The Blue Flower #6: A curious sensation

Footnotes & Tangents for chapters 43–47 of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

Erasmus chose his time carefully. Possibly our times are always chosen for us.

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Hello and welcome to this slow read of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. My name is Simon Haisell and I am the host of Footnotes & Tangents, book guides and slow reads of novels worth savouring. Check out our read-along plans for 2026.

In Week 6 of this slow read, we are reading chapters 43–47. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading these chapters before returning to this post to join the discussion.

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Spasm, Antonio Ambrogio Alciati, 1907. Source.

This week: A curious sensation

What a book this is! How strange and striking – its chapters shimmer dark and light, and thrust up earthly, ethereal, thrumming sensations from the deep mines of our many selves, where the black water rises, chamber by flooded chamber, atrium and ventricle, second by second, year by year…

Erasmus chose his time carefully. Possibly our times are always chosen for us. The violins in the music room, where the dancing was, struck up a Schottische, and he had a curious sensation of not qute understanding what they were, or why they were playing. He seemed to himself to belong to two worlds, of which one was of no possible importance.

This paragraph about Erasmus is one of many in The Blue Flower that seized me without warning. Erasmus is going to ask Sophie for a lock of her hair – his “blue flower” that Sophie cannot give him even if she wanted. “Erasmus chose his time carefully. Possibly our times are always chosen for us?”

We are unsettled by the absence of a “but” or any other coordinating conjunction between those two sentences. Their apparent contradiction may be an illusion. The paradox of free will and fatalism may yet be resolved on some unforeseen spiritual plane. It reminds me of Tolstoy’s discussion of history in War and Peace, and Fitzgerald was a great reader of Tolstoy.

Or perhaps, “our times” identifies us not with Erasmus but with Sophie? And someone is always choosing their moment to cut a lock from us and take what we cannot give? Her body is “wasting away” and being “consumed” by tuberculosis. Life as a thousand cuts and a series of incisions made by times that others choose – like Dr Stark and his students, arriving late and unannounced.

The violins have struck up a Schottische, which, despite its name, is not Scottish. In something like an uncanny moment of unheimlich, Erasmus does not recognise the instruments or what they are doing. He exists in “two worlds”, as if in a dream – and it is left uncertain which one was real and which was of no importance.

The Blue Flower asks us to live in this space of uncertainty, aware always of two worlds: our fragile, failing bodies and our spirits expanding, contracting and contorting; life’s particulars and practicalities, and the necessary dreamscape of our imagination.

It is, indeed, “a curious sensation” to be alive.

Interior with Woman at Piano, Strandgade 30, Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1901. Source.

Footnotes and tangents

1. Something old, something new

Something borrowed, something blue,
And a silver sixpence in her shoe.

So goes the traditional rhyme for what a bride should wear for luck at their wedding. This entered my head as I read about the servants wrestling the new pianoforte into the Hardenberg house at Kloster Gasse. It is a symbol of the Frieherr’s commitment to his son’s engagement and the arrival of modernity and new music to this austere and conservative household.

The Frieherr has chosen one of Johannes Zumpe’s square pianos to ignore his brother Wilhelm’s advice. This detail brings the familial dynamics to life in a way that is instantly recognisable. His son Anton later declares that the first tune the instrument will play is a revolutionary song. “What is that, boy!” his father objects.

Does the piano represent the invasion of a youthful romantic spirit into the house?

Zumpe is credited with popularising the pianoforte by making it affordable and convenient for the middle class. This was the instrument that Johann Christian Bach played in his first public performances in the 1760s.

• Watch: History of the early piano

• Watch: The Most Hated Piano in History

Louise Brachmann (1777 – 1822)

2. Louise Brachmann

‘Oh Louise, Lousie, I have spoken to Fritz: he is going to send your poems to Friedrich Schiller, only you must keep copies, my dear, because these great men frequently lose what is sent to them.’

At the engagement party, we get a glimpse of the German poet, Louise Brachman. Schiller did publish some of her work, but she did not find a publisher later in life and suffered severely from depression. In 1800, she attempted suicide, and around this time, his parents, brother and sister all died, leaving her almost destitute. She drowned herself in the river Saale in 1822.

• More: A short biography and two of her poems in translation

Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752 – 1814) Source.

3. What Anton does and does not play

Anton was called upon. Anton, who had been thought to have not much interest in life beyond following Karl’s example, was now the necessary person.

The French Revolution is always threatening to break into the Hardenberg household and give the Freiherr a headache. For his opening recital, Anton suggests “the revolutionary songs” of Johann Friedrich Reichardt. Reichardt was a close friend of Goethe and Schiller, placing him at the heart of Romanticism. His revolutionary sympathies got him thrown out of his job as choirmaster at the Prussian Court. He was pardoned in 1796 and made the director of the salt mine at Halle. Can’t escape that salt!

• More: Johann Friedrich Reichardt

I’m not sure which of his songs were considered “revolutionary”, but here is his most famous song, an ode to autumn:

His parents veto Anton’s choice in favour of the hymn “Wie sie so sanft ruhn”:

“How they so softy rest,” the song rises “so peaceable, so clear” from the new piano. But “the gentle air” is interrupted by the noisy entrance of the Rockenthiens! When the congregation has recomposed itself, Anton plays some hymns by the Moravian religious reformer Nicolaus Zinzendorf. Some of his hymns were translated by John Wesley, the founder of Methodism.

• Listen: One of Wesley’s translations of Zinzendorf’s hymns

After this, Anton sneaks in “the airs from two or three Singspiele”, a genre of German opera that emerged from miracle plays and includes magic and fantastical creatures. This is followed by his own virtuoso improvisation, and his recital concludes with Bach’s Capriccio on the Departure of His Brother:

There is an apocryphal story that Bach performed this work aged nineteen on the occasion of his older brother leaving home to join the Swedish army. Certainly, it is a fitting song for Anton to play for Fritz. We have already seen how Erasmus felt as though he was losing his brother to Sophie, and later the Bernhard says:

‘I’m going out to walk by the river in the darkness. That is the effect the music has had on me.’

The three brothers all seem to gesture towards some terrible separation between them and their beloved brother. Given Novalis's fate, this sense of an ending carries a deeper sadness.

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781. Source.

4. The Freifrau’s demons

The Freifrau, meanwhile, struggled alone with the demon of timidity.

A slow read seems perfect for picking up on all these terrible silences within the novel. We have already borne witness to the things unsaid beneath the cherry tree. Now, Fritz’s mother fears she is guilty of a mental transgression – a sin of thought – that makes her think ill of Sophie von Kühn. It is, in turn, an expression of her own suppressed self and a hidden self-hatred, which stands in stark contrast to the excess of self that emanates from her son’s romanticism.

Two men contemplating the Moon, Caspar David Friedrich, 1820. Source.

5. The Demon and the Angel

Downstairs in the half-darkened dining room, which had not yet been cleared, he came across a boy a couple of years younger than himself with the appearance (irritating to George) of an angel.

In a previous week, we noticed how the two families are mirror opposites, and Fritz's entering the world of the Rockenthiens is like Alice going through the looking-glass. The engagement party is like the collision of matter and anti-matter, or the intrusion of one reality into another.

Each family member has their alternate. The Bernhard is “the Angel” in his furtive red cap; George is the beast in a tricolour waistcoat. In the opening chapters, the Bernhard stole into Jacob Dietmahler’s room and opened his valise. At Grüningen, George’s transgressions show no discretion: he climbs a ladder to catch a glimpse of the painter in bed with the maid.

Now the two meet. Cramming pastries and clenching his fist, George embodies earthly urges and earthly violence. The Bernhard has no opinion on Sophie’s physical appearance, but notes she is ill and that Anton plays the piano well. His mind is on more ethereal matters, for he must go walk “by the river in the darkness.”

The Bernhard’s walk prefigures his fate. This line recalled to me a Leonard Cohen song inspired by Psalm 137 and, in Cohen’s words, “about reconciliation between the profane and the sacred.”

• Listen: “By the Rivers Dark” by Leonard Cohen

Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement, Filippo Lippi, 1440. Source.

6. But why did she laugh?

Meanwhile, another of Fritz’s brothers embarks on a quest for a lock of Sophie’s hair. It is an embarrassing farce and a fool’s errand which resembles the hunt for the Blue Flower, inasmuch as his desired object is unattainable: Sophie’s hair has gone. Comedy hides tragedy, and like her cough that sounds like laughter, her response to Erasmus is a jarring juxtoposition:

She had been laughing, it was true, most of the evening, but not with such enjoyment as she did now.

We were given a couple of hints that Sophie had lost her hair. When she arrived, we were told misleadingly that “her hair was hidden under a white cap”, and the Freifrau supposed that Sophie “might look better if she let her hair down. Fritz had told her that it was dark.”

• Tangent: Alopecia in art history: the many ways women’s hair loss has been interpreted

The city church, or Staatskirche, at the centre of Jena, 1720. Source.

7. She must go to Jena

And so Fritz’s Philosophy goes to the home of his philosophy and to Jena, where the Schlegels live. Fitzgerald makes the devastating critique that the Jena set are “hospitable” but “not charitable” – the reverse of the Hardenburgs. Caroline Schlegel mocks Fritz’s pious father: “Woe to the free, woe to the unprayed-over!”

The Mandelsloh remains one of my favourite characters. Uncle Wilhelm’s statement that “Women are always satisfied with too little” reiterates the male obliviousness to women’s frustrated desires, those of Karoline and of the Freifrau. The Mandelsloh, great manager of particulars, was “entirely assured that she had chosen wisely.”

View from the window of the artist’s studio, right window, Caspar David Friedrich, 1806. Source.

8. Fear of draughts

There is a draught, we know that already, but I go closer and confirm it, it is like a skewer. The great man of letters will risk pneumonia, and that must always be held against us.

I am endlessly intrigued by the fear of draughts. We are quite used to living in draughty houses in England. I missed them when I lived in New York, suffocating in sealed and air-conditioned accommodation. And in some cultures, a blast of air is believed to be actively harmful to health. In Italy, it is called colpo d’aria (hit of air) and is blamed for all manner of ailments. In Germany, Durchzug is the “through train” that can make you sick.

• Ill wind: How to avoid getting ‘hit by air’ in Italy

• Good air, bad air: Are Germans Scared of a Cool Breeze?

Fitzgerald has fun at the expense of the fear of draughts. To eliminate the draught in their Schaufelgasse lodgings, they open the windows very wide so that the interior is as hot as the outside. It is “hellishly uncomfortable”, but at least there is no dangerous draught!

From right to left, Goethe with Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Friedrich Schiller in Jena around 1797. Source

9. The great man

Sophie did not mention Hardenberg’s story The Blue Flower. And Goethe, at least, made no reference to the draught.

What do we make of this cameo from Germany’s great man of letters? He appears to be doing the young poet a courtesy by dropping in on Fritz’s fiancée. The conversation with Erasmus is revealing: he speaks condescendingly of Sophie’s lack of understanding and its irrelevance to Fritz’s happiness: “It is not her understanding that we love in a young girl.” But Erasmus is not concerned with his brother’s happiness.

‘Not about his!’ cried Erasmus. ‘About hers, aboute Sophie’s, about hers!’

I cannot quite make Erasmus out. He was first astonished by his brother’s declaration of love for Sophie, and then fell under her spell himself. He grieved the loss of a brother, and they quarrelled. He asked Sophie for a lock of her hair, and she laughed. What is the nature of Erasmus’s feelings towards Sophie?

Illustrations of pulmonary consumption, its anatomical characters, causes, symptoms and treatment, by Samuel George Morton, 1834. Image: Wellcome Collection

10. A scream

The full horror of the surgery undergone by Sophie von Kühn is recounted in Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels. Stark was the physician for Goethe and Schiller, and he was considered the best in the region. It was his practice not to warn his patients of the day of operation, to avoid the dread and anxiety of anticipation. There was, of course, no anaesthetic, and laudanum and alcohol would do little to dampen the pain of major surgery to drain an abscess on the liver.

It is a gruesome scene. In The Blue Flower, Stark brings three medical pupils to “learn how these things are done.” Fitzgerald does not mention that these assistants will be necessary to pin Sophie down through the painful procedure. She foregoes all graphic detail of the operation, so that all we hear is the polite “medical etiquette of Jena” as they prepare to make the first incision.

Frau Winkler, waiting below on the bottom stair, had been able to hear nothing, but now her patience was rewarded.

We have already been informed of Frau Winkler’s mobile obsession with the terminally ill. We know already that Sophie laughs at everything, even the loss of her hair. But she does not laugh now, and although Fitzgerald does not tell us in so many words, we can hear the sound she is making in our nerves and bones and brain.

In the silence, we can hear little else.

Next week

Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald.

Next week, we will finish The Blue Flower and read chapters 48–55. The reading schedule, weekly posts and further resources can all be found on the main page for The Blue Flower at Footnotes & Tangents.

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In the comments, let us know what caught your eye and ask the group any questions you may have. And if you’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole or taken your reading off on a tangent, please share where you have been and what you have found.

Until next time, I wish everyone happy and adventurous reading.

Simon