Of the various art forms of Romanticism, music played an especially important role. Music expresses the human being’s deepest feelings: as we listen to it, we experience the joy and suffering, sorrow and loss, love and rage it conveys first hand. At the same time, symphonies, sonatas, and other musical forms follow a clear inner logic and a stringent architectural structure. The Romantics regarded this combination of mathematics and emotion a wonderful mystery that testified to music’s otherworldly — perhaps even divine — origins.

Along with Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the composer Ludwig van Beethoven is today considered the most prominent exponent of so-called “Wiener Klassik”, known in English as the First Viennese School. Yet his contemporaries also perceived him as a Romantic, for with his highly expressive music he unleashed a musical revolution and unlocked new worlds of listening. The poet E.T.A. Hoffmann also composed and conducted music and therefore knew whereof he spoke: in a famous critique of 1810, he declared Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony a masterpiece whose sounds radiated gloriously “in the purple shimmer of Romanticism”.

This installation treats you to recordings of Hoffmann’s enthusiastic remarks alternating with passages from Beethoven’s Fifth.