Simulacra of the Invisible: The Human Voice and Musical Instruments in German Romanticism

Abstract

As is well known, the importance of instrumental music in the aesthetics of German Romanticism was accompanied, in the musical practice of the time, by a development of the construction technique of musical instruments. In literature, too, the interest in instrumental mechanics can be found in various authors, and is linked to the fascination/demonization of technology in general. Instruments are more and more often provided with a voice that competes with the human one, sometimes as an imitation, sometimes as a kind of surpassing and enhancement. Particularly in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, a writer whose musical skills excelled on the professional level, the instrument and the human voice (the latter understood as an immediate manifestation of the soul) became the object of a series of exchanges, mutations and substitutions capable of creating a dense interweaving between artifice (or illusionism) and what is presented as ‘natural’. Particularly interesting are the cases of the violin in the short story Rat Krespel and of the Unsichtbares Mädchen  in the novel Kater Murr.