From the late eighteenth-century to the present day, Goethe looms large on the landscape of Western music. Opera, secular oratorio, song: composers of the major genres of vocal music owe him massive debts. Certainly song scholars encounter him at every turn. Goethe, steeped in musical culture from his youth to the end of his days, attracted Lieder composers from the time his first poems were published, and not only in the German-speaking world. Benjamin Britten’s setting of ‘Um Mitternacht’ in the century just past is a work of the first magnitude, less well-known than it should be, and there are Goethe songs in a plethora of languages, from A to Z. In 1885, when Ernst Challier brought out his Grosser Lieder-Katalog. Ein alphabetisch geordnetes Verzeichniss sämmtlicher Einstimmiger Lieder mit Begleitung des Pianoforte, the tabulation of Goethe songs was already imposing. From this 1,382-page tome, we discover ‘best-sellers’ such as ‘Nähe des Geliebten’ (sixty-two settings, pp.620-21), ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht’ (forty-seven settings, pp.643-44), and ‘Erlkönig’ (twenty-six settings, p.227) as evidence of a burgeoning repertoire, with more to follow. Challier’s list was, of course, quite incomplete, as we have long known, although Goethe still awaits his Günter Metzner, whose twelve-volume catalogue, Heine in der Musik, is an invaluable resource for scholars. I will never forget my first visit to the ‘Dichter-Komponist’ catalogue at the Stadtbibliothek zu Berlin music collection, where I discovered file drawer after file drawer filled with index cards which record thousands of settings, ample evidence of Goethe’s impress on the world of music. How many singing Mignons are there on Planet Earth? – enough for mass choruses of wandering waifs with tragic origins and preternatural knowledge. Every ‘hunter-gatherer’ expedition I make to add to my storehouse of songs results in more Goethe settings whose existence I had not known before, and I expect that this tale will be repeated throughout my life, happily so. From Kleinmeister to the accredited ‘greats’, few composers passed by Goethe without appropriating him for music.
My own bird’s-eye view of Goethe features Schubert most prominently, given the seventy-four Schubert-Goethe songs and the great writer’s role in the ‘miracle year’ extending from late 1814 through 1815, when the young composer was as if drunk on Goethe’s words. By the time Schubert came onto the scene, Goethe was a demi-god; the young war-poet Theodore Körner was not the only one to own busts of Goethe and Schiller and to venerate the still-living writer with great fervor. It is fascinating to watch (and hear) Schubert ‘take on’ Goethe from the moment he came into full-fledged compositional maturity at the extraordinary age of seventeen in songs from the tiny, poignant ‘Die Spinnerin’ (eleven bars, repeated through seven verses) to works as challenging as ‘An Schwager Kronos’ and ‘Erlkönig’. In the multiple versions of single poems, for example, ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht’, Schubert both approaches Goethe with utmost seriousness and appropriates him for the composer’s own agendas. What, we hear him asking himself, is the suitable musical garb for the enigmatic Mignon? A harmonically tortured permutation of the folk-like Lied, or a flowing, Italianate song of the sort to which the Harper sings his torment, or (one of the most beautiful things Schubert ever wrote) the B minor duet which begins op.62? Who could fail to be fascinated by these multiple Mignons and Harpers? – certainly not the composer Seóirse Bodley, who adds his eloquent voice to those who have contemplated this evergreen subject and this extraordinary duet.
One of my favourite examples of Schubert returning to a poem by Goethe and engaging it in a different way is the two versions of ‘An den Mond’, the first composed in August 1815 as a strophic song, the transformation of Volkstümlichkeit into something radiant. (It is irresistible to speculate which verse or verses gave rise to the musical strophe in a strophic setting such as this one. It is my guess that the eighteen-year-old composer, already wise beyond his years, was most struck by the remembrance of ‘happy and dark times’ and by the evocation of a persona walking in solitude between joy and sorrow. The way in which the word ‘Schmerz’ leaps upward, startled, ambushing the singer’s line and transforming the tonic pitch into something else harmonically, is all-too-accurate a register of surprise attacks by pain in real life.) When he returned to the poem that same year, it was clearly with the intent of expanding, ‘unpacking’, if you will, the poem’s riches. This time, he makes of the ‘Labyrinth der Brust’ at the end something unforgettable, the singer’s music first drawn inside the labyrinth of the piano’s heart and then calmly walking the night in beauty from on high. Every time I return to one of the Schubert-Goethe songs, I am struck by jewelled details and musical-architectural wonders I had not seen before; for example, when I recently revisited this composer’s setting of ‘Ganymed’, op.19, no.3 (‘Dem Dichter gewidmet’), I realized that the first vocal gesture – the placement of the first word ‘Wie’ on the downbeat and its prolongation throughout three beats – constitutes a dazzled expression of wonderment. ‘How’ indeed does such transcendence happen?
But I digress (always tempting when Goethe and Schubert beckon). If these are troubled times for the world at large, they are halcyon times for those who love to contemplate the works of one of the world’s greatest literary figures and the music born from his words. In Nicholas Boyle’s massive, marvellous biography, we learn not only of Goethe himself, but the intellectual-artistic-political-social contexts in which he moved, and here, we share in Boyle’s reflections on the novel which made such a deep impression on the nineteenth century: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. In Boyle’s stimulating account, this novel marks a major station in the evolution of Goethe’s thinking about religion, from early sympathy for the figure of Christ (while, however, refusing to identify himself as Christian) to deeper critique; along the way, his alternative faith in ‘the gods’ also fails to survive the passage of time. And yet, Boyle locates in this crucial work precursors to Goethe’s later return to theistic language. In Nowak’s essay, we are told of diverse influences on Mignon’s requiem: the Protestant tradition of the Trauerfeier, the Egyptian tradition of embalming the bodies of the dead, and the historical requiem-in-music, with reference to Anton Rubinstein’s Requiem and Max Bruch’s Trauerfeier für Mignon, op.93, among others. Lorraine Byrne has carefully dissected (and exploded) many of the hoary old legends distorting what we know of Goethe’s involvement with music and musicians; she is continuing that exemplary project in her latest work on Goethe’s long relationship with the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter. Amanda Glauert is similarly rectifying prior accounts of Beethoven’s view of song. ‘Ich schreibe ungern Lieder’, he once famously grumbled, but the lyrical impulse was integral to his music, as Glauert demonstrates in full in a forthcoming book, and the way in which Beethoven garbs Goethe’s ‘Ich denke dein’ in music is a case in point of a complex Poet-Composer relationship. In another revisionary endeavour, Briony Williams casts the relationship of Bettine von Arnim and Goethe in a new and welcome light, that of a muse transformed from stereotypical passivity to reciprocal creativity. Goethe and Beethoven were often invoked in the same breath as like Prometheus-figures, and the familiar pairing of these two giants is at issue in Moray McGowan’s piece on Fidelio and Faust against the recent backdrop of political upheaval in East Germany in 1989/1990. The simultaneous phenomena of distance and affinity are explored in Claus Canisius’s essay. It is very moving to read Canisius’s careful tracing of the encounters, both personal and artistic, of these two men, from Beethoven’s first Goethe songs in the style of the second Berlin song-school to the triumph of Beethoven’s Egmont music. Goethe’s presence in other places, later times, other people’s creative endeavours, is the subject of Jan Smaczny’s, Gareth Cox’s and Otto Biba’s essays. In Smaczny’s article on the little-known and fascinating theme of Goethe and the Czechs due consideration is finally being paid to Vaclav Jan Tomášek’s Goethe songs, and I was fascinated to discover that Fibich and Smetana were Goethe composers. From Cox’s discussion of Anton Webern’s indebtedness to Goethe, a frequent presence in Webern’s correspondence, thought, and music we learn that Webern saw links between Goethe’s Farbenlehre and his own twelve-tone compositional techniques. Otto Biba enlightens us all about Goethe’s knowledge of music in the Habsburg realm, his personal relations with the Austrian emperor and the music-loving nobility circa 1800, and Goethe songs in late eighteenth-century Austria. In sum, what this volume demonstrates so richly are Goethe’s multitudinous transactions with the world of music, both past and present. The Nachklänge of such greatness are long-lived.