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

conspicuous and musically successful work can today be viewed historically
as the first step on the way toward new systems of harmony that marked the
development of music after 1890. The evolution of harmonic style from
Bruckner, Mahler, Reger, and Strauss to Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and later
twelve-tone composers can be traced back to the Tristan idiom. 50 (Grout, 752)
The originality of the finale of Der Steppenwolf within Hesse's literary production and
its point of convergence with the modernity expressed by Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
rests on Hesse's being, as Ziolkowski puts it, 'no longer romantic and not yet an
existentialist' (1965, 349). It is therefore necessary to outline the differences and
similarities underlying Romanticism and Existentialism and identify their
consequences for Hesse before we expound on the analogy between the finale of
Hesse's novel and the formal elements of Wagner's opera.51
The belief in a transcendent unity (e.g. between nature and spirit), as captured
by Cardinal, is the fundamental trait of Romanticism:
Romanticism is rooted in a sense of the rift between the actual and the ideal.
Its starting-point is the desire for something other than what is immediately
available, a desire for an alternative which will completely reverse that which
is. 52 (28)
As opposed to the former, Existentialism, as Kaufmann points out, faces up to the
chaos of a meaningless reality and rejects any conviction in a superior ideal or unity:
'Individuality is not retouched, idealized, or holy; it is wretched and revolting, and
yet, for all its misery, the highest good' (12). Both the Existentialist and Romantic
approaches lay great importance on individuality and on the concept of identity (see
Lange 1970,17). Existentialism, like Romanticism, is grounded in what the Romantics
felt as the gap between ideal and real which, with a little shift in emphasis, is now
50 'Tristan is a peculiar case: it begins in A minor and ends in B major, so that its tonality of E (which actually is
heard very little in the score) is, as it were, polarized, held between its subdominant and dominant' (Grout, 750).
51 As set out in Chapter 1 (see note 6), we will follow Ziolkowski's convention of referring to Romanticism, as a
historical literary movement, with capital initial, and to typological romanticism, as an attitude of mind, with
lower case initial.
52 The Romantic disaffection with the here and now leads authors to turn their attention to exotic places and
distant temporal dimensions: 'the Romantic may turn from the disappointments of the present to seek solace in
dreams of the past: the Europe of medieval Christendom, of the Crusades, of Renaissance art, offers a wide
scope. An alternative dream is that of a future Golden Age when men will live in perfect harmony with their
surroundings. These dreams of another and better time run parallel to the dream of another place. This can be an
irrecoverable site of childhood, as in Eichendorff s dreams of the castle in the forest where he was born, or
exotic lands, the Orient, Italy' (Cardinal, 28).
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