SOURCE: "Heine's Amusical Muse," in Monatshefte, Vol. 73, No. 4, Winter, 1981, pp. 392-404.

In the following essay, Kolb evaluates Heine's criticism of music, claiming that the poet was inexperienced and fairly uninterested in music itself, and that he used music, rather, as a touchstone to discuss the feelings it evokes and the creative process.

Whenever a novelist writes two words about music, one of them is wrong.

—Aaron Copland

In his book on Heine's music criticism, Michael Mann calls the poet a "musical nihilist." The phrase is a felicitous one, for it conveys both Heine's antagonism towards the "most romantic of the arts" and his ignorance of it. There were probably physiological reasons for Heine's malevolence or, at least, indifference towards music: his brother tells us that he was always hypersensitive to noise and found it increasingly painful as his illness progressed, and his secretary reports that he could not...