Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Höyng, Peter

Titel

For Heaven's Sake, I Will Have You Walk into the Dark: Grillparzer's Containment of Beethoven and the Ambivalence of Their Melusina Project

Ist Teil von

• Goethe yearbook, 2010, Vol.17 (1), p.275-302

Ort / Verlag

Rochester: North American Goethe Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]it is Lord Byron, "der Feind der Knechte,"5 who wishes to bond with Beethoven when the narrator has him speak the last lines: "Sieh dort dunkle Buchengänge, / Laß uns miteinander gehn!"6 On the whole, Grillparzer's assessment of Beethoven's legacy on the day of his death constitutes a surprisingly ambivalent sort of reverence: while in a semi-private act Grillparzer felt compelled to write a poem in which he imagines the deceased in an artists' heaven, his admiration is tempered by restraint. Whereas Beethoven states in one of his letters that "sobald das gefühl unß- eine [n] weg eröfnert, fort mit allen Regeln [sie] ," and thus he readily explores new aesthetic grounds by leaving conventional boundaries behind,52 Grillparzer leads his dramatis personae "zu einer Grenzüberschreitung,"50 only to return aesthetically to seemingly more secure ground. [...]to have Beethoven walk with the Romantic Byron into the darkness, at the very end of the poem, i.e., the border of the poem, is Grillparzer's effort to seek the dependable foundation of the established tradition.54 V Grillparzer delineates a philosophical treatment of the differences between music and poetry in his essay on Der Freischütz (1821). [...]Grillparzer's partial leaning towards Kantian aesthetics was not only outmoded vis-à-vis his contemporary authors and philosophers, but moreover by Beethoven's own concept of it and his actual music. [...]dreaming becomes a utensil of escapism but never a placeholder for a utopia.97 While dreams and reality are indeed rhetorically utilized as a chiasmus, dominant theme, and theatrical device, the libretto lacks, nevertheless, a consistency in regard to the most dreamed-of person, Melusina.