Ludwig Tieck, "Symphonien" (1799), from Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst, in Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Silvio Vietta and Richard Littlejohns, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1991), I, 245–246. Transl. Mark Evan Bonds. In instrumental music, . . . art is independent and free, it writes its own laws only for itself, it fantasizes freely and without purpose and nevertheless fulfills and attains the highest. It follows entirely its own dark drives and expresses the deepest, the most miraculous with its triflings. The full choruses, the polyphonic pieces that are elaborated with the great art, are the triumph of vocal music. The highest victory, the most beautiful prize of instruments are the symphonies. . . . These symphonies can present a colorful, varied, complicated and so beautifully developed drama such as the poet can never produce, for they reveal in an enigmatic language that which is most enigmatic. They do not depend on any laws of probability, they do not need to be affiliated with any story or any character, they remain in their purely poetic world. They thereby avoid all means for transporting us, for delighting us. From beginning to end, the thing itself is their object. The goal itself is present at every moment, beginning and ending the artwork. . . . I remember in particular one such pleasure given to me by music recently on a trip. I went to the theater; Macbeth was to be given. A famous musician [Johann Friedrich Reichardt] had poeticized a particular symphony [i.e., overture] for this wonderful tragedy. It delighted and intoxicated me so much, that I still cannot forget the great impressions it made on my spirit. I cannot describe how wonderfully allegorical this great composition struck me, and yet full of highly individualized images, just as the true, highest allegory similarly loses cold universality through itself, and which we find only with poets who have not yet grown to a stature commensurate with their art. I saw in the music the dark, foggy moor, in whose twilight muddled circles of witches passed in and out of one another, with the ever-thickening clouds all the while sinking ever closer and more poisonously to the earth. Horrible voices cry and moan through the desolation, and like ghosts, there is a trembling throughout all this chaos, a laughing, gruesome Schadenfreude appears in the distance. The forms take on more definite outlines, horrifying shapes stride meaningfully across the heath, the clouds break. Now the eye sees a revolting fiend that lies in its black cave, bound with heavy chains. He strives with all his power, with all his strength, to rid himself of these chains, but he is still restrained. Around him begins the magic dance of all the ghosts, all the ghouls. With weeping melancholy, the eye trembles in the distance, hoping that the chains will restrain the terrible one, that they will not break. But the commotion grows louder and more horrible, and with a terrifying scream, with the innermost rage the monster breaks loose and jumps with a wild leap into the ghouls. There is a wailing and exultation intermixed. The victory is decided, hell triumphs. The chaos now becomes even more chaotic and becomes truly horrible. Everything flees in terror and returns. The triumphant song of the damned ends the artwork. After this great phenomenon, many scenes of the drama struck me as tired and empty, for the most terrifying and revolting had already been announced in a grander and more poetic fashion. All I did was to keep thinking back to the music. The drama oppressed my spirit and disturbed my memories, for with the close of this symphony everything was completely finished for me. I know of no master and no work of music that would have aroused this in me, in that I could have perceived the restless, ever more enraged drive of all the soul’s power, this terrible, dizzying shift of all musical pulses. The drama should have closed with this great artwork, and in one’s fantasies, one could not conceive of or wish for anything higher. For this symphony was the poetic repetition of the drama, the most audacious presentation of a lost, lamentable human life that was stormed and conquered by all that is monstrous.