the ocular harpsichord of louis-bertrand castel - Gewina

Castel's oculcU" harpsichord 65
greatly influenced by Heinse; he urged his friend Wackenroder to read Ardinghello.^^
In Tieck's work synaesthetic imagery appears in full bloom. In his
poem Zerbino, written 1796-1798 and published in 1799, one reads: "What by
order of the gods had been jealously separated, here the goddess Fantasy has
united, having the sounds know their colours, causing sweet voices to shine
through the leaves and making colour, scent and song call each other sisters.""'
But in the Phantasien iiber die Kunst, which reads like a programme of
a new Romantic aesthetics and was largely written by Wackenroder but expanded
and published under his own name by Tieck, earlier objections against a
full analogy between painting and music, raised earlier by, for instance, Rousseau,
were taken up once again: painting cannot but imitate, and in this it is
necessarily very close to nature, but at the same time it will always fall short of
nature's own beauty. Music, on the other hand, is the essentially human, creative
art. Therefore the evocative power of music is much greater than the power of
colours.'^ Notwithstanding this asymmetry, however, Tieck engorged the
sensory abundance of nature, agreeing with Castel that a even a single colour
delights us, and he fully endorsed the use of synaesthetic imagery, although he
did not justify it in any systematical way:
The variety among flowers and shrubs is an arbitrary music in beautiful interplay, in sweet
repetition: the songs of the birds, the gurgling of the water, the cries of the animals are in a
sense at the same time an orchard or flower garden: the most charming love and friendship
winds itself with glittering chains around all forms, colours and tones inseparable.'"
'"" See ibid., p. 514.
Cited in ibid., pp. 521-522: "Was neidsch sonst der Goiter SchluB getrennet, / Hat Gottin
Phantasie allhier vereint, / So daB der Klang hier seine Farbe kennet, / Durch jedes Blatt die siiBe
Stimme scheint, / Sich Farbe, Duft, Gesang, Geschwister nennet."
'^ Tieck [and Wackenroder], Phantasien, esp. pp. 119-121, 240-245.
137
Ibid., p. 118: "Die Mannigfaltigkeit in Blumen und Gestrauchen ist eine willkiihrliche Musik
im schonen Wechsel, in lieber Wiederholung: die Gesange der Vogel, der Klang der Gewasser, das
Geschrey der Thiere ist gleichsam wieder ein Baum- und Blumengarten: die lieblichste Freundschaft
und Liebe schlingt sich in glanzenden Fesseln um alle Gestalten, Farben und Tone unzertrennlich."
Tieck did try to establish something of a formal analogy between colours and sounds,
though. He rejected the elementary analogy of the ocular harpsichord as he had come to know it,
but proposed instead an analogy not between single colours and tones but between the different
shades of one colour and different tones. The single colours themselves had to be seen not as the
analogues of single tones but of timbres or instruments. In this, Tieck repeated an interpretation
that had been suggested already a couple of times before. The French printer Gauthier d'Agoty,
one of the first printers to produce three-colour prints, had thought along these lines in 1753, and
the German Hellwag had written an article about it in 1786 and even presented the idea to Kant.
The one to have elaborated this idea the farthest was the German Johann Leonhard Hoffmann, in
his book Versuch einer Geschicfue der mahlerischen Harmonic iiberhaupt und der Farbenharmonie
insbesondere, published in 1786. Hoffmann even gave a list of all the different analogues of colours
and instrument, coupling indigo to the violoncello, blue to the violin, green to the human voice,