The Impotence of Adult Toys: The Dance of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Drosselmeier and Marie from Page to Stage

Abstract

The Impotence of Adult Toys: The Dance of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Drosselmeier and Marie from Page to Stage Holly Blackford (bio) First and foremost a musician and composer, German Romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann believed he would be remembered for his music. He appropriated the “A” in his initials from Mozart’s middle name, Amadeus. He composed nine operas, a symphony, ballet and chamber music, piano sonatas and songs (Taylor 65). His operatic adaptation of Undine influenced Carl Maria von Weber, who, in an 1817 review, praised it as “the purest, most ethereal language of passion” (3). His music, aesthetic theory, and writings influenced Richard Wagner (Taylor 53) and Heinrich Heine, who, in turn, influenced Friedrich Nietzsche (McGlathery, Mysticism 15). Hoffmann saw music as the most Romantic of all arts. In his “now famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” he elevated Beethoven to “a symbol of the longing that is quintessentially Romantic” (Donovan and Elliott xi). This passion for music infiltrated his fiction, and the vibrant cross-pollination of the fine arts, literature, and theater that characterized his work also caused other artists to embrace and adapt his writings into new forms. Most famously, his story Nutcracker and Mouse King (1816) was adapted into a ballet by Marius Petipa and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1892. Now a beloved Christmas tradition in the United States primarily, this version of Hoffmann’s story is strongly associated with child performers and playgoers. As I will demonstrate, however, the ballet’s recasting of Hoffmann’s tale as the innocent fantasy of an imaginative young girl only partially cloaks the disturbing aspects of the relationship that links the figure of the child—and the actual bodies of child performers—to adult male artist figures who depend on young people to animate their creations. The Nutcracker story develops a theme recurrent in Hoffmann’s fiction. He continually created protagonists torn between two realities, possibly [End Page 93] insane, and longing for imaginative and artistic transcendence of the so-called “Philistine” world, named such in his well-known tale The Golden Pot. If Hoffmann characters intimately experience the duality at the heart of German Romanticism (Taylor 35), this duality was also a response to the conditions of his own creative life. Although he wished to make music his exclusive career, Hoffmann trained as a lawyer and served for most of his career as a Prussian judiciary (McGlathery, Mysticism 40–41). When Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1806 and Hoffmann lost his position, he achieved moderate success supporting himself through the arts, serving for a short time as music director and conductor of Joseph Seconda’s opera company and supplementing his income through teaching music. He returned to government service after Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, spending many years as a jurist and well-respected judge. His thriving creative life was his other world. In a letter dated 23 January 1796 to his friend Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, he described his double life: “On weekdays I am a jurist and at most a bit of a musician, during the day on Sundays I draw and in the evenings I am a very witty author until late into the night” (McGlathery, Mysticism 64). Though he seems so flippant about it here, in his works he explores the darker difficulties of leading a double life, a condition that leads many of his characters to madness (The Devil’s Elixir, “The Sandman”), inebriation (The Golden Pot), or merely pathetic gestures of impotent artwork and uncanny inventions (Nutcracker and Mouse King). The adult male artists and inventors in Hoffmann’s fictions are too bound to the material world to create anything other than mechanical, lifeless works of art. Their creative impotence is symbolized in his stories by inventors who create lifeless, uncanny automata, indicative also of the Romantic era’s rejection of the mechanistic worldview of the Enlightenment, when “the intellectual golden age of automata” (1637–1748) wondrously captured ideas of the universe, state, and human body as masterfully and divinely ordained machines (Kang 112). In Hoffmann’s “Die Automate” or, in English, “Automata” (1814), Professor X invents a disturbing, lifeless mechanical symphony (played by machines), which unsettles the Romantic...