Eta hoffmann stories
The King asked for a reprimand only, but no action was ever taken. Eventually Meister Floh was published with the offending passages removed. Hoffmann wrote novels and short stories, and he composed music, including an opera , Undine Hoffmann's stories were written at a very sensitive time politically. The Nutcracker story is full of charming mimed phantasies with Marie Clara in the ballet , Fritz and Pate Drosselmayr, the mean Mouse King and the ever popular Nutcracker.
Many versions of have been published as children's books and Nutcracker performances have become a yearly feature in many cities around Christmas. Despite their obvious appeal to children, these stories introduce several philosophical themes and often express darker psychological themes. Hoffmann invariably explores the nature of Selfhood, Art and value-judgements.
These are typical Romantic concerns and Hoffmann is one of the best-known representatives of German Romanticism , as well as a pioneer of the fantasy genre, but with a taste for the macabre combined with realism. His wide-ranging influence upon and creative significance within the later German romantic period is frequently underestimated, but his works were one of the major influences for the modern novel, including such prominent authors as Edgar Allan Poe — , Nikolai Gogol — , Charles Dickens — , Charles Baudelaire — , and Franz Kafka — Hoffmann's work illuminates the darker side of the human spirit found behind the seeming harmony of bourgeois life.
Hoffmann also influenced nineteenth century musical taste directly through his music criticism. His reviews of Beethoven 's Symphony No. Hoffmann: Schriften zur Musik; Nachlese and have been made available in an English translation by Andrew Crumey, ed. Hoffmann strove for artistic polymathy. He created far more in his works than mere political commentary achieved through satire.
This novel deals with such issues as the aesthetic status of 'true' artistry, and the modes of self-transcendence that accompany any genuine endeavor to create. Hoffmann's portrayal of the character Kreisler a genius musician is wittily counterpointed with the character of the tomcat Murr — a virtuoso illustration of artistic pretentiousness that many of Hoffmann's contemporaries found offensive and subversive of Romantic ideals.
Hoffmann's literature points to the failings of many so-called artists to differentiate between the superficial and the authentic aspects of such Romantic ideals. The self-conscious effort to impress must, according to Hoffmann, be divorced from the self-aware effort to create. This essential duality in Kater Murr is structurally conveyed through a discursive 'splicing together' of two biographical narratives.
Such a framework warrants an extensive exploration of its philosophical implications. New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.
Piaskun eta hoffmann biography wikipedia
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Hoffmann From New World Encyclopedia. Jump to: navigation , search. Previous E. Next E. Hoffmann: Das Leben eines skeptischen Phantasten. Munich: Carl Hanser, Some later versions show the influence of The Nutcracker , the ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ; several years earlier, three of Hoffmann's stories had formed the basis of the opera Tales of Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach.
Tales of Hoffmann: Retold from Offenbach's Opera coll by Cyril Falls is typical of the watering-down that obscured Hoffmann's real worth for many years. For a faithful modern translation of the tale, by Ralph Manheim , see Checklist below. Offenbach's opera was filmed as The Tales of Hoffmann directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, this being probably the best and most famous of the fifty or more films based on his work.
Home About us Random Contact Donate. Concurrently, the bedridden author, in constant pain and partially paralyzed, was dictating the final chapters of the story. At intervals his physician came to lay hot irons against the patient's spinal column to "stimulate" the dead nerves. Hoffmann asked one visitor if he noticed the smell of roast flesh in the sickroom.
After the final dictation, on February 29, , the author expressed to his friend Hitzig the fear that the public might blame his illness for the faults in the story. One marvels that such circumstances permitted the bittersweet humor and the rapturous close of Master Flea, to say nothing of the deft and sure handling of serious thought. The ideas voiced in the work are significant ones, and though they are borrowed from other men—Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling, and others—they were nonetheless sincerely held and skillfully manipulated.
Always, however, they are expressed in terms of comedy and irony. There is no "philosophy" as such and there is no preaching.
Eta hoffmann the sandman: E. T. A. Hoffmann was a German author, jurist, composer, music critic, and artist. Check out this biography to know about his birthday, childhood, family life, achievements and fun facts about him.
In the early ages of the world, according to the Romantic interpretation, joyous creativity knew no bounds. With equal spontaneity, Nature expended energy in all possible varieties of experiment. The life force, having accumulated matter about one or more particles of itself, might "create" a lion; just as easily it might dissolve that lion form to "create" a flower, a cloud, a stone, a man, a centaur, a mermaid, an emerald, or, again, a lion.
Form might succeed form.
Nature was free and at play. Vitality was inexhaustible. Such was the Golden Age of old. Fixed forms and restricted progressions betokened the Fall from the exuberant, childlike grace, and with the Fall came sorrow and travail. Man, evolving, learned much and raised himself admirably. In so doing, however, he came to lay undue stress on the principle of the rational mind, to the harm of his other constituent faculties, much as the joyous and credulous child becomes a problematic and doubting adolescent.
Genuine adulthood must adjust childhood's values with the values of adolescence, and it must raise both to a higher power, not by a process of mere addition, but by a process of multiplication. The mission of Romanticism was not to regain the Golden Age of old, the childhood of the race, nor to undo the Age of Reason, the adolescence of the race, but to bring both into harmony within a new and greater Golden Age, the adulthood of the race.
Such, in oversimplified form, is the "philosophical" premise of this story. The characters in Master Flea have realistic existences in Frankfurt-on-the-Main as of , but they also existed, under different names, in the Golden Age of old, and the first task of the story is to bring them to realization of their former selves. Hoffmann, like other German Romanticists, tended to believe in the reincarnation of souls, without, however, making an article of faith of it.
But in the new and greater Golden Age, he saw some "souls" would be exalted by virtue of their merit while others would be reduced or even extinguished altogether, for in the present state of human life, there are petty spirits falsely aggrandized and downright negative or dead things that have wrongfully acquired the semblance of positive existence.
The dream vision at the end of Master Flea is a grandiose setting to rights of this condition and in that setting to rights it is not difficult to discern that the Heart is king or that aggressive pseudo-intellects are reduced to mere doll-babies; the repulsive, barely living Leech is banished "below," while his accomplice, Thetel, disintegrates into sheer nothingness, for that was his essence.
He was apparently a shuttlecock. Against this imposing general plan, the story displays its mellow wit and vivid human portraiture. The study in contrasted "loving" and "being in love" is one of Hoffmann's finest insights, and it should be noted that he does full justice to both. No other hero of his, except Johannes Kreisler, is so expertly portrayed as is Peregrinus Tyss.
We suggest that they are the tragic and comic heroes respectively of Hoffmann's art. Be it further noted that the author's concern with his hero is pedagogical, as it is in Little Zaches and in Princess Brambilla and in numerous other instances as well. But here there is no benevolent mage to guide him. Instead, we have Master Flea, who is a delightful combination of sober entomology, a proverb about "a flea in one's ear," and Common Sense.
If one looks closely, one will detect his partial provenience from Sterne's Tristram Shandy. George Pepusch as second hero is wholly lovable and understandable. In Keats's words, they "cease upon the midnight with no pain," and, quite literally as flowers, amid an outpouring of fragrance. The opening chapter of Master Flea is a masterpiece within a masterpiece.
Heine called it "divine. Heine was wrong. The explanation of his uncharacteristic misjudgment may well lie in another sentence of his review: "I do not find a single line in it that is concerned with demagogic activity. The suppressed Knarrpanti scandal had still another curious side effect. Duke Karl August of Weimar was mischievously amused by the highhanded goings-on in Berlin and chose to present a copy of Master Flea to his most distinguished courtier, the seventy-three-year-old Goethe, who, he thought, might enjoy a story set in Goethe's native Frankfurt.
Of the work and its dying author, Goethe wrote in "It is undeniable that there is a certain charm from which one cannot escape in the way he has of combining the most familiar places and customary, even ordinary, situations with implausible, impossible events. Of the author five years dead, Goethe wrote in What faithful participant concerned with the education of a nation has not noted with sorrow that the unhealthy works of that suffering man have been effective for long years in Germany and that healthy spirits have been inoculated with such aberrations in the guise of significantly helpful novelties.
Hoffmann satisfied neither Goethe's demand for heroic, eighteenth-century idealism nor Heine's newer demand for literature of political and social commitment. The masterpieces translated in this volume, like the rest of Hoffmann's works, were sustained by the reading public of the European continent and by certain continental intellectuals, especially Frenchmen and Russians.
With love and veneration they are herewith offered to the English-speaking peoples. Hoffmann's Fairy Tales, Boston, , as translated from the French by Lafayette Burnham, who remarks: "The French possesses in a greater degree the ease necessary for amusing narratives, and corrects the terseness of the harsher Teutonic.
Hoffmann, pp. New York , N. The distinguishing feature in his mind was surely the dominant role of the magical and miraculous in these works as contrasted with a more episodic, incidental, interventional function of these elements, and in some cases their complete absence, in his other short fiction. In particular, the magical personages in these seven stories are depicted as existing within the framework of a supernatural realm, about which a good deal of information is conveyed, invariably in the form of a story within the story.
In Ludwig Tieck 's stories with magical elements, notably "Der blonde Eckbert" "Blond Eckbert," , "Der Runenberg" "The Rune Mountain," , and "Die Elfen" "The Elves," , which exerted a considerable influence on Hoffmann's concept of fantastic fiction generally, the existence of the spirit realm remains largely unexplained and mysterious these stories were collected in the first volume of Tieck's Phantasus, In other German Romantic fiction of this type, the identification of the realm from which magical or miraculous happenings emanate is indeed clear; but at the same time there is no story within the story about that realm.
However, little else about that realm as such is related or depicted. Meanwhile, in Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl the supernatural power is the Christian devil; and in Joseph von Eichendorff's "Das Marmorbild" it is that of the heathen love goddess Venus, identified from a pious perspective as being a satanic agent. In the literary folk fairy tale, too, as known from the classic collections of Giambattista Basile ca.
As we remember, in famous stories such as "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty," we are dealing simply with magical curses or conjurings on the part of older women with supernatural powers of unspecified origin, whereas in "Cinderella" the same power is used for good rather than for evil purposes. In other well-known stories, such as "Beauty and the Beast" or "The Frog Prince," which involve magical transformations, the focus is so much on the reversal of the metamorphosis that the question of the magic that produced it is hardly raised or only as a seeming afterthought.
As we know, in the literary folk fairy tale the characters do not act as though the magic they encounter is anything out of the ordinary. They would not think of such occurrences as magical. While they live in an otherwise familiar realm, magical happenings are very much a part of that reality. In philosophical, allegorical, or symbolical fairy tales like those by Goethe and Novalis, the characters likewise do not show the least surprise at magical phenomena for the similar reason that they live totally within a spiritual realm.
As we have seen, the characters in his tales not uncommonly fear for their sanity in connection with their encounters with a spirit realm. A fire sprite whose natural form is that of a salamander has been banished from the spirit realm as punishment for having mated with a snake against the wishes of the realm's ruler, the spirit prince Phosphorus, who sired the snake with a fire lily.
The salamander has been condemned to live as an archivist named Lindhorst in Dresden in Germany until such time as he has succeeded in marrying his three serpentine daughters to young men of the town. The first of the three daughters to wed is Serpentina, with whom a young university student, Anselmus, falls in love. They are transported to a magical spirit realm called Atlantis where they marry and presumably live happily ever after.
Anselmus's union with Serpentina is a happy ending because he was blissfully enchanted by her from the moment she first appeared to him, in her elemental form as a small snake. He saw her among the leaves of an elder tree by the banks of the Elbe River in Dresden on Ascension Day. During the course of the following summer, he yearned in vain for the little snake with the beautiful blue eyes and heavenly singing voice to reappear to him in the elder tree.
With the approach of autumn, he learns from the archivist Lindhorst, for whom he had agreed to copy manuscripts, that the appealing snake is named Serpentina and is Lindhorst's daughter. In the course of his subsequent work for Lindhorst that following fall, Serpentina appears to Anselmus in human form to declare her love for him. Anselmus's devotion to Serpentina wavers when he is seized by fear that this involvement with a being from the spirit realm indicates that he is losing his mind.
His doubt about his love for Serpentina is punished by imprisonment in a glass bottle on a shelf in Lindhorst's library, from which torment he is released by a renewal of his faith in his devotion to the magical beloved. Upon his release from the glass bottle he is transported to Serpentina's spirit homeland Atlantis. Anselmus's lapse in his devotion to Serpentina is occasioned by the attention paid to him by the appealing daughter of his older schoolmaster friend, Vice-Principal Paulmann.
Veronica Paulmann, a blossoming maiden of 16, sets her cap on Anselmus from the moment she hears that Anselmus, as a result of his work for Lindhorst, has excellent prospects of achieving the coveted rank of councilor to the royal court Hofrat. Veronica immediately consults a fortune-teller, Frau Rauerin, recommended by her girlfriends for her usually favorable predictions about marriage prospects.
To her dismay, Veronica hears from the fortune-teller that Anselmus is in love with Serpentina, whereupon Veronica enlists the old woman's aid in attempting to win him away from the supernatural beloved with magical means.
Piaskun eta hoffmann biography
Aided by this magic, Veronica succeeds briefly in turning Anselmus's head as he pays a visit to her one morning that fall, only to have him then return to his love for Serpentina and disappear with her from Dresden. Veronica grieves that winter over the loss of her dream of marrying Anselmus and becoming Frau Hofrat but then finds a substitute in the young bookkeeper Heerbrand, who in the meantime has himself been named to the coveted rank, with its elevated social status.
Anselmus is not only a young man whom two young women are out to marry, he is also a pawn in a related struggle between two magical beings—the salamander alias archivist Lindhorst and Frau Rauerin alias an old woman apple peddler. Frau Rauerin, meanwhile, is out to defeat Lindhorst's plan. Even before Veronica enlists her aid in winning Anselmus, she appears to him in Lindhorst's door knocker to prevent him from reporting for work there.
She then enables Veronica to produce a little metal mirror with which Veronica can turn Anselmus's thoughts to her mesmeristically. Lindhorst's defeat of her in that struggle is the signal for Serpentina to appear and for Anselmus to be liberated from the bottle and blissfully plunge into the spirit beloved's arms. While Frau Rauerin does not belong to a spirit realm as such, her struggle with Lindhorst shows her to be a creature of the nether world, understood as a cross between the realm of earth sprites or gnomes and that of the devil.
She uses soil from pots as her weapon against Lindhorst's salamandric flames, and it is revealed that she is the offspring of a union between a root vegetable and a dragon's feather, the latter calling to mind the representation of the devil in Revelations as a dragon. Already in her first appearance, she may be seen as associated with infernal temptation insofar as she is peddling apples like the serpent in the biblical story of the Fall.
Her role as apple peddler may be seen at the same time as anticipating her later role as fortune-teller and mentor in Veronica's quest to marry Anselmus if one thinks of Eve's temptation of Adam as erotic seduction. From this perspective, the apple woman's enigmatic warning to Anselmus that he will soon fall "into the crystal" "ins Kristall bald dein Fall—ins Kristall!
She aims to have him marry a girl of the sort for whom she prophesies marital bliss, hence the reference to crystal as an allusion to the practice of fortune-telling with crystal balls, wherein the girl's intended would appear as a sign that her wish will be fulfilled. Since the apple woman appears to utter her warning in anger at Anselmus's absent-minded overturning of her apple baskets in his haste, she seems more likely to be foretelling that Anselmus will come to a bad end.
As a fortune-teller alias magical being, she may be presumed to foresee his imprisonment in the glass bottle, perhaps even his union with Serpentina, which from Frau Rauerin's perspective is a bad or at least unwanted end for him. It can be assumed that the apple peddler knows that he is headed to the amusement park to meet young women, and she perhaps recognizes him as the type of young student with his head in the clouds.
She does not demand money from him; it is he who in his horror and embarrassment over his clumsiness tosses her his purse and thereby loses his chance to try to strike up polite conversation with the girls at Linke's Bad. In her identity as Frau Rauerin, the last thing the peddler woman wants is to prevent him from meeting young women.
Hoffmann's reader is introduced first to the little snake alias Serpentina, and only afterwards to Veronica. However, it soon becomes clear that Anselmus has known Veronica for a good while before the little snake and her two sisters appear to him in the elder tree, under which he seated himself to smoke his pipe to console himself over the missed opportunity to see the girls at the amusement park.
Once he has encountered the little snake, Anselmus thinks no more of those girls; at the same time, he begins to notice Veronica and feel an attraction to her. Moreover, he notices for the first time that Veronica has blue eyes, as did the little snake he saw shortly before in the elder tree. If we view Anselmus as the romantic dreamer, then we can see his visionary experiences with Serpentina as a reflex and sublimation of his attraction to Veronica, an attraction that rises to the level of his consciousness only after he has encountered a sublimation of it.
From this perspective, Veronica has the misfortune of setting her cap on a romantic dreamer who is for that reason not the marrying type or is so only when it comes to marriage with spirits. At the same time, we may suspect that she is attracted to him precisely because he is a romantic dreamer, which would explain her psychic ability to know what he is dreaming.
That also explains why, at the end, she alone among Dresden's nonspirit residents seems to know what has happened to Anselmus. It was there, if Anselmus's "fellow prisoners" in glass bottles are to be believed, that he was standing when last seen in Dresden.
Eta hoffmann nutcracker
The implication is that, unknown to himself, Anselmus in plunging into Serpentina's arms was actually leaping to his death from the bridge. Such a reading of the tale suggests itself, too, from the playfully ironic tone in which Der goldne Topf is narrated, most notable in the frequent asides to the reader that culminate in the narrator's confession of the difficulty he encountered in envisioning Anselmus's bliss with Serpentina in Atlantis.
The concluding rhetorical question that Lindhorst puts to the storyteller—" Is Anselmus's bliss, all told, anything else than living in poetry, to which the sacred harmony of all beings reveals itself to be nature's deepest secret? Anselmus's bliss, which we know only from the storyteller's vision of it as experienced under the influence of Lindhorst's magical alcoholic punch, was by definition living in poetry on the storyteller's part.
As for Anselmus himself, his bliss was a matter not only of living in poetry but—albeit unconsciously—dying for it. A handsome young man has been transformed into an ugly nutcracker doll by a woman seeking to take revenge on a king with a beautiful daughter. The young man can only be restored to his human form through the brave devotion of a young woman who will assist the nutcracker in defeating the woman's son.
We may recognize in this story elements of such familiar fairy tales as "Sleeping Beauty," namely the woman's taking revenge on a king with a beautiful daughter, and "Beauty and the Beast," in which the beautiful daughter becomes devoted to the creature despite his ugliness. A chief difference between Hoffmann's nutcracker story and literary folk fairy tales is that, as in Der goldne Topf, the central figure receives an explanation of the magical realm's entry into his or her life from another character in the story.
The wound resulted from her witnessing, alone and at the stroke of midnight, a pitched battle between the nutcracker doll, which she and her siblings had just received that evening as a Christmas present from her father, and a hideous mouse with seven heads, each with a small crown. When the King of Mice appeared to be winning the battle and Marie took off a slipper to hurl at him, she fell against the cabinet.
The King of Mice is the son of the Queen of Mice, Frau Mauserinks, who is out to take revenge on Princess Pirlipat's father for having ordered that all of the mice in his castle be killed. That part of the idea for the tale is clearly related to the exchange that had occurred Christmas Eve between the godfather and goddaughter about the nutcracker doll's ugliness.
The nephew's role is the romantic one of the handsome young man who rescues a beautiful princess from an evil spell. More important, the godfather provides the goddaughter with a positive role most appealing to her imagination, that of angel of rescue for the handsome young man whom Frau Mauserinks turned into a nutcracker.
A twinge of envy surely seized the adoring godfather at that moment. Marie, meanwhile, devoted herself to caring for the injured doll.
Piaskun eta hoffmann biography death
Her ensuing magical adventure at midnight that evening can be seen as the fulfillment of a wish that the nutcracker doll might be in reality a brave young man who would try to protect her against mice—stereotypically an object of terror or revulsion for her as a young girl—and to whose aid she would come should he encounter mortal danger on her behalf in combating the mice.
At the same time, she envisions herself, like beautiful young Princess Pirlipat in that tale, as the object of attack from Frau Mauserinks and her son, the seven-headed King of Mice. Marie's ensuing magical adventures concern visits to her bedroom by the King of Mice to extort forfeits from her and her aiding Nutcracker in obtaining a sword with which to slay the mouse.
After Nutcracker has defeated the villain, he transports Marie, via the sleeve in her father's overcoat, to his magical realm of dolls. There Marie falls asleep and awakens back home at her parents' house in Berlin. The godfather's nephew explains that her declaration has just restored him to human form. Hoffmann's readers are left to ponder the connection between the goddaughter's declaration of love for "Dear Mr.
This shift from romantic to pious fairy tale was surely in response to the criticism that Hoffmann's nutcracker story was more for adults than for children and that he was incapable of writing a proper children's fairy tale. Felix and Christlieb von Brakel, a brother and sister of school age or approaching it, encounter a magical child while playing in the woods on their parents' estate.
Like the nutcracker in the previous story, this magical playmate, known to the siblings as the Strange Child, is threatened by an evil adversary, in this case a gnome or earth-spirit named Pepser. The gnome, having adopted the alias Pepasilio to veil his identity, became prime minister to the Strange Child's mother in her kingdom. Pepasilio rebelled, causing that paradisiacal realm to be forever separated from the earth.
The child tells Felix and Christlieb that his sojourn on earth must now end, since the gnome is master there. Sadly, they cannot join him in his return to his mother's kingdom because unlike him they are unable to fly. The siblings' encounter with the Strange Child occurs as they and their parents are anticipating the arrival of a tutor whom a rich relative, Count Cyprianus von Brakel, is sending out to their modest estate so that the children might receive some schooling that the count considers proper to the family's social standing and in keeping with the latest fashion.
In the tutor, Master Ink, the children discover the Strange Child's adversary, the Gnome Pepser, who was punished for his rebellion by being transformed into a fly. Even after Felix and Christlieb's father has chased off Master Ink with a flyswatter, the children are no longer able to find and communicate with the Strange Child.
The children's father then soon dies, as though in punishment for having chased away the tutor. Felix and Christlieb's encounters with the Strange Child are identified as fantasy insofar as the brother refers to the magical playmate as belonging to his sex, while the sister sees the child as a girl. The entry of the child into their lives occurs in connection with their anxiety about having their idyllic rural childhood disturbed or ended by the arrival of the tutor.
Master Ink represents for them the specter of growing up and assuming a proper station in society. Their father, Thaddeus von Brakel, has not met that challenge fully, to judge from his impoverishment and deep financial indebtedness to Cousin Cyprianus. As the father reveals to Felix and Christlieb shortly before his death, when he was their age the Strange Child appeared to him as well.
What Thaddeus von Brakel is saying to them is perhaps that he understands their sorrow at the prospect of leaving their childhood behind. The father's ensuing death can be seen as having been hastened by feelings of guilt that he had not provided better for his family and the recognition that his failure had resulted from his own reluctance to bid farewell to childhood bliss.
Following the father's death, hard-hearted Cousin Cyprianus chases Thaddeus's widow and the children from their estate. When their mother collapses on a bridge as they are on their way to seek refuge with other relatives, the Strange Child appears once more to Felix and Christlieb to comfort them. That last appearance of the magical playmate may be understood as a final indication that their encounters with the Strange Child are fantasies engendered by their emotional crisis.
Here, however, the fairy has taken pity not on a beautiful girl being mistreated by her stepmother but on an ugly changeling who has been rejected by his own birth mother, a poor peasant woman. Little Zachary, although he has the title role, is not the central figure in the story. Indeed, he is inwardly at least as revolting as is his outer appearance.
Our interest is chiefly directed instead toward a handsome dreamy youth, Balthasar, a student at the—imaginary—University of Kerepes. The gnomish changeling enters Balthasar's life on the very day Balthasar's friend and fellow student Fabian has accused him of being in love with pretty Candida, the daughter of their science professor Mosch Terpin. It is not until the next afternoon, however, that Little Zachary's magical hairs come into play.
The occasion is a tea at the professor's house at which Balthasar has mustered the courage to admit to himself that he is in love with Candida and to confess that love in a poem he recites. When he finishes the recitation, the praise of those present is heaped not on him but on the ugly little changeling instead, of whom Candida becomes instantly enamored and whom the professor welcomes as his prospective son-in-law.
Alpanus and Rosabelverde test their magical powers against each other when they sit down together for coffee. As a result of the fairy's visit to him, Alpanus is able to provide Balthasar with the magical means to defeat the spell that Little Zachary has worked on Candida, her father, and everyone else who has come into contact with him.
Balthasar is thus able to wed his beloved, while her father is dismayed that Little Zachary, who seemed such a good match for the daughter and a benefactor for himself, has been unmasked as an impostor, so to speak. The magical business in Klein Zaches clearly is a vehicle for Hoffmann to indulge in humorous if also occasionally biting satire on greed, false ambition, corruptibility, and vanity in contemporary life.
Particularly striking in this regard is that as soon as Balthasar has had to admit to himself that he is in love with Candida, a magical rival for her arrives on the scene in the person of Little Zachary. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, the magic of the changeling's hairs comes most strikingly into play at the moment when Balthasar is confessing that love to Candida with his poem.
Around he became friends with Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel the Younger — , the son of a pastor, and nephew of Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel the Elder , the well-known writer friend of Immanuel Kant. Their friendship, although often tested by an increasing social difference, was to be lifelong. In , Hoffmann became enamored of Dora Hatt, a married woman to whom he had given music lessons.
She was ten years older, and gave birth to her sixth child in From , Hoffmann obtained employment as a clerk for his uncle, Johann Ludwig Doerffer, who lived in Glogau with his daughter Minna. After passing further examinations he visited Dresden , where he was amazed by the paintings in the gallery, particularly those of Correggio and Raphael.
During the summer of , his uncle was promoted to a court in Berlin, and the three of them moved there in August—Hoffmann's first residence in a large city. It was there that Hoffmann first attempted to promote himself as a composer, writing an operetta called Die Maske and sending a copy to Queen Luise of Prussia. The official reply advised to him to write to the director of the Royal Theatre, a man named Iffland.
This was the first time he had lived without supervision by members of his family, and he started to become "what school principals, parsons, uncles, and aunts call dissolute. His first job, at Posen, was endangered after Carnival on Shrove Tuesday , when caricatures of military officers were distributed at a ball. It was immediately deduced who had drawn them, and complaints were made to authorities in Berlin, who were reluctant to punish the promising young official.
Hoffmann despaired because of his exile, and drew caricatures of himself drowning in mud alongside ragged villagers. He did make use, however, of his isolation, by writing and composing. He started a diary on 1 October Hoffmann's was called Der Preis "The Prize" , and was itself about a competition to write a play. There were fourteen entries, but none was judged worthy of the award: Friedrichs d'or.
Nevertheless, his entry was singled out for praise. At the beginning of , he obtained a post at Warsaw. Hoffmann assimilated well with Polish society; the years spent in Prussian Poland he recognized as the happiest of his life. In Warsaw he found the same atmosphere he had enjoyed in Berlin, renewing his friendship with Zacharias Werner , and meeting his future biographer, a neighbour and fellow jurist called Julius Eduard Itzig who changed his name to Hitzig after his baptism.
These relatively late introductions marked his work profoundly. But Hoffmann's fortunate position was not to last: on 28 November , during the War of the Fourth Coalition , Napoleon Bonaparte 's troops captured Warsaw, and the Prussian bureaucrats lost their jobs. They divided the contents of the treasury between them and fled.
A delay of six months was caused by severe illness. Eventually the French authorities demanded that all former officials swear allegiance or leave the country. As they refused to grant Hoffmann a passport to Vienna, he was forced to return to Berlin. He visited his family in Posen before arriving in Berlin on 18 June , hoping to further his career there as an artist and writer.
The next fifteen months were some of the worst in Hoffmann's life. The city of Berlin was also occupied by Napoleon's troops. Obtaining only meagre allowances, he had frequent recourse to his friends, constantly borrowing money and still going hungry for days at a time; he learned that his daughter had died.
Nevertheless, he managed to compose his Six Canticles for a cappella choir: one of his best compositions, which he would later attribute to Kreisler in Lebensansichten des Katers Murr. On 1 September he arrived with his wife in Bamberg , where he began a job as theatre manager. Hoffmann was unable to improve standards of performance, and his efforts caused intrigues against him which resulted in him losing his job to Cuno.
He began work as music critic for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung , a newspaper in Leipzig , and his articles on Beethoven were especially well received, and highly regarded by the composer himself. It was in its pages that the " Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler " character made his first appearance. Hoffmann's breakthrough came in , with the publication of Ritter Gluck , a story about a man who meets, or believes he has met, the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck —87 more than twenty years after the latter's death.
With this publication, Hoffmann began to use the pseudonym E. Hoffmann, telling people that the "A" stood for Amadeus , in homage to the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — However, he continued to use Wilhelm in official documents throughout his life, and the initials E. The next year, he was employed at the Bamberg Theatre as stagehand, decorator, and playwright, while also giving private music lessons.
He became so enamored of a young singing student, Julia Marc, that his feelings were obvious whenever they were together, and Julia's mother quickly found her a more suitable match. When Joseph Seconda offered Hoffmann a position as musical director for his opera company then performing in Dresden , he accepted, leaving on 21 April Prussia had declared war against France on 16 March during the War of the Sixth Coalition , and their journey was fraught with difficulties.
They arrived on the 25th, only to find that Seconda was in Leipzig; on the 26th, they sent a letter pleading for temporary funds. That same day Hoffmann was surprised to meet Hippel, whom he had not seen for nine years. The situation deteriorated, and in early May Hoffmann tried in vain to find transport to Leipzig.
On 8 May, the bridges were destroyed, and his family were marooned in the city. During the day, Hoffmann would roam, watching the fighting with curiosity. Finally, on 20 May, they left for Leipzig, only to be involved in an accident which killed one of the passengers in their coach and injured his wife. They arrived on 23 May, and Hoffmann started work with Seconda's orchestra, which he found to be of the best quality.