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Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822)
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A native of the Prussian university city of KA¶nigsberg (now Kaliningrad, the capital of a stranded enclave of the Russian Federation),
Theodor Hoffmann
was a man of extraordinarily varied talents. For most of his life, he was employed by the civil service, but for the years he lived in Bamberg (1808-13) he tried to establish himself as a composer, conductor and theatre director, having previously failed as a painter. Music was his greatest passion, but, notwithstanding the fact that he was arguably the first truly Romantic composer, he came to realize that his genius lay with words. He developed into an unusually perspicacious music critic, then increasingly devoted himself to his real forte as an author of weird short stories that reflected his own rather schizophrenic nature. Appropriately enough, he was a constant source of inspiration to later composers: Offenbach portrayed his bizarre personality in the opera
The Tales of Hoffmann
, while his stories formed the basis for two of the great Romantic ballets, Delibes'
CoppA©lia
and Tchaikovsky's
The Nutcracker
. His finest works are the chillingly supernatural
The Golden Pot
, and the later
Mademoiselle de ScudA©ry
, which is now generally regarded as the first detective story. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Germany,
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