The Blind Dülon and His Magic Flute

Abstract

The blind flutist Friedrich Ludwig Dülon (1769–1826) toured northern Europe from the early 1780s to the first years of the nineteenth century, winning applause as a virtuoso and composer. His travels took him throughout Germany and to London and St. Petersburg, and brought him into contact with some of the age's leading composers, including C. P. E. Bach. This article traces Dülon's career, describes several of his concerts (suggesting the possibility that his appearance in Vienna in early 1791, in a concert that also featured two singers from Emanuel Schikaneder's opera company, inspired the character of Tamino in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte), surveys his compositional output (with a list of works), and tries to account for the deeply felt emotions that his performances aroused.

    Dülon's surviving compositions show him to have been a talented and fluent composer for his instrument. But he owed his success not only to his musical skills. His youth and good looks contributed to his popularity; so did his exemplary character—his modesty, poise, and virtue. And his blindness was crucial to his appeal. Audiences pitied him, and they admired the way he overcame his handicap. They marveled at his powers of memory and at his ability to play chamber music and concertos with musicians he could not see; more important, they perceived his blindess as increasing the intensity of his emotions. His flute seemed to take on a magical quality; through it he was able to communicate his innermost feelings to his listeners and to awaken in them similar feelings.

    Dülon was not the only blind flutist with such power. A fictional flutist of the late eighteenth century has much in common with him, and may indeed have been created with him in mind. Julius, in Jean Paul Richter's early novel Hesperus, is "an uncommonly beautiful youth" the sound of whose flute drifts enigmatically through the novel. The blind Julius and his place in Hesperus can help us understand the strength of Dülon's appeal to late eighteenth-century audiences.

    Julius does little in Hesperus except play his flute, but in doing so he provides the novel with an essential element. Music, for Jean Paul, already occupied the place it would enjoy in Romantic aesthetics as the most perfect art, representing an ideal world otherwise unattainable by ordinary mortals. What Jean Paul called "the second world" was a kind of heaven, a dream world of eternal bliss. Music offered a presentiment of this "second world." And often it was the flute whose music—pure, gentle, sweet—represented for Jean Paul (not only in Hesperus but also in Die Flegeljahre, Die unsichtbare Loge, and Titan) the perfection of the world beyond. 

    In Dülon's portrait we can see some of that "almost womanly beauty" that enchanted Victor and Clotilda as they stared at Julius in Hesperus. Dülon's blindness, likewise, encouraged his audiences to enjoy his youthful beauty. Those audiences felt pity when they stared uninhibitedly at the blind youth. Dorothea Weisse (who wrote to Jean Paul asking if he modeled Julius on Dülon) was not the only one whom Dülon moved "to deepest pity." One poet wrote of the "sympathetic tears" that overflowed for him. But that pity was mixed with pleasure. As one of his admirers wrote: "Pleasure brings forth tears, sweetness and pain united." Pity for Dülon "tunes one's heart to the mournful, touching sounds of his flute," to quote Weisse again. 

    Dülon's misfortune and the feelings it evoked intensified the pleasure that he gave his audience, who regarded his blindness as a gift of heaven. "Surely the eternal one in his wisdom gave you blindness, which so augments your feelings," wrote one poet to Dülon. She must have seen in his face "the rapture of the musical genius and the abstractedness of the blind dreamer" that Victor saw in Julius. Another poet asked Dülon not to weep that "night obscures your eyesight." For those who read with pleasure Jean Paul's novels, night, the time of dreams, was a blessing to be wished for, not an evil to be conquered.

    Dülon's blindness brought him closer to Jean Paul's "second world." He inspired his listeners to poetry because his flute opened up for them the mysterious realm of the invisible: of darkness, feeling, and dreams. In Hesperus, Julius's flute accompanies the dying Emanuel into the peaceful ecstasy of the "second world." Dülon's playing, too, brought thoughts of heavenly delights to his listeners: "The feeling that raises you to a better world will follow you, blind youth, into a better life hereafter! When the illusion of this world escapes our eyes, your eyes too will awake to eternal rapture!"

This article appears in Music & Letters LXXI (1990), 25-55 (JSTOR, Academia.edu) and, in French translation (and abbreviated) in Traversières Magazine 94 (2009), 17–28. For further discussion of issues raised here, see Leta Miller, "C. P. E. Bach and Friedrich Ludwig Dülon: Composition and Improvisation in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany, " in Early Music 23 (1995), 65–80; Ardal Powell, The Flute (New Haven, 2002), 129–31; Julia Cloot, Geheime Texte: Jean Paul und die Musik (Berlin, 2001); and Nikolaus Bacht, "Jean Paul's Listeners," in Eighteenth-Century Music 3 (2006), 201–212. Dülon's autobiography is available on Google Books.