some musical echoes of lenau: an article in honour of othmar schoeck

German Life and Letters 40:4 July 1987 0015-8777 $2.00

SOME MUSICAL ECHOES OF LENAU: AN ARTICLE IN HONOUR OF OTHMAR SCHOECK

PETER PALMER

Writing in the early years of this century, J . G. Robertson declared Lenau to be ‘an inspired poet of the first rank; the haunting melancholy of his verses comes from sources that lay deeper than the conventional Romanticism, and give him a place by himself in the literature of the German tongue’. The Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck took a similar view. And in the songs of a congenial musician, a poet’s works can reappear in a light which time or fashion has obscured. With that kind of illumination in mind, my article will take as its principal subject the Lenau settings Schoeck made in the course of his life (1886-1957). To put his achievement into broader perspective, I shall preface my discussion of it with a brief survey of various other notable ‘Lenau compositions’, including several purely instrumental pieces. My starting-point, however, is the poet’s own involvement in music as practitioner, concert-goer and commentator.

The first instrument Lenau learnt to play was the guitar. It has been plausibly suggested that his earliest poetry stems from the improvising of lyrics to a guitar accompaniment. In the compositions of a great contemporary classical guitarist, Johann Kaspar Mertz, poetic undercurrents are acknowledged in such titles as ‘Abendlied’ and ‘An die Entfernte’. Later, Lenau became highly proficient on the violin, his constant companion for most of his chequered existence.’ He also indulged his love of music as an enthusiastic listener to concerts both private and public. Although Paganini was the main talk of Vienna after his visit in 1828, Lenau expressed a discerning preference for the less sensational violin virtuoso Joseph Art&. An operatic tear-jerker of 1834, ‘Das Nachtlager in Granada’, prompted his sardonic epigram: ‘Musikalische Schneuzer/Von Konradin Kreutzer.’ Two years earlier the poet had tried his hand at an opera libretto, which he soon abandoned. ‘Als ich meine Oper schreiben wollte, drangten sich die Gestalten zu voll und ernst hervor, so, dai3 sie nicht wohl singen konnten. . .’ His objectivity with regard to the needs of the lyrical theatre does him credit.2

Lenau’s letters fail to identify the ‘Kapellmeister’ who had commissioned that libretto from him. It may have been his close contemporary Franz Lachner, who many years later wrote a memoir that confirms Lenau as a fellow-member of Schubert’s social circle. Before Schubert’s songs were known at all widely or thoroughly, Lenau endeavoured to promote them in Germany, despite the unflattering comparison that he drew with Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg in 1830. Schubert, he wrote,

diirfte mehr aufiere Ausstattung und Malerei fur sich haben. Der erstere [Zumsteeg] vielleicht tiefer empfinden. Schubert scheint mir mehr

266 MUSICAL ECHOES OF LENAU

unserem Schiller zu gleichen, dessen bestechende Sprache, herrlicher Prunk und uberraschende Gedanken schon von ferne locken, wahrend Zumsteeg ein Goethe ist, dessen Schopfungen einfach sind und. . .nur den wahren Empfinder in ihre gottlichen Tiefen blicken lassen.

Cautiously expressed though it is, this seems a somewhat immoderate tribute to the older composer (who died in the year of Lenau’s birth). Zumsteeg specialized in the ballad - of which Schubert produced numerous early examples; and clearly it is that genre to which Lenau’s pronouncement relates. In the same letter he mentions Zumsteeg’s ‘Robert und Kathe’. The first part of its music can, he remarks, be fitted to his poem ‘Nachtliche Wanderung. There is no indication that the poem was a contrafacturn and consciously written for such a marriage, but the remark does point to a direct link between Zumsteeg and Lenau’s earlier lyricism.

‘Robert und Kathe’. Opening section of J. R. Zumsteeg’s music with the first two stanzas

of Lenau’s ‘Nachtliche Wanderung’ superimposed.

Lenau was at pains, however, not to play off Schubert against his favourite song-writer. ‘Doch glauben Sie ja nicht, dafi Schubert von mir nicht nach seinem grofien Verdienste geachtet werde . . . Beide diese Liedersanger bilden ubrigens den lebendigsten Gegensatz zu den meisten ubrigen Liedersetzern.’ He praised the accompaniments of each composer as ‘ein lebendiger, harmonischer Strom,

MUSICAL ECHOES OF LENAU 267

auf welchem der Gesang, ein seliger Schwan, sich dahinwiegt’. Melody and ‘Empfindsamkeit’: these were the budding poet’s primary values, nurtured through intercourse with the Swabian literary circle. Only gradually, with growing bitter experience, could his own oeuvre penetrate to the deeper pathos for which we chiefly prize Schubert’s today. There is an inkling of their real kinship in Lenau’s regret that Schubert had not lived long enough to take up his poems.

Of his own volition, the poet came into very limited personal contact with Mendelssohn. One fleeting encounter took place when the composer - ‘eine Lufterscheinung aus besserer Welt’ - accompanied the adored Lotte Gmelin at the keyboard. In 1838, after hearing part of Mendelssohn’s oratorio ‘St Paul’, Lenau viewed him in more critical terms. ‘Diese Musik hat im einzelnen groi3e Schonheiten, schien mir aber im ganzen sich zu eng zu bewegen in den hergebrachten Schranken Handels’ (an off-the-cuff verdict that has retained its validity). He went on to speculate on the demise of sacred music: ‘ . . . vorbei die Zeit, wo die Kunst unmittelbar und direkt sich zum Himmel aufschwang. Wir mussen vielleicht erst durch die Leidenschaft hindurchgetrieben und von Affekten verwundet werden.’ These thoughts led Lenau to plan an oratorio text that would engender a kind of modern Messiah with a new, Luciferan element. Although he discussed the project with a Viennese musician friend, Joseph Fischhof, it never went beyond a title, ‘Judas Ischarioth‘. But it continued to occupy his mind up to 1844, when he proposed courting Mendelssohn as his musical collaborator.

For Lenau, the paradigm of the modern artist was Beethoven, ‘in welchem wir das Hochste der neuern Kunst zu verehren haben, wie ich meine . . .’. Unlike Brentano he had had no opportunity to meet the composer; he was still a student when he took part in Beethoven’s funeral procession. As a 21-year-old he had heard the Ninth Symphony in rehearsal, and the work had made an indelible impression on him. Fifteen years afterwards he met and became engaged to its first contralto soloist, the Hungarian-born Caroline Unger. While it was partly through Schubert songs and Donizetti‘s opera Belisario that she attracted him then, her solo roles in the premieres of both Beethoven’s Ninth and the Missa Solemnis must have enhanced her worth in his eyes. Lenau’s consistently affirmative response to Beethoven’s music has diverse facets. R. H. Thomas draws attention to the political aspect of its appeal in the time of Met te rn i~h .~ That particular aspect holds more enduring implications in the sight of Ernst Fischer, who seeks to protect Lenau from bourgeois falsification and to present him as ‘den groi3ten revolutionaren Dichter O~terreichs’.~ (A large claim, perhaps, but Fischer’s eloquent essay on Lenau is no simplistic Marxist tract.) Lenau undoubtedly valued Fidelio for its libertarian message - and all the more because it was officially frowned on in imperial Vienna. He attended a Karlsruhe performance in 183 1, and it directly inspired the freedom theme in his poem ‘Der Gefangene’. The unalloyed Romanticism of ‘An Luise’ shows another facet of Lenau’s response to Beethoven, ‘. . . In dessen Lied vie1 sui3es Sterben/Und Harmonie des Todes rauscht’. This could have been written equally well of many a Schubert song. A different pointer to the poet’s


understanding of Beethoven, and one that reflects a specifically musical sensitivity, is his defence of the late string quartets. In 1836 he wrote: ‘Dann hab ich neulich zwei von den sogenannten verruckten Quartetten Beethovens gehort. Das eine nennen lahme Philister gar Teufelsquartett . . , Es hat Stellen, bei denen mir fast das Herz zersprungen ware.’ He summed up his feelings about Beethoven in the poetic memorial he produced in his last rational months. If Lenau could not himself withstand the ‘Damonenheere’ of the first part of ‘Beethovens Biiste’, he could at least rhapsodize on a unique musical vision in the apocalyptic close:

Horch! im Zwiespalt dieser Tone Klingt der Zeiten Wetterscheide, Jetzo rauschen sie Versohnung Nach der Menschheit Kampf und Leide.

In der Symphonien Rauschen, Heiligen Gewittergussen, Seh‘ ich Zeus auf Wolken nahn und Christi blut’ge Stirne kussen;

Hort das Herz die grode Liebe Alles in die Arme schlieden, Mit der alten Welt die neue In die ewige zerfliefien.

* * * * *

We turn now to the question of how musicians have responded to Lenau. In the sphere of the lied, the relationship of text to music is notoriously flexible. Now and then a poet expressly invites a musical setting - as applies, for instance, to ‘Nachtliche Wanderung’ and also to ‘Bitte’, which was set by Carl Evers and subsequently played by Lenau on his violin. In some cases, a composer will approach his literary text so timorously that the resultant music is devoid of intrinsic merit. Far more often, a certain degree of violence will be done to the original poem. From Schubert to Wolf and beyond, however, tolerably and even brilliantly successful marriages have been effected between significant poetry and musical compositions of autonomous merit. The character of such a relationship is often elusive; but what the Romantic song-composer brings to it was vividly suggested by Hebbel to Schumann. Thanking the latter for his choral ‘Nachtlied’, Hebbel ruefully observed ‘dai3 der Dichter so ahnungsreichen Natur- und Seelenmomenten doch nur die audersten Umrisse abgewinnt.’ This posits a latent and musically expressible core to a poem, a core beyond the grasp of verbal expression. Nearly a century after Hebbel, Hermann Hesse voiced a similar idea in a tribute to Schoeck - ‘ . . . iiberall ist mit fast erschreckender Sicherheit der Finger auf das Zentrum gelegt, auf jenen Punkt, wo um ein Wort oder urn die Schwingung zwischen zwei Worten sich das Erlebnis des Gedichtes gesammelt hat’.

The earliest Lenau compositions to have stood firm are Mendelssohn’s.


Within their graceful confines they have proved to be more lasting than the contemporary efforts of either Joseph Fischhof or Ferdinand Hiller (who jointly contrived to soften the poet’s reservations about Mendelssohn). Less well known than the solo songs is ‘Der erste Fruhlingstag‘ for unaccompanied mixed voices. The sequence of six part-songs includes a setting of ‘Primula veris’ and poems by Uhland and Eichendorff, and the texts are so ordered as to obtain a cyclical effect: the concluding poem is Lenau’s ‘Herbstklage’. The songs of Mendelssohn’s pupil Josephine Lang still await a balanced assessment. Born into a musical family, she married the poet Christian Reinhold. It is reported that Lenau was visibly moved by a performance of her ‘Scheideblick‘. Possibly her sex helped to influence him in her favour, but it has hardly done so with the twentieth-century lexicographer who finds her ‘surprisingly competent’. Like her teacher, she made a setting of ‘An die Entfernte’.

Via Joseph Fischhof, Robert Schumann first approached Lenau with an offer to publish him in his Neue Zeitschrift f i ir Musik. This could imply that he, for one, did not consider a verbally ‘musical’ poem to be necessarily fully ‘composed’ - an issue already raised in respect of Lenau’s poetry during his lifetime. (Composers of Tennyson or Verlaine have furnished their own answers to the question.) To Schumann, however, poetry afforded not only a pre-text for songs; it could also influence piano writing in metre and mood. In her Master Musicians guide to Schumann, Joan Chissell quotes the first stanza of ‘An die Entfernte’ in connection with the melody of the trio in the Novellette No 1, opus 2 1 . The composer’s meeting with Lenau in Vienna in the winter of 1838-9, from which the Novellette dates, lends historical weight to the connection. Not until 1840 did Schumann blossom as a song-writer, the stimuli being Heine and Eichendorff. Not until 1850 did he produce his Lenau-based ‘Sechs Gedichte’, opus 90, to which he appended a miniature requiem just before the deranged poet died. His requiem text was a translation of a Latin lament attributed to Heloise. What inspired this apparently odd choice? Perhaps Lenau’s ‘Heloise’ and the associated theme of sexual martyrdom - four of the ‘Sechs Gedichte’ derive from the ‘Liebesklange’ for Sophie Lowenthal.

Despite the umbrella title’s literary bias, Schumann’s first Lenau songs are by no means faithful from a textual viewpoint, and the musical inspiration is patchy. Yet their composer’s ability to capture the poet’s ‘Natur- und Seelen- momente’ occasionally shines through. Schumann’s version of ‘Meine Rose’ reveals his flair for atmosphere, as does his music for ‘Die Sennin’. The four ‘Husarenlieder’ for low voice which soon followed have no exact precedent in his output. Both the Dresden bloodshed of 1849 and a veneration of Kossuth in liberal circles seem to have left their mark on the group. Their unusual realism has been widely noted, and a disturbingly fevered quality attaches to the opening song. Schumann withheld from publication a setting of ‘Friihlingsgriifie’ that he also made at this time.

Robert Franz’s delicate Lenau settings invariably steer clear of any overt drama, even though Franz was regarded as a modernist at first. Schumann noted of him that he excelled in gentle and dreamy moods; Liszt was to call him a ‘psychic colourist’. Sparked off by an unhappy love affair, his setting


of all the ‘Schilflieder’ - beginning with the third in Lenau’s sequence - forms his opus 2 of 1844. Thereafter Franz published his Lenau songs within groups normally of six, and based on several different poets. He deplored Schumann’s verbal repetitions and paid stricter heed to the given imagery. In the matter of declamation, too, he was scrupulous, although he once pointed out that his songs were composed of ‘Empfindungen, nicht Worte’. Some of the most expres- sive subtleties lie in their modulations. The four-square character of Franz’s polyphonic piano parts caused the scholar A. W. Ambros to comment that the accompaniment to ‘Der schwere Abend’ could have been by Bach. ‘Stille Sicherheit’ and ‘Liebe~friihling‘~ are particularly engaging examples of his artistry. Before a nervous affliction cut short his song writing, Franz extended his net to ‘An die Wolke’, from Lenau’s ‘Heidebilder’, and to the ‘Eichwald’ poem in ‘Wanderung im Gebirge’. Liszt (to whom he dedicated his ‘Fruhlings- gedrange’) transcribed his ‘Schilflieder’ for performance as piano solos.

Lenau knew of Liszt chiefly as a lionized concert performer and held him in no great esteem. But the more mature Liszt’s creative encounters with Lenau’s poetry are of twofold interest. In the first place it served to stretch his composi- tional resources, as with his use of a whole-tone scale in the accompaniment to ‘Der traurige Monch‘ for reciter and piano. He set the ballad as a ‘melodrama’ in 1860, the year of his single Lenau song ‘Die drei Zigeuner’. Secondly, his exploration of Lenau’s Famt went far beyond Schumann’s ‘Lied eines Schmiedes’, whose text had also been published as an independent piece. The episodic structure of the poetic drama made it eminently suitable for translation into the orchestral medium of Liszt’s loose-knit tone poetry. As numbered by the composer, his two chosen episodes occur in the reverse order to that in which they appear in the drama. His first is ‘Der nachtliche Zug‘. Here, the original text addresses the hero in lines that carry overtones of the mediaeval moralities: ‘Horch, Faust, wie ernster Tod und heitres Leben,/In Gott verloren, hier so schon verschweben!’ By incorporating the Gregorian plainchant theme ‘Pange lingua’ in the orchestral song of the forest procession, Liszt’s music sets up a similarly archaic resonance. (His score is deftly emulated, but not surpassed, by the ex-Massenet pupil Henri Rabaud’s ‘La procession nocturne’.) Liszt’s other episode is ‘Der Tanz’, where the poet employs the conceit of violin triple-stopping:

Jetzt klingen im Dreigriff die lustigen Saiten, Wie wenn urn ein Made1 zwei Buben sich streiten; Der eine, besiegte, verstummt allmahlich, Die liebenden beiden umklammern sich selig. . .

Through his pulsating melodies, bold harmonic progressions and vivid orchestral colouring, the composer re-creates all the wildness of the poet’s Mephistophelean ‘danse profane’. The piece has alternative endings. In one version, Liszt arrests the music at the dance’s climax, while the second retraces Lenau’s episode to its ecstatic alfresco conclusion amid evocations of forest and nightingale. ‘Der Tanz in der Dorfschenke’ is generally heard in its keyboard guise, the Mephisto Waltz No 1. Mightily impressive though this is, Lenau did

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not care much for the piano as a solo instrument, and the loss of the orchestral version’s solo violin is regrettable. Liszt himself undertook a duo performance of the Mephisto Waltz with the violinist Eduard RemCnyi. In his last years he arranged the Lenau-inspired ‘Puszta-Wehmut’ for solo piano (or violin and piano).

The prominent post-Lisztian composers of Lenau discovered him early in life. Hugo Wolf failed to complete a number of tentative Lenau songs. Of those settings he did complete, not one appeared before his death: three were published in 1903, four more in 1936. As a fully fledged song-writer Wolf devoted his gifts largely to one poet at a time, but he attempted no Lenau volume. Neither Lenau’s emotional extremism nor his literary polish can be adduced as reasons for this omission - as they can be in the case of Brahms. What Wolf may have sought in vain from Lenau were the measures of diversity and objectivity that he found in Goethe, Morike and even Eichendorff. Already when planning two small song books in honour of his first sweetheart, he had varied their contents by combining four Lenau settings (‘Frage nicht’, ‘Herbstentschlub’, ‘Traurige Wege’ and a non-extant or never-composed ‘Der schwere Abend’) with four of Eichendorff. His projected ‘Reiseblatter’ after Lenau, for piano solo, came to nothing or have vanished without trace. It is interesting that Wolf viewed the poet as epitomizing the spirit of Hungary in a press notice he wrote of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody in F.

Richard Strauss made a setting of ‘Nebel’ at the age of fourteen. He produced only two further Lenau songs, the ‘Zwei Lieder’, opus 26. One is based on the ‘An *’ poem beginning ‘Ach warst du mein’ and shows considerable dramatic power. But Strauss’s most extended piece ‘after Lenau’ arose out of his personal development of Lisztian tone poetry. Under Hans von Bulow’s influence he defined his attitude to the tone poem in the statement: ‘Ein poetisches Programm kann wohl zu neuen Fortbildungen anregen, wo aber die Musik nicht logisch aus sich selbst sich entwickelt, wird sie “Literaturmusik”.’ And in an examination of Strauss’s Don Juan, Norman del Mar grants it the semi-classical structure of a sonata with episodes. Before going into musical detail, Del Mar quotes and discusses three extracts from Lenau’s drama with which the composer prefaced the original score. These monologues, he observes, are but a partial guide to the music, since it portrays the development of a character through the impact of events. Del Mar then displays no little ingenuity in correlating the salient musical gestures or events with specific sections of Lenau’s drama. As he admits, however, there is no identifiable textual parallel to Strauss’s impassioned central love-music. Rather, this music’s sense of fulfilment runs counter to that yearning which Lenau’s hero evokes in his ‘Anna’ monologue - ‘Geahnte Lust, doch nie umfangen, IEin ewig Jenseits dem Verlangen. . .’. The paradox can be explained in one of two ways. Possibly Strauss had an imperfect grasp of the poet; or else he had drawn on some other literary source, never acknowledged. The latter interpretation has gained weight with Willi Schuh‘s disclosure that Strauss had attended a performance of Paul Heyse’s Don Juans Ende before writing his piece.6 Cosima Wagner was convinced that the composer had felt no sympathy with Lenau’s Don Juan, and that his tone


poem was a product more of the brain than the heart. Four years after its completion, he explicitly challenged Lenau’s ‘Die einzle krankend, schwarm’ ich fur die Gattung‘ (first scene of the drama) when contemplating an opera about the legendary seducer. This project exemplifies Strauss’s magpie mind: a major source of ideas for him was Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. In fine, Strauss’s Don Juan is essentially more earthbound than Lenau’s, although the bravado activating the music is exactly caught by the close of the second prefatory quotation. ‘Hinaus und fort nach immer neuen Siegen, I Solang der Jugend Feuerpulse fliegen!’ As a study of the consequent disordering of the senses, the later sections of Strauss’s tone poem are brilliantly worked.

We have yet to consider a stalwart of the Liszt-oriented ‘neudeutsche Schule’ whom posterity may have dismissed a shade too hastily. Alexander Ritter was strongly attracted to Lenau’s poetry during several phases of his career. His ‘Liebesnachte’, opus 4, appeared as a sequence some twenty years after his marriage in 1854 to a niece of Wagner, and Wagner is the cycle’s dedicatee. Seven of its eleven songs are duets for a soprano and baritone; each singer is allotted two solo songs. The accompanying piano has a prelude and a sub- stantial ‘Zwischenspiel’. Harmonically and rhythmically, Ritter’s style displays a number of adventurous touches. He culled his texts from a total of seven authors; the longest lyric - published over the initials A. R. - includes imagery redolent of the second of the Wesendonck lieder (e.g. ‘Vor den entzuckten Sinnen mufi Wissensdrang verrinnen, Vergessens ew’ge Lust erfiillt allein die Brust!’). The second, fourth, fifth and eleventh songs are based on Lenau. No 2 , marked ‘sehr langsam und getragen’, is a setting of ‘Bitte’. First the baritone sings the opening stanza solo. As he repeates it, his partner takes up his words. The voices come together at ‘traumerische’, and in the second stanza the accented syllables of ‘diese Welt von’ point up the Wagnerian rejection of Day. The fourth song, a setting of ‘Frage nicht’ for soprano solo, directs her to perform ‘mit innig einfachem Vortrag’. Ritter places a dramatic emphasis on the final ‘beim Tode deiner Liebe’, the ‘deiner’ in particular. The next Lenau song is based on the first stanza of ‘Stumme Liebe’. On the one hand its tonal design is imaginative; on the other Ritter violates the text, and not only because Lenau ended the stanza with a semicolon. The soprano’s opening phrases crumple the poetry thus: ‘Liefie doch ein hold Geschick mich in deinen N&en vergehen!’. Later, both soprano and baritone are heard extolling a ‘SehnekuB’ - a formulation which recurs in one of the cycle’s two Ruckert-based texts. Schumann’s literary manipulations were never as cavalier as this. (In his seventh song Ritter proceeds to transpose Eichendorffs ‘Mondnacht’ to the present tense: ‘Es ist, als hatt[e] der Himmel’ etc.) The piano interlude follows the Riickert settings and leads straight to the final duet, which is based on the last twelve lines of ‘Der Steirertanz’. Here the composer proves to be, as it were, word-perfect. The lines are those in which Robert, Heinrich‘s companion in Lenau’s pastoral duologue, sweeps away the other’s doubts concerning the immortality of the soul. Heinrich himself has offered a musical analogy:

MUSICAL ECHOES OF LENAU

Meinst du, der alte Geiger, Dem die Gestirne tanzen Zur starken Weltenfiedel, Wird unser Erdenleben, Wenn’s einmal abgespielt ist, Noch einmal ’runterspielen, Nur hoher, in der Quinte?

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Robert’s reply was a gift to any musician possessed of a lively harmonic imagination, and his ‘freudigen Akkorden/Im Strom des ew’gen Liedes’ are triumphantly matched by Ritter.

Among Alexander Ritter’s other Lenau songs are ‘Welke Rose’, ‘Nie zuruck‘ and ‘Heimatklang‘, the last being one of a pair he dedicated to Sonia Schthafzoff, a pianist from his native Russia. In setting ‘Noch eine Nachtigall’, the first stanza of ‘Der Kranke im Garten’, he reproduced the poet’s final interrogative note more carefully than Strauss did at the comparable close of ‘Fruhlings- gedrange’. His creation of dissonances between vocal and keyboard parts enabled him to illuminate conflicts by means sharper than a diffuse chromaticism. Richard Strauss, who admired his handling of declamation, always regarded him as an underrated figure in the history of music. Certainly he remains one of the more fascinating nineteenth-century composers of Lenau.

The poet understandably appealed to other violinist-composers besides Ritter. They stretch in time from Lenau’s contemporary, Kalliwoda, to the violin virtuoso Henri Marteau (1874-1934). While his use of a string quartet in song composing was not altogether novel, the string-accompanied ‘Schilflieder’ that he set around 1905 reflect a new trend both within and beyond Germany. Marteau’s style owes much to his associate Max Reger. The ever-popular ‘Schilflied’ poems also struck a chord with two important young Austrian musicians around the turn of the century. An isolated setting by Schoenberg won him his first composition prize. Alban Berg was to hit on the idea of exploiting reed instruments in a reed-song when, in 1928, he came to orchestrate his ‘Sieben Fruhe Lieder’, written in 1905-8. In his later version, the ‘Schilflied 111’ is artfully scored for fifteen solo instruments - nine winds, a harp and a string quintet. Two more ‘Schilflied’ settings, for voice and piano, were made by the New World composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920). A four- year stay in Berlin had fostered his appreciation of German poetry: he set Goethe as well as Lenau.8 These songs pre-date his achievement of a distinctive musical idiom, but they did enhance Lenau’s fame in America. Griffes’s version of ‘Schilflied 111’ became known there in H. G. Chapman’s translation, ‘By a lonely forest pathway. . . ’.

Some artistic circles in Scandinavia, too, were now showing an interest in Lenau’s poetry. This interest produced one remarkable ‘Lenau composition’ of palpable relevance to the age of Freud and Munch. In the year that Griffes left Berlin, Natanael Berg (1879-1957) arrived in the city from his native Sweden. He had already composed several Lenau songs for voice and piano, including a setting of ‘Traumgewalten’. The latter text subsequently gave rise


to an orchestral poem which Natanael Berg founded on fresh thematic material, though without adopting a fresh title.g He completed the work in 1910. Its expressionist features - the first music Berg heard in Berlin had been Salome - were viewed with distaste by his compatriot Stenhammar, to whom it sounded ‘distressingly German’. Since Lenau’s poem is only 21 lines long, the composer was running the risk of a typically late-Romantic disparity between means and ends. But his results are persuasive: the work succeeds as a musical psychodrama, amplifying the poetic experience with skill and originality. When, after one especially vehement climax, the symphonic fabric appears to be about to disintegrate, the poet’s naked ‘Ich weiiS es nicht’ is eloquently suggested. A solo string quartet begins to play, ’dolce e tranquillo’, but viciously clashing wind instruments oppose it. The soft threnody of a cor anglais theme ensues. Then Berg introdiices a consolatory mood not expressed in the original poem, unless it be discerned in the consonance of the rhymes.’O The work concludes, however, in quietly sinister vein.

Three years later Natanael Berg finished a symphonic work headed ‘Alles endet, was entstehet’ (the opening line of the second of Wolfs Michelangelo lieder). Written in response to the sinking of the ‘Titanic’, it bears an additional motto from Lenau’s ‘Frage’ - ‘0 Menschenherz, was ist dein Gliick?’.” The sense of the fragility of human life, as voiced in this quatrain, also underlies an intimate song cycle which the Swiss composer Willy Burkhard produced as his opus 9 in 1925. His cycle begins with settings of ‘Frage’ and ‘Frage nicht’. The first is also the title song, and the words ‘Ein ratselhaft geborner/Und, kaum gegriik, verlorner, /Unwiederholter Augenblick!’ are sung in a monotone. The impressionistically coloured work draws on four other poets from Eichen- dorff to Dehmel. It ends serenely with the acceptance of life’s wonders; and it is the recurrence of ‘Frage’ as the penultimate number which determines its spiritual gravity.

Let us fix our attention on a few points to have emerged from our kaleidoscopic findings so far. Despite some choral compositions of the voices- of-spring type, the solo, solitary voice is the predominant singer of Lenau’s poetry. Keyboard accompaniments are the norm, although Liszt adapted ‘Die drei Zigeuner’ (more will be said about this song anon) to be accompanied by violin or orchestra. Liszt’s ‘Two Episodes from Lenau’s Fuust’ demonstrate how graphically an orchestra can be used to depict both pictorial and emotional impressions. The poetic forms encompassed by Lenau song-writers vary from the strophic to the sonnet (Robert Franz, for example). The choice of poetic material is quite varied, too. Ritter, who set ‘Zweierlei Vogel’, and Burkhard tackled poems with a markedly symbolic or ideational content. But the early groups and the ‘Liebesklange’ are the composers’ clear favourites.’* Other than Schumann, however, no-one of significance was inclined to look to Lenau’s verses exclusively for a song book or cycle. That is some reflection on Lenau’s lyrical range. For a concentrated reflection of the complexities of thought and feeling within that range, we must turn to Othmar Schoeck.

* * * * *


A native of Brunnen on the Vierwaldstattersee, the Protestant Schoeck grew up in a mainly Catholic community. Hugo Wolfs legacy had a significant influence on his early development as a song-writer. When Classical tonal perspectives were threatened with their dissolution, Schoeck reacted to the musical crisis in an independent way: in 1922 the critic Ernest Newman called him a conservative radical. Schoeck would never have described his work, as Schoenberg did, in terms of an endeavour to prolong the hegemony of German music. But he once spoke of Caspar David Friedrich as saving the honour of German art in the nineteenth century, and he took it upon himself to fulfil an analogous role amid what he deemed to be the cultural decadence of his own era.

Like Gottfried Keller before him, Schoeck combined republican attitudes with a belief in a deep-seated bond between Southern Germany and Alemannic Switzerland. The German language provided his music with a primary source of inspiration. In later life he composed a collection of forty Morike songs, which followed cycles that were based on Keller, Heinrich Leuthold (twice) and C. F. Meyer respectively. Keller had also prompted his richly orchestrated song cycle ‘Lebendig begraben’ of 1926. During his earlier years Schoeck cultivated Goethe and such representatives of literary Romanticism as Uhland and Eichendorff; the latter poet became one of his familiars. When the young Schoeck‘s music echoes Schubert or Schumann, it goes beyond mere pastiche - the idiom was authentic and spontaneous. This thorough at-homeness with Romantic values constitutes a good first qualification for a modern Lenau composer. What distinguishes Schoeck‘s particular relationship to Lenau is a shared inner urgency, a special intensity that manifested itself at crucial stages in the composer’s outwardly unsensational life.

Schoeck first came across Lenau’s poetry on his father’s bookshelf. He gave away the manuscripts of his earliest Lenau settings to an admirer, the novelist Friedrich Huch. He made several more as a teenager, including a highly chromatic version of ‘Lebewohl an Eugenie’ and ‘Drei Schilflieder von Lenau’ (projected settings of the last two poems in the sequence were not committed to paper). Another Lenau trilogy is formed by the ‘Drei Gedichte’ of Schoeck‘s opus 5. In 1909 he set ‘Der Postillon’ for male chorus, solo tenor and orchestra.13 It is imbued with the spirit of folk song; melting melodies and the agile declamation largely compensate for the lack of a unified style. The atmospheric orchestral writing evokes the enchantment that distance - Lenau’s poem dates from his American journey - had lent to the original view.

During the next few years Schoeck wrote the four Lenau songs with which his opus 24a volume begins. ‘An die Entfernte’ and ‘Die drei Zigeuner’ advance into bitonal and polytonal realms, and Schoeck’s song of the gipsies invites comparison with Liszt’s setting of the poem. Liszt’s ‘Die drei Zigeuner’ is a landmark in his dramatic song-writing style, whereby he had carried the ‘durch- komponiertes Lied’ to new lengths. After a 14-bar prelude, his singer begins ‘parlando’ and is unaccompanied at first. The time signature is 214, and the tempo quickens (to Allegro vivace quasi presto) for the second verse. In stanza 3, Liszt registers the second gipsy’s rising tobacco smoke before changing key

2 76 MUSICAL ECHOES OF LENAU

in mid-verse, the psychological cue being ‘Froh, als ob er vom Erdenrund . . .’. The third gipsy’s dream prompts a pppp dynamic; the new key and mood, however, are broadly sustained up to Liszt’s boldly harmonized coda to stanza 5. As with ‘Der Tanz in der Dorfschenke’, Liszt offers the option of docking Lenau’s conclusion - in this case, a reflective one. With or without its last verse, the song is a fine offspring of the composer’s interest in Magyar gipsy music, with copious grace-notes for singer and instrumental partner alike.

Before Max Reger had helped to launch Schoeck as song-writer, Hugo Wolf had developed a new literary element in the art of the lied. This was a closer matching of musical structure to the form of the source-poem, whether simple or more sophisticated. Here as in his declamation Schoeck followed in Wolfs footsteps, at the same time generally avoiding what Richard Capell called ‘hugging the words’. Schoeck’s version of ‘Die drei Zigeuner’ is progressive- strophic in outline. He dispenses with Liszt’s more exotic devices: the staccato stresses are milder, the arpeggii used more sparingly. The song’s tonalities are C minor and major (as compared to Liszt’s D minor key), with uncanny chromatic shifts between different parts in the texture. Over a pungent chordal accompaniment the singer enters at the outset - in common time, ‘ruhig, etwas schleppend’. Whereas Liszt reads ‘ein feuriges Liedel’ as ‘ein lustiges Liedel’ in stanza 2, Schoeck’s setting observes the poetic link between the fire of the fiddle tune and the glowing sunset. The one considerable pause comes at the end of stanza 4, with the dream; in its fluctuating pace and vocal ‘quasi- recitative’, Schoeck’s fifth verse is the freest in manner. In the next there is a double insertion of ‘und’ between ‘verraucht’, ‘verschlaft’ and ‘vergeigt’ - a rare textual variant on Schoeck‘s part, and one which enlivens the rhythm. - To sum up, Liszt expands the most celebrated poem in Lenau’s ‘Gestalten’ group into a dramatic scena, while Schoeck‘s setting inherently acknowledges the twofold meaning of ‘dichten’. Schoeck‘s ‘Die drei Zigeuner’ was orchestrated by a friend, the Swiss symphonist Fritz Brun.

From 1916 dates a Schoeck Andante for clarinet which was inspired by a Lenau poem. Seven years later Schoeck completed his first big song cycle, ‘Elegie’. It grew out of a miscellany of songs all sparked off by the same emotional cause. When the composer decided to unite them, he also began to orchestrate them for a small ensemble of woodwinds, horn, timpani, piano and divided strings. The finished product comprises eighteen Lenau songs and six based on Eichendorff. The first half features four poems from Lenau’s ‘Liebesklange’. Between ‘Liebesfruhling’ and ‘Kommen und Scheiden’ Schoeck directly recalls the vicissitudes of a bitter-sweet love affair. His first half closes with Eichen- dorff‘s ‘Vesper’ and Lenau’s ‘Herbstklage’ - as the affair breaks off, so does the spring. The following eight songs include texts from Lenau’s ‘Herbst’, ‘Reiseblatter 11’, ‘Sehnsucht’ and ‘Erinnerung’ groups. This section peaks in the feeling of desecration voiced through ‘Verlornes Gluck‘ from the posthumously assembled ‘Jugendgedichte’. Three of the work‘s final songs draw on Eichendorff and chart an increasing sense of acceptance. Here is the sequence in full:


1. ‘Wehmut’ (‘Ich kann wohl manchmal singen’); 2. ‘Liebesfruhling‘; 3 . ‘Stille Sicherheit’; 4. ‘Frage nicht’; 5 . ‘Warnung und Wunsch‘; 6. ‘Zweifelnder Wunsch‘; 7 . ‘Waldlied’ (111); 8. ‘Waldgang’; 9. ‘An den Wind’; 10. ‘Kommen und Scheiden’; 11. ‘Vesper’; 12. ‘Herbstklage’; 13. ‘Herbstgefuhl’ (‘Murrisch braust der Eichenwald’); 14. ‘Nachklang’ (111); 15. ‘Herbstgefuhl’ (‘Der Buchenwald ist herbstlich schon gerotet’); 16. ‘Das Mondlicht’; 17. ‘Vergangenheit’; 18. ‘Waldlied’ (11); 19. ‘HerbstentschluB’; 20. ‘Verlornes Gluck‘; 2 1. ‘Angedenken’; 22. ‘Welke Rose’; 23. ‘Dichterlos’; 24. ‘Der Einsiedler’.

A study of ‘Elegie’ forms the longest chapter in Derrick Puffett’s The Song Cycles of Othmar Schoeck.’4 Puffett’s discussion of the music is commensurate with the composer’s view that in terms of breadth and complexity, the genre of the song-cycle can be set on a par with the symphony. The study also delves into the pertinent literary background in admirable detail (a prefatory chapter on the nineteenth-century song-cycle begins by referring to Helen Meredith Mustard’s The Lyric Cycle in German Literature). Puffett has been reproached for dwelling on the most progressive aspects of Schoeck‘s musical idiom. But one should not overlook his comment on some of the more conservative ‘Elegie’ settings: ‘One must be careful, however, not to confuse artistic quality with ideas of “progress”: these songs are extremely beautiful.’

Puffett suggests that the way in which Lenau brought his ‘Liebesklange’ poems together contributed to the design of ‘Elegie’. Since Schoeck ordered the twenty- four poems of his cycle himself, their pattern warrants consideration in its own right, and Puffett goes on to adumbrate a deeper unity than that of the ‘narrative’. By virtue of their compatible imagery, Eichendorff and Lenau offer a wealth of atmospheric, even formal links between individual texts by either one of them. It is worth adding that the complementary function Schoeck assigns to his two Catholic nature poets is a mutable function. Although he employs Eichendorff s texts mainly to lighten the dominant mood, the ‘Vesper’ poem shows Eichendorff at his darkest, and it is the ensuing ‘Herbstklage’ which softens the impact. Schoeck’s major-key setting concludes by returning to Lenau’s opening line, ‘Holder Lenz, du bist dahin!’ - a valediction, but also a celebration. The final song in the cycle, ‘Der Einsame’ (Schoeck‘s title for ‘Der Einsiedler’), derives from Eichendorff s ‘Geistliche Lieder’. It deals, as Puffett says, with night and with death. But here the lyrical elegist’s life is released from those lethal ‘Rauberkrallen’ that Lenau, despairing of personal salvation, has envisioned in ‘Verlornes Gluck‘. There is the evocation of a sanctuary in the first verse’s image of a lone sailor, praising his safe return to harbour, and there is the ultimate conviction of ‘das ew’ge Morgenrot’ to succeed the singer’s long night.

Lenau’s religious oscillations I shall treat in connection with a much later Schoeck song-cycle. The choice of texts in ‘Elegie’ reveals more of the poet’s similarly inconstant attitude to nature. In a bald summary Puffett states that Eichendorff sees nature as a projection of God, whereas with Lenau, nature is a projection of himself. In Eichendorff, to be sure, we find a Romantic


investing of natural images with a symbolic meaning, along with a fundamental belief in the oneness of Creation. Lenau’s relationship to nature, on the other hand, cannot be reduced entirely to the concept of pathetic fallacy. Lenau could not have declared, as Caspar David Friedrich did, that feeling is always consistent with nature. Tentatively, he proposed a kind of dialectical relation between ‘Natur’ and ‘Menschenleben’. l5 This finds the following poetic expression in the fourth of the ‘Waldlieder’: ‘Sehnsuchtig zieht entgegen/Natur auf allen Wegen, /Als schone Braut im Schleier, /Dem Geiste, ihrem Freier.’ As noted, Schoeck‘s ‘Elegie’ draws on two Lenau ‘Waldlieder’; and while the first in Schoeck’s sequence is rich in Romantic pathos, his setting of the Waldlied’ (11) - marked ‘Presto’ - presents a different picture. Poet and singer stand their ground in the face of the storm they portray. The first person appears only towards the end of the lyric and maintains a Beethovenian resilience:

Der Donner bricht herein, Es kracht die Welt in Wettern, Als wollt’ am Felsgestein Der Himmel sich zerschmettern.

Der Regen braust; nun schwand Das Tal in seiner Dichte; Verpfahlt hat er das Land Vor meinem Augenlichte.

Doch mir im Herzensgrund 1st Heiterkeit und Stille; Mir wachst in solcher Stund’ Und hartet sich der Wille.

Part - not all - of this resolution is carried over into Schoeck‘s infinitely poignant setting of ‘HerbstentschluD’: one of the ‘Elegie’ songs that most readily brings to mind the spirit of Schubert’s ‘Die Winterreise’.

In 1930 Schoeck made a setting of the ten poems of Wanderung im Gebirge’. Here he used contrasting harmonic styles that establish a distinction between the worlds of nature and men throughout the cycle. At the same time, a recurring motto theme strengthens the musical continuity of this ‘Gedichtfolge nach Lenau’ for voice and piano. It shows the poet in more leisurely mood - Puffett points to the literary precedent of Uhland’s ‘Wanderlieder’. Although the cycle includes a storm poem tapping ‘die Zornesader’, there are no ‘Gewitter- sturme der Seele’ (Will; Schuh) of the kind unleashed in ‘Elegie’. In Lenau’s ‘An die Alpen’ the mountains exert the bracing influence he ascribed to them in ‘Beethovens Biiste’. In the ‘Wanderung’, however, he finds a rival attraction in the view from the summit. ‘Bald hing mein Auge freudetrunken/Hier an den Felsen, schroff und wild;/Bald war die Seele still versunken/Dort in der Ferne Ratselbild.’ Compared to the ‘Reisebuch aus den osterreichischen Alpen’ that Ernst Krenek composed to his own texts the previous year, Schoeck‘s ‘Wanderung im Gebirge’ evokes a Romantic sensibility without reservation. It has a shorter and macabre counterpart in his passacaglia-like setting of the


ballad ‘Die Drei’, which he wrote at around the same time for unaccompanied male chorus.

There were no more prizes to be won by composing Lenau in 1933, when Schoeck completed his ‘Notturno’ song-cycle. Yet the metaphysical overtones of ‘Notturno’ have led commentators to associate it with the spiritual condition of modern existentialism. It has also been linked with Mahler; and for all the differences between that artist and either Lenau or Schoeck, all three can be described as impassioned elegists and fervent, sometimes anguished, God- seekers. In character, the cycle is as intimate as ‘Elegie’. In its form, it has claims to uniqueness. As an erstwhile pupil of Reger, Schoeck may have known of Henri Marteau’s string accompaniments to his ‘Schilflieder’. ‘Notturno’, however, represents almost a string quartet composition in its own right as well as a string-accompanied song-cycle for baritone.16 Of the Lenau texts it includes, the first three determine the prevalent feeling of oppression and desolation. They are the double sonnet ‘Liebe und Vermahlung‘; ‘Der schwere Abend‘; and one of Lenau’s swan-songs) ‘Blick in den Strom’. These occupy the work’s opening movement (the first of five), which contains a purely instrumental ‘Andante appassionato’ at its centre. In later years Schoeck observed that the movement’s guiding idea was a line from the second sonnet: ‘Der immer naht, ihr immer doch zu fehlen.’ Puffett’s musical analysis demonstrates how effectively the idea is worked out in the cycle, with its quest to regain the elusive key of a lost C major.

The second movement of ‘Notturno’ is a muted scherzo and trio inspired by ‘Traumgewalten’. The trio section activates the baritone soloist’s rapid delivery of the text. Schoeck‘s setting makes it an intensely physical experience. First heard in the last bars of the scherzo, persistent viola and cello pizzicati ( = line 7 , ‘Ich hore mein Herz noch schlagen’) go on softly pulsating until the half-line, ‘Ich weil3 es nicht’. Together with the singer’s sustained notes across bar-lines (as on ‘tief, ‘traurig‘, ‘sagen’), cross-rhythms and eerie tonalities combine to produce an acute malaise. With ‘Doch waren sie da. . . ’ the reprise of the tightly-drawn scherzo begins. The next three lines are uttered without even the shortest rest. Different Lenau editions sectionalize the poem differently, or not at all; Schoeck has treated it as basically a single unit up to now. Before the concluding quatrain (‘Nun sind sie fort. . .’), however, the strings complete the last twenty-seven bars of the scherzo’s exposition on their own. The song ends with the recapitulation of the scherzo. The string quartet adds, as Puffett puts it, a final ‘shuddering reminiscence of the Trio’. Through his use of the scherzo-and-trio form Schoeck is singularly successful in presenting ‘die schlimmen Gaste’ as a conscious poetic recollection, while also clinching the dream’s spooky reality.

The third movement is a setting in rondo form of the alexandrines of ‘Ein Herbstabend‘. In the fourth movement’s muted presentation of Lenau’s last ‘Waldlied’, a kind of solace is eventually glimpsed with the proposal ‘DaS alles Sterben und Vergehen/ Nur heimlichstill vergniigtes Tauschen’. Schoeck admired this interpretation of death and considered it to be more positive than the nirvana proposed by Hermann Hesse. He would have agreed with Arturo


Farinelli’s characterisation of Lenau as ‘a melancholy rather than a pessimistic poet, a poet of transience and doubts rather than of futility and despair’.” The finale of ‘Notturno’ begins by setting the first part of ‘Der einsame Trinker’. By another skilful association of poetic images, this lyric precedes an instrumental interlude so constructed as to frame the singer’s impromptu couplet, ‘0 Einsamkeit, wie trink’ ich gerne/ Aus deiner frischen Waldzisterne!’. Then the music becomes etherealised as Schoeck transfigures the cycle’s guiding motif into the tune of a prose hymn derived from Gottfried Keller. A more spacious cousin to Lenau’s ‘Bitte’, the text invokes the ‘Heerwagen, machtig Sternbild der Germanen’.

Derrick Puffett has examined in depth the special interplay of instrumental and vocal forms in ‘Notturno’. He has established that where a text is involved, all the finer points of Schoeck‘s construction arise from the word-setting. Taking the ‘Waldlied IX’ movement - his book reproduces it in full - as a prime example, he states:

By following the natural rhythms of the text, with all their irregularities, Schoeck creates a nervous, shifting style, full of fluctuations and ambigui- ties, which at the climax gathers itself up in a stronger, more lyrical impulse. . . However tightly organised the music, it makes no sense other than as an expression of these words; they control the melody, the rhythm, the phrase-lengths, and all the details of harmony and colour which make the style what it is. In this the song is typical of its composer. . .

It can also be observed of his ‘Waldlied IX’ that Schoeck’s vocal writing abides quite firmly by the principle of one note per syllable. This tendency was to be just as pronounced when, after a gap of over twenty years, he returned to Lenau in his last song-cycle.

‘Nachhall’, opus 70, is the last work Schoeck completed, and its title is one he is said to have considered for ‘Elegie’. As in that cycle and in ‘Notturno’, he drew on one further poet in addition to Lenau. Matthias Claudius provided the closing text: an entreaty to a ‘Land des Wesens und der Wahrheit’. And here again Schoeck’s association of verbal themes deriving from two separate authors appears poetically apt. The Claudius poem immediately sets up connections to Lenau, most obviously so in its definition of the land introduced at the end of the cycle’s penultimate song, ‘Der Kranich‘. This constitutes a formal link of the type also present in ‘Elegie’. But longer-range connections - not necessarily fortuitous in the case of a musician who knew his poets as extensively as Schoeck did - are discernible as well. Such a connection is the relevance of ‘Wahrheit’ to Lenau’s ‘Der Gefangene’, where the theme occurs in association with that of ‘Freiheit’. Another takes an antithetical form: ‘Wesen’ as a counter-statement to Lenau’s illusion theme in, for instance, ‘Ein Herbstabend’ (‘Ist’s Erdenleben Schein? - ist es die umgekehrte/Fata Morgana nur, des Ew’gen Spielgefahrte?’). Schoeck described his final song as his requiem, and the signs are that he was carefully weighing each word. Not only is the poem wedded to the note-values of a chorale


tune; ‘Wesens’ and ‘Wahrheit’ are actually underlined in the score. Puffett recognises in ‘Nachhall’ the intensity of the younger Schoeck‘s Lenau

settings but gives its music relatively short shrift. Admittedly it lacks the kind of comprehensive tonal scheme that can be traced in ‘Elegie’ or ‘Notturno’. But its tonal vagrancy could be viewed as the inevitable outcome of a compilation which is more of a Lenau anthology than the previous cycles under discussion, exploring a greater variety of moods. With the exceptions of the juvenile ‘Der falsche Freund’, the genial ‘Abendheimkehr’ and, from the ‘Reiseblatter 11’, ‘Niagara’, the eleven Lenau texts used are among his later poems. Like the Schumann of the ‘Sechs Gedichte’, Schoeck seems to indulge in the occasional self-quotation: not an artistic vice in a cycle so retrospective in its import. Within individual songs, however, the musical invention is more desultory than before (it has been remarked with regard to Schoeck‘s great contemporary, Stravinsky, that richness of melodic invention is what diminishes most with the onset of old age). Yet - as with Schumann, and on a far broader scale - the composer’s sympathy with his poet brings ample rewards. Schoeck‘s flair for word-setting remains unassailable, while his instrumentation of ‘Nachhall’ contributes materially to its general vividness in performance. Like ‘Elegie’ the cycle is scored for a small orchestra, this time with the extra timbres of bassoons, trumpet, tam-tam, cymbal and xylophone. The vocal part is designated ‘fur mittlere Singstimme’.

Schoeck begins his sequence with a setting of the nostalgic title-sonnet. The desolation of ‘Notturno’ is soon evoked afresh through the double sonnets of ‘Einsamkeit’ - as Wittgenstein noted of Lenau’s Fuust, ‘Gott ruhrt sich nicht.”” Wolfdietrich Rasch has drawn a parallel between the language of the second sonnet and that of the finale to Chopin’s Piano Sonata No 2 , ‘die ein merk- wurdig trockenes, tonloses, heiser geflustertes Ansetzen zu melodischer Sprache ist, nur noch ihr Schatten, gespenstisch und erri is sen'.'^ Schoeck acknowledged the poems to be ‘brandschwarz’, yet his setting detects a slightly more sanguine element. Although it makes spectral use of the piano, it maintains a flowing basic tempo, and the string writing is not devoid of lyrical warmth. Lenau drafted the text as a soliloquy but turned it into a would-be colloquy; the closing‘. . .und du? -/Die ganze Welt ist zum Verzweifeln traurig’sustains this near-colloquial note. Schoeck directed the ending to be voiced ‘mit gesteigertem Ausdruck‘. ‘Einsamkeit’ and the two succeeding pieces in ‘Nachhall’ - ‘Mein Herd and ‘Veranderte Welt’ - indicate something of the complexity of Lenau’s religious feelings. Wittgenstein made no bones about calling his Faust drama a Catholic one, and the poet sent a copy of ‘Mein Herd to his violin teacher, Karl Gross, as a token of his piety. How orthodox, though, is the lyric’s presentation of Christ as a figure from the past, when read in conjunction with the proud apostrophe to the poet’s heart (‘So ruht in dir der Herr der Welten’)? This is the Beethovenian spirit briefly speaking once more. The text of ‘Veranderte Welt’ is downright equivocal. Puffett sums up Schoeck‘s setting as a ‘robust affirmation of life’ - whereas Hans Corrodi describes it as ‘das ironisch glossierte Bildchen der von Unternehmungslust und Tatendrang geschwellten Philister’.20 To my ear Corrodi has a point: despite ‘aller Gaukelei


der Frommen’, Lenau is made to sound no more approving of the new secularism than of the ‘lauten Freudenmarkt’ that appears in ‘Die Asketen’. True, Schoeck’s music for ‘Veranderte Welt’ evolves into an engaging dance, but he was fond of employing dance rhythms in a satirical context.

The next songs are ‘Abendheimkehr’ and ‘Auf eine hollandische Landschaft’,

A B E N D H E I M K E H R

Behuallch munfar brweat

‘Abendheimkehr’. Reduction for voice and piano of the fifth song in Universal


each one a graphic rendering of the poet's objective perceptions of a natural scene. If a painting inspired the second, both Lenau and Schoeck (the son of a landscape artist) succeed in entering into the painter's own vision. In then juxtaposing 'Stirnrne des Windes' and the blustering rhetoric of 'Der falsche Freund', the cycle shows how their texts touch on two forms of egotism. On

Othmar Schoeck's 'Nachhall' cycle, composed in 1954-55. Copyright Edition.


the one hand we skirt the perils of Romantic introspection - ‘schweigenstrunken’, on the other we encounter that calculating camaraderie which, when put to a real human test, withdraws into the ‘Ichs bequeme Hutte’. It is interesting that Lenau had already anticipated the ‘du’ device of ‘Einsamkeit’ in so early a poem. The ninth song of ‘Nachhall’ is a magnificent polyrhythmic setting of ‘Niagara’; the accompaniment for piano and strings derives from a basic whole-tone scale. In a version of the ghasel ‘Heimatklang’, Schoeck gives vent to renewed nostalgia in a poignant melody and alludes to his opening song. The poet’s ‘Sehnsucht’ theme subsequently acquires a different hue in ‘Der Kranich‘, via the splendid formulation ‘Ahnung, Sehnsucht und Vertrauen’. Lenau published this poem (in the Deutsche Musenalrnanach) as ‘Zugvogel - Zweite Stimme’, his sequal to ‘Ein Herbstabend’. It also relates to ‘Zweierlei Vogel’, which places ‘Zugvogel’ in apposition to ‘Phantasie’, and its main theme is echoed in stanza 13 of ‘Beethovens Buste’. ‘Der Kranich’ amounts to an exemplary realisation of Lenau’s theory of nature poetry, according to which the end- product must be a symbol ‘jener hoheren geistigen Einheit, worunter Natur und Menschenleben begriffen sind’. Schoeck‘s final Lenau setting is equally accomplished in its evocation of a gloomy and barren landscape, the beating wings and triumphant calls of the migrating crane, and the faith instilled into the doggedly striding poet.

Aber ohne Gram und Groll Blick’ ich nach den Freudengruften, Denn das Herz im Busen scholl, Wie der Vogel in den Luften;

Ja, das Herz in meiner Brust 1st dem Kranich gleich geartet, Und ihm ist das Land bewufit, Wo mein Fruhling mich erwartet.

* * * * *

Schoeck considered Lenau to be the most musical of poets writing in German. H e once enlarged on this in the words: ‘Lenau geigt die Verse. Seine Starke sind die kuhnen Bilder und die wohlklingende Sprache.’ As the composer recognised, Lenau was not altogether immune to the seductiveness of verbal euphony - that element of display for its own sake which he condemned in performing musicians. Or as Berthold Auerbach put it: ‘Auch Lenau schien mir nicht frei davon, in einzelne Zeilen und Wortfuhrungen einen selbstandigen Gehalt einzuknupfen, wodurch . . . ein fiprierter Gesang entsteht.’ To Schoeck‘s mind, however, the poet at his best combined the melodious language of Heinrich Leuthold with Gottfried Keller’s expression of important ideas. Of the composers mentioned in this article, scarcely a handful have registered both those aspects of Lenau, and none has done so to anything like the same degree as Schoeck. From a technical viewpoint it took a very resourceful song-writer to recapture the poet’s personality in the round. But why should a Swiss composer

MUSICAL ECHOES O F LENAIJ 285

(and life-long Swiss resident) have been especially sympathetic towards Lenau? Much of Schoecks output, and notably the ‘Lebendig begraben’ and ‘Notturno’ cycles, seems strikingly pertinent to a cultural thesis propounded by George Steiner.‘’ Steiner asks: ‘What can an artist do, what can he hope to alter in that pallid sanatorium of a land - a sanatorium in whose cellarage, as Spitteler showed in his astounding novella, “Conrad der Leutnant”, currents of choked violence are at work?’ And he answers the question by saying: ‘Where revolt is essentially impotent, the option of solitude lies to hand. . .my own hunch is that a certain form of aloneness is Switzerland’s main crop.’

In cultivating Lenau’s form of aloneness, Schoeck was at pains to absolve him of solipsism. ‘Lenau weist stets uber sich hinaus und gilt auch fur andere.’ This is a cardinal issue with so preponderantly subjective a poet; and as Ernst Fischer has stressed, only close attention to the texts can resolve it. Here, let it just be said that Lenau’s poetic use of ‘ich‘ is a highly controlled one. If our planet goes on resounding with ‘dunklen Monologen’ (‘Tauschung‘), that is because, in Lenau’s experience, no honest person can deny the fact of suffering as ‘ein Eremit auf Erden’. Like his poetry’s tendency towards dialogue, the plural pronoun in the ‘unser unerforschtes ich’ of ‘Doppelheimweh’ provides a fair indication of his larger concerns. ‘One of the last great Romantics’ - Schoeck would have been gratified by that modern verdict on Lenau, published even as I complete this article.”

NOTES

’ Lenau owned a violin attributed to Stradivari. From 1840 he also possessed a precious Guarnerius - ‘eines der besten lnstrumente in Wien. . . Der Ton ist entziickend weich, siii3 und doch stark und feurig’.

* Cf. Max Kraussold‘s observation: ‘Lenau’s DonJuan is by no means a finished play. . .But the story of the hero is completely carried out in the dramatic sense.’ From an essay (1925-6) translated as ‘Music and Myth in their Mutual Relation’ (ReJections on Art, ed. Susanne K. Langer, New York 1961).

R. H. Thomas, ‘Lenau and Beethoven’, Music G3 Letters, 18/4 (1937) E. Fischer, Von Glll&vZYZeT zu Kajka, Vienna 1962.

The New Grove Dictionary follows ‘Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart’ in ascribing the text of ‘Liebesfruhling’ to ‘anon.’. S. S. Prawer makes the correct attribution in The Penguin Book of Lieder, Harmondsworth 1964.

W. Schuh, Richard Straurs: a chronicle of the early years 1864-1898, trans. Mary Whittall, Cambridge 1982 (originally published in 1976). Vol. 1 of Del Mar’s critical commentary first appeared in 1962. ’ Part of Ritter’s ‘Noch eine Nachtigall’ is reproduced in Hans Joachim Moser, B a s deufsche Lied

seit Mozart , 2nd edn, Tutzing 1968. Among other Lenau settings to which Moser’s work refers are Carl Loewe‘s version of ‘Liebesfeier’ for mixed chorus; the violin-accompanied songs of Felix Woyrsch; Waldemar von Baussnern’s ‘Die drei Zigeuner’; some songs by Lothar Windsperger, who also set Holderlin and Nietzsche; and the opus 16 of the Swiss, Albert Moeschinger.

In his lecture ‘Goethe and the Lied’, in Goethe Reuzszted, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, London 1984, Hans Keller deprecates Griffes’s early setting of Goethe’s ‘Meeresstille’.


For information on Natanael Berg I am indebted to Bo Wallner‘s booklet accompanying a 1983 recording of the orchestral ‘Traumgewalten’ (Caprice CAP 1250). lo The poet Christopher Middleton avoids all rhyme and reworks the form of ‘Traumgewalten’ in an English rendering titled ‘Lenau’s Dream’. The piece appears in Middleton’s NonscqUmces/&~~omu and also in his 111 Poem, Manchester 1983.

The Lenau and Leopardi quotations which Busoni temporarily attached to a ‘Symphonisches Tongedicht’ of 1893 are other examples of the age’s liking for such mottoes. Later Busoni consigned both poets to the ‘suicide dub’ - his own phrase - of European literature. Antony Beaumont perceives Lenau’s influence in two lines of the libretto the composer drafted for his Doktor FQUS~ opera: ‘1st das Leben nur ein Wahn, / Was kann der T d mehr sein? These lines too were eventually discarded.

Ernst Challier‘s GrOper Liederhlahg, Berlin, cites over 150 settings of ‘Bitte’ for one voice up to 1908. The composers include Robert Franz, Anton Rubinstein and Hermann Goetz. After ‘Bitte’ in the Lenau hit-parade came the ‘Schilflied V’ (78 settings), ‘Schilflied I’ (75) and ‘Schilflied 111’ (68). ‘Der srhwere Abend’ and ‘An die Entfernte’ were fifth and sixth.

A recording of ‘Der Postillon’ with Ernst Haefliger as the soloist was issued in 1980 on the Swiss Jecklin label (Disco 504). Jecklin has also issued recordings of Schoeck‘s ‘Elegie’ (Disco 510-1 1) and ‘Nachhall’ (Disco 535). both with Arthur Loosli as the soloist.

BerneIStuttgart 1982. l 5 Lenau’s statement is quoted by Fischer, op. cit., and by Michael Ruder in G ~ Q R M m ofLetters, ed. A. Natan, V, London 1969. l6 ‘Notturno’ was first committed to disc by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with the Juilliard Quartet. The Schoeck centenary has been well served by Fischer-Dieskau’s recording with Hartmut Holl, piano, of the Keller cycle ‘Unter Sternen’ (Claves D 8606, L. P. and compact disc). This is currently available in Britain, as is a reissue of Fischer-Dieskau’s recording of ‘Lebendig begraben’ (Claves D 8610, cassette and compact disc). The English bass-baritone Ian Caddy’s sensitive recording of ‘Notturno’ with the Bochmann String Quartet was similarly released in 1986 (L. P. - Meridian E 77130). l7 As quoted by H. G. Schenk in TheMindoftheEuropeun Romantics, Oxford 1979 (paperback edn). Schenk discusses Lenau principally in a chapter headed ‘Defiance of God and Religious Frustra- tion’. Significantly, however, he also refers to the poet in eight other chapters, ranging from ‘The Romantic Malady of the Soul’ to ‘Redemption through Music’. l8 A comment made in 1946. In the preceding entry in Vennischte Bemerkungm Wittgenstein identi- fies himself with Lenau’s ‘Vereinsamung’ and adds: ‘Auch sein Talent kommt mir dem meinen ihnlich vor: Vie1 Spreu - aber einige schonc Gedanken . . .’ ’’ From an essay in Die deutsche Lyrzk, ed. B. von Wiese, 11, Dusseldorf 1957. 2o H. Corrodi, Othmar Schneck - Bild cines Schffms, Frauenfeld 1956. My main source of statements by the composer is Werner Vogel, Othmar Schoeck im Cesprach, Zurich 1965.

G. Steiner, ‘What is “Swiss”?’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 December 1984. 22 In Osman Durrani’s enterprising anthology German Poetry of the Romanlic Era, Leamington SpdNew York 1986, which includes a Lenau bibliography. Here the one British scholar cited is Richard Dove, ‘The Rhetoric of Lament. . .’, Orbis Litterarum, 39/3 (1984). Dove’s study suggests to me a certain similarity of purpose between Lenau’s artistic methods and the musical rhetoric of Liszt.

Addendum: Lenau’s guitar (see p. 265) was acquired by the German Museum, Nuremberg. A photograph of it is reproduced in Philip J. Bone, The GuitarandMandolin, 2nd edn, London 1954.

some musical echoes of lenau: an article in honour of othmar schoeck

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