Notes To Literature

Joseph von Eichendorff resists such efforts. Those who sing his praises are primarily cultural conservatives. Many invoke him as the chief witness to a positive religiosity of the kind he set forth in rigid dogmatic fashion, especially in the literary-historical works of his late period. Others lay claim to him in the name of a regionalist spirit, a kind of poetics of ancestry along the lines of Joseph Nadler. They would like to resettle him in his native region; their “he was ours” is intended to support patriotic claims, with whose most recent form Eichendorff’s restorationist universalism would have little in common. Given such adherents, an opportune reference to what is not up to date in Eichendorff is only too understandable. I remember clearly how when I was a student at the Gymnasium a teacher who had an important influence on me pointed out how trivial the image was in Eichendorff’s lines “Es war, als hätt’ der Himmel / Die Erde still geküsst” [“It was as though the sky / had quietly kissed the earth”], lines that I took as much for granted as Schumann’s setting for them. I was incapable of countering the criticism even though it had not really convinced me; in just this way, Eichendorff is open to all objections but at the same time immune to each of them. What every ass hears, as Brahms put it, does not touch the quality of Eichendorff’s poems. But if that quality is declared to be a mystery that one must respect, what hides behind such humble irrationalism is a lazy unwillingness to muster up the energetic receptivity the poem requires; and ultimately also a readiness to go on admiring what has already found approval and to content oneself with the vague conviction that there is something there that goes beyond the lyric poetry preserved in anthologies or editions of the classics. But at a time when no artistic experience is accepted unquestioningly any more, when, as children, no textbook authority can appropriate beauty for us any more—the beauty we understand precisely because we do not yet understand it—every act of contemplating beauty demands that we know why the object of our contemplation is called beautiful. A naiveté that would exempt itself from this demand is self-righteous and false; the substance of the work of art, which is itself spirit, does not need to be afraid of the mind that seeks to comprehend it; rather, it seeks out such a mind.

But this is no reason to defend the all too unbroken tones in which Eichendorff sings praises and gives thanks. In the generations that have come and gone since his days, the ideological elements in the cheerful and gregarious Eichendorff have emerged, with the result that his prose often provokes a snicker. But even here the matter is not so simple. A convivial song with a Goethean tone contains these lines:

Still, Eichendorff’s positiveness is intimately related to his conservatism, and his praise of what is is intimately related to the notion of something abiding. But if anywhere, it is in poetry that the status of conservatism has changed in the extreme. While today, after the disintegration of tradition, conservatism merely aids in justifying a bad status quo, with its arbitrary praise of binding ties, at one time it intended a very different status quo, one that can be fully judged only in relation to its opposite, an emerging barbarism. It is so obvious that much in Eichendorff has its origins in the perspective of the dispossessed feudal lord that it would be silly to criticize him in social terms; what Eichendorff had in mind, however, was not only the restoraton of a vanished order but also resistance to the destructive tendencies of the bourgeois. His superiority to all the reactionaries who are claiming him today is shown by the fact that like the great philosophy of his time he understood the necessity of the revolution he was terrified of: he embodies something of the critical truth of the consciousness of those who have to pay the price for the advance of the Weltgeist. Certainly there is much in his work on the nobility and the revolution that is narrow-minded, and his reservations about his own class are not free of a puritanical lament over the “plague of addiction to fame and pleasure,” which he lumps together with the capitalist mentality that was spreading among the feudal class, with their tendency to turn their land “into a common commodity through their desperate speculations in their perpetual need of money.” But he not only talked about the “swaggering bruisers of the Seven Years’ War,” “who made a profession of a certain upstandingness with an inimitably ridiculous masculine honor”; he also charged the German nationalists of the Napoleonic era with the “terrorism of a crude jingoism.” While Eichendorff the feudal aristocrat may share, with the addition of some social criticism, the arguments against cosmopolitan leveling current among the right-wingers of his time, he by no means made common cause with those who advocate a return to the land, the “Jahns” and the “Fries.” He is surprisingly sensitive to the aristocracy’s sympathies with revolution and disintegration; he affirms them:

The prebourgeois yeast in Eichendorff’s conservatism, however, which brings the unrest of longing, adventure, and blissful idleness to the bourgeois element in him, extends deep into his lyric poetry. In One-Way Street Benjamin writes: “The man…who knows himself to be in accord with the most ancient heritage of his class or nation will sometimes bring his private life into ostentatious contrast to the maxims that he unrelentingly asserts in public, secretly approving his own behavior, without the slightest qualms, as the most conclusive proof of the unshakable authority of the principles he puts on display.”1 That could have been based on Eichendorff; not, to be sure, on his private life, but on his conduct as a poet. To this we should add the question whether this lack of reliability expresses not only security but also a corrective to security, transcendence of the bourgeois society in which the conservative is never fully at home and in whose opponents something attracts him. In Eichendorff they are represented by the vagrants, the homeless of that era, as the messengers to the future of those who, as philosophy was to be in Novalis, are at home everywhere. One does not find Eichendorff praising the family as the nucleus of society. If some of his novellas—not Ahnung und Gegenwart [Intimation and Presence], the great novel of his youth—end conventionally, with the hero’s marriage, in the lyric poetry the poet, with unmistakable contempt for binding ties, confesses to having no place of his own. The motif comes from the folksong, but the insistence with which Eichendorff repeats it says something about him himself. The soldier sings: “Und spricht sie vom Freien: / So schwing ich mich auf mein Ross— / Ich bleibe im Freien, / Und sie auf dem Schloss” [“And if she talks about courting, / I jump on my horse— / I stay out of doors / and she in the castle”]. And the wandering musician sings: “Manche Schöne macht wohl Augen, / Meinet, ich gefiel’ ihr sehr, / Wenn ich nur was wollte taugen, / So ein armer Lump nicht wär.— / Mag dir Gott ein’n Mann bescheren, / Wohl mit Haus und Hof versehn! / Wenn wir zwei zusammen wären, / Möcht mein Singen mir vergehn” [“Many a beauty makes eyes at me, / says she likes me very much. / If only I were good for something / and not such a poor chump. — / God grant you a man / well provided with hearth and home! / If the two of us were together, / it would be all over with my singing”]. And the famous poem about the two traveling apprentices would be misunderstood by anyone who thought that the stanza about the first one, who found a sweetheart and founded his family in comfort in the home his father-in-law bought for him, sketches a picture of the proper way to live. The concluding stanza with its precipitous weeping “Und seh ich so kecke Gesellen” [“And when I see such bold fellows”] refers to the mediocre happiness of the first apprentice as much as the lost happiness of the second; the right mode of life is concealed, perhaps already impossible, and in the last line, “Ach Gott, führ uns liebreich zu dir!” [“Oh God, lead us lovingly to you!”], an onrush of despair bursts the poem open.

The opposite of that despair is utopia: “Es redet trunken die Ferne / Wie von künftigem, grossem Gluck!” [“What is far away speaks to us drunkenly, / as of a great future happiness!”]—and not of a past happiness; so unreliable was Eichendorff’s conservatism. But it is a rambling erotic utopia. Just as the heroes in his prose waver between feminine images that shade off into one another and are never sharply outlined against one another, so too Eichendorff’s lyric poetry does not seem tied to a concrete image of a beloved woman: any particular beautiful woman would be a betrayal of the idea of boundless fulfillment. Even in “Übern Garten durch die Lüfte” [“Over the garden through the breezes”], one of the most passionate love poems in the German language, the beloved does not appear, nor does the poet speak about himself. Only the rejoicing is made known: “Sie ist Deine, sie ist dein!” [“She is yours, she is yours!”]. Name and fulfillment fall under a ban on images. In contrast to the French tradition, undisguised depiction of sexuality was alien to the older tradition in German literature, and the penalty the average run of German literature has had to pay for that has been prudishness and an idealistic philistinism. But in its greatest representatives this silence has become a blessing; the force of what is left unsaid has permeated the language and given it its sweetness. In Eichendorff what was nonsensuous and abstract became a metaphor for something formless: an archaic heritage, something earlier than form and at the same time a late transcendence, something unconditioned, beyond form. The most sensuous of Eichendorff’s poems remains within the invisibility of night:

The experience of the modern element in Eichendorff, which has only now become accessible, leads directly to the center of his poetic substance. It is genuinely anti-conservative: a renunciation of the aristocratic, a renunciation even of the dominion of one’s own ego over one’s psyche. Eichendorff’s poetry confidently lets itself be borne along by the steam of language, without fear that it will drown in it. For this generosity, which is not stingy with its own resources, the genius of language thanks him. The line “Und ich mag mich nicht bewahren” [“And I don’t care to preserve myself”], which appears in one of the poems he placed at the head of his collected poems, is in fact a prelude to his whole oeuvre. Here he is most intimately akin to Schumann, gracious and refined enough to disdain even his own right to exist: in the same way, the rapture in the third movement of Schumann’s Piano Fantasia flows away into the ocean. Love is in bondage to death and oblivious of itself. In it the ego no longer becomes callous and entrenched within itself. It wants to make amends for some of the primordial injustice of being ego at all. Eichendorff is already a bateau ivre, but one that is still flying colored pennants on a river with green banks. “Nacht, Wolken, wohin sie gehen, / Ich weiss es recht gut” [“Night, clouds, I know full well / where they are going”]—these turbulently expressionistic lines occur in the poem “Nachtigallen” [“Nightingales”], which is modeled on a folksong: this constellation is Eichendorff. The itinerant musician says, “In der Nacht dann Liebchen lauschte / An dem Fenster süss verwacht” [“Then in the night my darling listened / at the window, sweetly half-awake”], an image of a woman with wild hair, enmeshed in dream, an image that cannot be captured by any precise conception but which is made more magical than any description could be by the syncopation of expression that merges the girl’s sweetness with her fatigue. In the same spirit, she is elsewhere called “a sweet dreamy child.” At times in Eichendorff words are simply babbled out without control, and in their extreme looseness they approach the archaic past: “Lied, mit Tränen halb geschrieben” [“A song half written with tears”].

A concept of culture that reduces the arts to a single common denominator is not worth much; we can see this in German literature, which, since Lessing pitted Shakespeare against classicism, has, in complete opposition to the great classical German music and philosophy, aimed not at integration, system, a subjectively created unity in multiplicity, but at relaxation and dissociation. Eichendorff secretly participates in this undercurrent in German literature, which flows from Sturm und Drang and the young Goethe through Georg Büchner and much in Gerhart Hauptmann to Franz Wedekind, Expressionism, and Brecht. His poetry is not “subjectivistic” in the way one tends to think of Romanticism as being: it raises a mute objection to the poetic subject, a sacrifice to the impulses of language. There is scarcely any writer whom Dilthev’s schema of experience and poetry fits worse than Eichendorff. The word “wirr” [confused, chaotic], one of his favorites, means something completely different than the young Goethe’s “dumpf” [dull, torpid, stale]: it signals the suspension of the ego, its surrender to something surging up chaotically, whereas Goethean dullness always referred to a self-assured spirit in the process of formation. One of Eichendorff’s poems begins: “Ich hör die Bächlein rauschen / Im Walde her und hin, / Im Walde in dem Rauschen / Ich weiss nicht, wo ich bin” [“I hear the little brooks rustling / to and fro in the woods, / in the woods in the rustling / I know not where I am”]; this poetry never knows where “I” am, because the ego squanders itself on what it is whispering about. The metaphor of the little brooks that rustle “to and fro” is brilliantly false, for brooks flow in one direction only, but the back and forth movement mirrors the agitated quality of what the sound says to the ego, which listens instead of localizing it; such expressions anticipate a bit of Impressionism as well. The poem “Zwielicht,” a special favorite of Thomas Mann, takes this to an extreme. In the hunting scene in Eichendorff’s novel Ahnung und Gegenwart, in which it is embedded, the poem retains a certain surface intelligibility, motivated by jealousy. But that does not go very far. The line “Wolken ziehn wie schwere Träume” [“clouds move like heavy dreams”] procures for the poem the specific kind of meaning contained in the German word Wolken, as distinguished for example from the French nuage: in this line it is the word Wolken and what accompanies it, and not merely the images the words signify, that move past like heavy dreams. And in the continuation especially, the poem, isolated from the novel, bears witness to the self-estrangement of the ego that has divested itself of itself until it reaches the madness of the schizoid warning “Hast ein Reh du lieb vor andern, / Lass es nicht alleine grasen” [“If you love one doe above others / do not let it graze alone”], and the isolate’s delusions of persecution, which turn his friend into an enemy for him.

Eichendorff’s renunciation of self has nothing in common with the power of material contemplation, the capacity for concreteness which the stereotype equates with poetic capacity. It is not only in the imago of love that his lyric poetry tends to abstractness. It scarcely ever obeys the criteria of intense sensuous experience of the world that have been derived from Goethe, Stifter, and Mörike. It thereby casts doubt on the unconditional rightness of those criteria themselves; they may be a reaction formation, an attempt to compensate for what Idealist philosophy withheld from the German spirit. In the fairy tales in the Grimm collection no forest is ever described or even given a characterization; but what forest was ever so much a forest as the one in the fairy tales? Wolfdietrich Rasch has correctly noted how infrequently lines of “heightened graphic vividness, with special optical charms,” like the line “Schon funkelt das Feld wie geschliffen” [“the field sparkles as though polished”], occur in Eichendorff. But one cannot simply pose the rhetorical question whether it is really necessary to demonstrate wherein the fascination of his verses lies. For Eichendorff achieves the most extraordinary effects with a stock of images that must have been threadbare even in his day. The castle that forms the object of Eichendorff’s longing is spoken of only as the castle; the obligatory stock of moonlight, hunting horns, nightingales, and mandolins is provided, but without doing much harm to Eichendorff’s poetry. The fact that Eichendorff was probably the first to discover the expressive power in fragments of the lingua mortua contributes to this. He liberates the lyrical tonal values of foreign words. In the utopian poem “Schöne Fremde” [“Beautiful Foreigner”] the words “phantastische Nacht” [“fantastic night”] occur immediately after “Wirr wie in Träumen” [“Confused as in dreams”], and the abstract word “fantastic,” archaic and virginal at the same time, evokes the whole feeling of the night, which a more exact epithet would cut to shreds. But these stage properties are brought to life not through discoveries of this kind, not by being seen in a new way, but through the constellation into which they enter. Eichendorff’s lyric poetry as a whole wants to arouse the dead, as the motto at the end of the section entitled “Sängerleben” [“the life of the poet”]—a motto which is in need of a respite—postulates: “Schläft ein Lied in all Dingen, / Die da träumen fort und fort, / Und die Welt hebt an zu singen, / Triffst du nur das Zauberwort” [“There is a song sleeping in all things / that dream on and on, / and the world begins to sing / if you only find the magic word”]. The word for which these lines, no doubt inspired by Novalis, yearn is no less than language itself. What decides whether the world sings is whether the poet manages to hit the mark, to attain the darkness of language, as if that were something already existing in itself. This is the anti-subjectivism of Eichendorff the Romantic. Here in the poet of nostalgia, in whose work much that is baroque lives on intact, there is much that recalls allegory. There are two stanzas that capture the fulfillment of his allegorical intention in almost paradigmatic fashion:

The structure of Schumann’s Liederkreis is intimately related to the content of the texts. The title Liederkreis [Song Cycle], which originated with Schumann, must be taken literally: the sequence is linked together in terms of the keys of the individual songs and at the same time follows a modulatory course from the melancholy of the first song, in F sharp minor, to the ecstasy of the last in F sharp major. Like the Kinderszenen, the whole is divided into two parts; an extremely simple symmetrical relationship with the caesura after the sixth song. The caesura should be marked with a definite break. The last song in the first part, “Schöne Fremde” [“Beautiful Stranger”], is in B major, with a marked ascent into the region of the dominant; the last song in the whole cycle is in F sharp major, a fifth up from B major. This architectonic relationship expresses a poetic one: the sixth song ends in the utopia of a great future happiness, in anticipation; the last song, “Frühlingsnacht” [“Spring Night”], ends in rejoicing: “Sie ist Deine, sie ist dein” [“She is yours, she is yours”], in the present. The caesura is made more emphatic through the arrangement of the keys of the individual songs. The songs in the first part are all written in keys with sharps. At the beginning of the second part there are two songs in the key of A minor, without a key signature. The songs then take up the key signatures that were dominant in the first part, as in a recapitulation, until the original key of F sharp is reached, while at the same time the strongest possible modulatory intensification is effected through the shift of the key into major. The sequence of keys is balanced down to the smallest detail. The second song, in A major, presents the parallel major to the first, in A minor, and the third, in E major, the dominant of the second song’s A major. The fourth sinks to G major, related to the third song’s E major as its mediant, the fifth restores the preceding E major, and the sixth ascends again, to B major. Of the two A minor songs in the second part, the first closes on a dominant chord that evokes the memory of E major. The following song, “In der Fremde” [“Abroad”], is in A major instead of A minor, and the next one again reaches E major as the dominant of A major, in analogy to the architectonic relationship of the third to the second song. Similarly, the tenth song, in E minor, corresponds to the fourth, in G major, both in keys with only one sharp. In place of the E major of the fifth song, however, the eleventh song offers only A major and thereby gives the utmost modulatory emphasis to the transition into the extreme key of F sharp major through the great distance between them.

These harmonic proportions provide the cycle with its internal form. It begins with two lyrical pieces, the first sad and the second in a tone of forced cheerfulness. The third, “Waldesgespräch” [“Forest Dialogue”], the Lorelei ballad, presents a contrast, both in its narrative tone and in its broader scope and two-stanza structure; it occupies a special position in the first part, similar to that of “Wehmut” [“Melancholy”] in the second. The fourth and fifth songs return to the intimate tone but intensify its delicacy, “Die Stille” [“Silence”] being a piano song and “Mondnacht” [“Moonnight”] a pianissimo song. The sixth song, “Schöne Fremde” brings the first great outburst. The second part of the cycle is opened by a piece that lies between song and ballad, and in the song that follows it the lyric expression is also given in the medium of narrative. Formally, “Wehmut,” which follows, is an intermezzo, as “Waldgespräch” was, but a thoroughly lyrical one—the self-reflection, as it were, of the cycle. The tenth song, “Zwielicht” [“Twilight”] reaches, as the poem demands, the center of gravity of the whole cycle, the deepest, darkest point of feeling. It continues to reverberate in the eleventh song, “Im Walde” [“In the Forest”], a vision of the hunt. Followed, finally, in the starkest contrast of the whole cycle, by the exaltation of “Frühlingsnacht.”

A few comments on the individual songs: the first, “In der Heimat hinter den Blitzen rot” is marked “Nicht schnell” [not fast] and for that reason is almost always taken too slowly; one should think of it in terms of peaceful half notes, not quarter notes. Especially striking are the dissonant chordal accents; the short middle section has a pale, shimmering major, with short motivic spurts in the piano part; an indescribably expressive harmonic variation occurs on the words “Da ruhe ich auch” [“Then I will rest too”]. In the cycle as a whole this song has an introductory function. It does not extend beyond itself melodically and works primarily with intervals of seconds. The second song, “Dein Bildnis wunderselig” [“Your Divinely Lovely Likeness”], the song most like Schumann’s Heine songs, has an urgent middle section whose impulse achieves fulfillment in the recapitulation. The recapitulation begins with an extension of the dominant in the absence of the tonic, so that the harmonic stream flows out over the formal divisions. Once again we see the beginnings of independent secondary voices, a kind of sketched-in harmonic counterpoint characteristic of the style of the work as a whole; the postlude is consistent, working with imitations of the theme through its inversion. The third song, “Waldesgespräch,” is one of those prototypical Schumann forms that gave rise to Brahms. The form is organized through the contrast between the ballad narrative and the ghostly voice. Most original, musically speaking, are the discordant, chromatically altered chords that express the menacing attraction. The fourth song, which is sung as a monologue, has an abrupt outburst in the middle section and immediately becomes soft again. A subdominant chord is struck on the word “wissen”; the double suspended notes give it the tonal quality of a triangle. As Goethe said, it is difficult to speak about things that have been extremely influential, and this is true of “Mondnacht,” the fifth song. But one can at least point out the features in its composition, which is clarity itself become sound, through which it avoids monotony, such as the additional friction provided by the seconds on the words “durch die Felder” in the second stanza. The song’s trademark is the great ninth chord with which it begins. Through the way it is set and the way it is resolved in figuration, the chord avoids the opulent quality it often takes on in Wagner, Strauss, and later composers. Instead, the layered thirds suggest the feeling of the poem: the ear extends the intervals on beyond what is really sounding, as if into infinity, while at the same time the continuation of the third interval preserves the clarity whose relationship to the infinite produces the song’s tonality. The form approaches the structure of the medieval lyric and Meistergesang; like an Abgesang, the last stanza reproduces the poem’s expansive gesture, while the last two lines recapitulate the beginning and close off the transcendent structure. No ear that has once heard the rhythmical extension on the closing word “Als flöge sie nach Haus” [“As though it were flying home”], where two measures in ⅜ time are made into one measure in ¾ time, can resist it. This ritardando, effected through the composition, gave rise to a technique of Brahms that eventually broke Schumann’s unchallenged superiority in the eight-measure period. The sixth song, “Schöne Fremde” begins on the mediant in a kind of floating tonality, so that the A major of the ecstatic conclusion sounds as though it had not been there from the beginning but had been produced by the course of the melody; the word “phantastisch” is mirrored in a dissonance that is sweetly urgent. Here too the concluding stanza is clearly of the nature of an Abgesang; but the song as a whole abstains from the symmetry of repetition; with truly unheard-of freedom, it flows in the directions its melodic and harmonic intentions take it.

“Auf einer Burg” [“In a Castle”], the Gothic piece with which the second half of the Liederkreis begins, is distinguished by its bold dissonances, probably unique in Schumann and the early nineteenth century, which result from the collision of the melodic line and the chorale-like ties in the accompaniment, which moves step-wise; it is as though the modernity of this harmonization were an attempt to protect the poem from aging. The eighth song “Ich hör die Bächlein rauschen” [“I hear the little brooks rushing”], with its subdued haste, is composed of utterly simple two-beat measures without any rhythmical variation, but it has such expressive harmonic nuances and such a sharp accent at the end that it emanates the wildest kind of agitation. The adagio intermezzo “Wehmut,” the ninth song, maintains an unbroken legato of harmonic instrumental voices; the modulatory detour into the subdominant region on the word “Sehnsucht,” however, casts an oblique, melancholy light on it for a second, a light that seems to come from outside; against the D major which it suggests, the tonic key E major seems to glow with a sickly light. In stark contrast to the preceding song, “Zwielicht,” the tenth song, a simple stanzaic song in form and perhaps the most wonderful piece in the cycle, is contrapuntal, in that infinitely productive reinterpretation of Bach to which historicism objects while in fact Bach thus transformed enjoys a genuine afterlife. The prototype which has been reconceived here is no doubt the theme from the B minor fugue in the first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier. The C in the counterpoint in the second measure, taken from the harmonic minor scale, has a kind of heaviness that is then communicated to the whole, horizontally and vertically, pulling the music as a whole down into the depths. The first and second stanzas end with the dark sound of a long echoing chord, as though the song were sounding in a hollow space; the third stanza, “Hast du einen Freund hienieden” [“If you have a friend here below”], strengthens the contrapuntal fabric by adding a third independent voice; the fourth, finally, simplifies the song by making it homophonic, keeping the identical melody, and the remarkable last line, “Hüte dich, sei wach und munter,” is made as concise as possible, like a recitative. The song that follows, “Im Walde” [“In the Forest”], is produced by the repetition of the horn sound and the repeated opposition of ritardando and a tempo, which, incidentally, creates extraordinary difficulties in performance. Schumann’s sense of form triumphs: as though to balance out the stubborn retarding moments, he writes an extremely haunting Abgesang, which glides with utter smoothness and yet keeps time to the rhythm of the horn, down to the last two notes in the vocal part. The “Frühlingsnacht,” finally, as famous as “Es wär, als hätt’ der Himmel,” seems to have been created with a single stroke, as if in mockery of analytic examination; but its unity is produced precisely by the articulation of its compressed course. As in the “Mondnacht,” the idea of the song—here that of the person reaching out beyond himself in ecstasy—is implicit in the opening material. The melody has as its nucleus a transcribed seventh chord. The seventh interval in the chord has melodic import; its impetus moves beyond the triadic thirds and interspersed seconds and, in a compositional space that is otherwise defined by the latter, helps to give voice to a subjectivity that breaks its bonds. But Schumann’s genius did not stop at the symbolism of affects but rather moved the critical seventh interval back into the center structurally. The interval is hinted at in the sequence of beginnings and endings of phrases in “Jauchzen möcht’ ich, möchte weinen” [“I would like to shout with joy, would like to weep”]; at the word “Sterne” [stars] it takes hold of the vocal part, and finally, before the words “Sie ist Deine,” it is varied in the accompanying phrase in the piano accompaniment so that the motivic sequence matches the curve of feeling. This song of the most extreme explosion of feeling is a piano song, returning to its quiet basis after each wave, and it owes its breathless quality, which is discharged only in the forte of these two lines, to this. The middle movement, “Jauchzen möcht’ ich, möchte weinen,” sets up an opposing voice, once again only hinted at, to the coursing chordal accompaniment without interrupting its movement. The breathless quality reaches its climax at the point immediately before the words “Mit dem Mondesglanz herein” [“In with the moonlight”], where a good portion of the measure is left vacant. The repetition of the first stanza leads to the climax, not only through the harmonic and melodic variants but because at the decisive point the counterpoint in the middle section is added, now completely free and fulfilling, and it carries over into the postlude, where the motif, true rejoicing, leaves everything else behind, forgotten.