Musical Improvisation in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck.

Readers of Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck have long focused on the ambiguity of the final sentence and its invitation to solve the mystery of the protagonist’s identity. However, the declaration of the stranger in response to the question of the first-person narrator: “Wer sind Sie?” ignores the first part of the narrator’s double question: “Was ist das?” Taking a cue from later evaluations of Ritter Gluck, I argue that Hoffmann’s text is far more interested in the answer to the narrator’s first question than in the second and that this answer involves a consequential rupture in the history of classical music performance: the veneration of the composer at the expense of the performer, as represented by the decline of musical improvisation in the concert hall and the opera house. Ritter Gluck thus marks in literature the division between baroque and early classical improvisational music-making and Romantic-era fealty to the text as inscribed by the composer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]