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

an appeal against war, expresses his moral slant and his view on music and literature
as ethical means. Field notes:
The title of Hesse's first wartime essay evoked the words of Schiller and the
music of Beethoven to protest against the war as a 'taking back' of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony with its call to brotherly love 'seid umschlungen,
Millionen! /27 (Field, Chapter IV, online)
Moreover, the meaning of life and music are linked in an entry of Hesse's diary of
1920-1921; an early summer day awakens his lust for life after several weeks spent in
bed because of the cold weather, and he records: 'MOZART. Das bedeutet: die Welt
hat einen Sinn, und er ist in uns spiirbar im Gleichnis der Musik' (SW 11, 629). A
similar need for meaning emerges in his last major work, Das Glasperlenspiel, where
'the notion of value is one of the central ideas in [the] novel' (Bishop, 215). 28 As noted
in Chapter 1 (section 3), Hesse claims that the world is in need of morality: 'Die Welt
braucht, das haben wir erlebt, Moral notiger als Gescheit' (letter of 1947, Musik, 184).
For Hesse, art conveys meanings and gives meaning to life. Yet what is the
meaning and value he ascribes to art and, more specifically, to music? In this
connection, Green helpfully observes:
It is almost universally agreed that if a composition in any medium deserves
to be called a 'work of art' it has some meaning. The first major difference of
opinion arises between those who insist that its meaning be restricted to its
intrinsically satisfying sensuous pattern, and those who believe that this
pattern also possesses an additional meaning. We can conveniently label those
who hold the first of these views the 'formalists', those who hold the second,
the 'expressionists'. (308)
Hesse certainly falls into the second 'category' since, to him, the work of artists who
content themselves with the formal beauty of their creation is largely devoid of
artistic significance. Although Hesse was a music lover who, especially in the later
part of his career (see previous section), delved into technicalities, his interest in
music was for the most part connected to the moral goal he ascribed to it. The more
27 Hesse's reference to Schiller's words and, by implication, to Beethoven's music constitutes a further point of
divergence with the work of Mann (see previous section and note 27), whose 'LeverkUhn, with his Dr. Fausti
Weheklag, composes an anti-Beethoven work cunningly inserting pessimism in place of Beethoven's soaring
optimism' (Field, Chapter IV, online).
2* Knecht's personality symbolizes 'der alte Wettstreit zwischen Asthetisch und Ethisch' (Gla, 141).
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