DER WOHLTEMPERIERTE ERZÄHLER: DIE GEWALT AMBIVALENTER ERZÄHLUNG IN HEINRICH VON KLEISTS ‘DIE HEILIGE CÄCILIE ODER DIE GEWALT DER MUSIK’

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe article approaches the violent potential of music in Kleist's short story ‘Die Heilige Cäcilie oder Die Gewalt der Musik’ by exploring intermedial references to music. How is music connected not only to power but also to violence? Which characteristics of music (and of the language used to describe it) are highlighted in this process? In the story, music appears less as sonority and more as bodily experience and therefore the experience of music and of violence become ambiguous and difficult to tell apart. As a result, all the dichotomies in which music and violence are usually firmly integrated, such as body and spirit, order and chaos, pleasure and pain, male and female, start to break down. The narrator equalises these perceived dissonances by adding further inconsistencies, in a similar way to tempered tuning that slightly compromises the intervals of just intonation. The ambiguous relation of music, violence, and power cannot be resolved; the ambivalent tension it creates demonstrates performatively the manipulative power of language.