Kleist and the use of reference works

thefool75 · Mon, 11 Sep 2000 16:32:31 -0700

Something which had puzzled me is why in QB
Kleist is always equated with Michael Kolhaas as the
giveaway and why that is the only Kleist work ever asked.
As a Kleist fan I was always under the impression
that The Prince of Homburg (or Hamburg) is the most
well-known and masterful Kleist work (it's my personal
preference as well) and a survey of several standard works
of Kleist scholarship confirms that. Michael (there
are various spellings) Kolhaas is important but
arguably no more so than Penthesilia or The Broken
Pitcher. Last year Eric Hilleman conducted a search of the
Carleton database and found no mentions of The Prince of
Homburg in any tournament set. Very strange. I've noticed
that an unfortunately large amount of questions appear
to be written out of Benet's (including 2 virtually
identical Inge bonuses) and I wondered if that was the root
of the discrepancy. The Benet's entry on Kleist
refers to Michael Kolhaas as his masterwork. O.k. their
opinion but do question writers never get a 2nd opinion?
I've never seen any other work of that opinion.
Further, there is a blatant objective error in the same
Benet's entry. It informs the reader that Kleist burned
his draft of the The Schroffenstein Family and only a
short fragment which he reconstructed remains. There's
only one problem, the work which Kleist burned was
Robert Guiscard (of which indeed only 500 lines are
extant). The Schroffenstein Family is in existence in
toto. I was curious, is this common with Benet's? I
don't want to make too much out of a couple errors but
I wonder how much of some of the strange things
which I occasionally hear in QB are due to an
inordinate trust in reference works (such as Rhapsody on a
Theme by Paginini being the crucial Rachmaninoff
work--that's news to musicians). The problem is: I know that
if I write a Prince of Homburg question; a
tournament editor is going to look at it and go "I haven't
heard of that"--go look it up in Benet's and assume
that I chose an obscure Kleist work instead of writing
another Michael Kolhaas question.

Nathan Freeburg