This chapter examines cross-fertilization in the ‘transitional’ period (roughly 1818–37) between the Gothic novel, the French roman noir, and the German Schauer traditions, including the well-known influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the French conte fantastique and Hoffmann’s relation to George Sand and to Sir Walter Scott. It does so by tracing the European peregrinations of the Gothic trope of forbidden space across diverse national and literary borders, from Perrrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ to Tieck, Hoffmann, Radcliffe, Stevenson, and Wilde’s Dorian Gray. The chapter then focuses on George Sand’s novel Mauprat and its dialogue with Hoffmann and Scott.

In descriptions of the interior drama of the wager, or of the game, or of the convoluted sequence of emotions suddenly untethered and allowed free expression, we see not only the ways that gambling generated emotional intensity in players, but also how it invited closely detailed descriptions of the ways emotions were experienced. Play and the creation of Blanc-style casinos created a social space and a set of images of gambling that provided Europeans from differing backgrounds a common language of emotion that was developed through a discussion of the ways that emotion was contained and expressed in the environment of the casino, an entity typically described as being passionless.

This chapter first outlines the Romantic perspective on performance as it was elaborated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concentrates on key writers who made music central to their philosophical and literary works, most notably E. T. A. Hoffman and Walter Scott. Both writers foregrounded the immediacy and social intimacy of performance as fundamental to musical beauty, even as they simultaneously discussed music in terms of objects (works, songs, poems). The chapter proceeds with case studies of three early-nineteenth-century performers – Niccolò Paganini, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz (as conductor) – who were considered ‘Romantic’ or who inspired writers to use Romantic literary and journalistic tropes. Each case study considers the interrelations between the performer’s look, onstage behaviour, and musical phenomena, as well as the literary elaborations they inspired. The conclusion suggests ways in these three key performers shaped performance ideals well into the twentieth century.

The listening posture that accompanied the rise of Romantic musical aesthetics in the late 1790s was decidedly inward-facing. Valorising interior response over external circumstance, Romantic listeners sought to be catapulted into a world of feeling and imagination, a world that stretched inward to the affects and outward to the realm of nature. Taking E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana as a point of departure, this essay identifies three guiding principles of musical Romanticism: that music is inscrutably deep or profound, that musical sounds penetrate into and change the listener’s inner world, and that music is capable of transporting listeners to a more ideal, and markedly spiritual, state of being. The essay shows how these principles undergird broader Romantic convictions about the relationship between music and interiority, as evidenced by authors ranging from Hoffmann, W. H. Wackenroder, and Bettina von Arnim to G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Malwida von Meysenbug.

E. T. A. Hoffmann famously lauded Beethoven’s ability to separate his ego from the world of tones, an image of autonomy that resonated with Idealist celebrations of human will. This essay challenges the underlying principle of sovereignty so central to Beethoven reception by examining the composer’s attitudes towards nature, both the natural world around him and his own physical nature. By examining contemporaneous notions of hypochondria, it links the interrelationship between physiology and psychology to Beethoven and his contemporaries’ artistic aspirations and works. If Idealists celebrated the power of spirit and the sovereignty of the will, they often did so in response to powerful experiences of their own physical nature.