The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

by E. T. A. Hoffmann

  89. respectus parentelae: Latin, ‘respect for one’s family’.

  90. the death of my mother: Hoffmann’s mother (1748–96) had separated from his father in 1778. She returned to her parental home with Hoffmann, her younger son; her elder son remained with his father. Since E. T. A. Hoffmann was twenty years old when she died, his own biography here diverges slightly from Kreisler’s.

  91. Iffland: August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814), a prominent man of the theatre in Germany at this period, was noted as an actor, director and playwright. He wrote over sixty dramas of a kind very popular at the time, dealing with tense emotional situations within family relationships.

  92. I didn’t go to school: The early careers of Hoffmann and Kreisler again diverge here, since Hoffmann did go to school in his native town of Königsberg, and it was at this school that he made friends with Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1775–1843), nephew of the well-known writer of the same name.

  93. Rousseau’s Confessions: Les Confessions, by the Swiss philosopher, writer and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), an autobiographical work which had a remarkable influence on the imagination of Romantic writers throughout Europe. In fact the passage from Book 7 of the Confessions, describing Rousseau’s decision to compose an opera, tells of an incident when he was not a boy, but was thirty years old, and did have some musical education. He was not very successful with his actual operas, but the French opéra comique was much influenced by his intermède (a form modelled on the Italian intermezzo) entitled Le devin du village, and his spoken monodrama to music (most of it composed by Coignet) entitled Pygmalion gave rise to the ‘melodrama’ musical genre. He composed songs, motets and instrumental pieces, and wrote a dictionary of music.

  94. ‘I loved none but Ismene…’: ‘Ich liebt’ nur Ismene’, a popular song of the early 18th century.

  95. Uncle Ow: In fact the first names of Hoffmann’s uncle were Otto Wilhelm. The German original has his nickname as der O-weh-Onkel, ‘the O Woe Uncle’, from the phonetic pronunciation of the letter w in German as [ve], which is also the pronunciation of weh = ‘woe!’.

  96. my uncle’s younger brother: The parallels between Hoffmann and Kreisler continue. Johann Ludwig Doerffer was a law officer in the Prussian civil service, into which his nephew followed him, pursuing a legal career except for a nine-year period during which he tried to support himself by music and music criticism.

  PART II: MY YOUTHFUL EXPERIENCES

  1. I Too was in Arcadia: From the famous Latin tag Et in Arcadia ego, often used as an inscription on tombs and shown in that context in various paintings, for instance by Poussin and by Reynolds. It is not known who first coined the phrase, which has usually been taken to refer to the occupant of the tomb, as Hoffmann suggests in his translation of the Latin into German, Auch ich war in Arkadien. However, another interpretation holds that because of the frequent connection with funerary inscriptions the ‘I’ should be taken as a personification of Death. The term Arcadia, or sometimes in English Arcady, which is the real name of a mountainous part of the Peloponnese, has also been used for centuries as a symbol of a lost classical Golden Age of pastoral simplicity and contentment, as in the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th-century prose romance The Arcadia. Both Goethe and Schiller made use of the Latin tag.

  2. as it says in that tragedy: Hamlet (II.ii).

  3. Hic jacet!: Latin, ‘here lies’.

  4. a well-known humorist: Christian Ludwig Liscow (1701–60), a writer of satires. It has been pointed out that Master Abraham’s surname of Liscov contains five letters from the name of Hoffmann’s own boyhood music teacher, an organist called Podbielsky, and in the same way the name of Kreisler’s birthplace Göniönesmühl contains five letters from the name of Hoffmann’s native town of Königsberg.

  5. a roquelaure: A man’s knee-length cloak with a cape collar, called after its first wearer Antoine-Gaston, duc de Roquelaure (1656–1738), and fashionable in the 18th century.

  6. a man… whom the laws of the land permit to carry a dagger: Not for self-defence but as a sign of social status.

  7. positive: A small movable or chamber organ, i.e. one that can be ‘put in position’. In English the word also refers to a manual from such an organ incorporated into a larger instrument.

  8. Casparini: A well-known German organ-builder who lived from 1624 to 1706 and whose real name was Caspar.

  9. Misericordias domini cantabo: ‘I will sing the mercy of the Lord.’

  10. cantilena: A sustained lyrical vocal line, or a similar passage of instrumental music.

  11. gros de Tours waistcoat: A waistcoat made of silk from Tours.

  12. a mighty crowned Colossus: Napoleon, who invaded various German territories in the course of the Napoleonic Wars.

  13. Kreisler was one of these: There are further possible parallels between the careers of Hoffmann and his hero here. At the time of the defeat of Prussia by the French in 1806, Hoffmann was working for the Prussian administration in Warsaw, and was dismissed along with his colleagues. The next year he took up a musical appointment in Bamberg. However, a theory that he too had a relationship with a married woman around this time (Kreisler’s precise relations with Madame Benzon remain unclear because the novel was never finished) is based mainly on the claims of a writer who was extremely hostile to him, and cannot be substantiated.

  14. I recollected reading somewhere…: Murr has been reading Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, §7, where the philosopher formulates his famous Categorical Imperative: ‘Act in such a way that your personal maxims can at any time also be taken as the principle of a general law.’

  15. King Gottlieb’s bosom friend: In Tieck’s play on the subject of Puss in Boots. See Part I, note 56.

  16. Damon and Pylades… Damon and Pythias… Orestes: Ponto has his Greek mythology mixed up, and the well-read Murr sets him right. In classical legend, Damon and Pythias of Syracuse set an example as devoted friends; Pylades was the faithful friend of Orestes, and stood by him when he was pursued by the Furies after murdering his mother Clytemnestra in revenge for her own murder of his father Agamemnon.

  17. Herr von Kreisler: In his optimistic view of Kreisler’s possible high rank, the Prince credits him with the noble particle von, bestowed upon a person raised to the nobility, as when the famous writer Goethe became Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

  18. make him maître de plaisir or maître des spectacles: Alternative French titles for the court officer in charge of organizing lavish spectacular entertainments on the lines of those at Versailles. As we have seen earlier, Master Abraham is already carrying out the functions of such an officer at the court of Prince Irenaeus.

  19. a man of some rank: Probably an adventurer who called himself Alexander, Count Cagliostro, but whose real name was Giuseppe Balsamo (1743–95), and who claimed to be able to make gold by alchemy and conjure up spirits. He was known throughout Europe as a famous charlatan, was involved in the scandal of Marie Antoinette’s necklace in Paris, and was imprisoned and then deported from France.

  20. that mauvais sujet: French, ‘bad character, ne’er-do-well’.

  21. all his courtiers should be able to play the recorder: Cf. Hamlet (III.ii) where Hamlet addresses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: ‘O, the recorder. Let me see… Will you play upon this pipe?’

  22. a brave officer: Johann Gottfried Seumes (1763–1810), whose travel book Der Spaziergang nach Syrakus im Jahre 1802 (‘The Walk to Syracuse in the Year 1802’) Hoffmann read, according to his correspondence, in 1804; he may also have been reminded of the incident closer to the date of his writing Murr by a quotation from the work in Tieck’s fairy-tale play about Tom Thumb.

  23. Nannette Streicher: A famous piano-maker of the period. She had learnt her craft from her father Johann Stein, a famous German maker of keyboard instruments whose pianos were praised by Mozart. Nannette and her husband founded the piano-making firm of Streicher in Vienna in 1802. It continued in business for nearly a century.
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  24. recitative from Gluck’s Iphigenia in Aulis: Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide had its première in Paris in 1774. The recitative Hoffmann means is probably from Act 3, Sc. 6: ‘Dieux puissants que j’atteste…’

  25. Uncommonly sound characters… pigtails cut off: The fashion in hairdressing had changed, i.e., Hoffmann means conservative, conventional and prosperous people such as lawyers and doctors.

  26. Spontini: Gaspare Spontini (1774–1851), an operatic composer famous in his time, who spent twenty years working in Berlin, where his style of opera conflicted with the new German operas of Weber. He is chiefly remembered now for his opera La vestale, which had its première in Paris in 1807.

  27. ‘Ah che mi manca I’anima in si fatal momento’: ‘Ah, that my heart fails me at so fatal a moment.’ Sento = ‘I feel’; tormento = ‘torment’; Abbi pietade o cielo = ‘have mercy, O Heaven’; pena di morir = ‘pain of dying’. Hoffmann is making fun of the conventionality of language in this Italian duet, one he himself composed in 1812 and published in 1819: No. 6 from his Six Little Italian Duets for Soprano and Tenor.

  28. Is there no Cimarosa, no Paesiello: Domenico Cimarosa (1749–1801), and Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816), both of them Italian composers of melodious operas.

  29. fichu: A light triangular scarf knotted round the neck and shoulders.

  30. a Congreve rocket… maroons: The Congreve rocket, intended for military use, was called after its inventor Sir William Congreve (1772–1828), Comptroller of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich. A maroon was a kind of firework imitating the sound of a cannon shot.

  31. Paesiello’s Molinara: An opera by Paisiello (see note 28 above) originally entitled L’amor contrastato, when it received its première in Naples in 1789 (first performance in Rome, later that year, as L’amor contrastato, o sia La Molinarella). It was performed in Vienna and Dresden in 1790 as La Molinara. Hoffmann conducted the opera himself in 1813–14. A ritornello, as the name indicates, is a recurring musical passage in an aria or concerto. Arietta indicates a vocal solo rather shorter or slighter than a full-scale aria. La Rachelina molinarina: ‘Rachelina, the little maid of the mill’.

  32. the river Acheron: One of the rivers of the underworld Hades in classical mythology.

  33. the Italian buffi: The male singers in Italian comic opera or opera buffa.

  34. Cato: Either Marcus Porcius Cato ‘the Elder’ (234–149 BC) or his great-grandson of the same name, Cato ‘the Younger’ (95–46 bc), both of them men of strictly upright principles who sought to reform abuses in the Roman society of their time.

  35. Leydenjar: An early form of electric capacitor, consisting of a glass jar or bottle partly covered with tinfoil, and named after the city of Leyden in the Netherlands where it was invented in the mid-18th century.

  36. Gall and such natural historians: Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), a doctor and the inventor of phrenology, the study of the size and shape of the skull, which was widely believed in the 19th century to be a valid indication of character. It will be noticed that in Hoffmann’s time popular wisdom about the cat’s ability to find its way home was precisely the opposite of the notions entertained today, when there are many stories (almost none of them with any basis in scientific fact) about extraordinary feats of direction-finding by cats lost or abandoned far from their former homes.

  37. morning and evening papers… the elegant and liberal journals: References to the titles of various journals of the time; the Morgenblatt (‘Morning Journal’), the Abendzeitung (‘Evening Paper’), the Zeitung für die elegante Welt (‘Paper for the Elegant World’), Der Freimüthige oder Unterhaltungsblatt für gebildete, unbefangene Leser (‘The Independent or Entertaining Journal for Educated, Unbiased Readers’) and Der Freimüthige für Deutschland. Zeitblatt der Belehrung und Aufheiterung (‘The Independent for Germany. A Journal of Instruction and Amusement’).

  38. Lichtenberg… Hamann: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) was a satirical writer, particularly of ironic aphorisms. Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) was a writer known in his time as ‘The Mage of the North’ because of his cryptic style.

  39. iambic pentameters… Shakespeare and Schlegel: In the original German, Murr quotes directly from Romeo and Juliet (IV.iii), as translated by August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), whose translations of seventeen of Shakespeare’s plays are regarded as standard versions and indeed classics in Germany.

  40. the Thousand and One Nights: The speaker is referring to the various animal stories in the famous collection of traditional Oriental fairy-tales.

  41. Contentement: The French word for ‘contentment, satisfaction’ is used here as an expression of goodwill to someone who has just sneezed, instead of the usual German Gesundheit!, ‘Good health!’.

  42. Berganza: A story by the famous Spanish writer Cervantes contains a conversation between two dogs, Scipio and Berganza. In 1813 Hoffmann wrote a sequel continuing the conversation, entitled Nachricht von den neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza (‘News of the Latest Fate of the Dog Berganza’). This is the ‘recent and very fantastic book’ to which the speaker refers.

  43. a famous doctor… Schiller and his Wallenstein: The doctor was Carl Alexander Ferdinand Kluge (1782–1844), whose book Versuch einer Darstellung des animalischen Magnetismus als Heilmittel (‘Essay on an Account of Animal Magnetism as a Remedy’) appeared in 1811 and was famous at the time. In it, Kluge quotes from Schiller’s play Wallensteins Tod (‘The Death of Wallenstein’), the final part of a trilogy on the historical figure of Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland and Mecklenburg and an outstanding general in the Thirty Years War.

  44. the electrical fluid… Mina… experiments: The reference is to ideas of the nature of electricity at this time. The sparks sometimes produced by stroking a cat’s fur in the dark are actually the result of static electricity caused by friction of the hairs. For the account given by Murr’s mother of her tribulations at the hands of children and adults seeking to produce these sparks, see p. 35.

  45. Claude Lorrain… Berghem… Hackert: Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), real name Claude Gellée from Lorraine, one of the most famous of all landscape-painters, is often known simply as Claude. Nicolaes Pietersz Berghem (1620–83) was a Dutch painter of landscapes in the Italian style. Philipp Hackert (1737–1807) was a German painter very famous in his own time, but whose reputation faded after his death; he was friendly with Goethe, who wrote a biography of Hackert based on the painter’s own autobiographical notes.

  46. obsessed… that madness lay in wait for him: Kreisler is again echoing Hoffmann’s own thoughts, as recorded in his diary for 6 January 1811: ‘Why do I think of madness so often, sleeping or waking?’

  47. a tolerably amusing play: The comedy Ponce de Leon written in 1804 as an entry for a competition by Clemens Brentano (1778–1842).

  48. pars pro toto: Latin, ‘a part [standing] for the whole’.

  49. a princess or a baker’s daughter, so long as the latter isn’t an owl: A reference to mad Ophelia’s speech in Hamlet (IV.v): ‘They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.’ The reference is to a folk legend in which Jesus Christ came incognito to a baker’s, asking for bread; the baker’s daughter grudged her mother’s charity in giving it and was turned into an owl as punishment.

  50. a pure vestal fire: With reference to the Roman temple of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, whose priestesses, the vestal virgins, were vowed to chastity.

  51. lower or upper mordent… parlando: A lower mordent is a musical ornament in which the main note alternates rapidly only with the note a step below; an upper mordent has the main note alternating with the note above. The Italian direction parlando indicates a speech-like manner of singing.

  52. the sausage-cart: In German Wurst, or in full Wurstwagen. This was a kind of open vehicle with its front and back axles joined by a long stuffed and padded bar (the ‘sausage’) upon which several people could sit as if riding a horse. It was used for conveying a number of people
at once, e.g. soldiers or huntsmen, and also for transporting items such as hunting equipment.

  53. Romanic: Hoffmann probably means a North Italian dialect such as that spoken in Bergamo.

  54. one of Gozzi’s masqueraders: Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806), an Italian writer, was a proponent of the old commedia dell’arte and comedies in masquerade, where some of the characters spoke in Venetian dialect.

  55. fit to stab himself with the steak knife: An allusion to the notorious occasion on which Prince Condé’s steward Vatel committed suicide by stabbing himself to death when his master had invited Louis XIV to dinner, and the fish failed to arrive in time.

  56. weather harp: See Hoffmann’s own explanatory footnote on the next mention of this unusual instrument and Part I, note 14.

  57. a fatuitas, a stoliditas which Kluge describes: Fatuitas = ‘foolishness’; stoliditas = ‘simple-mindedness’. Hoffmann is probably here confusing C. A. F. Kluge (see Part II, note 43) with Johann Christian Reil, who says in his Rhapsodien über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (‘Rhapsodies on the Application of the Psychic Method of Curing Mental Disturbances’), published in 1803, that the feeble-minded ‘are as a rule contented, happy and well-disposed’.

  58. an astral lamp: An oil lamp with a shallow oil container, invented in 1809 and developed from the kind of oil lamp called an Argand lamp after its inventor the French physicist A. Argand (1755–1803).

  59. chevalier d’honneur: French, literally ‘knight of honour’, i.e. a lord-in-waiting accompanying a royal lady as her escort.

  60. Privy Councillor Meister of Göttingen: Alfred Ludwig Friedrich Meister (died 1788), who wrote a work actually entitled De veterum hydraulis (‘On the Water-Organ of the Ancients’). The water-organ, hydraulus or hydraulic organ was a pipe-organ played in classical times which used water-pressure to keep a constant flow of air to the pipes.

  61. Cagliostro: See Part II, note 19.