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

(2004), Weiner (1993), Berendt (1977), and Kreidler (1972) engaged us on the
significance of Pablo, his ties with Mozart and 'Die Unsterblichen', and the
implications on an aesthetic level (see Chapter 3, section 4).
The first section of the present chapter, then, discusses the influence of music
on Hesse's language and explores the close relation between images and sounds in
his works. The second section (2.2) considers the extent to which his work imitates
musical forms such as the theme and variations (2.3) and the technique of the
leitmotif (2.4). The sonata form and the counterpoint technique, their literary and
historical implications, and their bearing on Hesse's thought, are the focus of 2.5. The
chapter draws to a close with a discussion of Hesse's contradictory statements on the
nature of music (2.5.1).
2.1 A matter of senses
As a representative document of the eighteenth century, reflecting the need for clear-
cut categorizations, Lessing's Laokoon (1766) distinguishes between writing and
painting, confining them to separate domains, the temporal and the visual
respectively. The nineteenth century was to reverse that attitude and promote the
collaboration and contamination across different artistic fields, as mirrored in
Wagner's elaboration of the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk in the second half of the
century. 6 One of the consequences of this new cultural mileu is the rise to
prominence of synesthesia among the figures of speech in literary texts of the period.
The use of synesthesia became very fashionable in nineteenth-century
European literature. The German romanticists, Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann in
particular, were early experimenters with the wide associative range of
synesthetic possibilities. This trend was further intensified by Wordsworth,
Shelley, and Keats in England and was brought to formal perfection by the
French symbolists. (Scher 1968,166)
6 'Wagner believed in the absolute oneness of drama and music that the two are organically connected
expressions of a single dramatic idea. Poetry, scenic design, staging, action, and music work together to form
what he called a Gesamtkunstwerk' (Grout, 625).
39