E. T. A. Hoffmann
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a German Romantic author of fantasy and gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic and artist. His short story "The Sandman" is seen as a pioneering work of horror fiction, while his novella Mademoiselle de Scuderi is regarded as one of the earliest examples of crime fiction.
Several of his works have been reimagined in other media: He is the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker is based. In addition, his stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffmann appears as the hero. The ballet Coppélia is based on two other stories that Hoffmann wrote, while Schumann's Kreisleriana is based on Hoffmann's character Johannes Kreisler.
Hoffmann's stories highly influenced 19th-century literature, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement.
Life
Youth
Hoffmann's ancestors, both maternal and paternal, were jurists. His father, Christoph Ludwig Hoffmann, was a barrister in Königsberg, Prussia, as well as a poet and amateur musician who played the viola da gamba. In 1767 he married his cousin, Lovisa Albertina Doerffer. Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, born on 24 January 1776, was the youngest of three children, of whom the second died in infancy.When his parents separated in 1778, his father went to Insterburg with his elder son, Johann Ludwig Hoffmann, while Hoffmann's mother stayed in Königsberg with her relatives: two aunts, Johanna Sophie Doerffer and Charlotte Wilhelmine Doerffer and their brother, Otto Wilhelm Doerffer, who were all unmarried. The trio raised the youngster.
The household, dominated by the uncle, was pietistic and uncongenial. Hoffmann was to regret his estrangement from his father. Nevertheless, he remembered his aunts with great affection, especially the younger, Charlotte, whom he nicknamed Tante Füßchen. Although she died when he was only three years old, he treasured her memory and embroidered stories about her to such an extent that later biographers sometimes assumed her to be imaginary, until proof of her existence was found after World War II.
Between 1781 and 1792 he attended the Lutheran school or Burgschule, where he made good progress in classics. Ernst showed great talent for piano-playing, and busied himself with writing and drawing. The provincial setting was not, however, conducive to technical progress, and despite his many-sided talents he remained rather ignorant of both classical forms and of the new artistic ideas that were developing in Germany. He had, however, read Schiller, Goethe, Swift, Sterne, Rousseau and Jean Paul, and wrote part of a novel titled Der Geheimnisvolle.
Around 1787 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. During the year 1792, both attended some of Kant's lectures at the University of Königsberg. Their friendship, although often tested by an increasing social difference, was to be lifelong.
In 1794, 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 1795. In February 1796, her family protested against his attentions and, with his hesitant consent, asked another of his uncles to arrange employment for him in Glogau, Prussian Silesia.
The provinces
From 1796, 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 1798, 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. By the time the latter responded, Hoffmann had passed his third round of examinations and had already left for Posen in South Prussia in the company of his old friend Hippel, with a brief stop in Dresden to show him the gallery.From June 1800 to 1803, he worked in Prussian provinces in the area of Greater Poland and Masovia. 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 1802, 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. The problem was solved by "promoting" Hoffmann to Płock in New East Prussia, the former capital of Poland, where administrative offices were relocated from Thorn. He visited the place to arrange lodging, before returning to Posen where he married Mischa. They moved to Płock in August 1802.
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 1803. An essay on the theatre was published in Kotzebue's periodical, Die Freimüthige, and he entered a competition in the same magazine to write a play. Hoffmann's was called Der Preis, and was itself about a competition to write a play. There were fourteen entries, but none was judged worthy of the award: 100 Friedrichs d'or. Nevertheless, his entry was singled out for praise. This was one of the few good times of a sad period of his life, which saw the deaths of his uncle J. L. Hoffmann in Berlin, his Aunt Sophie, and Dora Hatt in Königsberg.
At the beginning of 1804, he obtained a post at Warsaw. On his way there, he passed through his hometown and met one of Dora Hatt's daughters. He was never to return to Königsberg.
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. Itzig had been a member of the Berlin literary group called the Nordstern, or "North Star", and he gave Hoffmann the works of Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, Carlo Gozzi and Calderón. These relatively late introductions marked his work profoundly.He moved in the circles of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Adelbert von Chamisso, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Rahel Levin and David Ferdinand Koreff.
But Hoffmann's fortunate position was not to last: on 28 November 1806, 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. In January 1807, Hoffmann's wife and two-year-old daughter Cäcilia returned to Posen, while he pondered whether to move to Vienna or go back to Berlin. 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 1807, hoping to further his career there as an artist and writer.
Berlin and Bamberg
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 1808 he arrived with his wife in Bamberg, where he began a job as theatre manager. The director, Count Soden, left almost immediately for Würzburg, leaving a man named Heinrich Cuno in charge. 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 1809, with the publication of Ritter Gluck, a story about a man who meets, or believes he has met, the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck more than twenty years after the latter's death. The theme alludes to the work of Jean Paul, who invented the term Doppelgänger the previous decade, and continued to exact a powerful influence over Hoffmann, becoming one of his earliest admirers. With this publication, Hoffmann began to use the pseudonym E. T. A. 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. T. W. also appear on his gravestone.
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, he accepted, leaving on 21 April 1813.