Goethe Yearbook

I

On March 26, 1827, the day Ludwig van Beethoven died at the age of fifty-six, Franz Grillparzer, who was two decades younger in age than the composer, wrote a long-form poem to honor Beethoven, indicating his reverence as much as reflecting the intimidation he felt in his presence. In the poem, an invisible narrator celebrates Beethoven's ascendance into heaven and, once he has arrived, imagines a dialogue between him and fellow composers Bach, Handel, Gluck, and Haydn. Yet it is the encounter between Mozart and Beethoven that intrigues the narrator most. Mozart, the "Meister," who entered the scene "im Siegeskranz," welcomes Beethoven as equal to all of them: "Gleich den Besten sei geehrt!"¹ Nevertheless, Mozart's praise contains a hint of critique; a benevolent one since an agent is missing: "Rechtes, ohne Maß und Wahl, / Zeugt verderbenschwangre Qual."² Furthermore, Mozart is also lenient towards Beethoven; for violating the rules, he holds responsible only those who attempt to imitate the master. He does not accuse Beethoven of this himself: "Nach es ahmen in Geduld, / Ihnen ist, nicht uns die Schuld."³ Yet Beethoven's implied misstep seems in need of a quasi-theological pardon: "Doch kein Tadel folgt Verklärten, / Und der letzte Schritt auf Erden / Macht den letzten Fehler gut."⁴ Following Mozart's welcome speech, such luminary authors as Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Klopstock greet Beethoven as well. In the end, however, it is Lord Byron, "der Feind der Knechte,"⁵ who wishes to bond with Beethoven when the narrator has him speak the last lines: "Sieh dort dunkle Buchengänge, / Laß uns miteinander gehn!"⁶

On the whole, Grillparzer's assessment of Beethoven's legacy on the day of his death constitutes a surprisingly ambivalent sort of reverence: while in a semi-private act Grillparzer felt compelled to write a poem in which he imagines the deceased in an artists' heaven, his admiration is tempered by restraint. Unlike Mozart, who appeared in a "double aurora,"⁷ Grillparzer wants to have Beethoven guided into the darkness, out of sight. In a symbolic configuration Grillparzer temporarily puts Beethoven in the foreground only to ultimately place him in the background. [End Page 275]

Merely days later, Grillparzer continued to display his contradictory attitude, this time however making it public by writing a eulogy recited to a large crowd by the actor Heinrich Anschütz:

Wie der Behemoth die Meere durchstürmt, durchflog er die Grenzen seiner Kunst. Vom Girren der Taube bis zum Rollen des Donners …, bis zu dem furchtbaren Punkte, wo das Gebildete übergeht in die regellose Willkür streitender Naturgewalten, alles hatte er durchmessen, alles erfaßt. Der nach ihm kommt, wird nicht fortsetzen, er wird anfangen müssen, denn sein Vorgänger hört nur auf, wo die Kunst aufhört.⁸

For Grillparzer, Beethoven mapped out the boundaries of both what music is capable of and what it is conventionally allowed to do. While praising Beethoven for unleashing frightening artistic potential, Grillparzer censured him for transgressing pleasing beauty and thus revealed his own adherence to a Kantian notion of beauty. Instead, Beethoven's music represents the sublime, something so large that it threatens to overwhelm the listener's secure space of autonomy; this was a judgment shared by Beethoven's contemporaries, be they composers such as Louis Spohr, Carl Friedrich Zelter, Carl Maria von Weber, and Fanny Mendelssohn,⁹ or intellectuals such as Hegel and Goethe.¹⁰ Grillparzer, like his contemporaries, critiqued "Beethoven's music … against an implicit Classical standard whose ideals included lawfulness, objectivity, and moderation."¹¹

Because Beethoven disobeys acceptable Classical norms, Grillparzer could not assign him the designation of "role model" for other artists. Instead Beethoven becomes the "radical modernist,"¹² representing the end of art. As a result, Grillparzer's characterization of Beethoven's art moves from being descriptive to prescriptive. There shall be no followers of Beethoven and it might be safer to walk him into the dark, to an area where he cannot be seen (and heard), as the end of Grillparzer's initial poem suggests.

Thus, Grillparzer, on the day of Beethoven's funeral, inadvertently participated in the discourse on Hegel's earlier thesis "vom Ende der Kunst" that initiated an unending "Interpretationsstrudel"¹³ about Hegel's assertion regarding the limits and means of artistic representation—in short, modernism. For Grillparzer, then, Beethoven serves as a crucial signpost of a larger aesthetic paradigm shift and all the insecurities this shift entails. The poet's critique poses, among others, this question: does modernism oppose the ending of a Classical aesthetics and is Classicism required to give way to Romanticism?

In 1834, Grillparzer reassessed the composer's overall artistic work in a diary entry¹⁴ that is harsh and much more radical than what he wrote for his public funerary sermon:

Beethovens nachteilige Wirkungen auf die Kunstwelt, ungeachtet seines hohen, nicht genug zu schätzenden Werthes: 1. Leidet das erste und Haupterfordernis eines Musikers: die Feinheit und Richtigkeit des Ohrs unter seinen gewagten Zusammensetzungen und dem nur gar zu oft eingemischten, Tongeheul und Gebrüll. 2. Durch seine überlyrischen Sprünge erweitert sich der Begriff von Ordnung und Zusammenhang eines musikalischen Stückes so sehr, daß er am Ende für alles Zusammenfassen zu lose sein wird. 3. Macht sein [End Page 276] häufiges Übertreten der Regeln diese als entbehrlich scheinend, indes sie doch die Aussprüche des gesunden, unbefangenen Sinnes, und als solche unschätzbar sind. 4. Substituiert die Vorliebe für ihn dem Schönheitssinne immer mehr den Sinn für das Interessante, Starke, Erschütternde, Trunkenmachende, ein Tausch, bei dem, von allen Künsten, gerade die Musik am übelsten fährt.¹⁵

What is most striking about Grillparzer's private evaluation of Beethoven's music is not its bluntness or its continuation of the critique already apparent in his public funeral oration, but rather its rejection of Beethoven's music in general, a rejection most likely referring to the composer's later works.¹⁶ Even more fundamental to Grillparzer's ears, Beethoven's music trespasses well-defined artistic borders and threatens the process of self-identity formation.¹⁷ This discordant evaluation is only softened by the fact that Grillparzer insinuates that Beethoven's transgressions are caused by his deafness, and thus may be, to some extent, excused.¹⁸

Yet as much as Grillparzer seems to characterize all of Beethoven's music in one fell swoop, he unintentionally reveals even more about his own aesthetics: he favors tradition over adventure, the need for structure over anarchy, rules over transgressions, self-control over emotional boldness, beauty over the sublime. In contrast, Beethoven's aesthetic of the sublime breaks order, rules, stability, and self-control and moves decidedly towards chaos, anarchy, and loss of the self, and he associates Beethoven's rule-breaking with Romanticist notions of longing, the bizarre, and intoxication. In short, for Grillparzer Beethoven functions like a lightening rod in regard to his own aesthetic outlook, in which he favors a Classicist over a Romanticist approach.

Almost thirty years after he wrote the poem and diary entry, Grillparzer, now sixty-five years old, wrote a brief essay entitled "Die Kunstverderber" (1856). Even more fundamentally than before, he sees in Beethoven, once again, someone incapable of complying with the aesthetic norms of a Classicist model. Whereas there are two types of excellent artists—those who are "vortrefflich" but go their own way and those who are "mustergiltig" [sic] and thus lead others—it is clear that Beethoven does not belong to the latter. More explicitly than in the diary of 1834, Grillparzer now portrays him as "etwas Bizarres in seiner Naturanlage."¹⁹ In fact, Grillparzer goes one step further in his negative assessment by following a very peculiar logic: because of his deafness, Beethoven found lackeys ("Nachtreter"), who did not possess Beethoven's talent and thus caused a 'bloody civil war' between art and music:

allbekannte traurige Lebensumstände ihn dahin geführt, daß in weiterer Ausbildung durch talentlose Nachtreter, die Tonkunst zu einem Schlachtfelde geworden ist wo der Ton mit der Kunst und die Kunst mit dem Ton blutige Bürgerkriege führen.²⁰

What seemed in 1834 for Grillparzer a simple premonition has now become for him a cruel reality: things are out of control, but this time because of Beethoven's music.

Though Grillparzer does not directly refer to Richard Wagner, it is more likely than not that he viewed him as the instigator, or at least a leading combatant, in this "bloody civil war." After all, Wagner claimed Beethoven as his [End Page 277] model artist, beginning with his novella Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven (1840) and culminating in his elaborate essay about Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849). In the novella Wagner idealizes the Romantic figure of an impoverished composer who, after much hardship, finally succeeds in encountering his idol Beethoven, witnessing first hand the deaf man working on a grand choral symphony. In the essay Wagner portrays Beethoven even more boldly, as paving the pathway to the future, which undoubtedly no one other than Wagner himself best embodies:

Die letzte Symphonie Beethovens ist die Erlösung der Musik aus ihrem eigensten Elemente heraus zur allgemeinsamen Kunst. Sie ist das menschliche Evangelium der Kunst der Zukunft. Auf sie ist kein Fortschritt möglich, denn auf sie unmittelbar kann nur das vollendete Kunstwerk der Zukunft, das allgemeinsame Drama, folgen, zu dem Beethoven uns den künstlerischen Schlüssel geschmiedet hat.²¹

Like Grillparzer, Wagner interprets Beethoven's last symphony as reaching an end in its own right. And as in Grillparzer's eulogy, Wagner sees in Beethoven the catalyst that necessitates a new beginning. After all, Grillparzer asserted at the funeral: "Der nach ihm kommt, wird nicht fortsetzen, er wird anfangen müssen." But while Grillparzer tries to shield himself from a new aesthetic musical paradigm, Wagner eagerly welcomes Beethoven's forged key that opens the way to his musical drama.

Yet, it was exactly such a self-proclaimed master as Wagner that made Grillparzer defend Beethoven in a dialectical twist, when he wrote the following distich: "Die Feuerprobe des Tadels hat Beethoven siegreich bestanden / Gott beschütze ihn nur noch vor der Wasserprobe der Nachahmung."²² In light of an ongoing paradigm shift in the arts, Grillparzer grants Beethoven his exceptional modernist status, yet without allowing him to serve as a role model, and he views Wagner as a Zauberlehrling from Goethe's ballad who, without the master, creates nothing but chaos.

In the year of the composer's centenary (1870) Grillparzer, now seventy-eight years of age, once more repeated his dialectical appraisal of Beethoven by defending him against his admirers and imitators: "Wie ihr hab ich Beethoven hoch geehrt, / Wobei jedoch als Unterschied sich anhängt, / Daß, wo eure Bewunderung erst recht anfängt, / Die meinige schon wieder aufhört."²³ Yet there is another dialectical turn waiting: the Beethoven enthusiasts like Wagner who see in Beethoven the modernist and thus hear in Beethoven the future rouse Grillparzer's scorn, so that he displaces his negative attitude towards the modernist aesthetics directly onto Beethoven. With an ounce of pop psychology, Grillparzer's repositions himself towards Beethoven in a passive aggressive manner: while he honors his singular status, he simultaneously condemns him because of Wagner and thus keeps his admiration at bay.²⁴

When reading along a chronological axis of Grillparzer's private, semi-public, and public texts about Beethoven, they all begin to point to three larger issues. First, for Grillparzer, Beethoven's persona looms so large throughout his life that, from the beginning, the author's biography and the composer's music become inextricably intertwined. In regard to this psychological [End Page 278] fixation, Grillparzer employs various rhetorical strategies in his writing to elude the overbearing shadow. From this it follows that precisely because Beethoven's personal and artistic shadow is so strong, he can serve as a major key for molding Grillparzer's own ideas on aesthetics.

Second, while Grillparzer's critique of Beethoven shifts with time and circumstances, his conflicting attitude towards him remains constant. On the one hand, Beethoven represents "chaos" to him, as he noted in his diary as early as 1809, with the result that he creates for him an intense sense of destabilization.²⁵ Thus his art poses a threat that is all the more dangerous because it is, for Grillparzer, an emotional force and therefore irresistible and difficult to control by reason. On the other hand, because Beethoven's artistic expressions have the power to unleash hidden desires, he is utterly tantalized and inspired by him.²⁶ Hence, because Beethoven's music represents for Grillparzer the power of and lust for both the sublime and chaos, it serves as a strong warning signal that such dark forces need to be controlled. When Grillparzer moves Beethoven symbolically into the dark, he hopes not only to contain Beethoven by granting him a singular and exceptional status but also to suppress his own dark forces so that a Classicist model can outshine the shadows of uncontrollable powers that Romanticism represents to him.

Third, as a result of this struggle within the aesthetic domain, the playwright participates in the early post-mortem phase of Beethoven reception, not the least by overtly rejecting Wagner's usurpation of Beethoven. He senses a threat from an enthusiast like Wagner who creates even more chaos for Grillparzer than the one Beethoven brought: what used to be an exceptional case of (musical) aesthetics has become a new paradigm for the arts, over which Grillparzer has no means of control. While Grillparzer tried to contain Beethoven's chaos, he had no control over Wagner's appropriation of Beethoven for his own cause. Thus, Grillparzer's relates to Beethoven's music and its reception in a tripartite fashion: he continuously is a) attracted to, b) afraid of, and c) defending Beethoven. Instead of harmonizing his own ambiguities towards chaos as represented by Beethoven, Grillparzer displaces it by lashing out against those artists who fully embrace and valorize the dark side within their artistic means. Grillparzer's complex positioning vis-à-vis Beethoven can therefore be placed within a larger aesthetic discourse: while Beethoven's own modernism vacillates between Classicism and Romanticism, Grillparzer's pull to and fear of Beethoven's powers can be understood as Grillparzer's struggle to find an unwavering and harmonious aesthetic position which, as he was fully aware, was no longer tenable.

II

Recapturing Grillparzer's life-long ambivalence towards Beethoven's music sets the framework for reevaluating the failed cooperation between the two artists in 1823 on the opera project Melusina. What follows is first a quick look at the composer's and the writer's mutual interest in each other's art, which helps explain why the two were interested in pursuing a project together. This shared interest becomes even more evident when, in a second step, one contextualizes their highly creative output and aesthetic versatility that can [End Page 279] be seen as either adhering to Classical aesthetics or yielding to Romanticist notions. Yet, Grillparzer's alignment with a partial Kantian musical aesthetics, as outlined in a separate section, provides an important key for understanding the difficulties in their ensuing collaboration, and his half-hearted interest and trouble in delivering a convincing libretto for Beethoven.²⁷ When combining these biographical, historical and aesthetic contexts, a mix of conflicting outlooks emerges that not only leads to a close reading of the Melusina libretto in the final section of this paper, but moreover helps to interpret the libretto's indecisiveness, which fluctuates between Classicist and Romanticist notions and ultimately explains why Beethoven did not pursue the project. Thus the libretto not only mirrors Grillparzer's ambivalence towards Beethoven, therefore returning to the themes of my exposition, but also his own uncertainty regarding his own aesthetics with the difference that by now we can at last conclude that for Grillparzer Beethoven serves as his Other, one that needs to be contained at all cost.

III

Grillparzer's love for and knowledge of music began early and is well documented,²⁸ whereas Beethoven's strong interest in and knowledge of literature has not been treated comprehensively, even though he was an avid reader throughout his life as his compositions, letters, diary, and conversation notebooks make clear.²⁹ That Grillparzer held "Musik höher als die Poesie"³⁰ manifests itself not only in his autobiography and other autobiographical texts but also by the fact that he played piano, enjoyed singing, had studied composition, and frequently attended concerts and operas.³¹ He highly appreciated Schubert, and personally encountered not only Beethoven but also Weber, Schumann, Wagner, and Liszt. Yet despite Grillparzer's active involvement and fascination with music, his writings on music are rather limited compared to, for example, his literary history.

For Beethoven, literature was essential, and because of his growing deafness he retreated to it in his later years even more intensely than before. Throughout his life, he read Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, Herder, Klopstock, Kotzebue, Zacharias Werner and numerous more contemporary authors, many of whom are forgotten today. Of those authors that became and still are canonical, he had personally met Goethe and Grillparzer. He did not write any significant text that reflects in a more philosophical or elaborate way upon his lifelong interest in literature. Yet Beethoven's remarks on literature in letters and quotes from it in his diary, his more than one hundred songs,³² and most potently, his rendition of Schiller's An die Freude in his last symphony, are sufficient enough to claim that his genuine interest in literature played an integral part in his general outlook towards the arts and his self-identity.

IV

Based on these brief biographical references, it comes as no surprise that Beethoven and Grillparzer, both residing in Vienna, met in the summer of 1823 to plan an opera. What is astonishing, however, is everything else when [End Page 280] considering the specifics of the historical context surrounding this halfhearted cooperation.

In June of 1823, Beethoven had finished his officially listed composition 123, the Missa Solemnis, at a time when church music had declined as E. T. A. Hoffmann had already argued in 1814.³³ If the genre was outmoded, the Missas's scale was even more unconventional in its grand profession as evident in Beethoven's personal and long commitment to the work, its length as well as the grand size of its orchestra, choir, and soloists. The Mass is a hybrid; it closely interprets the traditional Roman-Catholic liturgical text on the one hand while infusing subjective and thus modern artistic means on the other: for example, in its calling for inner and outer peace in the final section of the Dona nobis pacem. This fusion of old and new helps explain the opposing interpretations it has received. Adorno wrestles with the "verfrem-dete Hauptwerk" that according to him is simply reified as a great master-work only to mask its compositional flatness.³⁴ In contrast, Klaus Kropfinger emphasizes its coherent and structurally detailed interdependence of text and music.³⁵

Beethoven was motivated to write this composition for Archduke Rudolph, youngest son of the Austrian emperor Leopold II, an adamant supporter and student of Beethoven. The Archduke was promoted to cardinal and archbishop of Olmütz in 1819, the year in which the Karlsbad Resolution forced the attempt by the so-called Holy Alliance of Prussia, Austria, and Russia to return to the status quo ante of the French Revolution. Placing Beethoven in a political camp of such repressive politics, however, is as wrong as it is wrong to overlook the political context of this Mass. Thus, Adorno sees in it a "Paradoxie, daß Beethoven überhaupt eine Messe komponierte; verstünde man ganz, warum er es tat, man verstünde wohl auch die Missa."³⁶ One path to understanding Beethoven's interest in this composition is to acknowledge his vivid interest in religious matters, apparent in his frequent reading of M. Christoph Christian Sturm's pietistic Betrachtungen ueber die Werke Gottes im Reiche der Natur und der Vorsehung auf alle Tage des Jahres.³⁷

Only because the Mass does not square with the progressive image of Beethoven, scholars often proceed to Beethoven's other grand piece, the Ninth Symphony—a piece he worked on simultaneously while he composed the Mass. Here he indeed returns to pre-revolutionary times: he uses Schiller's An die Freude from 1785, an ode as critical of the ancien regime as the common term Sturm and Drang suggests for this period. Thus, these neighboring compositions threaten any comfortable notion of a homogenous late Beethoven, that is unless one wants to emphasize the rich religious allusions that Beethoven stresses in his musical rendition of Schiller's ode. Beethoven "had explored in both compositions [= the Mass and Ninth Symphony] a broad spectrum of musical symbolism and music-text equivalents,"³⁸ and thus moved to new aesthetic grounds by returning back to the future in the case of Schiller's poem while the liturgical text allowed tradition to be forged anew. Beethoven's return to the past happens in a non-linear fashion, and thus defies scholarly attempts at comfortably labeling or categorizing the modernist tendencies in his late works as either Classicist or Romanticist.³⁹ Solomon takes a stance true to his proverbial name when he proposes, "that [End Page 281] Beethoven was deeply involved in a quest to preserve essential qualities of the ancient world, that this quest for a renovated Classicism is itself a defining characteristic of Romanticism."⁴⁰

As if to highlight these paradoxes even further, both compositions were premiered on May 7, 1824, and both works were threatened with censorship that was negotiated at the last minute. That is, it was clear to the political powers in Vienna that both compositions, regardless of their actual aesthetic violations, deserved to be censored: the Mass because a religious text was not to be performed in a secular setting, and the choral symphony because the secular text implied a quasi-spiritual bonding with political overtones. Thus, censorship, as so often is the case, pertinently reveals the aesthetic dialectics as they spill over into the political realm.

Yet, like in a fugue, there is another theme. While Beethoven had worked on the great Mass, he was simultaneously occupied with another grand-scaled work, his op. 120, i.e. 33 mostly unconventional variations for piano after a highly conventional waltz theme by Anton Diabelli. Prior to working on this large-scale piano piece, he had also composed his last three piano sonatas between 1819 and 1822. All these instrumental works share with the subsequent Mass and the Ninth Symphony an uncommon grandness and transcendent authority that breaks new aesthetic grounds while departing from commonality and the popular view of music's place within the arts. Especially, though, the instrumental compositions go beyond simplistic divertissement and pleasing of an audience. After all, common opinion has it that Beethoven is chiefly responsible for helping to upgrade the respect for and value of instrumental music after 1800. Michael Spitzer succinctly summarizes this view when he so boldly asserts: "Beethoven's late style takes instrumental music further into these spheres where language and thought than it had ever gone before, and arguably since."⁴¹ Whereas Kant ascribed in his third critique, the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), the ability of music to express affects, he denied it the capacity to articulate aesthetic ideas precisely because music's sensual realm supposedly provides no intelligible narrative and thus cannot signify concepts, as poetry does.⁴² However, Mark Evan Bonds meticulously demonstrates a significant shift that occurred during Beethoven's time. It was the representatives of post-Kantian idealism and early romantic writers such as Wackenroder, Tieck, and, in regard to Beethoven, particularly E. T. A. Hoffmann who "articulated the relatively sudden shift of instrumental music from the lowest to the highest of all musical forms, and indeed of all the arts in general. Long regarded as a liability, the vague content of instrumental music was now seen as an asset."⁴³

While these late works by Beethoven constitute (retrospectively) ample proof for this paradigm shift of conceptualizing untexted music, Beethoven also paid particular attention during this phase to the symbiosis of music and text, as the Mass and Ninth Symphony proves, and he never gave up the idea for another opera despite the rather traumatic experience surrounding his first Leonore performances in 1805 and 1806, and the revisions of it to Fidelio in 1815.⁴⁴ It may have been that the revival of the successful Fidelio in November 1822 triggered Beethoven's renewed interest in an opera so that some of his closest supporters acted as mediators between him and [End Page 282] Grillparzer.⁴⁵ As a result, in March 1823, Grillparzer finished his manuscript Melusina. Eine romantische Oper in drei Aufzügen, and "by early April 1823 Beethoven had learned that Melusina was about to be submitted to him."⁴⁶

Despite the differing stages of their careers, prior to their encounter and exchange, Grillparzer experienced an unusually productive period as well. In 1817, the young Grillparzer had made his fame with the debut of Die Ahnfrau which launched his career as a playwright, followed quickly by Sappho (1818) and the trilogy Das goldene Vließ (1821), and in 1823, just a week before he wrote the libretto Melusina, he had finished his fifth play, König Ottokars Glück.

Grillparzer's dramas are incommensurable with regard to plot, themes, and styles of drama. Whereas Grillparzer presents in Die Ahnfrau a "Gespenstermärchen,"⁴⁷ a fateful tragedy with an incestuous entanglement set in gothic times, Sappho portrays in a classicist manner the dilemma of the woman artist's unrequited love. After adapting other classical sources, the Argonauts and Medea themes in Das goldene Vließ, Grillparzer interpreted his own times—the rise and fall of Napoleon—by turning to history in his König Ottokar, the late medieval Bohemian king. Nevertheless, Helmut Bachmeier summarizes current common ground among scholars when he states that despite the dissimilarities of the early plays from 1817 to 1823 they share "isomorphe Tiefenstrukturen und konstante Problemstellungen der Dramen: eine Tendenz zu ästhethischen Werten wie Kontur, Plastizität, Geschlossenheit und Kohärenz und als thematischer Focus der Traditionalismus, Wert und Verlust der Tradition."⁴⁸ Translating this comment regarding deeper structures, one can argue that Grillparzer, while holding on to an aesthetic model for Classical restraints, displays nevertheless a modernist awareness that prevents one from simply reaffirming or uncritically praising traditional values, and therefore does not present a closure where fissures appear. This unity of ambivalence⁴⁹ anticipates not only the modernist figure of the "Zerissene,"⁵⁰ as Hinrich C. Seeba has argued, but leads this figure "zu einer Grenzüberschreitung," as Bachmeier observes, "zum Verlassen einer gesicherten und geschlossenen Lebensordnung, an deren Ende die Vernichtung und das Chaos steht."⁵¹

The three aspects of Grillparzer's ambivalent attitude towards Beethoven introduced at the end of the first section of this essay can now be solidified. Grillparzer's relationship to Beethoven's music, composed of both attraction to and fear of the perceived chaos that will surely ensue, is mirrored in Grillparzer's own early dramas: thematically, as the attraction to transgressions and the aesthetic holding on to Classicist suppositions. Both artists return to traditions, but only because they have become fragile for them. The analogies between the two artists with regard to the structural similarities of a heterogeneous output prior to their intended collaboration actually become mirror images: each artist's image reflects the other, while each other's image is inverted when looking at the intersection or border. Whereas Beethoven states in one of his letters that "sobald das gefühl unß—eine[n] weg eröfnert, fort mit allen Regeln [sic]," and thus he readily explores new aesthetic grounds by leaving conventional boundaries behind,⁵² Grillparzer leads his dramatis personae "zu einer Grenzüberschreitung,"⁵³ only to return aesthetically to seemingly more secure ground. Thus, to have Beethoven walk [End Page 283] with the Romantic Byron into the darkness, at the very end of the poem, i.e., the border of the poem, is Grillparzer's effort to seek the dependable foundation of the established tradition.⁵⁴

V

Grillparzer delineates a philosophical treatment of the differences between music and poetry in his essay on Der Freischütz (1821). Though brief and unfinished, the essay resembles the most elaborate regarding his musical aesthetics, and thus partially realizes his plan for a counterpart to Lessing's Laokoon, envisioned as Rossini oder über die Grenzen der Musik und Poesie, as he had expressed in a 1820 diary entry. There he notes "wie unsinnig es sei, die Musik bei der Oper zur bloßen Sklavin der Poesie zu machen," and derides music that naturalistically imitates ("nachzulallen") poetry.⁵⁵ At first such a claim can remind one of Wagner's later ideas as he fully developed them in his seminal essay Oper und Drama (1850/51). There the composer emphasizes the most fatal error in regard to the concept of opera "daß ein Mittel des Ausdrucks (die Musik) zum Zwecke, der Zweck des Ausdrucks (das Drama) aber zum Mittel gemacht war."⁵⁶ Aside from this partial overlap, Grillparzer opposed Wagner's musical philosophy that culminates in a newly conceived genre, the Musikdrama, where music and drama are united by treating them as equal, supplementing one another. Quite to the contrary, Grillparzer repeated and argued in other personal reflections the importance of separating music and drama by treating them independently. With these premises in mind, he opens his critique of Weber's Der Freischütz as follows:

Der Tonsetzer [= Weber] gehört offenbar ein wenig in die Klasse derjenigen, die den Unterschied zwischen Poesie und Musik, zwischen Worten und Tönen ver kennen. Die Musik hat keine Worte, d.h. willkürliche Zeichen, die eine Bedeutung erst durch das erhalten was man damit bezeichnet. Der Ton ist, nebstdem daß er ein Zeichen sein kann, auch noch eine Sache…. so wirkt die bildende und die Tonkunst unmittelbar auf die Sinne, durch diese auf das Gefühl und der Verstand nimmt erst in letzter Instanz an dem Gesamteindrucke Teil.⁵⁷

While Grillparzer's ideas here are interesting since they obviously borrow from Lessing's Laokoon⁵⁸ and simultaneously anticipate Eduard Hanslick's idea in his influential work Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854),⁵⁹ I will have to limit my discussion of Grillparzer's musical aesthetics to a consideration of how he, based on this essay, approached Beethoven's music when they first met. Surprisingly, Kant's judgment on music in his Kritik der Urteilskraft can serve as a reference point for Grillparzer's aesthetics on music as outlined in his Freischütz essay. As it turns out, Grillparzer's position towards Kant is somewhat analogous to his ambivalent view towards Beethoven in that Grillparzer's ideas align as much with Kant's as they strongly differ from it.

Because Grillparzer sees music first and foremost as a physiological and therefore sensual phenomenon ("ihre erste, unmittelbare Wirkung ist Sinnund Nervenreiz") that either causes pleasant or unpleasant sensations,⁶⁰ he echoes Kant's notion of music as primarily a sensual pleasure. Diametrically opposed, however, are the consequences from this categorical observation. [End Page 284] Because music is, for Kant, a sensual art and void of intelligibility (Verstand), it ranks lowest within the realm of the arts.⁶¹ Grillparzer, contrary to Kant, favors music over poetry for that very reason. While making the same observation, the two differ in their judgment of that observation. Despite this fundamental difference, Grillparzer furthermore subscribes to another of Kant's aesthetic determinations, namely that intelligibility is the last in the chain of comprehending and appreciating music. Kant asserts the notion of a sequential and hierarchical order between sentiment (Empfindung) and intelligibility (Gedankenspiel) when speaking of music:

Denn ob sie [= die Tonkunst] zwar durch lauter Empfindungen ohne Begriffe spricht, mithin nicht wie die Poesie etwas zum Nachdenken übrig bleiben läßt, so bewegt sie doch das Gemüth mannigfaltiger und, obgleich bloß vorübergehend, doch inniglicher; ist aber freilich mehr Genuß als Cultur (das Gedankenspiel, was nebenbei dadurch erregt wird, ist bloß die Wirkung einer gleichsam mechanischen Association).⁶²

Like Kant, Grillparzer sees music as only loosely connected to the faculty of reasoning because it is of an immediate and visceral nature. Doing so, Grillparzer mainly adopts the commonly held eighteenth-century notion that music is able to express affections such as joy, pain, fear, longing, and love.⁶³ Because of music's ability to evoke emotions, it only signifies conceptual meaning as an unintentional byproduct, and therefore requires only to a small extent the realm of reasoning.⁶⁴ Grillparzer continues to argue that music cannot be cognitively conceptualized and that the preceding sensual perception ultimately cannot be rationalized.⁶⁵ Here again, Grillparzer implicitly echoes Kant, for whom music cannot express an aesthetic idea, even though he stresses the realm of non-cognitive language:

unter einer ästhetischen Idee … verstehe ich diejenige Vorstellung der Einbildungskraft, die viel zu denken veranlaßt, ohne daß ihr doch irgendein bestimmter Gedanke, d. i. Begriff, adäquat sein kann, die folglich keine Sprache völlig erreicht und verständlich machen kann.⁶⁶

For Grillparzer too, reasoning in regard to music is very limited and can only be a) sequential, and b) subsequent in relation to the sensual impression. Thus a posteriori reasoning cannot balance or counter unpleasant perceptions when "die Sinne mit überwiegender Gewalt empfangen haben."⁶⁷ Music, in the ears of Grillparzer, is ambiguous because it can be not only pleasing, but also frightening, on account of its inherent power to dominate the emotions. It is precisely music's potential, its stronger affective impact that makes Grillparzer favor music over poetry, and that sharply separates him from Kant, who favors pure reasoning.

Grillparzer then provides examples to prove his conceptualization of the relationship between text and music, referring first to Mozart, who is for him the "unstreitig größte … aller Tonsetzer."⁶⁸ He argues that one could take any of Mozart's opera arias and change the text without any consequences for the music! According to Grillparzer, Mozart's music is independent of the text and thus the content to which it is set; a statement as radical as this would be insulting to his beloved musical idol, if one thinks, for example, [End Page 285] of the highly differentiated music of Die Zauberflöte that emerges out of Schikaneder's libretto.

Grillparzer then turns to Beethoven, arguing that if one were to choose any of his eight symphonies, one would be unable to describe its meaning by a suitable or universal text.⁶⁹ Consequently, he argues that instrumental music pleases only because of its own intrinsic laws,⁷⁰ an idea borrowing Kant's definition of beauty as an "interessenloses Wohlgefallen."⁷¹ As Bonds observes: "Kant explicitly rejected the notion that purely instrumental music might incorporate aesthetic ideas; it could be judged only on the basis of its form. He therefore relegated instrumental music—along with wallpaper—to the category of 'free beauty.'"⁷² And like Kant, Grillparzer emphasizes that this beauty is indistinguishable from the sentiment or, as Grillparzer writes, the "dunkle Gefühle," which one could read as music's power to evoke feelings that remain relatively unaffected by our rational capacities.⁷³ Departing again from Kant, Grillparzer then continues to declare these so-called dunkle Gefühle as constituting the true and actual strength of music, or "das eigentliche Gebiet der Musik. Hierin muß ihr die Poesie nachstehen. Wo Worte nicht mehr hinreichen, sprechen die Töne."⁷⁴ In this crucial passage Grillparzer transcribes Kantian aesthetic ideas regarding beauty to music while simultaneously re-scribing them by revalorizing Kantian hierarchies within the arts. While Grillparzer rejects the view that instrumental music cognitively means something, thus following Kant, at the same time he judges this semantic void as its strength, wholly rejecting Kant.

It is time to briefly pause in regard to Grillparzer's Freischütz-essay. Demonstrating Grillparzer's alliance with and deviation from Kantian aesthetics thus far actually serves to emphasize another crucial aspect. It shows how much Grillparzer was out of sync in his vision towards instrumental music in regard to his contemporaries such as Tieck, Wackenroder, and especially E. T. A. Hoffmann. As mentioned, they helped to reverse the notion of instrumental music as meaningless and elevated its status within musical aesthetics. Bonds, who comprehensively delineates the paradigm shift from instrumental music being a subsidiary to the most essential art form, emphasizes that "through idealism, the work of art became a vehicle by which to sense the realm of the spiritual and the infinite, and the inherently abstract nature of instrumental music allowed this art to offer a particularly powerful glimpse of that realm."⁷⁵ Hoffmann's canonical review of 1810 of Beethoven's C-minor Symphony, his Fifth, suffices to highlight this point, when he asserts: "Beethovens Musik bewegt die Hebel des Schauers, der Furcht, des Entsetzens, des Schmerzes, und erweckt jene unendliche Sehnsucht, die das Wesen der Romantik ist. Beethoven ist ein rein romantischer (eben deshalb ein wahrhaft musikalischer) Componist."⁷⁶ Hoffmann and Grillparzer arrive at more or less the same conclusion: that music's quintessential strength lies in its ability to stir intense emotions, including those of terrifying power. Where they differ is how these emotions are valorized and relate to the overwhelming sense of the sublime. For Hoffmann, along with his Romantic contemporaries, music's ability to express "dunkle Gefühle" is its most positive feature and is fully embraced, whereas for Grillparzer it is something to be equally suspicious of since it marks the boundary of potential loss of self-control. Otherwise, [End Page 286] Grillparzer and Hoffmann might not be as divergent as one might assume, since Hoffmann, as Solomon points out, "held Beethoven's extravagant imagination to be wholly consistent with his control of Classical form."⁷⁷ The Romantics' idealist notion of upgrading the status of a vague and therefore all the more powerful meaning of instrumental music can also be found in statements by Beethoven, as in this letter: "übe nicht allein die Kunst, sondern dringe auch in ihr Inneres; sie verdient es, denn nur die Kunst und die Wissenschaft erhöhen den Menschen bis zur Gottheit."⁷⁸ Beethoven upgrades the art of music by treating it as equal not only to the other arts, but to the cognitive faculties of sciences, something that Grillparzer clearly rejects.

Grillparzer ends his Freischütz-essay with a pledge that music should not attempt to make words out of musical notes, i.e., depict a narrative or, even worse, be mimetic.⁷⁹ Moreover, music should stay within its own realm by returning to his Kantian ideal of beauty and creating a "Wohllaut." Music, he states, ceases to be music if it transgresses its own natural boundaries.⁸⁰ This position diametrically opposes that of Hoffmann's who appreciates most in Beethoven to evoke a Burke-like sublime. Even more importantly, Grillparzer's notion clashes with that of Beethoven who aims at a transgression when he states in the same letter: "leider sieht [der wahre Künstler], daß die Kunst keine Gränzen hat, er fühlt dunkel, wie weit er vom Ziele entfernt ist und indeß vielleicht von Andern bewundert wird, trauert er, noch nicht dahin gekommen zu sein, wohin ihm der bessere Genius nur wie eine ferne Sonne vorleuchtet." As before, it is the metaphor of the border that can serve as the marker for how Grillparzer and Beethoven take opposite directions from it.

We arrive therefore at an intersection of fundamental aesthetic re-alignments: Grillparzer's relationship to Beethoven had to indeed be of a conflicting nature. Grillparzer, while partially endorsing Kantian aesthetics, favors, like E. T. A. Hoffmann and Beethoven, the emotional and subliminal quality of music yet he stops short of assigning meaning to music that goes beyond the realm of affects: "alles was höher geht und tiefer als Worte gehen können, das gehört der Musik an, da ist sie unerreicht, in allem andern steht sie ihren Schwester-Künsten nach."⁸¹ As argued before, Grillparzer is as much attracted to the "dunkle Gefühle" as he is afraid of them, and therefore remains a "Zerrissener." He is as much pulled towards Kant as he abandons him, since he regards "Musik höher als die Poesie."⁸² Yet he also disagrees with Romantic authors who strongly validate the dark side, of which instrumental music is capable. We might assume that they value Beethoven's (late) music precisely because it transgresses conventional boundaries, represents the sublime instead of the traditional aesthetic of Wohllaut. In short, Grillparzer's partial leaning towards Kantian aesthetics was not only outmoded vis-à-vis his contemporary authors and philosophers, but moreover by Beethoven's own concept of it and his actual music.

VI

As difficult as it is to comprehend why Beethoven turned to Schiller's pre-revolutionary text while working on his grand Mass, and as if we have not encountered enough conflicting views by Grillparzer, it is even more puzzling [End Page 287] how he, after his attack against the Freischütz and his distance to the new paradigm of Romantic music, turns to a libretto for Beethoven that is just that—a Romantic opera. And sure enough; he not only declares his libretto as such but indeed provides all the necessary ingredients of what by then had become a standard fare for popularized Romanticism, many of whose themes also occur in Der Freischütz: a dark night in a forest busy with hunters, the magical power of a ring, knights, and above all, alluring eroticism.

Even more baffling is the fact that he proposed that Beethoven signify the nymph and main figure Melusina with a leitmotiv, thus contradicting his own notion of textual independence, if not separation from music: "Ich habe mir überhaupt gedacht, ob es nicht paßend wäre, jede Erscheinung oder … Einwirkung Melusinenen duch eine wiederkehrende, leicht faßende Melodie zu bezeichnen."⁸³ With Grillparzer's aesthetic treatise in mind, we have yet another analogy to Beethoven: Grillparzer offers positions that are opposite to one another, if not outright antagonistic.

No wonder then that so far, no convincing solution has been offered on what to make of the initial cooperation and agreement between Grillparzer and Beethoven on Melusina. Did the rather successful revival of Fidelio in Vienna and in Dresden under Carl Maria von Weber's baton in April 1823, along with the success of his Freischütz in Vienna trigger not only Beethoven's but also Grillparzer's competitive nature?⁸⁴ Lichnowsky's remark in November 1823 makes this argument—at least for Beethoven— plausible when he jots down to him: "Wenn sie die Oper nicht schreiben, so ist es ohnedies mit der deutschen Opera aus, dies sagen alle Leute. Nach der verfelten Webrischen Oper [i.e., Euryanthe] haben mehrere die Bücher zurück geschikt. Freyschütz ist eigentlich keine Oper," implying that with its dialogues it is more of a Singspiel.⁸⁵ Additionally, the following remark from Grillparzer's 1844 "Erinnerungen an Beethoven" of their meetings and plans in 1823 seems to confirm that Weber's Freischütz served as the motivating factor when Beethoven purportedly said: "Weber hat vier Hörner gebraucht, Sie sehen, daß ich da ihrer acht nehmen müßte; wo soll das hinführen."⁸⁶ That Grillparzer was competitive himself is obvious when he states in his recollection that despite a) his disinterest in writing a libretto at all, b) Beethoven's disability, and c) Beethoven's latest compositions that he describes as having "Charakter von Herbigkeit," he agreed to the project because "Der Gedanke aber, einem großen Meister vielleicht Gelegenheit zu einem, für jeden Fall höchst interessanten Werke zu geben, überwogen alle Rücksichten…."⁸⁷

Why then Melusina, a piece that Grillparzer had initially conceived as a draft for a children's ballet in 1817 and revised in 1818 and 1819? Grillparzer's answer in his recollection of the intended collaboration is as follows: He chose this play because it is less diabolic than his draft of the Zauberwald, it features a full choir, is melodramatic in the final act, and most importantly, he allegedly adapted it to Beethoven's latest compositions.⁸⁸

VII

Similar to Grillparzer's emerging ambivalences with regard to Beethoven's music and his conflicting aesthetic views, in the following I will interpret [End Page 288] Grillparzer's libretto as disjointed and argue that the text's lack of coherence is the primary cause for their failed collaboration. I make the case that the libretto is inconsistent in regard a) to the plot, b) to the genre, c) to the figure of Melusina, and I will consequently argue that it ultimately fails as a libretto because it displays insecurity towards the relationship between text and music.⁸⁹ In short, I see the nymph Melusina as an allegory of the libretto's inherent indecisiveness, to an extent that contradicts some of Grillparzer's own creeds, making it easy for Beethoven as an avid and skillful reader to disregard the play in the end regardless of his initial entrepreneurial steps towards realization, and regardless of whether the play reflected his own view on loyalty and the relationship between man and woman.⁹⁰

When considering Grillparzer's ambivalence within his (musical) aesthetics in general and towards Beethoven's music in particular, it might not be surprising to see the libretto's lack of coherence—as it becomes visible— by the portent of the magical ring for the development of the plot, a narrative device drawn from the tradition of the Viennese magical opera that typically included a talisman, condition, trial, and redemption.⁹¹ In the first act, Raimund, the male protagonist, falls asleep in a forest at the foot of a well. Melusina appears, along with her two sister nymphs who are "halb ein Fisch und halb wie Weiber" (1:1172). She is warned by her sisters not to trust human beings: "Falsch ist der Mensch und treulos, / Ihn reut, was er verspricht / Trau du dem Menschen nicht!" (1:1173) Nevertheless, Melusina falls for Raimund (1:1174) and she presents to him her magical ring as a sign of love and reality of their encounter (1:1174), "Der Ring, am Finger gedreht, bringt dich zu mir. Wirfst du ihn von dir, sind wir geschieden auf ewig" (1:1174). As Raimund awakes he is completely taken by his dream and Melusina's ethereal presence. The Count and his sister, who listen to Raimund's dream, challenge it but their warning has no power over him, especially after Raimund recognizes the ring (1:1177) and turns it around and calls for Melusina (1:1178). As promised by her, she (re)appears. Bertha and the Count see her as a representative of evil but for Raimund she represents "selige Lust" (1:1179).

While the play revolves around the conflicts of love and insecurity, of loyalty and disloyalty, it is less than persuasive to follow the unfolding plot that hinges so much on the presence of the magical ring, a ring that is supposed to connect the various narrative turns and yet instead highlights the disconnect. While an emphasis on this weak link might seem nothing more than a pedantic reading, it nevertheless leads to a larger issue of incoherence.

As mentioned before, one can read Melusina allegorically. Melusina, being half fish, half woman, can be understood as emblematic of the incoherence of the play in general, and of the genre of the Zauberoper in particular. The play ends on a "melodramatic" note, as Grillparzer admitted in his Erinnerungen an Beethoven, yet prior to the ending shifts from dramatic to idyllic and back to dramatic action occur.⁹² Furthermore, the libretto contains elements that are half realistic and half fairy tale; it is part Schicksalsdrama and part a drama of redemption, as the final stanza with its implied ambivalence suggests: "Wenn sich höhre Mächte künden, / Muß auf ewig sich verbünden, / [End Page 289] Oder nahen mög er nie, / Halben Dienst verschmähen sie" (1:1202). Thus, the play ends with a double-bind message, suggesting that the individual must fully succumb to higher powers, while the simultaneous neglect and disobedience of it can be redeemed by love. Whereas the last message is typical of unavoidable fate, the first one makes redemption seem possible.

What makes the libretto even more uneven is the display of comical elements at the beginning while negotiating such matters of loyalty and love in such serious ways.⁹³ Even worse, the comical parts are all too serious while the serious parts become involuntarily comical. Take for example the figure of Troll, who is Raimund's servant, a character who is clearly reminiscent of Leporello/Don Giovanni or Papageno/Tamino.⁹⁴ For all intents and purposes, though, Troll's exchange with Raimund lacks both wit and pun: "Der ist wahrlich zu beklagen, / Der zum Dienen ward verdammt: / Mag man noch so Kluges sagen, / Hat der Herr allein Verstand" (1:1171) is one of the better lines by Troll in which the social hierarchy is reversed. While he accompanies Raimund as his Other in the first two acts, he becomes less a dialectical force than simply a humorless conformist of "der alten Welt" (1:1186) who admonishes Raimund for his Christian values (1:1183) and sees in Melusina nothing but the devil. (1:1183, 1185) Since he is not given any significant weight or development, he is simply left out in the final act.

As described before regarding the ring, it is difficult to see the third act as a fully developed plot. While Raimund was once again enchanted by the vision of Melusina, Bertha complains about it to her brother, the Count, who has a longer exchange with Raimund. Representing the opposite of Raimund's insecurity, doubts, and indecisiveness between two worlds, the Count is such a flat and straightforward character that his representation of a male-dominated world of action makes the conflict between the world of dreams and love versus reality and convention a non-issue. Even though the drama's conflict is set up so that Raimund is not only torn between these two worlds but also between two women, each belonging to one side, Bertha is never anywhere close to being a convincing character in her own right. She is merely an accessory useful upon call.⁹⁵ All in all, the play pulls in different directions, borrowing from various genres and literary fashions, operatic and not, without forging its own consistent style.⁹⁶

Even if one might argue that Grillparzer felt he had a license for playing with various styles and transgressions of genres because he identified this liberty as characteristic of Romanticists' more porous notions of genre, he merely seems to toy with them instead of taking them seriously in their own right. One can observe this, for example, when the scenery oscillates between Baroque theater with its machinery—Melusina appears from a fountain, or the fountain crumbles and Melusina's palace becomes visible behind a veil (all this in act one)—with those of contemporary Romantic notions of the forest as the hunting ground of Count Emerich von Forst (!) and his hunters and knights.

The most consistently Romantic of all themes is the blurring of reality with dreams. "Traum umgibt uns, die wir Träume sind" (1:1174): the play attempts to question the reality of dreams, shifting more than once from what is reality and back to dream, as, for example, during the second act, [End Page 290] when Troll tells Melusina that she cannot actually be real (1:1183). Yet, with all the mutual destabilizing around this polarized duality, in the end the drama favors a concept of a dream that negates the reality of dreaming. The proposed and pre-arranged marriage to Bertha is too profane a reality, having no real chance to be taken seriously despite all the hand wringing and evocation because Melusina supposedly represents the side of evil. While the uninspiring outlook to a traditional marriage and life might have triggered Raimund's weakness for considering his dream of Melusina a reality, Melusina's notion of true love is neither utopian ("Heimat") (1:1183) nor authentic since it takes place in heaven, safely displaced out of the realm of an earthly reality. Hence, dreaming becomes a utensil of escapism but never a placeholder for a utopia.⁹⁷

While dreams and reality are indeed rhetorically utilized as a chiasmus, dominant theme, and theatrical device, the libretto lacks, nevertheless, a consistency in regard to the most dreamed-of person, Melusina. Melusina's figure is inconsistent to the extent that she switches between an active and a contemplative woman, between a dominant and submissive one, between an "idealized and demonized" figure.⁹⁸ And even though her embodiment as a nymph signals her as the erotic Other, Melusina remains stringently asexual throughout the play. In the first act, she is the one who transgresses despite the sisters' warning, and expresses and offers her love to Raimund. Her castle is the visible sign of her power which is also tangible when she is able to set two conditions for her love: first she promises him satisfaction while living her contemplative lifestyle, a life that makes one recall the bucolic tradition: "Ruh und Gleichmut sprießen / In Melusinens Reich, / Und die Tage fließen / Immerdar sich gleich" (1:1174). If this will be satisfying for him, he will be "überglücklich" (1:1174), always to be assured of her chaste love. She warns him to trust this agreement/pact, otherwise he will be responsible for making the relationship "grenzenlos unglücklich" (1:1174). Then, as a second sign of her power, she gives the ring that, if taken off and thrown away, will separate them forever (1:1174). Both signals of her power, though, are mixed with a passive-aggressive attitude since her demands on him impose both her fear of loss and a punitive condition.

During the second act, she is the queen and reigns on her throne while Raimund lies "zu ihren Füßen" (1:1180). She has the characteristics of Mary when the choir sings at the beginning of Act Two: "Mütterlich fromm dich erweisest, / Liebe! Königin!" (1:1180) As promised, she provides a serene lifestyle, where music and dance are of a pleasant nature (1:1181). The queen rules and is eager to please Raimund's needs. That is why she gives in to his desire for his longing after a "Heimat" since he is not satisfied with the supposed utopian tranquility. Yet again her pleasing him is wrapped in a double-bind message when she reveals the following secret: The power that makes him envious is itself not as great as it seems ("Die Macht, die du an mir benei-denswert gefunden, / Sie ist doch an Bedingungen gebunden") (1:1184). She must return back to nature ("Der Mutter Element") (1:1184). When she does, he can return to earth. He is surprised when she begs him ("Du, und flehen?") that he cannot search for or speak to her because if he looks for her and sees her, their union cannot exist any longer. ("Hast du gesehen, / Muß ich [End Page 291] vergehen, / Und unser Bund kann nicht mehr bestehen") (1:1184). He promises to her "Treue, Glauben—Unverstand" (1:1184). Thus, in the very moment of her strength of being able to set the conditions and make Raimund subservient to her, she herself reveals her most vulnerable side and fears. She is a woman who possesses power yet remains powerless.

Soon after, Raimund is tested and questioned by Bertha and the Count, and he feels coerced to summon Melusina—without pulling the ring?!—who dramatically arrives with a clap of thunder, but in the end has to give up her power: "Nehmt die Macht, die ihr gegeben" because now Raimund has looked for her. (1:1190) When Raimund finally peeks at her, seeing her in her natural "Gestalt" as a fish-like woman, he is disgusted. Meanwhile he loses forever his "Braut" (1:1191).

The final act opens with Melusina "ärmlich gekleidet" (1:1193), in a state of mourning and melancholia. In fact, she is a "Leiche" (1:1193) even though she claimed before that when he transgresses he makes her die, though in her sphere the dead do not exist (1:1174). Powerless and dead as she might or might not be, Raimund's playing with the ring brings her momentarily back to life at the moment of his wedding with Bertha, after which he finally throws the ring away (1:1199). Strangely enough, at the end, when he is dead, Melusina is once again richly dressed, wearing a crown and ruling once more (1:1201). She now commands him again: "Raimund komm, / Nun Melusinen gleich, / Auf immerdar in ihrem Reich!" (1:1201) As mentioned before, this ending is highly unmotivated, not the least because Melusina's sisters, nymphs like her, are now are up in the air and no longer part of the water element. Their motto of "Tod versöhnt, / Treue gekrönt" ensures that in the end Melusina will reign again and can call Raimund her own: "Ewig mein!" (1:1202)⁹⁹ The finale displays a metamorphosis towards a Christian tableaux in which a Mary figure resides, annulling all previous transgressions and enslavements of fate and wrongdoings.

As Grillparzer noted in his conversation with Beethoven: "Die Geister unter den Weibern haben keine Leiber und die Leiber keine Geister."¹⁰⁰ In that sense Melusina becomes both real and fantastical for Grillparzer: he dreams of Melusina as uniting body and spirit. Yet, he cannot make a reality out of this unity. His own insecurity towards women, hence forces him to make Melusina's character dominant and submissive at once. Hence, she is simultaneously threatening and pleasing to Raimund. This lasting ambivalence of Melusina's figure undermines the heavenly tableaux that attempts to give the impression of a (re)union, closure, and stability. Thus, this play lingers around the conflict of destabilizing the known world of male order and convention, yet not to the point that chaos will prevail, because the fantasy of an androgynous loyalty and ethereal love is, after all, a counterfeit of a stable order.

Therefore, I would argue that Grillparzer could not find an aesthetic conclusion to the abyss that he had created within the play. Furthermore, in an allegorical reading of the libretto, one can argue that Grillparzer was confronted with the dilemma he did not want to face: to make a choice between text and music.

As Politzer correctly observes, [End Page 292]

es fällt auf, daß handlungswichtige Passagen in der Melusina wie in der Zauberflöte … in Prosa gehalten und damit der Musik entzogen sind. Der Unterschied liegt lediglich darin, daß in Melusina diese Handlungselemente zugleich Einsichten enthalten, die an sich bedeutsam sein mögen, aber musikalisch nicht fruchtbar gemacht werden können.¹⁰¹

Here one can think, for example, of Melusina's secret that she has to return to Mother Nature on the seventh day ("Der Mutter Element") (1:1184), or in act one when she offers her love to Raimund, attempting to persuade him to join her empire by saying: "Meiner Liebe bis du gewiß. Der Erde Müh und Not entnommen, wirst Du erkennen, was du jetzt nur ahnest, und schauen, was dir jetzt Mühe macht, nur zu denken" (1:1174). Grillparzer emphasizes the difference between "schauen" und "denken," and alluding to a resolution of a Kantian dichotomy (sensual perception versus rational cognition) is truly a challenge to represent in a musical form. Besides pointing to how difficult the philosophical concept might be to render in a musical language, the conceptual dichotomy also highlights once more how dispersed the play's content and form is.

Or consider, for example, the opening scene of act two, where music itself is thematized and Grillparzer's half-hearted treatment of the relationship between music and text becomes wholly evident. In a state of harmonious love both Melusina and Raimund sing: "Dann tönet froh mein Gesang" (1:1180). Here Grillparzer indeed seems closest to his own notion of music as a "Wohllaut." Opposing any Dionysian notion of dance or music, his is an Arcadian song, despite some of the subconscious erotic overtones. But what happens when "Tonkunst, die holde" becomes awake and "Brausende Donner, / Hirtliche Flöten, / Racheposaunen, / Banges Erröten" (1:1181) are heard? It is difficult not to think of Grillparzer associating these words with Beethoven's pastoral symphony by way of its mimetic representation of thunderstorm and shepherd's music. Yet Grillparzer summons a representational musical language while being programmatically opposed to descriptive music, therefore in tune with Beethoven's own musical aesthetics. What prevails, however, is Melusina's notion of music as a "gay dance," a serene and harmonious state of being.

VIII

The paradox of a text that shifts from dominating the music to submitting to musical domination gives more reason than all the other aforementioned incoherencies as to why I read the figure of Melusina as an allegory for the overall inconsistency of the libretto. While Grillparzer denounced Der Freischütz, he attempts likewise to write a Romantic opera. While he argues that in an opera the music is to be independent of the text, he wants for the figure of Melusina a melody that is recognizable as a leitmotiv (though he does not use this term) and writes passages that require much more attention to the drama's text than he argues for otherwise. And while he claims to have no real interest in the opera project, he nevertheless was humbled by Beethoven's excitement for his libretto. It is as if Grillparzer stopped writing [End Page 293] the libretto midway through and wrote a word-drama, and, vice versa, wrote part of a word drama that was supposed to be a libretto.

In the end, it is worthwhile to return briefly to Grillparzer's musical aesthetics. For him, as we recall, music is above all a visceral and sensual experience that evokes dunkle Gefühle that one should read as music's natural power to evoke feelings that remain unaffected by our rational capacities.¹⁰² These "dark feelings" are the actual strength of music and for Grillparzer music belongs, first and foremost, to the realm of the subconscious. Simultaneously, he argues, it requires a "Wohllaut," a harmonious system that represents a Kantian beauty conceived and grounded in nature. In short, Grillparzer's musical aesthetics is contradictory, a contradiction that only grows in proportion to his argument when he declares his concept of music a universal or natural truth.

Moreover, his musical aesthetics and its contradiction are played out within the Melusina libretto, which revolves around these oppositional forces, i.e., a desire for a stable order of harmony that clashes with a darker side. If music evokes the unrepressed and dark side it should do so in such a way that it is pleasing so that we have a key to Melusina herself; her identity is half-animal with respect to her body and half-human with respect to cognitive capabilities. She represents a dark and threatening side as well as a peaceful and serene one; she is both dominant and submissive. In other words, Melusina embodies Grillparzer's concept of music. This conflict within her (and to some extent Raimund) is supposed to be resolved when they both metamorphose into the ethereal beauty of eternal loyalty in heaven. Beauty should contain and outshine the dark in the end. The sphere of rationale should therefore rule the powers of the irrational. And the ascendance of Melusina and Raimund to a semi-Christian tableaux should resolve the conflict that remains resistant to such a quick-fix resolution. Therefore, the aforementioned dramaturgical contradictions emerge out of underlying conceptual and ideological ones.

Recall also that for Grillparzer, music is such a natural force that it requires the need to be contained by a cognitive power that resembles beauty. But what happens when the aesthetic tools or the grammar of music neglect the cognitive balance and become uncontrollable? That is when and where Grillparzer sees the danger in Beethoven's music. For him, Beethoven not only knows how to forcefully evoke a visceral reaction as Haydn and Mozart did, or for that matter any other music does, but his compositions tromp and transgress the natural border of beauty. Thus, in the ears of Grillparzer at least, Beethoven neglects the necessary restraint of music's power. At the time of their meeting Beethoven had finished his choral symphony and the grand mass, both playing to Grillparzer's fears, as he later articulates.

Instead of resigning to biographical circumstances or essentializing their personalities, ultimately Grillparzer's libretto, his conceptualization of music in general, and his ambivalence towards Beethoven's compositions in particular all provide keys to why Grillparzer's and Beethoven's collaboration was doomed to fail in the first place. Grillparzer's Melusina, the protagonist as well as the libretto, carry signs of a larger and inherent paradox that one can also trace in his musical aesthetics and vice versa. In the play the paradoxes [End Page 294] could only be resolved by faking a resolution and by displacement: magic and fairy-like mechanisms, i.e., unrealistic means are necessary to create a make-believe harmony in the end. The darker side creates such a strong urge that it needs to be forcefully resolved. Nothing less than heavenly paradise is necessary to resolve all the issues of conflict. While Grillparzer could create a fairytale solution and thus be in control, he might well have been fearful that a musical rendition by Beethoven would interfere and ultimately undermine his urge for dominating the dark side.

Grillparzer might have been fully aware of this unconvincing ending as well as the aforementioned contradictions or other shortcomings of his libretto. But instead of addressing his own indecisiveness or allowing his fears and irrational side to create their own way and rule, he left the libretto hanging somewhere between being interested in it and fearing that it would become, in the wan ears of Beethoven, a Romantic opera of which he had no control over as his own ending suggests. One could go even one step further and argue that Beethoven represents, for Grillparzer, his own inner dark side or Other, which he so badly thought needed controlling. In other words, he displaced his dark side not only into the music but also onto the composer himself.

Reading his Erinnerungen an Beethoven in this light, the memoir is nothing more than a talking cure in which Grillparzer posthumously could gain control (again) over the Other—both his own and the one represented for him in the composer Beethoven. Beethoven's unruly behavior, his messy room, his sexual desires, his dysfunctional life, and even his deafness are for Grillparzer signs of an unmitigated chaos. Whereas he regarded Beethoven as capable of conquering the abyss, Grillparzer preferred to remain on safe ground. For him Beethoven needed to be criticized for trespassing on the natural boundaries of beauty; he represented the limits of what music was allowed to do and thus should not be followed or emulated. It was not in a Hegelian sense that Beethoven represented the end of the arts, but for Grillparzer he mapped out the territory where art needed to be stopped.¹⁰³ In this sense, then, we can also finally read his various assertions and remarks on Beethoven after the composer had died. Thus, in the poem commemorating Beethoven's death, Grillparzer had the composer walk off into the dark and out of sight upon arriving in heaven. Likewise, there was no space left for the composer in Grillparzer's bonding of Raimund's and Melusina's heaven. For heaven's sake, Beethoven needed to disappear.