IN THE FOLLOWING, attention will be focused on issues of Romantic musical aesthetics in E. T. A. Hoffmann. Music is a libidinally driven and dangerous experience in Hoffmann, holding the promise of transcendence in the Romantic sense, which is partially a protest against the rationalizations of modern life. Hoffmann's outsider-protagonists, through their pursuit of artistic transcendence, often sacrifice their ability to function as rational beings. While the disruption of rational identity is a feature of almost all Romantic writing, it is intensified in Hoffmann and takes on a psychological character that is absent in, for instance, Novalis. The radicalized form of transcendence — the violent and self-destructive nature of madness in Hoffmann-protagonists such as Medardus, Ettlinger, or Nathanael — leaves no doubt that in Hoffmann's works the Romantic tendency to undermine identity as a transitional phase in coming to a fuller understanding of human experience is turned into something with more disturbing consequences.

This contribution will argue that parallel to the Romantic motif of art leading to madness is the narration of an aesthetic subjectivity that is not so much irrational as governed by sensations that are inadmissible in a strictly rational sense, because they are not capable of being translated into either verbal reasoning or visible messages. By this, I refer to auditory sensations and, more specifically, the experience of music, which seems, in the instance of Kreisler, to be far from irrational in itself.