Abstract
E.T.A. Hoffmann was one of the first artists from the beginning of the nineteenth century to make a significant contribution to the three fields of music, literature and criticism. Steven-Paul Scher suggests that «a critical observation of Hoffmann as musician, composer and music critic is unthinkable, if we don’t take his literary works into consideration». Indeed, Hoffmann wrote his music criticisms into different stories. One of the most famous stories is The Poet and The Composer from 1813, in which Hoffmann describes his theoretical idea of the romantic opera. Regarding Hoffmann’s conception of romantic opera, most scholars focus only on The Poet and The Composer and connect it with his criticism of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, while ignoring another story, Don Juan, which he also wrote in 1813. Don Juan seems at first glance to be a fantasy based on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, but is actually a music/opera criticism revealing Hoffmann’s idea of the romantic opera modeled on Mozart. In fact, Hoffmann kept Mozart as a special figure in his idea of the romantic opera, describing Mozart as an «inimitable creator of romantic opera» in his last easy from 1821. This picture of Mozart as «the creator of the romantic opera» is a little-discussed aspect of our understanding of Hoffmann’s criticism career. Thus, this paper will examine Hoffmann’s evaluation of Mozart in his criticisms and in his criticisms disguised as stories, reconstructing Mozart’s romantic image as seen by Hoffmann