(b Königsberg, 24 Jan 1776; d Berlin, 25 June 1822). German writer and composer. He was educated as a lawyer; his earliest compositions date from 1798-9 at Berlin, where he studied briefly with Reichardt. He moved to Warsaw in 1804, getting some of his works performed and conducting concerts. Periods as a theatre director, composer and producer in Bamberg (1808, 1810-12) raised his hopes, but he was more successful as a writer of stories, essays and reviews for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1809-15) and other journals. In 1813 he became conductor to a Dresden-Leipzig opera company and began work on Undine, to be his greatest success (1816); but he was obliged to return to law and wrote only a few more works. Praised by Weber for its pace, drama and melody, the magic opera Undine remains the most important of his six extant stage works; along with the heroic Aurora (1812), it enlarges German Singspiel by giving greater scope to the ensembles and a more prominent role to the chorus. He also wrote sacred works, piano sonatas and orchestral and chamber pieces. He is chiefly remembered as a writer on music; apart from his imaginative stories (e.g. ‘Kreisleriana’) which influenced Schumann, Offenbach and Wagner, his finest achievements were his perceptive reviews of Beethoven's works, which did much for contemporary understanding of the composer's music.

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(b Darmstadt, 30 July 1852; d Berlin, 11 Nov 1932). German architect and writer. He attended the Kunstakademie, Kassel (1873), and the Bauakademie, Berlin (1874-9), where his teachers included Johann Heinrich Strack and Richard Lucae, and he won the Schinkel prize. In 1879 he took the government examination in architecture and became a government architect (1884). In 1885 he won a competition, with Peter Dybwad (1859-1921), for the Reichsgericht in Leipzig and a subsequent commission to revise the design; work was carried out on this monumental, neo-classicist law court between 1887 and 1895. In early April 1896 Hoffmann was elected city architect of Berlin, a post he retained until 1924 (see BERLIN,

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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The German author, composer, and artist Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) is known chiefly for his short stories and novels. His work represents an extreme development of German romanticism toward the grotesque and the fantastic.

On Jan. 24, 1776, E. T. A. Hoffmann was born in Königsberg, Prussia. He studied law at the University of Königsberg, and by 1800 he had become a court official with the Prussian government in Berlin. However, in 1802 he was forced to move to the Polish town of Plock, partly because he had drawn an uncomplimentary sketch of one of his superiors. He obtained an appointment to Warsaw in 1804 and there wrote music until 1806, when he lost his government position during Napoleon's occupation of Prussia.

During the next few years Hoffmann cultivated his talents as writer, artist, and composer. By 1808 he had become orchestra conductor for the theater in Bamberg. Here he began to write the first of his short stories. His first published collection was Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (1814-1815; Phantasies in the Fashion of Callot), inspired by a French painter of grotesques. One of the best in this collection is Der goldne Topf ("The Golden Pot"), which tells of a law student torn between the love of a demonic "serpent-girl" and the daughter of a bureaucratic official. In the end the forces of the supernatural win out.

Hoffmann continued his career as musical director, moving to Dresden and in 1814 to Berlin, where he associated with other romantic writers, such as the poet Clemens Brentano. He was eventually reinstated as an official in the Prussian government, and in 1816 he became a judge with the superior court. He continued his literary activity, however, and in 1815-1816 published a horror novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil's Elixir). This tale, inspired by the English Gothic novel, recounts in lurid detail a wicked monk's commerce with evil spirits. Another grotesque novel is Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr (1820-1822; Views on Life of Tomcat Murr).

Hoffmann continued to serve as judge until the year of his death, relatively unhampered by a capacity for alcohol that is thought to have been a source of some of his more striking literary inspirations. Hoffmann was the German romantic whose works were most enthusiastically read abroad. He died on June 25, 1822, in Berlin, of a spinal infection.

Further Reading

The best study in English of Hoffmann is Harvey W. Hewett-Thayer, Hoffmann, Author of the Tales (1948), which examines the relationship between his life and his writings. A brief, general discussion of the author is in L. A. Willoughby, The Romantic Movement in Germany (1930). Ralph Tymms, German Romantic Literature (1955), analyzes Hoffmann's writings as horror stories.

Additional Sources

Daemmrich, Horst S., The shattered self; E. T. A. Hoffmann's tragic visit, Detroit, Wayne State University, 1973.

Hoffmann, E. T. A., Selected letters of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

Kaiser, Gerhard R., E.T.A. Hoffmann, Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1988.

Roters, Eberhard, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Berlin: Stapp, 1985.

Schafer, R. Murray, E. T. A. Hoffmann and music, Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1975.

For more information on Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, visit Britannica.com.

Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus (b Konigsberg, 24 Jan. 1776, d Berlin, 25 June 1822). German writer and composer whose stories have been the basis of several ballets, most famously Der Sandmann for Coppélia (chor. Saint-Léon, Paris, 1870) and Der Nussknacker und der Mäusekönig for The Nutcracker (chor. Ivanov, St Petersburg, 1892). Ashton and Massine choreographed dances for Powell's 1951 film based on the opera Tales of Hoffmann, and Béjart choreographed a dance version of the opera in 1961 for his Ballet of the 20th Century as did Darrell for Scottish Theatre Ballet in 1972.

Hoffmann, E. T. A. (1776–1822), writing name of arguably the world master of the genre of fantastic tales, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (he adopted the initial ‘A.’ in his pen name out of reverence for the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart). He was born in Königsberg, East Prussia (since 1945 Kalinengrad, Russia) into a family of lawyers and completed a course of study in law at the university in his native city. Following family tradition he entered upon a career in the Prussian judiciary, passing successfully through the several stages of apprenticeship, first in Königsberg, then in Glogau (now Glogów, Poland), in Berlin, and finally in Posen (now Poznan, Poland). There in 1802 he was promoted to full rank as councillor (Rat), but then was given an unwelcome posting to Plock, as punishment for having participated in a prank ridiculing governing officials in Posen. He was happy to be posted two years later to Warsaw, then in Prussian hands as a result of the third partition of Poland in 1795. There he participated enthusiastically in the active cultural life of the city, through which he became acquainted with the works of German romantic authors and had the opportunity to further his cherished musical ambitions as composer and conductor. A chance to fulfil that dream presented itself with Napoleon's occupation of Poland in the autumn of 1806, which necessitated the dismissal of most Prussian officials there, including Hoffmann. After a period of discouragement and poverty, he moved in 1808 to Bamberg, where he was able to support himself and his wife through work as composer, music teacher, and music critic, the latter activity leading him to embark on the literary career that made him famous. That acclaim dated from the publication of his Fantasiestücke (Fantasy‐Pieces, in 4 vols., 1814–15), which included republication of his much debated hailing of Beethoven as the most romantic of composers (in the ‘Kreisleriana’) and his equally much discussed romantic interpretation of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni (in the fantasy‐piece entitled ‘Don Juan’). His achievement of literary fame coincided with his reinstatement in the Prussian judiciary, following the defeat of Napoleon; with an appointment at the Kammergericht in Berlin (1816); and also with the successful première (also 1816) of his pioneering romantic opera Undine to a text by Fouqué (based on the latter's mermaid story of that title). In the half‐dozen years that remained before his life was cut short by death from a relatively sudden onset of paralytic illness, Hoffmann enjoyed both continued popularity and acclaim as an author and distinction as a high judiciary official.

As Hoffmann repeatedly explained to his readers, his aim as an author was to offer an experience of poetic transport by depicting the entry of a magical spirit realm into the confines of earthly existence in such a way as to make that realm seem as vivid as familiar reality. The transport created by such mingling of fantasy and reality involved an element of horror, vertigo, or sense that one was perhaps surrendering to insanity. His immediate literary precursor in this regard was his romantic contemporary Ludwig Tieck, but Hoffmann's interest in the relation between fantasy and insanity was much deepened by his acquaintance in Bamberg with psychiatric physicians there and the relevant medical literature. Important, too, in this regard was his own experience of fantasy and fear of insanity regarding his romantic infatuation with the niece of one of these physicians, his adolescent voice pupil—a devotion that found various depictions in the Fantasiestücke and later in the autobiographical novel Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (Views on Life of the Tomcat Murr, 2 vols., 1819, 1821). The theme of the threat of insanity in connection with erotic passion is dominant as well in his other novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil's Elixirs, 2 vols., 1815, 1816) and in his two volumes of tales entitled Nachtstücke (Nocturnal Pieces, 1816, 1817). He collected and published his numerous tales written—often in a lighter vein—for almanacs and other periodicals in the four volumes entitled Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brethren, 1819–21), for which he provided a narrative frame of the sort familiar since Boccaccio's Decameron.

The most popularly famous of the seven of his stories that Hoffmann considered to be fairy tales is ‘Nussknacker und Mausekönig’ (‘Nutcracker and the Mouse‐King’, 1816), on which the Tchaikovsky ballet is based. Hoffmann, however, considered the very first of these Märchen, Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot, 1814), to be his masterpiece. It is indeed in that tale that Hoffmann most brilliantly succeeds at his programmatic intermingling of fantasy and reality, using lore about elemental spirits familiar to him from Fouqué's Undine and other literary sources, as he did again in the later fairy tale ‘Die Königsbraut’ (‘The King's Bride’, 1821). In the Nutcracker story, the magical realm is that familiar from literary folk fairy tales like those of Perrault and the Grimms, while in Hoffmann's other four Märchen—‘Das fremde Kind’ (‘The Strange Child’, 1817), Klein Zaches (Little Zachary, 1819), Prinzessin Brambilla (Princess Brambilla, 1820), and Meister Floh (Master Flea, 1822)—the element of fantasy is taken from pious legend, French literary fairy tales, the commedia dell'arte, and lore about ghosts, respectively. In addition, the fantastic in Hoffmann's Märchen is usually connected with elements from nature mysticism as found in the writings of his German romantic contemporaries, especially the philosopher Schelling, the poet Novalis, and others influenced by them.

Bibliography

• Daemmrich, Horst S., The Shattered Self: E. T. A. Hoffmann's Tragic Vision (1973).
• Hewett‐Thayer, Harvey W., Hoffmann: Author of the Tales (1948).
• McGlathery, James M., Mysticism and Sexuality: E. T. A. Hoffmann (2 vols., 1981, 1985).
• McGlathery, James M., E. T. A. Hoffmann (1997).
• Negus, Kenneth, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Other World (1965).
• Taylor, Ronald, Hoffmann (1963).

— James M. McGlathery

Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus (Königsberg, 1776-1822, Berlin), whose third baptismal name was Wilhelm, adopted the name Amadeus as a token of his reverence for Mozart. The child of a broken home, Hoffmann was brought up by relatives. At school his principal friend was Th. G. Hippel (1775-1843, nephew of the writer Hippel). Hoffmann's father and some of his mother's family had been law officers of the Prussian Crown, and, although he displayed considerable artistic gifts, he was destined for the same profession, studying law at Königsberg University (1792-5), and obtained appointment at Groß-Glogau in 1796. He made rapid progress, serving from 1798 in Berlin, and from 1800 in Posen. He devoted his spare time to drawing, painting (he was successful with portraits), and extensive reading; he composed music, chiefly ecclesiastical works and incidental music to plays. But he also drew caricatures, some of which made fun of his seniors, and rashly allowed them to circulate. As a result he received in 1802 a disciplinary posting (which did not affect his promotion) to the dull Polish town of Plozk. He married Michaeline (Mischa) Rorer and also discovered his ability to write. In 1804 he was transferred to Warsaw, where he resumed his artistic pursuits in a more congenial environment. During these rather isolated years in Poland he found stimulating friends in Julius Hitzig and Zacharias Werner.

After the defeat of Prussia by the French in 1806, the Prussian administration was dismissed, and Hoffmann found himself virtually without means until he was appointed orchestral conductor to the theatre at Bamberg. For the next few years he sought to live for his music alone. The theatre soon fell on evil days, and Hoffmann left it for a time in 1809, supporting himself and his wife by giving music lessons. Among his pupils was Julia Marc, a girl with a beautiful voice, to whom Hoffmann became passionately attached. In 1812 she entered a short-lived marriage with a Hamburger, who was an alcoholic. Hoffmann's love for her recurs in the form of an idealization of music in many of his writings. In 1813 he obtained a post as musical director with a company that performed at Dresden and Leipzig.

By now Hoffmann was an accomplished writer. In musical reviews published 1809-14 he proved himself not only an acute as well as passionate admirer of Mozart, but also showed sympathy for baroque music, and notably for the work of J. S. Bach, at that time subject to neglect. Furthermore, he was an informed and enthusiastic supporter of his contemporary Beethoven. Not surprisingly, his early fiction is closely linked with music ( Ritter Gluck, 1809; Kreislers musikalische Leiden, 1810; Ombra adorata, 1812; Don Juan, 1813). The last of these includes a noteworthy contribution to the interpretation of Mozart's Don Giovanni. In 1814 the first volumes of Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, a collection of stories, including Ritter Gluck and Don Juan, appeared, and this was quickly followed by two more volumes, in which, among others, the new stories Der goldne Topf and Abenteuer der Sylvester-Nacht appeared. Hoffmann's first novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels, written in Leipzig and Berlin, was also published in 1815-16.

After his disappointing theatrical experiences in Bamberg and Leipzig, Hoffmann abandoned his intention to depend solely on his pen and his music, and sought reappointment in the Prussian civil service. He retained, however, his desire to compose, and completed the opera Undine, an adaptation of F. de la Motte Fouqué's story, for which Fouqué himself supplied the libretto. The opera was eventually performed in the Berlin Schauspielhaus in August 1816, and achieved some fourteen performances before the theatre was destroyed by fire. Hoffmann was duly reappointed a Crown law officer, at first without pay, but in 1816 he was restored to his former seniority. He achieved a reputation for punctiliousness and humanity in the discharge of his duties, but undermined his health by heavy drinking, a habit acquired during his years in Poland. His writings were as much in demand as ever. Nachtstücke (2 vols., including Ignaz Denner, Der Sandmann, Das Sanctus, and Das Majorat) came out in 1816-17, and in 1819-21 followed Die Serapionsbrüder (4 vols., including Der Artushof; Nußknacker und Mausekönig; Rat Krespel; Doge und Dogaressa; Meister Martin, der Küfner, und seine Gesellen; Das Fräulein von Scuderi; Der unheimliche Gast; and Der Baron von B.). Simultaneously, volumes 1 and 2 of Hoffmann's unfinished second novel, Lebensansichten des Kater Murr, appeared (vol. 1 in 1819, vol. 2 in 1821), as well as the three fantasies Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober (1819), Prinzessin Brambilla (1820), and Meister Floh (1822).

Hoffmann died after an illness of some months. This last phase was embittered by an inquiry into his work involving charges that he did not pursue agitators with sufficient vigour. The dialogue Des Vetters Eckfenster (1822) appeared shortly before his death; Meister Johannes Wacht and the unfinished Der Feind were both dictated by the sick poet, and published posthumously in 1823. A projected work of autobiographical character, Schnellpfeffers Flitterwochen vor der Hochzeit, was never written. For further information on individual works see Automate, Die (1814), Prinzessin Blandina (1815), Kampf der Sänger, Der (1818), Bergwerke zu Falun, Die (1819), Doppeltgänger, Die (1821), and Elementargeist, Der (1821 and 1825).

It is a remarkable feature of Hoffmann's career that he did not regard himself as a writer until he was in his thirties and then, in the fourteen years before his death at the age of 46, wrote two novels and some fifty, mostly substantial, stories. He possessed extraordinary inventiveness, a remarkably fertile imagination, a vision at once childlike and sophisticated, and a gift for vivid evocation of scenes, often in realistic terms. His stories range from the pure fantasy of the fairy-tales Der goldne Topf, Nußknacker und Mausekönig, and Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober (which nevertheless have an element of parable) to dark, sinister, frightening tales, such as Das Majorat, Ignaz Denner, and Das Fräulein von Scuderi on which P. Hindemith based his opera Cardillac (1926, rev. 1952). In between these extremes are neatly contrived narrations such as Doge and Dogaressa and Meister Martin, der Küfner, und seine Gesellen. Of the novels, Die Elixiere des Teufels shows horror stretched to the point of insanity, while the Lebensansichten des Kater Murr maintains a subtle balance between the dark irrational elements and a palpable reality. Hoffmann is the central figure in the opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann (première 1881) by Offenbach.

Gesammelte Schriften (15 vols.) appeared 1827-39. 20th-c. editions include the incomplete Historisch-kritische Gesamt-Ausgabe (vols. 1-4 and 6-10, 1908-28), ed. C. G. von Maaßen, Kritische Gesamtausgabe der musikalischen Werke (3 vols., incomplete, 1922), ed. G. Becking, Dichtungen und Schriften sowie Briefe und Tagebücher. Gesamtausgabe (15 vols., 1924), ed. W. Harich, Briefe, 4 vols. (incl. diaries), ed. F. Schnapp, 1967-71, Werke in fünfzehn Teilen, ed. G. Ellinger (1912, 2nd edn. 1927), and Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. W. Segebrecht and H. Steinecke, 1985 ff.

(ĕrnst tā'ōdōr ämädā'ʊs hôf'män) , 1776–1822, German romantic novelist and composer, a lawyer. At one time an opera composer and musical director at Bamberg and a gifted music critic, he is most famous as a master of the gothic tale. His stories of madness, grotesquerie, horror, and the supernatural include Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (1814–15), Die Serapionsbrüder (1819–21, tr. The Serapion Brethren, 1886–92), Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815–16, tr. The Devil's Elixir, 1824–26), and Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1820–22, tr. Kater Murr, the Educated Cat, 1892). Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker (1892) and Offenbach's opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann (1881) [the Tales of Hoffmann] are based on his stories. His writings greatly influenced the composer Schumann.

Bibliography

See his Selected Writings (1969); studies by K. Negus (1965), H. W. Hewett-Thayer (1948, repr. 1971), H. S. Daemmrich (1973), and J. M. McGlathery (4 vol., 1981).