Ofterdingen’s Final Failure
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
 The Swan-song of Peter Ceniti


Imagine picking up the newspaper one morning and reading: Hello, this is God.  I made the world you inhabit and everything it contains (in a sense, at least – I mean, I didn’t create the chewing gum and the umbrellas ex nihilo, but I provided the raw materials and endowed people like you with the necessary brains). Well, for a long time I’ve been occupying myself with this task, but I’ve finally had enough (it's  becoming unhealthy) and so I’m ending it.  

Note that I’m a personal God, the kind that knows himself in relation to the things he makes, not the impersonal type God who, being inseparable from the cosmos, needs neither to make nor to know ( a sort of everything-at-once / nothing-at-all mush-of-a-god, in my opinion).

So what’s happening is I’m stepping back, climbing out from my creation, in order to see in it the image of my self (despite its flaws, despite my eternal failure to get it right).  And the only way to do this is to bring it to an end, but at a  price: and so I'm alerting all of you - apologies if this is disconcerting - that the show is over.

Faithful followers of the Ofterdingen Gesellschaft, something like this has happened to me: it has come to my attention that I’m but the stuff of dreams, the creation of Peter Andreacchi, who fashioned me to “search out the ways of my life and find, in the apparent randomness of my forgotten labor, a pattern,” – a task, apparently, I’ve completed, and so this is goodbye.  Well, that’s only fair, I suppose, seeing as it’s pretty much what I’ve done by “discovering” all those works by Ofterdingen (as I now admit).   Andreacchi, in turn,  should not  be surprised to find  his own destiny’s to show some greater god his face – and disappear as well.

But before we go, Ofterdingen and I, there’s one more work to discuss, his magnum opus, my swan-song and the instrument of Andreacchi’s re-emergence:  Hellas!  Now, the experienced traveler among these pages will be aware of Ofterdingen’s fascination, common among German Romantics, with ancient Greece, whose idealized culture they viewed as exemplary for the rejuvenation of society.  Novalis and Hoelderlin, in particular, dreamed of a synthesis of Apollo and Christ while, in England, Byron and Shelley, steeped in the classics, expressed their sympathies for the contemporary Hellenes, the former with arms, the latter in verse.

Indeed, the most substantial fragment of text we find for the present work comes from the final chorus of Shelley’s uncompleted drama, Hellas, a work suffused with antique allusions and fired with prophetic zeal, in which the poet combines the theme of cyclic time (The world’s great age begins anew  /  The golden years return) with the dream of progress, the hope of liberation (The world is weary of the past  /  Oh might it die, or rest at last!), spiraling toward a Final Restoration: Apocatastasis.

Sadly, but a few sketches by Ofterdingen have survived, and it is unclear from these whether Hellas was to be an oratorio, a symphonic poem, or something  even worse.  My guess is that the composer fell victim to the overwhelming grandeur of his vision (the fate of Scriabin with his Mysterium) so that, paradoxically, the larger and more inclusive his plans became, the more distant loomed the specter of completion, until silence swallowed him, along with his asymptotic extravaganza.

Not to worry:  I am blithely occupied at present with elaborating these bits and pieces into a lovely fantasy for solo piano which should be completed in the near future (so stay tuned!).



In the margin alongside these musical sketches we find this touching note from the composer:  

See how, the moment I surrender, the moment I concede it’s only
fragments, the pieces begin to cohere!

Oh, how life has taught me this lesson, that when we relinquish control and
trust in a wisdom wider than ours are we granted the fulfillment of our dreams – but at the price of no longer believing in them.

…Or is this artlessness artifice, this chaos calculated, this disintegration intentional, arising from the desire “to respond to the world in an articulate form without sacrificing the mysterious,” to rend, like lightning, the opacity of quotidian experience, opening a breach…?

…In which case these shards of melody, this jumble of words, can be seen as
enacting a philosophy of art, and providing a model for the larger site, itself
an image of the vaster world without…

Enough! – though I could go on forever.  I, Peter Ceniti, hereby lay aside my
editorial duties at the Gesellschaft.  With gratitude I grasp the hand of Heinrich
von Ofterdingen – and bid him disappear.  Reader, grasp now my hand, annihilate me with the steadfastness of your gaze.  See, where the light is glowing: a path leads out from the labyrinth!