Hölderlins Erinnerungsmusik

Abstract

In Friedrich Hölderlin’s letters and poetry, the fragility and evanescence of music frequently functions both as an aesthetic object and as a metaphoric medium of a self-reflexive tension between memory and forgetting. Inspired by the classical Orpheus myth, Hölderlin’s musical imagery expresses the human subject’s melancholic quest for the re-presentation of a lost object of desire that irrevocably slips away into an idealized past. But for all their mournfulness and despair, the musical references also evoke the poet’s hope for a redemptive harmony even if his writings question whether this vision is realizable in the future. (RG; in German)