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

eproducing the soloist's frenzy, increases and, in a sort of crescendo, becomes
progressively richer in adjectival phrases, the syntax being conspicuously
disjunctive:
bald wiegenden, bald triumphal, emporsteigenden, bald bacchantisch
bafiwarts abstiirzenden Passagen, Schwungen und Fliigen das scheinbar
Uniiberbietbare, ja Unmogliche an virtuoser Ekstase zu erleben. (Musik, 110)
Hesse illustrates his poetic and aesthetic intentions in a letter of October 1947:
[D]afi ich dennoch nach Jahren mir einmal wieder einen kleinen literarischen
Spafi gegonnt habe, das Blatt iiber die Kadenz, wundert mich selber. Natiirlich
habe ich musiktechnisch dariiber nichts Neues oder Eigenes zu sagen,
sondern das Blatt ist der Versuch, in einem einzigen, ubermutig langen und
koloraturreichen Prosasatz die Kadenz nicht nur zu beschreiben, sondern
gewissermafien nachzuahmen. (Musik, 185)
The piece clearly shows that, although in the form of a 'literarische[r] Spafi', Hesse
deliberately seeks to imitate a music pattern (the cadenza). Investigating the
structural influences of music on at least some of his works can consequently be seen
as legitimate and justified. This path is fascinating as well as perilous and full of
pitfalls, against which Rene Wellek and Austin Warren warn in their Theory of
literature:
[I]t is hard to see why repetitive motifs or a certain contrasting and balancing
of moods, though by avowed intention imitative of musical composition, are
not essentially the familiar literary devices of recurrence, contrast, and the like
which are common to all the arts. (127)
Before drawing our conclusions on opportunity and scope of an investigation of the
structural correspondences between musical forms and Hesse's writing, another
aspect claims our attention at this point. In a short story of 1906, 'Eine Senate' (SW 6,
455-60), a piano sonata, to which the title refers and which is central to the story, is
ascribed to Max Reger. However, as Gianino notes, Reger's vast output does not
include any piano sonatas (see Gianino, 22). 24 It is therefore surprising that Hesse,
who does not usually provide specific information or technical details when he
writes about music, fails to be accurate at the very moment he makes a concrete
24 Among Reger's major works are two organ sonatas, nine violin sonatas and seven sonatas for solo violin, three
cello sonatas, three clarinet sonatas, and four piano sonatinas (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music).
46