The Tragedy of Leo Armenius: Gryphius, Music, and the Divine Telos of History

Abstract

Although seventeenth-century German poet and dramatist Andreas Gryphius revered science and the new empiricism, he also believed that God was behind the events of history. The problem of how to voice this belief without compromising the objective representation of history in his Trauerspiele (“mourning plays”) led to a strategy of bifurcation: the realistic plot exposition was framed by interpretive Reyen, choruses in which the deeper allegorical meaning of events was explicated. That the Reyen were sung, whereas the rest of the drama was spoken, bespeaks Gryphius's investment in common notions of music as partly spiritual in nature, but in his tragedy Leo Armenius he also appropriated current poetic ideas that identified music's transcendent qualities with pure, nonverbal sound. The employment of a divinely “pre-semantic” poetic Klangmalerei within the rationally governed structures of verse enabled Gryphius to voice something of the hidden divine hand behind history without compromising the written record. This belief in the power of sound per se to signify higher things would inform later extra-poetic developments, including notions of the sublime and the ineffable in German instrumental music of the Romantic era.