Markx Francien. E.T.A. Hoffmann, Cosmopolitanism, and the Struggle for German Opera

Brill, 2015. — 496 p. — (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 192).In this first monograph on E. T. A. Hoffmann and opera, Francien Markx examines Hoffmann’s writings on opera and the challenges they pose to established narratives of aesthetic autonomy, the search for a national opera, and Hoffmann’s biography. Markx discusses Hoffmann’s lifelong fascination with opera against the backdrop of eighteenth-century theater reform, the creation of national identity, contemporary performance practices and musical and aesthetic discourses as voiced by C. M. von Weber, A. W. Schlegel, Heine, and Wagner, among others. The book reconsiders the traditional view that German opera followed a deterministic trajectory toward Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and reveals a cosmopolitan spirit in Hoffmann’s operatic vision, most notably exemplified by his controversial advocacy for Spontini in Berlin.Francien Markx, Ph.D. (2003), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is Associate Professor of German at George Mason University. Her primary area of expertise is in the intersections of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German literature, music, and theater, particularly opera and the lied.