Friedrich Richter, to whom Hoffmann had paid a visit while at Bamberg.
The incipient author was delighted with his new task; and Rochlitz and his readers no less so with its execution. These Fantasiestücke turning chiefly on Music, exclusively on Art, were afterwards to make him known to the world as a brilliant and peculiar writer; and they served for the present to augment his scanty funds, to bring him into favour and employment as a musical composer, and at last to deliver him from Bamberg. In 1813, by the management of Rochlitz, he formed an engagement at Dresden, again as Music-director, in the theatre of one Seconda. This appointment he hailed as a most propitious change; but his theatrical career was not destined anywhere to be smooth. Misfortunes, almost destruction, overtook him even on his journey: Seconda he soon found to be a driveller; the opera shifted from Dresden to Leipzig, and from Leipzig to Dresden; the country was full of Cossacks and Gendarmes, and Hoffmann's operatic melodies were drowned in the loud clang of Napoleon's battles. Till the end of 1814, he led a life more chequered by hard vicissitudes than ever: now quarrelling with Seconda, now sketching caricatures of the French; now writing Fantasies, now looking at Battles; sometimes sick, often in danger, generally light of heart, and always short of money. The Golden Pot, one of the Fantasiestücke, which follows this Introduction, was begun in Dresden, shortly before the Battle of Leipzig, while the cannon of the Allies was bombarding the city; with grenadoes bursting at the writers very hand, nay, at last driving him from his garret into some safer shelter.
The revolution of Europe, which restored so many sovereigns to their thrones, restored Hoffmann to his chair of office. He arrived at Berlin in September 1814; was provided with employment; reinstated in his former rights of
Lorraine painter of the seventeenth century; a wild genius, whose Temptation of St. Antony is said to exceed in chaotic incoherence that of Teniers himself.
