The Muse as Hero(ine): Gender and Creative Process in Hildegard von Hohenthal

Wilhelm Heinse's erotic novel about music, Hildegard von Hohenthal (1795/96), written in the confusion of the short-lived “Mainz Republic”, uses a fictional court on the Rhine to tell the story of a slice of European musical life just before the French Revolution. It is an extraordinarily systematic and self-reflexive book. The eight studies in this volume examine the book across its wide thematic range. Heinse’s characters come together, fall in love, make music and most of all discuss musical matters in a reflection of the learned conversational culture of the late Enlightenment. Heinse stages these performances and discussions in such a way as to leave open their full critical potential. In opposition to the emerging disenchantment of thinking about and feeling music, Heinse presents ideas about the “magical” expressive potential of music to elicit reactions of wonder. The tuning of a piano becomes a metaphor for how a dynamic natural system can be bound by chains of rationality and progress. The question of subjective aesthetic choice remains suspended between nature (physical, anatomical and magical) and “common sense”. His characters explore their own “imaginary museum” in their rehearsals and concerts, performing and analysing a historical repertoire that (literally) stages the conflict between opera seria and Gluck’s reform opera. Heinse shapes the plot of the novel around the plots and subjects of these operas and thus calls into question the reality voice and gender roles, and of the concert itself as cultural form. By taking musical thought and weaving it into the narrative of the novel, Heinse emerges as a key—and up to now hardly noticed—intermediary between the discourses of his time and current study of eighteenth-century music. His book opens new perspectives on debates over the arts as museum, on culture as an object itself of mise-en-scene, on the opposition between nature and society and the critical role of musical performance.