The Glass Bead Game
Bildungsroman by Hermann Hesse, published 1943
By Rudolf Haase
Translated by Ariel Godwin

Preliminary
note: For the better understanding of the final essay by Rudolf Haase,
a text documentation follows from Hermann Hesse's introduction to his Glass Bead Game.
The novel takes place in the 23rd century, looking back upon our time.
The following excerpts from the novel give an idea of the sophisticated
cult of the Glass Bead Game, as it is practiced in the monastic erudite
city, Castalia, in which values of all cultures and sciences are
expressed in signs and connected with each other in ritualistic “games.”
Let
no one ... expect from us a complete history and theory of the Glass
Bead Game. Even authors of higher rank and competence than ourself
would not be capable of providing that at the present time ... Still
less is our essay intended as a textbook of the Glass Bead Game ... The
only way to learn the rules of this Game of games is to take the usual
prescribed course, which requires many years; and none of the initiates
could ever possibly have any interest in making these rules easier to
learn.
These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a
kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences
and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and
capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the
content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass
Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values
of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the
arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All
the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has
produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly
study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual
property-on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead
Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has
attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals
range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond
number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the
Game the entire intellectual content of the universe. These manuals,
pedals, and stops are now fixed. Changes in their number and order, and
attempts at perfecting them, are actually no longer feasible except in
theory. Any enrichment of the language of the Game by addition of new
contents is subject to the strictest conceivable control by the
directorate of the Game. On the other hand, within this fixed
structure, or to abide by our image, within the complicated mechanism
of this giant organ, a whole universe of possibilities and combinations
is available to the individual player. For even two out of a thousand
stringently played games to resemble each other more than superficially
is hardly possible. Even if it should so happen that two players by
chance were to choose precisely the same small assortment of themes for
the content of their Game, these two Games could present an entirely
different appearance and run an entirely different course, depending on
the qualities of mind, character, mood, and virtuosity of the players.
How far back the historian wishes to place the origins and antecedents
of the Glass Bead Game is, ultimately, a matter of his personal choice.
For like every great idea it has no real beginning; rather, it has
always been, at least the idea of it. We find it foreshadowed, as a dim
anticipation and hope, in a good many earlier ages. There are hints of
it in Pythagoras, for example, and then among Hellenistic Gnostic
circles in the late period of classical civilization. We find it
equally among the ancient Chinese, then again at the several pinnacles
of Arabic-Moorish culture; and the path of its prehistory leads on
through Scholasticism and Humanism to the academies of mathematicians
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on to the Romantic
philosophies and the runes of Novalis's hallucinatory visions. This
same eternal idea, which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead
Game, has underlain every movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of a Universitas Litterarum,
every Platonic academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every
rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, and
every effort toward reconciliation between science and art or science
and religion. Men like Abelard, Leibniz, and Hegel unquestionably were
familiar with the dream of capturing the universe of the intellect in
concentric systems, and pairing the living beauty of thought and art
with the magical expressiveness of the exact sciences. In that age in
which music and mathematics almost simultaneously attained classical
heights, approaches and cross-fertilizations between the two
disciplines occurred frequently ...
And we suspect, although we cannot prove this by citations, that the
idea of the Game also dominated the minds of those learned musicians of
the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries who based their
musical compositions on mathematical speculations. Here and there in
the ancient literatures we encounter legends of wise and mysterious
games that were conceived and played by scholars, monks, or the
courtiers of cultured princes. These might take the form of chess games
in which the pieces and squares had secret meanings in addition to
their usual functions. And of course everyone has heard those fables
and legends from the formative years of all civilizations which ascribe
to music powers far greater than those of any mere art: the capacity to
control men and nations. These accounts make of music a kind of secret
regent, or a lawbook for men and their governments. From the most
ancient days of China to the myths of the Greeks we find the concept of
an ideal, heavenly life for men under the hegemony of music. The Glass
Bead Game is intimately bound up with this cult of music (“in eternal
transmutations the secret power of song greets us here below,” says
Novalis).
Although we thus recognize the idea of the Game as eternally present,
and therefore existent in vague stirrings long before it became a
reality, its realization in the form we know it nevertheless has its
specific history. We shall now attempt to give a brief account of the
most important stages in that history.
The beginnings of the intellectual movement whose fruits are, among
many others, the establishment of the Order and the Glass Bead Game
itself, may be traced back to a period which Plinius Ziegenhalss, the
historian of literature, designated as the Age of the Feuilleton, by
which name it has been known ever since. Such tags are pretty, but
dangerous; they constantly tempt us to a biased view of the era in
question. And as a matter of fact the Age of the Feuilleton was by no
means uncultured; it was not even intellectually impoverished. But if
we may believe Ziegenhalss, that age appears to have had only the
dimmest notion of what to do with culture. Or rather, it did not know
how to assign culture its proper place within the economy of life and
the nation. To be frank, we really are very poorly informed about that
era, even though it is the soil out of which almost everything that
distinguishes our cultural life today has grown ...
In discussing these matters we have approached the sources from which
our modern concept of culture sprang. One of the chief of these was the
most recent of the scholarly disciplines, the history of music and the
aesthetics of music. Another was the great advance in mathematics that
soon followed. To these was added a sprinkling of the wisdom of the
Journeyers to the East and, closely related to the new conception and
interpretation of music, that courageous new attitude, compounded of
serenity and resignation, toward the aging of cultures. It would be
pointless to say much about these matters here, since they are familiar
to everyone. The most important consequence of this new attitude, or
rather this new subordination to the cultural process, was that men
largely ceased to produce works of art. Moreover, intellectuals
gradually withdrew from the bustle of the world. Finally, and no less
important-indeed, the climax of the whole development-there arose the
Glass Bead Game.
The growing profundity of musical science, which can already be
observed soon after 1900 when feuilletonism was still at its height,
naturally exerted enormous influence upon the beginnings of the Game.
We, the heirs of musicology, believe we know more about the music of
the great creative centuries, especially the seventeenth and
eighteenth, and in a certain sense even understand it better than all
previous epochs, including that of classical music itself. As
descendants, of course, our relation to classical music differs totally
from that of our predecessors in the creative ages. Our
intellectualized veneration for true music, all too frequently tainted
by melancholic resignation, is a far cry from the charming,
simple-hearted delight in music-making of those days. We tend to envy
those happier times whenever our pleasure in their music makes us
forget the conditions and tribulations amid which it was begotten.
Almost the entire twentieth century considered philosophy, or else
literature, to be the great lasting achievement of that cultural era
which lies between the end of the Middle Ages and modern times. We,
however, have for generations given the palm to mathematics and music.
Ever since we have renounced-on the whole, at any rate-trying to vie
creatively with those generations, ever since we have also forsworn the
worship of harmony in music-making, and of that purely sensuous cult of
dynamics-a cult that dominated musical practices for a good two
centuries after the time of Beethoven and early romanticism-ever since
then we have been able to understand, more purely and more correctly,
the general image of that culture whose heirs we are. Or so we believe
in our uncreative, retrospective, but reverent fashion! We no longer
have any of the exuberant fecundity of those days. For us it is almost
incomprehensible that musical style in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries could be preserved for so long a time in unalloyed purity.
How could it be, we ask, that among the vast quantities of music
written at that time we fail to find a trace of anything bad? How could
the eighteenth century, the time of incipient degeneration, still send
hurtling into the skies a fireworks display of styles, fashions, and
schools, blazing briefly but with such self-assurance? Nevertheless, we
believe that we have uncovered the secret of what we now call classical
music, that we have understood the spirit, the virtue, and the piety of
those generations, and have taken all that as our model. Nowadays, for
example, we do not think much of the theology and the ecclesiastical
culture of the eighteenth century, of the philosophy of the
Enlightenment; but we consider the cantatas, passions, and preludes of
Bach the ultimate quintessence of Christian culture.
Incidentally, there exists an ancient and honorable exemplar for the
attitude of our own culture toward music, a model to which the players
of the Glass Bead Game look back with great veneration. We recall that
in the legendary China of the Old Kings, music was accorded a dominant
place in state and court. It was held that if music throve, all was
well with culture and morality and with the kingdom itself. The music
masters were required to be the strictest guardians of the original
purity of the “venerable keys.” If music decayed, that was taken as a
sure sign of the downfall of the regime and state ...
We shall now give a brief summary of the beginnings of the Glass Bead
Game. It appears to have arisen simultaneously in Germany and in
England. In both countries, moreover, it was originally a kind of
exercise employed by those small groups of musicologists and musicians
who worked and studied in the new seminaries of musical theory. If we
compare the original state of the Game with its subsequent developments
and its present form, it is much like comparing a musical score of the
period before 1500, with its primitive notes and absence of bar lines,
with an eighteenth-century score, let alone with one from the
nineteenth with its confusing excess of symbols for dynamics, tempi,
phrasing, and so on, which often made the printing of such scores a
complex technical problem.
The Game was at first nothing more than a witty method for developing
memory and ingenuity among students and musicians. And as we have said,
it was played both in England and Germany before it was “invented” here
in the Musical Academy of Cologne, and was given the name it bears to
this day, after so many generations, although it has long ceased to
have anything to do with glass beads.
The inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw, a rather eccentric but clever,
sociable, and humane musicologist, used glass beads instead of letters,
numerals, notes, or other graphic symbols ...
Perrot ... constructed a frame, modeled on a child's abacus, a frame
with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of
various sizes, shapes, and colors. The wires corresponded to the lines
of the musical staff, the beads to the time-values of the notes, and so
on. In this way he could represent with beads musical quotations or
invented themes, could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them
and set them in counterpoint to one another. In technical terms this
was a mere plaything, but the pupils liked it; it was imitated and
became fashionable in England too. For a time the game of musical
exercises was played in this charmingly primitive manner. And as is so
often the case, an enduring and significant institution received its
name from a passing and incidental circumstance. For what later evolved
out of that students' sport and Perrot's bead-strung wires bears to
this day the name by which it became popularly known, the Glass Bead
Game.
A bare two or three decades later the Game seems to have lost some of
its popularity among students of music, but instead was taken over by
mathematicians. For a long while, indeed, a characteristic feature in
the Game's history was that it was constantly preferred, used, and
further elaborated by whatever branch of learning happened to be
experiencing a period of high development or a renaissance. The
mathematicians brought the Game to a high degree of flexibility and
capacity for sublimation, so that it began to acquire something
approaching a consciousness of itself and its possibilities. This
process paralleled the general evolution of cultural consciousness,
which had survived the great crisis ...
Having passed from the musical to the mathematical seminaries (a change
which took place in France and England somewhat sooner than in
Germany), the Game was so far developed that it was capable of
expressing mathematical processes by special symbols and abbreviations.
The players, mutually elaborating these processes, threw these abstract
formulas at one another, displaying the sequences and possibilities of
their science. This mathematical and astronomical game of formulas
required great attentiveness, keenness, and concentration. Among
mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good
Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a
very good mathematician.
At various times the Game was taken up and imitated by nearly all the
scientific and scholarly disciplines, that is, adapted to the special
fields. There is documented evidence for its application to the fields
of classical philology and logic. The analytical study of musical
values had led to the reduction of musical events to physical and
mathematical formulas. Soon afterward philology borrowed this method
and began to measure linguistic configurations as physics measures
processes in nature. The visual arts soon followed suit, architecture
having already led the way in establishing the links between visual art
and mathematics. Thereafter more and more new relations, analogies, and
correspondences were discovered among the abstract formulas obtained in
this way. Each discipline which seized upon the Game created its own
language of formulas, abbreviations, and possible combinations.
Everywhere, the elite intellectual youth developed a passion for these
Games, with their dialogues and progressions of formulas.
... The Glass Bead Game contributed largely to the complete defeat of
feuilletonism and to that newly awakened delight in strict mental
exercises to which we owe the origin of a new, monastically austere
intellectual discipline ... The young people who now proposed to devote
themselves to intellectual studies no longer took the term to mean
attending a university and taking a nibble of this or that from the
dainties offered by celebrated and loquacious professors who without
authority offered them the crumbs of what had once been higher
education. Now they had to study just as stringently and methodically
as the engineers and technicians of the past, if not more so. They had
a steep path to climb, had to purify and strengthen their minds by dint
of mathematics and scholastic exercises in Aristotelian philosophy.
Moreover, they had to learn to renounce all those benefits which
previous generations of scholars had considered worth striving for:
rapid and easy money-making, celebrity and public honors, the homage of
the newspapers, marriages with daughters of managers and
industrialists, a pampered and luxurious style of life. The writers
with heavy sales, Nobel prizes, and lovely country houses, the
celebrated physicians with decorations and liveried servants, the
professors with wealthy wives and brilliant salons, the chemists with
posts on boards of directors, the philosophers with feuilleton
factories who delivered charming lectures in overcrowded halls, for
which they were rewarded with thunderous applause and floral
tributes-all such public figures disappeared and have not come back to
this day ... It took long enough in all conscience for realization to
come that the externals of civilization-technology, industry, commerce,
and so on-also require a common basis of intellectual honesty and
morality.
To return now to the Glass Bead Game: what it lacked in those days was
the capacity for universality, for rising above all the disciplines.
The astronomers, the classicists, the scholastics, the music students
all played their Games according to their ingenious rules, but the Game
had a special language and set of rules for every discipline and
subdiscipline. It required half a century before the first step was
taken toward spanning these gulfs. The reason for this slowness was
undoubtedly more moral than formal and technical. The means for
building the spans could even then have been found, but along with the
newly regenerated intellectual life went a puritanical shrinking from
“foolish digressions,” from intermingling of disciplines and
categories. There was also a profound and justified fear of relapse
into the sin of superficiality and feuilletonism.
It was the achievement of one individual which brought the Glass Bead
Game almost in one leap to an awareness of its potentialities, and thus
to the verge of its capacity for universal elaboration. And once again
this advance was connected with music. A Swiss musicologist with a
passion for mathematics gave a new twist to the Game, and thereby
opened the way for its supreme development. This great man's name in
civil life can no longer be ascertained; by his time the cult of
personality in intellectual fields had already been dispensed with. He
lives on in history as Lusor (or also, Joculator) Basiliensis. Although
his invention, like all inventions, was the product of his own personal
merit and grace, it in no way sprang solely from personal needs and
ambitions, but was impelled by a more powerful motive. There was a
passionate craving among all the intellectuals of his age for a means
to express their new concepts. They longed for philosophy, for
synthesis. The erstwhile happiness of pure withdrawal each into his own
discipline was now felt to be inadequate. Here and there a scholar
broke through the barriers of his specialty and tried to advance into
the terrain of universality. Some dreamed of a new alphabet, a new
language of symbols through which they could formulate and exchange
their new intellectual experiences ... It was at this point that
Joculator Basiliensis applied himself to the problem. He invented for
the Glass Bead Game the principles of a new language, a language of
symbols and formulas, in which mathematics and music played an equal
part, so that it became possible to combine astronomical and musical
formulas, to reduce mathematics and music to a common denominator, as
it were. Although what he did was by no means conclusive, this unknown
man from Basel certainly laid the foundations for all that came later
in the history of our beloved Game.
The Glass Bead Game, formerly the specialized entertainment of
mathematicians in one era, philologists or musicians in another era,
now more and more cast its spell upon all true intellectuals ... After
Joculator Basiliensis' grand accomplishment, the Game rapidly evolved
into what it is today: the quintessence of intellectuality and art, the
sublime cult, the unio mystica of all separate members of the Universitas Litterarum. In our lives it has partially taken over the role of art, partially that of speculative philosophy.
... For all that the Glass Bead Game had grown infinitely in technique
and range since its beginnings, for all the intellectual demands it
made upon its players, and for all that it had become a sublime art and
science, in the days of Joculator Basiliensis it still was lacking in
an essential element ... Only after some time did there enter into the
Game ... the idea of contemplation.
This new element arose out of an observed evil. Mnemonists, people with
freakish memories and no other virtues, were capable of playing
dazzling games, dismaying and confusing the other participants by their
rapid muster of countless ideas. In the course of time such displays of
virtuosity fell more and more under a strict ban, and contemplation
became a highly important component of the Game. Ultimately, for the
audiences at each Game it became the main thing. This was the necessary
turning toward the religious spirit. What had formerly mattered was
following the sequences of ideas and the whole intellectual mosaic of a
Game with rapid attentiveness, practiced memory, and full
understanding. But there now arose the demand for a deeper and more
spiritual approach ...
There is scarcely any more we need add. Under the shifting hegemony of
now this, now that science or art, the Game of games had developed into
a kind of universal language through which the players could express
values and set these in relation to one another. Throughout its history
the Game was closely allied with music, and usually proceeded according
to musical or mathematical rules. One theme, two themes, or three
themes were stated, elaborated, varied, and underwent a development
quite similar to that of the theme in a Bach fugue or a concerto
movement. A Game, for example, might start from a given astronomical
configuration, or from the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a
sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads, and from this theme,
depending on the intentions and talents of the player, it could either
further explore and elaborate the initial motif or else enrich its
expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts ...
Incidentally, the terminology of Christian theology, or at any rate
that part of it which seemed to have become a part of the general
cultural heritage, was naturally absorbed into the symbolic language of
the Game. Thus one of the principles of the Creed, a passage from the
Bible, a phrase from one of the Church Fathers, or from the Latin text
of the Mass could be expressed and taken into the Game just as easily
and aptly as an axiom of geometry or a melody of Mozart. We would
scarcely be exaggerating if we ventured to say that for the small
circle of genuine Glass Bead Game players the Game was virtually
equivalent to worship, although it deliberately eschewed developing any
theology of its own ...
If the Game is regarded as a kind of world language for thoughtful men,
the Games Commissions of the various countries under the leadership of
their Magisters form as a whole the Academy which guards the
vocabulary, the development, and the purity of this language ...
But for every independent player, and especially for the Magister, the
Glass Bead Game is primarily a form of music-making, somewhat in the
sense of those words that Joseph Knecht once spoke concerning the
nature of classical music:
“We consider classical music to be the epitome and quintessence of our
culture, because it is that culture's clearest, most significant
gesture and expression. In this music we possess the heritage of
classical antiquity and Christianity, a spirit of serenely cheerful and
brave piety, a superbly chivalric morality. For in the final analysis
every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for
human behavior concentrated into a gesture. As we know, between 1500
and 1800 a wide variety of music was made; styles and means of
expression were extremely variegated; but the spirit, or rather the
morality, was everywhere the same. The human attitude of which
classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always
based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same
kind of victory over blind chance. Classical music as gesture signifies
knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human
destiny, courage, cheerful serenity. The grace of a minuet by Handel or
Couperin, the sensuality sublimated into the delicate gesture to be
found in many Italian composers or in Mozart, the tranquil, composed
readiness for death in Bach-always there may be heard in these works a
defiance, a death-defying intrepidity, a gallantry, and a note of
superhuman laughter, of immortal gay serenity. Let that same note also
sound in our Glass Bead Games, and in our whole lives, acts, and
sufferings.”
These words were noted down by one of Knecht's pupils. With them we bring to an end our consideration of the Glass Bead Game.
The Glass Bead Game
by Hermann Hesse
We are prepared to listen reverently
To universal music, the Master's music,
Evoking noble minds of golden ages
To pure celebration.
We now bring forth out of the mystery
The magic formula, beneath whose spell
The boundless, raging storm that we call life
Solidifies into clear analogies.
Like constellations, crystals give forth tones,
Serving them gives meaning to our lives,
And from their circle none can be dislodged
Except to fall into the holy center.
Hermann Hesse and the Harmonic Tradition
A study on the origins of the Glass Bead Game
Essay in Neue Zürcher Zeitung Oct. 12-13, 1974, No. 463
By Rudolf Haase
Translated by Ariel Godwin
Early
on, Hermann Hesse and Hans Kayser, both closely connected with
Switzerland personally and through their lifelong work, developed a
relationship with one another. No attempt has been made until now to
describe this relationship-actually only hinted at-in any depth. To be
exact, this did not so much involve direct contact between the great
author and the philosopher, at the time not yet at the peak of his
reformation of Pythagorean-harmonic studies, but more a tangency of
Hesse to the tradition as a whole; yet this little known connection
appears significant enough to us to be lifted once more out of
obscurity.
The stage is set by Hermann Hesse's novel The Glass Bead Game,
the equally momentous and puzzling work that has led to many
interpretations and speculations. When it was published in 1943, all
those familiar with Kayserian harmonics were convinced that it
contained an encryption of harmonics, and today when the Author of this
essay refers to Hesse's Glass Bead Game in front of students or others
versed in harmonics, they immediately mention this possibility. Kayser
summarized the events of the time in a later letter to Fritz Bouquet as follows: “For weeks after the publication of Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game,
I hardly passed a day without receiving letters or calls from outraged
readers of my books, saying that this was the outright robbery of my
fundamental ideas of harmonics.”
The Author's Allusions
It
is in no way our intent to take on the considerable task of a
comparison, or even a proof, although the topic is undoubtedly
tempting; but we shall at least make a few observations regarding the
subject matter. In The Glass Bead Game,
the following paragraph is found: “The analytical study of musical
values had led to the reduction of musical events to physical and
mathematical formulas. Soon afterward philology borrowed this method
and began to measure linguistic configurations as physics measures
processes in nature. The visual arts soon followed suit, architecture
having already led the way in establishing the links between visual art
and mathematics. Thereafter more and more new relations, analogies, and
correspondences were discovered among the abstract formulas obtained in
this way.” It is clear even to someone with only superficial knowledge
in the field that this paragraph can be applied directly to harmonics.
Considering the subject here is a “Swiss musicologist” who brought the
ancient traditional game into connection with music “and thus to the
verge of its capacity for universal elaboration,” this appears to be a
direct reference to Kayser, who had indeed lived in Switzerland since
1933. When the game is also described as “unio mystica of all separate members of the Universitas Litterarum,”
the idea again approaches Kayser, who broke into the harmonic tradition
in the 1920s with the task assigned to him by Insel-Verlag, a work on
mysticism (Der Dom - Bücher deutscher Mystik), and continually brought this tradition into connection with mysticism in his own harmonic works.
Kayser, in letters to Hesse a few years later, made references to the
possibility of a connection between harmonics and the “Glass Bead
Game.” This letter had another motivation in itself; the Neue Zürcher Zeitung had recommended that Kayser ask Hesse to write a review of his book Akróasis, and on this occasion he also asked the question about the “Glass
Bead Game.” Hermann Hesse answered on May 29, 1946 with a friendly
decline of the request, and did not discuss the question of the Glass
Bead Game, but ended the letter with the words: “In grateful memory of
the Kepler that I once partly read, I send you my greetings
(signature).”
References to Kepler
The
unexpected reference to Johannes Kepler is of great significance. The
true concern of this great astronomer and mathematician of the baroque
period was harmonics! Although a false image of Kepler was promoted for
centuries, we now know very well that from his youth onwards, the
legendary Pythagorean scholar aspired to prove the harmony of the
spheres, and his famous astronomical discoveries were made-paradoxical
though this may sound-along the way to this proof, which he finally
found and set down in his Harmonices mundi libri V.
This proof of musical laws (interval proportions) in the planetary
orbits is still just as valid today as Kepler's planetary laws, and is
not only a discovery free of scientific objections, but also exquisitely methodically interesting and relevant today, as the well known Swiss physicist Walter Heitler
indicates. But regarding this connection, it is also important that
Hans Kayser made efforts early on to correct the false image of Kepler,
firstly by including a volume on Kepler, translated and published by
Walter Harburger in 1925, in the aforementioned collection Der Dom - Bücher deutscher Mystik. Later, Kayser made repeated references to Kepler's harmonic significance.
With the reference to Kepler, Hermann Hesse indubitably gave a sign
that he was well aware of Kepler's harmonic interests-what other
meaning could such a remark have in this context? With this, however,
speculations about the novel The Glass Bead Game
acquired a new slant, namely the fact that Hesse must have been
thinking not of Kayserian harmonics, but of its great Baroque
predecessor, Kepler's “universal harmonics.” Of course, as before, it
was impossible to prove this. It could have been done when the
collection of writings and letters Materials on Hermann Hesse's “The Glass Bead Game” was published in 1973-but the opposite was the case: there was no trace of harmonic sources.
The Material
From
this sourcebook, it immediately becomes apparent that Hermann Hesse had
been occupied with the ideas of the “Glass Bead Game” long before any
possible acquaintance with Kayser's work. Above all, ancient Chinese
ideas appear to have provided motivation, for example the “Spring” of
the Lü Bu-we-one of very few concrete cited sources. In correspondence,
Hesse continually avoids precise definition or explanation; the
following letter to Cuno Amiet,
in the same volume, is typical: “Some people have broken their heads
over my book, instead of simply reading it and seeing what it says to
them. It is only intended as fiction, neither philosophy nor a
political utopia. I had to set this story in the future, not because
Castalia, the Order, and the Hierarchy are future things or were
haphazardly thought out, but because all these things have existed,
always and forever, in ancient and medieval times, in Italy and in
China; because they are a true “idea” in the sense of Plato, namely a
legitimate form of the spirit, a characteristic possibility of human
life.” At best, a single reference to Kepler can be found in another
letter, addressed to Otto Engel:
“...If scientific industriousness endures a while longer, some clever
doctoral student in twenty years will discover that perhaps the
inspiration for Castalia and the school of the elite was the Swabian
cloister seminary and monastery.” Was this merely written in jest?
Kepler, after all, was also a student at the monastery of Tübingen, to
which Hesse refers here. In other letters it also appears that Hesse
was emphatically interested in Württemberg, the church music and organs
there, etc.; but he is thinking of a later time, namely that of J.S.
Bach.
Hesse's hint in the letter to Kayser therefore stands in remarkable,
one might say anticlimactic opposition to all statements about the
“Glass Bead Game.” And since Hesse gave this hint entirely voluntarily,
it can only be assumed that in all the other evidence, he exercised a
conscious concealment of such an accepted source. Admittedly, a
question remains unanswered: which of Kepler's works was he referring
to in the quoted allusion in his letter? And of course the question of
when Hesse studied Kepler remains fully open. We did not explore these
questions further, since we expected an answer from professional
scholarship on Hesse-if such a thing is possible at all. But recently a
significant proof has reached us, through which these puzzles may
henceforth be solved.
“Cosmic Harmony”
In the Suhrkamp publication containing The Glass Bead Game,
there are also “Writings on Literature” by Hesse (in volumes 11 and
12), with the descriptive subtitle: “A Literary History in Reviews and
Essays.” And here there is a statement by Hesse on Kepler, with the
title “Cosmic Harmony,” which we shall reproduce word for word:
The modern educated man is proud that he no longer merely sniggers at
the ideas and systems of the pre-modern, pre-critical period, that he
has learned to assume value behind them. Ah, if one looks at a book
like this one on Kepler, then one trembles in horror at our emptiness,
and stands awestruck at the wealth of life, knowledge, reverence,
meditation, joyfulness, piety, with which a scholar of around 1600 was
able to write such a book! It is a study of harmony in which the
musical study of harmony is incorporated, but only as a part. The whole
does not apply to human music, but to the music of the universe, the
concert of creation, and its foundation is the joyous belief in the
unity and harmony of the universal plan, a belief in which the echoes
of Pythagoras and strong Platonic influences agree as much as possible
with naïve Christian faith. It often sounds like the music of Handel,
so proud yet also warm, so superior and yet also naïve, so radiant and
transfigured.
This review, from 1925, can only refer to that aforementioned Kepler
publication by Harburger, which comes from the collection supervised by
Kayser, Der Dom - Bücher deutscher Mystik, since it was published in 1925 and bore the title Cosmic Harmony.
Dr. Migge of the Schiller National Museum in Marbach, where Hesse's
legacy also resides, informed us at our inquiry that it was printed in
December 1925 in the Neue Rundschau.
Hesse must have known that Hans Kayser was behind this publication,
although this is not mentioned in the volume; in 1920 Hermann Hesse
wrote a review of Kayser's work on Böhme in the Dom
collection, which was reprinted by Suhrkamp directly after the Kepler
review, whose place of publication is not indicated. Dr. Migge,
however, kindly informed us that Hesse wrote two other reviews of
Kayser's work on Böhme, and in one of them Hans Kayser is explicitly mentioned as the editor of the entire Dom collection.
Science and Game
Could
Hermann Hesse's “memory of the Kepler ... once partly read” have had a
greater influence-perhaps subliminal-than can be gathered from the
sources of The Glass Bead Game?
We cannot answer this question. But it is certain that Hesse was
familiar with the work of the most important harmonist in history, in
whom he admittedly saw only a “joyous belief” and obviously not the
successful proof; precisely through this, there appears yet another
important analogy to the “Glass Bead Game”: since this is not a matter
of science, but only a game. We shall leave the indicated connections
in the form of analogies and conclude these essays with a letter from
Hermann Hesse to Theo Baeschlin (end of 1943), which refers to the
“Glass Bead Game” but could also relate to harmonics-just as Hesse's
Kepler review can be applied in part, inversely, to the “Glass Bead
Game”:
“...Just
as one can read a musical piece from notation, an algebraic or
astronomical formula from mathematical symbols, so the Glass Bead Game
players formed a sign language over the centuries, making it possible
to reproduce the ideas, formulae, music, poetry, etc. etc. of all times
in a type of spoken notation. The innovation here is simply that this
game has a kind of common denominator for all disciplines, and thus
integrates a number of series of coordinates and makes them into one.”