Aesthetic And Philosophical Reflections On Mood

Stimmung And Modernity Birgit Breidenbach

download

https://ebookbell.com/product/aesthetic-and-philosophical-
reflections-on-mood-stimmung-and-modernity-birgit-
breidenbach-33056428

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

Kierkegaard And Philosophical Eros Between Ironic Reflection And

Aesthetic Meaning Ulrika Carlsson

https://ebookbell.com/product/kierkegaard-and-philosophical-eros-
between-ironic-reflection-and-aesthetic-meaning-ulrika-
carlsson-50224256

Dionysus Reborn Play And The Aesthetic Dimension In Modern

Philosophical And Scientific Discourse Mihai Spariosu

https://ebookbell.com/product/dionysus-reborn-play-and-the-aesthetic-
dimension-in-modern-philosophical-and-scientific-discourse-mihai-
spariosu-51939022

The Dunhuang Grottoes And Global Education Philosophical Spiritual

Scientific And Aesthetic Insights Xu Di

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-dunhuang-grottoes-and-global-
education-philosophical-spiritual-scientific-and-aesthetic-insights-
xu-di-9998372

Beyond Aesthetics And Politics Philosophical And Axiological Studies

On The Avantgarde Pragmatism And Postmodernism Skowronski

https://ebookbell.com/product/beyond-aesthetics-and-politics-
philosophical-and-axiological-studies-on-the-avantgarde-pragmatism-
and-postmodernism-skowronski-5263160
Heideggers Style On Philosophical Anthropology And Aesthetics 1st
Edition Markus Weidler

https://ebookbell.com/product/heideggers-style-on-philosophical-
anthropology-and-aesthetics-1st-edition-markus-weidler-46383312

The Concept Of Expression A Study In Philosophical Psychology And

Aesthetics Alan Tormey

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-concept-of-expression-a-study-in-
philosophical-psychology-and-aesthetics-alan-tormey-51944384

Aesthetics Of Presence Philosophical And Practical Reconsiderations

Willmar Sauter

https://ebookbell.com/product/aesthetics-of-presence-philosophical-
and-practical-reconsiderations-willmar-sauter-32566626

Cognition And Practice Li Zehous Philosophical Aesthetics Rafal Banka

https://ebookbell.com/product/cognition-and-practice-li-zehous-
philosophical-aesthetics-rafal-banka-46370878

The Aesthetics Of Food The Philosophical Debate About What We Eat And
Drink Kevin W Sweeney

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-aesthetics-of-food-the-
philosophical-debate-about-what-we-eat-and-drink-kevin-w-
sweeney-10636698
Aesthetic and Philosophical
Reflections on Mood

This study explores the concept of Stimmung in literary and philosoph-

ical texts of the modern age. Signifying both ‘mood’ and ‘attunement,’
Stimmung speaks to questions of affective experience and aesthetic de-
sign alike. The study locates itself in the nexus between discourses on
modernity, existentialism and aesthetics and uncovers the pivotal role
of Stimmung in 19th- and 20th-century European narrative fiction and
continental philosophy. It first explores the philosophical and aesthetic
origins and implications of Stimmung to, then, discuss its role in the
narrative fiction of three key authors of modern literature: Fyodor Dos-
toevsky, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. These readings demon-
strate a significant shift towards an aesthetic of affective intensity and
immediacy in which the experience of the reading process takes cen-
tre stage as each author develops an aesthetic philosophy of Stimmung
in their own right. Through its focus on the concept of Stimmung, the
study thus unearths a fundamental link between existentialist concerns
and narrative techniques in modern literature.

Birgit Breidenbach is a Lecturer in Literature and Philosophy at the Uni-

versity of East Anglia. She completed her Ph.D. in English and Compar-
ative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and gained teaching
and research experience at Warwick and Queen Mary University of
London before joining UEA in 2018. Her published and presented work
focuses on literary and aesthetic theory, mood and collective forms of
feeling and the interplay between philosophy and literature. She is the
co-editor of the collection Mood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New
Theories (co-edited with Thomas Docherty; Routledge, 2019).
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Aesthetic and Philosophical
Reflections on Mood
Stimmung and Modernity

Birgit Breidenbach
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Birgit Breidenbach to be identified as author of
this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-27552-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-29657-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
To my mother, Delia Camacho-Breidenbach, for her
courage, love and strength, and in loving memory of my
father, Herbert Breidenbach
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi

1 Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Moody Modernity 40

Alienation in the Modern City 43
Attuning the Reader to The Idiot 56
Aesthetic Intensity and the Modern Condition 74

2 Aesthetic Attunement in Samuel Beckett’s

Narrative Fiction 83
The (Pre- and Post-)Cartesian Subject in Murphy
and Watt 87
‘All I am is feeling’: The Textual Dynamics of Molloy 106
Decomposed Selves, Voices in the Dark 121

3 Eine ‘Stimmungssache’: Thomas Bernhard’s

‘Trilogy of the Arts’ 136
Music and Artistic Ideal in The Loser 145
Woodcutters: Irritation and the Creative Process 158
Bernhard’s Aesthetics of Stimmung and the Failure
of Art in Old Masters 168

Bibliography 193
Index 209
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my former Ph.D. supervisor Thomas Docherty,

whose guidance, support and generosity of spirit before, throughout
and after my doctoral studies were invaluable for the writing of this
book. I owe an immense intellectual debt to him. Many colleagues at
the University of Warwick and elsewhere kindly took the time to engage
with the ideas that formed the basis for this book and helped me to re-
fine them. I would, in particular, like to thank Emma Mason, Paulo de
Medeiros, Steven Connor, Daniel Katz, Christina Britzolakis and Hans
Ulrich Gumbrecht for their very helpful input and much appreciated en-
couragement. During my doctoral studies at Warwick, I received gener-
ous financial support from the University of Warwick and the German
National Academic Foundation, for which I am very thankful. Since
joining the University of East Anglia, I have received an immense amount
of support from many wonderful colleagues here while completing this
book, including Alison Donnell, Clare Connors, Anshuman Mondal,
Claire Jowitt, James Wood and Eugenia Kelbert Rudan. I would also
like to extend my gratitude to my students, who have made my academic
path beyond engaging, rewarding and enjoyable by providing inspiration
and much food for thought along the way. It is a daily pleasure and a
privilege to learn from you.
Particularly heartfelt gratitude is owed to my family and friends.
I cannot thank my parents enough for everything that they have done for
me. Thanks to my brilliant sister, Carina Breidenbach, and her equally
brilliant fiancé, Max Gilljohann, who have always been an amazing
source of support, kindness and laughs. Janette and John Odley are two
of the most generous people that I have ever met and gave me a home
away from home. Madelyn Rittner and Daniel Schneider have been the
best friends I could have wished for, and their friendship is a true priv-
ilege. Daniel Tiemeyer has been a most erudite and kind musicology
‘consultant’ and friend. I also want to thank the wonderful friends that
I was lucky enough to make at Warwick, in particular Madeleine and
Rory Tulip, Kristin Hübner and Karen Borg Cardona, for making my
x Acknowledgments
time there truly fabulous. Lastly, I would like to thank Mark Wilson –
without whom I could not have done this – for inspiring me, for believ-
ing in me more than I did at times and for graciously accommodating
the many different Stimmungen (and Verstimmungen) that the writing
of this study produced.
Preface

In 1864, a young Friedrich Nietzsche reflects on his struggle to decide on

a theme for his writing:

Imagine me on the evening of the first day of Easter, sitting at home

wrapped in my dressing gown: outside a fine rain is falling; no one
else is in the room. I stare for a long time at the white paper lying in
front of me, pen in hand, angered by the confused crowd of themes,
events, and thoughts all demanding to be written down; and a num-
ber of them demand it in a very stormy way, because they are still
young and in ferment, like must [new wine], while a number of old,
mature, settled thoughts resist, like an old gentleman gauging the ef-
forts of the world of youth with an equivocal glance. Let us say this
plainly: our frame of mind is determined by the struggle of the old
with the young world; and we call the state of the struggle at each
moment ‘mood’ [in the original: Stimmung,1 my addition] or else,
somewhat contemptuously, ‘whim.’2

This self-reflexive passage addresses the circumstances, and difficul-

ties, of its own writing. Where is the writing process to begin when
myriad ideas and impressions simultaneously inhabit one’s mind? asks
Nietzsche. Old and new impressions, ideas and thoughts come to mind
as he sits down to write, and where ‘old’ and ‘new’ collide, something
Nietzsche calls Stimmung – here translated as ‘mood’ (though it can
also be rendered as ‘attunement’) – emerges. The moods of one’s daily
existence, he thus suggests, grow out of the tension between that which
is familiar and that which is new, but – being so very familiar to our day-
to-day existence – this very collision of new and old is often discarded
as being mere ‘whim’ (Laune). Nietzsche, however, unable to settle on
either an ‘old’ or a ‘new’ idea, decides to address this affectively laden
mode of writing itself: the state of being in a mood that is, by his defini-
tion, indicative of the relationship and tension between various, tempo-
rally disparate impressions in his mind.
In this short prose text, fittingly titled ‘Ueber Stimmungen’ (‘On
Moods’), Nietzsche thus gives the term ‘mood’ a decidedly temporal
xii Preface
dimension: it is the mutual consciousness of past and present in whose
field of tension moods arise. That which has been and that which is si-
multaneously lay claim to and forge the Stimmung arising in the mind
of the writer. As Nietzsche further describes it, his existing affective
state determines the ways in which he encounters new impressions: for
instance, he describes having experienced ‘a parting or a nonparting’ –
presumably the break-up of a romantic relationship or the parting of a
close friend – shortly before, after which he played Liszt’s Consolations,
noticing that he was deeply touched by them, precisely because the pre-
vious event had already established a sorrowful mood:

Thus, it is similar things which the soul seeks to attract; and the
existing mass of feelings squeezes out, like a lemon, the new events
that touch the heart, yet always so that only a part of the new unites
with the old.3

Nietzsche’s Stimmung emerges through an encounter as an existing dis-

position ‘filters’ new impressions. Moods become the site of a perpetual
sense of novelty as Nietzsche further elucidates that they never repeat
themselves but are always new: ‘no single one is exactly like any other
one, but each is unfathomably young and the offspring of the moment.’4
Every mood that he enters is unprecedented as it is born in the present
moment, arising out of a dialectic of past and new impressions. To Nietz-
sche, Stimmung, as the site of our affective encounter with the world,
thereby becomes the locus of a perpetual modernity of experience.
Strikingly, Nietzsche resists a strict division between thinking and
feeling as he gives his account of moods. On the contrary, he portrays
his own thoughts as characters with a certain affective disposition: the
young, stormy thoughts are battling the old, settled ones, which resem-
ble ‘an old gentleman gauging the efforts of the world of youth with
an equivocal glance.’ Rather than contrasting mood with the world of
thought and philosophical contemplation, Nietzsche’s understanding of
mood straddles the realms of feeling and thinking; indeed, his use of im-
agery suggests that thought itself, and philosophical thought no less, are
affectively disposed. Furthermore, as he describes the phenomenology
of a moment-to-moment affective experience of the world, he (perhaps
inspired by literary idols such as Hölderlin5) also aims to create an aes-
thetic mood in its own right: opening the text by prompting the reader
to imagine the physical circumstances in which he is writing – on the
evening of the first day of Easter, sitting at home in his dressing gown,
alone in his room while a fine rain is falling outside – the essay attempts
to produce the same mood that it aims to portray. Small details – the
intimacy of the dressing gown, the quality of the rain (which one might
recognise as part of the volatile Aprilwetter that is typical of spring in
Germany) and the use of the present tense – aim to make the author’s
 Preface xiii
mood accessible by evoking a material presence through physical pa-
rameters such as space, time of day and weather. A melancholy mood
of solitary reflection emerges, in which the imperative form ‘imagine
me’ encourages the reader to not only picture the scene but simulta-
neously empathise with the author’s mood. The details are evocative
enough but not too specific to bar the reader from picturing themselves
in this very situation. Noticeably, the exact location – which would have
been Nietzsche’s boarding school in Schulpforta – and the exact year
of composition – 1864 – are omitted from his introductory description,
giving it a sense of universality that facilitates empathic identification.
Imagine you are sitting at home, wrapped in your dressing gown, on
the evening of the first day of Easter, while a fine rain is falling outside,
and no one else is in the room. Imagine you have been dumped recently
and are now trying to compose a piece of philosophical writing, but
you just can’t seem to focus on any particular thing. In Nietzsche’s text,
the lines between describing a mood and evoking it are blurred; as one
bleeds into the other, description and evocation inevitably accompany
one another. Not only does Stimmung thus become a pivotal aspect of
the phenomenology of our everyday experience; it is also conceptualised
as a central element of writing, one which is made communicable to the
reader through specific textual means.
This short text encapsulates a number of key components of how the
concept of Stimmung manifests itself in the literature of the modern age
as well as in aesthetic and philosophical discourses of modernity and
affect, and it sets the scene for the work of this study. Stimmung has
recently resurfaced in a number of scholarly explorations of aesthetic
affect – which I will engage with in the pages to follow – putting this
concept on the map of emerging research into ways of conceptualising
art and modes of affective aesthetic reception. This study investigates
this phenomenon’s far-reaching influence on modern aesthetics and its
crucial relationship with the concepts of the self that are emblematic
of the age of modernity while building on existing contributions to the
study of Stimmung and aesthetic moods from a variety of disciplines.
Since the reflective aesthetic-philosophical mode of engaging Stimmung
goes hand in hand with literature’s incessant production of moods – as
my reading of Nietzsche’s text has shown – the relationship between
textual reflections on and descriptions and evocations of Stimmung will
be a core concern of this book. What I aim to show is that the re-positing
of the question of Stimmung is inextricably connected with the notion
of aesthetic modernity. Nietzsche’s essay already locates moods at the
level of a perpetual modernity of everyday experience, and my critical
readings of literary texts from the time of its composition in the 1860s
to the late twentieth century will uncover an intense preoccupation with
Stimmung and forms of affect within the medium of literary fiction.
This preoccupation is directly linked to a self-reflexive exploration of
xiv Preface
the notion of modernity, which gained growing influence over European
thought and art over the course of the nineteenth century. We will see
that the idea of modernity itself produces a pressing need to renegoti-
ate Stimmung on an existentialist and an aesthetic level through differ-
ent modes of attunement. Stimmung, it will thus become apparent, can
make a principal contribution to the understanding of modern aesthetics
and philosophy as it permeates the modern self-understanding of the
subject as well as the dominant modes of receiving and understanding
literature and art in general that the age of modernity has produced.
The focus of this study will be directed at the philosophical discourse
on Stimmung and at the ways in which three eminent authors of modern
literature – Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard –
negotiate the question of mood in their narrative fiction. Existing studies
of the conceptual history and theory of Stimmung have made invaluable
contributions to the understanding of this phenomenon through critical
engagement with existentialist and aesthetic thought. This book aims to
build on this work and simultaneously complement it by closely examin-
ing articulations of and reflections on mood, first and foremost, within
the medium of literature. We will find that Dostoevsky, Beckett and
­Bernhard each developed key ideas and aesthetic strategies towards pro-
ducing an aesthetic philosophy of Stimmung in their own right. These
philosophies yield crucial insight into the ways in which existentialist
questions, aesthetic theory and literary practice coalesce in the medium
of modern fiction. I chose these authors, first, as all three display a sim-
ilar affinity for existentialist questions alongside modernist aesthetic
concerns; second, as an intriguing line of influence can be detected
from Dostoevsky to Beckett and Bernhard; and, third, as this combi-
nation presents a diachronic, trans-national and trans-lingual picture
of, broadly speaking pan-European, aesthetic-philosophical concerns
that are clearly linked to the notion of modernity. By examining the
intersection of individual consciousness and affect with the world and
with others – as well as the modes of unison and dissonance that spring
from this relationship – in the works of these three writers and alongside
ideas from major works of modern philosophy, we will become more
cognisant of the philosophical modes of Stimmung that have shaped our
present-day understanding of aesthetic affect in literary fiction.
One of the intricacies in writing about mood relates to the self-
reflexive sensitivity towards one’s own disposition in the act of writing
that it facilitates, as exemplified by Nietzsche himself: ‘Let us admit that
I am writing on moods because right now I am in a mood, and it is a
good thing that I am just in the mood to give a description of moods.’6
A study of mood requires that we are ‘in the mood’ to critically examine
moods, that we are attuned to the question of attunement itself.7 How
may my own mood impact the way I write about the very phenomenon
of mood? How attuned am I towards the texts that I am writing about?
 Preface xv
And how does my attunement shape my understanding of these texts?
A mood-oriented reading sensitises us to these questions, and indeed this
study departs from the understanding that mood ‘is not optional, but a
prerequisite for any kind of intellectual engagement’8 as much as it is for
any aesthetic experience.

Notes
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
Introduction. Stimmung and
Modernity
Theoretical Explorations

‘That’s such a mood,’ one of my students remarked in response to a

comment made by another student during a seminar break a few months
ago. As a supposed ‘mood scholar,’ I was intrigued, but also slightly
alarmed by the fact that I had never heard of this expression before.
The student then went on to explain to me that this phrase has become
a popular way of signalling relatability in online and youth culture
over the last few years, particularly on social media.1 Further online
searches revealed that a meme of a cat lazily lounging on a chair can be
‘a mood.’ A video of a celebrity dancing like no one is watching can be
a ‘whole mood’; one of Greta Thunberg frowning at Donald Trump is a
‘big mood.’ On social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter,
the hashtag ‘mood’ has thus gained increasing popularity. What it ex-
presses is that users recognise feelings, sentiments and attitudes artic-
ulated by others and that they can relate to them on an affective level.
For academics, not being familiar with new phrases that your students
confidently wield is a whole mood. A mood in this sense is never singular
and never associated with an isolated individual. ‘X is a mood’ signifies
that X is familiar to a plurality and that that familiarity is somehow
communicable – indeed, that X’s ‘moodiness’ is what allows us to com-
municate about it in the first place. As social media platforms so often
rely on brevity and simplicity in expressing attitudes or feelings in our
day and age, ‘X is a mood’ operates as shorthand for ‘I’ve been there,’
‘I feel like this all the time’ and ‘you know what I mean, right?’ Moods
are shared, communicable and recognised by others within a culture.
They tie the individual into an affective collectivity. The growing sen-
sitivity towards moods in contemporary culture makes an engagement
with philosophical and literary discourses which have engaged with this
phenomenon and similar ones all the more fruitful – yet mood has, until
recently, not been a major field of enquiry in Anglophone philosophy or
literary criticism. We thus need to turn to other sources that can inform
and direct the study and understanding of collective forms of feeling.
The German word Stimmung possesses semantic specificities which are
absent from the English ‘mood’2 and which make it a particularly fruitful
concept for the mode of enquiry that this study pursues: one that seeks
2 Introduction
to combine a philosophical and aesthetic understanding of moods in the
context of their cultural and historical genesis, specifically in the age of
modernity. The term’s particular semantic elasticity allows it to, simultane-
ously, answer to questions of human existence and aesthetic composition.
Moreover, as opposed to ‘mood’ – in the Anglophone sphere a relatively
new topic in aesthetics and literary studies – Stimmung benefits from a
long conceptual history in the German-speaking aesthetic-philosophical
tradition. The concept has gained increasing critical attention over the
course of the last ten years, particularly in the German-speaking aca-
demic discourse on aesthetic experience, and this interest has now notably
spilt over into Anglophone criticism as part of the newfound inter- and
transdisciplinary focus on affect and the history of emotion.3 As there is,
at this point, a considerable, growing body of critical work on mood and
Stimmung, this introduction focusses on two specific areas of interest in
relation to this work: first, on the conceptual history of Stimmung in the
context of the modern age, with a particular spotlight on the nexus of
existentialism and aesthetic theory, and, second, on the question of how
the concept can be used in the context of studying literary texts.
In contemporary German, the word Stimmung carries multiple con-
notations that inform its usage as a critical concept: first, it describes
psychological ‘mood’ and, like the English ‘mood,’ can refer to both
the affective state of an individual and that of a group; second, it refers
to ‘atmosphere’ as an affectively charged sense of place or situatedness;
and, third, it denotes the tuning of instruments through its etymolog-
ical kinship with the verb stimmen (which translates both as ‘to tune’
and as ‘to be correct’) and the noun Stimme (‘voice’). Stimmung, in the
original musical sense, refers to the attunement of different parts of an
instrument – such as its strings – in order to create a harmonic relation-
ship between them. Due to the intersection of these specific semantic
fields in one term, the word Stimmung has repeatedly been qualified as
‘untranslatable.’4 Indeed, the word is featured in the Dictionary of Un-
translatables, where it states that its precise difficulty for any translator
lies in the peculiar ‘analogy between the musical (tuning of instruments)
and the psychological (a person’s way of being in agreement, his or her
mood)’ that the term offers. 5 ‘Mood,’ ‘humour,’ ‘attunement’ and ‘dis-
position’ are perhaps its closest English-language equivalents, although
none of them encompasses all three semantic elements that are simulta-
neously present in the modern German – i.e., the affective, spatial and
musical dimensions.
Since its meaning habitually transcends the emotion or affective state
of an individual, the current-day use of the term Stimmung addresses the
elusive ‘sweet spot’ between subject and other, between individual and
group, that allows for a transmission of affect and for different people
to have similar forms of experience, psychologically and aesthetically.
More often than not do we feel as though moods are contagious, as if
 Introduction 3
they operate in some intersubjective sphere of affectedness that is hard to
pinpoint. This is precisely why Stimmung has recently resurfaced as such
a productive concept within the discourse on aesthetics. As the short
essay by Nietzsche discussed in the preface exemplifies, a pivotal notion
silently underlying discourses on mood is that it makes aesthetic impres-
sions communicable and liberates them from the confinement of sub-
jectivism as it allows readers, viewers and listeners to encounter pieces
of art in a way that suggests a shared or related form of experience.
The musical dimension of Stimmung indicates this element of relation-
ality as musical tuning aims to bring elements together that are initially
marked by difference. The Oxford Dictionary of Music defines tuning
as the ‘[a]djustment of pitch in any instrument so that it corresponds
to accepted norm,’6 thus suggesting a notion of interdependence that is
structured through an adherence to normativity. Initially, tuning applies
to the elements constituting an instrument: the strings of a violin or gui-
tar must be tuned to a given standard as a preparatory action for playing
music. Then, different instruments playing together must be attuned to
one another to establish a harmonious relationship and enable them to
perform together. Through the process of musical attunement, difference
is thus not erased but integrated into a condition of mutual interdepen-
dence whereby different elements are brought into a relationship marked
by a pre-configured, normative sense of consonance and harmony. Imag-
ine that we are singing a song together in C major, trying to harmonise: if
I sing an E flat to your C, I will be off-key. Es stimmt nicht. The concept
of harmony – in the musical sense and in the metaphorical sense of the
word – is therefore of pivotal importance to any discussion of Stimmung
as it addresses the precise relational nature of attunement.
The word Stimmung has undergone a number of semantic shifts since
its first emergence in the sixteenth century, which are well documented
in David E. Wellbery’s comprehensive semantic and conceptual history
of the term, first published in the encyclopaedia Ästhetische Grund-
begriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden (2000–5) and re-
cently translated into English by Rebecca Pohl for New Formations
(2018). In this text, Wellbery outlines the most significant adaptations
and interpretations of the concept in German-language philosophy and
aesthetic theory from the sixteenth century to the present day. A detailed
discussion of the stages that Wellbery presents goes beyond the scope of
this book and would hardly do justice to the intricate detail with which
Wellbery studies different iterations of the concept, but a number of key
points from this article are of particular significance for this study.
According to Wellbery, in the German-speaking context, the word
Stimmung has been in use in the musical sense of its meaning since the
sixteenth century, while the aesthetic concept – derived from the musi-
cal sense by means of metaphorical transference – emerged in the late
eighteenth century.7 Kant’s use of the term in the Critique of Judgment
4 Introduction
(1790) established it as an aesthetic concept, albeit as one that did not
relate to a subjective mode of experience. On the contrary, both within
its original musical context and in Kant’s aesthetic theory, Stimmung
designates an objective relationship – in the musical context one be-
tween the parts of an instrument and in the context of Kant’s writing
one between the cognitive faculties of the mind. However, throughout
the nineteenth century, particularly within the contexts of Romanticism
and German Idealism, the meaning of the term was gradually shifted
towards the subjective perception of states of mind. In the writings of
Dilthey, Schlegel and Hegel, Stimmung is interpreted as the innermost
form of subjective experience, and, by extension, according to Fichte’s
aesthetic theory, the aesthetic process transfers the artist’s subjective
mood onto the recipient.8 This shift frames the communication of mood
as the principle aim of art: ‘Stimmung is the content of communica-
tion, only Stimmung is not the content but the shape of the movement
of the artist’s innermost subjectivity as self-activity.’9 According to this
perspective, literature thus needs to bridge the gap between subjectivity
and language in order to make the subjective states of mind originally
experienced by the artist communicable. Stimmung here becomes a
problem of artistic form: as Wellbery phrases it in the original German,
Stimmung designates the ‘Bewegungsform,’ i.e., the form or shape of the
movement of the artist’s subjectivity.10
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, various aesthetic
theories, including those proposed by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Alois
Riegl, emphasised the central role that mood plays in aesthetic experi-
ence and posited the evocation of Stimmung as art’s principal objective.
For Hofmannsthal, however, this role is notably detached from a sense
of subjective experience or interiority – it is the materiality of language
that affects the body and produces Stimmung in the poetic encounter.11
Riegl’s account of Stimmung is particularly intriguing as we can find
here one of the earliest suggestions that there is a particular relation-
ship between aesthetic Stimmung and the age of modernity. According
to Riegl, modern art, first and foremost, serves the purpose of evoking
Stimmung as it provides a sense of order and harmony. Riegl suggests
that in previous historical periods, humankind’s need for a sense of har-
mony was satisfied through other sources, particularly through the me-
dium of religion, and that art therefore served purposes other than that
of evoking a sense of harmony through Stimmung. The modern age,
however, is marked by a new scientific perspective which relies on the
principles of causality and order. Riegl suggests that modern art – and
some of the examples he gives are the artworks of Max Liebermann and
Storm van’s-Gravesande – is based on this notion of scientific causality
and order, and that it aims to communicate a sense of oneness with the
surrounding natural world, a comforting knowledge of harmony, that
has otherwise become rare in the modern age.12
 Introduction 5
A similar link between harmony and modernity is established in the
work of the Austrian philologist Leo Spitzer. In his study Classical and
Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation
of the Word ‘Stimmung’ (1944/5), Spitzer traces the concept of musical
Stimmung back to the ancient Greek idea of world harmony. Spitzer
sees the conceptual origin of attunement in Pythagorean philosophy,
where a natural ‘world harmony,’ metaphorically derived from musical
harmony, is pursued as an aesthetic and philosophical ideal that was
later on carried forth into Christian theology. In this context, Augus-
tine’s writings shifted the focus from an all-encompassing transcendent
harmony to an inner-worldly, phenomenologically significant form of
attunement.13 According to Spitzer, the pervasive idea of world harmony
dominated European theological and philosophical discourses until it
started to erode and was eventually repealed after the Renaissance pe-
riod. Although Spitzer hints at a connection with the process of sec-
ularisation and the development of modern European philosophy, his
study closes by emphasising the need for further research into the ways
in which the concept of Stimmung was adapted and transformed in the
age of modernity:

[T]he death of this concept cannot be attributed to Protestantism

as such—as one might be tempted to assume from Novalis’ Chris-
tenheit oder Europa—but only to the destructive process of ‘demu-
sicalization’ and secularization, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries […]. How this process is connected, in turn, with Cal-
vinism and Cartesianism, with the growth of analytical rationalism
and the segmentary, fragmentary, materialistic, and positivistic view
of the world—all this would have to be shown in another study.
An inquiry into this era of disintegration would put into relief once
more the ancient and Christian tradition of world harmony, that is,
the spiritual and intellectual background on which alone a future
linguistic and semantic interpretation of the word Stimmung itself
can be built.14

The crucial turn in the conceptual framework revolving around the term
Stimmung which Spitzer hints at coincides temporally with the outset of
modernity and its far-reaching impact on societal and political realities,
ways of living and philosophical and aesthetic paradigms.
Alongside these historical analyses of Stimmung, the first half of the
twentieth century saw an increasing interest in the concept from the per-
spective of phenomenology and existential philosophy. With the work of
Moritz Geiger, the concept of Stimmung gained growing critical attention
in phenomenological thinking, culminating in what is perhaps its most
famous philosophical interpretation in the work of Martin ­Heidegger.
Heidegger’s reconsideration of Stimmung is considered a pivotal turning
6 Introduction
point for the development of the concept in philosophy and, by exten-
sion, in aesthetics. Heidegger’s philosophy – which I will discuss in more
detail later on in this introduction – eliminates the distinction between
exteriority and interiority and conceptualises Stimmung not as an ex-
pression of the innermost self, but as a way of embedding the subject
position within a transsubjective structure of affect. Wellbery highlights
the significant link between Heidegger’s ontological analysis of Stim-
mung and subsequent reconsiderations of the concept within the sphere
of aesthetic theory:

the crucial point [of Heidegger’s work on Stimmung] is surely that

the hermeneutic version of the concept of Stimmung opens up the
possibility of moving from the analysis of Dasein to aesthetics, or
rather the possibility of converting aesthetics into a hermeneutics
of art.15

Wellbery’s historical overview outlines a number of different inflections

that have been applied to the term Stimmung. The diverging interpre-
tations of its role in the aesthetic process and in existential philosophy
indicate that there is no such thing as an essential, trans-historic mean-
ing of the term; instead, the development of the concept showcases how
historically and culturally contingent its variations and inflections have
been since the sixteenth century. And yet, while each interpretation of
the term needs to be framed through its cultural and historical situated-
ness, what they all have in common is the privileged position which they
assign to the concept: Stimmung is a pivotal dimension for the way in
which human beings experience their daily lives in the world and works
of art. In fact, it indicates a clear experiential correlation between these
two realms of human activity, and one that I consider to be essential to
the modern understanding of art and, by implication, literary fiction.
But to justify a claim of this nature, I first need to consider the link be-
tween modernity and Stimmung more fully.

Stimmung in Modern Philosophy

The term ‘modernity’ is as commonly used as it is contested, and it
has come to designate a number of different phenomena: historically
speaking, it addresses the consequential impact of secularisation, tech-
nological progress and the emergence of new forms of governance and
capitalism in Europe from the Enlightenment period onwards, and the
vicissitudes of the circumstances of social and private life resulting from
these manifold transformations. From a philosophical point of view,
modernity is very much associated with wide-ranging paradigm shifts
affecting discourses on human existence, politics and aesthetics, and is
often fashioned in an antithetical relationship to antiquity or the Middle
 Introduction 7
Ages.16 In his influential book All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982),
Marshall Berman defines modernity, first and foremost, as a mode of
experience marked by transformation, change and the absence of stable
points of reference and meaning. This ‘maelstrom of modern life’17 is
engendered by the ongoing vicissitude of world-historical processes from
the sixteenth century onwards, which generated a sense of disintegration
that, according to Zygmunt Bauman, renders modernity an age marked
by an increasing sense of fluidity.18 Increasingly, the concept of moder-
nity as defined through a single radical break with the past has become
subject to criticism from prominent scholars such as Fredric Jameson and
Arjun Appadurai, who argue against the notion of a singular historical
moment that, as it were, propelled the world into a state of modernity.19
Jameson, conversely, argues that rather than a historical fact, modernity
is a ‘narrative category’20 that has led to the creation of the trope of the
modern as an epistemological and historiographic instrument. Moder-
nity is also associated with a distinctly Eurocentric, colonial ideology:
the invention of the modern enabled diverse forms of oppression and ex-
ploitation as European modernity was fashioned as an advanced model
of social organisation – one that all other cultures should aspire to. For
the purpose of this study, I understand modernity as a dominant, pan-
European mode of thinking about experience, existence and the notion
of the ‘present’ that has shaped philosophical thinking, social organisa-
tion and aesthetic production from the post-Renaissance age onward.
Modernity, as any ideological category, thus needs to be nourished,
sustained and continually adapted by specific discourses and cultural
practices. What I aim to show here is that the concept of Stimmung
gives insight into a correlation between ways of understanding human
existence and the experience of art that constitutes such a foundational
discourse for the category of the modern.
Pioneering the term ‘modernité’ in his 1863 essay ‘The Painter of
Modern Life,’ Charles Baudelaire laid a foundation for the nexus of so-
cial transformation, new modes of experience and new artistic forms of
expression that I am particularly interested in. In this essay, Baudelaire
famously states: ‘[m]odernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent;
it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.’21
His own poetic response to the urban reality of nineteenth-century Paris
constitutes one of the first instantiations of an aesthetic that would be-
come constitutive for and emblematic of modernity, and which places
experience, space and contingency front and centre. The idea of moder-
nity thus became the self-defined birthplace of a new aesthetic that grew
out of a mode of experience shaped by instantaneity and presence, one,
I argue, that is inextricably connected to Stimmung: where the notion
of a world harmony has been declared as lost, the moment-to-moment
attunement of experience becomes the new focal point not only of phi-
losophy but also of aesthetic production. As Darío Gonzáles points out,
8 Introduction
mood’s capacity to create a unity of affective experience that goes be-
yond the individual subject takes on a particular significance in the con-
text of modernity:

As in earlier phases of the German aesthetic tradition, Stimmung

seems to designate a non-reducible meaning that can become per-
ceptible under the condition of a unifying vision. What seems to
constitute a new turning point in the interpretation of the phenom-
enon, however, is the increasing awareness of the necessity of that
kind of vision in the modern world. 22

The conception of the modern subject that is developed in Cartesian

philosophy23 presents a challenge to existential and artistic attunement:
if there is such a thing as a subjective, interior core of being that is sepa-
rate from the world, attunement becomes a secondary process that con-
nects a primary subject of cognition and experience – the locus of the
Cartesian ‘cogito’ – to a, necessarily, contingent world. The emergence
of modern individualism and the concept of subjectivity render attune-
ment not a given state of affairs, as it was for the Pythagoreans, but an
unresolved problem. What we can gather from this is that the disjunc-
tive, ever-changing experience of the modern world and its emphasis on
the individual subject completely reframe the question of Stimmung. At-
tunement to the world and a universal harmony between the world and
individual beings within it are no longer conceived as a given. In other
words, through the advent of modernity, the question of attunement be-
comes a pivotal problem – one that is explored in aesthetics as well as the
philosophical discourse on affect and the subject.
This rupture in the existentialist understanding of Stimmung and
harmony is prominently and most succinctly articulated in Heidegger’s
discussion of Stimmung in his landmark work Being and Time (1927).
Presenting the most fully fledged philosophical investigation of the con-
cept, Heideggerian Stimmung is part and parcel of the philosopher’s
comprehensive attempt to structurally examine human existence as
‘Being-in-the-world.’ As Heidegger fundamentally redefines the subject
through its relationship to the world, he proposes that self and world are
not separate from each other; on the contrary, in his existential philoso-
phy, Dasein is marked precisely by its ‘Being-in-the-world.’ And yet, to
Heidegger, Being-in-the-world is defined by a sense of struggle and dis-
location, of ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) into the world, rather than a
purposeful placement. While we endeavour to find a home in the world,
a space of ‘dwelling,’ our sense of belonging to the world and engaging
with it is thus by definition always somehow disturbed. As Heidegger
locates mood within a field of tension between the subject and the world
that I consider to be crucial to an understanding of Stimmung in the
context of modernity, I will revisit some key points from Heidegger’s
 Introduction 9
discussion of this concept in order to extrapolate, first, the existential
structure of Stimmung that he develops and, second, its implications for
reconsidering the role of Stimmung in aesthetic reception.
In attempting to define the existential constitution of Dasein, i.e., the
fundamental conditions and modes of human existence, Heidegger in-
troduces the concepts of Befindlichkeit – in Macquarrie and Robinson’s
canonical translation rendered as ‘state-of-mind,’ though it may more
accurately be translated as ‘affectedness’24 – and Stimmung. As opposed
to the commonplace understanding of states-of-mind and moods as
psychological phenomena or emotions, Heidegger’s initial definition lo-
cates them among the basic conditions of human existence, the so-called
existentials:

What we indicate ontologically by the term ‘state-of-mind’ is onti-

cally the most familiar and everyday sort of thing: our mood, our
Being-attuned [in the original: ‘die Stimmung, das Gestimmtsein’;
my addition]. Prior to all psychology of moods, a field which in any
case still lies fallow, it is necessary to see this phenomenon as a fun-
damental existential, and to outline its structure.25

As existentials, states-of-mind are thus a basic feature of Being-in-the-

world, and moods are the concrete forms that they assume as everyday
manifestations of ‘affectedness.’ In contrast to the idea of emotions and
feelings as interior states-of-mind, mood is thus given a transsubjective
dimension. Moods ‘encompass our total perspective,’26 thus taking on
a much more fundamental and capacious role than emotions. And yet,
Heidegger’s exploration of Stimmung indicates that this phenomenon is
related to feelings and emotions and that, ontologically, they all belong
to ‘the different modes of state-of-mind.’27 States-of-mind, Heidegger
finds, disclose ‘wie einem ist,’28 i.e., how one’s own being appears or
‘feels’ to a person, and it therefore establishes, first, the relationship of
a person to the world and, second, the way in which that person con-
ceptualises their own existence and place in the world. In this sense,
moods articulate the fundamental relationality between the subject and
the world and shed light on the nature of this connection, as well as
on the nature of being itself: ‘a mood does not “discover” entities but
“discloses” something about the kind of being that I am.’29 Heidegger
further argues that the sensation of being in a bad mood or ‘out of tune’
(verstimmt) indicates that Dasein is always already (at)tuned:30 only
when we feel ‘off-tune’ or out of tune do we realise that our existence is
subject to an attunement that is always at the backdrop of our everyday
activities. ‘One mood can be replaced by another,’ contemporary philos-
opher Lars Svendsen thus states, summarising Heidegger’s position, ‘but
it is impossible to leave attunement altogether.’31 Abandoning the Car-
tesian notion of a primary, subjective core of being which then interacts
10 Introduction
with the outside world in a secondary move, Heidegger insists that we
are always already contained in the world – where ‘world’ is not only un-
derstood spatio-temporally, but more generally as a structure that tran-
scends the individual being and provides the ground for the individual’s
existence. Thus, ‘world’ here designates not only the ontic environment
within which Dasein exists, but also, more importantly, the system of
references through which it relates to those entities surrounding it. 32
Given that, Dasein’s attunement to the world is the prerequisite for its
ability to establish meanings, intentions and actions in relation to the
world. Heideggerian Stimmung is then not a subjective – and less ‘ob-
jectively’ valid – way of experiencing the world; instead, it describes the
fundamental and inescapable mode of being in which we find ourselves
‘attuned’ to the world at any given moment in time.
The connection established here renders Stimmung an ambivalent
phenomenon: on the one hand, it ‘belongs’ to the individual self since
it describes the individual’s relationship to the world, but on the other
hand, it transcends the realm of subjectivity (hence Heidegger’s reluc-
tance to use existing terms such as ‘subject’ or ‘self’ to refer to individ-
ual existence and his adoption of the term Dasein, which semantically
blurs the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity). Heidegger
radically foregrounds the intersubjective semantic potential harboured
in the term Stimmung – which, as mentioned previously, can designate
both the mood of an individual and that of a group – thus elevating
it from the bias of being a merely subjective, internal phenomenon. In
response to this, Michel Haar’s account of the twofold nature of mood
highlights that ‘Stimmung is […] both a property and not a property,
both relative to the I and relative to the world. But first of all it is rela-
tive to the world.’33 It connects Dasein to the world in the sense that it,
first, relates it to the social world it is situated in and, second, lays bare
its existential possibilities in relation to this world. Haar hints towards
a crucial element in the nature of Stimmung as he qualifies it as ‘both
a property and not a property,’ and yet this aspect has largely been ne-
glected by previous studies of the concept: Stimmung, like most German
nouns ending in the suffix ‘-ung,’ implies a processual element. Due to
this, it cannot be considered to be a property or a fixed trait that is at-
tributed to Dasein; conversely, it signifies the continual process of tuning
human existence, and of attuning it to the world. This processuality has
been recognised by philosopher Hagi Kenaan, who argues that ‘there
is no such thing as a mood’ since moods always unfold temporally and
occur in relation to other moods.34
Rather than a static relationship, Heidegger’s Stimmung, then, de-
scribes a relational process between the subject and the world which is
marked by degrees of consonance and dissonance. This interpretation
noticeably hinges on the musical metaphor from which the concept was
derived in the first place. As Heidegger points out, we tend not to be
 Introduction 11
aware of our moods, and they only make their presence felt if we feel
‘out of tune’ – just as a concertgoer may pay more attention to the one
instrument in the orchestra that is out of tune rather than to the remain-
ing ones that are not. Haar’s ontological study The Song of the Earth:
Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being (1993) calls atten-
tion to the intimate relationship between music and mood as he defines
Stimmung as

a unity that precedes the subject-object division; a nonverbal dimen-

sion for which music is a more faithful analogy than is language. […]
Heidegger thinks Stimmung as a music complete by itself, as at-
tunement, the accord that defines the profound coherence of
being-in-the-world.35

Stimmung, like music, is thus located at the stage of the pre-linguistic,

and both Stimmung and music transcend individual emotion and ‘assail’
the individual, attuning it to a larger structure. In line with this no-
tion, the German musicologist Heinrich Besseler seized the potential for
reconceptualising music as a fundamentally mood-related phenomenon
that is inherent in Heidegger’s notion of Stimmung and traced its origin
in human ontology, concluding that ‘[t]he musical originally comes to
us as a manner/melody of human existence.’36 Likewise, Kenaan ex-
plores the conceptual similarity between musical keys and moods, writ-
ing that ‘[m]oods, like musical keys, are […] relational modes of being
anchored in the world.’37 But music can not only serve as a metaphor for
the way in which Stimmung operates within the wider context of human
existence – philosophical considerations of the concept can, in turn, feed
back into the study of aesthetic phenomena. This can, for instance, be
seen in Erik Wallrup’s insightful study Being Musically Attuned, which
draws on philosophical modes of engaging with the notion of attune-
ment to shed light on the very act of listening to music. The conceptual
affinities and etymological links between the realm of music and that
of human existence thus ground Stimmung in a discourse that is, by
definition, always simultaneously aesthetic and philosophical in nature.

Heidegger’s reconceptualisation of Stimmung invites a further consid-

eration of the notion of an existential structure of ‘affectedness’ which
articulates itself in our everyday moods. Heidegger suggests that ‘[i]n
a state-of-mind Dasein is always brought before itself, and has always
found itself, not in the sense of coming across itself by perceiving it-
self, but in the sense of finding itself in the mood that it has.’38 Befind-
lichkeit thus designates how Dasein quite literally ‘finds’ itself thrown
into the world – as it links to finden, ‘to find’ – and how it negotiates
12 Introduction
that thrownness through the process of attunement: it describes the way
in which we are, ontically, already attuned to the world rather than a
conscious ontological act of perceiving our existence in relation to it.
Heidegger’s ‘gestimmtes Sichbefinden,’39 i.e., attuned presence or state-
of-being, as a way of finding and locating oneself, is thus implicitly and
unconsciously comprised in every situation of life. It argues against a so-
lipsistic idea of finding one’s ‘true’ self as a spiritual essence, and instead
proposes a relational and spatial definition of self-disclosure. To find
yourself, then, means to locate the self in its directedness and positioning
toward the world, an act that thus constitutes a form of disposition. This
redefinition results in a peculiar tension between selfhood and worldli-
ness: if the finding of the self is dependent on finding a place in and at-
tunement to the world, is an individual core of being, independent from
the ‘outside’ world, possible at all? Can my moods, in that sense, ever
be my own? To identify the locus of Stimmung (or rather, to take this
very question off its metaphorical hinges in the subject-object division),
we ought to consider Heidegger’s rejection of the distinction between
interiority and exteriority.
To Heidegger, the source of moods lies neither inside nor outside in-
dividual consciousness since they are intertwined with the fundamental
state of ‘Being-in-the-world’:

States-of-mind are so far from being reflected upon, that precisely

what they do is to assail Dasein in its unreflecting devotion to the
‘world’ with which it is concerned and on which it expends itself. A
mood assails us. It comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside’, but
arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being. But with
the negative distinction between state-of-mind and the reflective ap-
prehending of something ‘within’, we have thus reached a positive
insight into their character as disclosure. The mood has already dis-
closed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it
possible first of all to direct oneself towards something. Having a
mood is not related to the psychical in the first instance, and it is not
itself an inner condition which then reaches forth in an enigmatical
way and puts its mark on Things and persons. It is in this that the
second existential characteristic of states-of-mind shows itself. We
have seen that the world, Dasein-with, and existence are equipri-
mordially disclosed; and a state-of-mind is a basic existential species
of their disclosedness, because this disclosedness itself is essentially
Being-in-the-world.40

Moods, according to Heidegger, originate neither from within nor from

without but from a relationship between Dasein and world that pre-
cludes that very distinction. They emerge and ‘assail’ the subject out of its
attunement to the world, and their continuous latency as an existential
 Introduction 13
under normal circumstances prevents the human agent from consciously
reflecting on their presence and origin. If the locus of mood is not within
the self, Stimmung becomes the scene of an affective relationality with
potentially far-reaching consequences for the ethics of attunement as it
is, in Heidegger’s existential philosophy, decidedly not conceptualised as
being ‘owned’ or controlled by the individual.
Furthermore, the existential ‘disclosure’ enabled by moods as it is de-
scribed in the section quoted above does not signify a conscious realisa-
tion of the nature of Being-in-the-world but a disclosure in the sense of an
opening up or making accessible. The German erschließen (‘to disclose’)
refers to an exploration or opening up of something that enables practi-
cal usage: for instance, a piece of land may be ‘erschlossen’ to become a
construction site. Disclosure in the sense of such development indicates
a more practical – as opposed to theoretical or ontological – orientation.
Moods disclose Being-in-the-world by means of development; they de-
velop the existential possibilities of Dasein at any given point in time and
enable us to direct ourselves towards other entities by providing the frame-
work of possible ways to relate to and interact with the world. Heidegger
thus concludes: ‘Dasein’s openness to the world is constituted existentially
41
by the attunement [in the original: Gestimmtheit ­ ] of a state-of-mind.’42
In laying bare its existential possibilities, Stimmung as the attunement of a
state-of-mind thereby enables Dasein’s openness to the world and its abil-
ity to engage with it. Matthew Ratcliffe summarises this by writing that

for Heidegger, mood is primordial, meaning that it is presupposed

by the intelligibility of all explicit forms of cognition and volition. It
is a condition of sense for any encounter with beings, whether the-
oretical or practical. It is thus prior to the intelligibility of all such
beings and not reducible to them. Hence moods are not subjective or
psychic phenomena but are instead prior to the sense of a theoretical
subject-object distinction.43

As the constitutive element that intertwines subjectivity and worldliness,

Stimmung thus illustrates the ways in which Dasein’s notion of identity,
its actions, affectedness and interpretations are interdependent with the
system of reference that establishes the world. This interdependence is
articulated in the dimension of attunement, which at the same time dis-
closes Dasein’s ‘thrownness.’ Since the notion of ‘thrownness’ indicates
a relationship between Dasein and world that is marked by a sense of
dislocation rather than being contained and finding a harmonious ‘home’
in the world, the process of Stimmung becomes an all the more critical
requirement for human existence.
However, in everyday life, Heidegger finds, Dasein tends to evade this
realisation, which is why he ascribes an exceptional function to anxi-
ety as a Grundstimmung (‘basic state-of-mind’). In anxiety, Heidegger
14 Introduction
states, echoing Søren Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy,44 Dasein is
forced to realise its otherwise implicit dependence upon the world, a pro-
cess which then exhibits its ownmost, ‘authentic’ possibilities as isolated
from the social world:

That which anxiety is anxious about is Being-in-the-world itself. In

anxiety what is environmentally ready-to-hand sinks away, and so, in
general, do entities within-the-world. The ‘world’ can offer nothing
more, and neither can the Dasein-with others. Anxiety thus takes away
from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in the
terms of the ‘world’ and the way things have been publicly interpreted.
Anxiety throws Dasein back upon that which it is anxious about—its
authentic potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world. Anxiety individualizes
Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-world, which as something that
understands, projects itself essentially upon possibilities.45

While it is important to recognise that, for Heidegger, anxiety harbours

the possibility of authentic and ontologically self-aware being, the notion of
authentic Dasein must not be mistaken for the idea of a ‘true’ core of being
that is independent from the world. As a way of rethinking one’s self in rela-
tion to the world, anxiety is still indebted to and concerned with the world
through which Dasein finds its place and its own existential constitution.
Despite the ontologically accentuated nature of anxiety, it is therefore not
necessarily more prevalent in human existence than the less conspicuous
everyday moods that regulate Dasein’s continual attunement to the world.
Summarising the constitutive structures of Dasein, which he names
facticity, being-ahead-of-oneself and being-with, Heidegger subsequently
develops the term ‘care’ (Sorge) in order to describe the totality of being.
In the existential structure of care, past, present and future are encom-
passed as the three aspects that define Dasein at any given moment:

[T]he Being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-

world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world).
This Being fills in the signification of the term ‘care’ [Sorge] […].
Because Being-in-the-world is essentially care, Being-alongside the
ready-to-hand could be taken in our previous analyses as concern,
and Being with the Dasein-with of Others as we encounter it within-
the-world could be taken as solicitude. Being-alongside something
is concern, because it is defined as a way of Being-in by its basic
structure—care. Care does not characterize just existentiality, let us
say, as detached from facticity and falling; on the contrary, it embraces
the unity of these ways in which Being might be characterized.46

Care thus implies the temporality of being but also the temporal nature
of affectedness. We develop a ‘caring’ relationship to things, others and
 Introduction 15
ourselves in a way that brings together our past experience (facticity), in-
tentions, wishes and desires for the future (existentiality) and our present
situation (falling). For the concept of Dasein, this means that the sense
of self is characterised by the simultaneity of past, present and future
that is brought into being by the temporal nature of existence. Likewise,
the attunement of Dasein and world – which is fundamentally temporal
and processual in nature – is regulated by the structure of care as a form
of concern that orients Dasein towards its being with others. This fun-
damental dimension of intersubjectivity, which Heidegger places at the
core of human existence, will usefully inform the way in which we can
conceptualise attunement in relation to literature.
To summarise, through Heidegger’s influential framework of Being-in-
the-world, Stimmung takes on a pivotal role in the formation of the self
and its relationship to the world. To Heidegger, it articulates the ways in
which Dasein finds itself by disclosing its existential possibilities with re-
gard to the world and within the context of a temporal structure that un-
derscores attunement’s processual nature. The origin of the pressing need
for this attunement is Dasein’s fundamental ‘thrownness’ into the world:
in the absence of a harmonious home, in Heideggerian terms, ‘dwelling’ in
the world – as it is fashioned in Pythagorean philosophy – Dasein’s dislo-
cated existence necessitates the process of Stimmung to negotiate and es-
tablish its position within the world. While Heidegger de-subjectifies the
concept of attunement against the Idealist notion of interior Stimmung,
his philosophical framework therefore also solidifies the categorical im-
possibility of a Pythagorean notion of world harmony from a modern
perspective. Importantly, from an ontological point of view, Verstim-
mung, the notion of ‘out-of-tuneness,’ becomes what we could consider
to be a much more productive state-of-mind as it harbours forms of in-
sight into the nature of our very existence. Heidegger’s distinctly modern
take on attunement thus revolves around an intrinsic sense of dissonance
and displacement, which counters the concept of existential harmony
through a fundamental sense of fracture underlying philosophical and
aesthetic modernity. This discussion of Stimmung constitutes a defining
moment in the history of the concept in the context of both existential
philosophy and aesthetic theory, and it has remained influential in both
spheres. An important post-Heideggerian development in the evolution
of the concept of Stimmung is presented in Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s Das
Wesen der Stimmungen, which was first published in 1941.47 Bollnow
draws on the contributions to the phenomenology of mood that work by
Heidegger and other existential philosophers provided in order to inte-
grate them into a philosophical anthropology of Stimmung which aims
to shed light on the psychological and phenomenological significance of
moods in our lives. Remarkably, Bollnow also draws on literary exam-
ples, such as Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, to study the ways in which
moods are experienced and articulated. This privileging of literature as
16 Introduction
an epistemological tool within the philosophical study of moods is par-
ticularly notable as it highlights literature and philosophy’s shared preoc-
cupation with the role of Stimmung in human experience.

In discussing the relationship between Stimmung and the self, I have pre-
viously raised the question of ownership and belonging: do our moods
belong to us? Are they a phenomenon of the world or of the self? As
discussed above, and succinctly summarised by Hubert L. Dreyfus, ‘af-
fectedness is not a structure of the world, but rather a structure of the
there’48 – an assertion that renders the question of ownership void. Ac-
cording to Heidegger, as a basic feature of our Being-in-the-world, moods
are the condition of our ability to define a self and a world in the first place.
If we thus have no ownership of our moods, do we have any influence on
or control of them at all? Or are they the masters of our affectedness, of
the way we find ourselves in the world and engage with it? Heidegger’s
notion that mood ‘assails’ Dasein bestows a form of agency on mood that
would suggest an affirmative answer to the latter question. The linguis-
tic structures that are commonly used to describe and define moods are
somewhat at odds with Heidegger’s view on mood, but they are indicative
of the implied cultural understanding of forms of attunement.
Habitually, moods are referred to as something that we find our-
selves ‘in’ (think back to Heidegger’s term Befindlichkeit), as a locus
of experience into which the self enters: ‘she’s in a bad mood,’ ‘he’s in
a funk,’ ‘she’s in good spirits,’ etc. Charles Taylor elaborates on this
spatial understanding of affect as he explains the Platonic notion of a
unitary self:

The temptation to place certain thoughts and feelings in a special

locus comes from the special nature of those thoughts and feelings.
They are different from, perhaps even incompatible with, what we
ordinarily feel. What we experience in moments of heightened in-
spiration can have this character. And today, we are still tempted by
talk of special localizations, but of another character: we speak as a
person being ‘carried away’, or ‘beside herself’, swept off as it were
to someplace outside. In a sense, what we feel when we are in a tow-
ering rage seems incommensurable with what we feel when we have
calmed down; the people and events are quite transformed in aspect.
And a similar change can occur when we fall in or out of love. The
landscape of experience changes so much that we are easily tempted
to use images of a change of locale to describe the transition.49

As something that, as it were, ‘contains’ or envelops the individual,

moods are thus traditionally conceptualised in accordance to the binary
 Introduction 17
of interior self and exterior world. According to Taylor, strong moods
are thought to affect the self in a way that endangers the idea of its unity,
which is why we commonly speak of them as if they are places outside
the self rather than an integral part of the self. While Heidegger’s phi-
losophy conceptualises Stimmung as being neither ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’
the subject, thus making this distinction obsolete, the affinity between
mood and space is indicative of the ways in which attunement depends
not only on the temporal dimension – as outlined above – but also on an
inherent sense of spatiality. Although the idea of being ‘in a mood’ up-
holds the unitary idea of the self, the notion of moods as affective spaces
gives them a transsubjective potential. A conception of Stimmung as a
space of experience – rather than as a property belonging to the individ-
ual self – makes it possible for two people to be in the same affective lo-
cus, i.e., to be ‘in the same mood.’ However, this notion still implies that
the subjects entering into a mood are separate, self-sufficient individuals
that then encounter an ‘objective’ attunement as a force from ‘without.’
If ‘being in the same mood’ is described as attuning oneself to the same
experiential ‘space,’ the subject upholds its primacy of existence, and
Stimmung becomes a secondary existential phenomenon. The notion of
individual experience thus prevails in the traditional account of how
we experience moods. However, if we develop Heidegger’s notion of at-
tunement further through twentieth-century post-structuralism, mood’s
dependence on subjectivity can, as it were, be inverted to outline the
experiential primacy of this phenomenon.
In a special edition of the New Literary History focussing on the phe-
nomenon of mood, Rita Felski and Susan Fraiman emphasise the poten-
tial that the concept harbours for reconceptualising modes of thinking
about the categories underlying the notion of attunement itself:

The concept of mood […] circumvents the clunky categories often

imposed on experience: subjective versus objective, feeling versus
thinking, latent versus manifest. The field of affect studies is some-
times taken to task for reinforcing such dichotomies, creating a
picture of affect as a zone of ineffable and primordial experience
that is subsequently squeezed into the rationalist straitjacket of lan-
guage. The concept of mood, for the most part, avoids such diffi-
culties. Definitions of mood often emphasize its role in modulating
thought, acknowledging a dynamic and interactive relationship be-
tween reason and emotion. Mood is tied up with self-understanding
and shapes thinking rather than being stifled by thinking. It makes
intellectual work possible and inflects it in subtle and less subtle
ways, informing the questions we ask, the puzzles that intrigue us,
the styles and genres of argument we are drawn to. Mood impinges
on method. 50
(my emphasis)
18 Introduction
Rethinking mood, then, means not only to question epistemological bi-
naries that have long shaped habitual modes of thinking but also to re-
consider the method which we apply in order to define and describe the
relationship between such binary categories as those of self and world.
Applying this notion to the way in which attunement is conceptualised
can thus aid in navigating around the ‘clunky categories’ that have long
been used to structure experience. One of these clunky categories is that
of the subject: even on the most basic level, speaking about it is termino-
logically difficult. Does it equal the ‘self,’ the ‘I,’ one’s ‘identity’ or the
‘body’? Despite its relative conceptual vagueness, and although its co-
herence and integrity have been attacked by various schools of thought,
the concept of the subject remains pervasive and has been foundational
to discourses in philosophy and elsewhere. The Cartesian philosophy of
the subject is often quoted as the origin of modern philosophy and has
been, according to Dalia Judovitz, ‘instrumental in fashioning the view-
point that we identify today as modern.’51 Laying the foundation of a
philosophy of the self that pits subjective interiority against objective ex-
teriority, Cartesianism created a dominant narrative of the subject that
defines it through its inwardness. As Taylor describes it in his famous
study Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989), ‘[w]e
think of our thoughts, ideas, or feelings as being “within” us, while the
objects of the world which these mental states bear on are “without.”’52
This topography of the subject constitutes a dichotomy of self and world
that is predicated upon physicality on the one hand and a transcendental
idea of the self on the other hand. The Cartesian subject is characterised
by such a notion of interiority as well as by its structural unity:

First, dependent upon its identity to itself, the subject is defined by

the content or essence—the intrinsic being—of this identity. Drawn
around such content, the rational subject resides in a position of
stasis, anchored as it is at the center of knowledge. Finally, the an-
choring of the subject as such indicates a clearly defined zone of inte-
riority: the thinking subject seeks only to apprehend and confirm its
identity, thus rendering it immune to the difference at play outside
of itself.53

The still pervasive paradigm of the subject advocated in Cartesian and

post-Cartesian philosophy is thus grounded in the principles of essence,
unity, stasis and interiority. The subject is here defined in opposition to
the outside world, from which it is shut off by means of its static, indi-
vidual essence. However, Taylor also points out that this sense of the
self, defined by its inwardness and in opposition to the exteriority of the
world, has increasingly been viewed as a ‘historically limited mode of
self-interpretation’54 – one that is distinctly associated with the notion of
modernity. As outlined in the previous pages, Heidegger characterises the
 Introduction 19
idea of Dasein as located in between what we commonly refer to as the
internal and the external in the concept of Being-in, a phenomenon that
‘is underivable from the phenomena of Worldhood and the Self,’ as Bruce
W. Ballard states. ‘If anything,’ Ballard proceeds, ‘the analysis of Being-in
explicates human Being as the “between” of World and Self.’55 Dasein as
a ‘between’ of the Cartesian dualism of world and self is determined by its
Being-in-the-world, but as it is defined by a twofold dependence on the bi-
nary structure of world on the one hand and the subject on the other hand,
an echo of Cartesianism may still loom therein. The difficulty of overcom-
ing the dualism of subject and world that is at the core of modern thought
reflects particularly in the way in which critics have tried to consider more
fully the theoretical implications of Heidegger’s concept of Stimmung.
In his discussion of attunement and affectedness, Hubert L. Dreyfus
problematises the latent Cartesian idea of an independent subject which
he perceives as being present in Heidegger’s philosophy of affect. The
problem arises as Dreyfus considers the possibility of moods that are
specific to the individual:

Of the three aspects of being-in, affectedness, especially as manifested

in individual moods, is the most dangerously close to Cartesianism.
How can you and I be said to be open to the same situation if what
each of us is in is threatening to me and exhilarating to you? At best
our different moods seem to be subjective colorings projected onto a
shared neutral scene. Worse, since the situation includes how it mat-
ters to me as one of its constitutive aspects, Heidegger runs the risk
of making my personal situation, colored by my mood, into a private
world cut off from and more fundamental than, the public world [...].56

The primacy of subjectivity that Dreyfus describes in the Heideggerian

notion of Stimmung leads to an irreconcilable multiplicity of experience,
which may render a more general discourse on experience and affect in-
sufficient. Dreyfus’s reading of Heidegger demonstrates to what degree
the notion of the Cartesian subject is pervasive in and through the way we
habitually think about experience and affect and it indicates the difficulty
of untethering our understanding of these categories from the subject-
object binary. However, the notion of attunement can be rephrased more
radically through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s take on the self in order to
circumnavigate the affective solipsism which Dreyfus warns of.
Dasein, as Heidegger defines it, initially finds itself ‘thrown’ into the
world and through the process of attunement establishes its position
within it, reflecting the musical metaphor that this notion of attune-
ment derives from: when tuning an instrument, the first operation is
to identify a steady point of reference that can be used as a measure
for the tuning process. Attunement thus requires the setting of an arbi-
trary fixed-point, which then allows for other elements to be established
20 Introduction
around it. In the Cartesian method of radical scepticism, the ‘cogito’
establishes such a fixed-point, while in Heideggerian philosophy, the at-
tunement of Dasein and world itself constitutes the referential centre
of existence and ‘makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards
something.’57 The ideas of self and world are thus relative to our attune-
ment, an attunement which determines the way in which we define our
selves in relation to the ‘other,’ to the ‘outside’ world. While Heidegger
suggests that attunement is that which allows the subject to direct it-
self towards the world, a more radical reformulation already implied in
Heidegger’s theory thus emerges from the concept of Stimmung: rather
than modulating the relationship between a pre-existing world and sub-
ject, the continuous attunement between these two is instead precisely
what produces the categories of subjectivity and world in the first place.
Without explicitly relating this phenomenon to the Heideggerian con-
cept of Stimmung, Deleuze’s interpretation of Kant points towards a
similar definition of the self through a perpetual process of attunement
dependent on time. ‘[T]he Self is not an object,’ Deleuze suggests, ‘but
that to which all objects are related as to the continuous variation of
its own successive states, and to the infinite modulation of its degrees
at each instant.’58 The term ‘modulation’ as a reference to the musical
realm indicates the extent to which Heidegger and Deleuze here strike a
very similar note, so to say, in underlining the relational nature of this
concept of self. Deleuze’s Self is thus a relative, ever-evolving reference
point giving meaning to the objects surrounding it, just as Heidegger’s
Dasein relates to the world through a continuous, processual attune-
ment that is constitutive for Being-in-the-world. In this respect, time
and modulation play a crucial role in what is defined as the self. Deleuze
proceeds by stating that the grammatical ‘I’ is subject to a temporal
structure of affectedness:

[i]f the I determines our existence as a passive self changing in time,

time is the formal relation through which the mind affects itself, or
the way we are internally affected by ourselves. Time can thus be
defined as the Affect of the self by itself, or at least the formal possi-
bility of being affected by oneself.59

Again, Deleuze’s terminology is in line with Heideggerian thought as

he elaborates on the role of ‘affect’ in generating a sense of self or sub-
jectivity. In Kant’s redefinition of time, which Deleuze here glosses on,
the term ‘time’ does, then, not refer to a pre-existing condition of the
self but to the way in which the self relates to itself and affects itself,
thereby constituting a structure of attunement. A similar concept of
time is developed in Heidegger’s previously mentioned notion of ‘care,’
which characterises the simultaneity of past, present and future in the
way Dasein relates to itself, to the world and to others.
 Introduction 21
Deleuze’s post-structuralist project of undermining the Cartesian
notion of the unified subject in favour of a changeable, multi-faceted
subject-position ultimately leads him to a renouncement of the concept of
the subject in the first place. Together with Félix Guattari, he concludes
that ‘there is no subject, only collective assemblages of enunciation.’60
The unified, static subject is thus replaced by a collection, an assem-
blage, of subject-positions, which is over time bundled into the place
of enunciation called ‘I.’ Emphasising the processual nature of this ‘I,’
Deleuze states, in another context, that ‘[t]here’s no subject, but a pro-
duction of subjectivity.’61 The Deleuzian ‘Self’ is thus as interdependent
with the world as the Heideggerian Dasein, although it is much less
stable. Bradford Vivian aptly summarises Deleuze’s manner of resolving
the paradigm of the interior/exterior binary of subjectivity by echoing
Heidegger’s concept of Being-in-the-world:

Vis-à-vis his interpretation of Foucault, Deleuze […] identifies

a very different space and morphology of thought than the one
embodied by the self-same subject of the cogito. The exercise of
encountering the outside is therefore an exercise by which one si-
multaneously hollows out a space for self-knowledge, self-reflection,
and self-mastery. This self-knowledge, however, is not founded
upon the identity of the thinking subject. By Deleuze’s account, the
admonishment to ‘know thyself’ is actually a command to know
one’s self in the world, as part of the multiplicity of the world,
since one’s self cannot be separated from, but is indeed enfolded
among, the world.62

Throughout the twentieth century, the Cartesian distinction between the

subject and the world was thus increasingly countered by a reconfigura-
tion of the self that defines it through an originary sense of multiplicity
and vicissitude, as reflected in Heidegger’s and Deleuze’s work. Deleuze’s
redefinition of the relationship between self and world, which extends
Heidegger’s existential philosophy, shows world and subject to be intrin-
sically related and dependent on one another through a process of at-
tunement that generates the production of subjectivity and the notion of
the ‘world’ as such. The concept of the self emerging from this discourse
thus fashions the subject position as the result of an attunement that
takes place between the ‘I,’ which is an acquired position rather than a
unified, static locus of identity, and its surroundings. As this attunement
is by definition an ongoing process, the twentieth-century discourse on
the self thus redefines the subject as an ever-evolving position within –
and in relation to – the world that allows for meanings and intentions to
develop, rather than as a fixed locus of subjectivity. Furthering the sense
of fracture emblematic of the modern condition, this notion of the sub-
ject is relative to its spatio-temporal situational context and marked by a
22 Introduction
sense of directedness and affectedness as well as by a concern with itself
which is constitutive not only for the possibility of any kind of directed-
ness but also for the definition and identification of the subject position
itself. In this sense, the attunement of the subject and its affectedness in
time generate the concepts of self and world themselves. Stimmung, in a
sense derived from Heideggerian philosophy, is thus an ontically primary
precondition for subjects to be able to produce a self in the first place
and to locate it within the world. Post-structuralist philosophy offers
an inversion of the structure of attunement as I have previously defined
it, transforming it from a product of the negotiation between world and
subject into the process that produces those very categories.

Conceptualising Stimmung in Literature

The philosophical implications of Stimmung as they have been explored
in the previous pages are inextricably connected to its central role in
aesthetics. David Wellbery’s historical overview of the concept compel-
lingly illustrates that in modern German philosophy, Stimmung was first
established as an aesthetic concept and then transferred into the realm
of existential philosophy. Spitzer’s study of Stimmung even suggests that
the musical metaphor of attunement governed the ways in which phi-
losophers conceptualised human existence and the relationship between
individual and society well before the advent of modernity, since the de-
velopment of Pythagorean philosophy. Although the existentialist inter-
pretation of the concept predominated in the years after Heidegger, over
the past ten years, Stimmung has made a comeback in the sphere of aes-
thetics. In 2011, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht published Atmosphere, Mood,
Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (translated into English
in 2012), a book which has played an essential role in putting Stimmung
on the map of current-day aesthetics and which opens by addressing a
perceived sense of stagnation in contemporary literary criticism through
the opposition of two predominant schools of thought that have emerged
over the course of the twentieth century: Deconstruction on the one hand
and Cultural Studies on the other hand. Gumbrecht suggests that, since
these positions fundamentally refute one another, literary theory remains
prone to the danger of being stuck between two opposing viewpoints
until it produces alternative ways of approaching literature:

To overcome such dangers—which have already materialized in

part—we need ‘third positions’. The German word Stimmung […]
gives form to the ‘third position’ I would like to advocate. In anal-
ogy to the notion of ‘reading for the plot’ that Peter Brooks set forth
some years ago, I would like to propose that interpreters and histo-
rians of literature read with Stimmung in mind.63
 Introduction 23
When Gumbrecht proposes a new approach to reading literature that is
predicated upon the aesthetic notion of Stimmung, he simultaneously
implies that critics and readers are always already reading ‘with Stim-
mung in mind,’ that this phenomenon – which had taken a backseat in
literary theory for the past decades – is thus a vital part of any form of
aesthetic reception. He further argues that, as opposed to Deconstruc-
tion and Cultural Studies, both of which place the question of represen-
tation and representability at the centre of their analyses, an approach to
literature that focusses on Stimmung can refocus critical attention onto
the reading experience:

[T]he dimension of Stimmung discloses a new perspective on—and

possibility for—the ‘ontology of literature.’ […] [A]n ontology of lit-
erature that relies on concepts derived from the sphere of Stimmung
does not place the paradigm of representation front-and- center.
‘Reading for Stimmung’ always means paying attention to the tex-
tual dimension of the forms that envelop us and our bodies as a
physical reality—something that can catalyze inner feelings without
matters of representation necessarily involved.64

Gumbrecht’s book puts mood at the core of the study of literature in

order to account for an immediacy of the aesthetic experience that has
been overlooked in other approaches understanding texts. This ethos
ties in with other calls for a ‘postcritical’ mode of engaging with liter-
ature – one that privileges the aesthetic experience over the application
of critical theory – which is advocated, for instance, by Rita Felski in
her book The Limits of Critique (2015). Felski, too, proposes here that
affect-focussed readings of literature can offer reparative potential, in-
sofar as they shift the critical focus to the encounter, engagement and
attachment between reader and text:

Reading, in this light, is a matter of attaching, collating, negotiat-

ing, assembling—of forging links between things that were previ-
ously unconnected. It is not a question of plumbing depths or tracing
surfaces—these spatial metaphors lose much of their allure—but of
creating something new in which the reader’s role is as decisive as
that of the text.65

Felski thus advocates an affective hermeneutics which takes the produc-

tion, exchange and circulation of feelings and moods in the reading pro-
cess into account and which links back to the work of reader-response
criticism and to previous objections to the fundamentally ‘suspicious’
ethos of critique, as, for instance, expressed in Susan Sontag’s famous
essay ‘Against Interpretation.’66
24 Introduction
Gumbrecht’s proposition that Stimmung is always at work in our
encounter with works of art relates to certain aesthetic reflections by
nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers and critics. Among
such thinkers is Fichte, whose aforementioned definition of Stimmung
as the transmission of the author’s affect to the reader by means of the
literary text is a key example. The notion that art makes the dimension
of Stimmung communicable and sets out to produce moods that en-
velop the recipient is pervasive in modern aesthetics. Gumbrecht goes
on to define mood as a ‘universal category’67 that is present in any work
of art and allows for the recipient to encounter the moods of different
times and ages through the aesthetic process. Forms of Stimmung in
literature, Gumbrecht argues, allow readers to access these historical
moods through ‘an encounter—an immediacy, and an objectivity of
the past-made-present, which is produced to linguistic and textual
means.’68 According to this position, literary texts thus evoke an objec-
tive material ‘presence of the past’ that enables readers to experience
the specific moods of their times. Works of art are thereby conceptual-
ised as vehicles of Stimmung that preserve and contain moods, which
then unfold in the aesthetic process and envelop the recipient. Michel
Haar’s study of Stimmung is in line with this notion and suggests that
moods ‘emanate’ from works of art and other objects in the world
rather than originating from a place of subjective experience:

More exactly, it is what we occupy ourselves with, what we read

or watch that interests us, stimulates us, bores us—in short, that
always produces these often changing dispositions. Phenomenologi-
cally speaking, Stimmung, the atmosphere, emanates from the things
themselves and not from our subjectivity or from our bodiliness.69

Haar’s account is, of course, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s concept

of auratic art, and it represents a range of aesthetic theories of Stimmung
that suggest that works of art ‘exude’ the moods emerging in aesthetic
experience and render the reader a rather passive recipient of these forms
of affectedness. However, the dimension of aesthetic mood harbours far
more interactive and experiential potential than existing studies indi-
cate. If we are indeed to grasp the full extent of the role that Stimmung
plays in aesthetic experience, we must extend the logic further and at-
tend more fully to the actual process of reading itself. To this end, and
by utilising the philosophical ideas about Stimmung that have been ex-
plored in the previous sections of this book, I propose a different view on
the modes of attunement in the reading process. If we redefine the aes-
thetic process as one that is fundamentally structured through the dy-
namics of Stimmung – as an attunement between text and reader – then
Stimmung has the potential to indeed present a critical new paradigm
in literary studies, one that illuminates the conditions of our encounter
 Introduction 25
with literature and that attends more fully to literature’s experiential,
affective and existential dimensions.

Although far from the only philosophical contribution to the study of

Stimmung, Heidegger’s discussion of the concept has remained influen-
tial, not only in the sphere of existential philosophy but also in aesthetic
explorations of mood. Heidegger’s suggestion that forms of affected-
ness permeate our experience of the world and our perception of our
own existence can, without great difficulty, be transferred onto the act
of reading, as our encounters with literary texts often rely on affective
forms of engagement. We can thus think about the literary text as some-
thing that, too, relies on an attunement, a form of Stimmung, between
the reader and the text that is constitutive for the way in which we ex-
perience literature. Moreover, through its capacity for fictional ‘world-
making,’70 literature can fictionalise existential concerns and explore the
conditions of human existence – including Stimmung in its existentialist
sense – through its imagined worlds and characters. This argument is
put forward by Fritz Kaufmann in his study ‘Die Bedeutung der künst-
lerischen Stimmung’ (1929). Kaufmann here seeks to apply Heidegger’s
philosophy of Stimmung to aesthetic reception and proposes that con-
centrated, aesthetic forms of Stimmung enable philosophical insight into
the nature of existence and the originary attunement of Dasein that are
otherwise occluded in everyday articulations of mood.71 Furthermore,
Kaufmann’s study, importantly, moves away from the dominant notion
of an artificially pre-configured mood that is then transmitted in the aes-
thetic process. Instead of this, he suggests that genuine forms of aesthetic
Stimmung emerge out of the process of aesthetic reception and cannot be
predicted or purposefully induced. Kaufmann thus states, ‘[i]ch werde in
die Stimmung versetzt, die mir das Werk mit-teilt’72: ‘I am put into the
mood that the work of art con-veys to me’ (my translation). Kaufmann’s
peculiar use of the verb mitteilen (to convey, transmit) singles out the
dimension of shared affect by separating the prefix mit (with) from the
verb teilen (share). Reader and text thus share in the creation of a mood
as Kaufmann underlines the collaborative act between the work of art
and the recipient. Aesthetic mood is here not transmitted from a work
of art onto a passive recipient; rather the mood that emerges is of a dia-
lectical nature.
My focus in this study lies with this dynamic, interactive relationship
that I consider to inhere in the term ‘mood’ – one that is encapsulated
perfectly by Karlheinz Stockhausen’s well-known philosophically in-
spired musical composition Stimmung (1968). A piece for six vocalists,
Stimmung presents an in-depth reflection on the nature of harmony and
harmonic modulation. Throughout the piece, the vocalists take turns
26 Introduction
in acting as lead singers and ‘resonators,’ where the latter attune to the
harmonic patterns put forward by the former. Stockhausen himself de-
scribed the piece as ‘nothing for seventy-five minutes but one chord,’73
with timbral changes throughout. The piece ‘is standing still and vibrat-
ing inside,’74 shedding light on the embodied experience of the vibration
that comes with attunement and its interdependent nature. ­Stockhausen’s
Stimmung is an exercise in the pursuit of acoustic harmony, but it also
foregrounds the dynamic nature of the tuning process, relying on ‘har-
monious cooperation’75 throughout its tonal developments. Its composer
was well aware of the semantic equivocality of the German word, as he
remarked that Stimmung ‘incorporates the meanings of the tuning of a
piano, the tuning of the voice, the tuning of a group of people, the tun-
ing of the soul.’76 His piece thus reconnects the aesthetic and existential
dimensions of Stimmung.
This notion of a constant negotiation between the self and the world,
the self and other, and the question of how mood – as a phenomenon that
connects these two – is experienced and communicated intersubjectively
as part and parcel of a ‘literary ontology,’ are at the centre of my dis-
cussion. More specifically, rethinking literary mood through existential-
ist philosophy requires that we consider the act of reading as a process
that, in some way, re-enacts the basic modes in which we ­experience and
conceptualise our own existence. Our affectedness through a text and
the sense of perceiving the ‘atmosphere’ of a fictional world predicate
on the implied forms of Being-in-the-world to which we are always al-
ready subject through the originary structure of existence. In that sense,
Stimmung – as the condition for establishing a subject position and for
orientating oneself in the world – is also the prerequisite for our ability
to make sense of fiction in the first place; to use Matthew Ratcliffe’s
­expression, it is constitutive for the ‘intelligibility’ of a text.77
Since Stimmung thus establishes the ground for meaning-production
in literature, it is a crucial element for the development of an ontol-
ogy of literature as Gumbrecht suggests it. On the first level of this
ontology, the ways in which literature conceptualises characters in re-
lationship to the fictional worlds which they find themselves ‘thrown
into’ frequently mirror forms of existential self-interpretation. Depict-
ing characters as attuned to (or out of tune with) the world, litera-
ture therefore commonly addresses the interaction of consciousness
and the ‘outer world’ and negotiates clashes emerging between these
two which may indicate the conceptual instability of these catego-
ries. By re-enacting human subjectivity, agency and consciousness,
literature thus oftentimes implicitly or explicitly portrays human self-
understanding in relation to its situatedness within the world, or the
struggle which comes with such an effort. What is more, in line with
Kaufmann’s aforementioned argument, Stanley Corngold observes
that the realm of the literary offers insights into ontological concerns
that might be obscured in most contexts of lived experience:
 Introduction 27
The point is plausible, I think, if one grasps the literary work as a
world. In an exemplary way the human beings ‘in’ it are delivered
over to that world and none other. The interpreter of literature who
shares the existence of its ‘characters’ has the exemplary experience
of what it is to be enthralled by a world. At the same time he main-
tains an interpretative distance from his experience. This distance
permits him to grasp the fact of his thralldom to his own world
and at the same time to reorient himself toward it. Literature thus
becomes the vehicle of a possible authenticity. […] Poetic discourse
seeks to share that articulation of moods which would amount to
a disclosure of existence. It thus aims at Dasein’s most authentic
disclosedness, for ‘the most primordial, and indeed most authentic,
disclosedness in which Dasein […] can be is the truth of existence.’78

The attunement that, according to Heidegger, is always implicitly regu-

lating Dasein’s Being-in-the-world can thus become more observable in
literature, which then allows readers to venture into explorations of their
own thrownness (or, in Corngold, ‘thralldom’) into the world. Poetic
discourse, which Corngold here – in reference to Heidegger’s later works
on poetry and language – names as the ‘scene’ of ontological disclosure,
signifies not only poetry but any kind of speaking that stems from au-
thentic language-use. To Kaufmann and Corngold, literature therefore
has an exceptional potential for exploring the conditions of human exis-
tence and for producing forms of ontological self-understanding.
While literary fiction thus displays an inherent affinity with ontologi-
cal reflection, the study of Stimmung in literature cannot be based on a
mere application of any particular philosophical system to the aesthetic
process. Crucially, the specifics of an aesthetic philosophy of mood must
be taken into account and integrated into pre-existing discourses on
aesthetic reception, the most crucial being the field of reader-response
criticism and its inquiry into the dynamics of the reading process. The
phenomenological study of Stimmung in literature, while inspired by the
philosophical dimension of this concept, must develop its own modalities
and analytical categories, which I will further discuss in the following.

In conceptualising the role of attunement in literature, I will briefly

return to the philosophical discourse on the concept as the different ar-
ticulations of this phenomenon in private and public contexts can shed
light on the ways in which Stimmung manifests itself in fiction. Accord-
ing to Dreyfus, ‘mood’ as it is defined by Heidegger, appears in at least
five different forms:

As Heidegger uses the term, mood can refer to the sensibility of an

age (such as romantic), the culture of a company (such as aggressive),
28 Introduction
the temper of the times (such as revolutionary), as well as the mood
in a current situation (such as the eager mood in the classroom) and,
of course, the mood of an individual.79

Stimmung thus articulates itself on various phenomenological levels,

the most specific of which is the notion of individual mood, while the
most comprehensive form represents the sensibility of an entire histori-
cal period. Oscillating between the realm of the social and the private,
this definition continues to render the phenomenon rather elusive. In
another attempt to categorise the different types of Befindlichkeit, Drey-
fus then identifies three domains: ‘What Heidegger should have done, I
suggest, is distinguish three types of affectedness: a world type (cultural
sensibility); a situation or current world type (mood); and the specific
directedness mood makes possible (affect).’80 This distinction hinges on
the degrees of pervasiveness of different forms of affectedness, locating
Stimmung at the intersection of the levels of private and public expe-
rience. As a transsubjective phenomenon, cultural sensibility – which
we may alternatively refer to as the ‘mood of an age’ or Zeitgeist –
encompasses, amongst other things, the predominant opinions, senti-
ments, beliefs, social conventions and forms of artistic expression of a
culture in a certain historical period. ‘Mood’ as it is defined here, as ‘a
situation or current world type,’ constitutes a bridge between the sub-
jective and the transsubjective. A situation can involve several people or
only one person; regardless, the expression to be in a situation suggests
that whoever is involved is spatially contained in a larger context, one
that transcends individual experience. Thus, becoming a spatial denom-
inator for a context of meaning which contains a human being or human
beings, a situation marks the integration of subjectivity into transsub-
jective forms of affectedness. What Dreyfus defines as ‘affect’ is then the
smallest unit of Befindlichkeit, the notion of having a specific affective
response in a given context. Dreyfus’s discussion of the different types
of mood is thus largely quantitative as it identifies different categories of
attunement based on their duration on the one hand and on their capa-
ciousness on the other hand.
This significant move away from Heidegger’s abstract discussion of
Stimmung and towards a more applied study of its factual articula-
tions makes a helpful contribution to describing and qualifying forms
of attunement. Dreyfus further argues that the aforementioned levels
of Stimmung are, by definition, intertwined and interdependent: ‘[m]y
mood, while possibly at a given time mine alone, is not essentially pri-
vate; another person in my culture could share the same mood,’ he
proposes; and further, ‘I can have only the sort of moods one can have
in my culture; thus the public is the condition of the possibility of
personal moods.’81 Although it problematically relies on a fairly self-
contained Cartesian conception of selfhood – as discussed previously –
Dreyfus’s discussion of mood is interesting insofar as his proposition
 Introduction 29
of an interdependence between individual and cultural moods ques-
tions Heidegger’s notion of the possibility of an ‘authentic’ being that
can somehow detach itself from society – in Heidegger’s terms, the
Man – since the attunement of the individual is described as being es-
sentially pre-configured through cultural means. The cultural influence
on forms of Stimmung that Dreyfus calls attention to aptly foregrounds
attunement’s dependence on the world and at the same time opens up
the question of the relationship between attunement, society and cul-
tural production. In view of these considerations, aesthetic attune-
ment is, then, by definition dependent on cultural parameters – e.g.
the shared semiotic system it is based upon, aesthetic modes and genre
conventions and established art forms – that pre-configure the forms of
Stimmung emerging in the aesthetic process.
Literature has the capacity to negotiate Stimmung on several levels: as
mentioned prior, on the most elementary level, fiction can depict charac-
ters and their forms of attunement to the fictional world, to other char-
acters and to specific narrative situations and events, thus formulating
an implicit or explicit ontology of Stimmung. On the second level of aes-
thetic affect, literature also creates a plane of attunement in the narrative
act, through the relationship which it creates with the reader, a pivotal
dimension that I will explore more fully below. Third, genre and other
literary conventions, as essential forms of literary meaning-making, are
predicated upon specific forms of Stimmung that are constitutive for
textual understanding and which shape the reader’s expectations. For
instance, the genre of the thriller stipulates that murder and suspense
would be ‘in tune’ with the fictional world, while slapstick comedy or
boredom would not be (although the juxtaposition of such aspects can,
of course, be used to create a sense of incongruity which, then, pro-
duces a mood in its own right). Finally, every text relates to the mood of
its age – what Heidegger describes as epochal Grundstimmung 82 – by
means of representation, rejection or negotiation. Satire, for instance,
oftentimes imitates the epochal climate of its own production for the
sake of critique, thus undermining the epochal Zeitgeist. In addition to
these aspects (and oftentimes through them), literature can implicitly
and explicitly reflect on the nature of mood itself and thus become a
vehicle for interrogating the nature of Stimmung.
In the following chapters of this study, each of these levels of mood-
related inquiry is taken into account in tracing modernity’s concern with
Stimmung as a foundational aspect of existential and aesthetic experi-
ence. In doing so, I pay particular attention to the depiction of modes
of attunement in the medium of literature and to the Stimmung that is
created between text and reader, while the question of epochal Grund-
stimmung considerably informs my analysis of all three chosen authors
since their works are read against the backdrop of the epistemological
category of modernity and in view of the cultural and historical context
in which they were written. In addition to this, the notion of genre as a
30 Introduction
form or convention predicated upon mood becomes a recurrent aspect of
enquiry. First, however, to clarify the conditions of literary attunement
further, we shall examine in more detail the dynamics between reader
and text in the context of aesthetic Stimmung.

In order to bridge the gap between the philosophical theory of Stim-

mung outlined above and the study of literary forms of attunement, we
can now turn to a proper understanding of the relationship between
reader and text. Their rapport, I suggest, structurally corresponds to
the relationship between the self and the world which I have already
outlined above through reference to philosophies of existence and the
self. The reader-text relationship has been subject to considerable at-
tention in the context of twentieth-century poetics and criticism, most
compellingly in the reader-response criticism of Stanley E. Fish and the
Vienna or Konstanz schools, including the works of Hans Robert Jauss
and Wolfgang Iser, and more recently, in studies of the reading process
linked to cognitive psychology (for instance, in Lisa Zunshine’s Why We
Read Fiction). Iser’s influential contribution to the field has redefined the
role of the reader and elevated it from the position of a passive recipient
to that of an active subject who is complicit in generating the meaning
of a text. In Der implizite Leser (1972) and Der Akt des Lesens (1976),
he introduced a new concept of textuality that shifted the critical focus
from the written text to the process described in title of the latter, the
act of reading, thus initiating a paradigm shift that would eventually
lead to the cognitive turn in literary criticism. Iser’s significant body
of work redefined the literary text through the process of interaction
between the reader and the text,83 thus implying that the place of ‘liter-
ature,’ which – by Iser’s definition – is a phenomenon generated by the
convergence of reader and text, is outside the text and in the reader’s
mind. Iser’s ‘participating’ reader is constitutive for the meaning of the
literary work since the reading experience is shaped by his participation:

participation means that the reader is not simply called upon to ‘in-
ternalize’ the positions given in the text, but he is induced to make
them act upon and so transform each other, as a result of which the
aesthetic object begins to emerge.84

At the same time, the text produces an effect on the reader, thereby gen-
erating a structure of affectedness (Betroffenheit), which is, according to
Iser, impossible to grasp within the confines of theoretisation:

Meaning as impact affects the reader, and such affectedness cannot

be revoked through explanation, but instead causes the explanation
 Introduction 31
itself to fail. The impact is brought into being through the reader’s
participation in creating the text.85

Textual meaning is thus generated through the reader’s participation in

actualising the text, and at the same time, this participation is constitu-
tive for an emotive affectedness that cannot be accounted for through
rational categories. Iser here posits the literary work as something that
matters to the reader and affects him due to his own complicity in gener-
ating its meaning in an event that is defined as the emergence of the text.
In Heideggerian terms, one could speak of a structure of ‘care’ being
generated through the reader’s participation in the actualisation of the
text. By participating in the process of meaning-construction, the reader
is drawn into a temporal structure of affectedness which is marked by
‘caring’ about the text.
An even more radical position was developed by Stanley Fish, who
introduced the concept of ‘affective stylistics’ as a way to describe
the reader’s contribution to the creation of textual meaning. In oppo-
sition to the New Critics’ idea of the text as a self-contained object,
Fish argues that there is no such thing as a text which exists inde-
pendently of its readership, although this notion has continued to
exist in the cultural consciousness as a ‘dangerous illusion.’ 86 Freed
from the idea of being a fixed entity consisting of historically invari-
able, written signs, the literary text is thus re-conceptualised as a pro-
cess, as an ‘event’87 only emerging and taking place when it is read.
The important turn in the argument that Fish puts forward is that the
meaning of a text – which Iser still holds on to – is dismissed in favour
of the dimension of experience: since semantic textual meaning is
unstable, the experience of reading the text itself becomes its mean-
ing. 88 The literary text is thus marked by a structural openness that
allows readers to have different experiences of the same text as the
semantic plane of meaning is replaced by the experiential dimension
of the aesthetic process.
The key tenets of reader-response criticism, as laid out above, in them-
selves indicate a certain affinity with the notion of Stimmung or attune-
ment: according to Fish and Iser, the reading process is defined by an act
of attunement between reader and text, which operates though a struc-
ture of affectedness. If the reader, to Iser, is a participating subject in the
creation of meaning, Fish more radically proposes that the figure of the
reader makes textual meaning possible in the first place. A dialogue with
the previously discussed poststructuralist interpretation of the subject
as it is defined by Deleuze and Guattari may complicate this view the
reader as a site of subjectivity, too, may come under threat. If we take
the process of negotiation taking place between reader and text as being
structurally similar to the attunement between the self and the world,
what we call the ‘reader’ is redefined as a subject position corresponding
32 Introduction
to the notion of the self as inflected through Heidegger and Deleuze, i.e.,
as an ever-evolving subject position. In this context, the (written) text
represents the ‘world’ as a linguistic structure of reference that draws on
a historically and culturally defined semiotic system, and in relation to
which the reader-position is established.
At the same time, however, literature – as a fictional way of ‘world-
making’ – often problematises our implicit ontological notions of the self
and of the world. Literature can thus be regarded as both a vehicle of
(ontic) implicit cultural notions of the self and the world and as a ‘play-
ground’ for ontological possibilities. This complicates the attunement
that takes place between the reader and the text: on the one hand, this
form of Stimmung draws on the attunement taking place between the
self and the world as a reference point for worldmaking in the medium
of fiction; it creates a world in accordance with the way in which we con-
struct the ‘real’ world in relation to our subject positions. On the other
hand, this very attunement can be explored, modified and manipulated
by the literary text. I return to these possibilities and the ways in which
they are implemented in the substantive engagements with the texts that
constitute the body of my argument in the following three chapters of
this study.
Despite certain similarities between what I have philosophically
defined as the ‘world’ and the fictional worlds created in literary
texts, it is crucial to bear in mind the differences between the ways
in which Dasein encounters them: the form of participation that
the reader exerts in the text differs from her active participation in
Being-in-the-world. Although her mind may be the locus of the lit-
erary event as Iser defines it, she is, beyond the experiential process
of meaning-making, not actively involved in the events depicted in
the literary text, but remains an observer – although, once again,
this position will be shown to be relative in some of the texts under
discussion. Nevertheless, her relationship to the text is marked by the
existential structure of ‘care’ as she becomes an accomplice to the
process of generating the meaning of a text. To a certain extent, a
‘suspension of disbelief,’ as it was famously defined by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, is required for the reader to become involved in what is
depicted in a narrative text. Even though she remains an observer,
she has to give herself up to the text in a certain way in order to en-
gage with and ‘attune to’ it. The aim of this attunement is a form of
convergence which, according to Iser, brings the literary work into
being: ‘[t]he convergence of text and reader brings the literary work
into existence.’89 The sense of convergence, of literary meaning pro-
duction, is, however, not a fixed product or a result of the interaction
between reader and text but an ongoing process taking place in the
 Introduction 33
act of reading: the process of Stimmung. The sense of affectedness,
of care, which Iser defines as – in Heidegger’s words – equiprimordial
to the interaction between reader and text, results from a negotiation
between the reading self and the literary work as it is constructed
by the reader in the process of aesthetic attunement. In this context,
the reader, as a specific function of the self, is defined in analogy to
the concept of self in the previous section. She is the ever-evolving
subject-position generated by the attunement between subjectivity
and worldliness, a worldliness which, in the reader function of Das-
ein, is represented by the text.

The historical view on the concept of Stimmung outlined at the be-

ginning of this introduction underlines a pivotal caesura in the way
attunement was conceptualised in aesthetics which correlates to the ad-
vent of modernity. Whereas the classic idea of world harmony largely
dominated aesthetics from Pythagorean philosophy to the Renaissance
age, the epoch that has been defined as modernity has established a
much more unstable and complicated relationship with the concept of
Stimmung. However, the idea of an affinity between art and harmony
is still very deeply ingrained in the European aesthetic tradition. For
example, Augustine’s declaration that harmony is at the core of art and
beauty still strikes a chord familiar to some present-day notions of the
purpose of art:

The source of pleasure in any art is harmony, which alone is re-

sponsible for the beauty and wholesomeness of all things. At the
same time, harmony aspires to equality and unity, either through
the similarity of even parts or through a regular progression of
uneven.90

This idea of harmony as the ultimate purpose of art has continued to

inform discourses on aesthetics beyond the outset of modernity. As
mentioned previously, the art historian Alois Riegl suggests that the
main aim of modern art – as opposed to previous historical eras – is to
create moods. He therefore defines modern art as ‘Stimmungskunst’ 91
(‘mood art’), which seeks to re-establish order and harmony where
it is lacking in life, thus constituting an aesthetic corrective for the
chaotic modern world.92 According to Riegl, the desire for the lost
harmonious form of Stimmung thus establishes the fundament of mod-
ern aesthetics.93 Writing over a century later, Gumbrecht, conversely,
proposes that in the modern age, the concept of Stimmung is no longer
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
most often and he was permitted to go his way, even when he went
without paying his bill. (“Notizen,” p. 122.)
Beethoven had taken lessons on the violin even after he reached
Vienna from Krumpholz and frequently when I was there we played
his Sonatas for Pianoforte and Violin together. But it was really a
horrible music; for in his enthusiastic zeal he never heard when he
began a passage with bad fingering.
In his behavior Beethoven was awkward and helpless; his uncouth
movements were often destitute of all grace. He seldom took
anything into his hands without dropping and breaking it. Thus he
frequently knocked his ink-well into the pianoforte which stood near
by the side of his writing-table. No piece of furniture was safe from
him, least of all a costly piece. Everything was overturned, soiled
and destroyed. It is hard to comprehend how he accomplished so
much as to be able to shave himself, even leaving out of
consideration the number of cuts on his cheeks. He could never
learn to dance in time. (“Notizen,” p. 119.)
Beethoven attached no value to his manuscripts; after they were
printed they lay for the greater part in an anteroom or on the floor
among other pieces of music. I often put his music to rights; but
whenever he hunted something, everything was thrown into
confusion again. I might at that time have carried away the original
manuscripts of all his printed pieces; and if I had asked him for them
he would unquestionably have given them to me without a thought.
(“Notizen,” p. 113.)
Beethoven felt the loss of Ries very sensibly; but it was in part
supplied by young Röckel, to whom he took a great liking. Inviting
him to call, he told him he would give special orders to his servant to
admit him at all times, even in the morning when busy. It was
agreed that, when Röckel was admitted, if he found Beethoven very
much occupied he should pass through the room into the bed-
chamber beyond—both rooms overlooked the Glacis from the fourth
story of the Pasqualati house on the Mölker Bastei—and there await
him a reasonable time; if the composer came not, Röckel should
quietly pass out again. It happened one morning upon his first visit,
that Röckel found at the street door a carriage with a lady in it; and,
on reaching the fourth storey, there, at Beethoven’s door, was Prince
Lichnowsky in a dispute with the servant about being admitted. The
man declared he dared not admit anybody, as his master was busy
and had given express orders not to admit any person whatever.
Röckel, however, having the entrée, informed Beethoven that
Lichnowsky was outside. Though in ill humor, he could no longer
refuse to see him. The Prince and his wife had come to take
Beethoven out for an airing; and he finally consented, but, as he
entered the carriage, Röckel noticed that his face was still cloudy.
That Beethoven and Ignatz von Seyfried were brought much
together in these years, the reader already knows. Their
acquaintance during thirty years—which, for at least half of the time,
was really the “friendly relationship” which Seyfried names it—was,
he says, “never weakened, never disturbed by even the smallest
quarrel—not that we were both always of a mind, or could be, but
we always spoke freely and frankly to each other, without reserve,
according to our convictions, without conceitedly trying to force
upon one another our opinions as infallible.”
Besides, Beethoven was much too straightforward, open and tolerant
to give offence to another by disapprobation, or contradiction; he
was wont to laugh heartily at what did not please him and I
confidently believe that I may safely say that in all his life he never,
at least not consciously, made an enemy; only those to whom his
peculiarities were unknown were unable quite to understand how to
get along with him; I am speaking here of an earlier time, before the
misfortune of deafness had come upon him; if, on the contrary,
Beethoven sometimes carried things to an extreme in his rude
honesty in the case of many, mostly those who had imposed
themselves upon him as protectors, the fault lay only in this, that the
honest German always carried his heart on his tongue and
understood everything better than how to flatter; also because,
conscious of his own merit, he would never permit himself to be
made the plaything of the vain whims of the Mæcenases who were
eager to boast of their association with the name and fame of the
celebrated master. And so he was misunderstood only by those who
had not the patience to get acquainted with the apparent eccentric.
When he composed “Fidelio,” the oratorio “Christus am Ölberg,” the
symphonies in E-flat, C minor and F, the Pianoforte Concertos in C
minor and G major, and the Violin Concerto in D, we were living in
the same house[44] and (since we were each carrying on a
bachelor’s apartment) we dined at the same restaurant and chatted
away many an unforgettable hour in the confidential intimacy of
colleagues, for Beethoven was then merry, ready for any jest, happy,
full of life, witty and not seldom satirical. No physical ill had then
afflicted him [?]; no loss of the sense which is peculiarly
indispensable to the musician had darkened his life; only weak eyes
had remained with him as the results of the smallpox with which he
had been afflicted in his childhood, and these compelled him even in
his early youth to resort to concave, very strong (highly magnifying)
spectacles.[45]
He had me play the pieces mentioned, recognized throughout the
musical world as masterpieces, and, without giving me time to think,
demanded to know my opinion of them; I was permitted to give it
without restraint, without fearing that I should offend any artistic
conceit—a fault which was utterly foreign to his nature.
The above is from “Cäcilia,” Vol. IX, 218, 219. In the so-called
“Studien” (appendix) are other reminiscences, which form an
admirable supplement to it. Those which belong to the years 1800-
1805 follow:
Our master could not be presented as a model in respect of
conducting, and the orchestra always had to have a care in order not
to be led astray by its mentor; for he had ears only for his
composition and was ceaselessly occupied by manifold gesticulations
to indicate the desired expression. He used to suggest a diminuendo
by crouching down more and more, and at a pianissimo he would
almost creep under the desk. When the volume of sound grew he
rose up also as if out of a stage-trap, and with the entrance of the
power of the band he would stand upon the tips of his toes almost
as big as a giant, and waving his arms, seemed about to soar
upwards to the skies. Everything about him was active, not a bit of
his organism idle, and the man was comparable to a perpetuum
mobile. He did not belong to those capricious composers whom no
orchestra in the world can satisfy. At times, indeed, he was
altogether too considerate and did not even repeat passages which
went badly at the rehearsal: “It will go better next time,” he would
say. He was very particular about expression, the delicate nuances,
the equable distribution of light and shade as well as an effective
tempo rubato, and without betraying vexation, would discuss them
with the individual players. When he then observed that the players
would enter into his intentions and play together with increasing
ardor, inspired by the magical power of his creations, his face would
be transfigured with joy, all his features beamed pleasure and
satisfaction, a pleased smile would play around his lips and a
thundering “Bravi tutti!” reward the successful achievement. It was
the first and loftiest triumphal moment for the genius, compared
with which, as he confessed, the tempestuous applause of a
receptive audience was as nothing. When playing at first sight, there
were frequent pauses for the purpose of correcting the parts and
then the thread would be broken; but he was patient even then; but
when things went to pieces, particularly in the scherzos of his
symphonies at a sudden and unexpected change of rhythm, he
would shout with laughter and say he had expected nothing else,
but was reckoning on it from the beginning; he was almost childishly
glad that he had been successful in “unhorsing such excellent
riders.”
Before Beethoven was afflicted with his organic
ailment, he attended the opera frequently and with Deafness and
Disorderliness
enjoyment, especially the admirable and flourishing
Theater-an-der-Wien, perhaps, also, for convenience’ sake, since he
had scarcely to do more than to step from his room into the
parterre. There he was fascinated more especially by the creations
of Cherubini and Méhul, which at that time were just beginning to
stir up the enthusiasm of all Vienna. There he would plant himself
hard against the orchestra rail and, dumb as a dunce, remain till the
last stroke of the bows. This was the only sign, however, that the art
work had interested him; if, on the contrary, the piece did not please
him he would turn on his heel at the first fall of the curtain and take
himself away. It was, in fact, difficult, yes, utterly impossible to tell
from his features whether or not he was pleased or displeased; he
was always the same, apparently cold, and just as reserved in his
judgments concerning his companions in art; his mind was at work
ceaselessly, but the physical shell was like soulless marble. Strangely
enough, on the other hand, hearing wretched music was a treat to
him which he proclaimed by a peal of laughter. Everybody who knew
him intimately knew that in this art he was a virtuoso, but it was a
pity that those who were near him were seldom able to fathom the
cause of such explosions, since he often laughed at his most secret
thoughts and conceits without giving an accounting of them.
He was never found on the street without a small note-book in
which he was wont to record his passing ideas. Whenever
conversation turned on the subject he would parody Joan of Arc’s
words: “I dare not come without my banner!”—and he adhered to
his self-given rule with unparalleled tenacity; although otherwise a
truly admirable disorder prevailed in his household. Books and music
were scattered in every corner; here the remnants of a cold
luncheon; here sealed or half-emptied bottles; here upon a stand the
hurried sketches of a quartet; here the remains of a déjeuner; there
on the pianoforte, on scribbled paper the material for a glorious
symphony still slumbering in embryo; here a proof-sheet awaiting
salvation; friendly and business letters covering the floor; between
the windows a respectable loaf of strachino, ad latus a considerable
ruin of a genuine Veronese salami—yet despite this varied mess our
master had a habit, quite contrary to the reality, of proclaiming his
accuracy and love of order on all occasions with Ciceronian
eloquence. Only when it became necessary to spend days, hours,
sometimes weeks, in finding something necessary and all efforts
remained fruitless, did he adopt a different tone, and the innocent
were made to bear the blame. “Yes, yes,” was the complaint, “that’s
a misfortune! Nothing is permitted to remain where I put it;
everything is moved about; everything is done to vex me; O men,
men!” But his servants knew the good-natured grumbler; let him
growl to his heart’s content, and—in a few minutes all would be
forgotten, until another occasion brought with it a renewal of the
scene.
He often made merry over his illegible handwriting and excused
himself by saying: “Life is too short to paint letters or notes; and
prettier notes would scarcely help me out of needs.”[46]
The whole forenoon, from the first ray of light till the meal hour, was
devoted to mechanical labor, i. e., to transcribing; the rest of the day
was given to thought and the ordering of ideas. Hardly had he put
the last bit in his mouth before he began his customary promenade,
unless he had some other excursion in petto; that is to say, he
hurried in double-quick time several times around the city, as if
urged on by a goad; and this, let the weather be what it might.
And his hearing—how was it with that?
A question not to be answered to full satisfaction. It is clear that the
“Notizen” of Wegeler and Ries, the Biography (first editions) of
Schindler, and especially the papers from Beethoven’s own hand
printed in those volumes, have given currency to a very exaggerated
idea of the progress of his infirmity. On the other hand, Seyfried as
evidently errs in the other direction; and yet Carl Czerny, both in his
published and manuscripts notices, goes even farther. For instance,
he writes to Jahn: “Although he had suffered from pains in his ears
and the like ever since 1800, he still heard speech and music
perfectly well until nearly 1812,” and adds in confirmation: “As late
as the years 1811-1812 I studied things with him and he corrected
with great care, as well as ten years before.” This, however, proves
nothing, as Beethoven performed feats of this kind still more
remarkable down to the last year of his life. Beethoven’s
Lamentation, the testament of 1802, is one extreme, the statements
of Seyfried and Czerny the other; the truth lies somewhere between.
In June, 1801, Beethoven is “obliged to lean down
to the orchestral rail to hear a drama.” The next Neglect of Medical
Treatment
summer he cannot hear a flute or pipe to which
Ries calls his attention. In 1804, as Doležalek tells Jahn, “in the
rehearsals to the ‘Eroica’ he did not always hear the wind-
instruments distinctly and missed them when they were playing.”
The evil was then making, if slow, still sure progress. “In those
years,” says Schindler, “there was a priest named Pater Weiss in the
Metropolitan Church of St. Stephen who occupied himself with
healing the deaf and had accomplished many fortunate cures. He
was not a mere empiricist, but was familiar with the physiology of
the ear; he effected his cures with simple remedies, and enjoyed a
wide fame among the people, and also the respect of medical
practitioners. With the consent of his physician our terrified tone-
poet had also entrusted his case to the priest.” Precisely when this
was, is unknown; it could not, however, have been until after Dr.
Schmidt’s treatment had proved hopeless. The so-called Fischoff
Manuscript, evidently on the authority of Zmeskall himself, gives a
more particular account than Schindler of Pater Weiss’s experience
with his new patient. “Herr v. Zmeskall with great difficulty
persuaded Beethoven to go there with him. At first he followed the
advice of the physician; but as he had to go to him every day in
order to have a fluid dropped into his ear, this grew unpleasant, the
more since, in his impatience, he felt little or no improvement; and
he remained away. The physician, questioned by Zmeskall, told him
the facts, and Zmeskall begged him to accommodate himself to the
self-willed invalid, and consult his convenience. The priest, honestly
desirous to help Beethoven, went to his lodgings, but his efforts
were in vain, inasmuch as Beethoven in a few days refused him
entrance, and thus neglected possible help or at least an
amelioration of his condition.”
Probably the evil was of such a nature that, with all the resources of
our present medical science, it could hardly have been impeded,
much less arrested. This is poor consolation, but the best we have.
The sufferer now resigned himself to his fate. On a page of twenty-
one leaves of sketches to the Rasoumowsky Quartets, Op. 59,
stands written in pencil—if correctly deciphered—these words from
his hand:
Even as you have plunged into the whirlpool of society, you will find
it possible to compose operas in spite of social obstacles.
Let your deafness no longer remain a secret—not even in art!
 Chapter VI
Princes as Theatrical Directors—Disappointed Expectations—
Subscription Concerts at Prince Lobkowitz’s—The Symphony in B-flat
—The “Coriolan” Overture—Contract with Clementi—The Mass in C—
The Year 1807.
A controversy for the possession of the two Court Theatres and that
An-der-Wien involved certain legal questions which, in September,
1806, were decided by the proper tribunal against the old directors,
who were thus at the end of the year compelled to retire. Peter,
Baron von Braun, closed his twelve years’ administration with a
circular letter addressed to his recent subordinates, dated December
28, in which, after bidding them an affectionate adieu, he said:
“With imperial consent I have turned over the vice-direction of the
Royal Imperial Court Theatre to a company composed of the
following cavaliers: the Princes Lobkowitz, Schwarzenberg and
Esterhazy and the Counts Esterhazy, Lodron, Ferdinand Palffy,
Stephen Zichy and Niklas Esterhazy.”
Beethoven naturally saw in this change a most
hopeful prospect of an improvement in his own Plans to Keep
Beethoven in
theatrical fortunes, and immediately, acting on a Vienna
hint from Lobkowitz, addressed to the new
directors a petition and proposals for a permanent engagement, with
a fixed salary, in their service. The document was as follows:
To the Worshipful R. I. Theatre Direction:
The undersigned flatters himself that during his past sojourn in
Vienna he has won some favor with not only the high nobility but
also the general public, and has secured an honorable acceptance of
his works at home and abroad.
Nevertheless, he has been obliged to struggle with difficulties of all
kinds and has not yet been able to establish himself here in a
position which would enable him to fulfil his desire to live wholly for
art, to develop his talents to a still higher degree of perfection,
which must be the goal of every true artist, and to make certain for
the future the fortuitous advantages of the present.
Inasmuch as the undersigned has always striven less for a livelihood
than for the interests of art, the ennoblement of taste and the
uplifting of his genius toward higher ideals and perfection, it
necessarily happens that he often was compelled to sacrifice profit
and advantage to the Muse. Yet works of this kind won for him a
reputation in foreign lands which assures him of a favorable
reception in a number of considerable cities and a lot commensurate
with his talents and opportunities.
But in spite of this the undersigned cannot deny that the many years
during which he has lived here and the favor and approval which he
has enjoyed from high and low have aroused in him a wish wholly to
fulfil the expectations which he has been fortunate enough to
awaken; and let him say also, the patriotism of a German has made
this place more estimable and desirable than any other.
He can, therefore, not forbear before deciding to leave the city so
dear to him, to follow the suggestion kindly made to him by His
Serene Highness the ruling Prince Lobkowitz, who intimated that a
Worshipful Direction was not disinclined under proper conditions to
engage the undersigned for the service of the theatre under their
management and to ensure his further sojourn here by offering him
the means of a permanent livelihood favorable to the exercise of his
talent.
Inasmuch as this intimation is in perfect accord with the desires of
the undersigned, he takes the liberty to submit an expression of his
willingness as well as the following stipulations for the favorable
consideration of the Worshipful Direction:
1. He promises and contracts to compose every year at least one
grand opera, to be selected jointly by the Worshipful Direction and
the undersigned; in return he asks a fixed remuneration of 2400
florins per annum and the gross receipts of the third performance of
each of such operas.
2. He agrees to deliver gratis each year a small operetta,
divertissement, choruses or occasional pieces according to the
wishes or needs of the Worshipful Direction, but hopes that the
Worshipful Direction will not hesitate in return for such works to give
him one day in each year for a benefit concert in the theatre
building.
If one reflects what an expenditure of capacity and time is required
for the making of an opera to the absolute exclusion of every other
intellectual occupation, and further, that in cities where the author
and his family have a share in the receipts at every performance, a
single successful work may make the fortune of an author; and still
further how small a compensation, owing to the monetary condition
and high prices for necessaries which prevail here, is at the
command of a local artist to whom foreign lands are open, the
above conditions can certainly not be thought to be excessive or
unreasonable.
But whether or not the Worshipful Direction confirms and accepts
this offer, the undersigned appends the request that he be given a
day for a musical concert in one of the theatre buildings; for, in case
the proposition is accepted, the undersigned will at once require his
time and powers for the composition of the opera and therefore be
unable to use them for his profit in another direction. In the event of
a declination of the present offer, moreover, since the permission for
a concert granted last year could not be utilized because of various
obstacles which intervened, the undersigned would look upon the
fulfilment of last year’s promise as a highest sign of the great favor
heretofore enjoyed by him, and he requests that in the first case the
day be set on the Feast of the Annunciation, in the second on one of
the approaching Christmas holidays.
 Ludwig van Beethoven, m. p.
Vienna, 1807.
Neither of these requests was granted directly; one of them only
indirectly. Nor is it known that any formal written reply was
conveyed to the petitioner. The cause of this has been strangely
suggested to lie in an old grudge—the very existence of which is a
mere conjecture—cherished against Beethoven by Count Palffy,
director of the German Drama. But it is quite needless to go so far
for a reason. The composer’s well-known increasing infirmity of
hearing, his habits of procrastination, and above all his inability, so
often proved, to keep the peace with orchestra and singers—all this
was too well known to the new directors, whatever may have been
their own personal wishes, to justify the risk of attaching him
permanently to an institution for the success of which they were
responsible to the Emperor. It is very evident, that they temporized
with him. His petition must have been presented at the very
beginning of the year; otherwise the grant of a theatre for a concert
at the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25) would have been
useless, for want of time to make the necessary preparations; and
an allusion to the “princely rabble” in a letter written in May, proves
that no answer had then been given him; and a reference to the
matter by the correspondent of the “Allg. Mus. Zeitung” near the end
of the year shows that at least none had then been made public. So
far as is known, the Directors chose to let the matter drop quietly
and gave him none; nor did they revive “Fidelio”—for which
abundant reasons suggest themselves. But they gave Beethoven
ample proof that no motives of personal animosity, no lack of
admiration for his talents or appreciation of his genius, governed
their decision. Prince Esterhazy ordered the composition of a mass,
and immediate preparations were made for the performance of his
orchestral works “in a very select circle that contributed a very
considerable sum for the benefit of the composer,” as a writer in the
“Allg. Mus. Zeitung” remarks. These performances took place in
March “at the house of Prince L.” according to the “Journal des
Luxus.”
Was “Prince L.” Lobkowitz or Lichnowsky? The
details above given point decisively to the former. The Symphony in B-
flat
It is true that the paroxysm of wrath, in which
Beethoven had so unceremoniously parted from Lichnowsky in the
Autumn, had so far subsided that he now granted the Prince the use
of his new manuscript overture; but the contemporary notice, from
which this fact is derived, is in such terms as of itself to preclude the
idea that this performance of it was in one of the two subscription
concerts. In these subscription concerts three new works were
performed: the Fourth Symphony,[47] in B-flat major, the Fourth Pf.
Concerto, in G major, and the “Coriolan” Overture. About the latter
something is to be said. The manuscript bears the composer’s own
date, 1807. Collin’s tragedy was originally performed November 24,
1802, with “between-acts music” arranged by Abbé Stadler from
Mozart’s “Idomeneus.” The next year Lange assumed the leading
part with a success of which he justly boasts in his autobiography,
and played it so often down to March 5, 1805, as to make the work
thoroughly familiar to the theatre-going public. From that date to the
end of October, 1809 (how much longer we have no means at hand
of knowing), it was played but once—namely, on April 24, 1807. The
overture was assuredly not written for that one exceptional
performance; for, if so, it would not have been played in March in
two different concerts. Nor was it played, April 24th, in the theatre;
if it had been, the correspondent of the “Allg. Mus. Zeitung,” writing
after its public performance in the Liebhaber Concerts near the end
of the year, could not have spoken of it as “a new overture.” It is,
therefore, obvious that this work was composed for these
subscription concerts. Beethoven had at this time written but three
overtures—two to “Fidelio” (one of which was laid aside), and that to
“Prometheus,” which had long ceased to be a novelty. He needed a
new one. Collin’s tragedy was thoroughly well known and offered a
subject splendidly suited to his genius. An overture to it was a
compliment to his influential friend, the author, and, if successful,
would be a new proof of his talent for dramatic composition—
certainly, an important consideration just then, pending his
application for a permanent engagement at the theatre. How nobly
the character of Coriolanus is mirrored in Beethoven’s music is well
enough known; but the admirable adaptation of the overture to the
play is duly appreciated by those only, who have read Collin’s almost
forgotten work.
The year 1807 was one of the years of Beethoven’s life distinguished
by the grandeur and extent of his compositions; and it was probably
more to avoid interruption in his labor than on account of ill health,
that early in April he removed to Baden. A letter (to Herr von
Troxler) in which occur these words: “I am coming to Vienna. I wish
very much that you would go with me on Tuesday to Clementi, as I
can make myself better understood to foreigners with my notes than
by my speech,” seems to introduce a matter of business which called
him to the city for a few days.
Clementi, called to Rome by the death of his
brother, had arrived in Vienna on his way thither, Clementi Secures a
Contract
and embraced the opportunity to acquire the
exclusive right of publication in England of various works of
Beethoven, whose great reputation, the rapidly growing taste for his
music, and the great difficulty of obtaining continental publications in
those days of “Napoleonic ideas,” combined to render such a right in
that country one of considerable value. Clementi reported the results
of the negotiations with Beethoven in a letter to his partner, F. W.
Collard, with whom he had been associated in business for five
years, which J. S. Shedlock made public in the “Athenæum” of
London on August 1, 1902. It runs as follows:
Messrs. Clementi and Co., No. 26 Cheapside, London.
Vienna, April 22d, 1807.
Dear Collard:
By a little management and without committing myself, I have at last
made a complete conquest of the haughty beauty, Beethoven, who
first began at public places to grin and coquet with me, which of
course I took care not to discourage; then slid into familiar chat, till
meeting him by chance one day in the street—“Where do you
lodge?” says he; “I have not seen you this long while!”—upon which
I gave him my address. Two days after I found on my table his card
brought by himself, from the maid’s description of his lovely form.
This will do, thought I. Three days after that he calls again, and
finds me at home. Conceive then the mutual ecstasy of such a
meeting! I took pretty good care to improve it to our house’s
advantage, therefore, as soon as decency would allow, after praising
very handsomely some of his compositions: “Are you engaged with
any publisher in London?”—“No” says he. “Suppose, then, that you
prefer me?”—“With all my heart.” “Done. What have you
ready?”—“I’ll bring you a list.” In short I agree with him to take in
MSS. three quartets, a symphony, an overture and a concerto for the
violin, which is beautiful, and which, at my request he will adapt for
the pianoforte with and without additional keys; and a concerto for
the pianoforte, for all which we are to pay him two hundred pounds
sterling. The property, however, is only for the British Dominions. To-
day sets off a courier for London through Russia, and he will bring
over to you two or three of the mentioned articles.
Remember that the violin concerto he will adapt himself and send it
as soon as he can.
The quartets, etc., you may get Cramer or some other very clever
fellow to adapt for the Piano-forte. The symphony and the overture
are wonderfully fine so that I think I have made a very good
bargain. What do you think? I have likewise engaged him to
compose two sonatas and a fantasia for the Piano-forte which he is
to deliver to our house for sixty pounds sterling (mind I have treated
for Pounds, not Guineas). In short he has promised to treat with no
one but me for the British Dominions.
In proportion as you receive his compositions you are to remit him
the money; that is, he considers the whole as consisting of six
articles, viz: three quartets, symphony, overture, Piano-forte
concerto, violin concerto, and the adaptation of the said concerto,
for which he is to receive £200.
For three articles you’ll remit £100 and so on in proportion. The
agreement says also that as soon as you receive the compositions,
you are to pay into the hands of Messrs. E. W. and E. Lee, the stated
sum, who are to authorize Messrs. J. G. Schuller and Comp. in
Vienna to pay to Mr. van Beethoven, the value of the said sum,
according to the course of exchange, and the said Messrs. Schuller
and Co. are to reimburse themselves on Messrs. R. W. and E. Lee.
On account of the impediments by war, etc., I begged Beethoven to
allow us 4 months (after the setting of his MSS.) to publish in. He
said he would write to your house in French stating the time, for of
course he sends them likewise to Paris, etc., etc., and they must
appear on the same day. You are also by agreement to send
Beethoven by a convenient opportunity, two sets of each of the new
compositions you print of his.... Mr. van Beethoven says, you may
publish the 3 articles he sends by this courier on the 1st of
September, next.[48]
The closing of the contract with Clementi had been preceded by
negotiations with Breitkopf and Härtel for the same compositions.
On the same day that Clementi wrote to Collard he also wrote a
letter to the Leipsic publishers in which he said that he had
purchased the right of publication for the British Dominions in
consequence of their letter of January 20th, in which they had said
that because of the war they had declined Beethoven’s proposition.
He also promised to ask Beethoven to treat with them for the
German rights. (This fact is already known to the readers from the
letters written by Beethoven to Breitkopf and Härtel dated
September 3 and November 18, 1806.) Count Gleichenstein
witnessed the signing of the contract (which is in French), the
substance of which is as follows:
Beethoven grants Clementi the manuscripts of the works afterwards
enumerated, with the right to publish them in Great Britain, but
reserving the rights for other countries. The works are: three
Quartets, one Symphony (“the fourth that he has composed”), the
Overture to “Coriolan,” a Concerto for Violin and the arrangement of
the same for Pianoforte “with additional notes.”
Clementi is to pay for these works the equivalent of £200 in
Viennese funds at Schuller and Co.’s as soon as the arrival of the
manuscripts is reported from London. If Beethoven cannot deliver all
the compositions at once he is to be paid only in proportion.
Beethoven engages to sell these works in Germany, France or
elsewhere only on condition that they shall not be published until
four months after they have been despatched to England. In the
case of the Violin Concerto, the Symphony and the Overture, which
have just been sent off, not until September 1, 1807. Beethoven also
agrees to compose on the same terms, within a time not fixed, and
at his own convenience, three Sonatas or two Sonatas and a
Fantasia for Pianoforte with or without accompaniment, as he
chooses, for which he is to be paid £60. Clementi engages to send
Beethoven two copies of each work. The contract is executed in
duplicate and signed at Vienna, April 20, 1807, by Clementi and
Beethoven.[49]
The quartets, in parts, had been lent to Count Franz Brunswick and
were still in Hungary, which gave occasion to one of Beethoven’s
peculiarly whimsical and humorous epistles:
To Count Franz von Brunswick:
The Famous Love-
Dear, dear B! I have only to say to you that I came Letter Again
to a right satisfactory arrangement with Clementi. I
shall receive 200 pounds Sterling—and besides I am privileged to
sell the same works in Germany and France. He has also offered me
other commissions—so that I am enabled to hope through them to
achieve the dignity of a true artist while still young. I need, dear B,
the Quartets. I have already asked your sister to write to you about
them, it takes too long to copy them from my score—therefore make
haste and send them direct to me by Letter Post. You shall have
them back in 4 or 5 days at the latest. I beg you urgently for them,
since otherwise I might lose a great deal.
If you can arrange it that the Hungarians want me to come for a few
concerts, do it—you may have me for 200 florins in gold—then I will
bring my opera along. I will not get along with the princely rabble.
Whenever WE (several) (amici) drink your wine, we drink you, i. e.,
we drink your health. Farewell—hurry—hurry—hurry and send me
the quartets—otherwise you may embarrass me greatly.
Schuppanzigh has married—it is said with One very like him. What a
family????
Kiss your sister Therese, tell her I fear I shall become great without
the help of a monument reared by her. Send me to-morrow the
quartets—quar-tets—t-e-t-s.
Your friend Beethoven.[50]
If an English publisher could afford to pay so high a price for the
manuscripts of a German composer, why not a French one? So
Beethoven reasoned, and, Bonn being then French, he wrote to
Simrock proposing a contract like that made with Clementi. The
letter, which was dictated and signed by Beethoven but written by
another, expresses a desire to sell six new works to a publishing
house in France, one in England and one in Vienna simultaneously,
with the understanding that they are to appear only after a certain
date. They are a symphony, an overture for Collin’s “Coriolan,” a
violin concerto, 3 quartets, 1 concerto for the pianoforte, the violin
concerto arranged for pianoforte “avec des notes additionelles.” The
price, “very cheap,” is to be 1200 florins, Augsburg current. As
regards the day of publication, he thinks he can fix the first of
September of that year for the first three, and the first of October
for the second three.
Simrock answered that owing to unfavorable circumstances due to
the war, all he could offer, in his “lean condition,” was 1600 livres. He
also proposed that in case Beethoven found his offer fair, he should
send the works without delay to Breuning. Simrock would at once
pay Breuning 300 livres in cash and give him a bill of exchange for
1300 livres, payable in two years, provided nobody reprinted any of
his works in France, he taking all measures to protect his property
under the laws.
A series of letters written from Baden and bearing dates in June and
July, addressed to Gleichenstein, are of no special interest or
importance except as they, when read together, establish beyond
cavil that Beethoven made no journey to any distant watering-place
during the time which they cover. By proving this they have a
powerful bearing on the vexed question touching the true date of
Beethoven’s famous love-letter supposed by Schindler to have been
addressed to the young Countess Guicciardi. That it was written in
1806 or 1807 was long since made certain; and it was only in a
mistaken deference to Beethoven’s “Evening, Monday, July 6”—
which, if correct, would be decisive in favor of the latter year—that
the letter was not inserted in its proper place as belonging to the
year 1806. That this deference was a mistake, and that Beethoven
should have written “July 7,” is made certain by Simrock’s letter,
which, by determining the dates of the notes to Gleichenstein,
affords positive evidence that the composer passed the months of
June and July, 1807, in Baden. A cursory examination of the
composer’s correspondence brings to light other similar mistakes.
There is a letter to Breitkopf and Härtel with this date, “Wednesday,
November 2, 1809”—Wednesday was the 1st; a letter to Countess
Erdödy has “29 February, 1815”—in that year February had but 28
days; and a letter to Zmeskall is dated “Wednesday, July 3rd,
1817”—July 3rd that year falling on a Thursday. Referring the reader
to what has appeared in a previous chapter, for the letter and a
complete discussion of the question of its date, it need only be
added here, that it was, beyond a doubt, written from some
Hungarian watering-place (as Schindler says), where Beethoven
tarried for a time after his visit to Brunswick and before that to
Prince Lichnowsky. This fact being established, it follows, as a
necessary consequence, that it was not written to Julia Guicciardi—
already nearly three years the wife of Gallenberg—nor to Therese
Malfatti—then a girl but thirteen or at most fourteen years—nor, in
short, to any person whose name has ever been given by biographer
or novelist as among the objects of Beethoven’s fleeting passions.
Thus we are led to the obvious and rational conclusion, that a
mutual appreciation had grown up between the composer and some
lady not yet known; that there were obstacles to marriage just now
insuperable, but not of such a nature as to forbid the expectation of
conquering them in the future; and that—in 1807 as in 1806—they
were happy in their love and looking forward with hope.[51]
The following letter to Prince Esterhazy, dated July 26, belongs to
the same period and refers to the composition of the Mass in C:
Most Serene, most Gracious Prince!
Having been told that you, my Prince, have asked concerning the
mass which you commissioned me to write for you, I take the liberty,
my Serene Prince, to inform you that you shall receive the same at
the latest by the 20th of the month of August—which will leave
plenty of time to have it performed on the name-day of her Serene
Highness, the Princess—an extraordinarily favorable offer which I
received from London when I had the misfortune to make a failure
of my benefit at the theatre, which made me grasp the need with
joy, retarded the completion of the mass, much as I wished, Serene
Prince, to appear with it before you, and to this was added an illness
of the head, which at first permitted me to work not at all and now
but little; since everything is so eagerly interpreted against me, I
inclose a letter from my physician—may I add that I shall give the
mass into your hands with great fear since you, Serene Highness,
are accustomed to have the inimitable masterpieces of the great
Haydn performed for you.
At the end of July, Beethoven removed from Baden
to Heiligenstadt, devoting his time there to the C Composition of the
Mass in C
minor Symphony and the Mass in C. One of
Czerny’s notes relates to the mass:
Once when he (Beethoven) was walking in the country with the
Countess Erdödy and other ladies, they heard some village musicians
and laughed at some false notes which they played, especially the
violoncellist, who, fumbling for the C major chord, produced
something like the following:

Beethoven used this figure for the “Credo” of his first mass, which
he chanced to be composing at the time.
The name-day of Princess Esterhazy, née Princess Marie von
Liechtenstein, for which Beethoven promises in the letter above
given to have the Mass ready, was the 8th of September. In the
years when this date did not fall upon a Sunday it was the custom at
Eisenstadt to celebrate it on the first Sunday following. In 1807 the
8th fell on a Tuesday and the first performance of Beethoven’s Mass,
therefore, took place on the 13th. Haydn, as Pohl informs us, had
written his masses for this day and had gone to Eisenstadt from
Vienna to conduct their performance. So Beethoven now; who
seems to have had his troubles with the singers here as in Vienna, if
one may found such an opinion upon an energetic note of Prince
Esterhazy copied and printed by Pohl. In this note, which is dated
September 12, 1807, the Prince calls upon his vice-chapelmaster,
Johann Fuchs, to explain why the singers in his employ were not
always on hand at his musical affairs. He had heard on that day with
displeasure that at the rehearsal of Beethoven’s Mass only one of the
five contraltos was present, and he stringently commanded all the
singers and instrumentalists in his service to be on hand at the
performance of the mass on the following day.
The Mass was produced on the next day—the 13th.
“It was the custom at this court,” says Schindler, Ill Feeling between
Beethoven and
that after the religious service the local as well as Hummel
foreign musical notabilities met in the chambers of
the Prince for the purpose of conversing with him about the works
which had been performed. When Beethoven entered the room, the
Prince turned to him with the question: “But, my dear Beethoven,
what is this that you have done again?” The impression made by this
singular question, which was probably followed by other critical
remarks, was the more painful on our artist because he saw the
chapelmaster standing near the Prince laugh. Thinking that he was
being ridiculed, nothing could keep him at the place where his work
had been so misunderstood and besides, as he thought, where a
brother in art had rejoiced over his discomfiture. He left Eisenstadt
the same day.
The laughing chapelmaster was J. N. Hummel, who had been called
to the post in 1804 in place of Haydn, recently pensioned because of
his infirmities, due to old age. Schindler continues:
Thence dates the falling-out with Hummel, between whom and
Beethoven there never existed a real intimate friendship.
Unfortunately they never came to an explanation which might have
disclosed that the unlucky laugh was not directed at Beethoven, but
at the singular manner in which the Prince had criticized the mass
(in which there is still much that might be complained of). But there
were other things which fed the hate of Beethoven. One of these
was that the two had an inclination for the same girl; the other, the
tendency which Hummel had first introduced not only in pianoforte
playing but also composition.... Not until the last days of Beethoven,
post tot discrimina rerum, was the cloud which had settled between
the two artists dispelled.
In the earlier editions of his book, Schindler gives a still gloomier
tinge to the story:
His hatred of Hummel because of this (the laugh after the mass)
was so deeply rooted that I know of no second one like it in his
entire history. After the lapse of 14 years he told me the story with a
bitterness as if it had happened the day before. But this dark cloud
was dissipated by the strength of his spirit, and this would have
happened much earlier had Hummel approached him in a friendly
manner instead of always holding himself aloof.
That Schindler heard Beethoven speak of the occurrence in
Eisenstadt, fourteen years thereafter, with “great bitterness” is not to
be doubted; but this does not prove the existence of so lasting and
deep a hatred towards Hummel as is asserted. That he was
dissatisfied with Hummel’s later course as pianist and composer is
most probable, and hardly needs Schindler’s testimony; but it is not
so with other statements of his; and facts have come to light since
his book appeared (1840) which he could not well have known, but
which leave little doubt that he was greatly mistaken in his view of
the relations between the two men. That something very like an
“intimate friendship” had characterized their intercourse, the reader
already knows; and that, three or four years later, they were again
friendly, if not intimate, will in due time appear. As to the girl whom
both loved, but who favored Hummel, if Schindler refers to the sister
of Röckel—afterwards the wife of Hummel—it is known from Röckel
himself that there is nothing in the story. If, on the other hand, he
had in mind a ludicrous anecdote—not quite fit to be printed—the
“wife of a citizen,” who plays the third rôle in the comedy, was not of
such a character as to cause any lasting ill blood between the rivals
for her passing favor.
In short, while we accept the Eisenstadt anecdote, as being
originally derived from Beethoven himself, we must view all that
Schindler adds in connection with it with a certain amount of distrust
and doubt—if not reject it altogether—as a new illustration of his
proneness to accept without examination old impressions for
established facts.
This year is remarkable not only in Beethoven’s life, but in the
history of music, as that in which was completed the C minor
Symphony. This wondrous work was no sudden inspiration. Themes
for the Allegro, Andante and Scherzo are found in sketchbooks
belonging, at the very latest, to the years 1800 and 1801. There are
studies also preserved, which show that Beethoven wrought upon it
while engaged on “Fidelio” and the Pianoforte Concerto in G—that is,
in 1804-6, when, as before noted, he laid it aside for the
composition of the fourth, in B-flat major. That is all that is known of
the rise and progress of this famous symphony, except that it was
completed this year in the composer’s favorite haunts about
Heiligenstadt.[52]
In the “Journal des Luxus” of January, 1808, there appeared a letter
in which it was stated that “Beethoven’s opera ‘Fidelio,’ which despite
all contradictory reports has extraordinary beauties, is to be
performed in Prague in the near future with a new overture.” The
composer was also said to have “already begun a second mass.” Of
this mass we hear nothing more, but there was a foundation of fact
in the other item of news. Guardasoni had for some time kept alive
the Italian opera in Prague, only because his contract required it. It
had sunk so low in the esteem of the public, that performances were
actually given to audiences of less than twenty persons in the
parterre—the boxes and galleries being empty in proportion. That
manager died early in 1806, and the Bohemian States immediately
raised Carl Liebich from his position of stage-manager of the German
drama to that of General Director, with instructions to dismiss the
Italian and engage a German operatic company. Such a change
required time; and not until April 24th, 1807, did the Italians make
their last appearance, selecting for the occasion Mozart’s “Clemenza
di Tito”—originally composed for that stage. On the 2d of May the
new German opera opened with Cherubini’s “Faniska.”
Beethoven, in view of his relations to the Bohemian nobles, naturally
expected, and seems to have had the promise, that his “Fidelio”
should be brought out there as well as its rival, and, as Seyfried
expresses it, “planned a new and less difficult overture for the
Prague theatre.” This was the composition published in 1832 with
the title: “Overture in C, composed in the year 1805, for the opera
‘Leonore’ by Ludwig van Beethoven”—an erroneous date, which
continued current and unchallenged for nearly forty years.
Schindler’s story—that it was tried at Prince Lichnowsky’s and laid
aside as inadequate to the subject—was therefore based on
misinformation; but that it was played either at Lichnowsky’s or
Lobkowitz’s is very probable, and, if so, it may well have made but a
tame and feeble impression on auditors who had heard the glorious
“Leonore” Overture the year before. A tragical and lamentable
consequence of establishing the true date of Op. 138—of the
discovery that the supposed No. I is really No. III of the “Leonore-
Fidelio” overtures—is this; that so much eloquent dissertation on the
astonishing development of Beethoven’s powers as exhibited in his
progress from No. I to No. III, has lost its basis, and all the fine
writing on this topic is, at a blow, made ridiculous and absurd! As to
the performance of “Fidelio” at Prague, Beethoven was disappointed.
It was not given. Another paragraph from the “Journal des Luxus,
etc.” (November, 1806) gives the only satisfactory notice, known to
us, of the origin of one of Beethoven’s minor but well-known
compositions.
A bit of musical pleasantry (says the journal last
mentioned) recently gave rise to a competition “In Questa Tomba
Oscura”
amongst a number of famous composers. Countess
Rzewuska[53] improvised an aria at the pianoforte; the poet Carpani
at once improvised a text for it. He imagined a lover who had died of
grief because of the indifference of his ladylove; she, repenting of
her hard-heartedness, bedews the grave; and now the shade calls to
her:

In questa tomba oscura

Lasciami riposar;
Quando viveva, ingrata,
Dovevi a me pensar.

Lascia che l’ombra ignude

Godansi pace almen,
E non bagnar mie ceneri
D’inutile velen.

These words have been set by Paër, Salieri, Weigl, Zingarelli,

Cherubini, Asioli and other great masters and amateurs. Zingarelli
alone provided ten compositions of them; in all about fifty have been
collected and the poet purposes to give them to the public in a
volume.
The number of the compositions was increased to sixty-three, and
they were published in 1808, the last (No. 63) being by Beethoven.
This was by no means considered the best at the time, although it
alone now survives.
Though disappointed in December, as he had been
in March, in the hope of obtaining the use of a The Publications of
the Year 1807
theatre for a concert, Beethoven was not thereby
prevented from coming prominently before the public as composer
and director. It was on this wise: The want of better opportunities to
hear good symphony music well performed, than Schuppanzigh’s
Concerts—which were also confined to the summer months—and the
occasional hastily arranged “Academies” of composers and virtuosos,
afforded, induced a number of music-lovers early in the winter to
form an institute under the modest title: “Concert of Music-Lovers”
(Liebhaber-Concert). Says the “Wiener Vaterländische Blätter” of
May 27, 1808: “An orchestra was organized, whose members were
chosen from the best of the local music-lovers (dilettanti). A few
wind-instruments only—French horns, trumpets, etc., were drafted
from the Vienna theatres.... The audiences were composed
exclusively of the nobility of the town and foreigners of note, and
among these classes the preference was given to the cognoscenti
and amateurs.” The hall “zur Mehlgrube,” which was first engaged,
proved to be too small, and the concerts were transferred to the hall
of the University, where “in twenty meetings symphonies, overtures,
concertos and vocal pieces were performed zealously and
affectionately and received with general approval.” “Banker Häring
was a director in the earlier concerts but gave way to Clement
‘because of disagreements.’” The works of Beethoven reported as
having been performed in these concerts, are the Symphony in D (in
the first concert), the overture to “Prometheus” in November, the
“Eroica” Symphony and “Coriolan” Overture in December, and about
New Year the Fourth Symphony in B-flat, which also on the 15th of
November had been played in the Burgtheater at a concert for the
public charities. Most, if not all of these works were directed by their
composer. The works ascertained as belonging to this year are: (1)
The transcription of the Violin Concerto for Pianoforte, made (as
Clementi’s letter to Collard says) at Clementi’s request; (2) the
overture to “Coriolan”; (3) the Mass in C;[54] (4) the so-called
“Leonore” Overture, No. 1, published as Op. 138; (5) the Symphony
in C minor; (6) the Arietta, “In questa tomba.” The original
publications of the year were few, viz., (1) “LIVe Sonata” for
Pianoforte, Op. 57, dedicated to Count Brunswick, advertised in the
“Wiener Zeitung” of February 18, by the Kunst- und Industrie-
Comptoir; (2) Thirty-two Variations in C minor, advertised by the
same firm on April 29; (3) Concerto concertant for Pianoforte, Violin
and Violoncello, Op. 56, dedicated to Prince Lobkowitz, advertised in
the “Wiener Zeitung” on July 1.
The following advertisements are evidence of the great and
increasing popularity of Beethoven’s name: On March 21, Traeg
announces 12 Écossaises and 12 Waltzes for two violins and bass (2
flutes, 2 horns ad lib.); also for pianoforte; other works are being
arranged; on April 20, the Kunst- und Industrie-Comptoir announces
an arrangement of the “Eroica” Symphony for pianoforte, violin, viola
and violoncello; on May 27 (Artaria), a Sonata for Pianoforte and
Violoncello, Op. 64, transcribed from Op. 3; on June 13 (Traeg), the
Symphony in D major arranged by Ries as a Quintet with double-
bass, flute, 2 horns ad lib.; on September 12 (the Chemical Printing
Works), a Polonaise, Op. 8, for two violins and for violin and guitar.
 Chapter VII
The Year 1808—Beethoven’s Brother Johann—Plans for New Operas
—The “Pastoral Symphony” and “Choral Fantasia”—A Call to Cassel—
Appreciation in Vienna.
The history of the year 1808 must be preceded by
the following letter to Gleichenstein: Slanders against
Johann van
Dear good Gleichenstein: Beethoven

Please be so kind as to give this to the copyist to-morrow—it

concerns the symphony as you see—in case he is not through with
the quartet to-morrow, take it away and deliver it at the
Industriecomptoir.... You may say to my brother that I shall certainly
not write to him again. I know the cause, it is this, because he has
lent me money and spent some on my account he is already
concerned, I know my brothers, since I cannot yet pay it back to
him, and the other probably who is filled with the spirit of revenge
against me and him too—it were best if I were to collect the whole
1500 florins (from the Industriecomptoir) and pay him with it, then
the matter will be at an end—heaven forefend that I should be
obliged to receive benefactions from my brothers.[55]
Beethoven.
Of all the known letters of Beethoven, perhaps no one is so much to
be regretted as this, written near the end of 1807, just when the
contracts with the Kunst- und Industrie-Comptoir, and Simrock—he
had received nothing as yet on the Clementi contract—made his
pecuniary resources abundant, doubtless increased by a handsome
honorarium out of the receipts of the Liebhaber Concerts. True, the
letter was intended for Gleichenstein’s eye alone; still it is sad to
know that even in a moment of spleen or anger and in the privacy of
intimate friendship, the great master could so far forget his own
dignity, and write thus abusively of his brother Johann, whose claim
was just and whose future career was dependent upon its payment
at this time.
The case, in few words, was this:—Eleonore Ordley, sole heir of her
sister, Theresia Tiller, was, in the autumn of 1807, seeking a
purchaser for the house and “registered apothecary shop” which,
until 1872, still existed directly between the market-place and the
bridge at Linz on the Danube, and was willing to dispose of them on
such terms of payment, as to render it possible even for Johann van
Beethoven with his slender means to become their owner. “I know
my brothers,” writes Beethoven. His brothers also knew him; and
Johann had every reason to fear that if he did not secure his debt
now when his brother’s means were abundant, he might at the crisis
of his negotiation find himself penniless. His demand was too just to
be resisted and Gleichenstein evidently drew the money from the
Kunst- und Industrie-Comptoir and paid it; for on the 13th of March,
1808, the contract of sale was signed at Vienna. By the terms of the
contract which fixed the price at 25,000 florins, the vendee agreed
to assume incumbrances on the property amounting to 12,600
florins, pay 10,400 florins in cash and 5% interest on 2,000 florins to
the vendor during her life, and to be in Linz and take possession of
the property on or before March 20, i. e., within a week after the
signing of the contract.
The expenses incurred in the negotiations, in his journey to Linz,
and in taking possession, left the indigent purchaser barely funds
sufficient to make his first payment and ratify the contract; in fact,
he had only 300 florins left. The profits of his shop and the rents of
his house were so small, that Johann was almost at his wit’s end
how to meet his next engagements. He sold the iron gratings of the
windows—but they produced too little to carry him through. It was a
comical piece of good luck for him that the jars and pots upon his
shelves were of pure, solid English tin—a metal which Napoleon’s
non-intercourse decrees fulminated against England had just then
raised enormously in price. The cunning apothecary sold his tin,
furnished his shop with earthenware, and met his payments with the
profits of the transaction. But it is an ill wind that blows nobody any
good; the reverses of the Austrian arms in April, 1809, opened the
road for the French armies to Linz, and gave Apothecary Beethoven
an opportunity to make large contracts for the supply of medicines
to the enemy’s commissariat, which not only relieved him in his
present necessities but laid the foundation for his subsequent
moderate fortune.
This concise record of facts effectually disposes of the current errors,
which are, first: that about 1802-3 Beethoven established his brother
in Linz as apothecary, advancing to him the necessary capital;
second: that, through his personal influence, he obtained for Johann
profitable contracts with the Austrian Commissariat for medicines—
which contracts were the basis of his subsequent prosperity; third:
that consequently, in obtaining monies from his brother, Beethoven
was only sharing in the profits on capital furnished by himself; and,
fourth: that hence, Johann’s urgent request for payment in 1807 was
an exhibition of vile selfishness and base ingratitude! All this is the
exact reverse of the truth.
No other performances of Beethoven’s works at the Liebhaber
Concerts, than those before enumerated, are reported; perhaps
none were given, for reasons indicated in a letter from Stephan von
Breuning to Wegeler, written in March, 1808: “Beethoven came near
losing a finger by a Panaritium [felon], but he is again in good
health. He escaped a great misfortune, which, added to his
deafness, would have completely ruined his good humor, which, as it
is, is of rare occurrence.”
The series of concerts closed with the famous one of March 27th, at
which in honor of Haydn, whose 76th birthday fell on the 31st, his
“Creation” with Carpani’s Italian text was given. It is pleasant to
know that Beethoven was one of those who, “with members of the
high nobility,” stood at the door of the hall of the university to
receive the venerable guest on his arrival there in Prince Esterhazy’s
coach, and who accompanied him as “sitting in an armchair he was
carried, lifted high, and on his entrance into the hall was received
with the sound of trumpets and drums by the numerous gathering
and greeted with joyous shouts of ‘Long live Haydn!’”
Some pains have been taken in other chapters to show that the
want of taste and appreciation so often alleged for the works of
Beethoven at Vienna is a mistake. On the contrary, generally in the
concerts of those years, whenever an orchestra equal to the task
was engaged, few as his published orchestral compositions then
were, they are as often to be found on the programmes as those of
Mozart or even Haydn; none were more likely to fill the house. Thus,
immediately after the close of the Liebhaber Concerts, Sebastian
Meier’s annual benefit in the Theater-an-der-Wien opened with the
“Sinfonia Eroica.” This was on Monday evening, April 11. Two days
after (13th) the Charity Institute’s Concert in the Burg Theatre
offered a programme of six numbers; No. 1 was Beethoven’s Fourth
Symphony in B-flat; No. 5, one of his Pianoforte Concertos, played
by Friedrich Stein; and No. 6, the “Coriolan” Overture—all directed
by the composer; and, at a benefit concert in May, in the
Augartensaal, occurred the first known public performance of the
Triple Concerto, Op. 56.
The once famous musical wonder-child, Wilhelm
Rust, of Dessau, at the time a young man of some Rust’s Meetings
with the Composer
twenty-two years, had come to Vienna in 1807, and
was now supporting himself by giving “children instructions in
reading and elementary natural science.” In a letter to his “best
sister, Jette,” dated Haking (a village near Vienna), July 9, 1808, he
wrote of Beethoven.
You want much to hear something about Beethoven; unfortunately I
must say first of all that it has not been possible for me to get
intimately acquainted with him. What else I know I will tell you now:
He is as original and singular as a man as are his compositions. On
the other hand he is also very childlike and certainly very sincere. He
is a great lover of truth and in this goes too far very often; for he
never flatters and therefore makes many enemies. A good fellow
played for him, and when he was finished Beethoven said to him:
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com