'To our ears, that sounds very esoteric and very high-flown,' Guerrieri says, 'but what the Romantics were really trying to do - and Hoffmann was very much a member in good standing of the German Romantic movement - they were, they had this problem of trying to put into language how we experience beauty.' 'But it also explains why it's a review much more about the nuts and bolts of the piece of music than how it actually would be experienced in a concert hall, and I think it's one of the reasons that he's able to, in the review, talk about the experience of it in a language and in a manner that's far more heightened than we would ever really experience.'īefore he delved into the musical play-by-play of his review, Hoffmann wrote that music 'reveals an unknown kingdom to mankind: a world that has nothing in common with the outward, material world that surrounds it, and in which we leave behind all predetermined conceptual feelings in order to give ourselves up to the inexpressible.' 'It's a feat of imagination in a lot of ways, but it would have been standard for the time,' Guerrieri says. 'It was really both the first extended review of the Fifth Symphony that we have,' he tells NPR's Robert Siegel, 'and it was also really this one particular review that is the bridge between Beethoven as a composer of the classical era and Beethoven as this sort of almost musical mascot of the German Romantic movement, which really became one of the most long-lasting and persistent images of Beethoven that we have.'īut here's a crucial detail about Hoffmann's review - when he wrote it, he hadn't actually heard the Fifth Symphony. Hoffmann, not long after the symphony was first performed. Guerrieri says that one of the most influential reviews of that work was written in 1810 by E.T.A. You may have seen Hoffman's name recently in Matthew Guerrieri's new book The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination.

Hoffmann, original author of The Nutcracker. His name used to be hugely famous, but nowadays, it draws blank stares, even from people who know that work. This is the time of year when one man's work is widely - if indirectly - celebrated. Hoffmann's original story, 'Nutcracker and Mouse King,' is darker and spookier than the ballet version most people know.

Mouse king book