Sample 510322
Sample 510322
Sample 510322
Nineteenth Century
EDITED BY
Rufus Hallmark
MASON GROSS SCHOOL OF THE ARTS
RUTGERS, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contributors
1. The Literary Context: Goethe as Source and
Catalyst
Harry Seelig
x
xviii
xix
1
35
92
142
viii
178
239
273
332
363
Contents
405
CommunicationFaithfulnessUnderstanding
TechniqueStylePresentation
Index
421
ix
Preface
Preface
xi
xii
Although chamber music has the intimacy of a song recital and opera the
beauty of the human voice, in neither is there the unique bond of eye
contact between musician and audience. Singers and instrumentalists alike
acknowledge this crucial distinction. (The young singer finds this one of
the hardest things to become accustomed to.) A good song recitalist
becomes the persona in the poem-song and engages each member of
the audience in the shared lyrical experience of poet and composer (see
Chapter 10 below and Cone 1974, 5780 and 11535). To use a hackneyed
but apt expression, the singer bares her or his soul and draws the sympathetic beholder-listener into an aesthetic, psychological, and emotional
experience evoked by the words and mediated by the music. For some, the
words get in the way of the music. But for others, this apparent drawback is
the very thing that keeps the lied potent. The lied invites us, as in no other
common modern situation (beyond school and college classrooms), to
read poetry. It enlivens thoughts and feelings, delineated by the text, that
we thought were no longer part of our sensibilities. The music insinuates
them, and we discover that this medium defines and releases feelings that
are not so outdated or superseded as we may have thought. (Consider: Did
we once believe that technology and contentTechnicolor, wide screens,
flawless special effects with computer-generated images, fast-paced editing,
sexual and linguistic explicitness, graphic violencehad rendered the
great movies of the 1930s and 40s second rate, outmoded, and irrelevant?)
We need not depend for our enjoyment on a museum recreation of what
lieder meant when they were new; with intelligence and imagination we can
find readings that still speak to us today.
Through lieder, many musicians have their only significant contact
with German literature (other than a novel or two in translation)the
native literature of many of the most important and beloved composers in
the Western European canon. This is the body of philosophy, prose fiction, drama, and poetry that (together with its English counterparts) gave
voice to the cultural consciousness named Romanticism. Though no one
challenges the existence of Romanticism in late eighteenth-century and
early nineteenth-century Europe, it admits no easy definition dependent
on a simple set of traits. An understanding of this phenomenon is best
formed inductively, through the slow accretion of impressions. There
could be no better place to start than with the poetry and music of the
German lied. Here one encounters Goethe and Schiller, the collectors and
imitators of German folk poetry, and other poets of the first Romantic
generation; then their successorsthe spiritual symbolist Eichendorff, the
balladist Uhland, and the hard-surfaced and curiously modern Heine, to
name but a few. These figures, though active and frequently set to music
well before midcentury, persist into the songs of Brahms, Wolf, Strauss,
and Mahler. Many who are considered lesser figures by literary historians
and critics were nevertheless prized and set to musicfor example, the
poet Friedrich Rckert, who was favored especially by Schumann
and Mahler.
Preface
xiii
And the pianist? Far from serving as a mere accompanist, the pianist
who delves into lieder will soon discover what balanced partners voice and
instrument are, and how crucial to the total effect of the song the piano
writing is and how gratifying it is to play. By the same token, the singer
should not think her- or himself the sole focus of the audiences attention,
but must learn the mutual attentiveness and pleasure of chamber musicmaking.
This is a great time to be studying German lieder. In the first place,
reports of the death of the genre have been greatly exaggerated. Professional singers continue to feature lieder in recitals and recordings; many
new and re-issued CD sets of the complete songs of majors composers are
available, and less well known lied composers are finding their way onto the
market. Lieder remain a staple of vocal instruction. And more scholars have
taken an interest in the lied, producing numerous articles and books of
historical, source-critical, and style studies; older interpretive discussions of
lieder have been scrutinized, and fresh analytical approaches are being
proposed to take their place. The updated bibliographies of the individual
chapters of this book will serve as a guide to this rich, rewarding, and
burgeoning secondary literature, and some of the more general seminal
studies are found in the (partially annotated) bibliography appended to
this preface. There is no lack of specialized studies to draw on as a guide to
appreciating the repertory. (The growth of this secondary literature is
manifest in the roughly 20 percent increase in the chapter bibliographies
since first publication of this book in 1996.)
* * *
The nineteenth-century German lied is often said to have been born on
19 October 1814, when Franz Schubert composed Gretchen am
Spinnrade. The quantity and quality of Schuberts songs were important,
even crucial, determinants in music history, so much so that it is not farfetched to suppose that without his example many of the composers in this
book might have ignored this genre altogether or devoted much less creative effort to it. But there are other factors to keep in mind: (1) the predecessors of the eighteenth century: the two Berlin schools (the second
one including the prolific lied composers Johann Friedrich Reichardt and
Carl Friedrich Zelter), as well as the songs of Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart;
(2) Schuberts predecessors and contemporaries in early nineteenthcentury Vienna, such as Beethoven and the balladist Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg;2 and (3) the tradition of domestic music-making, the growing popularity of the piano,3 and the market for accessible keyboard music and
keyboard-accompanied song.
Although these factors are not treated in this book, a fourth, crucial
factorthe lyric impulse of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
poetryis discussed in the opening essay, by Harry Seelig. Seelig essentially
argues for the seminal role of Goethe in launching the new, unbuttoned
lyricism in German poetry. Although I considered organizing this book
xiv
Preface
xv
In late summer 1992, not long after he had submitted his original chapter
on Mahler, Christopher Lewis was killed in an automobile accident. John
Daverio died in a drowning incident in March, 2003. Their untimely deaths
cut short two remarkable careers. I am grateful to Stephen Hefling and
David Ferris for taking on the revision and expansion of the chapters on
Mahler and the song cycle, respectively. In accordance with the wishes of
the contributors, this revised version of the book is dedicated to the memory of these two scholars.
Rufus Hallmark
Notes
1. Some signs perhaps undercut this pessimistic conclusion. A feature story on
the PBS Newshour (6/16/08) told of a literature professor who teaches reading and
writing poetry to prison inmates in Arizona. PBS has a regular poetry series, of
which this was a part. An article in the New York Times the very next day described a
poetry program at a Navajo school in Santa Fe, N.M.; its students were preparing to
participate in the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival
in Washington, D.C. These two unrelated and supposedly irrelevant reports are
perhaps symptomatic of a renewed interest in poetry per se.
2. For a sympathetic and informative account of the eighteenth-century, preSchubertian, lied see Parsons (2004, 3582), which champions this neglected and
overshadowed repertory.
3. For a discussion of the piano, see Nineteenth-Century Piano Music, ed. R. Larry
Todd (New York, 1990), especially Leon Plantingas essay The Piano and the
Nineteenth Century, 115.
Bibliography
(Note: The following works are recommended for further reading about the
German lied in general. Some specialized studies are included in the third section
because they present interesting methodological approaches to lieder.)
Surveys
Brody, Elaine, and Robert Fowkes. The German Lied and Its Poetry. New York, 1971.
Drr, Walther. Das deutsche Sololied im 19. Jahrhundert. Wilhelmshaven, 1984.
Gorrell, Lorraine. The Nineteenth-Century German Lied. Portland, 1993.
Landau, Anneliese. The Lied. The Unfolding of its Style. Washington, D.C., 1980.
xvi
Moser, Hans Joachim. Dos deutsche Lied seit Mozart. Tutzing, 1968.
. The German Solo Song and the Ballad. New York, 1958.
Parsons, James, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Lied. Cambridge, 2004.
Radcliffe, Philip. Germany and Austria. In A History of Song, ed. Denis Stevens,
22864. London, 1960. Rev. ed. New York, 1970.
Smeed J. W. German Song and its Poetry 17401900. London, 1987.
Whitton, Kenneth S. Lieder. An Introduction to German Song. London, 1984.
Wiora, Walter. Das deutsche Lied. Zur Geschichte und sthtetik einer musikalischen
Gattung. Wolfenbttel and Zurich, 1971.
Lied Texts
(These are the standard anthologies of lied texts and translations. For more comprehensive collections, see the bibliographic notes for each individual composer.)
Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich. The Fischer-Dieskau Book of Lieder. The Texts of Over 750 Songs
in German. London, 1976.
Miller, Philip, ed. and trans. The Ring of Words. An Anthology of Song Texts. New York,
1966.
Prawer, Siegbert S., ed. The Penguin Book of Lieder. Baltimore, 1964.
Preface
xvii
music. A key chapter appears in English as Lyric as Musical Structure: Schuberts Wanderers Nachtlied (ber allen Gipfeln, D. 768) in Frisch 1986,
84103).
Ivey, Donald. Song. Anatomy, Imagery, and Styles. New York, 1970. (A basic primer in
studying the elements of poetry and song.)
Kerman, Joseph. An die ferne Geliebte, Beethoven Studies, ed. Alan Tyson, New York,
1973: 123157. (Imaginative and incisive study of Beethovens famous song
cycle, discussing poetry, music, and the biographical implications of the
work.)
Kramer, Lawrence. Music and Poetry. The Nineteenth Century and After. Berkeley, 1984.
(In Chapter 5 Song, 125170, Kramer argues provocatively that song often
subverts the meaning of the poetry. His thoughts prefigure some of Agawus
critical approach.)
Stein, Deborah, and Robert Spillman. Poetry into Song. Performance and Analysis of
Lieder. New York & Oxford, 1996. (Written for use as a textbook, it surpasses
Ivey as an introduction to the study of the lied.)
Stein, Jack. Poem and Music, in the German Lied from Gluck to Hugo Wolf. Cambridge,
M.A., 1971. (By approaching lieder as a literary historian, Stein places the
poetry at the forefront, challenges cozy assumptions about the superiority of
the music, and faults irresponsible scholarship that ignores or slights the text.
Though Steins pronouncements have been challenged, his book provided a
healthy corrective at the time and is still valuable.)
Thym, Jrgen, ed. Of Poetry and Song. Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Lied.
Rochester, 2010. (Essays, solo and jointly authored, by Thym, Ann C. Fehn,
Harry Seelig, and Rufus Hallmark. Includes studies of, among other things,
how composers approach particular verse forms, poetic meters, etc., in their
song settings.)
Winn, James, Unsuspected Eloquence. A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music.
New Haven, 1981.
Zbikowski, Lawrence M. Conceptualizing Music. Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. Oxford, 2002. Ch. 6 Words, Music, and Song: The Nineteeth-Century
Lied, 243286. (A painstakingly systematic attempt to rationalize the discussion of how poetry and music interact to produce song. Should be considered
together with Agawu, Cone, and Kramer.)
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank R. Larry Todd, the general editor of the original series of
which this book was a part, for his invitation to produce the book and for
his periodic gentle urgings and helpful suggestions. The book owes much
to the confidence, patience, and prodding of Schirmer Books editor in
chief Maribeth Anderson Payne and to her successor, Richard Carlin. In
addition, I most gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of all my fellow
contributors, who were able with equanimity and generosity to bear up
through the vicissitudes of the production of a book with ten authors, one
of whom was also the sometimes foot-dragging editor.
For this revised edition, I am grateful to Constance Ditzel of Routledge
for her confidence and encouragement. I also thank the anonymous
reviewers who made many valuable suggestions about improving the book;
if we did not follow all of them, the oversight lies entirely with me. I also
wish to express my thanks to the original contributorsHarry Seelig, Susan
Youens, Virginia Hancock, Lawrence Kramer, Barbara Petersen, and
Robert Spillmanwho generously updated and revised their chapters, to
Jrgen Thym, who added an additonal composer to his chapter, and especially to David Ferris and Stephen Hefling, for their sympathetic updating
and reworking of the chapters originally written, respectively, by the late
John Daverio and Christopher Lewis.
Finally, I wish to thank all of those who have spoken or written to me
asking about the republication of this book. It is gratifying to know that our
work has aided colleagues in introducing the German lied to their students
and has also provided a helpful survey for readers who have come to the
book independently.
Rufus Hallmark
Contributors
xx
Contributors
xxi
CHAPTER ONE
Goethes Contribution
German literary Classicismi.e., Deutsche Klassikrefers to the
relatively brief but halcyon period in German letters and culture that followed Germanys brief but rebellious post-Enlightenment storm and
stress era; it began soon after Goethe moved from Frankfurt to Weimar in
1785. There he joined his younger and equally gifted compatriot Friedrich
Schiller, with whom he would engage in some twenty years of aesthetic
discourse exemplary in its intellectual give-and-take and in its celebrated
yield of mutually inspired literary publications lasting until Schillers
untimely death in 1805 (Garland 1976, 466). This Classical Age of Weimar
embraces salient parts of Goethes vast oeuvre from as early as 1786 onward
and coexists temporally with much of Germanand EuropeanRomanticism well beyond the turn of the new century and is often referred to in
Germany as the Age of Goethe (Brown 1997, 183). The designation
Romantic is notoriously controversial in its own right (cf. Plantinga 1997,
829), but it is problematic in this context because it has been applied
to three generations of artists generally regarded as belonging to both
Classical and Romantic camps in literature and music. Goethe (born
1749), Beethoven (1770), and Schubert (1797), whose careers coincided in
successive waves from 1790 to 1827 and who played major roles in the era
under discussion, illustrate this period overlap.3
The word romantic was first used in 1798 by Friedrich Schlegel.
In influential public pronouncements, he formulated the quintessentially
romantic concept of progressive Universalpoesie to express the almost
infinite scope of German Romanticisms aesthetic aspirations. By progressive and universal Schlegel meant not only that the basic epic, lyric,
and dramatic genres of the literary enterprise should be imaginatively
combined and juxtaposed, but also that this endeavor should involve
interdisciplinary elements from the other arts, particularly music: It
embraces everything that is poetic, from the most comprehensive system
of art . . . to the sigh or kiss which the poetic child expresses in artless
song.4 He singled out Goethes novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm
Meisters Apprenticeship), the first edition of which was published with
musical settings of the interpolated lyric passages sung by Mignon and
the Harper, as one of the seminal events and accomplishments of the
(Romantic) age.5
Nur nicht lesen! immer singen! (Dont ever read it! always sing it!)
With these urgent and sonorous words (from his twelve-line poem An
Lina), Goethe addresses the central cultural-aesthetic issue of the entire
art-song century. Although this seventh line has attracted the most attention from critics, it is the last quatrain that actually explains why Goethe
feels that lieder should be sung and not merely read:
Ach, wie traurig sieht in Lettern,
Schwarz auf wei, das Lied mich an,
Das aus deinem Mund vergttern,
Das ein Herz zerreien kann!
And the actual musical performance qua lied transcends the mere physical
proximity of the lovers, which was primary when she originally played and
sang his songs to him at the piano (as the first quatrain describes it).
A similarly proto-romantic articulation of this fundamental conception
can be found in Herders writings (Martini 1957, 214): Melodie ist die
Seele des Liedes . . . Lied mu gehrt, nicht gesehen werden (Melody is
the soul of song . . . song must be heard, not seen). Goethes clarion call
always to sing his otherwise incomplete lieder expresses in nuce the aspirations of poets as well as composers throughout the nineteenth century.6
Goethes lyric insistence, immer singen!taken together with Schlegels
artless song and programmatically progressive view of the Mignon and
Harper settings by Reichardt (see Schwab 1965, 31)emphatically anticipates the importance of musical settings of poetry in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
Musical settings of many kinds of poetry had been a vital part of
aristocratic and bourgeois social activity since the optimistic and confident
Enlightenment spirit of the mid-eighteenth century had taken hold in the
three hundredodd domains that made up the German territories of central Europe. A five-volume novel published in 177073, in which songs are
sungusually at the pianosome fifty times, illustrates this literarymusical
activity and justifies the conclusion that the accompanied song was the most
important aesthetic feature of everyday bourgeois life (Albertsen 1977, 175;
cf. Smeed 1987, xii). Numerous theoreticians have sought to explain the
interrelatedness of poetry and musical settings throughout this period (and
up to the present day).7 Moreover, the social-aesthetic dichotomy between
Volkslied (folk song) and Kunstlied (art song), as well as the more modern
theoretical distinction between musical and (more or less) non-musical
poetry, further complicates an already problematic situation. The latter
distinction engages primarily those theoreticians who feel that only less
musical poems allow enough aesthetic space for the lied composer
to add something musical and meaningful to the text, achieving a true
literary-musical synthesis.
In Klopstocks poem there is antithesis, but in Goethes there is reciprocity. Throughout May Celebration, subjective and objective terms
interpenetrate, at times to the point of indistinguishability:
O Erd, o Sonne,
O Glck, o Lust,
O Lieb, o Liebe
Oh earth, oh sun,
Oh bliss, oh pleasure
Oh love, dear love
My peace is gone,
My heart is sore,
Never will I find it,
Nevermore.
It recurs twice at strategic points within the poem but not at the end,
as a true refrain would, and obviously inspired both the melody and the
onomatopoeic accompaniment, which reflects the spinning-wheel imagery
in its relentless sixteenth-note motion. But the text itself, couched in quatrains of increasing intensity and expanding referencemoving from
Gretchens person and psychic condition to Fausts physical attributes, as
she idealizes them, and finally to an emotional agitation of grief that has
become indistinguishable from sexual desire (Kramer 1984, 152)calls
for varied musical treatment as it builds from an anguished but moderated
outcry (the very first instance of the refrain) to a violent and open
expression of sexual fantasy (Kramer 1984, 153) in the climactic final
quatrain:
Und kssen ihn,
So wie ich wollt,
An seinen Kssen
Vergehen sollt!
The composer ultimately returns to the first two lines of the refrain
Meine Ruh ist hin, / Mein Herz ist schweras a musically apt denouement, but which nevertheless vitiates the stunning effect (Stein 1971, 72)
of the poems deliberately abrupt ending. Goethe achieves this stunning
effect, as Jack Stein observes, by ending both poem and scene (in the Faust
drama) at the moment of highest intensity, on the words An seinen Kssen
vergehen sollt: The theater audience is left limp with empathy as the
curtain closes. But the song is so much more aggressive in impact that the
effect of breaking it off at this climax would be brutal. Hence, the necessary
tapering off (Stein 1971, 72).
Schuberts ending can be seen as a combination of both possibilities:
(1) the breaking off has been transferred to the final statement of the
refrain, which is then truncated after the reason for Gretchens anguish
in the textis revealed to be her heavy heart; (2) the tapering off results
from the reiteration of the very first statement of the songs basic melodicharmonic substance. Inasmuch as this denouement does not contain
any trace of the innovative merger of strophic variation and throughcomposition developed elsewhere in the composers profoundly progressive setting, the music parallels Goethes dramatic literary truncation in
its own terms.
In the earliest form of Goethes play (the Urfaust), the poems strategic enjambment combines Und halten ihn (And hold him close) and
Und kssen ihn (And kiss him) into one eight-line stanza, which gains
even more energy and urgency from the brutally honest words Scho
(womb) and Gott! (God), in place of Busen (bosom):
Mein Scho, Gott! drngt
Sich nach ihm hin.
Ach drft ich fassen
Und halten ihn
Und kssen ihn,
So wie ich wollt,
An seinen Kssen
Vergehen sollt!
The enjambment itself is brilliantly reflected in Schuberts musical extension, strengthening both enjambed stanzas. Furthermore, the music
10
of Als ich sie errten sah is disappointing: not only are the accompaniment figures empty arpeggios throughout, but the smattering of melodic
interest attending the first strophe degenerates thereafter into desultory
arpeggiated meanderings as well, particularly in the fourth and fifth
stanzas.
These two settings demonstrate that a modified strophic form, however varied and unorthodox, is the more appropriate form for musical
settings of lyric poetry, which, after all, usually exists in strophes of one
form or another. Yet Romantic lieder are apt to be formally anything other
than the simple strophic settings of their eighteenth-century predecessors.
Three factors help explain this change. The first, as Gretchen am Spinnrade indicates so poignantly, is Goethes timeless structural lyricism
itself. The second is the emerging awareness of an individual self, which
evolves into the self-consciousness of distinctly Romantic poetry, if the
insights of poet and literary critic W. H. Auden can be taken at face value.11
Equally important is a third element in Romantic poetry: reverence
for nature. This deeply felt worship of nature, articulated with specific reference to German Romanticism by Madame de Stal in 1810, stresses
thatin direct contrast to the classical literary representation of man as
determined by external societal forcesRomantic literature sees mans
actions and behavior as primarily governed by inner energies and emotions. Although mindful that the Romantic personality tends toward
unbridled emotionalism, and that its enthusiasm for the moon, the forest,
and solitude runs the risk of mindless faddishness, Stal considers the
unusual wealth of feeling coming to the fore in Romanticism as a particular
strength of the Germans in poetic, religious, and even moral terms (Peter
1985, 1023).
These characteristics infuse the specifically Romantic poems chosen
by most lied composers, but they are especially prominent in Goethes
lyrics. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt (Only one who knows longing), one
of the four Mignon songs from Wilhelm Meister, embodies in astonishingly
concentrated lyrical form the proto-Romantic emotional fervor and selfawareness:
Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt,
Wei, was ich leide!
Allein und abgetrennt
Von aller Freude,
Seh ich ans Firmament
Nach jener Seite.
Ach! der mich liebt und kennt,
Ist in der Weite.
Es schwindelt mir, es brennt
Mein Eingeweide.
Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt,
Wei, was ich leide!
11
12
(unstressed)
(stressed)
(unstressed)
(stressed)
13
14
The explicit movement within and between the individual stanzas here
is a crucial difference between Eichendorff and other Romantic poets
generally.17 Although Mondnacht (Moonlit Night) manifests all the
figurative devicesmetaphors, personification, onomatopoeia, and as if
subjunctivescommonly associated with the atmospheric nature imagery
of Romantic poetry, it also reveals a carefully crafted structure very much
like that of Goethes ber allen Gipfeln (Over every summit), where
there is an order of the inner process of nature as known by the mind, an
organic order of the evolutionary progression in nature, from the
inanimate to the animate, from the mineral, through the vegetable, to the
animal kingdom, from the hill-tops, to the tree-tops, to the birds, and
so inevitably to man (Wilkinson 1962, 317). But here the structure is
15
The poems lyric structure goes further toward actual release than
does Schumanns setting, which delays the musical releasethat is, the
dominant-tonic resolutionuntil the third measure of the next song, Aus
meinen Trnen sprieen (From my tears burst). The latter contains no
fewer than six dominant-tonic cadences, lavishly compensating for the
unresolved harmonic tension of the first song. Even if the poetic bursting forth of Im wunderschnen Monat Mai (In the wondrous month of
May) does not find overt musical realization until Schumanns second
song, in which fully blossoming flowers literally burst forth from the personas tears, Heines quatrains provide the structural integrity and varied
rhythmic movement that inspired Schumann to compose such an evocatively delaying musical texture.
Heines mostly sentimental, often ironic, and occasionally sarcastic
poetry contributed markedly to the development of the Romantic lied.
16
The first two lines, with their gorgeous liquid alliteration, are a good
example of what an inspired opening will do to make a poem famous
forever; apart from Goethe and Eichendorff, hardly any poet was as skilled
in extracting such sounds from the German language. But the whole poem
continues to be superb. Although it contains not a single pure rhyme, the
lattice of near-rhymes and near-assonances gives it a genuine musicality
(Sammons 1969, 18283). This genuine musicality, paradoxically, may
help explain why there is only one setting (Mendelssohns Op. 19a, No. 5,
Gruss) of Leise zieht durch mein Gemt (Gently through my soul)
listed by Fischer-Dieskau (1972): the metaphorical musicality of poetry may
preclude or leave no space for actual music.
Romanticisms Aftermath
Heines younger contemporary Eduard Mrike (180475), though
humorous and witty, did not share the older poets vitriolic tendencies, but
embodied instead the holdes Bescheiden (gracious moderation) that
epitomizes the Biedermeier period. This was a specifically German version
of the ubiquitous European Realism that reigned in the aftermath of
the Vienna Congress of 1815.19 Germanists are prone to call this general
literary movement Poetic Realism, which suggests why the lyrical style of a
17
poet like Mrike might not immediately attract the musical interest of
cosmopolitan composers like Schumann and Brahms, though both did set
several of Mrikes poems.20 It remained for Hugo Wolf (18601903) to
discover the modernity and musical utility of Mrikes poetry in general,
over a decade after the poets death.
Two poems, both set by Wolf, express graphically the introspective
conservatism and subtle sensitivity of Mrikes paradigmatic nineteenthcentury worldview that looks both backward and forward:
Herr! schicke was du willt,
Ein Liebes oder Leides;
Ich bin vergngt, da beides
Aus deinen Hnden quillt.
18
the imagery of which goes further even than Goethes evocative metaphors, but the theme of whicha lover lying on a hilltop in springtime
(Hier lieg ich auf dem Frhlingshgel, line 1), borne on the wing of a
cloudis unthinkable without the equally cloud-borne spring paean
Ganymed (Ganymede) that Goethe had written some fifty-four years
earlier. Yet Goethes influence did not guarantee public success by any
means. The significance of Hugo Wolfs fifty-three settings, in 1888, for the
general popularity and critical acceptance of Mrikes poetry some five or
more decades after its original publication, is legendary.23 But although
Mrikes fame is indelibly connected with Hugo Wolf, his poetry has not
found as many different composers as, say, Friedrich Rckert (17881866),
whose poetry has been set as often as Heines and Eichendorffs, though
not nearly as often and as consistently as Goethes (Fricke 1990, 18).24
Harald Fricke candidly admits that the lyric quality of Rckerts poetry is
not as high as that of Goethe, Eichendorff, and Heine: he shrewdly analyzes
their lyric structure and finds thatalthough their diction is typically
non-musicalthey are rich in varied repetition (variierte Wiederholung)
and relatively sparse in themes or subjects. Although Rckerts poems do
not stray far from the usual Romantic topics of love, suffering, distress,
nature, season, and pious devotion, the use of these themes is carefully
limited; no more than two-and-a-half such subjects are presented in a
given poem.25
In addition to the lyrical poem, another poetic genre, the ballad, has
been an important source of art song settings. Because this genre can be
characterized as a combination of epic, dramatic, and lyric elements, its
appeal to composers who want to tell a story as dramatically as possible,
19
even while they evoke a pervasive mood, is obvious. The most celebrated
composer of ballads, Carl Loewe (17961869), provided many settings of
Goethes ballads, as well as a brilliant alternative to Schuberts famous
Erlknig (Erl-king). But he is generally given greatest credit for his
evocative rendition of the horrific Edward, a grisly dialogue between a
young man and his mother, translated from a Scottish source by Goethes
mentor Herder.26
Almost all the poets so far considered wrote ballads as a matter of
course, so that Heines Die beiden Grenadiere (The Two Grenadiers)
of 181920, set by Schumann in a dramatic through-composed version,
is not unusual. However, both Heines Bonapartism (Sammons 1969, 45)
and Schumanns climactic quotation of the Marseillaisein 1840
represent a response to the eras invidious censorship that emboldened
creativity even as it sought to restrict its existence. The Swabian poet
Johann Ludwig Uhland (17871862), whose Frhlingsglaube (Spring
Faith) is the only work of the poet that Schubert set, served the development of the Romantic lied in at least two respects: his folk song-like poems
have often been taken to be authentic VolksliederUhlands scholarly
updating of earlier folk song collections in his Alte hoch- und niederdeutsche
Volkslieder (Old high and low German Folk songs) of 184445 no doubt
enhanced their apparent genuineness27and his masterly ballads inspired
Schumann and Liszt to rhapsodic musical emulations.
Some of the same poems by Goethe and Heine prompted both Liszt
and Schumann to compose lieder that are staples of todays art song canon.
Another poet who inspired Schumann and Liszt is Nikolaus Lenau
(180250), an Austrian of German, Hungarian, and Slavic descent, whose
poems met with enthusiastic reception in 1832 and thereafter no doubt
because they echoed the Weltschmerz of the times (Brody and Fowkes
1971, 218).28 Georg Friedrich Daumer (180075), on the other hand,
reflected another passion of the times: Orientalism. He translated the
Persian poet Hafiz (130088) and wrote pseudo-Oriental poetry; Brahms
set nineteen Daumer poems, including lyric versions of Hafizs originals.
The repetitions of the word wonnevoll (blissful) in Wie bist du meine
Knigin (How Blissful, My Queen), Op. 32, No. 9 reflect the Persian
ghazel, which, in its German realizations, is perhaps the most unusual and
highly patterned structure (Fehn and Thym 1989, 33) that Romantic lied
composers chose to set. Whereas the sonnets length and meter are strictly
limited to fourteen pentameter lines, the ghazel can vary in length from four
to perhaps fifteen couplets; its meter is freely chosen by the given poet.
Only the rhyme is constant, but it binds each ghazel absolutely by virtue of its
twofold appearance in the first couplet, whereafter it recurs at the end of
every subsequent couplet. Friedrich Schlegel was the first German poet to
use the ghazel in 1803, but it was Joseph Hammer-Purgstalls 1812 translation of the fourteenth-century poet Hafiz, master poet of the ghazel, that
inspired Goethes West-stlicher Divan (West-eastern Divan) of 1819 and
established the literary fashion of German Orientalism that enthralled
20
21
22
23
Den Sonnenschein
Und Schatten der Erde?
Die Mauern stehn
Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.