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

eference to a real composer. As noted in the previous section, Hesse was a music
lover if not a professional musician and, for part of his life, a regular concert-goer. It
is thus unlikely that he set out to write his short story ignoring that the piece of
music he would refer to did not feature among Reger's compositions. On these
grounds, we would discard the hypothesis of an inaccuracy on Hesse's part and
consider it more as an intentional distortion, which can be explained in the light of
two considerations. Firstly, the sonata as a form was, for reasons addressed below
(see section 2.4), particularly appealing to Hesse. Secondly, Reger generally disliked
programme music and, like Hesse, had a penchant for absolute music, particularly
for old musical forms (e.g. the fugue); he therefore embodied a music aesthetic
congenial to Hesse. In brief, the classical form of the sonata and the aesthetic
implications connected to Reger7s music serve as a symbol in Hesse's short story.
Similarly, in 'Orgelspiel' (1937, Musik, 27), 'Orgel' does not solely refer to the actual
instrument: 'sondern [die Orgel] ist Symbol fur die in vielen Generationen
aufgebaute »geistige« Kultur und Geistesmoral', as Hesse notes in a letter of July
1937 (Musik, 172). 25
The interplay of different sensory domains, as suggested in the previous
section, informs Hesse's writing on a linguistic level and, in part, also accounts for
Hesse's calling on images to transliterate music into words, the latter feature being
also determined by Hesse's limited command of theoretical aspects of music,
especially at the beginning of his career. The analysis of two late short pieces 'Ein
Satz iiber die Kadenz' (1947) and 'Dreistimmige Musik' (see 2.4), reveals that Hesse
occasionally seeks to imitate musical structures by means of his writing, at least from
the time he was occupied with the composition of Das Glasperlenspiel and seeks to
refine his competence in music through his nephew, Karl Isenberg. The artistic value
of the two pieces mentioned above is, however, limited and, in the case of 'Ein Satz
iiber die Kadenz', Hesse explicitly speaks of literary entertainment ('literarische[r]
25 Schneider strikes a similar chord when, in connection with Hesse's early poem 'Valse Brillante', composed
between 1899 and 1902, he notes: 'It appears to be of no importance to him [Hesse] that Chopin's "Valse
brillante" is expressed in an iambic meter rather than in the three-four dactylic beat that Novalis used more
"musically" in his poem "Walzer"' (376). Further considerations on 'Orgelspiel' are included in section 4 of
/"•Via «*£»•• < Chapter 5.
47