HERMANN HESSE AND THE DIALECTICS OF TIME Salvatore C. P. ...

Jahren war ich nicht mehr in dem scheufilichen und unwiirdigen Zustand gewesen,
dafi ich die Zeit furchtete und verlegen war, wie ich sie umbringe' (SW 7, 232).2
What is common in both Hesse's work and private documents, of any period
is, however, his dialectical response to temporality. Like his protagonists, Hesse is
torn between the urge to escape the reality of everyday life-along with his
particularly problematic historical context-and the impulse to participate in the
minutiae of existence.
Within Hesse's dialectical framework, it is clear that music assumes a crucial
position. Both the sonata form and the counterpoint technique, with their structural
emphasis on the mutual dependence between themes (sonata form) and between
subject and countersubject (counterpoint) foster Hesse's 'thinking in polarities' and
illustrate two sides of his dialectics: while the sonata form emphasises the
antagonistic complementarity of the themes, the counterpoint brings out the
concordant interplay between subject and countersubject as well as the harmonious
coalescence of the various voices. Moreover, the simultaneity underlying the
dynamics of counterpoint is, for Hesse, suggestive of the eternal (see below).
Hesse's dialectics is also at play when he polarizes the past and present of
music history. The music he regards as 'klassisch' constitutes a temporal niche, a
retreat outside his time and, for Hesse, almost outside time. Through classical music,
Hesse measures the value of contemporary composers such as Max Reger, Ferruccio
Busoni, Bela Bartok, as well as the idiom of jazz and its for him problematic
aesthetic significance.
The dualism of lofty intellectualism and childlike enthusiasm for life is a
further facet of Hesse's dialectics of time in addition to being a component of Hesse's
relation to music. The veneration of the transcendental attributes of classical music,
as expressed in his works, from Hermann Lauscher to Das Glasperlenspiel, is the
counterpart of his attitude towards less reflective forms of musical expression such as
whistling and dance (e.g. Tito's 'Opfertanz').3
2 See also the discussion in the Introduction to this thesis.
3 Harry Haller also brings out the polarization ofmelos (music) and logos (words) as a distinctive feature of
German thought, at least since Romanticism, as Chapter 2 sought to emphasize.
198