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and the Ency. Brit.—Tr.)