Performers: Judith Schmidt (soprano); Verena Schweizer (soprano); Thomas
Schulze (tenor); Klaus Lang (bass);
His father Christoph Ludwig Hoffmann (1736-97), Hofgerichts-Advokat (high court barrister) and later Justizkommissar (attorney-at-law) and Kriminalrat (counsellor in criminal law), married his cousin Lovisa Albertina Doerffer (1748-96); they lived apart after 1778, and Hoffmann stayed with his mother in the house of his grandmother. The two women lived in almost complete retirement in their rooms, and the boy’s education was directed by his uncle Otto Wilhelm Doerffer (1741-1811), with whom he shared a living-room and bedroom. Doerffer was well educated but unimaginative, mechanical and a strict disciplinarian; Hoffmann was quick to see his uncle’s faults and could never love or respect him, although he owed to him his earliest musical education and the lifelong habit of constant hard work. Hoffmann attended the Burgschule in Königsberg and became friends with Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1775-1843), later a West Prussian civil servant, whom he counted as his ‘most faithful and constant friend’; from Hippel comes the only reliable information about Hoffmann’s childhood, adolescence and early works. In keeping with the family tradition, Hoffmann was enrolled (unwillingly) in the faculty of law at Königsberg University (27 March 1792). At the same time he continued his studies in painting and was taught the piano by Carl Gottlieb Richter (1728-1809), thoroughbass and counterpoint by the Königsberg organist Christian Wilhelm Podbielski (1740-92) and (after Podbielski’s death) by the choirmaster Christian Otto Gladau (1770-1853), who had already been his violin teacher. Hoffmann completed his law studies in July 1795, and on 27 August 1795 he was appointed Auskultator (junior lawyer) by the Königsberg administration. After extricating himself from a painful love affair, in May 1796 he moved to Glogau, where Johann Ludwig Doerffer (1743-1803), his mother’s second brother, was a civil servant. There Hoffmann became engaged to his cousin Sophie Wilhelmine Doerffer (1775-1835) in 1798 (he broke off the relationship in 1802). Shortly after a journey to the Riesengebirge and Dresden he left Glogau with his uncle, who was moving to Berlin and who recommended Hoffmann, a Referendar (junior barrister) since 15 July 1798, for a similar position at the Berlin Kammergericht (Supreme Court). He enthusiastically attended Italian opera and the German Nationaltheater, made the acquaintance of B.A. Weber and took composition lessons from J.F. Reichardt. His earliest extant composition dates from this period: the three-act Singspiel Die Maske (completed in March 1799), to his own text. If the performances he saw in the Berlin theatres stimulated his musical creativity, his visits to art galleries decisively subdued his zeal as a painter. After passing his final law examination with distinction, he was appointed Assessor (assistant judge) at the high court in Posen (now Poznań) on 27 March 1800. There he wrote the Kantate zur Feier des neuen Jahrhunderts, the first of his compositions to be performed in public (New Year’s Eve, 1800). His setting of Goethe’s Singspiel Scherz, List und Rache also had its first performance in Posen; 18 years later Hoffmann still spoke warmly of this early work, whose score and parts had meanwhile been destroyed by fire.
Soon after breaking off his engagement to Sophie Doerffer, Hoffmann married Marianna Thekla Michaelina Rorer (1778-1859) on 26 July 1802. Earlier that year he had been appointed Regierungsrat (administrative adviser) and transferred to Płock in southern Prussia because of a well-founded suspicion that he had been drawing caricatures of authorities in the Posen garrison. His promising career was thus thwarted by an exile to provincial obscurity lasting until early 1804, during which time there could be no public performances of his music. He therefore attempted to have his compositions printed, and in May 1803 answered an advertisement by Nägeli, the publisher of the Répertoire des clavecinistes; under the pseudonym Giuseppo Dori he sent off a Fantasia in C minor, which met the publisher’s explicit demands for ‘a piano piece of large proportions, deviating from the usual sonata form and worked according to the rules of double counterpoint’. However, Nägeli rejected the piece, and a Piano Sonata in A sent to Schott in Mainz likewise failed. Hoffmann even entered a literary competition organized by Kotzebue, but his comedy Der Preis (which took as its subject the competition itself) brought him no prize money, only the judges’ commendation. A second approach to Nägeli in March 1804 with a piano sonata did not even meet with a reply, and his hope of financial independence through a legacy from his aunt Johanna Sophie Doerffer came to nothing. He did at least succeed in his constant efforts to get himself transferred from Płock, and in March 1804 he was sent to Warsaw. In the Polish capital Hoffmann the musician had to make a completely fresh start; nevertheless, he found conditions so favourable to his musical ambitions that he could dispense with the income brought by his official position. After only a year he had an opera successfully staged (Die lustigen Musikanten, with text by Brentano); he completed the D minor Mass begun in Płock, had a piano sonata published in a Polish music magazine and found, in the weekly concerts of the Ressource music society (of which he became vice-president), opportunities to try out new compositions on the public. He also conducted the society’s orchestra (which was of a sufficiently high standard to perform Beethoven’s first two symphonies) and took part in its concerts as a pianist and singer. Moreover, it must have been for the Ressource concerts that he wrote his Symphony in E , his Quintet for harp, two violins, viola and cello and the lost Piano Quintet in D. When the dramatist Zacharias Werner commissioned him to write incidental music for his play Das Kreuz an der Ostsee, Hoffmann saw this as a welcome opportunity to gain a footing in the Berlin Nationaltheater, and he intended to solidify his anticipated reputation with a comic opera, Die ungebetenen Gäste, oder Der Kanonikus von Mailand (after Alexandre Duval). However, nothing came of all these plans: Werner’s play was rejected as unperformable, and Hoffmann’s Singspiel clashed with G.A. Schneider’s setting of the same plot, which was already under consideration by the Berlin theatre. After Napoleon entered Warsaw and disbanded the Prussian provincial government in 1806, Hoffmann continued to direct the music society’s concerts, even though most of its members were Prussian officials who had left the city. The performances were gradually eclipsed by the concerts of Paer, who had come to Warsaw in the emperor’s retinue, and Ressource soon gave up. Hoffmann, his circumstances now aggravated by material need and illness, occupied himself with preparing a new libretto from A.W. Schlegel’s translation of Calderón’s La banda y la flor.
At the beginning of June 1807, when former officials who refused to sign a declaration of submission and take an oath of allegiance were expelled from Warsaw, Hoffmann planned a move to Vienna bearing a recommendation from his colleague J.E. Hitzig. When he was not granted a pass he went to Berlin, arriving there only to learn that officials from the surrendered provinces of Prussia could not be given compensation for the loss of their positions. He advertised for the post of music director at any theatre, and was accepted by those of Lucerne and Bamberg. Having decided on the latter, he was commissioned to write a four-act opera, Der Trank der Unsterblichkeit (to a libretto by Count Julius von Soden), as a specimen of his work and was given the post with effect from 1 September 1808. At last it seemed that Hoffmann was achieving his goal: not only was he free from a merely breadwinning profession, but he could also use his status as music director of a theatre to further his career as a composer. He had particular hopes for the Calderón opera completed in Berlin, which he finally called Liebe und Eifersucht. But circumstances again thwarted him; when he took up the new post he found another director in place of Count Soden who had appointed him. A few weeks later Hoffmann’s contract as music director was cancelled, and it was only as a theatre composer that his association with the organization continued. In this capacity he wrote a large number of short commissioned compositions, including choruses and marches for plays, additional arias, and so on, nearly all of which have been lost. For two years he earned his living chiefly as a singing and piano teacher, since even the small salary due him as a theatre composer was constantly jeopardized by maladministration at the theatre. Once again he was forced to look for sources of income beyond the narrow confines in which he was working. During the time he was without work in Berlin, Hoffmann had again made contact with Nägeli in Zürich, no longer under a pseudonym but (after his successes in Warsaw) using his own name. A firm agreement seems to have been reached, but despite an active correspondence from Bamberg lasting until November 1809 not a single work of his appeared under Nägeli’s imprint. Early in 1809 he composed the Miserere in B minor with orchestra for the Grand Duke Ferdinand, whose residence was in Würzburg, though this did not secure him an association with the court. He was more successful in his contact with Rochlitz, to whom he sent the story ‘Ritter Gluck’ on 12 January 1809, adding that he was prepared to send the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AMZ) essays on music and reviews of musical works. Rochlitz published ‘Ritter Gluck’ in February, and dispatched the first works for review (including two symphonies by Friedrich Witt) at the beginning of March, inquiring in June whether Hoffmann would also review Beethoven’s symphonies; the historic review of the Fifth Symphony appeared a year later, and Hoffmann remained a regular contributor to the AMZ until 1815. In September 1809 Soden was compelled to resume the directorship of the Bamberg theatre, which had been ruined by bad management, and on 11 October his melodrama Dirna, with Hoffmann’s music, was first staged (later it was presented in Donauwörth and Salzburg); no other significant dramatic composition of Hoffmann’s was performed in Bamberg during his stay.
His music for Sabinus, another melodrama by Soden, was left incomplete when the author again gave up his directorship of the theatre. Hearing of a vacancy for the position of conductor with Joseph Seconda’s company based in Dresden and Leipzig, Hoffmann asked Rochlitz for a recommendation; but the request came too late – Friedrich Schneider had already been engaged. The wretched state of affairs at the Bamberg theatre briefly improved when Franz von Holbein took over the direction on 1 October 1810. Hoffmann had known Holbein since 1798 in Berlin, and he was immediately engaged as the new director’s secretary, producer, scene-painter and stage designer, though not as conductor, and was also re-employed as a composer of incidental music. The melodrama Saul, which he had composed early in 1811 to a libretto by Seyfried, was performed that summer in Bamberg and in Würzburg as late as 1815, and he wrote the music for Holbein’s heroic opera Aurora in 1811-12. The mastering of unfulfilled passion remained Hoffmann’s poetic mission to the end of his life; he himself hinted (diary, 27 April 1812) at the close connection between his hopeless love for his young pupil Julia Mark, the crucial experience of his Bamberg years, and the impetus of his literary production. The wine merchant, bookseller and librarian C.K. Kunz, with whom Hoffmann regularly associated, was anxious to set up as a publisher, and when, on 15 February 1813, he proposed that Hoffmann should write for him, Hoffmann accepted the offer, but delayed a binding agreement until 18 March, St Anselm’s Day and Julia’s 17th birthday. The first work published under that day’s contract was the initial pair of volumes of Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Easter 1814), and included the ‘essays’ which had appeared in the AMZ: ‘Ritter Gluck’ (1809), ‘Johannes Kreislers, des Kapellmeisters, musikalische Leiden’ (1810), ‘Gedanken über den hohen Wert der Musik’ (1812) and ‘Don Juan’ (1813), as well as a recasting of the main part of two AMZ Beethoven reviews under the title ‘Beethovens Instrumentalmusik’, which had already appeared in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt (1813) and ‘Höchst zerstreute Gedanken’ (1814), also reprinted from the same journal. All the earlier pieces included in the Fantasiestücke were inspired by music, and in those written especially for the two volumes (the foreword, Jacques Callot, the ‘Kreisleriana’ Ombra adorata and Der vollkommene Maschinist, Nachricht von den neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza and Der Magnetiseur) references to Julia are obvious. Meanwhile Hoffmann continued to pursue his musical career. An invitation from Holbein in January 1813 proposed a move to the Würzburg theatre, but shortly afterwards Holbein resigned his directorship in Würzburg on account of politics and the plan was forgotten. In February Schneider resigned his position with Seconda (to become organist at the Leipzig Thomaskirche), and Rochlitz, remembering Hoffmann’s request, recommended him to fill the vacancy with the Dresden-Leipzig company. Hoffmann left Bamberg to take up this new post on 21 April 1813. To his friends he reported that his new orchestra treated him with civility and a kind of submissiveness, which differed considerably from the foolish manners of the Bamberg musicians (letter to Speyer, 13 July 1813).
As a composer he supplied Morlacchi’s Italian court opera in Dresden with a duet for insertion into a work by the younger Guglielmi, La scelta dello sposo, but he was preoccupied with the opera Undine. He had come across Fouqué’s short story in Bamberg in the summer of 1812, and had immediately seen in it an ideal subject for a Romantic opera; Hitzig, his former colleague and friend in Berlin, had managed to persuade Fouqué himself to prepare the libretto. Hoffmann set about composing the opera with great enthusiasm, but his work on it was constantly interrupted and it was not completed until August 1814. His financial situation compelled him to fulfil his literary obligations punctually, so that gradually his career as writer came to take priority over his career as composer. His own feelings are clear from a letter (20 July 1813) to his publisher with final instructions for the printing of the Fantasiestücke: ‘I do not want to give my name, since that should only be known to the world by a successful musical composition’. He remained true to this principle – although Trois canzonettes were published in 1808 under Hoffmann’s name, nearly all his writings which preceded the première of Undine appeared anonymously. After falling out with the unmusical Seconda, Hoffmann was given notice on 26 February 1814; he was stunned by this dismissal, only four days after declining the offer of the music directorship in Königsberg. Although Rochlitz tried to assist him with further commissions for the AMZ, without a regular position he found his situation in Leipzig increasingly difficult. He produced some caricatures, pamphlets and even a musical portrayal of a battle, Deutschlands Triumph im Siege bei Leipzig (printed in Leipzig under a pseudonym), which used the war and its hardships for their subject. In July 1813 his old friend Hippel came to Leipzig and was able to offer him the prospect of rejoining the Prussian civil service. In his straitened circumstances Hoffmann had to seize this opportunity, though he tried his best to arrange for a subordinate post which would leave him time to pursue his musical activities; he was too brilliant a lawyer for the Prussian judiciary to contemplate this arrangement, and on 1 October 1814 he was appointed to the Kammergericht. In Berlin he vainly sought a job as theatre conductor, but was turned down in favour of the virtuoso cellist Bernhard Romberg, who was to be the conductor of Undine. Although Romberg’s efforts were considered by many inadequate (including Hoffmann), the opera was a great success from its first performance on 3 August 1816 until, after the 14th performance, the theatre was burnt to the ground. Although Undine was never again staged during Hoffmann’s lifetime (apart from an unsuccessful performance in Prague in 1821), he was soon busy with other plans. Helmina von Chezy had introduced him to Calderón’s El galan fantasma; he was immediately enthusiastic about it and asked Carl Wilhelm Salice-Contessa to work out a libretto for him. This was to be a lighter companion-piece to Undine, surpassing it in effect wherever possible. On 24 June 1817 Hoffmann offered the proposed opera to the administrator of the Berlin Opera, who, though not uninterested, deferred a decision. Hoffmann was determined to compose the piece, though Salice-Contessa’s work took longer than expected and was finished only in August 1818. He claimed to have composed the opera in his head before ever writing down a note; however, he delayed too long before committing his ideas to paper. The beginning of a fair copy entitled Der Liebhaber nach dem Tode was found in his Nachlass, but is now lost. During the last two years of his life he was overwhelmed with commissions for pocket-books and almanacs, and editors paid him princely sums for his stories. The literary projects closest to his heart – the second part of Kater Murr and Schnellpfeffer – were pushed into the background along with writing down the opera which was to have been his greatest musical work. For this Hitzig, his first biographer, reproached him bitterly, but Hoffmann, of course, could not have foreseen his early death.
