Harmonics & Symbolism - Hermann Hesse & The Glass Bead Game.html
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."1
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.
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
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 Bouquet2 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,3 but also exquisitely methodically interesting and relevant today, as the well known Swiss physicist Walter Heitler4 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.5
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"6 was published in 1973-but the opposite was the case: there was no trace of harmonic sources.
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,7 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:8 "...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:9
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.10 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 them11 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":12
"...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."
1 Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), tr. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Picador Henry Holt and Co., 1969), pp. 14-44
2 R. Haase: Paul Hindemiths harmonikale Quellen - sein Briefwechsel mit Hans Kayser, Vienna 1973, p. 41
3 R. Haase: "Keplers Weltharmonik in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft," in: Sudhoffs Archiv, vol. 57, no. 1, Wiesbaden 1973
4 W. Heitler: Der Mensch und die naturwissenschaftliche Erkenntnis, Braunschweig 1966
5 H. Kayser: "Johannes Kepler und seine Weltharmonik," in: H. Kayser: Die Harmonie der Welt, Vienna 1968
6 V. Michels (ed.): Materiellen zu Hermann Hesses "Das Glasperlenspiel," 2 vols., Frankfurt am Main 1973
7 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 233
9 H. Hesse: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, Frankfurt am Main 1970, p. 94
10 W. Harburger (ed.): Johannes Keplers kosmische Harmonie, Leipzig 1925
11 Vivos Voco, vol. I, book 6, 1920, p. 400
12 V. Michels, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 233