Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs

SUSAN YOUENS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Viennese composer Hugo Wolf produced one of the most important song collections of the nineteenth century when he set to music fifty-three poems by the great German poet Eduard Mörike. Susan Youens reappraises this singular collaboration to shed new light on the sophisticated interplay between poetry and music in the songs. Wolf is customarily described as “the Poet’s Composer,” someone who revered poetry and served it faithfully in his music. Yet, as Youens reveals, this cliché overlooks the rich terrain in which his songs are often at cross purposes with his chosen poetry. Wolf and Mörike were very unlike one another and had different aims for their arts. Although Wolf did much to draw the world’s attention to the neglected Swabian poet, his musical interpretation of the poetry was also influenced by his own life, psychology, and experiences. Youens examines selected Mörike songs in detail, demonstrating that the poems and music each tell their own stories which at times intersect but also diverge. This, she argues, is the distinctive strength of lieder.          is Professor of Musicology at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include Hugo Wolf: The Vocal Music (1992), Schubert’s Poets and the Making of Lieder (1996), and Schubert, Müller, and Die schöne Müllerin (1997).

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Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs

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Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs

S U S A N YO U E N S

PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING) FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia http://www.cambridge.org © Susan Youens, 2000 This edition © Susan Youens, 2003 First published in printed format 2000

A catalogue record for the original printed book is available from the British Library and from the Library of Congress Original ISBN 0 521 65159 X hardback

ISBN 0 511 01926 2 virtual (netLibrary Edition)

Contents

List of illustrations Preface

page viii ix

1 “Göttlicher Mörike!”: an introduction to Eduard Mörike and Hugo Wolf

1

2 Peregrina revisited: songs of love and madness

18

3 Agnes’s songs: the fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman

60

4 Sung desire: from Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied

100

5 Doubters and believers: case-studies in the geistliche Lieder

140

Notes Select bibliography Index

169 190 199

vii

Illustrations

1 Pastel portrait of Eduard Mörike by Johann Georg Schreiner 2 Drawing by Eduard Mörike to accompany his Schilderung eines Traums

viii

page 101 146

Preface

If music and poetry are the sister arts, so says tradition, they are also the odd couple. They do different things in fundamentally different languages; even where they seem to come together, they have different large tales to tell. It is symptomatic of their dissimilarities that actual collaboration – a poet and composer working together – is a rarity in the history of song. Even those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets who desired musical settings of their verse were seldom asked for their assent or consulted about their wishes in the matter; the usual practice was a composer’s appropriation of a poem without even the poet’s knowledge, much less his or her consent. Music’s conventional obeisances to poets and poetry are thus in some measure a guilty façade to conceal a form of theft in which an existing work of art is not only robbed but used and sometimes abused for purposes unimagined by the original creator. No longer poetry per se, it undergoes a sea-change – whether for better or worse is out of the helpless (often dead) wordmonger’s hands. One of the oddest of odd couples is the pairing of Eduard Mörike (1804–75) and Hugo Wolf, despite the fact that they are often cited as “the perfect marriage” of poetry and music. But even a skeletal outline of their lives makes it apparent that their arts issued from very different experiences and perspectives – two more unlike creatures would be difficult to imagine. Mörike was born in Ludwigsburg, still a small town in the kingdom of Württemberg and even smaller then, into a middle-class but far from wealthy family and was educated for the Lutheran ministry. His youth was punctuated by a series of tragedies – his father’s death, his younger brother August’s suicide, a catastrophic love affair – and life did not become easier in adulthood. Unsuited for religious life, he went from vicarage to vicarage and village to village in the late 1820s and early 1830s before finally receiving a pastorate in Cleversulzbach (another small town within the the Stuttgart–Tübingen– Ludwigsburg axis of his life), not in time, however, to save his protracted engagement to his fiancée Luise Rau. The hypochondriac poet, his psychosomatic illnesses exacerbated by detestation of his breadwinning occupation, was finally forcibly retired from the church’s service at age thirty-nine and became a teacher at a girls’ school in Stuttgart. Although he married Margarethe Speeth in 1851, jealousies between his sister Klara, who lived with them, and his wife eventually put an end to the marriage, while one of their two daughters died young. His oeuvre is slim for someone who lived to the ripe old age of seventy-one: the principal works are the novel Maler Nolten (The Artist Nolten) in 1832; a single anthology of poetry first published in 1838 and revised for editions in 1848, 1856, and 1867; ix

Preface and several tales and novellas, including what is perhaps his best-known work, Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (Mozart on the Journey to Prague). He was just beginning to garner a small modicum of recognition when he died in poverty in 1875. Anyone familiar with the bare facts of Wolf ’s life can recognize numerous points of dissimilarity and difference. And yet, Wolf would become the agent by which Mörike’s fame surpassed its former regional limits to reach a wider public. Wolf ’s spate of fifty-three Mörike songs composed in 1888 constitutes one of the most famous episodes in the history of the lied, and it began the process by which Wolf became known as “the Poet’s Composer,” someone who cared more about poetry, served it more faithfully, delved into it more deeply than other lieder composers. Wolf ’s famous act of citing the poet first on his title pages (Gedichte von Eduard Mörike . . . componirt von Hugo Wolf) supposedly sets the seal on poetry’s primacy in these songs, but it is the verb “componirt,” “composed,” which matters more: these songs consist of something done to the Gedichte von Eduard Mörike. The cliché of the Poet’s Composer misunderstands Wolf by overlooking the rich terrain in which the songs are often at cross-purposes with his chosen poetry. This is not to deny his reverence for his favorite poets, the depth of his poetic understanding, or his capacity to find uncannily exact musical analogues for textual nuances, but he came from a different world than the older poets he preferred to his own generation. He could not help reading these late eighteenth- and earlier nineteenth-century poems in ways that were affected by his own political and historical context, psychology, erotic experience, and notions of spirituality, not Goethe’s or Gottfried Keller’s or Justinus Kerner’s or Eduard Mörike’s – and therein lies this book. Previous scholars, including Eric Sams in the sixth edition of Grove, have pointed out that Wolf ran roughshod over the printed text on occasion, and the ways in which he did so, the whys and wherefores, bear examining. For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the backdrop to Wolf ’s Mörike songs, the first chapter is a summary of that background, with an emphasis on the huge aesthetic gaps between poet and composer. Wolf, one discovers, would have known little, if anything, about Mörike’s life when he composed these songs, and his ignorance had consequences for his shaping of the music. The poems of the Nachlaß and Mörike’s letters, both of which provide invaluable glimpses into the poet’s character, beliefs, events in his life, and so on, only began to emerge in the 1880s and 1890s, and one doubts Wolf encountered what little scholarship there was by 1888. He would later pursue information about Mörike after making the acquaintance of someone with close ties to the Mörike circle, only to reach the conclusion that he might not have liked the poet, had they met. They certainly had divergent likes and dislikes musically; Mörike worshipped Mozart and detested Wagner and Liszt, whom Wolf loved. Even anecdotes about Mörike’s tendencies to torpor and Wolf as someone who always ran up the stairs rather than walking point to different natures. The four chapters which follow this brief introduction each tell of Wolf doing something Mörike would not have sanctioned to various poems and of a rich context surrounding the genesis of both the poems and the music, the composer often being unaware of the poetry’s origins. The first case-history in chap. 2 begins with what little is known of a formative event in Mörike’s life. In 1823, the young poet met a Swiss-born wanderer named Maria Meyer, who seems like a character out of a popular novel and who became x

Preface the stuff of fiction thereafter. When not imprisoned in Swiss workhouses for the poor, she depended upon different men and different menial jobs – tavern waitress, maidservant – for survival; when Mörike found out about her supposed promiscuity, he was devastated and turned her away from his doorstep in the summer of 1824. This cataclysm in his life is both told and revised in the cycle of five Peregrina poems he wrote over a period of many years, but Wolf set only two of the poems to music, for reasons possibly bound up with Wolf ’s own life; it may have been impossible for him to confront the content of the poems he omitted. The differences between the two cycles and speculation about Wolf ’s reduction of the poetic work to a dyad are the subjects of the latter half of the chapter. Maria Meyer is doubled in Mörike’s 1832 novel Maler Nolten, as Peregrina – four of the five poems appear here – and as the psychotic gypsy Elisabeth, the dea ex machina of the work. Elisabeth is not the only madwoman; the title character’s fiancée Agnes goes mad as well, and Mörike carefully traces the course of her mental breakdown from childhood paranoia to insanity and suicide. Here, nineteenth-century notions about hysteria and about women are placed under a literary microscope, and one can glimpse Mörike’s simultaneous critique of and concurrence with those notions. Like Goethe in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (the younger writer’s model), Mörike fills Maler Nolten with interpolated poetry, some of which Agnes sings en route to madness and from within it – her songs are the subject of the third chapter. One of those songs, entitled either “Rosenzeit! wie schnell vorbei” (the first line of the poem) or “Agnes,” was set to music many times, notably by Brahms in 1873, while other poems had to await the events of 1888. If it is speculatively possible that Wolf devised his setting of “Agnes” in part to “correct” what he found objectionable in Brahms, it is certain that he had Wagner in mind when he set “Seufzer” (Sigh) and “Wo find’ ich Trost?” (Where can I find consolation?), especially the latter, with its quotations from Parsifal. Mörike would not have approved, since he and his friends even contemplated publishing polemics against Wagner, but the reminiscences of Monsalvat are peculiarly appropriate for the poetic content – until the end. Wolf was prone to imaginative extensions of the poem in his postludes, and he provides for one of these songs a “redemptive” ending à la Wagner and not in accord with Mörike, more pessimistic than his best composer. Dyad-cycles, revised endings, and songs with other songs in mind recur in the fourth and fifth chapters. Eroticism is a red thread throughout the second and third chapters, given Maria Meyer’s embodiment of it and Agnes’s fear of it; Mörike’s erotic poems in Wolf ’s hands are the focus of chap. 4. Here, I have arranged four songs along a spectrum from near-pornographic symbolism to fairy-tale eroticism of the lightest, brightest variety and have tried to show what changes Wolf wrought on Mörike’s scenarios and why. Wolf probably found in the invocation of intercourse in “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens” (A Maiden’s First Love-Song) – Mörike’s most startling poem – an antidote to the sexual hypocrisies he decried in his own time and place, but in his delight with the poet’s seeming explicitness, he may have missed the deeper implications of the poem. In his setting of “Der Knabe und das Immlein” (The Boy and the Little Bee) and “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” (An Hour before Daybreak), he avails himself of the Schumannian privilege of putting separate poems together in conjunctions not of the poet’s making and doing so in a manner reminiscent of his Peregrina dyad, while his setting of “Der Gärtner” (The xi

Preface Gardener) is speculatively a correction or revision of Schumann’s earlier setting of the same text. And finally, at the opposite end of the spectrum from eroticism, I examine Wolf ’s treatment of two Mörike poems on religious subjects – “Gebet” (Prayer) and “Auf ein altes Bild” (On an Old Painting) – in the fifth chapter; ironically, Wolf the Nietzschean exCatholic gives Mörike the unhappy Lutheran songs in which the poet’s doubts are converted to redemptive endings, as in “Wo find’ ich Trost.” Wolf could not have realized the full extent of Mörike’s unhappiness with Lutheranism without knowing the Nachlaß and the letters; he might have formed a distorted estimation of the poet’s faith from the religious poems in the anthology, or he could, speculatively, have instilled something of his own non-dogmatic spirituality into these settings. One cannot discuss discrepancies between Mörike and Wolf without also invoking the points of convergence, more numerous by far. Wolf did, after all, recognize sooner than almost anyone else what is golden in Mörike, and he could and did devise complex, sophisticated intersections between this poet’s words and his own music. It is in the polyphony of ideas, his and Mörike’s, that the richness of these songs resides. Anyone writing a book incurs more debts than he or she can repay. I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the research fellowship that enabled me to complete this project and to the Graduate School at the University of Notre Dame for their funding of a trip to the Mörike archives at the Deutsches Literatur-Archiv in Marbach. I am grateful both to A-R Editions, which produced the music examples for this book, and to the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame, which generously paid for the production costs of those examples. I must also thank the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Houghton Library, Andover Theological Library, the Fogg Art Library, and Widener Memorial Library at Harvard University for their aid on many occasions, as well as the Music Collection of the Library of Congress, both houses of the Stadtbibliothek zu Berlin, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, and Regenstein Memorial Library at the University of Chicago. Jonathan and Maureen Boulton of the University of Notre Dame translated a Latin text in chap. 3 for me, and Albert Wimmer and Siglind Bruhn have helped with the daunting task of translating Mörike’s poetry. Students in two lied seminars have challenged, added to, argued with, and helped refine my thoughts about these songs, and friends (principally James McCalla, James Parakilas, and Mary Hunter) have both put up with a fine whine or two as the project wended its way and given me the benefit of their advice. Most of all, my heartfelt thanks go once again to Roger Parker, whose suggestions regarding this manuscript were invaluable. I am lucky to have such a good colleague and friend. Everything I write has been, still is, always will be, dedicated to the memory of Paul Amadeus Pisk, teacher and musician extraordinaire. Wolf ’s settings of “Schlafendes Jesuskind” and “Anakreons Grab” were sung at a memorial service for him when he died in 1990, and I cannot imagine a more fitting tribute for someone who loved Wolf ’s music and shared that love with me.

xii

Chapter 1

“Göttlicher Mörike!”: an introduction to Eduard Mörike and Hugo Wolf

In the summer of 1890, when Hugo Wolf was attempting to explain his philosophy of art to his new friend, the Stuttgart composer Emil Kauffmann (1836–1909), he cited works by Eduard Mörike as a perfect example of the kind of artistic truth he too sought to create:1 And Mörike himself, this darling of the Graces! to what excesses his Muse gave herself up, when she turned her countenance to the daemonic side of truth! The “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens” presents a striking example of this. And what convulsive intimacy, what voluptuous pleasure in pain [welche krampfhafte Innigkeit, welches wollüstige Behagen am Peinlichen] speaks from those inimitable lines: “Erinn’rung reicht mit Lächeln die verbittert / Bis zur Betäubung süßen Zauberschalen; / So trink’ ich gierig die entzückten Qualen” [Memory, smiling, offers me the bitter-anodyne, sweet, enchanted chalice; so I drink avidly of enraptured torments2]. That is written with blood, and such tones can only strike one who, suffering, surrenders his innermost being to deeply truthful knowledge.3

The context for this impassioned passage is distressing – Wolf was trying to prove that Wagner was superior to Brahms (Wolf dubbed his detestation of his older contemporary “my anti-Brahmimentum”) – but the letter is still crucial for what it tells of Wolf ’s attraction to this poetic repertoire. Wolf even mimics Mörike’s Baroque-influenced trafficking in oxymoron, among the devices this poet used to evoke the intensity, complexity, ambiguity, and suffering of life. “That is written with blood,” Wolf declared, but this aesthetic idealin-a-nutshell was far from Naturalism or Realism, literary tendencies Wolf detested. Rather, passion and knowledge of pain are channeled into creations by artists who abjured the confessional gushing Wolf found so objectionable in certain poets of his own day. That the composer claimed Mörike as a kindred spirit, an alter ego, is evident in the letter to Kauffmann, but more than mere admiration is at work. Wolf used the poet for his own purposes, and he necessarily filtered everything in Mörike through the warping mirror of his (Wolf ’s) psychology, musical concerns, and culture, different from those of the poet he venerated. The discrepancies between poet and composer are far more interesting than the hoary legend of Wolf and his poets marching in lock-step, a myth which crumbles upon examination to reveal more intricate processes at work. Wolf was preaching to the converted when he wrote of Mörike as the “darling of the Graces” to this particular correspondent. Emil Kauffmann was the son of Ernst Friedrich Kauffmann (1803–74), a lifelong friend of Mörike’s4 and one of the first composers ever to set the words of this “son of Horace and of a cultivated Swabian lady” – Gottfried Keller’s 1

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs famous capsule characterization of Mörike – to music.5 The friendship between Wolf and Kauffmann began with Kauffmann’s enthusiastic response to Wolf ’s 1889 Gedichte von Eduard Mörike; along with a letter expressing his admiration, Emil sent a princely token of appreciation: the autograph manuscript of Mörike’s “An Longus” (To Longus) of 1841. Perhaps Kauffmann knew from Wolf ’s settings of Mörike’s comic songs that the Viennese composer would relish the verbal demolition of pushy, presumptuous types, or Sehrmänner (“very-men”) in this poem. The gift arrived on Wolf ’s thirtieth birthday, and the composer was delighted: You have unknowingly given me a birthday present, and a more splendid one I could not have wished for. With inner joy, I beheld the poet’s handwriting and, for the first time, discovered that its symmetrical strokes harmonize splendidly with the balanced essence of the poet. The poem, which, to be sure, manifests nothing of the “arch-fantasy” for which Mörike is renowned, is numbered among those I love most. Composable it isn’t, however.6

The passage is revealing. Wolf ’s knowledge of Mörike’s poetry is obvious, and he writes almost as if he were a literary critic, pointing out the poet’s idiosyncratic vein of fantasy and his cultivation of balance, but this connoisseur’s thumbnail sketch of the poet culminates with the omnipresent thought of a poem’s suitability or not for conversion into music. The search for song texts was his entire reason for reading poetry; whatever his appreciation of literary merit, he placed poems that were not composable into a different category than those that were amenable to music – his music. It is a mysterious phenomenon, neither comprehensible nor calculable, when the rediscovery of a poetic repertoire at a certain point in a composer’s life unlocks the door to musical maturity. In February of 1888, after a long, troubled apprenticeship in the art of composition, Wolf returned to the poet whose “Mausfallen-Sprüchlein” (Magic Charm for Mousers) he had set so charmingly six years earlier in 1882. For some reason, the renewed encounter was the catalyst for an explosion of creativity (the same was true of Schubert’s return to Goethe’s poetry in late 1814–15 and of Debussy’s musical rendezvous with Verlaine in 1884). On 24 January 1888, just three weeks before the Mörike outpouring began, Wolf had composed a listless setting of a listless poem by Heine, “Wo wird einst” (which, however, he later published in the 1897 Vier Gedichte nach Heine, Shakespeare und Lord Byron); this would be his last attempt to tune his lyre to that of Schumann’s favorite poet. It seems only appropriate to this tale of transformation that Mörike and Heine heartily disliked one another, representing as they do different approaches to poetry.7 That same day, however, Wolf also set to music Robert Reinick’s “Gesellenlied” (The Apprentice’s Song) about an apprentice whose master continually tells him “Kein Meister fällt vom Himmel” (Masters don’t fall from the sky) and who longs to find a bride and be a master himself. Wolf, who linked the cheeky, attractive apprentice David from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg with the apprentice in Reinick’s poem, might have seen himself in both of these figures as well and perhaps glimpsed that his own mastery was just around the corner. He was exuberant over his friend Friedrich Eckstein’s services in arranging for the publication in 1887 of the Sechs Lieder für eine Frauenstimme and the Sechs Gedichte von Scheffel, Mörike, Goethe und Kerner – the first appearance in print of Wolf ’s songs – and had moved in mid-January 1888 to the Werner family’s home in Perchtoldsdorf in search of the peace and quiet he needed for composition. It was laugh2

An introduction to Eduard Mörike and Hugo Wolf ter that unleashed the floodgates, and laughter by a greater master than Reinick: Mörike’s “Der Tambour” (The Drummer-boy), composed on 16 February 1888, about a lad on the threshold of adulthood who fantasizes transformations and metamorphoses. How appropriate! – Wolf too was transformed in a way no one yet understands. What happened in those three weeks between “Wo wird einst” and “Der Tambour”? What conjunction between the trajectory of Wolf ’s life and this poet’s words brought “Wölferl’s own howl” into being at that moment in February? How does a poet act as midwife for a composer’s attainment of mastery? Wolf himself could not explain it, indeed, could hardly believe it. The letters he wrote to his friends Edmund and Marie Lang, Eckstein, and his brother-in-law Josef Strasser are hyperbolic, dazed, exuberant reports of what he had just composed and how he felt about each specimen of “Mörikeana,” as he dubbed the growing pile of songs.8 A letter to Lang on 22 January, one week after the start of it all, ricochets from joyful boasting (“A divine song, I tell you! Quite divinely marvelous!”) to an exacerbated state he could only evoke in phrases of oxymoronic ambivalence worthy of Mörike himself (“this condition of inspiration is exquisite torment to me, not pure happiness”). “Am I really one of the elect?”, he asked, and then wrote, “I believe I am mad,” the foreshadowing of his descent into insanity nine years later terrible to read. That February, however, he was at the height of his powers, composing “Der Knabe und das Immlein,” “Jägerlied,” and “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” (The Boy and the Little Bee, Hunter’s Song, An Hour before Daybreak) in a single day. To his circle of intimates, he characterized “Nimmersatte Liebe” (Insatiable Love) as “a regular student’s song” – that students then as now are preoccupied with sex is the implication – and “Zur Warnung” (Warning) as “so weird and strange that I am quite afraid of it.” A leitmotif of the letters is enormous pride at what he was finally able to accomplish, after years of struggle. “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens,” he wrote, “is of such intensity that it would lacerate the nervous system of a block of marble.” “What I write now, dear friend, I write for posterity too,” he said – not hyperbole, but statement of fact. Elective affinities are only partially explicable, if at all, but surely one source of Wolf ’s love for this poet was the nature of creativity as both men experienced it. For them, artistic creation was a matter of inexplicable visitations by an unreliable Muse, incalculable in her arrivals and departures, and both men suffered horribly during her frequent absences. In the poem “Muse und Dichter” (Muse and Poet), Mörike’s weak, ill poetic speaker begs desperately for the return of his lyre and is given only the most equivocal of answers, while Wolf compared life without musical creation to “a frog’s existence . . . not even a galvanized frog”; the Stoic humor of some (not all) of his references to Polyhymnia’s sulky withdrawals could not hide his misery.9 In a letter to his friend Friedrich Vischer in 1832, Mörike writes “I live here in a place that my Muse herself (and I have a very subjective and self-willed Muse) could not have sought out better.”10 Wolf too knew of willful Muses, capable of mocking, shocking, and deserting their hapless human prey; the inebriate tone of his announcements to friends of creativity redivivus are a measure of the relief he felt when the seasons of drought were over. Neither poet nor composer could court his Muse by any inducement; disciplined work-habits and the greatest of desires to create were of no avail in this fealty where she, not they, held the reins. I wonder whether Wolf felt a pang 3

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs of recognition when he read Mörike’s “An einem Wintermorgen, vor Sonnenaufgang” (On a Winter Morning, Before Sunrise), the “flagship poem” in each of the four editions of Mörike’s poetry directed by the poet himself, with its invocation of “eiderdown lightness” and “new worlds” stirring within him (“O flaumenleichte Zeit der dunkeln Frühe! / Welche neue Welt bewegest du in mir?”). The poet’s “bright swarm of images,” bathing in his breast like goldfish in a pond, became for the composer an inner swarm of musical ideas, and Wolf too lived in hope that new music would move and stir within him. For this composer, it was wintry death-in-life when he could not compose and the first day of creation when he could. Another source of Wolf ’s attraction to Mörike’s poetry is surely Mörike’s many-sidedness and slipperiness of categorization. He cannot be pigeonholed as wholly Romantic, neo-classical, Biedermeier-idyllic, or folkish, although he partakes on occasion of each of the above and has an instantly recognizable “voice” in whatever context. He wrote poems of many types, his works encompassing love-sonnets, folksong-like (but with a twist) ditties, free verse, blank verse, Knittelvers, sarcasm, good-natured humor, poetry about poetry, Rollenlieder (“role poems,” in which stereotypical characters speak), ballads of the supernatural, Dinggedichte (“thing poems,” in which vast recesses of meaning are glimpsed in seemingly insignificant objects), eroticism bordering on pornography, occasional poems, religious poetry, fantasy and fairy-tale worlds, Nature poems, and poems which burst the bounds of convention. His love of masks delighted Wolf, who also prided himself on his one-man carnival act, on the variety of characters he could clothe in music. In a letter to Kauffmann of 15 December 1891, Wolf, rejoicing over the initial work on the Italienisches Liederbuch, wrote “It [the songbook] is once again an entirely different world, and you will be not a little astonished at my Proteus-nature, that can now enter this skin.”11 He had already demonstrated his shape-shifting abilities in the Mörike volume, although “Wölferl’s own howl,” as he called it, those harmonic predilections, voice-leading procedures, textures, and so forth that he made his own, is manifest in every song. Perhaps most important, Wolf could claim Mörike as his own discovery for song. This poet came along too late for Schubert’s brief hold on life; while Schumann’s Mörike settings from his later years (including “Die Soldatenbraut” and “Das verlassene Mägdlein,” from the Romanzen und Balladen, op. 64, nos. 1 and 2; “Er ist’s!”, op. 79, no. 23; “Der Gärtner,” op. 107, no. 3; and “Jung Volkers Lied,” op. 125, no. 3) have much that is admirable, Mörike was not Schumann’s alter ego as was Heine, to whose name he is evermore linked. A few earlier composers (mostly close friends of the poet) had set Mörike to music, but despite their virtues, they are not Wolf ’s equal. Mörike was not yet recognized in 1888 as one of Germany’s best poets, although a few critics had begun to point out his significance; it was Wolf who lit a bonfire from the embers of the poet’s modest reputation and broadcast his name as never before. “The good Swabians shall yet come to know their poet!”, Wolf declared in a letter of 9 November 1890 to Emil Kauffmann in which he announced the possibility of a concert tour with the singer Ferdinand Jäger to Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin, Cologne, and Tübingen; two recitals in Tübingen, where Mörike had received his seminary training, would be devoted entirely to Mörike songs.12 When I contemplate the Mörike exhibits at the Schiller-Nationalmuseum or walk along Mörikestraße 4

An introduction to Eduard Mörike and Hugo Wolf in Marbach or visit the Mörike Bookstore in Ludwigsburg, I do so in part because of Wolf ’s actions on Mörike’s behalf. Wolf ’s championship of this poet was hardly disinterested: it was born of gratitude for the music Mörike helped him to create. Between 16 February and 18 May (a mere three months), Wolf composed forty-three songs.13 At the end of May, he had to leave the Brunnergasse house in Perchtoldsdorf because the Werner family wished to use it, and set off on a walking tour before returning to Vienna in July. Shortly thereafter, he joined Eckstein and the Langs near Grinzing, where he occupied himself with rebuilding an old piano. After going to Bayreuth in late August, where he was reportedly moved to tears by a performance of Parsifal, he returned first to Grinzing and then back to Vienna. It was at Eckstein’s house at Siebenbrunnergasse 15 in Vienna that Wolf composed Eichendorff’s “Verschwiegene Liebe” (Secret Love) on 31 August. He had earlier tried and failed to set it to music, and the success of his renewed encounter with the poem impelled him to seek solitude once again in order to compose. This time, he made use of the Eckstein family’s country house at Unterach am Attersee in the Salzkammergut, where he composed ten songs in nine days to complete his Eichendorff project. But he was not yet done with Mörike and wrote nine more songs between 4 and 11 October, beginning with “An den Schlaf ” (To Sleep) and ending with “An die Geliebte” (To the Beloved),14 before beginning his journey home to Vienna on 12 October. The final Mörike song, “Auf eine Christblume II,” was composed some six weeks later at Perchtoldsdorf, where it all began, on 26 November. The end of composition did not spell the end of Wolf ’s reverence for this poet. References to Mörike recur as a leitmotif in Wolf ’s letters for years after the miracle of 1888. On 25 April 1891, during his visit to Swabia, Wolf wrote to his friend Oskar Grohe to say “Today Urach will be visited,” mimicking the title of Mörike’s poem, “Besuch in Urach” (Visit to Urach).15 On 3 March 1893, following the birth of Grohe’s son Helmuth on 27 February, Wolf wrote to say, “Bravo!”, followed by a doggerel mélange of Mozart and Mörike: Das haben Sie einmal gut gemacht – über Nacht. You have done well once more – overnight; Bald werden Sie’s weiter noch bringen – mög’ es soon you will bring forth more – may you be gelingen – successful – Zu Papagenos und Papagenas, jedoch mit Maß. Papagenos and Papagenas, but with moderation. Laut klappert nur einer “im lustigsten Ton,” Only one loudly rattled its beak “in the merriest key,” Hellmutig er grüßt und flieget davon. He salutes you right merrily and flies away. . . . Ihr Hugo Wolf, priv. Kinderweibel und . . . Your Hugo Wolf, private child-nanny Komponist außer Diensten.16 and composer off-duty

The references are to Papagena’s and Papageno’s duet in act 2, scene 9 of Die Zauberflöte (“Es ist das höchste der Gefühle, / Wenn viele, viele Papageno, Papagena / Der Eltern Segen werden sein”) and to Mörike’s comic ballad “Storchenbotschaft” (Storks’ Message), in which a pair of storks herald the arrival of twins. Grohe, the composer teased, may still catch up with his operatic predecessors but should do so “mit Maß,” with Mörike-esque moderation. However, this merry squib has a sad subtext in Wolf ’s inability to compose, due to a compositional block lasting from 1892 to 1895, hence the designation of himself as an “unemployed” or “off-duty” composer. He too wished to give birth, but to more music 5

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs and not “mit Maß.” He had two more years to endure before this season in an arid hell of the mind was over. It was to Kauffmann, however, that Wolf would speak most often of Mörike, since Kauffmann could relay personal anecdotes to Mörike’s latterday admirer and could show his Viennese friend artifacts from the Kauffman family treasure-trove of Mörike memorabilia. (It is due to the efforts of several generations of Kauffmanns that there is so much Mörikeana in Marbach for scholars to study, from the red Hussar’s jacket worn by the fouryear-old future poet to autograph manuscripts and the books in his library.) On 2 April 1892, Wolf wrote to Kauffmann of his desire to own another photograph of Mörike; he had, he told Kauffmann, only the well-known image of the poet in his last years, showing Mörike in profile and reading a book.17 Kauffmann replied with the description of a different daguerrotype, and the composer’s curiosity about “our poet”18 was piqued. “Might I beg for your picture?”, he asked eagerly.19 The obliging Kauffmann sent him the image, and Wolf was duly grateful: Of all the portraits of the poet that I know, this seems the most successful, especially in the refined, sober tone of the execution, the rich modelling with regard to light and shadow on those striking features, over all of which lies the purest expression of thoughtful contemplation and gentleness. Truly, a glorious aspect that brings back to mind all of the wonderful hours that once, blessed by his genius, made me so deeply happy. A thousand, and yet again a thousand, thanks.20

On 26 September 1894, Wolf again wrote of his gratitude for Kauffmann’s gift of a book by Rudolf Krauß on Mörike als Gelegenheitsdichter (Mörike as Occasional Poet) – Kauffmann was sending Wolf books hot off the press21 – and recounts a tale of having taken the book with him on a picnic, intending to read selections from it aloud to his friends, only to find that it must have fallen out of the wagon. Everyone searched, then gave the book up for lost, until a package arrived by post from Wolf ’s friend Hugo Faißt, who had found the missing treasure. “You have gladdened me doubly with the book,” Wolf wrote Kauffmann, “and therefore you deserve double the thanks.” In the same letter, Wolf writes of his belief that from henceforth, biographies of Mörike should include his [Wolf ’s] name as well; Faißt had promised to drop a word to that effect in Krauß’s ear.22 Wolf knew that he would figure prominently in the history of Mörike-reception from that day on, and so he has. But it is perhaps just as well that Wolf only knew Mörike’s poetic works (minus the Nachlaß) and little else when he composed his songs, since his enthusiasm for the poet as a man, not as an artist, dimmed with greater knowledge. When he first encountered Mörike’s letters and heard Kauffmann’s tales, he was deeply moved, writing Kauffmann a letter on 22 November 1892 in which he reminisces about his visit to Tübingen in autumn 1890. On that occasion, Kauffmann had brought out Mörike’s letters to his (Kauffmann’s) father and read them aloud. “What fresh, youthful life breathed forth from these yellowed pages! These were no dead letters: the living word resounded throughout, and all was so full of meaning and feeling, shaped in the fullest image of life,” Wolf wrote.23 But it is an irony of history that, with the exception of the Hermann Kurz – Mörike correspondence published in 1885, Mörike’s letters only began to emerge in print after the composition of Wolf ’s Mörike lieder. On 17 May 1895, Wolf wrote to Melanie Köchert that he had read Mörike’s letters on the train en route to the Lipperheides’ villa at Matzen where he would 6

An introduction to Eduard Mörike and Hugo Wolf work on his opera Der Corregidor. What, one wonders, was he reading? The Mörike – Theodor Storm exchanges published in the Deutsche Rundschau for 1889 or the volume of Mörike’s letters to Moritz von Schwind published in 1890?24 If the latter, as seems likely, did Wolf know of the earlier connection between Schwind and Schubert? Whatever it was, Wolf dismissed the first half as “weak and fairly uninteresting,” the latter half meeting with greater approval, although “I had imagined the letters to be wittier and more original. A certain antiquated tone is all too prominent . . . I suspect we would not have gotten along well after all.”25 He was probably right. The Mörike–Storm and Schwind letters come from late in the poet’s life, not from the youthful years in which Mörike wrote many of the poems Wolf set to music, but Wolf might not have found the earlier letters that much more sympathetic. Mörike was monarchist in what little politics he was willing to espouse and conservative in many of his views, while Wolf was not; Mörike was bound to his family in ways Wolf was not; and Mörike was angst-ridden in matters of love and sex where Wolf was not. Mörike’s anti-Wagnerism would have roused Wolf ’s ire to a surety, and Mörike would have been horrified by Nietzsche and by Wolf ’s partial partisanship of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Even their religious dubieties, seemingly an element in common between poet and composer, were unlike beneath the surface. But in 1888, Wolf could find no fault with “divine Mörike,” and for that, the world of music is fortunate. Protected by historical circumstance from knowledge that might have marred his involvement with Mörike’s poetry, Wolf was able to claim the poet as his own for music. “AU F G O L D N E R TÖ N E L E I T E R ! ” : M Ö R I K E A N D M U S I C

And yet, there is an enormous aesthetic gap between these two men, the gulf exemplified in their differing musical tastes and their uses of music. Wolf would have known from Mörike’s works that the poet loved music (Emil Kauffmann, a musician and the son of a musician, might have told him more of Mörike’s passion for music), but Wolf ’s métier meant something other to the music-loving poet than to the practicing composer. Their opposing stances vis-à-vis Wagner make the point most strongly – had they met in real life, one can imagine their mutual disgust with each other – but Wagner is not the only point of disagreement. Ironically, both looked back to an earlier generation, Mörike to Mozart and Wolf to Schumann and Wagner, but they were attracted to different pasts for different reasons. Mörike, one is forced to conclude, would have neither understood nor liked Wolf ’s settings of his poetry. Despite his love of music, Mörike had limited technical understanding of it; he may even have rejected, consciously or unconsciously, specialized knowledge for fear of how that might affect the operations of music in his writings. To him, music was a Janus-faced phenomenon, both a source of beauty and a dangerous force which could cause listeners to lose their hold on the concrete world, music’s workings thus related to similar effects wrought by Eros and creativity. The seventeen-year-old Mörike wrote the following passage in a letter of February 1822 to his friend Wilhelm Waiblinger: Truly music has an indescribable effect on me – it is a recurrent sickness, but not constant. I tell you, a moving but not necessarily sorrowful piece of music, often a merry one, can sometimes release

7

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs what is innermost in me; then I sink into the most melancholy fantasies, where I want to embrace the whole world, where what is petty and bad is apparent in all its nothingness, where everything appears in a different, transfigured light. When the music breaks off, I want to throw myself from a high wall, I want to die; at those times, it fares with me as with the wandering Harper [Goethe’s Harper in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre].26

If adolescent self-dramatizing is evident in the passage, similar experiences were written into his mature poetry. After the poetic persona hears someone singing in “Auf einer Wanderung” (On a Walk), he is no longer enclosed by an ordered space, with buildings and people in their proper places, but instead is magically transported outside of the town, beyond the bounds of human society, into an incandescent realm in which forms and shapes dissolve. Here, the experience is rapture, a passageway to the Muse’s “breath of love,” but the unanchored state induced by music is also akin to death in its dissolution of the self and hence threatening. The alliance of music with the destructive forces of creation, initial rapture ceding rapidly to illness and annihilation, is as much a leitmotif of the poems as music in its more beneficent guises. In “Josephine,” sacred music in a Catholic church seems to soar into the heavens “like a sun-drunk eagle,” summoning the wind to make the tapers waver and causing the poetic speaker to sicken at heart, while “Evil Greta” of the ballad “Die schlimme Greth und der Königssohn” (Evil Greta and the King’s Son) is a musical demon who “howls a death-song” as she throws the prince’s body into the sea at the end. A more potent compound of music and sexual fear would be hard to imagine. Time itself alters under music’s spell; in a letter of 14 May 1831 to his fiancée Luise Rau, Mörike told of visiting his home town of Ludwigsburg and hearing an Aeolian harp, whose “sweet tones fused the entire past within me.”27 Music was a means to an end for Mörike, and that (non-musical) end was a state conducive to the creation of poetry. In that poetry, he often waxes nostalgic for the late eighteenth-century world of his two gods: Goethe and Mozart. Everything Mörike found compelling in music had its epitome in Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, especially the Mozart of the mature operas, and there was little in the music of his own century that he liked.28 For him, Don Giovanni was the ne plus ultra of music, the artistic wholeness of this work and the rest of Mozart’s oeuvre being lost, so Mörike thought, to his own less fortunate generation. (On hearing Don Giovanni for the first time in December 1876, the sixteen-year-old Wolf “liked it very much,” but was already too Wagner-obsessed – he noted the presence of anti-Wagnerians in the audience – to find in Mozart an object of veneration equal to the composer of Parsifal.29) In Mörike’s sonnet “Seltsamer Traum” (Singular Dream), written in 1828 after attending a performance of Le nozze di Figaro in Stuttgart, the poet dreams of springtime gardens in which a hundred miniature Figaros dance with equally diminutive Cherubinos; the scene is espied through a veil of dream-illusion and as if through a reversed telescope, the objects smaller and more distant. Like stars in a far-away firmament, the Mozartian figures are multiplied, visible but not of Mörike’s own world. The poet himself appears in the last line as a Hanswurst, singing on the flowery field; he could only fulfill his desire to belong to Mozart’s realm, to sing with Mozart’s characters, in the disguise of a clown, a clumsy, masked mimicry of earlier authenticity, and then only in dreams.30 Mörike’s opinions about music are a leitmotif of his letters, especially his correspondence with the musically talented members of his circle, Wilhelm Hartlaub (1804–85) and Ernst Friedrich Kauffmann, and with his music-loving family (his brother Adolph 8

An introduction to Eduard Mörike and Hugo Wolf became a piano-builder, and his brother Karl was a composer). In an amusing missive of 6 February 1825 to his mother and older sister Luise, Mörike tells of attending a student orchestra rehearsal at the Lutheran seminary in Tübingen, a rehearsal led by the Stift’s music director, the young Friedrich Silcher (1789–1860) before his fame as a folksong arranger.31 On this occasion, the musicians performed the overture to Die Entführung aus dem Serail, to Mörike’s pleasure, and a “modern” composition by someone named Vogel, first name not supplied and not to the poet’s pleasure. Manuals of concertgoing etiquette should not be based on this incident, except as a negative example; one suspects Mörike exaggerated the story for his family’s entertainment (as we shall see in chap. 2, this event occurred six months after multiple traumas in Mörike’s life, and he was attempting to spare his mother and sister concern for his well-being, to pretend that he was all right): When a bad piece was played, however, full of affected melancholy and plagiarisms, my amusement tempted me into all sorts of secret pantomimes and mockery which, without my noticing it at first, made the neighboring listeners break out in loud and hearty laughter. The laughter grew as it spread through the hall until the uproar brought the melting sighs of the overture to a halt. The angry musicians cast their instruments aside and jumped up, upon which I could hardly slip out the door fast enough. Silcher . . . could no longer keep going. I was both rueful and delighted [Es reute mich und freute mich] over what I had done to the miserable piece. (It was by Vogel.)32

Consigning the wretched composer to a parenthetical afterword is mockery indeed, but it is the dislike of “heart-on-sleeve” emotionalism that one most notes in this letter. He was already averse to Romanticism in music, and he would become more so with age. But emotions unleashed by Mozart were another matter. Although more poet than scholar, Mörike was a classicist who cherished Greek and Roman antiquity, and it is surely in part for that reason that he was so drawn to La clemenza di Tito. In a letter to his friend Johannes Mährlen of 5 June 1832 from Ochsenwang, Mörike describes how a sudden summer thunderstorm had affected him: At the window, I saw a storm draw near from the Teck side; a minute later, I heard the first roll of thunder, and all my life-spirits in delight began secretly to wait for it. With incredible swiftness, the storm broke over our heads. Broad and mighty lightning strikes, one after another, such as I had never seen before in daytime, fell like a shower of roses in our white room. Old Mozart might at that moment have been standing invisibly at my back, beating on my shoulders with his Kapellmeister’s staff. It was as if the devil had let loose the overture to Titus in my soul, so incessant, so glorious, so piercing that with each brassy cry of the Roman trumpet [“römische Tuba,” Mörike writes, punning on the Latin “Tuba mirum spargens sonum” of the Requiem – Mozart yet again], I clenched both fists in rapture.33

In this fantasy, Mozart is still living, grown old but no less powerful, and directing the forces of Nature itself. The equation of music with the diabolical-elemental could not be more vividly expressed. In one summation, La clemenza di Tito tells of someone who is spurred to wrongdoing by erotic passion, but is granted forgiveness for his transgression at the end; Mörike, who was not so fortunate (see chap. 2), was perhaps drawn to Mozart’s last opera for this reason as well. Mörike’s memento mori “Ach, nur einmal noch im Leben” (One Last Time before Dying), written sometime before 4 August 1845,34 has its inception in Sesto’s aria, “Deh, per questo istante solo,” from the second-act confrontation between Tito and Sesto, when Sesto cannot bring himself to reveal that it was Vitellia who plotted against Tito’s life and Tito, believing Sesto responsible for the assassination attempt, condemns him to death. 9

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs The remorseful Sesto implores Tito, “Just for a moment, remember our past affection, for your contempt, your coldness, make me die of grief,” before the guards lead him away. In Mörike’s poem, only the beginning of the aria is given, in seeming whimsy, to a singing garden gate, but the words not sung, the continuation of the German text, linger in the background and confirm the death-haunted atmosphere (“Ach, nur einmal noch im Leben / lass dein Herz mir offen steh’n, / ruhiger, hast du mir vergeben, / werd’ ich dann zum Tode geh’n,” or “Ah, once more in life, let your heart stand open to me; I will go more peacefully to my death if you forgive me”): Ach, nur einmal noch im Leben! (lines 30–54) – Und was, frug ich nach einer kurzen Stille sie, Was denn noch einmal? Sprich! woher, Elegische, Hast du das Lied? Ging etwa denn zu deiner Zeit (Die neunziger Jahre meint’ ich) hier ein schönes Kind, Des Pfarrers Enkeltochter, sittsam aus und ein, Und hörtest du sie durch das offne Fenster oft Am grünlackierten, goldbeblümten Pantalon Hellstimmig singen? Des gestrengen Mütterchens Gedenkst du auch, der Hausfrau, die so reinlich stets Den Garten hielt, gleichwie sie selber war, wann sie Nach schwülem Tag am Abend ihren Kohl begoß, Derweil der Pfarrherr ein paar Freunden aus der Stadt, Die eben weggegangen, das Geleite gab; Er hatte sie bewirtet in der Laube dort, Ein lieber Mann, redseliger Weitschweifigkeit. Vorbei ist nun das alles und kehrt nimmer so! Wir Jüngern heutzutage treiben’s ungefähr Zwar gleichermaßen, wackre Leute ebenfalls; Doch besser dünkt ja allen, was vergangen ist. Es kommt der Zeit, da werden wir auch ferne weg Gezogen sein, den Garten lassend und das Haus. Dann wünschest du nächst jenen Alten uns zurück, Und schmückt vielleicht ein treues Herz vom Dorf einmal, Mein denkend und der Meinen, im Vorübergehn Dein morsches Holz mit hellem Ackerblumenkranz.35

One last time before dying! – And what, I asked it after a short silence, was that all about? Speak! from whence, o elegiac one, came that song? In your time (the nineties, I would guess), did a lovely child, the pastor’s granddaughter, modestly go in and out of here, and did you hear her often through the open window brightly singing to the accompaniment of a green-lacquered, gold-flowered dulcimer? And did you also think of her strict mother, the housewife who took such painstaking care of the garden, how in the evening, after a sultry day, she watered her cabbages; in the meantime, the pastor took some friends from town down the road to see them off; he had entertained them there in the arbor – a dear man, though he loved to ramble on. They are all gone now and will never return! We young ones nowadays do the same things more or less – gallant folk we are, but everyone prefers best of all what is vanished. The time will come when we too will have gone far away, leaving the house and the garden. Then you will sing the olden tune for us as well, and perhaps some true heart will come this way from the village, may think of me and mine in passing, may adorn your crumbling wood with a garland of wildflowers.

A skeleton by Holbein, death is visible behind every word of this poem, from its title to the mouldering wood, evocative of coffins, at the end. In this hall of mirrors, a memory contains yet another memory which in turn tells of still more memories of what is gone: all art is elegy, Mörike says. His singing gate, comic at first glance, is the saddest of symbols. One leaves Edenic Paradises – this one too has a stern guardian – by way of gates which open time as well as space, with art the amanuensis to lead us through corridors of memory and into realms of death. 10

An introduction to Eduard Mörike and Hugo Wolf Mozart’s older and younger contemporaries Haydn and Beethoven were also composers Mörike venerated, although Mozart always came first in his pantheon and late Beethoven was beyond his grasp.36 (Late Beethoven is among the principal influences on Wolf ’s D minor string quartet.) In the postscript to a letter of 2 September 1837 to Hartlaub, Mörike writes of a “piece by Haydn” – which one, he does not say – that he compares to a “Komplimentenmacher” (flatterer) because “it is as if two men, one with hat in hand, took leave of one another at the door, but could not end the matter and continually began conversing all over again from the start. The men wore wigs.”37 It is a charming pictorial fantasy by which Mörike renders visible the developmental processes in Haydn’s music and invokes the bewigged, witty formality of it all. High praise for Beethoven is also a recurring motif in Mörike’s letters, the poet telling Hartlaub in a letter of 12 August 1837 that he (Mörike) had an added inducement for his friend to pay him a visit: “I have copied a facsimile in Beethoven’s handwriting; when you come, you shall have it.”38 The thought of Mörike, whose own handwriting now appears in facsimile reproductions, copying Beethoven’s script is moving. Three years later, Mörike once again begged Hartlaub in a letter of 10 May 1840 to visit him, saying, “Do not forget to bring the     &          volumes! Here, I also have a new ‘Rohtraut’ along with a pleasant letter from the composer [he refers to his friend Ludwig Hetsch’s setting of Mörike’s “Schön-Rohtraut”]. I naturally have no     how to procure a musical performance here and thus will hear the work for the first time through you.”39 One instance of the poet’s Beethoven-veneration is also a demonstration of the way in which Mörike used his experience of music to unleash poetic images that have nothing to do with the music itself. In a letter to his mother and sister Klara on 2 December 1838, Mörike goes into ecstasies about hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony when it was performed at a concert in Stuttgart; his impressions of the various numbers on the program are a window onto his musical tastes: Hideous festival overture by Lindpaintner. Hardegg said afterwards that it was as if one had pasted together a slew of phrases without any sense to them. [Peter Joseph von Lindpaintner, 1791–1856, was a composer in Stuttgart who would, ironically, collaborate with Mörike the next year on a festival-cantata in honor of Schiller, while Hermann Hardegg was a boyhood friend of the poet’s.]40 The quartet [sic! “song and duet”] from the Abduction [Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail]: “Wer ein Liebchen hat gefunden” sung wonderfully by Pezold, Walbach-Canzi, etc. Quartet from Lachner’s Geisterthurm, charming and individual – beautiful unity. It was heartily applauded, which seemed a good omen to me. [Ignaz Lachner, who gave Mörike the ticket for this concert, set Mörike’s Singspiel libretto Die Regenbrüder to music.] A few others I shan’t name. On the other hand, [there was] a symphony by Beethoven in C minor! How thrilling! (I thought quite involuntarily of spirit-choirs coming together to create a world; they sway and sing, singly and in groups, often in blessed strife with one another, and pour out rivers of light before them, entire oceans!)41

Similar invocations of paradisaical light appear in Mörike’s poem “An Wilhelm Hartlaub” (To Wilhelm Hartlaub), written before April 1842: An Wilhelm Hartlaub (lines 7–14 of 34) Doch plötzlich war dein Spiel wie umgewandt, Nur blauer Himmel schien noch ausgespannt Ein jeder Ton ein lang’ gehaltnes Schweigen.

To Wilhelm Hartlaub Then suddenly your playing was as if transformed; the blue sky only seemed to expand still further, every tone a long-sustained silence.

11

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Da fing das Firmament sich an zu neigen, Und jäh daran herab der Sterne selig Heer Glitt rieselnd in ein goldig Nebelmeer, Bis Tropf ’ um Tropfen hell darin zerging, Die alte Nacht den öden Raum umfing.42

The firmament began to bend down and suddenly the blessed host of stars glided downwards in a golden sea of cloud until drop upon drop brightly dissolved therein; the olden night encircled the bleak room.

One thinks of Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Dante’s Il Paradiso, with their angel throngs and rays of supernal light. To be so dazzled by Beethoven’s Fifth or the Classical keyboard repertoire is commendable anytime, anywhere, but one notes the almost immediate replacement of music by literary images. Mörike would always prefer eighteenth-century music above all else, but he did explore more recent compositions to the degree his limited finances would allow, and he and his circle avidly discussed new arrivals on the musical scene. A few nuggets of nineteenthcentury opera even found their way into his poetry as sources for contrafacta; Mörike, a pastor (albeit a reluctant one), was familiar with the old Lutheran practice of adapting prior music to new words and turned it to secular uses on occasion. His “Wanderlied” (Walking Song, beginning “Entflohn sind wir der Stadt Gedränge,” or “We have fled the press of the city”) should be sung, so the poet directs, to a melody from Daniel François Auber’s La Muette de Portici of 1828 (?); which air, Mörike does not say – he is as mute as Auber’s Fenella on the subject – and the conjunction is a curious one. Another poem, “Lang, lang’ ist’s her!” (Long, long ago), written for the wedding of Mörike’s friend Johannes Mährlen’s daughter, tells of remembered music which is itself about memory, a doubling and trebling of Mörike’s lifelong preoccupation with the workings of remembrance. His source was Thomas Haynes Bayly’s (1797–1839) popular air “Long, long ago” (which appears translated in German songbooks such as Ludwig Erk’s Deutscher Liederschatz):43 Long, long ago (stanza 1 of 3) Tell me the tales, that to me were so dear, Long, long ago, long, long ago: Sing me the songs I delighted to hear, Long, long ago, long ago. Now you are come, all my grief is removed, Let me forget that so long you have roved, Let me believe that you love as you loved, Long, long ago, long ago!

So much that is characteristic of this poet is bound up in his attraction to this tune: nostalgia for bygone melodies and bygone days, the longing for a remedy to heal the wounds inflicted by Eros (that these words lurk in the background of a wedding song seems psychologically fraught), and the obsession with memory. The nineteenth century’s best composers, however, seldom met with his approval. On 20 March 1843, Mörike wrote of hearing Schubert’s “Erlkönig” when the theologian David Friedrich Strauß’s wife Agnes Schebest (a well-known opera singer) and Kauffmann performed it at a domestic musicale. Despite admitting that the lied had things of beauty in it, he thought it strident and shrill, a “display piece” which nullified the character of the poem (Goethe would probably have agreed with him). “The child’s cries could shatter glass,” 12

An introduction to Eduard Mörike and Hugo Wolf Mörike wrote; they can indeed, but Mörike meant the words as disparagement.44 His friend Ludwig Hetsch’s (1806–72) twelve Mörike songs, bland and forgettable, seemed to him worthier stuff than the songs of Robert Franz or Schubert, as Mörike wrote to Hartlaub on 19–20 August 1865 – confirmation, if any were needed, of the poet’s conservatism.45 He made a qualified exception to his dislike of most “new music” for Mendelssohn, telling Hartlaub on 6 May 1838 that he had heard some of the Lieder ohne Worte and had liked them.46 He was evidently moved to explore more of Mendelssohn’s music; on 10 June 1838, he asked whether Hartlaub would like to see his [Mörike’s] copy of the op. 8 songs, even copying out the melody of the “Erntelied” (Harvest Song) for his friend.47 Fifteen years later, in April 1853, he was even more impressed by Mendelssohn’s op. 55 incidental music to Sophocles’s Antigone for male chorus and orchestra: “Countless times I was so struck by the poetic and musical impression together that I felt a shiver down my spine!” But even such praise went hand-in-hand with condemnation of what Mörike dubbed “ticklish oddities” and learned, “great Master” effects (in which works, he does not say).48 Mendelssohn’s younger contemporaries and successors met with still less approbation from the Mörike circle. Whether Mörike ever heard Schumann’s nine songs to his poems, we do not know, but Hartlaub attended a recital in Stuttgart in 1872, three years before Mörike’s death, which included some unspecified Schumann songs; Hartlaub found them not at all to his liking.49 But the foremost target of scorn for Mörike and his friends was the “new German school” of Liszt and Wagner, especially Wagner. Strauß seems to have been the first in the group to encounter Wagner’s music and described Lohengrin in a letter of 1851 to Kauffmann as “mediocre.”50 One year later, he was far more exercised about the matter, telling Kauffmann in a letter of 11 October 1852 that the two of them should work together on a “critique of the Wagnerian ravings about opera, drama, etc.” 51 No such critique ever appeared in print, but in a lengthy letter of 19 March 1853, Kauffmann dubbed the Wagnerians “these false prophets,”52 and Mörike would subsequently borrow those words for a climactic passage in his novella Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (Mozart on the Journey to Prague). After playing the second-act finale of Don Giovanni for his hosts, the fictive Mozart declares, “Yes truly, in the course of the next sixty or seventy years, after I am long gone, many a false prophet will arise.” The figure of sixty or seventy years was carefully chosen: Mozart’s “future” was the Wagnerian “present” of the novella. In their opposition to Gesamtkunstwerk, the Mörike circle took great delight in a parody written by their friend Bernhard Gugler (1812–80, the rector of the Stuttgart Polytechnic), who entitled his veritable delirium of alliterative and rhyming words “Naturbilder” (Nature Images). A brief excerpt will suffice: Naturbilder (lines 1–12 of 40) Horch! die düstern Rüstern flüstern lüstern dort, Alter Katzen Tatzen kratzen fort und fort. Grauer Wölfe zwölfe raufen, saufen wild, Doch die flinken Finken trinken, sinken mild. Felsen schmelzen, Dohlen johlen, Grillen schrillen keck; Draußen brausen, sausen Straußen durch den Dreck. Hochverstiegen liegen Ziegen faul im Gras, Raben traben, graben, laben sich am Aas.

13

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Die Hyänen gähnen, Eulen heulen gräulich, Storchen horchen, sorgen, brüten, hüten treulich Zweier Reiher Eier; Nattern schnattern traut, Dreier Geier Schleier flattern, knattern laut [and so on].53

A malevolent and noisy Noah’s Ark is assembled to mock Wagnerian notions of Nature, poetry, and music. That the poem makes any sense whatsoever is a virtuosic feat of sorts. Ultimately, Mörike resembles his idol Goethe in his musical tastes. Like Goethe, he welcomed settings of his verses, as long as they were in a style he found acceptable – classicizing or folklike – and did not compete with the poetry for primacy. Given a reputation more modest by far than Goethe’s, it was mostly friends, family, and local composers who provided Mörike with lieder fashioned from his verse, and of their songs, he was happiest with the more modest ones. For example, Mörike’s brother Karl brought Emilie Zumsteeg (1796–1857, Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg’s youngest daughter) to Mörike’s attention, and her subsequent music for Mörike’s “Die Soldatenbraut” (The Soldier’s Bride) particularly pleased the poet. On 3 February 1839, he sent Hartlaub copies of Ernst Friedrich Kauffmann’s setting of “Die traurige Krönung” (The Sad Coronation) and Zumsteeg’s song, saying he preferred the latter; given Kauffmann’s occasional experimentation with Romantic chromaticism of the sort Mörike disliked, one is not surprised that Emilie Zumsteeg’s artful simplicity was more to his taste.54 His friend Ludwig Hetsch’s forgettable, bland diatonicism also pleased him; on 29 December 1837, Mörike copied out revisions to “Die Schwestern” (The Sisters) and the “Lied eines Jägers” (Song of a Hunter) for Hartlaub to convey to Hetsch for musical setting55 and then eagerly anticipated hearing the new songs in February 1839.56 Post-Mozartian music of any real power, from Schubert to Wagner, disturbed him as it had earlier disturbed Goethe. One may regret this inability of a great poet to appreciate the great music of his own time, but it is a reminder that poets and composers are fundamentally different, created works which are intrinsically different, and wanted different things from each other. The poetry more than makes up for Mörike’s inability to comprehend the musical innovations of his day. For the image of the piano keyboard as a skeletal old mare suddenly transformed into an Arabian steed, its fierceness tamed by a pianist’s skill, in “Auf einen Klavierspieler” (On a Pianist), one can forgive Mörike his dislike of Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and Liszt – Wolf ’s musical gods: Hört ihn und seht sein dürftig Instrument! Die alte, klepperdürre Mähre, An der ihr jede Rippe zählen könnt, Verwandelt sich im Grippe dieses Knaben Zu einem Pferd von wilder, edler Art, Das in Arabiens Glut geboren ward! Es will nicht Zeug noch Zügel haben, Es bäumt den Leib, zeigt wiehernd seine Zähne, Dann schüttelt sich die weiße Mähne, Wie Schaum des Meers zum Himmel spritzt, Bis ihm, besiegt von dem gelaßnen Reiter, Im Aug’ die bittre Träne blitzt – O horch! nun tanzt es sanft auf goldner Töne Leiter!

Hear him and see his shabby instrument! The old, withered nag, on whom you could count every rib, transformed in this boy’s grip into a steed of a wild, noble sort, that was born of Araby’s ardor! It will have neither saddle nor bridle, it rears its body, neighing, shows its teeth, then shakes its white mane, spraying to the skies like the ocean foam, until, vanquished by the patient rider, bitter tears shine in its eyes – Oh listen! now it dances gently on a scale of golden tones!

14

An introduction to Eduard Mörike and Hugo Wolf It is fortunate that Wolf in 1888 knew only poems such as this and nothing of Mörike’s anti-modern intransigence in musical matters when he set so many of this poet’s works to music. “ N O T P O E M S, BU T E N T I R E P O E T S ” : F RO M P O E T I C A N T H O L O G Y TO WO L F

What Wolf knew best of Mörike was the poet’s one medium-sized poetic anthology, a collection with a long history. Emerging from several years of silence to renewed activity, Mörike told his older contemporary Justinus Kerner – whose late poem “Zur Ruh’, zur Ruh’” Wolf would set to music in 1887 – in a letter of 16 August 1836 that he would shortly begin collecting and revising his better poems for the purpose of publishing an anthology.57 The Stuttgart firm of Cotta finally agreed to publish 1,000 copies of the collection in 1838 and to pay Mörike 330 florins; the more famous Swabian poet Ludwig Uhland had received 1,000 florins for 1,000 copies of his poems that same year, and Mörike was not entirely happy with the contract (Uhland’s and Mörike’s literary standing has since reversed). In three subsequent editions, Mörike would revise, delete from, add to, and rearrange his anthology, culminating in the Ausgabe letzter Hand of 1867. By then silenced as a poet, his ineradicable psychological conflicts seldom ceding to creative endeavors, Mörike wrote of this fourth edition to his brother Karl, “It’s just dressed-up old wares,”58 but those “old wares” are both works of self-sufficient poetic beauty and the stuff of fifty-seven lieder by Wolf.59 Eduard Hanslick, not predisposed to like Wolf, once made the acid comment that Wolf composed not poems, but entire poets, and Mörike was the first poet Wolf composed en masse.60 Although this composer’s first two publications were in the “Six Songs”-format typical at the time, he had earlier envisioned a small-to-medium-sized “Song Bouquet” of lieder entirely to poems by Heine; organizing an opus around a single poet had already occurred to him, but not on this scale.61 That he did not set out to compose a compendium of this size seems obvious from his dazzlement at the rapid march through the Mörike volume (Wolf ’s source was probably the posthumously published sixth edition of Mörike’s poetry), and yet this became the model for all of his subsequent song collections; even the three Michelangelo songs of 1897 were originally intended as part of a volume that would be a many-sided portrait of the artist. Late eighteenth-century song composers, most notably Johann Friedrich Reichardt and Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, had published even larger compendia of Goethe songs and Schiller settings a century earlier, but Wolf ’s singlepoet collections were differently calibrated. In this way, Wolf could “one-up” the large song cycles of Schubert and Schumann with something even bigger and could exercise his operatic dreams even within the sphere of lieder by devising music for a variety of poetic personae. Those operatic ambitions, evident early in Wolf ’s life, doubtless determined his attraction to Mörike’s many Rollenlieder; lovers, hunters, abandoned maidens, an old woman, a drummer-boy, elves and fairies, penitents, a goddess or two, poets, a critic, and more speak from the poems Wolf chose. Looking through Mörike’s and Wolf ’s anthologies side-byside, one can see certain patterns in the composer’s selection of song texts, for example, his liking of Mörike’s vein of fantasy in both comic and menacing manifestations, 15

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs although longer fantasy-poems, such as “Vom Sieben-Nixen-Chor” (From the SevenNixie-Choir), were too large for lieder; so too were lengthy poems on non-supernatural subjects, such as “Die schöne Buche” (The Beautiful Beech-Tree). Other poems were excluded for other reasons; Mörike’s tiniest epigrammatic poems, such as “Vicia faba minor,” were too brief for even the most compressed songs, while his many occasional poems were often too specific to their time and place for transference elsewhere, such as Mörike’s witty apology to a librarian for the late return of a book of Catullus’s poems. Ultimately, one is impressed by Wolf ’s discernment of what is finest in Mörike, by his choice, for example, of ballads such as “Der Feuerreiter” (The Fire-Rider) rather than “Die Schatten” (The Shadows, a tale of supernatural vengeance for sexual transgression), or of “Der Tambour” (The Drummer Boy) rather than the comic “Alles mit Maß” (Everything in Moderation). Both of the latter poems are, in one summation, comic food-fantasies, but the drummer boy is a more complex creation, mingling pathos and humor, than the persona who undergoes a surfeit of roasted pigs’-feet in “Alles mit Maß” in order to preach a sermonette on moderation. In fact, most of the best poems of a length suitable for lieder became song texts in 1888, with certain significant exceptions (see chap. 2). One may mourn the lack of a Wolf setting of such poems as “Im Park” (In the Park) or “SeptemberMorgen” (September Morning), but that would be greedy, given what we have. Both the poetic and the musical anthologies are partially organized by thematic groupings, untitled and unacknowledged in both instances but nonetheless recognizable. Although the poet in 1837 had rejected the notion of subtitles for clusters of poems on similar subjects or of the same type, loosely defined groupings are discernible in all four editions of his anthology (poems on classical themes and in classical meters, a series of sonnets, a grouping of distich-epigrams, and a cluster of humorous poems at the close), and Wolf does likewise. His Mörike songs appeared at a time when larger song-collections were published in multiple Hefte, or little booklets with anywhere from two to six songs in each (Schubert’s Müller-cycles were published in this manner). Wolf evidently devoted considerable thought to the order in which his Mörike songs appeared in these Hefte, so that buyers would recognize a certain coherence operative in each one and would be enticed into acquiring the next in the series. For example, the entire volume begins with a dedicatory hymn of praise, “Der Genesene an die Hoffnung” (The Convalescent’s Address to Hope), which is perhaps an encoded – Wolf speaking through Mörike – announcement of the composer’s recovery from depression brought on by fears that he might never accomplish anything significant in Wagner’s wake. What follows this symbolically placed invocation to the gods is a series of four songs about Eros and separation, each in a different “voice” (a youth, a woman, a hunter, a drummer boy), and the nine Hefte which follow are likewise more or less organized in groups. In Wolf ’s schema, a particularly serious Heft is usually followed by a lightening of the musical landscape at the beginning of the next Heft, which then shades to greater and greater seriousness towards the end. Heft 3, for example, is a cluster of masterpieces having to do with the deepest matters of the soul, with death, withdrawal into oneself, memory, creativity, loss of love and impending loss of sanity (nos. 11–15, “An eine Äolsharfe,” “Verborgenheit,” “Im Frühling,” “Agnes,” “Auf einer Wanderung”), while Heft 4 is a fairy-tale grouping with elves at beginning and end (nos. 16–21, “Elfenlied” and “Auf 16

An introduction to Eduard Mörike and Hugo Wolf eine Christblume I & II”) and “Um Mitternacht” as its center of gravity. At the end of a Heft, Wolf would on occasion anticipate the major themes of the next grouping, as when the fourth set concludes with two religious songs which anticipate the songs in Heft 5 (nos. 22–26, “Seufzer,” “Auf ein altes Bild,” “In der Frühe,” “Schlafendes Jesuskind,” “Charwoche”), a central cluster which starts with a chromatic hell of failed belief and proceeds through calmer meditations on Christianity. Heft 6 (nos. 27–31), also dominated by religious themes, begins – in contrast to Heft 5 – with a song of joyous affirmation (“Zum neuen Jahr”), but doubt already intrudes in the second song, in which an attempt to pray breaks down, and then pervades the remainder of the Heft. The last two songs in the group tell of Eros and Caritas, the poetic persona despairing of human love but ecstatically aspiring to God’s love in “Neue Liebe,” despairing of both and without consolation in “Wo find’ ich Trost.” Ballads of the supernatural are grouped together in the ninth set (nos. 44–48, “Der Feuerreiter,” “Nixe Binsefuß,” “Gesang Weylas,” “Die Geister am Mummelsee,” and “Storchenbotschaft”), with a display-piece at the beginning, an intense “slow movement” in the middle, and a comic ballad at the end; “Storchenbotschaft” furthermore paves the way for the comic lieder of Heft 10 (nos. 49–53). Wolf took his cue from Mörike’s poetic anthology when he grouped the comic songs at the end, even concluding with the poet’s last word: “Abschied.” What poet or composer could resist kicking a fictive critic down the stairs before the real-life practitioners of praise and damnation could have their say? If in this brief introduction to the pairing of Wolf and Mörike, one alternates between emphasis on the distance and difference between the two artists and emphasis on Wolf ’s literary acuity, that is only appropriate to this subject. That Wolf revered Mörike is evident in his famous act of giving the poet pride of place on the title page of the first edition, that he had a sophisticated grasp of Mörike’s ambiguities is apparent in one compositional decision after another, but the nineteenth-century myth of perfect poetico-musical “union” is not to be found here. Mörike knew the myth; when he was asked to be adviser to a men’s chorus in 1850, he wrote to Hartlaub of the director’s desire for works in which “the text and melody live entirely in one another [ganz ineinander leben],” and one doubts he considered the ideal easily attainable, if at all.62 Wolf ’s version of the myth was more complicated. He believed that certain poems had to await a later musical idiom for successful musical setting; implicit in that belief is acknowledgment of discrepancies, of difference, but he also wanted to make audible as many levels of poetic meaning as he could grasp. The myth of “the sisterly arts” seems confirmed where words and music intersect, but where they diverge is perhaps the more interesting story.

17

Chapter 2

Peregrina revisited: songs of love and madness

This chapter is a demonstration-piece of sorts, a laboratory experiment designed to make a point to excess. Only two of Wolf ’s Mörike songs appear in these pages, a dyad-cycle or pair of songs entitled “Peregrina I & II,” but the background to both words and music could fill a book – in fact, the story behind the poetry has filled several. If those books are mostly historical fiction (the noun, as always, taking precedence over the adjective), that is because the documentary record of this incident in Mörike’s life is incomplete; what was left for the curious to investigate later is so startling, despite the gaps in the chronicle, that it invites, and has received, imagination’s embroidery in prose.1 The backdrop to Wolf ’s selection of only two poems from a cycle of five born of this episode and speculative reasons for certain compositional twists and turns in the songs have not been explored at all and are possibly bound up with the composer’s erotic history, very different from Mörike’s. Wolf periodically lamented that he was only a song composer – a guarantee of second-class citizenship in the nineteenth century – and desperately wanted to make a name for himself in the larger genres (opera first and foremost) which brought both greater public recognition and private sense of worth, but small things can and do contain worlds. Unpacking a mere five pages of music, one finds a series of ripples spreading outwards from the small artifact, waves of history, poetry, biography, mythology, politics, art, psychology, assassination, mysticism, and more. Wolf himself was enthralled when he discovered some of the biographical context after he had composed his songs – we know more than he did when he created this music. The backdrop to the songs is, like Everest, there and looms large, but has previously been parceled out to literary critics, without application to the music which issued from it. Mörike’s life and art were irrevocably altered by an event early in his life: his love affair in 1823–24 with a woman named Maria Meyer, an encounter which ranks in literary history with the youthful Goethe’s stay in Strasbourg in 1770–71 or Hölderlin’s arrival at the Gontard household in 1795. Until Easter of 1823 (an ironic time for a reluctant pastor-in-the-making to discover the woman who would be the cause of a death-andresurrection of sorts), he had been little more than a teenage Gelegenheitsdichter with a lively gift for fantasy, but in the wake of suffering we know in part from the rigor with which he banned all mention of it thereafter, he became something extraordinary. (Perhaps he would have become so anyway, but this we shall never know, and the massive presence of the Meyer-episode early in his history is undeniable.) Although he cast Maria 18

Songs of love and madness Meyer out of his life, the poetic veils wrapped around the wound in his soul could not obscure the lurking presence of actuality behind the poetry, his subsequent mythifying never free of flesh and blood. While “actuality” is Goethe’s influence and other factors as well as Maria Meyer, these works must also be understood as repeated attempts to “do something” with an insoluble dilemma. Mörike rewrote the cataclysm that was Maria Meyer over and over again without ever convincing himself that his actions were right, and in the most incandescent of the poems he judges himself guilty beyond reparation. These poems are a hall of mirrors, their untrustworthiness integral to the subject; they issue from a realm where nothing is certain, where one grapples in vain with love and betrayal. Only slippery symbols will do, and it is their very ambivalence which conveys the impression of ultimate truths. In July 1824, the volcanic middle of the crisis, Mörike wrote three poems in free verse: “Ein Irrsal kam in die Mondscheinsgärten” (A Madness Entered the Moonlit Gardens), or what finally became “Peregrina III;” “Aufgeschmückt ist der Freudensaal” (The Hall of Joy Is Bedecked), or what became “Peregrina II;” and “Im Freien” (In Nature). Significantly, “Im Freien,” its autobiographical elements closer to the surface than the other two poems, was never included in Mörike’s poetic anthologies, while the other more mythified poems were. Four years later, possibly in the first half of 1828 (the chronology is a matter of scholarly debate), he revised “Ein Irrsal kam” and “Aufgeschmückt ist der Freudensaal” and wrote three additional poems; it was perhaps at this time that he first thought to put them together as a cycle, ultimately a set of five poems entitled Peregrina, from the Latin peregrinus (vagabond, pilgrim).2 A version of the cycle with only four poems first appeared in Mörike’s Maler Nolten of 1832, a novel containing what Claudia Liebrand calls “the constitutive element of his life’s lie, to which he was thereafter bound”;3 here, Maria becomes “unbehauste Eros,” unhoused Passion, archaic, antique, undomesticated, the antithesis of every Biedermeier ideal. What this primeval power creates around her is a world where no categories are secure, the queasy mixture of Schicksalsroman, Künstlerroman, Schauerroman, and anti-Bildungsroman (novels about destiny, art, horror, and Bildung, or the great German pastime of self-improvement) that is Maler Nolten so filled with mirror images, shadow-plays, masks, Doppelgängers, veils, duplications, and magic lantern mimicry that the dizzied reader hardly knows who is who by story’s end. In this untelling of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, massive forces indeed press on the characters, as in Goethe, but not for their Bildung and betterment. These events happen in the courtyards of psychosis, and they are inimical to the patriarchal society which Goethe affirmed, societies where Mignons do not belong and must be killed. The Peregrina poems were thus not written for inclusion in Maler Nolten, but had their genesis earlier (in this, as in much else, Mörike reverses Goethe, who created Mignon, the Harper, and their songs expressly for his novel). In a Stuttgart manuscript of 1831 called the Grünes Heft4 (Green Notebook) containing the four poems published in Maler Nolten, “Peregrina III” (“Ein Irrsal kam”) is entitled “Abschied von Agnes” (Parting from Agnes) and the entire group is given the name Agnes, die Nonne (Agnes the Nun); what nuns have to do with it and why Peregrina and Agnes (another character in the novel) are fused/confused in this fashion will be explained in due course. The cycle appears in all four editions of his poetic anthology, each time with revisions that are uncannily appropriate because 19

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs they enact returning, and this saga is fraught with eerie acts of repetition. The fourth poem, or Wolf ’s “Peregrina II,” did not appear in the 1832 novel, although it had already come into being four years earlier, but it seems likely that Mörike intended to place all five poems in their final manifestations in his revision of the novel, a revision he never completed and perhaps never could have completed; he had lived his life from age twenty onwards in the shadow of a myth he himself had created and could not alter in old age. His friend Julius Klaiber, who lacked Mörike’s genius (a tactful understatement), finished the project after the poet’s death and included the whole Peregrina cycle, whose different poetic structures betray its creation-by-accretion over time. In the 1867 fourth edition, Mörike for the first time gives the cycle the subtitle “(Aus: Maler Nolten),” perhaps as a paradoxically truthful red herring; he wanted to distance these poems, born of the rawest event in his life, from biographical interpretation. But the formalist insistence that life and art have nothing to do with one another falls apart when applied to these works, however much Mörike himself wanted them understood as fictive. Other poems also printed in the novel, one notes, were not tagged in this manner in the anthology: the poet felt no similar need thus to misdirect readers. Hugo Wolf probably found the five Peregrina poems (and all the others he set to music) in the sixth edition and dutifully repeated Mörike’s parenthetical indication that the poems come from the earlier novel. Wolf did not, however, set all five poems to music, but omitted nos. II, III, and V, telling Melanie Köchert (1858–1906, the sister of Wolf ’s good friends Edmund and Marie Lang, wife of the Viennese jeweller Heinrich Köchert, and Wolf ’s mistress probably from summer 1884 on) two years later that he was unable to understand at least one of them (no. III) sufficiently for musical composition; one guesses that the incomprehension might also have extended in lesser degree to no. II, with which it is paired in imagery and content. He would not have found any elucidation in the scant secondary literature on Mörike extant in 1888, if he had even looked for such scholarly appendages to the poetry. Although one Hermann Fischer had published a tiny (forty-six-page) biography of the poet in 1881, there is no mention of Maria Meyer to be found – implicit testimony to discretion on the part of Mörike’s friends and to Mörike’s suppression throughout his life of virtually all mention of her.5 When Wolf did discover some of the background, however, it was from a source close to the original events. On a tour of Mörike country in 1890 with his new-found friend Emil Kauffmann, the son of Mörike’s friend Ernst Friedrich Kauffmann, Wolf heard the tale and regaled Melanie with a condensed version in a letter of 15 October 1890 from Stuttgart: On the way to Reutlingen today, Kauffmann gave me wonderful disclosures about Mörike’s love-affair with Peregrina. According to his account, she was named Maria Meyer and was found unconscious on the road to Ludwigsburg by a carter. Revived and taken to Ludwigsburg, Maria Meyer, who refused to say anything about her background or home, caused a great sensation with her marvelous beauty, especially her fascinating eyes. Mörike fell madly in love with her – he was then a student in Tübingen. They wrote each other burning love-letters; his beloved was highly cultivated, and her writing showed a particular resemblance to Jean Paul. The pair eventually considered themselves engaged. – One day Maria disappeared from Ludwigsburg without a trace. For a week, no one knew her whereabouts. Mörike was in despair, then came a notice from Carlsruhe that a certain M. M. had been arrested for unauthorized begging and prostitution. This news came to Kauffmann’s parents, who had sheltered M. M. for a while in their home. Mörike was informed of this and was beside himself. Then suddenly,

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Songs of love and madness his lost love appeared early one morning on the steps of the house in which Mörike lived; although he still loved her, he cast her away from him, hence, “Ein Irrsal kam in die Mondscheinsgärten / Einer einst heiligen Liebe” (A madness entered the moonlit gardens of a once-sacred love). How much more I understand this poem now! Kauffmann showed me the house where Mörike lived then and so I saw the steps where Peregrina for the last time encountered the unfortunate poet. Isn’t that fascinating?6

In the wording of the phrase “The pair eventually considered themselves engaged” are hints of an affair without the formal machinery of betrothal and official permission. When he was told of Maria Meyer, Wolf, one notices, did not return to the three poems he had bypassed earlier; he had just begun the Italienisches Liederbuch songs in 1890, and the Mörike moment in his life was over. Had he heard this tale sooner, would we now have a larger musical cycle with all five poems? Possibly, but I doubt it. Wolf may have had additional reasons, hidden from conscious knowledge, for omitting those three poems. Wolf retained Mörike’s subtitle “(Aus: Maler Nolten),” and one wonders whether this indication of a larger context (and perhaps also Wolf ’s ravening desire for a librettosource) led him to read the book. If so, when? Before or after he composed the songs? If he did explore the novel, he would have found four of the five Peregrina poems near the end, when the title character Theobald Nolten – an artist unable to reconcile his art with what one scholar drily describes as “the imperatives of a disordered love-life”7 – discovers a group of poems with the collective title Peregrinens Vermählung mit * (Peregrina’s Wedding to *) among his actor friend Larkens’s papers after Larkens’s suicide. Reading them, Nolten realizes that his friend had spun a poetic fantasy of love and loss from Nolten’s obsession with the beautiful but psychotic gypsy Elisabeth (Maria Meyer in another mythic role). The ordering of the four poems is different from that of the cycle in Mörike’s anthologies, and the titles were later eliminated, replaced by stark Roman numerals stating the order and nothing else: Maler Nolten, 1832 Die Hochzeit (The Wedding) – “Aufgeschmückt ist der Freudensaal,” at first entitled “Agnesens Hochzeit” (Agnes’s Wedding) in the Green Notebook, later revised as “Peregrina II.” Only in the novel does Mörike add the footnoted indication “Im Munde des Bräutigams gedacht” (Conceived in the bridegroom’s voice). Warnung (Warning) – “Der Spiegel dieser treuen braunen Augen,” at first entitled “Agnes, die Nonne” (Agnes the Nun) – also the title of the entire small cycle – in the Green Notebook and later revised as “Peregrina I” Scheiden von ihr” (Parting from Her) – “Ein Irrsal kam in die Mondscheinsgärten,” originally entitled “Abschied von Agnes” (Parting from Agnes) in the Green Notebook and later revised as “Peregrina III” Und Wieder (And Again) – “Die treuste Liebe steht am Pfahl gebunden” (The truest love is bound to the stake), later revised as “Peregrina V” One can see from this list that Mörike at one time had Larkens fantasizing about Agnes, Nolten’s fiancée whom Larkens loves and Nolten does not, but altered the focus before publication. The oldest of the poems is no. III in the final ordering (“Ein Irrsal kam in die Mondscheinsgärten”); a stormy first sketch of this poem exists in a manuscript in Wilhelm 21

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Hartlaub’s handwriting dated 6 July 1824, and may have been the product of dictation – still more evidence, if the speculation is correct, of the close “Bruderschaft” that was the Mörike-Kreis.8 “Aufgeschmückt ist der Freudensaal” could also have been written that same terrible summer, in which he returned home after catastrophe only to have his beloved younger brother August commit suicide one month later. The sonnet “Und Wieder” (these words could be Mörike’s motto) in the 1832 novel was included in the manuscript collection Neue weltliche Lieder (New Secular Songs), dated 19 June 1828, under the title “Verzweifelte Liebe” (Despairing Love) and was first published separately in Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (Morning Paper for the Cultured Classes) of 1829; it appears in the poetic anthologies as “Peregrina V.”9 Wolf ’s “Peregrina II,” or “Peregrina IV” in the final cycle of five poems, was only published for the first time in the 1838 first edition of Mörike’s anthology, although we know that it was written sometime before 2 May 1828 and was included in the Green Notebook containing the “Agnes”-cycle, or poems I–IV. Since I have already invoked Elisabeth as the Maria Meyer figure in Maler Nolten, a few introductory words about her are in order before we revert from fiction to the model in real life. As an impressionable adolescent, Nolten has a fateful encounter with Elisabeth, who turns out at the end to be the illegitimate daughter of Theobald’s uncle Friedrich and the gypsy Loskine: in other words, his cousin from the wrong side of the tracks. Theobald thus repeats his uncle’s erotic crisis of a generation earlier (echoes and Doppelgängertum once again), Mörike rewriting the revelation of Mignon’s incestuous parentage at the end of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Despite the fact that Elisabeth is in part a literary trope, one of many paper gypsies who roam throughout nineteenth-century fiction, the analogies with Maria Meyer are unmistakable. Like Maria, Elisabeth disappears and reappears unexpectedly, asserting on her return a pathological bond born of mental illness; if she is untameable Eros whose power cannot be gainsaid, she is also pitiable, desperate, psychotic, and Mörike ensures that we see both faces. The actual and the fictional characters are each outcasts from bourgeois society, neither Maria the Swiss prostitute’s daughter nor Elisabeth the gypsy being stuff from which a middle-class Biedermeier pastor’s wife could be fashioned. Gypsies are venerable emblems of “the Other” in their rejection of conventions other than their own, and they are often depicted as sexually unconstrained – it was, we gather, for her promiscuity that Mörike rejected Maria.10 One notices, however, that there are no sexual transactions of any kind in the novel between Nolten and Elisabeth while they are alive, not even a kiss. Only after both have died are their ghosts seen locked in a despairing embrace, Mörike thus revising what we can infer was physical as well as psychological in his own experience. Ultimately, the actual woman and the literary figure seem most alike in their shadowiness, in the lack of any adumbration of an inner life. Elisabeth is a symbol of Eros, a principle, not a credible human being, and Maria had, as we shall discover, reason to hide her thoughts from her male “protectors.” O F G Y P S I E S, WA N D E R E R S, A N D P O E T S I N T H E I R YO U T H : T H E B I O G R A P H I CA L BAC K D RO P

There are blank spaces at the heart of the tale from its inception. Of the historical Maria Meyer, we know very little, and even that is reportage, much of it embroidered with the 22

Songs of love and madness kind of fictional garlands she both invented and inspired in others. There are no extant letters by her, only testimonials in writing to her cultivation, nor are there any portraits to tell us what she looked like, only encomiums to surpassing beauty. It is from her effect on others that we know her, and that incompletely. Maria’s penchant for fabricating glamorous but false life-histories for herself, her disappearance into obscurity after her youth was over, and Mörike’s silence all conspired to ensure that her background remained shadowy for many years. Shortly after World War I, a Swiss lawyer named Paul Corrodi, intrigued by the connection between Maria Meyer and nearby Schaffhausen, investigated the town archives and published his findings in order to correct misstatements on the part of Mörike’s biographers.11 The story begins in Schaffhausen with a master-butcher named Johann Georg Meyer (1749–1810) and his wife Anna Maria, born Ermatinger (1748–1812), whose third child of eleven was a daughter they named Helena, born 1 September 1777. Helena became a prostitute who bore at least three illegitimate children by three different men, the first child supposedly fathered by a tannery apprentice named Jakob Fried and born on 27 February 1802 – Mörike’s Peregrina.12 Although baptized “Anna Maria” after her grandmother, she later dropped the name “Anna” and was known simply as Maria Meyer. We know little about her childhood, but what we do know is dire. Her mother’s two other children were a son named Johann Georg Meyer, who later served in the Neapolitan army and died in 1834, and a girl named Anna Margaretha, who was raised in Merishausen at the city’s expense. From the records of the suit Helena brought against the third child’s father, it is evident that she was regarded as an infamous prostitute and a discredit to her family, although, given the paucity of possibilities for poor women in the early nineteenth century and our ignorance about her, she might well have been doubly victimized by her circumstances and by small-town Swiss disapproval. Finally, in 1834, she married a farmer named Konrad Weber and in 1852, emigrated with him to Brazil, where all trace of her was lost. Despite the efforts of a group of charitable Schaffhausen ladies and the sporadic intervention of relatives ill-disposed to care for a wayward woman’s bastard children, Helena’s first child Maria, we are told, early developed a taste for pilfering – perhaps motivated by need?13 Even in so sketchy an outline, it is not difficult to imagine why Maria would want to escape the stigmas surrounding her, to go elsewhere and to masquerade as someone else. The fact that she was extremely beautiful – it is always the first thing which those who knew her mention – made the fictions credible, at least for a brief interval, before darker pathologies intervened. In the summer of 1817, a notorious wandering mystic named Barbara Juliane von Vietinghoff, Freifrau von Krüdener, born in 1764 to a wealthy Livlander family and unhappily married for a time to a Russian diplomat, came to Schaffhausen with her band of followers, and Maria reportedly joined their number, although there is no documentary verification. Madame von Krüdener had been transformed under the influence of the south German chiliasts, especially Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, from a worldly member of the nobility into a religious mystic; her two-volume epistolary roman à clef entitled Valérie, translated from the original into German in 1804, tells her own tale in fictional guise.14 After the scandal of her divorce in 1796, she began a new life as an itinerant lay religious, preaching the renunciation of earthly goods and the impending end of the world 23

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs in one town after another; through her influence on Tsar Alexander I, she is said to have contributed to the formation of the Holy Alliance between Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1815. She first came to Switzerland in the autumn of 1815 and attracted both a horde of followers and the attention of the law, which drove her band from one canton to another in rapid succession. On 12 July 1817, she and her disciples arrived in Schaffhausen after stays in Lucerne, Zurich, and Lottstetten, where the swarms of curiosity-seekers, beggars, vagrants, and pilgrims in search of miracle cures had earned her a police escort out of town. The Allgemeine schweizerische Korrespondent for 1817–18 was filled with excited warnings to the populace to resist her ravings and avoid her followers, the disapproving but titillated Swiss journalists describing her camp as a wandering bordello.15 Goethe echoed their opprobrium in his poetic squib “Von Krüdener. Jena, den 4. April 1818”: Von Krüdener Junge Huren, alte Nonnen Hatten sonst schon viel gewonnen, Wenn, von Pfaffen wohlberaten, Sie im Kloster Wunder taten. Jetzt geht’s über Land und Leute Durch Europens edle Weite! Hofgemäße Löwen schranzen, Affen, Hund und Bären tanzen – Neue leidge Zauberflöten – Hurenpack, zuletzt Propheten!

On the Krüdener Woman Young whores, old nuns have already gained much if, well-advised by their priests, they work wonders in the cloister. Now they go over lands and nations through noble Europe’s expanses! Royal courtly lions cringe, Apes, dogs, and bears dance: Modern miserable Magic Flutes – A pack of whores, now prophets!

Goethe’s distaste for mystics (he had earlier devised similar jabs at the self-proclaimed sorcerer Cagliostro) and his strain of misogyny aside, one can note more sympathetically that Juliane von Krüdener sought ways to make the life of the emotions accord with life in the real world where women such as herself, unable to find love in marriage, were subjected to moral umbrage. No wonder Maria Meyer found her message attractive. When Madame Krüdener was forced to leave Schaffhausen on 25 July, it is possible that Maria Meyer joined the Krüdener disciples on further peregrinations to Dießenhofen, Randegg, Radolfszell, the southern banks of the Bodensee, and, on 4 October, AltBreisach. It was perhaps there that Maria left the followers of the “Sonnenfrau” (SunWoman), as Madame Krüdener was dubbed by her believers, since it is known that Maria had returned to Schaffhausen by the end of November 1817.16 By that time, according to her own account, she had fallen in love with Carl Ludwig Sand (1795–1820), who was shortly thereafter to murder the playwright and statesman August von Kotzebue on 23 March 1819, thereby providing Metternich with his rationale for the Karlsbad Decrees, for the suppression of intellectual freedom at universities and elsewhere. Sand left his home in Wunsiedel, Bavaria for Eisenach in order to take part in the Wartburgfest of 18 October 1817 which he had helped to organize, so it is conceivable that he and Maria could have met.17 But was this reality or the fabrication of someone attempting to sensationalize her life? No Maria Meyer, or anyone recognizable as her, appears in the chronicles of Sand’s last years, and she could, as Mörike discovered to his cost, lie. When Maria returned to Schaffhausen after the Krüdener episode, she was consigned to the work-house in the Frauenkloster St. Agnes, where female correctional prisoners 24

Songs of love and madness were kept occupied with knitting and spinning (her mother had been confined to the same institution for two years). This is perhaps one source for her later story that she had been a nun unjustly imprisoned by her family in a Hungarian [!] cloister, although the Swiss work-house was not a Catholic institution but a charity of the Reformed church. What, one wonders, had she been reading? This is not the only time in the chronicle of Maria Meyer that one suspects her of borrowing from works such as Johann Martin Miller’s Siegwart, Eine Klostergeschichte, which influenced Mörike as well; women sequestered against their will in nunneries were a staple of popular fiction in the Enlightenment. At the Frauenkloster, Maria reached age sixteen and was confirmed on Easter Day 1819. Impressed, like so many, by her beauty, her religious instructor Melchior Kirchhofer helped her to obtain release from the work-house on 20 April 1819, and she then left Schaffhausen yet again.18 It seems likely that Maria next went to Rheinfelden im Aargau, where she was taken in by the Münch family. The son of the household, Ernst Hermann Joseph Münch (1798–1841), had recently returned home from the university at Freiburg im Breisgau, where he had studied law at his father’s wish, despite his inclinations to poetry and history (he was a copious practicioner of both in adulthood). His poems have since fallen into the oblivion they deserve but his Erinnerungen, Lebensbilder und Studien aus den ersten sieben und dreißig Jahren eines teutschen Gelehrten (Reminiscences, Portraits from Life, and Essays from the First Thirty-seven Years of a Swiss Intellectual) of 1836 makes lively reading, in particular, his account of Maria’s stay in his father’s household.19 After marvelling at her beauty, he relates that she called herself “Minette” – again, one thinks of bad novels – and fabricated an early history compounded of fact (minimal) and fiction (highly colored) in a manner as moving as it is dishonest. Those who have had wretched childhoods often imagine an upbringing they would have liked but never had, and dramatize their real travails in order to garner sympathy. Maria no doubt had to give some sort of account to the Münch household of her solitary, penniless, unprotected state – according to her, she was the daughter of wealthy parents from “S.” who took great pains with her upbringing and were proud of the results of their care until 1817 or 1818, when a love affair and mysticism à la Krüdener overturned her soul. After her relatives fought fiercely to win her away (how sad that she thus invented caring parents), they cursed her and cast her out forever.20 For all the rodomontade, one can recognize a core of truth in the account. Being cast out may well have been reality and would become so again, each subsequent repudiation possibly an echo of parental rejection. “Minette’s” obsession with Sand, whom she described as the ideal of Germanic manhood and Christian virtue (she was not the only one to think so), was particularly acute at the time of her stay in the Münch household. After Sand’s execution, Maria read, so she told Münch, everything she could find about her hero and was convinced that he was her guardian angel, that his spirit attended her everywhere she went. When she learned that Münch was among Sand’s “friends,” that is, those sympathetic to his political ideals, she drew from her bosom a medallion of Sand with his image, a lock of his hair, and several of his sayings and kissed it repeatedly. Later, Münch relates, when he read her some of his patriotic poems and told her the legends of Charlemagne, she threw herself into his arms, covered him with fiery kisses, and declared him worthy to 25

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs be an adherent of “the Enlightened One.” “Naturally, I was quite glad to let this happen,” writes Münch.21 Maria told Münch that she had been forced to leave the Krüdener troupe, why or how she did not say. When she begged her parents to take her back, they would only do so, she said, if she served as a maidservant for three years and could produce testimonials to her industry and good behavior. However, she was too beautiful “not to entice lustful impulses,” writes Münch, and Maria told him that she had even leapt from windows to escape importunities. Recognizing that her tale was in part a nonsensical farrago, Münch describes her as a “rare mish-mash of truth and irrationality, light and dark, sensuality and morality”; she would kiss him passionately, throw herself into his arms, and say “with a moving naiveté,” “See, I am your maid; command, lord, what you will! But honor your sister, whom God has sent you, as a brother. Perhaps I shall proclaim your works when the time comes that the reaper calls and the sheaves are brought to the threshing floor,” the Krüdener influence possibly responsible for the Biblical turns of phrase. Münch treats the tale as Frenchified farce, a bit of luck come his way, and he records disturbing behavior without taking it seriously as evidence of mental distress. When Münch was reading or working, she would stretch out next to him or sit in his lap, staring at him blankly before bursting into laughter; she would stuff his pipe with a mixture of tobacco and flowers; and she would lapse into melancholy for entire days and sing “highly confused” mystical songs.22 As long as she was willing to regale him with “fiery kisses,” however, he could, and did, dismiss her actions as inconsequential. On one occasion, he tells of coming downstairs during a summer thunderstorm and finding her half-clad, singing mad songs, and flagellating herself while lightning-bolts and thunder raged outside; with lip-smacking pleasure, he dwells on the color contrast of disordered raven-black hair, white skin, and purple lash-marks. (Corrodi felt that Münch might have been influenced in this description by Karl Ludwig von Woltmann’s Memoiren des Freiherrn von S—a of 1815–16, which Münch himself cites in the account – still more of the intertwining of life and literature which pervades this episode.23) The scent of the flowers in the room and the hypnotic effect of the lightning flashes was such that Maria claimed to see the heavens open and Christ and the Virgin looking at her; she had, Münch writes, previously worked herself into such an ecstasy when reading the works of the French mystic Madame Guyon (Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte, 1648–1717) and St. Theresa that she heard heavenly flutes and harps. In her vision during the storm, she found herself, so she said, on a mountain peak, the horizon stretching out endlessly, the planets and stars swaying through the clouds, through which she saw God and Christ together.24 But Münch, however willing to take advantage of her beauty for his own pleasure, was not in love with her. When he accepted a position as professor of history in Aarau, he did not take her with him as a chambermaid, despite her entreaties; he was too practical for continued exposure to such high drama, and he was engaged to someone more comme il faut. The account he gives of Maria in his Erinnerungen is frivolous in tone, with an unpleasant substratum of mockery and disdain. She was not of his social class, and he did not really care what became of her, beyond his use of her to sell books years after her departure from his life. His reminiscences are an even more fictionalized working-up of material he recognized as already semi-fictive, and there is not a trace of the passion she aroused in Mörike. 26

Songs of love and madness After Maria’s departure from Rheinfelden, one loses sight of her until the end of 1820, when she had an attack of – convulsions? a nervous breakdown? a fainting-fit from hunger? in a church in Berne. Corrodi conjectures epilepsy, but there seems to be little corroborating evidence. Perhaps illness brought on by destitution was the explanation, although it is also possible that she staged such scenes in order to attract help. She knew how to embody various roles from popular fiction – gypsy, wanderer, mystic, practitioner of animal magnetism, nun, soothsayer – and her bizarre behavior made it impossible to know who she really was and what she thought and felt. After being tended for a time by a women’s charitable society, they rejected her for what they considered craziness, and she was sent home to Schaffhausen in early 1821. After several months in the work-house, she was granted permission on 14 May 1821 to take a cure at Baden, from which she then escaped Schaffhausen’s control yet again.25 What she did for two years thereafter, no one knows. We next hear of her at Eastertime 1823 in Ludwigsburg – it was there she met Mörike. Mörike later destroyed his and Maria’s letters to one another, so accounts of the matter must be drawn from a scant cache of letters by his older sister Luise (1798–1827) and his close friends Rudolf Lohbauer, Ludwig Bauer, and Rudolf Flad (1804–30), as well as Luise Mörike’s diary and a few letters by Mörike himself to friends and family. It is evident from the record that sexual tensions in the entire group were running high: Bauer was also infatuated with Maria, while Lohbauer was initially attracted both to her and to Luise Mörike before embarking on a literally fiery affair with a young Jewish woman named Julie Michaelis – he burned down their house in late 1823 – at almost the same time as Mörike’s Maria Meyer ordeal, although the latter scandal stayed out of the newspapers and the former did not. But if there was free-flowing sexual tension aplenty, there was also a formidable opponent of passion in Luise Mörike, a woman whose repression and religiosity were more than equal to the task of quashing her brother’s errant inclinations. One anecdote is indicative: in February 1840, Lohbauer told his bride-to-be about an episode earlier in his life in which he lost control, seized Luise, and covered her face with kisses. She endured his impetuosity in stony silence, he wrote, after which, chilled, he no longer pursued her (how his fiancée felt about this confession is not known).26 Certainly Lohbauer’s behavior was condemnable, but Luise’s icy control makes unpleasant reading as well. When Mörike first encountered Maria, he was on vacation in Ludwigsburg, where he was visiting childhood friends, from his theological studies in Tübingen. At the inn Zum Holländer at 13 Bauhofstrasse owned by a brewer named Wilhelm Mergenthaler, they encountered a serving girl – Maria – whom the innkeeper had found unconscious on the road between Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg; again, one wonders whether the repeated scenario was staged or was the product of recurring episodes of poverty and hunger. Mergenthaler knew that she would attract customers to his inn with her beauty, and he was right, all the more so because she seemed so well educated (how and where did this happen?) and could discuss the works of Goethe and Jean Paul with the university students who fell in love with her. Again, she lied about her background, hinting that she came from Austria or Hungary – Münch had told her tales of his travels in Austria, and it is possible that he provided the source for yet another fictional history – and that she had 27

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs fled her home because her parents had wished to make her a nun against her will. Lohbauer recognized her accent as Swiss and realized that her story was in part a fabrication, but this did not hinder him or his comrades from seeing her as a Mignon-figure, a mysterious wanderer driven from her native climes and forced to eat bitter bread among strangers. Six months before the encounter with Maria Meyer, Mörike had written to Hartlaub on 19 September 1822, saying, “I have also thought of you, and more than once. And, oddly enough, for a long time of Mignon. She has never stood so movingly before me. Her song continually runs through my mind,”27 which song, he does not say. He had been looking for his own Mignon, and now he had found her. Lohbauer begged his mother, the widow of the patriotic poet Karl Philipp Lohbauer, to take in the beautiful stranger with whom he had fallen in love. So had Mörike, for whom the experience was overwhelming (his teenage love for his cousin Klärchen Neuffer, over by the end of 1821, was of another order).28 Whenever he sought thereafter to describe Maria’s effect on him, as in the sonnet “An die Geliebte” (To the Beloved) or in Maler Nolten, it was in images of a dizzying fall into cosmic depths, all the way down to the earth’s heart and the beginning of time. In the inset-tale “Ein Tag aus Noltens Jugendleben” (A Day from Nolten’s Youth) in Maler Nolten, Larkens imagines a dialogue between Elisabeth and Nolten – another instance of the Larkens/Nolten Doppelgängertum, of Larkens living vicariously through Nolten – in which “Nolten” says: when I saw you, it was as if I sank deep within myself, as if in an abyss, as if I fainted, falling from deep to deep, through all the nights where I have seen you in a hundred dreams, just as you stand before me now. I flew down into a vortex through all the stages of my life and saw myself as a boy and as a child, near your form, as you are now again risen before me. Yes, I came right to the darkness where my cradle stood and saw you draw back the veil that covered me: then I lost consciousness, I have perhaps slept for a long time, but as if my eyes opened by themselves, I looked into yours as in an endless well in which lay the riddle of my life.29

“As if,” “as if ” – over and over, Mörike reaches for analogies and tells of their inadequacy. This passage epitomizes Mörike’s conception of passion as, paradoxically, both a dizzying confounding of the self and an instrument of self-recognition. The hope was that love would lead to revelation of “the riddle” within the abyss of self, but in order for that hope to succeed, the sibylline mirror/woman had to remain fixed in place so that the lover’s projections did not waver or shatter. For reasons implicated in the riddle of his life, Mörike fell in love with someone whose precarious sense of self made that impossible. At the end of the Easter vacation, Mörike returned to Tübingen and began exchanging letters with Maria, who remained in Ludwigsburg. Luise Mörike in Stuttgart heard unsettling reports of Maria’s behavior and wrote her brother a strongly worded letter in April 1823, warning him against both Lohbauer and Maria. Luise could smell a rat, could sense that being and seeming were two different quantities in Maria, and worried, with reason, about her brother’s well-being, but the lecture she delivers about proper female comportment might well give the present-day reader a chill. Women, she admonishes, should conform to an ideal of “sweet modesty” and “quiet holiness”; Maria’s extravagant, mystical performances were not what Luise considered to be true religion. “Good” women, in her definition, were all alike (the Stepford wives come to mind); external differences were permitted, like ornamentation on a dress pattern, but the pattern itself should not change. 28

Songs of love and madness In her catalogue of the traits one should expect from the eponymous good woman, Luise juxtaposes the words “womanly” and “childlike” – women should maintain a child’s lack of knowledge about sex – in a manner particularly notable because her brother would later portray a woman (Agnes in Maler Nolten) made mad by this contradiction: I cannot yet wholly see through Maria. Apart from those who speak ill of her, her entire being appears to me in a mysterious, dark, I can almost say, in an ambiguous light. What I know of her from R[udolf Lohbauer]’s writing and from you yourself is not enough for me. I must see and observe her myself, in order to evaluate her. In the meantime, my opinion of her must remain the same. Everyone has his own manner by which he is differentiated from all others, even if the fundamental character traits are the same, but these traits must be recognized in their outward manifestations, and a sweet modesty is innate to the truly pious, womanly, childlike soul. Beneath these light veils lies hidden the godly heart . . . only God’s Eye can discern the quiet holiness. Enough – until she herself can allay my doubts, I cannot deem her to be truthful. But I will not trouble you any longer with what my natural feelings say against her. Always heed the high ideals of purity and duty that lend a mighty power to your soul, that can bear it swiftly to heaven! Preserve the image of virtue that is alive within you . . . If she is truly what she appears to be, then she will not forsake God and will untangle the muddled strands of her unfortunate destiny. Then she will forgive me the injustice that comes from concern for a beloved brother’s peace.30

The nineteenth-century critic Friedrich Notter who complained that the gypsy Elisabeth lacked “womanly sweetness” and “moral graces” could have been quoting Luise Mörike on Maria Meyer. 31 For Luise, this was war: in her diary for December 1823, she speaks of the battle waged since “that unfortunate Easter holiday,” and she feared losing the battle. “I saw with unending sorrow how strongly Eduard still believes in his destroyer [Verderber], saw the magic that still binds him so strongly, and the enchanter that seeks to win him, to deceive him – and to destroy him.”32 She need not have feared, as Maria herself would soon put the necessary weapons for conquest in Luise’s hands. Amidst the concatenation of unknowns is the exact time of Maria’s flight from Ludwigsburg, perhaps in late 1823. She went to Heidelberg, where she was again found senseless by the side of the road and was arrested as a vagrant. After appealing to the Mörike circle for help in obtaining her release, the familiar roundelay began all over again: first, she enchanted all and sundry, and then her errant behavior alienated everyone. The landscape painter Christian Philipp Köster (1784–1851), whom Goethe admired – Gottfried Keller describes Köster as dwarfishly short, a mere three-and-a-half feet tall – fell briefly under her spell, but disillusionment set in quickly.33 In a letter of 21 February 1824, Köster wrote to Mörike that Maria had behaved so badly that she would probably have to leave the city soon; she had already, he continued, lost some of her former admirers, and the ground was beginning to quake beneath her feet. Maria had chattered to him of “Eduard and Rudolf and Rudolf and Eduard,” and Köster had even been shown Mörike’s letters, such that he could recognize “your brief happiness and sorrowful dissolution.” In an act of commendable sensitivity, Köster tells Mörike that he [Köster] has taken pains to ensure that Mörike’s letters to her would not be “more widely profaned” (“nicht weiter profanisiert würden”), that is, shown to still other people. Köster was forty years old when he met Maria, twice Mörike’s age, and maturity gave him readier access to an antidote for her poison (his words) than the dazed young poet. “My God, what a creature she is! – as beautiful as her Creator on the outside, but chaos on the inside!”, 29

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Köster wrote in what is surely the single most memorable capsule characterization of Maria Meyer.34 Maria wrote to Mörike from Heidelberg, but he did not answer her, as he told Luise in a letter from Tübingen on 26 January 1824. Reassuring his sister that the matter was over, he wrote, “Why should I not have confided in you regarding Maria? You seemed after your last letter half to doubt it. But I didn’t answer her . . . Her life, this much is certain, has ceased to invade my own any further, except as a dream I had, one which was very useful to me” [italics Mörike’s].35 The words “very useful” seem a two-edged sword, the adjective redolent of pained sarcasm. For his sister, “usefulness” would surely mean lessons about vicarage-worthy womanhood rather than beautiful, unstable vagabonds, while for him, it probably meant poetry and the bitter knowledge of Eros’s treachery. Is there perhaps also implicit in the phrase “a dream I had” recognition that he had projected a poetic ideal upon a reality which turned out to be very different? Köster was right: having worn out her welcome, Maria left Heidelberg sometime in the spring of 1824. She might have gone next to Freiburg im Breisgau in May to find Ernst Münch and implore his protection; reports of a beautiful woman who was looking for him and who had fallen senseless in various town squares preceded her appearance on his doorstep. When she poured out the story of her latest tribulations and begged him to help her, Münch was on the horns of a dilemma: his wedding was planned for early July in Aarau. What would his bride think? He put Maria up temporarily at an inn, but the press of young men who came to gawk at the beautiful stranger and listen to her mystical ramblings was too much for the respectable housewife who ran the guest-house. After being sharply reproved, Maria vanished once more and went to Tübingen, where again, she was found unconscious in a public place. Although she once more sought and found those who would help her, reports of her previous escapades in Heidelberg and Ludwigsburg made the rounds, and she soon became persona non grata. Eventually, a Dr. Gmelin (who said that he would have taken her into his home, but his wife would not stand for it) and others raised the money to send her back to Schaffhausen in August 1824. It should surprise no one that she did not remain there. Few letters by Mörike himself and none by Maria survived the poet’s subsequent holocaust of documents pertaining to her, but one can detect in the extant sources the echoes of an auxiliary crisis between Mörike and Ludwig Bauer and the pained solicitude of his close circle of friends. Maria had evidently sought out Eduard on 10 July, and he had escorted her to a woman who took her in. Mörike, however, refused to have her back. The last paragraph of a brief, undated letter to Hartlaub hints at a decision of some sort, presumably to repudiate Maria, and wild pain at the prospect. “I cannot now put off any longer going to a certain known place,” Mörike told Hartlaub, “but promise me truly that you will not ask me the reason why, that you will not take me for a bad person, and that . . . you will not misinterpret what I do alone.”36 Bauer, who one remembers was also infatuated with Maria, wrote Eduard a letter, undated but surely from 1824, in which he sympathizes with Mörike (“You have lost your goddess, and your heart bleeds”), but reproaches his friend for lack of compassion, for not even giving Maria “a few words on an album-leaf.”37 Out of consideration for his friend’s sorrow, however, Bauer assured Eduard that he would not write further of Maria and did so thereafter only to convey tidbits of factual information. 30

Songs of love and madness Fearful lest he lose his best friend, Bauer had gone to Mörike and begged him to tear down the wall between them; Mörike, moved by the plea, confided his sorrow to Bauer, who promptly turned around and told Luise of the incident in a dramatic letter – the prose is a deep shade of purple – written on 10 July (the same day as Mörike’s penultimate encounter with Maria that year). In Maria, Mörike told Bauer, he had first found, then lost, the mystery of his life, the waking dream of his soul. Deprived of her, he was like “an ocean without waves, reflecting without choice everything equally, heaven and earth, the elevated and the lowly”: Maria, his wandering “I,” knocked again at his heart, abandoned, sick, given over to strangers, without defence, without support, only able to perceive the more beautiful, ethereal side of herself through his eyes. Affected by the wayward spirit of the homeless one, moved to his inmost self, he had either to enter the mysterious creature’s realm or to adhere to feelings already stirred into being earlier . . . with new determination, he drew away from the emotional vortex of that secret dwelling place. So it came that he cried out to me, “I must go home!” and that I so resolutely affirmed, “Yes, you must!”38

In her diary for that same day, Luise states that another letter from her brother had arrived on the heels of a prior missive, the most recent letter written “in a violently painful, almost pathological state of mind” in which he spoke only of his fervent desire to flee Maria.39 Two days later, on 12 July, she received Bauer’s letter and noted that Eduard was indeed coming home, that he was physically ill with grief. On 16 July, he fled home to Stuttgart, accompanied by Bauer and Mährlen, and on 31 July, wrote the royal Konsistorium to ask for four weeks’ leave from his studies, a leave extended for another month in the wake of his brother August’s mysterious death, probably a suicide by poison.40 Bauer had assured Mörike that Maria would “leave us in peace,” but in a letter of 11 August, he wrote to his friend, saying, “With regard to Maria, no one knows anything certain. I saw her once, in all likelihood, go by Bengel’s house at midday, a little summer hat on her head and halfblinking before the unclouded sun”41 (one notes the lingering traces of Bauer’s infatuation and the “literary” tone of the description). Bauer’s next letter on 23 August, mourning August’s death, ends with a brief postscript to say that Maria had left for Schaffhausen the preceding Thursday, in effect, that it was safe for his friend to return to Tübingen.42 From this laconic reference, we infer that Mörike knew Maria’s origins. Luise had won the war, but its effects on her brother frightened her. In her diary for 24 July 1824, one week after Eduard’s return, she wrote at length recounting what she knew of the end of the Maria story – of all the documentary sources, this is one of the most interesting. To give her credit, Luise expresses a modicum of pity for Maria, calling her “Die Arme Ruhe- und Heimatlose!” and writes, “I am often very angry at her, and yet I am sorry for her weakness,” but this is the magnanimity of the victor and therefore qualified, as Luise herself admitted. Maria still retained her “heavenly pure and spotless” image in Eduard’s heart, Luise continues, but only as a shadow of her former radiance. The students at the Stift, whom Luise considered overly susceptible, were kept away from Maria; only Flad saw her, and – once more – Eduard. Of that occasion, Mörike told Luise very little, and she did not press him for particulars, worried as she was about his state of mind. Although he did not wish his family to be troubled and assented willingly to everything they wanted, Luise was not fooled and wrote that a lengthy cure would be necessary.43 Physicians, medicinal 31

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs waters, healing baths, and solicitude were all pressed into service, to little or no effect, until the fresh grief of August’s death took precedence over the aftermath of Maria’s loss. A final measure of Maria’s powers comes from Luise’s diary for 12 August, in which she writes that “The innocent sufferer is now become the beautiful penitent in public,” her vengeful satisfaction evident. The entry continues with Luise’s account of letters just received from Rudolf Flad, a member of the Mörike circle especially favored by Luise for his piety. Flad told Luise – who never saw Maria – that anyone must feel “Amor’s sting” on seeing such a beautiful creature: It seemed to him [Flad] . . . that her eyes [were] holy, pious, but curiously threatening, fixed on him in a dream so that he almost wanted to see her as a creature of darkness, tempting him. He now takes pains to imagine her in fantasy as a hateful hag and will only, like Christ, do for her what he can . . . in a fine turn of events, he also contacted Eduard and condemned the notion which she expressed in one of her letters that Eduard had left her because he [Mörike] had shamed her. He [Flad] reproved her that she should set herself in any particular bond with Eduard and was inclined to lay such worth on her own person. Maria, it appears to me, needs more lies to bind young hearts to her than they all believe. She is too foolish and too feeble to deprive her vanity of this nourishment, and so I believe she will never come to the right road, if time or misfortune does not snatch away from her the magic wand with which she knows so powerfully how to dazzle and confuse them.44

“Because he had shamed her” [“weil er sich ihrer geschämt habe”] . . . “geschämt” has a clear sexual connotation. Luise, one guesses, used Flad in order to deny to herself the possibility of a sexual relationship between Maria and Eduard, but one can infer that her brother and the beautiful Swiss vagrant were lovers in the physical sense of the word. If so, Maria would have had some justification for her reproaches to Eduard, despite her errant behavior, while Flad’s accusation that she was a liar seems doubly unfair. None of those at the heart of this episode emerged unbesmirched, without cause for guilt. Another revelatory document is a distraught letter Mörike wrote to Wilhelm Waiblinger on 13 or 14 August 1824. Mörike attempted to spare his family, especially his beloved brother August, at least some of his misery,45 but the common bond of erotic travail possibly led him to confide in Waiblinger.46 At the beginning, Mörike tells of opening the windows in order to see the fresh rain dripping from the tree branches, but the attempt to find consolation in Nature fails. Mörike does not once refer to Maria by name, but she is clearly the subject of the following passage: The child of whom I spoke to you before would look you lovingly in the eyes, and you perhaps asked yourself softly, Is this then my past or my future? Or you might have thought: what if you had not just had a dream in which all beautiful things dissolved in fire and smoke, and what was in part lost to you, in part sunk down next to you in the ruins, was gone and if only the child could come forth out of the dream into reality, embodied – nothing of what you dreamed of her, so lifelike and filled with love, can or should be left to you . . . from her eyes . . . where only silence and peace and clarity dwell, you would see in the farthest depths the tapestry of a second dream gaze forth, a wonderful, secret transformation back to a time already past!47

That Waiblinger might understand how the lovers were separated, Mörike tells of a dream in which he and his sister Luise entered a pleasingly furnished room. Mörike was enraptured by its charm, but on seeing Luise’s disapproving face, he could not remain any longer. Although he hastens to say that his sister is one of the few people capable of con32

Songs of love and madness verting his customary mixture of “Lust” and “Unlust” into gentler (more properly repressed?) states, it is the image of her silently hostile face and the beautiful room (a female symbol – one thinks of the word “Frauenzimmer”) which linger.48 Even in the midst of the summer 1824 crisis, Maria was already en route to her ultimate transformation into art, and the near-incoherent distress of the letter to Waiblinger was soon distilled into controlled poetry. Mörike’s first poem in free verse, “Im Freien” (In the Open), probably written on 10 July 1824 and published posthumously, tells of a poetic persona who flees to Nature in search of consolation, much like the Natureingang of the letter to Waiblinger, but cannot find surcease from memories of an “unholy love”: Im Freien (stanza 3, lines 21–28) Oder bin ich dir gestorben, Du unsterblicher Geist der Natur? Konnte die weichliche Pein Jener unseligen Liebe Dich mir auf ewig entfremden? Und so verzweifl’ ich jetzt, Weil ich mein Herzblut gab Für einen Schatten?

In the Open Or have I died to you, thou immortal spirit of Nature? Can the soft pain of this unholy love forever alienate me from you? And so I now despair because I gave my heart’s blood for a shadow?

Bauer too was inspired to verse, if not to poetry, by Maria’s departure. His poem “Geheimniß. An E. M. (Nach derselbe seinem Freunde ein merkwürdiges Lebensereigniß anvertraut hatte),” or “Secret. To E[duard] M[örike] (After he confided a noteworthy experience in life to his friend)” is drivel, but nonetheless it documents the effect Maria had on the young artists of the Neckar valley, who made her into a Muse and turned her into words. Given her name, it was perhaps only to be expected that a lesser talent would echo Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht at a lower level of creative imagination: Geheimniß. An E. M. (stanzas 1, 3, and 8 of 8) “Zur der des Himmels Glorie sich neigte, Die an die Brust das Götterkind gedrückt, O Du, Maria, hohe, schmerzgebeugte,

Secret. To E. M.

“To one for whom heaven’s glory bows down, who pressed the Child of God to her breast, O thou, Mary on high, bowed down with sorrow, Die Du am Kreuz den Blutenden erblickt! as you saw the bleeding one on the cross! Vor allen Müttern Du so hochbeglückte, Before all mothers thou so highly fortunate, Du Unglückseligste, Du fern Entrückte – thou the most afflicted, thou carried away into O könnt’ ich doch in einem Bilde fassen the distance, O if I could capture in one image Die Gottheit und Dein menschliches Erblassen!” the Godhead and your mortal pallor!” .......... ......... “Ach, daß Du einmal nur sie könntest schauen, “Ah, if you could see her just once, Wenn mit gesenktem Haupt sie schmerzlich lacht! when she sadly laughs with bowed head! Säh’st ihren Blick mit zauberhaftem Grauen, If you had seen her gaze with bewitched terror, Den goldnen Ring in ihres Auges Nacht! the golden ring in the night of her eyes! Hörtest die Melodie der Sprache klingen, If you had heard the melody sounding in her Die Schweizerlaute, die zum Herzen dringen! speech, the Swiss sonority that pierces the heart! Säh’st Du die Sonne, die ein Flor getrübet, If you had seen the sun that saddened the Die heil’ge Sünderin, die ich geliebet! blossoms – the holy sinner that I loved! ....... .......

33

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Das Wunder, dem die Scheiterhaufen rauchen, Sink’ es nur tief in’s Fluthenbad der Zeit! Du siehst es wieder zu Dir aufwärts tauchen Und perlen von dem Thau der Ewigkeit. O dieser Stunde laß uns nie vergessen! Du maßest Dich, und hast die Welt gemessen: O Eduard, nun bist Du ganz der Meine, Du liebest mich, ich liebe all’ das Deine!49

The wonder, which smokes upon the funeral pyre, sink it deep in the floodwaters of time! You see it rise upwards again to you and sparkle with the dew of eternity. O let us never forget this time! you measured yourself and have gauged the world: O Eduard, now you are entirely mine: You love me, I love all that is yours!

Bauer’s juxtaposition of “sinner – woman” may be a theological commonplace of the time, but it is an infuriating one, and distaste for such schlock-versifying is heightened by Bauer’s trumpetings of triumph that Maria was no longer a rival for Mörike’s affections, that Bauer once again had his friend to himself. Their bond was even strengthened, so Bauer thought, because they had shared this secret. Mörike would repeat that same word “secret” as the most oblique of references to Maria in his poem “Nachklang” (Echo) addressed to Luise and probably written in 1826 – before or after 25 April 1826 when Maria returned to Tübingen and begged Mörike in writing to come to the inn where she was staying? He did not respond, so we learn from Ernst Friedrich Kauffmann in a letter to his fiancée Marie Lohbauer. If only he could take “this undeserved sorrow,” Mörike writes in “Nachklang,” and bury it within her [Luise’s] soul, so that she could pronounce a blessing over it, he might then have peace. Is it too fanciful to detect a trace of vengefulness in the poem? Was he hinting, “You caused this . . . you fix it”?50 But Luise died of tuberculosis the following year, and no such appeasement was possible. In the years after Mörike’s rejection of Maria and her departure, Ernst Münch claimed to have had another encounter with her and included the tale in his second volume of reminiscences, the Erinnerungen, Reisebilder, Phantasiegemälde und Fastenpredigten aus den Jahren 1828 bis 1840 (Reminiscences, Travel Images, Fantastic Paintings, and Lenten Sermons from the years 1828 to 1840) published in 1841 before Münch’s sudden death on 9 June of that year.51 According to this patently romanticized story, Münch in 1830 or thereabouts saw a painting of a gypsy, clad in gaudy raiment, with a heavy garnet necklace around her neck and a turban wound about her head.52 Various passions – sorrow, frivolity, melancholy, sentimentality, and impetuosity – were, he writes, stamped on her face, and skin originally fine and white was burnt by long wandering. All of a sudden, a woman whispered in his ear, “Do you recognize her still?”, a woman who bore a striking resemblance to the painting and who stared at him with huge black eyes, then heaved a deep sigh, pressed his hand, and disappeared into the crowd. That night, in the garden of the guesthouse, a group of musicians began to entertain the company, including a singer whose outline he could only dimly discern and who sang “a curious song” for the assembled company: (stanzas 1–2, 4–6 of 7) Ich war ein armes, junges Blut, Da stieß man mich in die Welt, Und niemand hatte auf mich Hut, Da wechselt’ ich zwischen Frost und Glut, Das Herz von Lieb’ geschwellt.

I was a poor, young creature who was cast forth into the world, and no one paid heed to me. So I alternated between frost and fire, my heart swelled with love.

Wär’ mir geblieben der Liebste treu, So stünd ich wohl nimmer allein;

Had my beloved remained true to me, then I would never have stayed alone;

34

Songs of love and madness Doch ist sein Bild mir immer neu, Gefangen auch, blieb ich stolz und frei, Das will ich wohl immer sein. ....... Ich habe gebetet in mancher Stund Zur heiligen Jungfrau rein, Mein Herz, es war so öd und wund, Doch ward mir nimmer und nimmer kund, Wo der Freund wohl möge sein.

but his image is ever renewed to me, even imprisoned, I remain proud and free, this will I always be. ...... I have prayed for many an hour to the pure, holy Virgin; My heart was so barren and wounded, but word never, never reached me of where my friend might be.

Und seh’ ich den Liebsten nur wieder einmal, So will ich verstummen wie einst; Doch leuchtet mir noch ein Hoffnungsstrahl, So zieh’ ich gern über Berg und Tal, Ach, spräch’ er nur tröstend: “Du weinst?”

And if I saw my beloved just once more, I would be mute as before; but a ray of hope still shines for me, so I wander gladly over mountain and valley, ah, if only he said comfortingly, “You weep?”

Die Tränen, die sind mein Testament, Die hab’ ich ihm alle vermacht; Doch, bin ich auch ewig von ihm getrennt, Den Namen sein hab’ ich nie genennt, Gute Nacht, mein Freund, gute Nacht53

Tears are my testament, those have I bequeathed all to him, yet I am eternally parted from him whose name I have never named, Good night, my friend, good night!

In the last verse, she contemplates suicide in one of Switzerland’s deep lakes. When Münch rushed over to see who the singer was, he discovered the apparition from the museum, but she gave a loud cry, threw the guitar from her, and fled without heeding his calls. This is Trivialroman entertainment, not fact. In the end, Münch had only harsh words for Maria. She was, he writes, an adventuress, a rudderless ship on the waves, a creature lacking in all moral sense and a magnet for misfortune. Those who spurned her were right to do so, he asserted, exculpating himself for her misfortunes – Mörike was not so self-righteous. He heard, so Münch says, that she had gone to America with a colony of Swiss settlers and that she had later died in Niagara or Orinoco [!]54 How interesting that someone of siren-like beauty who inspired torrential passions in others would be associated with torrents of water in far-away countries. Removal to the Americas, whether north or south, belongs to the mythologizing of Maria by the poets and would-be writers who knew her; her wanderings invited fictive extensions to her more limited journeys in real life. According to Münch, when Mörike’s Maler Nolten was published two years or so after his [Münch’s] encounter, he was astonished to find the life-history of his mysterious gypsy embodied in the novel’s character Elisabeth, but it seems quite clear that Münch read Mörike first and then cobbled together the confabulation in the 1841 reminiscences (one remembers the word “Fantasiegemälde” in the title). It is a palpable impossibility that Münch would have remembered a song of that length word-for-word on one hearing, and phrases in the poem resemble phrases in Mörike as rendered by a lesser mind. The first line of stanza 2, “Wär’ mir geblieben der Liebste treu,” seems Münch’s permutation of Mörike’s line “Wär’ mein Lieb’ nur blieben treu” from Agnes’s song “Rosenzeit! wie schnell vorbei” in Maler Nolten (note Münch’s trivializing lighter rhythm), while the words “verstummen wie einst” in Münch’s fifth stanza were almost certainly derived from the line “Fremd saßen wir mit stumm verhaltnen Schmerzen” in “Peregrina IV.” And Münch 35

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs knew that Peregrina was Maria Meyer converted into myth, as we discover from a letter Mörike wrote on 20 March 1843 to Wilhelm Hartlaub. In it, Mörike tells of receiving from David Friedrich Strauß an excerpt – the Minette episode – from Münch’s first volume of reminiscences. Despite Mörike’s admission that certain unspecified aspects rang true, he ends by ascribing the “deficiencies and exaggerations” of the account to its author’s conceit. Despite the generally contained tone of the letter, Mörike’s anger is evident: he speaks of Münch as a “Hofrat” (court councillor), refusing to grant him recognition as a writer, and jibes at the title Denkwürdigkeiten (Reminiscences). These were not “worthy” thoughts in his estimation: Since the subject here is my Noli me tangere past, I must also say that Strauß showed me a long passage from the Denkwürdigkeiten (if that is the title) of the deceased court councillor Ernst Münch, in which he told the story of a young visionary from Switzerland and his [Münch’s] youthful experience with her. This is supposed to be one and the same as Maria Meyer before our time. Along with much that is remarkably true to character is just as much in which I could not recognize anything of her at all. But Strauß spoke to Münch about it and confirmed the person’s identity, and therefore the deficiencies and exaggerations of the representation, which bespeak a repugnant conceit on the author’s part and are at times very coarse, were only vexing to me.55

The phrase “my Noli me tangere past” is drenched in corrosive irony. The words are taken from the Vulgate rendering of Christ’s admonition to Mary Magdalen, “Do not touch me [for I have not yet ascended to the Father],” in the Gospel according to St. John 20: 17, part of the dramatic recognition scene in which Mary Magdalen weeps by the empty sepulchre and Christ appears to her. The Magdalen was thus the first witness to the risen Christ, whose words “Noli me tangere” tell her that she should cease thinking of him as corporeal and worship him from henceforth as God. The various guises conferred on her – companion to Christ, apostle to the apostles, and beata peccatrix (holy sinner) – have been the subject of many scholarly studies,56 but always, there is the association with female sexual sin, with tainted beauty which induces vice. That Mörike should appropriate Christ’s words and, by implication, cast Maria as Mary Magdalen is enough to make anyone familiar with the episode dizzy; certainly Maria’s beauty, promiscuity, mystical mumbo-jumbo, fits of penitence, even her speculative mental illness (Mary Magdalen is described in the gospels according to Luke and Mark as once possessed by seven demons, which Christ cast out of her), are easily grafted onto the myth of the beata peccatrix. Mörike, unable to cast out Maria’s demons, cast her out instead; if Christ could forgive sins, he could not. Did he thereafter feel that among the sins Christ bore was his [Mörike’s] indissoluble guilt in the wake of that act? Or is Mörike’s momentary appropriation of Christ’s cloak pained irony from someone unable truly to believe in religion, whatever his sporadic avowals to the contrary? Münch was wrong about Maria’s later fate, as both her adventures and her youth were over by the mid-1830s. Back home in Schaffhausen, she met a carpenter’s apprentice named Andreas Kohler (born 1805 in Nuremberg), whom she married in 1836 and followed to Winterthur, where he worked as a carpenter, she as a milliner. In 1842, the couple moved to Wilen in the canton of Thurgau, where they bought a small house in 1857 – at age fifty-five, Maria the “Heimatlose” at last had a home. Ironically, Mörike and his sister Klara stayed for several months in 1851 in the Thurgau border town of 36

Songs of love and madness Egelshofen bei Konstanz without ever knowing that Maria was nearby. The Kohlers reportedly lived in straitened circumstances and kept to themselves; Frau Kohler did not cultivate friendships with other women in the village, her husband had no apprentices or fellowworkers, and the couple were childless. The days of mysticism were no more: Maria Kohler went infrequently to the Protestant church in nearby Sirnach, had no more seizures (or none that were reported), and neither prophesied nor went into trances. She died of dropsy on 2 September 1865 at age sixty-three, followed ten years later by her husband Andreas, who had sold their former home two years after Maria’s death. All trace of their graves in the cemetery at Sirnach has since been obliterated, a final disappearance which sets the seal on her removal from real life so that a paper phoenix named Peregrina could take her place.57 I N A M I R RO R DA R K LY: T H E P E R E G R I NA P O E M S

Mörike’s conversion of Maria into poetry that bursts the bounds of convention began immediately with “Peregrina III” (one thinks of Claude Monet painting his wife Camille on her deathbed and realizes that a similar phenomenon of life-into-art happened here). Mörike would not approve of this book: he warned against any quest for biography in his poems, and yet the veils of artifice he spun around Maria in the Peregrina poems only heighten the perception of something real at the core. On the back of the title page for the 1828 manuscript anthology Neue weltliche Lieder, which contains “Verzweifelte Liebe” (later, Peregrina V), is the statement, “These pieces, right down to the epigram, belong collectedly within the context of a novella, and there is nothing personal to look for in them,” but his warning actually confirms that which it seeks to deny; anyone reading it would immediately look for what is personal in the poems.58 If what the “slender, magical maiden” became in Mörike’s poetry transcended the personal, it is still indisputable that the poet’s experience of love’s ecstasy and indissoluble guilt was mediated through a mortal agency. The name Peregrina tells of pilgrimage, of the ages-old quest, so often thwarted, for love. Peregrina is both a seeker after love and emblematic of Love itself, homeless by nature and given to restless vagrancy. Throughout the cycle, Mörike establishes a dichotomy between “Haus” and “Welt” (house and world), between security, intimacy, domesticity, and social convention on one side and the dark, unbounded realm of errant Eros on the other.59 Peregrina’s lover, who is the poetic voice throughout all five poems, casts her out into the world and chooses to remain inside the security of his “house” (his family, his society, his religion’s notions of sexual sin), but his safety is purchased at the price of the soul’s devastation. When, overwhelmed by fear, he rejects the realm of sex and death, he rejects love in its essence, and the knowledge that he has done so comes too late. The name Peregrina even hints at the wildness of love in the association for English-speaking readers with peregrine falcons, the gold in Peregrina’s gaze a distant echo of their strange yellow eyes. Before discussing the two Peregrina poems Wolf set to music, I want to point out a few aspects of the poems he chose not to set in order to elucidate what may have made those works seem uncomposable. Mörike and Maria Meyer were never married, and yet Peregrina and the poetic persona do marry in “Peregrina II” (“Aufgeschmückt ist der 37

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Freudensaal”), their bizarre, Orientalizing ritual of union fraught with menace and beauty in equal measure: II Aufgeschmückt ist der Freudensaal. Lichterhell, bunt, in laulicher Sommernacht Stehet das offene Gartengezelte. Säulengleich steigen, gepaart, Grün-umranket, eherne Schlangen, Zwölf mit verschlungenen Hälsen, Tragend und stützend das Leicht gegitterte Dach.

II Bedecked is the hall of joy, Brightly-lit, many-colored in the warm summer night, the garden pavilion stands open. Like columns, green-wreathed brazen snakes rise, coupled, twelve of them with necks intertwined, bearing and supporting the lightly latticed canopy.

Aber die Braut noch wartet verborgen In dem Kämmerlein ihres Hauses. Endlich bewegt sich der Zug der Hochzeit, Fackeln tragend, Feierlich stumm. Und in der Mitte, Mich an der rechten Hand, Schwarz gekleidet, geht einfach die Braut; Schön gefaltet ein Scharlachtuch Liegt um den zierlichen Kopf geschlagen. Lächelnd geht sie dahin; das Mahl schon duftet.

But the bride is still waiting, hidden in her house, in her little room. Finally the wedding processional sets forth, bearing torches, solemnly mute. And in the middle, myself at her right hand, the bride walks simply, clad in black; she wears a scarlet cloth, beautifully folded, around her dainty head. Smiling, she goes inside; the scents of the feast are already wafting in the air.

Später im Lärmen des Fests Stahlen wir seitwärts uns beide Weg, nach den Schatten des Gartens wandelnd, Wo im Gebüsche die Rosen brannten, Wo der Mondstrahl um Lilien zuckte, Wo die Weymouthsfichte mit schwarzem Haar Den Spiegel des Teiches halb verhängt.

Later, amidst the noise of the festivities, we both stole away from the others, wandering into the shadows of the garden, where the roses burned in their bushes, where the moonbeam gleams on the lilies, where the weeping willow with its black hair half overhangs the mirror of the pond.

Auf seidnem Rasen dort, ach, Herz am Herzen, Wie verschlangen, erstickten meine Küsse den scheueren Kuß! Indes der Springquell, unteilnehmend An überschwenglicher Liebe Geflüster, Sich ewig des eigenen Plätscherns freute; Uns aber neckten von fern und lockten Freundliche Stimmen, Flöten und Saiten umsonst.

On the silken lawn, there, oh heart to heart, As if entangled, my kisses smothering her shyer kiss! Meanwhile the fountain, ignoring the rapturous whispers of love, rejoiced eternally in its own plashing; but the friendly voices of flutes and strings teasingly enticed us in vain from a distance.

Ermüdet lag, zu bald für mein Verlangen, Das leichte, liebe Haupt auf meinem Schoß. Spielender Weise mein Aug’ auf ihres drückend, Fühlt ich ein Weilchen die langen Wimpern, Bis der Schlaf sie stellte, Wie Schmetterlingsgefieder auf und nieder gehn.

The light, lovely head lay wearily in my lap, too soon for my desire. My eyes pressed on hers in playful fashion, I felt her long lashes for a while, until they closed in sleep, moving up and down like butterflies’ wings.

Eh’ das Frührot schien, Eh das Lämpchen erlosch im Brautgemache, Weckt ich die Schläferin, Führte das seltsame Kind in mein Haus ein.60

Before the dawn came, before the little lamp went out in the bridal chamber, I awoke the sleeper, led the strange child into my house.

38

Songs of love and madness Virtually every detail is sexually liminal, symbolic of tragedy, or both, and yet there is rapture as well. The pair celebrate their union in a nocturnal garden – an anti-Garden of Eden, already tainted – whose concatenation of multivalent symbols is almost too much, one potent image following another until the reader feels dizzied.61 The snake-caryatids supporting the wedding canopy, for example, are fashioned of a metal evocative of Urantiquity’s idols and bedecked with clinging vines (female joined to male symbolism); they evoke associations not only of Old Testament tempters in gardens of love, but of Artemis, whose emblem was the snake and who had to be appeased at weddings by sacrificial offerings because she was the sworn enemy of Aphrodite. Phallic and female alike, the bronze snakes are coupled, their necks intertwined, and rising as if alive, as if in sexual excitation – an eerie image with which to begin the poem, before anyone human enters the picture. The ceremony is bizarre, its mute processional reminiscent of Oriental harem slaves whose tongues were amputated to ensure their silence and its bride a witchy-dark figure adorned with Mary Magdalen’s red veil of sexual transgression. The lovers consummate their passion out-of-doors, the moonbeam which makes the lily twitch and the burning roses easily decipherable codes for love-making, but they do so near a black-hued weeping willow which leans over the pond in a classical image of absence and grief. It is here, in this first of the Peregrina poems to be written, that Mörike makes of the word “Haus” something powerful and particular to this cycle: before the wedding, the bride waits “hidden away in the little room of her house” (wording which also suggests a sexual meaning), and he leads her “into my house [italics mine]” at the end. If he succumbs to passion outside the bounds of convention, he immediately thereafter wants to domesticate her, to enclose her in his circumscribed life. Even the traditional placement of the bride at the groom’s left hand seems symbolic in this context; she is literally a sinister figure, while he is on the side of right, a right he will soon rue. Of course, poets convert biographical vicissitudes into fiction in part via literary forebears. Adolf Beck has found a model for the Peregrina tale in Justinus Kerner’s eccentric first novel, the 1811 Reiseschatten von dem Schattenspieler Luchs (the fashion for “phantasmagoria,” or magic-lantern shows, is responsible for book and title alike), in which the narrator tells of “the strange maiden” who is mysteriously bound to the sea, for which she longs. The pair come to a garden with a ruined house where once, forty years ago, lived a beautiful madwoman from Nuremberg (that legendary site for necromancy) who awoke briefly from her madness after twenty years, invited her friends to a banquet, took leave of them, and sank again into insanity. The garden, we are told, is the very picture of madness, and it is there that the “strange maiden” draws her hand three times over the narrator’s eyes, casting him into magnetic slumber and then disappears, nevermore to be seen.62 The relationship to the first version of “Peregrina II” is striking. And Gerhart von Graevenitz has pointed out the kinship between Mörike’s wedding poem and Kerner’s graveyard nuptials in the Reiseschatten, each with its roses and lilies, the noise of the festivities, and the lovers’ need for rest:63 Komm, Bräut’gam! kommt, ihr Gäste! Schon steht im Hochzeitkleid Die bleiche Braut bereit, Erwartend euch zum Feste.

Come, bridegroom! Come, guests! Already the pale bride stands ready in her wedding garb, waiting for you to begin the festivities.

39

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Herbei! herbei! Zum Tanz Die bleiche Braut zu führen, – Seht! ihre Haare zieren So Ros’ als Lilienglanz.

Come here! Come here and lead the pale bride in the dance – See! Her hair is adorned with glorious roses and lilies.

So Mond und Sterne kränzen Lichtvoll das dunkle Tal, Lampen im Hochzeitsaal, Die Leichensteine glänzen.

The moon and stars garland the dark valley in light, lamps in the wedding hall, the tombstones gleam.

Und weil nach Tanz und Lauf Der Ruh’ wir nötig hätten, – Schloß ich zu Schlummerstätten Die stillen Gräber auf.

And because we needed rest after the dancing and motion – I unlocked the quiet graves as places to sleep.

Seht! eure Betten kränzet Der Rosen stolze Art, Doch eine Lilie zart Am Bett der Braut erglänzet.

See! your beds are garlanded with the rose’s proud beauty, but a sweet-scented lily gleams on the bride’s bed.

Die Hochzeit ist bereit, Komm, Bräut’gam! kommt, ihr Gäste! Es öffnen sich zum Feste Die schwarzen Tore weit.64

The wedding is ready – Come, bridegroom! Come, guests! The black doors are opened wide for the festivities.

That Mörike knew the Reiseschatten is evident from a letter of 1 September 1824 to Hartlaub, just after the Maria-crisis, when the poet tells his friend that he has not had a single truly happy hour since August’s death (he says nothing of Maria), save for reading his sister “something strange” from Kerner.65 The wedding is followed in “Peregrina III” by Verstoßung, in which a man may cast out, even kill, an adulterous wife, or one suspected of adultery with little or no punishment; if canon law did not allow it, custom in civil society did.66 But justification in the eyes of the law is not always congruent with inner experience; abiding love and Verstoßung can and do go hand-in-hand, says Peter von Matt, who compares the Peregrina poems to Grillparzer’s “Das Kloster bei Sendomir”; in this tale, a man kills his adulterous wife and lives out the rest of his days as a half-mad monk, tormented by a deed in which the law found nothing culpable. With the exception of Ludwig Bauer, Mörike’s friends and family considered him justified in expelling Maria from his life for her supposedly immoral behavior; if they could glimpse earlier circumstances which might have produced her aberrant ways, their occasional sympathetic impulses were not sufficient to redeem her in their eyes. Mörike was not legally married to Maria, but, as we are reminded by Wolf ’s letter of 15 October 1890 to Emil Kauffmann, he considered himself betrothed, bound to her in every way that mattered. That he condemned himself for rejecting her is evident in many details of the language in “Peregrina III,” for example, the phrase “Mit weinendem Blick, doch grausam” in line 4, describing the persona’s aspect as he casts Peregrina out. The opposite phenomenon – dreadful implacability on the outside, weeping on the inside – issues from a more readily comprehensible psychological realm, but weeping to hide inner Grausamkeit is a mask of a different sort, complex and terrible.67 Furthermore, the adjective “verjährten” implies that the unspecified wrong (Mörike could not bring himself to say that it was sexual) is outdated, beyond the statute of limitations. Whatever she did that was 40

Songs of love and madness condemnable had no bearing on her love for the poetic speaker; it belonged to an earlier time, and she should have been forgiven for it. The poet thus invites the reader to judge the speaker harshly, to recognize that he had a cruel streak and acted at its behest: III Ein Irrsal kam in die Mondscheinsgärten Einer einst heiligen Liebe. Schaudernd entdeckt ich verjährten Betrug. Und mit weinendem Blick, doch grausam, Hieß ich das schlanke, Zauberhafte Mädchen Ferne gehen von mir. Ach, ihre hohe Stirn War gesenkt, denn sie liebte mich; Aber sie zog mit Schweigen Fort in die graue Welt hinaus.

III A madness came in the moonlight gardens of a once holy love. Shuddering, I discovered past wrongdoing. And with weeping look, but terrible, I bade the slender, magical maiden to go far from me. Ah, her noble brow was bowed down, for she loved me; but she went silently out into the gray world.

Krank seitdem, Wund ist and wehe mein Herz. Nimmer wird es genesen! Als ginge, luftgesponnen, ein Zauberfaden Von ihr zu mir, ein ängstig Band, So zieht es, zieht mich schmachtend ihr nach! – Wie? wenn ich eines Tages auf meiner Schwelle Sie sitzen fände, wie einst, im Morgen-Zwielicht, Das Wanderbündel neben ihr, Und ihr Auge, treuherzig zu mir aufschauend, Sagte: da bin ich wieder Hergekommen aus weiter Welt!68

Sick since then, wounded and sad my heart. Never will it be healed! As if a magic thread, spun from air, went from her to me, an anxious bond, so it draws, draws me longingly after her! – How? if one day I found her sitting on my doorstep, as before, in the morning’s twilight, her wanderer’s knapsack by her, and her eyes, looking at me trustingly, said: I have come back again from the wide world!

Certain details of the poem are especially compelling. One notices the short lines in the first section when the speaker bids Peregrina leave, as if pain had burned away all superfluity and left only these gasping constructions, in contrast to the longer lines of the fantasy of return in the second section, also the repeated –ei diphthongs of line 2 (“Einer einst heiligen Liebe”), exhalations opening out into infinity. The word “house,” doubly invoked in “Peregrina II,” is replaced here by the doubled invocation of the “world” at the end of each stanza, not Eichendorff’s wide world of spiritual quest but a vast Siberian wasteland through which Love roams without respite. The starkness of that “Welt” is made apparent in the enjambement of lines 11–12 (“Fort in die graue / Welt hinaus”),69 and at the beginning of the second stanza, the trebled devastation of “krank, wund und wehe” (sick, wounded, and sad) precedes the noun “heart.” Pain claims priority. Peregrina’s silence in this poem is an important leitmotif of the cycle. Not once does this allegorical figure of wandering Eros utter words of her own; it is her eyes that speak at the end of the poem, not her lips, and only in fantasy can they say what the speaker wants to hear. Her silence is the measure of her defenselessness in III, but it is also the representation throughout all five poems of her absence, of the void into which these poems speak. Such silences also tell of the degree to which passion depends upon the unsaid and of the manner in which guilt feeds upon fantasies of words one might have uttered to alter the 41

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs irreparable. The single word “– Wie?” in line 19 is another detail of language compressed into white-hot incandescence, even the punctuation laden with meaning; the dash which precedes the monosyllabic interrogative is a symbol of the time in which longing gives rise to the fantasy that she might one day return. Mörike perhaps wrote it because a fullfledged question – “How would it be if I found her one day . . . ?” – would necessitate a question mark at the close of the poem rather than the ecstatic exclamation he places at the end of this dream of reconciliation, but the impossibility of it all seems best encoded in the single syllable. “How” indeed could this be? The ghost who returns in “Peregrina IV” (see p. 47 below) is thus the ghost of the poetic speaker’s wife. But we cannot realize this from the two poems Wolf chose, although he assuredly knew it, whatever his bewilderment over certain aspects of the Peregrina poems he omitted from his volume of Mörike songs. The wedding and the expulsion are at the heart of Mörike’s cycle in its final form, but they do not appear at all in Wolf ’s dyad. Instead, presentiments of sex and death already cast a dark shadow in “Peregrina I,” written as if minutes away from first sexual consummation, while the aftermath of passion in ghosts and guilt follows right after in Wolf ’s “Peregrina II” (Mörike’s IV). The heart of the poetic narrative is not there, and one notes the absence, whether or not the listener is aware of Mörike’s free-verse masterpieces. This is the same model Wolf had already established when he paired “Der Knabe und das Immlein” (The Boy and the Little Bee) with “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” (An Hour before Daybreak), poems Mörike does not pair, such that we hear the anticipation of a sexual affair in the first song and the announcement of betrayal ending the affair in the second, but nothing of what occurs in the middle (see chap. 4). Nor did Wolf set the final poem of the Peregrina cycle in which the poet confronts the irrevocability of his loss. The complex formality of Petrarchan sonnet form – Petrarch too loved and lost and turned the matter into art – sets the seal on closure: V Die Liebe, sagt man, steht am Pfahl gebunden, Geht endlich arm, zerrüttet, unbeschuht; Dies edle Haupt hat nicht mehr, wo es ruht, Mit Tränen netzet sie der Füße Wunden.

V Love, they say, is tied to a stake, is destitute, ragged, unshod; this noble head has nowhere to rest, she washes her wounded feet with her tears.

Ach, Peregrinen hab ich so gefunden! Schön war ihr Wahnsinn, ihrer Wange Glut, Noch scherzend in der Frühlingsstürme Wut, Und wilde Kränze in das Haar gewunden.

Oh, thus I found Peregrina to be! Her madness, her flushed cheeks, were beautiful, still at play in the fury of the spring storms, and wild garlands wound in her hair.

Wars möglich, solche Schönheit zu verlassen? – So kehrt nur reizender das alte Glück! O komm, in diese Arme dich zu fassen!

How was it possible to forsake such beauty? – The olden joy comes back still more sweetly! Oh, come back that I may hold you in my arms!

Doch weh! o weh! was soll mir dieser Blick? But alas, alas! What does this look mean? Sie küßt mich zwischen Lieben noch und Hassen, She kisses me with love still and hate, Sie kehrt sich ab, und kehrt mir nie zurück. she turns away, and never returns to me.

One remembers Münch’s description of Maria weaving flower garlands to wear in her hair. Perhaps Wolf was turned away from music by the overt allegorizing or by the motif of madness or by the finality of it all – we can only guess. His song-dyads of desire, as we shall 42

Songs of love and madness see, are painfully open-ended, devoid of the acceptance one finds in “Peregrina V.” Although the admission is fraught with anguish, the poet is at last able to say that she will never come back to him, to put a halt to dreams of returning, but Wolf ’s bereft lovers, male and female alike, “end” in ambivalence, their tragedies ongoing. Why the composer might have omitted these three Peregrina poems is an issue I will revisit at the close. It is an intriguing possibility that “Peregrina I” might have come into being as the result of Mörike’s later affair with someone else, after Maria’s departure. From the end of February 1828 to the end of May, Mörike went to visit his brother in the town of Scheer on the Danube and then journeyed on to Buchau in the early summer, with a side-trip to Munich. On 20 July, he wrote the following postscript to a letter from Buchau to his friend Mährlen, “                      ,                  ,      ” (In amorous matters, I have, without risking anything, made good strides here). Exactly what that exuberantly capitalized news-flash meant remains Mörike’s secret (what was not at risk? . . . disease, marriage, deeper emotional involvement, a repetition of the Maria catastrophe?), but it seems that the poet had an affair with the Catholic schoolmaster’s daughter in Scheer. It was during this time that Mörike wrote “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens,” “Liebesvorzeichen,” “Josephine,” and the first version of “Im Frühling,” in which the poet states that Love and the winds “have no house,” the house-symbolism of four years earlier reawakened.70 When he left Scheer, Mörike wrote in a letter to Mährlen on 16 May 1828, “I went with my brother to the gates, where, however, I was seized by an unconquerable aversion to all things domestic” [eine unwiderstehliche        vor aller häuslichen Atmosphäre].”71 No translation can adequately account for the adjective “häuslichen” in this context, for the irreconcilable duality Mörike perceived between eroticism/passion/sex and “houses” (society, family, domesticity, limits). The other four poems speak boldly of desire given an extra frisson because it comes into being during a mass and of a woman who is sensual, sexually naïve but curious – these are not innocent poems. Like Peregrina, Jorinde’s kisses in “Liebesvorzeichen” can incinerate the soul, the words “kecksten,” “kecklich” (boldest, boldly) a link between “Peregrina I” and its less fraught cousin: Liebesvorzeichen (stanzas 4 -6 of 10) Dann leuchtet dieser Augen Schwärze Mich an in lieb- und guter Ruh’, Sie hört dem Mutwill meiner Scherze Mit kindischem Verwundern zu.

Signs of Love

Dazwischen dacht ich wohl im stillen: Was hast du vor? sie ist ein Kind! Die Lippen, die von Reife quillen, Wie blöde noch und fromm gesinnt!

In between I thought to myself quietly: What are you doing? She’s a child! The lips swelling with ripeness, how bashful still and piously disposed!

Fürwahr, sie schien es nicht zu wissen, Wie mächtig ihr die Fülle schwoll, Und dass sie in den Feuerküssen Des kecksten Knaben brennen soll.

Truly, she seemed not to know how mightily abundance swelled in her, and that she, with her fiery kisses can incinerate the boldest youth.

Then the black depths of these eyes gleam at me in loving and sweet peace; she hears the wantonness of my jests with childish astonishment.

Josephine in the poem given her name is described as having brown eyes, Jorinde dark eyes; Peregrina too is brown-eyed, and yet, the poet cannot trust what he sees reflected in her 43

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs gaze and falls headlong into terrified premonitions of sin and death. Did the erotic experience in Scheer reawaken the memory of Maria Meyer? If so, he knew to convert it immediately into poetry, the result a new “first chapter” to what would become the Peregrina cycle: I Der Spiegel dieser treuen, braunen Augen Ist wie von innerm Gold ein Widerschein; Tief aus dem Busen scheint er’s anzusaugen, Dort mag solch Gold in heil’gem Gram gedeihn. In diese Nacht des Blickes mich zu tauchen, Unwissend Kind, du selber lädst mich ein – Willst, ich soll kecklich mich und dich entzünden, Reichst lächelnd mir den Tod im Kelch der Sünden!72

I The mirror of your faithful brown eyes is like a reflection of inner gold. They seem to absorb the gold from deep within your bosom, where it might thrive in holy sorrow. To plunge into that night of your gaze, unknowing child, you yourself invite me – want me rashly to inflame myself and you, hand me, smiling, death in the chalice of sin!

The original version of “Peregrina I” in the Green Notebook (the version entitled “Agnes, die Nonne”) consisted of two stanzas in ottava rima rather than one. Lines 1–7 were unchanged in the final version, but for line 8, Mörike originally bade his poetic speaker cry out, “Weg, Reue-bringend Liebes-Glück in Sünden!” (Go away, remorse-bringing loverapture in sin!), a line which anticipates the Verstoßung created four years earlier in “Peregrina III”; in Maler Nolten, one recalls, “Peregrina I” was entitled “Warnung” and was placed after “Die Hochzeit” (“Peregrina II”) – that is, after sexual consummation – and before “Scheiden von Ihr” (“Peregrina III”).73 Sometime before publication of his novel, Mörike altered the last line of stanza 1 and omitted the second stanza altogether: (stanza 2 of “Agnes, die Nonne”) Einst ließ ein Traum von wunderbarem Leben Mich sprießend Gold in tiefer Erde seh’n, Geheime Lebens-Kräfte, die da weben In dunkeln Schachten, ahnungsvoll verstehn; Mich drang’s hinab, nicht konnt’ ich widerstreben, Und unten, wie verzweifelt, blieb ich stehn, – Die goldnen Adern konnt’ ich nirgend schauen, Und um mich schüttert sehnsuchtsvolles Grauen.

Once I saw a dream of wonderful life, germinating gold in the deep earth, mysterious life-forces that float in dark gorges, ominously known; it compelled me below, I could not withstand it, and below, as if in despair, I remained fixed – I could no longer see the veins of gold and around me shuddered desire-filled terror.

This stanza is both a mirror image of the first and a progression to the next stage of sexual encounter, in which the speaker attempts unsuccessfully to retain his former image of the beloved as a sacred creature. The gaze deep into the beloved’s eyes becomes the descent into “dark gorges,” devoid of the gold he had thought to mine therein – Freudian meanings are not far to seek in this imagery of abysses and urges that cannot be withstood. (In the first stanza, Mörike underscores the depths at which inner gold might lie buried by switching to a dactylic foot at the beginning of line 3 – “Tief aus dem . . .” – before reverting to the ruling iambs in line 4.) One scholar has speculated that Mörike deleted the stanza because it was too much akin to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Die Bergwerke von Falun” (The Mines of Falun) from the Serapions-Brüder tales, and indeed Hoffmann’s gorges and shafts, the hope of finding precious metals in abysses which instead yield only darkness, the symbolic links between mining and love-making, could well be a source for this stanza. But I wonder whether Mörike perhaps also judged the sexual imagery to be too explicit, too personal, and deleted it for those reasons as well.74 44

Songs of love and madness In ottava rima, the same a b rhyme is repeated three times, intensifying with each recurrence and culminating in a rhyming couplet which is usually a summation, an epigrammatic twist, the end of a crescendo. For the Renaissance masters of ottava rima, the form was peculiarly adapted to mixtures of narrative and lyric, the perfect medium for odes to the Virgin, saints, and martyrs – and Mörike was courting a kind of religio-erotic frisson when he first entitled the poem “Agnes, die Nonne”; the martyrdom of St. Agnes, whose breasts were cut off, melds sex/religion/misogyny in an especially graphic way. (Did he envisage at some point sending Agnes into a nunnery in Maler Nolten, one wonders?) Yet Mörike’s mixture is not of poetic modes, but of desire and doubt. The poet is unable from the beginning to believe in the very fidelity he wishes to assert, and hence he tentatively proposes analogies he does not trust, succumbing to terror when the inability to believe proves stronger than the desire to do so. “Wie . . . Gold,” “scheint er’s”, “dort mag,” the poet says in a concatenation of uncertainties, ambivalence born of fear present from the start. Mörike, writes one scholar, is situated historically in a state of Zwischenheit, or “betweenhood”; perhaps the greatest poet of the “no longer” and the “not yet,” he could be certain of nothing.75 The former halcyon unity between the world and the poetic “I” of the sort Mörike located most powerfully in Goethe was a matter of recent loss, and those poets who followed in its wake could only see fragmentary glimmers of former wholeness in the mirror of memory. However beautiful the remembrance or the poem spun from it, awareness that the thing itself was irrefutably gone permeates the work with a sense of loss. The reflection, not the substance: that was his realm, fragile, susceptible to breakage, and not to be trusted. In mirrors, right and left are reversed, being and seeming impossible to distinguish, perception a perilous trick, beauty as transient as the brittle glass which reflects it, the sight of oneself in a mirror a premonition of death. One thinks of the unknown seventeenth-century French artist who painted Justice holding a mirror turned toward the viewer so that we are forced to imagine our own image superimposed on its blank reflective surface, while the skull placed beside the mirror bids us see death in our own faces,76 or of Ingres’s great portrait of Madame Inès Moitessier, whose reflection – inaccurate according to the laws of physics – seems a ghostly-dark Doppelgänger from some netherworld the Second Empire could not banish.77 In the 1827 poem “Besuch in Urach” (Visit to Urach), Mörike writes of memory’s broken mirror transmuting the past into something disorienting, self-alienating, paralyzing: “Aus tausend grünen Spiegeln scheint zu gehen / Vergang’ne Zeit, die lächelnd mich verwirrt” (From a thousand green mirrors, bygone time, which, smiling, threw me into confusion, seemed to go by). The poet’s own image becomes “a strange and gentle face,” and from memory’s chalice, he drinks a draught “bitter to the point of stupefaction” – this was a poem Wolf particularly loved.78 Eyes too are mirrors. In Mörike’s masterpiece “Erinna an Sappho” (Erinna to Sappho), the young poetess – Sappho’s pupil circa 600 BC – looks into doubled mirrors, the silvered glass that reflects her image and her own eyes, and says: Erinna an Sappho (stanza 3, lines 17–22) . . . seltsam betraf mich im Spiegel Blick in Blick. Augen, sagt’ ich, ihr Augen was wollt ihr?

Erinna to Sappho . . . in the mirror, gaze within gaze struck me strangely. Eyes, I said, eyes, what do you want?

45

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Du, mein Geist, heute noch sicher behaust da drinne, Lebendigen Sinnen traulich vermählt, Wie mit fremdendem Ernst, lächelnd halb, ein Dämon, Nickst du mich an, Tod weissagend!79

You, my spirit, today still securely housed there within, intimately wedded to living senses – with alienating seriousness, half smiling, a daemon, how you beckon to me, prophesying death!

The word “behaust” is yet another testament to the symbolic weight of the word “Haus” in Mörike’s poetic world. The historical Erinna, so Mörike tells the reader in a didactic note placed between the title and the poem, died aged nineteen; one remembers that Mörike was nineteen when he first encountered Maria Meyer and guesses that the figure might thereafter have become a “magic number” for him, the age at which deaths of several kinds happen. The young poet from ancient Greece sees her own death in the mirror of her eyes, and so does the persona of “Peregrina I,” who looks into the mirror of the beloved’s eyes and finds, not the golden holiness he tries to see at the beginning, but sin and death. Mirrors infuse the language of this poem, reflecting the dilemma at its heart. Dreading the death sexual fusion might bring, the poet shies away from the pronoun “uns,” but the linked words “mich und dich” in the penultimate line reiterate an old literary motif in which “I” and “thou” are mirror images. The narcissism of passion was made explicit in Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan und Isold: “mit liebe also vereinet, / daz ietweder dem anderm was / durchluter alse ein spiegelglas [italics mine]. / sie haeten beide ein herze: / ir swaere was sin smerze, / sin smerze was ir swaere” ( . . . so unified in love that each was to the other as transparent as a mirror. They shared a single heart; her anguish was his pain, his pain was her anguish), a passage in which the language itself is mirrored.80 The phrase “kecklich mich und dich” is among Mörike’s many instances of echoing internal rhyme and mirrored alliteration, such as the doubled –ie and –au sounds of line 1 (“Spiegel dieser . . . braunen Augen”), the inverted -g’s and -m’s of “mag” and “Gram” in line 4, the brightness of “wie” and “Wi-[derschein]” echoing one another at opposite ends of the second line. The word “Widerschein,” which is echoed by “scheint” in line 3, seems peculiarly apt for this context of mirrors and reflections, with its conjunction of “S/schein,” or “seeming,” and “wider,” or against – counter to reality, although the latter implication is lost in translation (“reflection” has its own double-entendre in English, that of mirror images and pensive thought). “Unwissend” in line 6 is followed by “Willst” in line 7, while the adverb “kecklich” is followed in the final line by the assonant noun “Kelch.” The transmutation of suffering into gold, the kinship between the base material and its alchemical transformation, 81 are heightened by the assonance of the -g’s in “Gold” and “heil’ger Gram,” and the beloved’s power over the speaker is evident in the accented, parallel, monosyllabic verbs “willst” and “reichst” placed at the beginning of the final two lines, a rhyming couplet in hexameters – weightier than the iambic pentameters regnant elsewhere (line 3, as noted earlier, begins atypically with a dactyl). By the end, Peregrina becomes something akin to a priestess of sexual desire officiating at an anti-mass, her Communion chalice (the “Kelch der Sünden” a readily-decipherable metaphor for female sexual organs) filled with something other than Christ’s transubstantiated blood and proffered with a seductive smile; well before Baudelaire, Mörike heightens eroticism with hints from religion’s realms. Ironically, Heine would also use the words 46

Songs of love and madness “tauchen” and “Kelch” as similarly laden with sexual implications in “Ich will meine Seele tauchen / in den Kelch der Lilie hinein” (I want to sink my soul into the lily’s chalice) from the Buch der Lieder, roughly contemporaneous with Mörike’s “Peregrina I.” Both poets imbue the sexual object with something of purity – Heine’s is a lily, Mörike’s an “unknowing child” – and yet they are seductive, promising still more sexual passion to follow. The “Kelch der Sünden” echoes in mirrored distortion words from the shadow-play Der letzte König von Orplid in Maler Nolten; at the end of the fourth scene, the fairy queen Thereile, to whom King Ulmon (the last king of Orplid) is bound in erotic servitude, asks him if he can tell the bitter from the sweet in what she lets him taste on the rim of her goblet. He replies: from “Der letzte König von Orplid” Wie hass’ ich sie! Und doch, wie schön ist sie! (für sich) Hinweg! mir wird auf einmal angst und bange Bei dieser kleinen golden-grünen Schlange. Von ihren rothen Lippen träuft Ein Lächeln, wie drei Tropfen süßes Gift, Das in dem Kuß mit halbem Tode trifft.82

from “The Last King of Orplid” How I hate her! And yet, how beautiful she is! (to himself) Away! I become all of a sudden anxious and fearful near this little greeny-golden snake. From her red lips drips a smile like three drops of sweet poison that in a kiss strikes one half-dead.

One recalls the “anxious bond” between Peregrina and the poet in “Peregrina III” and realizes the degree to which sexual passion was permeated with angst in Mörike’s experience. If the “chalice of sins” in “Peregrina I” and the beaker of bittersweet poison in the shadowplay are, in one reading, Peregrina’s and Thereile’s mouths each pursed for a kiss, “chalices” lower down are also implied. “Peregrina IV” apppears in the Green Notebook with the title “Nachklang von Agnes” (Echo of Agnes), where it is she who bursts into tears, not the poetic speaker: IV (Wolf ’s “Peregrina II”) Warum, Geliebte, denk’ ich dein Auf einmal nun mit tausend Tränen, Und kann gar nicht zufrieden sein, Und will die Brust in alle Weite dehnen? Ach, gestern in den hellen Kindersaal, Beim Flimmer zierlich aufgesteckter Kerzen, Wo ich mein selbst vergaß in Lärm und Scherzen, Tratst du, o Bildnis mitleid-schöner Qual; Es war dein Geist, er setzte sich ans Mahl, Fremd saßen wir mit stumm verhaltnen Schmerzen, Zuletzt brach ich in lautes Schluchzen aus, Und Hand in Hand verließen wir das Haus.

IV Why, beloved, do I think of you all at once now, with a thousand tears, and cannot be at peace, my heart swelling to bursting? Ah, yesterday, into the bright nursery, by the flickering light of ornately placed candles, where I forgot my very self in games and bustle, you entered, o image of compassion-beautified suffering; it was your ghost; it sat down to the meal. Like strangers, we sat there with mute, suppressed sorrows. Finally I burst into loud sobbing, and hand in hand we left the house.

All grief asks why, but this “Warum” is more, the speaker querying the operations of memory.83 The last phrase of the question in lines 1–4, “. . . und will die Brust in alle Weite dehnen?”, is virtually untranslatable in its evocation of grief ’s physicality, of the feeling that one’s chest might burst from sorrow, and it also echoes the “weite Welt” into which the poetic speaker sent Peregrina comfortless on her way. Now, too late, his heart swells in 47

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs the desire to be everywhere, to find her. These five poems are arranged along a continuum from the first floods of desire to the sad acceptance of her loss in the last line of the last poem (“Sie küßt mich zwischen Lieben noch und Hassen, / Sie kehrt sich ab und kehrt mir nie zurück,” or “She kissed me between love still and hate; she turned away and never came back to me” – he admits the possibility that she now hates him, but even here, he creates a farewell kiss and lingering remnants of love). In “Peregrina III,” he could imagine her returning to him in the flesh, but by the next poem, the fantasy is no longer possible. Only the guilt represented by all ghosts can and does return, a ghost whom he endows with the compassion he should have given her earlier (“mitleid-schöner” . . . her pity for him heightens her beauty). Mörike’s single twelve-line stanza is divided into time zones of “now” and “yesterday,” but these are not twenty-four-hour days of which he speaks. Time in Mörike’s poems is fluid, spilling over clock- and calendar-bound limits through the operation of memory, and the poet ensures that we understand “then” and “now” as all of a piece by knitting the sections together rhythmically. The shift from lines in tetrameters (lines 1–3) to pentameters (lines 4–12) occurs at the invocation of “alle Weite” – the lines expand with the speaker’s heart – at the end of the question, the iambic pentameters continuing for the remainder of the poem. “Yesterday” is both yesterday and yesteryear: in willed regression, the speaker has retreated to memories of childhood to escape the pain of loss. The phrase “wo ich mein selbst vergaß” (where I forgot my very self) is a psychologically rich formulation, implying that Peregrina is part of the speaker’s very being, that when he tries to forget her by withdrawing into childhood, he abnegates his own Self. The attempt at escape is not even possible. An adult can only recall childhood through the scrim of adult consciousness, whose sorrows infiltrate recollections of youth, and thus Peregrina’s ghost comes unbidden into this vision of a bygone nursery. The slender tapers and the meal transform the remembered nursery into a distant echo of the torches and the wedding feast for man and wife in “Peregrina II,” but they also suggest sacred precincts, a place where Communion and forgiveness might occur. The alienation between former lovers cannot be bridged, however, and her continuing silence becomes his – ironically, the only thing they share. Although he and his ghostly revenant mimic the actions of lovers who unite and go forth into the world together, it is the house of innocence they leave and she is but a ghost. That he does not yet fully accept her loss, even though he has come one step closer to its truth, is at the heart of the poem, evident in the vision of lovers hand in hand. The poem ends there, not with the solitary grief of lines 1–4 – he cannot let her go just yet. I always think of “Peregrina IV” when I read the final section of W. H. Auden’s “Anthem for St. Cecilia’s Day,” with its “dear white children . . . so gay against the greater silences / of dreadful things you did ” and the child enjoined at the end to “weep away the stain, / Lost innocence who wished your lover dead, / Weep for the lives your wishes never led. [italics Auden’s]” The “cry created as the bow of sin / Is drawn across our trembling violin” is Peregrina in essence; if much is unlike, what lies at the core of these two works seems akin. 84 “That what has been may never be again,” both Auden and Mörike declare in their own ways; thereafter, we “continually mark the spot / Where the body of his happiness was first discovered” (Auden again, in “Detective Story”).85 Mörike is justly lauded for his ability to retrace those acts of mind which lead to an altered understanding of life’s larger matters – love, death, 48

Songs of love and madness creation – and he does so here in the Peregrina poems; step by step, the poetic speaker recounts his struggles with the difficult acknowledgment of wrongdoing on his part (a struggle encoded in the compositional process), and the acceptance of permanent loss and guilt. If, in “Peregrina V,” he recognizes his lost beloved’s madness, he nonetheless asks himself how it was possible to abandon such beauty and vulnerability. He never found an answer that would banish guilt or allow more than partial self-expiation, but his bitter statement to Luise that the experience had been “very useful” for poetry could not have been more true. WO L F ’ S P E R E G R I NA : M I R RO R S I N M U S I C

Exactly fifty years after the publication of Mörike’s first poetic anthology, Wolf set Peregrina I and IV (Wolf ’s II) to music in late April 1888, the manuscripts dated 28 and 30 April respectively. Unlike “Auf eine Christblume I & II,” the two songs composed seven months apart (“Auf eine Christblume II” was the last Mörike song Wolf composed), “Peregrina I & II” were clearly conceived from the beginning as a dyad-cycle, with one compositional decision after another predicated on pairing. “Peregrina I” seems a self-contained work, but is not; it stops in a remarkably irresolute manner, continuation beckoning and following. Things only hinted in I unfurl to their full consequences in II. This dyad is an example of progressive tonality in nineteenth-century song, and a singular example at that. Although this was already a familiar phenomenon in Schubert, Wolf customizes the practice to his purposes in a way that glosses over the two omitted poems, or attempts to do so. Specifically, Wolf joins I and II by means of a postlude to I which then becomes the introduction to II, at first repeated on its original E Ü major location but turning to the true G Ü major tonality of II in the final “twist” of the piano’s four introductory bars. Music has often been likened metaphorically to memory in its recollections and transformations, and here Wolf allows us to hear memory’s treadmill in the prelude to II, the speaker mulling wordlessly over the death-haunted carnal sin he first came to know in I until remembrance impels the question, “Warum, Geliebte” (Ex. 2.1). It is significant that the turn to G Ü major, although forecast in the G Üs which darken the postlude of I, happens so quickly, in the last few beats of m. 4 with the query “Warum” crowding immediately on its heels, and that the figure in the postlude/prelude is extended in the body of the song. Where it contracts, movingly, to its former dimensions at a different tonal location in II (mm. 13–14, mm. 41–43), we hear more than mere transposition. Wolf tells us as plainly as possible in the bridge shared between the two songs that the lovers’ parting was brought about by the “Tod im Kelch der Sünden,” although we are not told how and why. The postlude/prelude consists entirely of instrumental echoes of the words “Tod im Kelch der Sünden,” words which are a mirror of the first measure – but at the end of “Peregrina I,” the instrumental motive stops short of the word “treuen” from before. The motive reiterated in mm. 17–19 is ringlike, beginning on the pitch B Ü (the fifth scale-degree of E Ü major) and returning to it at the end, theoretically infinitely repetitious; as we shall see in chap. 4, Wolf would use ring-symbolism in his other Mörike dyad of desire as well. One notices that the words “Tod” and “Sünden” are emphasized on first appearance, “Tod” sustained across the barline and gratingly dissonant with the C Ü in the 49

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 2.1(a)

Hugo Wolf, Peregrina I, mm. 15–20

nachlassend −− −Ł − Š

15

reichst

!

− ¦ ŁŁ Š − − ¦Ł 

Ł
 ¦Ł

3

ŁŁ ŁŁ 

ŁŁŁ Ł  \
Ł Ł

Ł ¦ Ł


Ł

la¨ - chelnd mir den

ŁŁ − Ł Ł Ł Ł −Ł Ł Ł

ŁŁ − dim. Ý −− −Ł
¦ − ŁŁ − −Ł

Tod

im

ŁŁŁ ¦ Ł − Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł

¦ ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ

3

ŁŁ ŁŁ 

ziemlich bewegt und sehr ausdrucksvoll

rit.


−Ł
Ł
−Ł −Ł Kelch der

Su¨n

Ł Ł Ł Ł −Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł −Ł Ł   3 \\ dim.
¹ ¦ ŁŁ −ŁŁ ŁŁ ¹ Ł Ł Ł −ð ð −ð ð ritard.

-

Ł 

Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł rit.

ŁŁŁ 3

den!


ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁŁ

3

¹ ¹


− ¹ Š − − ¼ Ł ¦ Ł −−ŁŁ Ł −ŁŁ ý Ł ¼ Ł ¦ Ł −−ŁŁ Ł −ŁŁ ý Ł ¼ Ł ¦ Ł −−ŁŁ Ł ŁŁ −Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł \ ][ ][ \ ][ Ý −− ¼ Łð ý ¦ Ł −ŁŁ ¼ Łð ý ¦ Ł −ŁŁ ¼ Łð ý ¦ Ł −ŁŁ −Ł Ł Ł

17

!

Ł Ł  

¦ ððð ýýý ðý \\ ¦ ðð ýýý ðð ý

¼ ¼

bass on the downbeat of m. 16, while the accented first syllable of “Sün-den” is inflected by the darkening dip of G
to G Ü (two of the most important pitches in the dyad); even the normally unaccented second syllable of “Sün-den” turns upward to the beginning pitch in slight emphasis, albeit on a weak beat. The same pitches to which these words are sung in mm. 15–16 are reiterated in the postlude, the C Ü in the vocal line of m. 16 now consigned to an inner voice in order to compress the motive as a descending chromatic figure within the bounds of a major third (B Ü –G Ü). This postlude is not “pure” or “abstract” music: we are meant to attach specific words to the instrumental strains and to realize that the persona mulls over the words and what they represent over and over, as if trapped by them.86 The final tonic chord in m. 20 with B Ü in the topmost voice simply stops on what might otherwise be another repetition of the motive in a manner that is markedly un-final-sounding . . . a pause, not an end. It is surely for this reason that Wolf begins “Peregrina I” without any piano introduction. Like Schubert, Wolf was prone to establish the tonality, important harmonic elements, the principal musical material, and the atmosphere of a song in the introduction; on those infrequent occasions when he dispenses with an introduction in the Mörike songs, it is for a reason. For example, “An eine Äolsharfe” begins with recitative so that the song proper might start with the winds’ arrival, while “Auf eine Christblume I” and “Charwoche” perhaps lack introductions so that the solemn acclamations at the beginning (“Tochter des Walds, du Lilienverwandte,” “O Woche, Zeugin heiliger Beschwerde”) can receive greater emphasis. Introductions customarily stand in a carefully plotted relationship – not necessarily repetition – to the postlude, the two instrumental passages forming a frame around the lied; here, the poetic persona refuses to see “death and sin” at 50

Songs of love and madness Ex. 2.1(b)

Wolf, Peregrina II, mm. 1–8 Ziemlich langsam

!

¹
− Š − −−−−  ¼ Ł Ł ð ][ ¦ ðð Ý −− − −  −− Ł − Š − −−−−

4

Ł ¦ Ł −Ł −Ł ¦ ŁŁ

Wa-rum

!

− Š − −−−− ŁÐ ¦ Ł −ŁŁ ý Ł ðŁ Ł \\ Ł Ý −− − − Ł ŁŁ −−Ł ðð −−
− Š − −−−− Ł ý Ł Ł

7

- mal nun

!


¦Ł ¹ Ł

(sehr innig) ¹ Ł Ł ¾ Ł Ł ý   

ÿ

¹
Ł Ł ¼ ð ][ ¦ ðð Ł

Ł ¦ Ł ¦−ŁŁŁ ý Ł ðð Ł Ł Ł \\ ŁŁ − ððð ýýý

Ge-lieb

-

te,

denk’

Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł −−ŁŁ


Ł Ł −−Ł Ł ich dein auf ein

-

¹ Ł
Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ŁŁ −−Ł Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ŁŁ ý −−Ł Łý Ł ¦ Ł ð ¼ ¼  \ Ł Ł Łý Ł ¦Ł Ł Ł Ł −−Ł Ł ð Ł ý Ł  Ł 

Ł Ł Ł   mit tau

Ł Ł Ł  

Łý -

send Tra¨

¦Ł  -

nen,

− ¹ Ł
Ł −−Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł −Ł Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł −−Ł Ł Ł ý ¦ Ł Š − −−−− ¼ Ł Ł Ł ðý ð \ cresc. [ ¦ Ł − Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ý −− − − Ł −Ł ðý ¦ð −− Ł

the beginning and can see nothing else at the end. (With hindsight, one looks back at the beginning of the vocal line in mm. 1–2 and realizes both that “death and sin” were there from the start and that the persona dodges them when he evades G Ü on the chromatic linear descent from the same B Ü that bounds “Tod und Sünden” a few moments later; it is en route to the word “treuen,” “faithful,” that the singer bypasses the darkness of G Ü .) A classical relationship between introduction and postlude is not possible in such a poetic world, and Wolf dispenses with an introduction altogether, thereby placing even greater architectural weight on the bridge between songs. In a lied which not only lacks an introduction but also any piano interludes in the body of the song, the postlude is given a status all its own, peculiar to this dyad. Anyone who hears or plays this song is struck by the rhythmic inexorability and seamlessness of the piano part, especially the ritualistic solemnity of mm. 1–12. The slow, measured motion of a religious processional, bearing the worshipper from the outer reaches of the nave towards the sacramental heart of mystery, here leads to sin-stained erotic ecstasy (Ex. 2.2). The vocal prosody coils and winds its way above or within this 51

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 2.2

Wolf, Peregrina I, mm. 1–8 Sehr getragen




¦ Ł −Ł Ł
Ł
−Ł
Ł
ý Ł Ł
¦ Ł Ł
¹ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł  

(innig) − Š − −  ¹ Ł Łý 

!

− Š −− 

Der Spie

gel die-ser

Łý ŁŁ ýý

ŁŁ
−ŁŁ ýý

Łý \ Ý −−  Ł ý − Łý −

Š −− Ł Ł Ł

Ł ý Ł Ł 

Łý −− Ł ý − Š \ Ý −− ŁŁ ýý − Łý

ein Wi

-

Ł ŁŁ ýý Ł  \\ ŁŁ ŁŁ ýý Ł Łý 

treu-en, brau - nen Au - gen


Ł Łý


Ł
ŁŁ

4

!

-

cresc.

der-schein;

Ł Ł  ŁŁ Ł 


Ł ŁŁ ýý Ł Ł 

Łý Łý


ŁŁ ŁŁ ýý ][ ý Ł −Ł ¦ ŁŁ ý 

ist wie von in-ner’m Gold

Ł
Ł ýý Ł Ł Ł ŁŁ ýý Ł Łý 

¹


−Ł
Ł
Ł ¹ −Ł Ł 
¦ Ł  −Ł Ł −Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł  tief aus dem Bu-sen scheint-er’s an - zu-sau Łý Łý Ł −Ł ý − Ł Ł ý ŁŁ −− ŁŁ ýý Łý Ł −Ł ý −Ł    −Ł ý Ł Łý ŁŁ − ŁŁ ýýý ŁŁ −ŁŁ ýýý ŁŁ −− ŁŁ ý ŁŁ ŁŁ ý −− ŁŁŁ ýýý ŁŁŁ −ŁŁŁ ýýý   

Ł Ł  ŁŁ Ł  Ł 

gen,

−Ł −Ł  ŁŁ ŁŁ 

Ł

 ¹ Ł Ł Ł ²Ł Ł Ł  −Ł Ł ý Ł ð      dort mag solch Gold in heil’ - gem Gram ge-deihn. −8ŁŁvaýý Ł ŁŁ ýý ŁŁ Ł ý −− ¦ − ŁŁ ýý Ł ý Ł
−
ð Š ¦ ŁŁ Ł  Ł ¦ Ł ŁŁ ýý ŁŁ \\ ŁŁ ýý ŁŁ Ł
Ł ýý Ł Ý −− −−ŁŁŁ ýýý ŁŁ
−Łð Ł Ł Łý Ł − −Ł ý Ł Łý Ł ð  − Š −−

7

!

almost unchanging rhythmic pattern, in which almost every downbeat or mid-measure harmony is repeated as an anacrusis to the next harmony; despite the slow tempo (sehr getragen), the anacruses are engines to drive the song relentlessly forward. Where this dotted rhythmic pattern is altered in m. 8, it is in order to permit cadential resolution of the multiple appoggiaturas in the inner voices, evocative of a Baroque chorale, at the words “heil’gem Gram gedeihn”: holy music for holy sorrow. But cadence – rare in this song – does not mean cessation of motion; this is the only cadence in twenty bars whose resolution is not elided with the beginning of another section (the other two cadential articulations lead to the passage on the dominant beginning in m. 13 and to the postlude), and even here, one notes that Wolf places the B Ü major chords of resolution in the last half of m. 8 in the higher tessitura and with the chord-voicing of the transitional passage in mm. 9–12, not at the lower level of the Baroque-style penultimate harmonies. The shift of 52

Songs of love and madness register and spatial arrangement creates impulsion forward despite the harmonic relaxation of tension. The holiness which the persona had thought to find does not provide more than the briefest place of rest, and the processional rhythm carries us immediately thereafter to still greater destabilization, a barrage of chromatic seventh and ninth and augmented sixth chords “resolving” each time to yet another seventh chord. The inner turmoil aroused by the “night gaze” pervades the processional until it can no longer be maintained. (In deference to Mörike’s prevailing iambic meters, most of the phrases in the vocal line begin after the downbeat. Only in mm. 11, 13, and 15, at the adjective “un-[wissend]” and the verbs “willst” and “reichst” do we hear downbeat emphasis, the effect all the greater for the rarity.) There is no pause for the piano anywhere and no structural repetition, but rather inexorable through-composition in an idiosyncratic formal structure based on transformed reflections; taking his cue from Mörike’s mirrors in which meanings change, Wolf too built mirrors within and between his two songs. For example, the E Ü to B Ü progression in the first section (mm. 1–8) is followed by its mirror image in the second section (mm. 13–20), the prior progression reversed, B Ü to E Ü , and the former holiness, fidelity, and gold transmuted into fire, sin, and death. In “Peregrina I,” the invocation of golden holiness deep within the heart impels harmonic motion to richer, warmer depths, to intensified G Ü major harmonies in mm. 5–6. The third-related harmonic locations, G Ü and B Ü , are both reflected in mirror image in the transitional passage in mm. 9–12, as the persona is drawn deeper into night, while the incendiary (“entzünden”) phrase on the dominant (mm. 13–16) is a harmonic battle zone between tones belonging to the two spheres. G Ü attains its fullest meaning in “Peregrina II” as the principal tonality of the song, and in the sudden turn to this key at the end of m. 4, one can hear something akin to a conversion-experience. The one-bar circular motif from the postlude of “Peregrina I” comes back in “Peregrina II,” not on the rooted tonic chord of E Ü , but on the six-four chord of G Ü in mm. 13–14, once again, in the piano alone. It is to this harmony, Desire itself bound up in a harmonic function which draws close to ending but is not final, that the lovers leave the house of innocence. One detail at the beginning of the song is ironically reminiscent of Brahms, although the contexts are different. In “Von ewiger Liebe” (despite his anti-Brahmimentum, Wolf grudgingly conceded that this was a good song), Brahms sets the word “fester” (stronger) in the maiden’s proclamation “Unsere Liebe ist fester noch mehr” to a harmony that is anything but “fest” – chromatic and destabilizing – in order to underscore the young woman’s self-delusion. The young lout whom she loves has just attempted to ditch her by means of a “noble” offer to abscond, lest her reputation be besmirched, and Brahms tells us in no uncertain terms that “ewig bestehen” is not in the cards. Nor is fidelity a trustworthy quantity in “Peregrina.” The first chromatic harmony in the piano, the C Ü –F tritone between the soprano and bass on the downbeat of m. 2 at the adjective “treuen,” tells of erotico-chromatic deception. So does the descending chromatic line in the voice, evocative of erotic surrender and passion’s complexity; one can assert triadic purity only for the duration of a single measure (m. 1), the piano’s processional chords rising upwards to the heavens, but the voice that sings of mirrors already tells of passion’s “night gaze.” “Peregrina I” is filled with smaller reflections as well. Motivic and intervallic mirrors 53

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs abound: the bass line in mm. 3–4 (C–B Ü –A Ü ) is conjunct with a vocal phrase beginning with the same pitches in reverse, while the “inner gold” E Ü –G in the vocal line of m. 3 is an inverted echo of the right-hand pitches just before it. The G–C–F rising fourths in the right hand of mm. 1–2 are echoed in mm. 3–4 and reflected in the vocal line at the words “ein Widerschein,” lest anyone miss the multiple mirrors already at play. The vocal phrase outlining a G Ü major triad in m. 5 (“tief aus dem Busen scheint er’s”) sounds simultaneously with its retrograde high in the right-hand part, which is then repeated in m. 6; much the same is true of m. 7, in which the vocal pitches B Ü –C–C –D are elided with their retrograde in the right hand, and the bass progression G Ü –F becomes the vocal line at the words “heilgem Gram gedeih’n.” Retrograde and inversion are music’s mirror images, especially where both forms exist simultaneously – which is “real,” one asks, and which mirrored? – and such a concatenation of them is hardly coincidental. As flames leap up in mm. 13–16, banishing the processional rhythms altogether, we hear more mirrors, fragmenting or fusing what came before. The descending chromatic triplet motives in the right-hand part of mm. 13–16 are fragments in rhythmic diminution of “der Spiegel dieser treuen, braunen Augen,” and the vocal gesture of “anzusaugen” in m. 6 is echoed in transposition at the words “ich soll kecklich” in m. 13. The heightened Ü III harmonies are woven into the last half as well; the final vocal phrase, for example, with its magnificent sweep spanning an octave and a half, outlines a tonic E Ü chord (“mir den Tod”) in the interior but surrounds and inflects it with the prominent pitches from the Ü III area (G Ü , C Ü ). And the two descending leaps of a sixth in the vocal line will become, in the next song, two unforgettable ascending leaps of a sixth, always a special gesture in Wolf. Throughout the postlude/prelude, the pitch A
recurs as a passing tone in an inner voice. When the introduction to “Peregrina II” (a halt-and-lame prolongation of the onebar figure from the postlude of I into two bars) turns to the new tonic G Ü , A
becomes the Ü III of the new key and the tonal location of “gestern” and the brightly lit room within the mind; A major is easier to notate than an inundation of double-flats, and its brightness is in apt contrast with the dark barrage of flats before it. Wolf lifts the piano part into the treble register for the evocation of childhood but restores the low bass at the words “tratst du, o Bildnis mitleid-schöner Qual.” Not only is she the ground and fundament of the persona’s being, but she belongs to adult experience, and the ethereal registers of childhood are no longer appropriate; upon her entrance, we return as well to G Ü major, its reappearance underscored by the pedal-point on low G Ü throughout mm. 25–29 (Ex. 2.3). “Gestern” is a memory, drenched in heightened awareness of her, even when the poet tells how he fled to childhood in the futile attempt to escape her. In his obsessive repetitions of a motive whose contours are always strongly discernible wherever it might be placed, Wolf tells of grief ’s insistence and of the poet’s dependence upon Peregrina’s presence as the essence of his art; that the figure slips downward, that it is pervaded by passing tones as if perpetually en route, seems only apropos. “Peregrina II” is spun entirely from repetitions of the one figure, disposed in an ABA tonal structure in which the returned A section is almost unvaried in the piano. “Tausend Tränen” and “lautes Schluchzen” are thus made parallel, the song a tape-loop of tears which keep coming back. The A section returns at the words “Fremd saßen wir”: this is the “answer” to the question in lines 1–4 of the first stanza/the first A section. At the end, Wolf 54

Songs of love and madness Ex. 2.3

Wolf, Peregrina II, mm. 16–29

² ¦¦¦¦¦¦ ²² ½

− Š − −−−−  ½

16

¼

²Ł Ach,

Ý −− − −  ððð −− ²²
Š ² ¦Ł Ł

!

!

!

² ¦¦¦¦¦¦ ²² ¹ Ł

¦ ðððð

77777777777777777

!

− Š − −−−− 

² ¦¦¦¦¦¦ ²² ½

Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ł ² Ł
   

¹ ¦Ł ge

-

stern

l l l l Ł Ł Ł ²Ł ¦ Ł ²Ł Ł Ł Ł  ¹  \\ (einfach)
Š ¹ Ł Ł Ł ¦ ŁŁ ² ŁŁ Ł

in den hel - len

¦ ŁŁ ¦ Ł ý Ł ² Ł 
Ł Łý Ł Ł

¦Ł  Ł 

¹ Ł
Ł
Ł
Ł Ł
¦¦¦ −−−−−− Ł
Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ł Ł      Kin - der - saal, beim Flim-mer zier-lich auf - ge-steck-ter Ker - zen, l l l l l l ¦ ²²² ¦ − Ł Ł Ł Ł ¦ ŁŁ −Ł ŁŁ Ł − ² Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł ² Ł ¦ Ł ¦ − −−−− Ł Š ¦ ŁŁ Ł ŁŁ ¦ Ł ¹ ¹ Ł   ²² ¹

¦¦¦ −−−−−− ¹ Ł Ł −Ł Š ² ð ŁŁ ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ ²Ł Ł ²Ł Ł   22 21 −Ł − Ł −−Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ł Ł ¦ Łý Ł Ł Ł Ł Š − −−−− ¼      wo ich mein selbst ver - gass in La¨rm und Scher - zen, l l l l l l l l Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł −Ł Ł −− −− − Ł¹ Ł ¦ Ł Ł −Ł Ł Ł Ł −ŁŁ −−Ł ý Ł −−Ł −ŁŁ ¦ Ł ŁŁ ¦ Ł −Ł ¹ Š −    \\ \


− Š − −−−− ¹ ŁŁ −ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ ý Ł ¦ ðŁ Ł ¦ Ł ¹ ŁŁ −ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ    25 24 ð −

ÿ ¹ −−Ł Łý Ł Š − −−−− ¼ Ł Ł Ł  20 19


Ł Ł

l l −− −− − ŁŁ −−−− ŁŁ Š − − Š − −−−− ¹ −−ŁŁ Ł ŁŁ Ł 

l Ł ¦− Ł Ł ¦−¦− ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł ¦− Ł ][ \\
Ý ¹ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł −−Ł ŁŁ Ð

tratst

¦ Łl − Łl ¦ Ł −Ł

du,

o Bild

-

nis mit - leid -

Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ŁŁ −−−− ŁŁ Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł


ŁŁŁ ¦ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ −− ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ¦ Ł ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ Ð

55

Łl Ł

−− Ł −− Ł

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 2.3 (cont.)

−−Ł Ł − Š − −−−− Ł Ł   Ł

28

¹

- scho¨ - ner Qual;

!

Łl −− −− − Ł Š − ŁŁ
Ý −− − − ¦ Ł −− Ð

¦ Łl ¦Ł

Ł ŁŁ

− Łl −Ł

Ł ŁŁ

¹ −Ł
Łý es war

Łl Ł ŁŁ Ł

ÿ

ŁŁ
Ł


Ł Ł dein Geist,

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sets Mörike’s last words of the poem to the figure as it appears in mm. 13–14 in the piano, the sounding emblem of love and loss. The persona repeats the declamatory repeated low D Ü s of “Fremd saßen wir” for the words “verließen wir das [Haus]” (the end of the section echoes its beginning), but it is the spotlight Wolf shines on the final words “das Haus” that makes the ending unforgettable (Ex. 2.4). Wolf clearly knew that the word “house” was of great significance, but it is my belief that he misread it, if only partially. The yearning leap upwards of a sixth from the fifth degree of the chord to the third degree (avoiding the root of the harmony) at the words “dein Geist” in m. 29 reappears here, a gesture reserved for those two places only, both of the eloquent intervallic leaps set to six-four chords. The equivalence is unmistakable. Hearing this passage, one remembers that the composer could never share a house with the woman he loved; whether this was something he could actually have tolerated, “domestic” not being the first adjective that springs to mind when one thinks of Wolf, he must have longed on occasion for togetherness acknowledged openly and housed under one roof. Perhaps this is why he invests the last two words of Mörike’s fourth Peregrina poem with such intensity. Although Wolf gives the last “word” in the piano to the Peregrina figure, to desire haunted by sin and death (the ending of “Peregrina II” mirrors the end of “Peregrina I” and is just as un-final in its effect), it is that transcendent leap of longing at “das Haus” that we most remember. If it is not Mörike’s meaning, the song was, after all, Wolf ’s to do with as he saw fit, and the beauty of the gesture is its own justification. That it might have a subtext in Wolf ’s own life makes it all the more moving. Why Wolf might have omitted three of the Peregrina poems is a conjecture that begins with a divagation to another Mörike poem drenched in the same guilt originating from the same source. In 1826, Mörike wrote a poem as a new ending for Ludwig Tieck’s drama Leben und Tod des kleinen Rotkäppchens (Life and Death of Little Red Riding Hood), which Mörike’s brother Adolph had staged as a domestic puppet theatre performance.87 The poem does not appear in any of the anthologies and was not published until after Mörike’s death, perhaps because it is an appendage to a play by someone else (Mörike did not even give it a title) and perhaps because it had too much that was personal in it; one wonders whether the family members who took part in the puppet theater, especially Luise, recog56

Songs of love and madness Ex. 2.4

Wolf, Peregrina II, mm. 39–44

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42

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nized the origins of the torment pervading this extension of the fairy tale.88 At the beginning, elfin spirits lament the death of Little Red Riding Hood, whose bloodied white hands and feet and red cap they have just buried, but then console themselves that she will soon be among their company, will dance through the woods and the meadows with them. In the second section, the ghost of the wolf, who was shot for his crime, wanders wearily through the forest seeking expiation from his victim’s spirit. It is against his nature, and he does not really want to do this, he says, but desire for rest impels him. When he sees her ghost at the end of the poem, he tells her not to fear him: [Rotkäppchen und Wolf] (section 2, lines 64–70 of 70) “Sieh her! ich bin mein eigner Schatten Und muß vor tiefem Schmerz ermatten. Du aber bist wie eine Blume nun, Die wandelt durch den Wald, wie sel’ge Geister tun Ach gib in deiner Seligkeit Ein Zeichen nur, daß mir dein Geist verzeiht! – Du winkst mir zu? . . .”89

Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf “See! I am my own shadow and must grow weary from deep sorrow. But you are now like a flower that wanders through the forest, as blessed spirits do. Ah, in your blessedness give me just a sign that your spirit forgives me! – You beckon to me? . . .”

There is no answer, and he cannot tell whether she gestures to him or what it might mean . . . and there the poem ends. This is the Peregrina-guilt, the Peregrina “Unanswered Question,” in mythification so painful it bleeds. One remembers Maria’s accusation that 57

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Mörike had “shamed” her and no longer wonders to find the poet assuming the voice of the most famous sexual predator in fairy-tale lore, the wolf who preys on an “unwissend Kind.” The real Maria Meyer was the antithesis of the Biedermeier ideal – every dangerous, anti-bourgeois passion comes under her sign. The more Mörike banished her from his life, with a rigor not typical of his personality, the more persistent she became in the realm of art, a “Wiedergängerin sui generis.”90 The purpose of Maler Nolten was to assert that Eros can never be socialized, thus sparing Mörike from the subterranean presentiment that failed courage, his family’s influence, and his sexual anxieties might have tipped the scales, but the ploy did not work, and Mörike punished himself from within his own poetry for the rest of his life. In the final analysis, it did not matter that Maria was clearly disturbed and that Mörike was young, that loving her would have required brooking formidable family opposition and society’s disapproval. He did love her, and he did cast her out. What Mörike abjured, Wolf did not. From his different time, place, and personality, the fin-de-siècle composer took on Sexus und Tod in some of their most dangerous (if commonplace) manifestations in late nineteenth-century Viennese life, that is, sex with a prostitute as a young man, followed in adulthood by a longstanding affair with a married woman. Although Bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone moralists might have condemned Wolf and Melanie Köchert for their affair, the double standard in matters of adultery and the church’s role in limiting or prohibiting divorce put the pair in an impossible bind. When she became Wolf ’s lover, Melanie was a middle-class Hausfrau with daughters to raise (how must she have felt, given the expectation that she inculcate bourgeois sexual morality in her children?), and she knew that the church and society would condemn her if they knew of her love for this man. It must have required great courage not just to embark on the affair but to continue for some nineteen years, and the secrecy, the uncertainty, the mental turmoil caused by flying in the face of convention eventually killed her as surely as syphilis killed Wolf, after more than five years of suffering; the chronicle of his torment from September 1897 to February 1903 makes harrowing reading. A witness to every stage of his agony, Melanie fell prey to guilt and grief following his death, repeatedly calling herself “a bad wife,” a sinner beyond redemption. In 1906, three years after Wolf ’s death, she killed herself by jumping from the third-floor window of her home, leaving the house that was the site of her lawful marriage forever – the free fall of “unbehauste Eros” into Tod. Condemning herself as her husband had not, she enacted her own Verstoßung, the most final of all. When Wolf set the Peregrina poems to music, the affair with Melanie had already begun and was still a secret. Heinrich Köchert did not discover the truth until 1894, and when he did, he was remarkably generous (none of these people was small-minded); he did not subject Melanie to the Peregrina-like Verstoßung of an unfaithful wife, but that was still a possibility in 1888. That Wolf and Melanie were aware of the consequences society could impose on adulterous liaisons is made crystal-clear in a paragraph from one of Wolf ’s “public” letters to Melanie, not the private correspondence destroyed after their deaths, but a letter Heinrich could read. The letter is from 6 October 1894, after the revelation of Wolf ’s and Melanie’s affair: 58

Songs of love and madness How glad I am that I have added something to your pleasure with Stauffer’s letters. Not everyone will, to be sure, agree with such confessions, but we are not numbered among those moral cowards who shrink timidly from every natural emotion and try anxiously to paste fig leaves over all nakedness. Pious souls may lament all they want about how Stauffer blasphemes against customs and morals; he still remains one of the most admirable figures of the fin-de-siècle by virtue of his heroic nature and the tragic fate to which he, an energetic and strong-willed man, was forced to succumb. Even so, one also has to have experienced certain things in order to penetrate with deeper understanding the mysteries of these kinds of psychological occurrences.

In the early morning of 24 January 1891, a Florentine chambermaid found the thirtythree-year-old Swiss artist Karl Stauffer (1857–91) dead of a chloral overdose in his room. Scornful of convention from his youth, he had embarked on a psychologically fraught affair in late 1889 or early 1890 with Lydia Welti-Escher, the wife of one Emil Welti, who was the son of a powerful member of the Swiss Bundesrat. (Did Wolf, I wonder, read about the battles between Lydia and Cornelia Wagner, the latter briefly Stauffer’s fiancée, and find it reminiscent of the similar war between Melanie Köchert and Frieda Zerny, the latter briefly Wolf ’s mistress earlier that same year in 1894?) The vengeful Weltis saw to it that Stauffer was first thrown into the Carceri Nuovi in Rome, then into the madhouse of San Bonifazio in Florence, while Lydia was eventually transferred from a Roman insane asylum to one in Switzerland until divorce set her “free.” Disgraced, poverty-stricken, alone, she killed herself on 12 December 1891 by opening the jet of a gas heater in her hotel bathroom. The cause célèbre riveted much of Europe at the time, all the more so when Stauffer’s prison poetry and letters were published one year after the artist’s suicide by a Berlin writer named Otto Brahm, who had known Stauffer and Lydia personally.91 It was this work which Wolf both read and sent to Melanie after they could perhaps have met the same fate or, at the least, similar disapprobation from society . . . and he knew it. Implicit in the letter to Melanie are gratitude to Heinrich for not acting as the Weltis had done and a loving acknowledgment of Melanie’s courage. Reading this letter and reflecting on its content brings one back, if by a circuitous route, to Peregrina. Was Wolf perhaps psychologically unable to compose the other poems in Mörike’s cycle, not because he found them too mysterious, as he claimed, but because the themes of a “marriage” outside of society’s strictures and the casting-out of a “sinful” wife struck far too close to the bone? Were the poems he did set bound up with echoes from his own experience? Did the brown eyes gleaming with reflections of inner gold and the invocations of sexual sin in “Peregrina I” impel analogies with the brown-eyed Melanie and the adultery which put them both in danger? Did the dream of love’s return in Wolf ’s “Peregrina II,” its grief bursting the bounds of convention, perhaps awaken thoughts of forced separation from Melanie, should their affair be discovered, and the ghost of passion past that might then haunt him? We cannot know, of course, but the sense that Wolf ’s own knowledge of “these kinds of psychological occurrences” informed his compositional decisions with respect to the poems born of Mörike’s love for Maria Meyer is intriguing, to say the least.

59

Chapter 3

Agnes’s songs: the fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman

The fictive insane, male and female, are stock characters in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings across the literary spectrum from highbrow to lowbrow. Goethe’s depictions of insanity in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Torquato Tasso join forces with less exalted (but still notable) works such as Christian Heinrich Spiess’s Biographien der Wahnsinnigen (Biographies of the Insane) and downright trashy (but influential) “Gothick” novels populated by Bedlamites galore, many of them inspired by Matthew Gregory (“Monk”) Lewis’s spine-tingler Ambrosio, or, The Monk.1 History was cooperating mightily with the trend, since the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars gave Europeans ample opportunity to survey madness writ large over the landscape, and so too was science, which generated an outpouring of hysteria theory and re-conceptualizations of madness during the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century.2 Novelists and poets, opera librettists and playwrights, all took note, among them Mörike, whose character Agnes in Maler Nolten represents certain early nineteenth-century notions of female hysteria leading to madness. That Mörike both subscribed to certain misogynistic characterizations of women and yet understood that women were trapped by the ignorance imposed on them, with terrible consequences for everyone, adds to the novel’s complexity. En route to her death, Agnes sings, and she does so in part because Goethe had made doomed young women sing before her. The creation of an hommage à Wilhelm Meister – published, as coincidence decreed, the year of Goethe’s death – seems an over-determined act for this writer who once told his fiancée Luise Rau that he particularly loved to hear her singing the Mignon songs “So laßt mich scheinen” and “Kennst du das Land.”3 Mörike professed his great admiration for Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre on numerous occasions, but the other side of such reverence is competition, whether or not the latterday writer could ever admit it.4 In place of Goethe’s abused child of incest, her behavior disturbed and disturbing,5 Mörike invents not one but two women who go mad in Maler Nolten (to some critics in Mörike’s day, this was de trop6): the gypsy Elisabeth, whom we have already encountered, and a forester’s daughter named Agnes, whose path to madness is traced in detail throughout the novel. Mörike stacks the deck against Agnes: not only is sexual maturation impeded by Protestant ideals of angelic purity before marriage, but she is multiply the victim of a “nervous disorder” (diagnoses of Nervenkrankheit were applied in monolithic fashion for “diseases which nobody chuses to own,” as one eighteenth-century writer put it7), of Elisabeth’s baleful influence, and of calamitous circumstance. She is in 60

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman part typecast from the contemporary medical lexica in which gynecology and psychophysiology joined forces to define every aspect of women’s behavior as sexually liminal; men too could suffer from “nerves” but in masculinized forms (for example, Mörike’s own psychosomatic gastric disorders), whereas women were typically rendered helpless by their hysteria, in a mirror of their social powerlessness. Agnes exemplifies a “worst-case scenario” of the “Hysteric’s Progress” as the medical establishment then defined it, beginning with childhood paranoia and culminating in madness, and her creator denies her any counsel. Without mother, sister, or friend to help her, trapped by strictures on mind and body alike, a disturbed child becomes an even more disturbed woman. Although she does everything in her power to remain “the chaste one,” as the Greek derivation of her name implies, she can only do so at the expense of her sanity. Goethe’s Mignon, crippled of speech, is only expressive in song, and so too is Agnes, who begins to sing as she starts her descent into madness; before it founders, the soul finds a voice. Nolten and Agnes, we learn, were affianced when young, but during his absence at court, her once-blond hair has turned chestnut brown – not the black-brown hair of female sensuality in German folklore, but darker than the blondness of fairytale princesses – and she has learned to sing. Her newfound musical abilities signify, not sexual experience, from which the frightened Agnes shies away, but sexual awareness, and it is in part the suppression of that awareness which drives her mad. Unable to speak of things taboo, the mad Agnes intermingles speech with song in a manner which both imbues the sung words with heightened significance and makes of them works of art. The paradox of fashioning ordered artistic structures from the chaos of reason’s overthrow, suggesting that art and truth well up from the unconscious when civilizations’s bonds are broken, was surely one attraction of “mad songs” for those who wrote them; the horror-struck Laertes, on hearing the flower-bedecked mad Ophelia’s songs, proclaims the paradox in act 4, scene 5 of Hamlet: “Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, / She turns to favour and to prettiness.” Siren-like, the madwoman holds center stage – and the scenes in which Agnes sings resemble theatrical tableaux – and transmutes into melody what she cannot say, the songs a compound of lamentation and diagnostic recollection. “A document is madness,” Laertes continues, “thoughts and remembrance fitted,” and Agnes sings just such documents en route to her Ophelia-like death by drowning. Agnes sings five songs in Maler Nolten, two shortly before her descent into madness (the songs are untitled in the novel, but later included in the poetic anthologies with the titles “Der Jäger” and “Agnes”) and three from within it (“Lied vom Winde,” “Seufzer,” and “Wo find’ ich Trost?”). One of them – “Der Jäger” (The Hunter) – poses as a pre-existing folk song selected by Nolten for Agnes to sing in company, while the other four are equally divided between secular topoi and tortured variations on geistliche Lieder. Songs of faith are converted into songs of faith’s insufficiency in “Seufzer” (Sigh) and “Wo find’ ich Trost?” (Where Can I Find Solace?), and composers did not flock to them as they did to the lament given her name in Mörike’s anthology and the singular prayer “Gebet” (which Agnes does not sing, but speaks in one of her mad scenes), a poem later augmented for inclusion in the anthologies – see chap. 5 for a discussion of this song. By retaining the character’s name when he transferred the lament from Maler Nolten to the collected poems, Mörike invited curiosity about her identity, and one can speculate that some of the composers who 61

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs set “Agnes” to music, including Wolf, might have known the prose context and shaped their settings accordingly. As with Goethe’s Mignon and Harper songs, the experience of hearing or performing Wolf ’s settings of Agnes’s mad songs is altered when one knows more about the character in the novel and about the early nineteenth-century realities she embodies. But Wolf composed his songs for reasons different from Mörike’s. The writer both challenged Goethe and, in Maria Meyer’s wake, tried to prove that no one of either gender is spared Eros’s destructive power; Goethe salvages his male title character for a useful life to come, but not so his inheritor, as we shall see. Wolf, however, was possibly challenging Brahms when he set “Agnes” to music, and he found in the religio-erotic anguish of “Seufzer” and “Wo find’ ich Trost?” the stuff of Wagnerian echoes, Parsifal in particular. Mörike would not have approved. “ M I R K R A N K E N B L U T W I L L N I C H T S M E H R G E L I N G E N ” : WO M E N, S E X , H YS T E R I A , I N S A N I T Y

In a letter of November 1831 to his brother Karl, Mörike wrote that his hopes for success as a novelist would depend more upon the second half of Maler Nolten than the first. From the end of the interpolated shadow-play Der letzte König von Orplid (The Last King of Orplid) in Part I on, everything was livelier (“lebendiger”), he declared; in particular, the title character Theobald Nolten’s visit to his fiancée Agnes’s home in the forest and “the little songlet [the double diminutive of “kleine Liedchen” is noteworthy] ‘Rosenzeit, wie schnell vorbei’” would, he thought, have great appeal for female readers. The statement is two-edged. The burgeoning female readership for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels was often derided for lack of taste, for preferring frivolity and the sensational to serious literature, but male writers paid heed to the market and tuned their works accordingly. And Mörike surely knew that many women would find in Agnes’s story a mirror of their own lot in life, of all that was frightening to women in the prospect of marriage, the consequences of women’s dependency upon men, and the desolation of abandonment. He had reasons for creating such a character – he had, after all, caused a woman to be abandoned – and for tracing the course of female mental illness: he must have wondered what made Maria Meyer into the person he encountered in 1823, and the abandoned woman is thereafter a recurring persona in his poetry. To his brother Karl in 1831, Mörike continues: That the fiancée later becomes newly mad and thereby dies cannot be otherwise. I have prepared it sufficiently beforehand. A certain Dr. Zeller, who is much occupied with psychiatry and will shortly become a physician at just such an institute, has read the novella and found the psychological progression that I have pursued with Agnes from p. 66 on to be quite correct and well established; now I do not regret having treated this part of the history in more detail than I was willing to do in the first draft . . . and perhaps more than the superficial reader will thank me for knowing.8

“Superficial readers” would be, he realized, content with characters catapulted into madness by their creators with no concern for the origins of their insanity. One notes with a certain amusement that the concern with accuracy was ex post facto, that Mörike wrote the novella first, then checked with a psychiatrist, but one also sees the justifiable pride that his depiction was correct. 62

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman Agnes is more the portrait of a dilemma than of an individual, a demonstration of one of the ways in which Eros can kill. Mörike lived at a time when cultured middle-class young men, whatever wild oats they might sow before betrothal, expected marriage to an angel of the household who should be a virgin before her wedding day and a Mary-motherfigure after it. Larkens, in love with Agnes (one thinks irresistibly of Bauer in love with Maria), characterizes her as “das goldreine Christengelsbild” (the golden-pure image of an angel of Christ), not as a flesh-and-blood creature allowed to experience erotic desire, while the adolescent Nolten loved Agnes for her “outward purity of mind, childlike modesty and unbounded submissiveness.”9 The adjective “outward purity” already implies that one cannot expect inner purity, a tell-tale touch of the misogyny Nolten musters as a defense against the prospect of marriage to a person he no longer loves. Mörike knew just such expectations, idealizations, and rationalizations from personal experience; Agnes is in part a re-writing of his adolescent love for his cousin Klärchen Neuffer, a love he tried to recapture in his courtship of the pastor’s daughter, Luise Rau, his fiancée during the creation of Maler Nolten.10 One of Agnes’s names is Luise; the real Luise saw herself and Mörike in the novel and was not pleased. One can hardly blame her. Agnes exemplifies the figure of the Hysterika or female hysteric in German literature, and Mörike carefully traces the etiology of her disorder throughout Maler Nolten.11 Living as he did in the wake of Enlightenment redefinitions of many psychological disorders and doubtless forced by the Maria Meyer episode to confront the phenomenon of emotional dysfunction in the woman he loved, Mörike incorporated psychiatry’s then-current fascination with this variable affliction – it was often anything prejudicial about female sexuality that medical men wished somehow to categorize – into his novel. A pedagogy which dictated that women should be intellectually ignorant and sexually pure (the two are contingent) and that the obligatory purity should be policed by shame led to speech and actions which can be construed as the only expression possible for the “guilty secret” of sexuality. The premium placed on pudeur not only forbade open speech about sexual matters – the loquacity of the hysterical state is a consequence of dammed-up words finding an “out” at last – but even forbade inner recognition of sexuality as pleasurable. Proper women could not admit to themselves, much less to others, awareness of sexual feelings. One sees the proscriptions on awareness spelled out in pedagogical manuals on the proper upbringing of young women, such as Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Väterlicher Rath für meine Tochter (Fatherly Advice for my Daughter), originally published in 1789 and going through seven editions by 1809.12 Campe had earlier written a manual for young men called Theophron, and its popularity had encouraged the author to give equally prolix advice – 703 pages of it – to young women. The floodtide of verbiage is directed at middleclass girls, not aristocrats, who followed other codes of behavior, and it preaches “Kinder, Kirche, Küche” (children, church, kitchen) at great length. To be wife and mother was the only destiny Campe believed proper for middle-class women, whom he enjoined to shun “glittering artistic achievements,” great learning, writing for publication,13 or aping the aristocracy. Only housewifely arts were suitable for this “ewig gegängelte und ewig getäuschte Geschlecht” (ever led about by the nose, ever deceived sex).14 Campe recognized that bourgeois women who thus fulfilled their duty led restricted lives and were subjected to many injustices; far from rosy pictures of “happily ever after,” he invokes the 63

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs thankless tasks, the difficulties of pregnancy, the illnesses and deaths, the troublesome chores of tending small children and educating older ones, but a “pure heart” would, he advised, sustain them in life’s worst storms.15 One can almost hear him thanking God that he was not born a woman. Most of all, Campe preached “Schamhaftigkeit und Keuschheit” (modesty and purity, the word for “modesty” derived from “Scham” or “shame”) as the wellspring of true happiness for women. As if speaking to his own daughter, he wrote, “May that day be the last day of your life and mine, the most sorrowful for you and for me, on which you – but away with this hideous thought!” In a treatise where “under the heart” is the most precise anatomical term allowed, he does not commit to paper the words “pregnant out of wedlock.”16 He was more frank than some because he believed that “young cooks who are told not to mix hemlock into their dishes must be told what hemlock is and how to recognize it,” but frankness had its limits.17 Most women, confronted with the prospect of physical pain in sex and childbirth, would shrink away from the thought of marriage, but God has given humanity, Campe writes, a “Fortpflanzungstrieb” (reproductive drive) to provide sensuous pleasure sufficient to compensate women somewhat for the miseries of bearing children. The consequences of succumbing too soon to this “Naturtrieb,” however, are disease and death. “Have you ever noticed that sickly, sorrowful, withering, nervenkranke [italics mine] maiden who, in what should have been the bloom of her life, sinks down her head, like a young plant attacked by worms, and goes to an early grave?”, he asks, and then invokes the “living corpses” he saw once in Berlin at a “hospital for lewd persons,” doubtless a ward for syphilitics.18 How should young women avoid this dire fate? They should, Campe advises, ban from their souls all thoughts of a sexual nature; maintain utmost purity not only with others but by oneself (this was an age obsessed by the supposed ill-effects of masturbation); avoid the opposite sex; and obliterate bodily awareness by every means possible.19 Agnes does not even receive this much instruction, but is left to struggle with her fears in isolation. Those fears are massive: she does not, we discover, wish to marry Theobald, not because she does not love him but because she is afraid of sex. Hysteria marks a knowledge that does not know itself, and it reaches crisis proportions in Maler Nolten at the prospect of the wedding night. When Nolten and Agnes were first affianced, we are told that Agnes nearly died of her “nervous disorder,” emerging from the shadow of death a changed creature. At times sunk in reflection, at times given to hectic merriment, at times lapsing into sudden fits of crying, she repeatedly tells her father that she is not good enough to marry Nolten.20 Nor does he want to marry her. At the beginning of the novel, Theobald tells Larkens that he [Nolten] is angered by Agnes’s supposed attraction to her cousin Otto; she is sullied in his eyes because she has demonstrated a capacity for sexual feelings not permitted a modest, unmarried maiden.21 He will not convey his displeasure to Agnes directly, however, only to her father, who pleads his daughter’s illness as an excuse. Although he is portrayed as well-meaning, the forester echoes society’s negation of women’s thoughts and feelings, and Agnes has no one to whom she can turn when he fails her. Nolten’s anger, furthermore, is fabricated self-justification. In love with the Countess Constanze von Armond, he is ready to snatch at any excuse to break off the engagement and, in self-serving fashion, to make the rupture her fault. 64

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman One of the most revealing scenes in the novel occurs shortly after Agnes’s nervous breakdown, when she and her father attend a comic play in a nearby town. Agnes, Mörike writes, laughed for the first time in weeks, but that night, she comes to her father’s room and wakes him up. At first unable to speak, she tells him of a dream (theatre in “real life” has unleashed the theatre of the mind) in which Theobald begs her not to leave him, then nearly suffocates her with his kisses. The ambivalence of desire – that she wishes to leave him is the unspoken subtext – and the image of the self smothered by the invading Other finds expression in a classic dream; Freud could not have devised a better example of sexual fear. In tears, Agnes declares that “he [Theobald] will find his happiness with another [Elisabeth]” but she cannot tell him so. Agnes’s father is, astonishingly, reassured, believing that the dream is a sign of renewed longing for her fiancé rather than its opposite. Even when Agnes says, “Theobald must not be my husband, and then I may continue to love him,” he fails to understand, although one could hardly state more forcefully the desire to be saved from sexual experience. The next morning, her father finds her writing a letter to Theobald and insists on reading it; the refusal to allow her any privacy is compounded by his blundering intent to interfere.22 The extent to which the troubled sexual identities of the early nineteenth century were dependent on suppressing the female voice that speaks its needs is all too clear in this episode in which she attempts to make those around her understand, but to no avail. Only in madness is she free to speak, when her encoded truths are considered nothing more than pathetic raving. The trap Mörike constructs around her is indeed impermeable, inescapable. A H A RV E S T O F L A M E N TAT I O N : “ RO S E N Z E I T ! W I E S C H N E L L VO R B E I ”

The scene in which Agnes sings “Rosenzeit! wie schnell vorbei” is a way station before the collapse into madness. Nolten has come to visit Agnes and her father at their home, where Agnes’s thanks for his gift of a little clock (emblematic of time running out for both characters) induce guilt – ”But my soul! what were you thinking?”, Agnes says, “this is an ornament for a Countess, not one of us!”23 The forester tells the young man that he must seize the moment and announce the wedding right away, but Nolten is panic-stricken: “Not yet!”, he cries, “I beg you, Papa, for God’s sake, not now.” When Agnes appears, she is dressed in her finest white dress, “radiant, beautiful, like a young princess,” and with flowers strewn in her hair, a reminiscence both of the white-clad Mignon singing “So lasst mich scheinen” shortly before her death and of the mad Ophelia with flowers in her hair. Taking up the mandoline, Agnes reminds Nolten of an occasion in the past when she had asked him if he was offended by her ignorance of the “beautiful arts” other women knew (music and flower-painting). Although Nolten reassured her, the couple paid a visit to the vicarage a few days later, and Agnes was asked to sing; as she did, she fancied the pastor’s daughter was mocking her and was so distressed that she could hardly finish the song. While someone else played and sang after her, she went to a window where she could not be seen and wept, the episode revelatory of her vulnerability and her longing to be “musically accomplished,” to be like other young women. After her illness, Agnes tells Nolten, she has studied music assiduously, aided by her cousin Otto. 65

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Her father does not want to hear of her distress and requests a happy song, which Agnes obediently sings in a voice “strong and sweet, moving more easily in the low than the high registers,” the lower tessitura evoking both the amateur voice and sensuality (higher voices are construed as celestial, lower voices as more earthly). While she sings, Nolten averts his gaze until she bids him turn and look at her; he does not wish to see her as a musical/sexual being. The second song, “Der Jäger,” comes at Nolten’s request because he expresses a liking for this “folk song,” in which a hunter frets about a quarrel with his sweetheart. Hunters are hyper-masculine creatures in German folklore, but this one swiftly capitulates to his beloved and rushes back to apologize, fantasizing as he goes about the kisses that will end the matter . . . another merry song, but fraught with serious overtones in this context.24 Through the surrogate of music, Nolten seems thereby to signal his desire to rectify his former repudiation of Agnes, to return to her after absence and distance like the hunter in the song, and yet at the same time to pin the blame for erotic distress on woman’s unknowable nature; the hunter’s references to the sweetheart’s “trutzen” and “nagen” are classic designations of shrewish female behavior. That Nolten makes Agnes sing a song about the kind of sexual desire neither one of them is capable of feeling for the other suggests a complicated compound of wish-fulfillment on one hand (he should want to be her hunter, should want to kiss her) and an underlying, unspoken spice of cruelty on the other (“This is how lovers feel about one another, but neither of us feels this way”). Wolf subsequently devised for his setting of “Der Jäger” a left-hand part filled with linear tritone intervals, created by the lower chromatic neighbor note to the fifth degree above the initial bass tone, often varied by other intervals – augmented fifths, minor sixths, even ninths and tenths – but with tritones predominating. If this is a comically exaggerated version of “trutzen” and “nagen,” it is also diabolus in musica repeated over and over, perhaps a hint to the cognoscenti of psychological darkness beyond a mere lovers’ spat. Agnes’s father calls for another song, but Agnes is no longer capable of feigned merriment. Closing the book of folksongs, she speaks softly to Nolten while striking an occasional chord on the harmonium, chords which develop into a sorrowful prelude to the song, “Rosenzeit! wie schnell vorbei.” Here, traditional images are put to sad, startling use in yet another attempt to convey her distress to those who should help her, but do not. The song at an end, Agnes, in tears, flings herself into Nolten’s arms, saying, “Be true! you are mine! I have remained yours!”, but Theobald can only reply, tepidly, “I am yours,” the discrepancy between the magnitude of her distress and the lukewarm quality of his response marked. Mörike not only builds a trap around Agnes, but makes her aware that the walls of an inferno are closing in. If Ophelia and Agnes are akin in some ways, the differences between Elizabethan and nineteenth-century conceptions of female madness are also embodied in these two characters. Unlike Agnes, Ophelia does not sing until she is completely mad, and her fragmentary songs come from someone more spirited and more knowledgeable about sex than Agnes, although Hamlet has infected Ophelia with his sexual revulsion, born not of ignorance but awareness of lust’s seamier side literally too close to home. Accusing all men for their sexual predation and broken promises, the mad Ophelia punishes them with songdeath, transferring to them the fate she is about to inflict on herself, and then mourns them 66

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman wildly before departing to kill herself. Agnes, however, goes mad after diagnosing herself in accord with nineteenth-century notions of female incapacity, attributing her melancholy to causes both external (the beloved’s betrayal) and internal (“sick blood”). Infidelity she can try to deter with her desperate pleas to Nolten, but there was little or nothing she could do about the latter. The phrase “Mir kranken Blut” (“my sick blood”) is Mörike’s variation on an old topos – the abandoned woman’s lament – in accord with medical superstitutions of the day. The excess blood in the female body made women, so said medical lore, susceptible to “nervous disorders,” the uterus supposedly linked to the brain in a two-way traffic whereby cerebral disturbance could cause menstrual disturbance and vice versa. According to the gynecological establishment, female reproductive organs were so precariously poised that little was required to create psychological impairment, and the phrase “sick blood” is thus indicative both of mental illness and female fertility gone awry. The danger of madness is all the greater if a predisposition to nervous disorders is manifest early in life;25 Mörike, determined to allow Agnes no escape, tells of childhood paranoia in which she believed herself watched perpetually by forces in a vast educational project.26 If this is Mörike’s inversion of Goethe’s Tower Society in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, it is also a moving psychological detail. In the wake of her mother’s death, Agnes appropriates the entire cosmos to watch over her after all possibility of maternal nurture vanishes: Rosenzeit! Wie schnell vorbei, Schnell vorbei Bist du doch gegangen! Wär’ mein Lieb nur blieben treu, Blieben treu, Sollte mir nicht bangen.

Time of roses! How quickly gone by, how quickly you are gone! If my lover had only stayed true, stayed true, I would not be afraid.

Um die Ernte wohlgemut, Wohlgemut, Schnitterinnen singen. Aber ach! mir kranken Blut, Mir kranken Blut Will nichts mehr gelingen.

As they merrily harvest, merrily, the women sing. But alas, my sick blood, my sick blood, will let nothing go right for me.

Schleiche so durchs Wiesental, So durchs Tal, Als im Traum verloren, Nach dem Berg, da tausendmal, Tausendmal Er mir Treu’ geschworen.

So I slink through the valley meadow, so through the meadow, as if lost in dream, to the mountain, where thousandfold, thousandfold, he swore he would be true to me.

Oben auf des Hügels Rand, Abgewandt, Wein’ ich bei der Linde; An dem Hut mein Rosenband, Von seiner Hand, Spielet in dem Winde.

Up there at the edge of the hill, deserted, I weep by the linden tree. On my hat, the rosy ribbon he gave me plays in the wind.

Agnes assumes a traditional identity, “the abandoned maiden,” in this song, and therefore Mörike fashions it from traditional emblems of lamentation. The linden tree where the 67

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs maiden weeps in the last stanza is the archetypal place for lovers’ rendezvous and for bereaved lovers to mourn since the time of Walther von der Vogelweide’s thirteenthcentury Minnesong “Under der linden” (Under the Linden), and roses are the ages-old symbol both of youthful passion and death at a young age, the brief, brilliant blossom quickly vanished. Mörike likens the sudden scattering of a rose’s petals to the death of his brother August in “An eine Äolsharfe” (To an Aeolian Harp), and a similar nexus of Love and Death beckons here as well in the elegiac acclamation “Rosenzeit!” The song is a variation on the antique scenario in which a bereaved lover sings of lost love and Echo responds, the voice mysteriously separated from the persona and assuming its own shadowy identity to mock or mourn (act 5 of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo comes to mind); from the hilltop or mountain where such scenes take place, the singer can survey time and space, can put the experience of loss in perspective. Here, Agnes is her own Echo, repeating in the refrains those things which most haunt her: the rapidity with which love vanishes, the longing for constancy, the contrast between other people’s health and happiness and her sickness of mind, and the thousandfold oath of fidelity. The starkest refrain is the single word “abgewandt” in the final stanza, with its overtones of alienation, estrangement, and aversion (“Das wolle Gott abwenden,” “God forbid,” one says). Agnes knows herself barred from life’s blessings by powerful forces, and in her song, she isolates the word as she herself is isolated. Mörike echoes more recent literary forebears as well, with trace-elements of Goethe particularly prominent. The “Rosenband” of the last stanza recalls Friedrich Klopstock’s “Das Rosenband” (The Rosy Ribbon, which Schubert set to music in 1815, D. 280), whose lovers are bound for eternity with rose-colored ribbons of love, but here, the ribbon is left to flutter in the wind symbolic of inconstant, destructive passion. Agnes’s word “tausendmal” (a thousand times) is probably an echo from Goethe, who was prone to indicate the innumerable as “tausend” or multiples of “tausend,”27 while Mörike’s line “Schleiche so durchs Wiesental” is another (deliberate?) reminiscence of Goethe, whose Harper tells of a “schleichendes” lover in “Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt” (Whoever Surrenders to Loneliness) and sings “An die Türen will ich schleichen” (I Will Creep from Door to Door) in his vision of a bleak, mad future. Agnes is, in one sense, the Harper’s latterday daughter, and she shares with him the furtive motion of those who feel they have no rightful place in the world and cannot claim it in stance or stride, but must slink about, hiding from those more fortunate.28 One of the most evocative details in “Agnes” – the harvesters in stanza 2 – had special significance for Mörike. In a letter to Luise Rau, written from Plattenhardt on the afternoon of 2 September 1829, he told her that the sound of nearby threshers brought back memories of the person he once was and bygone times: In the barn across from my window, I hear threshing: a familiar . . . sound, to whose beat my heart so contentedly accords itself. I always associate an entire throng of bittersweet memories with its tones, going back deep into my childhood. This same monotonous melody, renewed each autumn – how wonderfully it takes me by surprise in these momentous times! It reminds me of everything that happened to me these past twenty years, what I have found and lost, what has changed for me and what is unchanging . . . Still, one is fortunate if one can speak of what has vanished, if all-disillusioning Time has not stripped all the golden surface from the forms, if one dares summon the courage to walk through the old, magic gardens and to lean one’s dreaming forehead on many a crumbled monument . . . So it is with me, so can it be for you too.29

68

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman This was Mörike the didact, teaching the young woman he believed to be teachable (as Maria Meyer was not) the lessons of poeticized life, in which seemingly inconsequential things can open worlds in the mind. Mörike the pastor and Luise the pastor’s daughter both knew the Biblical metaphor of human life as the sowing of seeds which ripen, blossom, then are winnowed in death,30 and so does the pious Agnes, for whom harvest bespeaks a fruition she cannot have. The female “Schnitterinnen” (harvesters) sing as they reap, but she, crippled by pathological fear, can expect no such happy music. Mörike twists the knife in the wound when he immediately thereafter brings back Theobald’s brother-inlaw, happily married to Nolten’s sister Adelheid, who is about to bear her first child. Nolten and Agnes cannot hear enough about the unseen Adelheid (her example is all the more powerful for her absence), especially Agnes for whom Adelheid seems “the very pattern of true womanhood” in her marital bliss and pregnancy. When the pastor whom Nolten and Agnes are visiting improvises a merry song, “Frau Adelheid / Zu dieser Zeit / In ihrem Bettlein reine / Muß ferne sein . . . / Doch ist sie nicht alleine. / Herr Storch hat ihr Besuch gemacht, / Darob ihr süßes Herze lacht” (Mrs. Adelheid at this time must be far away in her clean little bed . . . and yet, she is not alone; Mr. Stork has paid her a visit, which makes her sweet heart smile), in order to awaken the echoes at a well-known spot for such soundeffects along a mountain path, we hear the happy antithesis to Agnes’s echo-song.31 But it was the latter which attracted composers.32 Of more than thirty settings in the nineteenth century, only those by Brahms and Wolf have remained in the standard recital repertoire, although several of the songs by now-forgotten Kleinmeister deserve revival (in particular, Ferdinand Hiller, op. 46, no. 2; Robert Emmerich, op. 12; and Alexis Holländer, op. 6, no. 2). Of the prior settings, Brahms’s op. 59, no. 5 of 1873 is probably the only one to which Wolf paid any heed, and one doubts he liked it. Brahms treats Mörike’s poem as a variation set, each stanza sounding the same music but with the instrumental figuration varied; in the final stanza, the composer floods the otherwise diatonic accompaniment with chromatic passing tones, and the dissonances surrounding the harmonic progressions imbue the end of the song with considerable tension. Brahms would later do something similar in his arrangement of “Maria ging aus wandern,” another lament of a woman’s – the Virgin Mary’s – sorrows, in the 49 Volkslieder; again, the diatonic bedrock suggests the fixity of grief, the songs pinned in place, while the plethora of chromatic passing tones conveys the restlessness of a sorrowful mind. Whether or not Brahms had read Maler Nolten, he understood that the persona in this poem is psychologically disturbed, and he made her “sick blood” manifest primarily in metrical fluctuations. To see a song published in the early 1870s with triple-meter and duplemeter time signatures side-by-side must have been startling for some, and to hear such deliberate instability is still striking. Where Brahms indicates a prolongational accent on the second beat in a triple-meter measure – and he does so often – the sense of rhythmic surety is undermined all the more; bars with strong downbeats are little or no help in such a context of flux. Both as a means of characterization and as a way of emphasizing the metrical contrast, Brahms does not indicate a single rest in the vocal line of stanza 1, but instead crowds triple- and duple-meter measures one after another without pause (Ex. 3.1). The singer must gasp between phrases in order to take in enough oxygen to live through the stanza, which is, furthermore, marked “Con moto.” Claustrophobic panic 69

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 3.1

Johannes Brahms, Agnes, from the Lieder und Gesänge, op. 59, no. 5 (1873), mm. 1–17.

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The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman does not permit amplitude of phrase structure – and this is, of course, a deliberate compositional decision, not naïveté about singing on Brahms’s part. There are other musical indices of anguish as well. Although the harmonic palette is somewhat restricted, Brahms includes numerous unresolved, uncompleted references to C minor in this G minor lied, even beginning the song with C minor chords easily mistaken for tonic (he clarifies the matter in m. 2). The first instance of heightened plagal harmonies occurs at the words “Wär’ mein Lieb’ nur blieben treu” (If my love had only stayed true), as if the subjunctive – the kingdom of wish – had occasioned this brief allusion to another realm (but it too would be a more tragic key) without ever establishing it fully. At the center of each strophe, Brahms fluctuates between tonic and emphasized subdominant harmonies; just when he seems to be back in tonic again and about to end the strophe, the final word of the stanza, “bangen” (to fear), jolts the music away from G minor, the appoggiatura on the downbeat of m. 12 heightening the accented first syllable of the verb like a small shudder of fear. The hoary cliché that Brahms’s lieder are instrumental in conception is disproven by the plenitude of text-driven details, such as the “schleichendes” variation of the piano figuration for the third verse, especially the offbeat bass pitches in mm. 39–40. Furthermore, Brahms treats the echoes as just that, repeating the music of the first statement of the echoed words literally but with a sudden hush to piano, followed by an immediate return to the forte dynamics regnant elsewhere in stanza 1. The sudden alternation between loud and soft heightens the effect of breathlessness. This Agnes is unlike any other in the nineteenth century, with more energy than the stricken creature other composers would have us hear; she can even begin with a fanfare in the piano and sing the initial acclamation in an almost proclamatory manner. Was Wolf ’s setting perhaps in reaction to Brahms – an “unwriting” of op. 59? In place of the earlier Agnes, metrically awry and harmonically somewhat tame, Wolf devises harmonies whose warping – this is a remarkably sour, ambiguous, shifting pitch-world – tells of encroaching madness, while his rhythmic patterns mimic the monotonous rhythmic rocking of the mentally ill. Throughout the song, but especially from m. 16 onward, Wolf simulates rocking motion in the piano, either in the left-hand part (stanzas 1 and 3) or in both hands (stanzas 2 and 4); the listener who is tempted to rock back and forth in time to this music, especially the slurred figures of the even-numbered stanzas, soon realizes how realistic the simulacrum of this symptom is. The fact that the most obvious rocking pattern begins just after the word “bangen,” as if in response to it, is telling. There is never any cessation of motion in the piano part, no place where the quarter-note tactus does not plod wearily on; this slow, nonstop motion in an unchanging tactus seems a rendering in sound of the combined numbness and restlessness in mental illness. In the novel, Agnes precedes her song with a brief instrumental introduction, and so does Wolf. Before a word is sung, one hears extremity in these strains (the mot juste), all the more intense for being muted; pianissimo and piano dynamics are one way to suggest interiority. Wolf fills the five measures of the introduction (the first of many five-bar phrases to come) with minor ninth intervals (C –D Ü ) in the left hand, the semitone emblematic of lamentation inverted, widened, rising and falling through a range of more than four octaves and obsessively repeated throughout mm. 1–10. One notices the asymmetrical slurring of these minor ninth intervals across the barline and against the indicated meter, the latter 71

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 3.2

Wolf, Agnes, mm. 1–5 Ziemlich langsam, schwermu¨tig

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difficult for the ear to determine, given the numbed, quarter-note tactus and the lack of an initial downbeat in mm. 1, 3, and 5. Above the yawning ninths are appoggiatura “sighing figures” (the mirror image of the bass, descending minor seconds above ascending minor ninths) and sustained tones, completing the dominant ninth chord which is the sole harmony of the introduction. Two pitches in the bass, a quarter-note tactus, a single harmony fragmented and recombined – and yet one hears dissonant abysses opening in the mind, the sinews of reason splitting open (Ex. 3.2). Agnes is afraid and says so; in Wolf ’s setting, she is additionally afraid of the tonic, as if coming to rest on F minor and staying there might somehow mean capitulation to that which she most fears, to abandonment and death. There is very little incidence of tonic harmony in this song, and even where it occurs, it is only in the piano, after Agnes’s words at the end of stanzas 1, 3, and 4; she cannot bring herself to finish the first verse with resolution in the vocal line to the tonic and shudders away just short of the cadential goal. Wolf lifts the first syllable of the verb “ban-[gen]” a minor third higher in mid-measure (m. 15), the small ascent intensified by a crescendo, then sinks down a semitone to end the word on the last and weakest beat of the measure. Where we expect the deferred tonic at the beginning of m. 11, we are indeed given F in the bass but as a secondary dominant ninth, one which unfurls in fragments throughout mm. 11–13, similar to the treatment of the dominant ninth in mm. 6–10. Even where the tonic harmony does appear, there is little sense of quietus; the rocking motion continues in the piano figuration, and the shifting non-tonic pitches (the supertonic, flatted supertonic, and submediant scale degrees) blur any sense of tonic surety and drive the song onward. That this continues to the end is one notable feature of a song whose “Wahrheit bis zur Grausamkeit” (truth to the point of terror) is uncomfortable to confront, devoid of merely pretty melancholy and lacking the compensations of virtuosity – lied-madness is not opera-madness. The final chord of the song seems a demonstration of how to make a tonic harmony on the downbeat, in root position, and with tonic closure in the topmost voice sound un-final by virtue of what precedes it. In the silence after the last chord, one listens for the music to start again, unsure whether this is really the end. Those who know the novel realize that it is not, in fact, the end, that a dénouement in madness and death follows this song. What most darkens and destabilizes the postlude is the alternation between G
and G Ü that one has heard earlier throughout the first and third stanzas. Although the flatted second degree exerts its traditional gravitational pull downward to the tonic, Wolf unsettles the voice-leading at the end in order to refuse the listener any sense of finality; the G Ü sinks as expected to F in the soprano voice, but the bass moves to the fifth scale degree, the 72

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman harmony thus a tonic six-four chord, and the topmost voice moves upward for the next figure rather than staying on the tonic. This tension between different forms of the supertonic first appears in the setting of the first stanza, where Wolf doubles the singer’s B Ü in m. 6 (the first bar of the vocal part) with the lowered second degree G Ü in the piano, creating a passing Neapolitan sixth harmony to darken the sad acclamation of the “Rosenzeit.” G
is reinstated in the next measure, but Wolf then repeats the Neapolitan–to–natural progression even more strongly, framing the two-bar phrase in mm. 9–10 (“Bist du doch gegangen”) with G Ü at the beginning and G
at the close. The fragmentary implied Neapolitan underscores the present tense (“Bist”) on the downbeat, while the natural second degree belongs to the past (“gegangen”) on the weak beat. When G Ü reappears immediately after in m. 11, at the start of the second half of the first stanza (mm. 11–15), it is stronger still, present in every measure but the last. Wolf caught – it would be hard not to – the resentment in the words “sollte mir nicht bangen” and sends the vocal line marching scalewise up the dark length of a Neapolitan triad, “mir nicht” emphasized by triplet quarter-notes (“This should not be happening to me”), “nicht” angrily accented on the last, ordinarily the weakest, beat. Fear (“bangen”), however, cancels out anger and sends her music back to the dominant and to G
(Ex. 3.3). In one sense, the setting of the first stanza is predicated on the tension between these two different forms of the second scale degree and the gathering strength of its darker flatted manifestation. At the end of the song, it is G Ü that has the final say. There are certain details of Wolf ’s “Agnes” that make one wonder whether the composer knew Maler Nolten, since they would seem to suggest knowledge of the larger context. The relationship between the vocal line and the right hand in stanzas 1 and 3 is one such detail: after the piano’s doubling of the voice when the singer first enters in m. 6, the right hand continues to descend in scalewise motion in m. 7, like ground slipping away beneath the maiden’s feet, while the voice branches off from it in contrary motion for the refrain “schnell vorbei.” When the refrain-words are repeated in sequential transposition downward in m. 8, not only is there contrary motion yet again but voice-exchange (F–G–A Ü /A Ü –G–F), and the compound of the two techniques is then reiterated in mm. 9, 13, and 14 of stanza 1. Half of the stanza’s ten bars feature contrary motion between the voice and right hand or contrary motion and voice-exchange combined (and this all recurs in stanza 3). It is perhaps fanciful to hear in this compositional decision the sounding analogue of Mörike’s masks, mirrors, and ghostly doubles, of identities so confounded that Agnes cannot tell them apart, but Wolf is prone to creating just such parallels between textual content and musical device, and it is at least possible that he did so in this instance. Other details of the musical architecture might also suggest the composer’s understanding that Agnes in Maler Nolten struggles to avert tragedy, that she does not succumb to fatalism and “sick blood” without attempting to save herself. Unlike Brahms, Wolf makes of the poet’s first and second stanzas a bipartite musical strophe, the second half spun from the same material as the first but extensively varied (the bipartite strophe is then repeated for stanzas 3 and 4). In this way, he could distinguish the harvesters’ singing from Agnes’s misery and yet filter the invocation of other women’s good fortune through her unhappiness, never absent for a single bar or beat. With the first mention of the harvesters (“Um die Ernte wohlgemut”) in mm. 18–19, Wolf begins shifting to the relative major key of A Ü , 73

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 3.3

Wolf, Agnes, mm. 6–17

− \ Š − −− Ł Ł Ł Ł

6

Ro - sen - zeit! wie

!

Ł ð

Ł

schnell vor - bei,

− −ŁŁ ŁŁ Š − −− ðð \\ Ł Ý −− − ¼ Ł Ł −

gan - gen!

!

− Š − −− ŁŁ Ý −− − ¼ −

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[Ł Ł −Ł ð

\\ Ł Ł Ł ð

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][ Ł

¼

3 −−− Łn − Ł − Ł Ł Š −Ł ð

14

soll - te

!

mir nicht ban

− Š − −− −ŁŁ −Łðý Ł Ł Ý −− − ¼ −Ł Ł Ł −

doch

Ł Ł Ł Ł −−ðð

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du

−ŁŁ ŁŁ ð ð Ł Ł ¼ Ł

Wa¨r’ mein Lieb’ nur

¦ Ł ý Ł
¦ Ł ¦ Ł −ð

bist

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¼

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schnell vor - bei

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10

3
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gen.

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¼

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¼ Ł

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but the movement towards this tonality sticks momentarily at the word “wohlgemut.” Wolf first arrests the harmonic motion on an incomplete seventh chord on C in m. 19, a harmony conspicuously lacking the third degree (E Ü or E
) that would clarify its function. When Agnes repeats “wohlgemut” in m. 20 in tragic emphasis on what is not, after all, hers to enjoy, the first syllable of the word brings back the E
of the dominant in the tonic F minor. She is not “wohl,” and in bitter awareness begins to slip back to the harmonies of stanza 1. But at the second half of the word, E
is respelled enharmonically as the flatted sixth degree (F Ü ) of the relative major, resolving to E Ü as a constituent of A Ü major six-four chords in mm. 21–22 (“Schnitterinnen singen”), the brief assertion of another nearby tonal world confirmed by the secondary dominant at the end of m. 22. It is a conscious act by which Wolf ’s Agnes turns away from wormwood-and-gall melancholy so that she, and we, may briefly hear the harvesters as a harmonic climate of warmth, clarity, and peace. That A Ü major is never firmly established, that six-four chords are associated with longing 74

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman elsewhere in the Mörike songs (as we saw in “Peregrina II”), makes the diatonic brightness of these two measures, their almost total lack of dissonance, a privileged place in this song (Ex. 3.4). If the brightness seems less apposite for the words “Wein’ ich bei der Linde” in stanza 4, one can hear that passage as a recollection of the harvest allotted to others but not to her, a loss for which she weeps. The partial respite from pain does not last long. With her admission of “sick blood,” chromatic tensions return in force, evident first in the barrage of “sighing figures” in the inner voice but eventually permeating everything. What those semitone motives do is sour still more the increasingly chromatic harmonies to which they are attached, beginning with the otherwise diatonic D Ü major triads of m. 23 (the “but, alas” measure which begins the departure from the harvesters’ happy world) and warping still further from there until the musical “blood” is very sick indeed. There is a struggle embedded in this chromaticism: at the parallel spot where the enharmony occurred before (the refrain), we find enharmony again, followed by a quiet battle to win back A Ü major – unsuccessful, but intense. All Agnes can manage is an uncompleted return to A Ü minor; it is the piano which finishes the cadence and then clears away the darkened third and sixth degrees of the minor mode (C Ü , F Ü ) in the interlude (mm. 27–29), returning to A Ü major only in the last half of m. 29. But A Ü major, normalcy, happiness, do not belong here and cannot remain. The music of stanza 1 returns immediately, without pause, in m. 30, and the matter-of-fact way in which the harvesters’ tonal realm simply vanishes is sad. That one can find in “Agnes” the skeleton of folkish simplicity twisted into shapes that are far from simple is Wolf ’s distinctive achievement here. “This,” Wolf could have been saying to Brahms while thumbing his nose, “is what one does with the folklike lied nowadays,” and he might also have wanted to “correct” Brahms’s more robust Agnes, replacing her with a character whose “sick blood” is audible in sick harmonies, voice-leading, form, and rhythm. What he does with the songs of full-blown madness is different – affirmation of Wagner rather than negation of Brahms – and it is to Agnes’s tragic end that we now turn. T H E D E AT H O F AG N E S

Mörike’s novella Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag, several of his stories, and many of his poems have been translated into English,33 but Maler Nolten has not, although it is essential for an understanding of its author. The ending to this “grim story of a quadrangular interaction among three neurotic personalities and a psychopath”34 is filled with songs, all of which Wolf set to music. Knowing their context in the novel adds an extra dimension to one’s experience of the music, and therefore a summary of the final episodes of Maler Nolten seems in order. For a short time after Agnes sings “Rosenzeit! wie schnell vorbei,” a delusory calm prevails, but the interlude is broken by a concatenation of deaths. First, the baron who was like a second father to Theobald suddenly dies, and Agnes reacts to the news of his demise with a numbed muteness she recognizes is pathological. “I see all of you weeping,” she says, “but that isn’t possible for me. Oh Theobald, Father, what is this state I am in? It is as if every other feeling but . . . fiery, painful anxiety is consumed.”35 After the burial, Agnes 75

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 3.4

Wolf, Agnes, mm. 18–29

− Š − −− Ł

18

Um

!

Ł

Ł

die

Ern

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Ł Ł


− Š − −− ¹ Ł ŁŁ Ý −− − Ł − Ł − Š − −− Ł

21

Ł

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te

wohl

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ð

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½

27

lin

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gen.

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mir

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¼

A

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kran - kem ken Blut Blut

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¹

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Ł ŁŁ Ł

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wohl

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Łý

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gen.

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¹


¦ Ł − ŁŁ

-

¹ Ł Ł  Ł

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kran - kem ken Blut, Blut

!

sin

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ge - mut,

Ł

− Š − −− ¹ Ł ŁŁ \\ Ý −− − −Ł Ł − −Ł 24

!

-

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Schnit - te - rin - nen

!


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ach!

mir

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will

nichts mehr

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Ł Ł ge


Ł ŁŁ

¹


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Ł Ł

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76

Ł

Ł

Ł

-

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman begs to have the wedding put off because she cannot overcome the premonition that something unusual is about to happen. When she and Nolten bid each other goodnight, she asks him if it is true that “the woman” – Elisabeth – will never come again, but the gypsy does return soon thereafter to set the seal on an already catastrophic dénouement to the novel.36 Agnes and Theobald, accompanied by Theobald’s younger sister Nannette, depart for the town where they plan to live when they are married. The travellers spend the night at an inn where Theobald meets the eccentric, talkative barber Sigismund Wispel, who gossips about an odd man recently arrived in the town. It soon becomes clear to Theobald that the man is Larkens, who has tried to renounce acting and live a “genuine” life but has not made a success of it and is in a bad way. When Theobald and Larkens encounter one another on the street, Larkens runs away to his lodgings and kills himself by taking poison. A local official, the “Präsident von K*,” arranges for the dead man’s burial and invites the party of Nolten, Agnes, and Nannette to stay at his villa, where the grief-stricken trio is introduced to the nobleman’s talented daughter Margot and the gardener’s blind son Henni. It is here that catastrophe strikes. Mörike fills the final scenes with symbols on symbols, ghostly doubles, and foreshadowings. On a sultry afternoon, Theobald wanders through a neatly tended maze in his host’s garden until he reaches the clearing at its center. There, at the heart of the labyrinth, he reads Larkens’s sonnets “An L.” (to Agnes, also named Luise), which Nolten wrongly believes have to do with Larkens’s earlier love for “a pastor’s daughter,” and the Peregrina cycle. When Agnes comes out to join him, the couple take refuge from a sudden thunderstorm under the canopy of a garden shed. Agnes wants to comfort her betrothed for his grief over Larkens’s death, but Theobald explodes with grief and guilt, confessing his love for the Countess, his suspicions concerning Otto, the love-letters ostensibly from himself to his fiancée but actually written by Larkens, who had loved Agnes from afar. Devastated, Agnes takes to her room and will say nothing to anyone. Mörike, who knew that present misery is magnified by unresolved past distress, tells us that “in an instant, the maiden’s heart began to bleed again from a thousand old wounds.”37 Because no one can sleep in the aftermath of such distress, their host tells a ghost story – diversion for the midnight hour – of a young woman married against her will to a man who dies soon after the wedding. When she meets a man whom she loves, a merchant who is separated from her by business affairs in North America, the affianced couple conduct an occult wedding ceremony long-distance, but the extinguished tapers in her bedchamber tell of the fiancé’s death abroad.38 This inset-tale is itself a ghost of Agnes’s and Nolten’s situation, an echo of Theobald’s first betrothal to Elisabeth and of a second betrothal that will end in death. Just then, the company hears “a strange song” outside, and Nolten recognizes Elisabeth’s voice. Panic-stricken at the thought of what might happen to Agnes, he runs out of the room to look for her, but she has disappeared; when they find her, she is lying unconscious under a willow tree. A shattering scene ensues between Nolten and Elisabeth, who claims Nolten as hers. Rejecting Elisabeth’s wild embraces, the distraught Nolten rushes into the house, and the gypsy, waving a dagger in her fist to keep the others from seizing her, disappears into the night.39 We learn later that she dies on the road, but we are not told how or why. 77

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs In the wake of this catastrophe, Agnes goes mad. At first, she is cataleptic, watched over by members of the household (except for Nolten and Margot, whom Agnes will not tolerate, since Margot represents the kind of female learning which had earlier elicited Agnes’s insecurities). Nolten, near-mad himself from grief, bursts out in a tirade of self-pity, whereupon he is reproved and left alone to recover his equanimity. At this moment, Agnes comes into the room, her hair disheveled, barefoot, and speaks, her mad loquaciousness even more disturbing than her former muteness – ”Good morning, heathen! Good morning, devil!”, she says to Nolten. The details of this scene and those that follow echo nineteenthcentury medical descriptions of insanity, such as that by the “gloomy giant of late Victorian psychiatry,” Henry Maudsley:40 an attack of acute maniacal excitement, with great restlessness, rapid and disconnected but not entirely incoherent conversation, sometimes tending to the erotic or obscene, evidently without abolition of consciousness; [also] laughing, singing, or rhyming, and perverseness of conduct, which is still more or less coherent and seemingly wilful.41

The insane Agnes is unable to tell Nolten, Larkens, and Otto apart and cannot even believe Larkens’s death, insisting that “an empty coffin lies in the grave, with only a pair of lumpen rags inside.” Short visits are the mode in the aristocratic world, she declares mockingly, and leaves; thereafter, sexual treachery and fluid, untrustworthy identities are the leitmotifs of her speeches. “Do you know why Theobald, my beloved, became an actor?”, she asks Henni as they are reading the New Testament together. “For two years, he came to me disguised as cousin Otto . . . I didn’t know him and caused him great sorrow. For that I can never forgive myself for all eternity.”42 She asks Margot the Latin word for “spark,” then raves that she can see not just sparks but little green flames in her lover’s eyes and tells Margot, whom she accuses of being another of Nolten’s lovers, to look for them the next time they make love. “I beg you, tell me, how is it when you kiss? Has anyone noticed,” she asks wildly, “that he has the devil in his body? . . . A beautiful Countess was there first . . . You don’t believe me that he is betrothed to the gypsy? If I wanted to, I could name the place where the promise was made and the sign pronounced over it, but good Christians don’t speak of such things.”43 One evening, Agnes asks for her betrothed and embraces him passionately, but cannot believe that he is truly Nolten: “What is whispering by you? What are you saying? I hear two voices – help! help! you trickster Satan, away! I have been betrayed! Oh, all is over with me! The liar has deceived me as my beloved, as if I were not an honest maiden, as if I had willingly let this horror kiss me. Oh Theobald, if only you were here so that I could tell you everything! You don’t know what the snakes do to make my mind crazed, your poor, abandoned child!”44 When she is calmer, she speaks of her death. “A good end, that is what everyone wants at the close, an easy, gentle death . . . I am like a ship beached on a sandy bank, a ship no one can help . . . when the grass grows over me, that will be the end of it.”45 When Nolten leaves, she removes her engagement ring, saying that her mother has taken it, then confusedly imagines that “he” (Larkens/Nolten) has it in his grave. She knows now, she tells Henni, that the wedding will not take place. “I always thought so,” she says, “now it may end when it will; my maidenhood is secure, I will take it to the grave. Between us, I have always wished thus and in no other way to come to Heaven. But I must have the ring.”46 78

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman Soon after, Nannette, Margot, and the President listen to Henni play the chapel organ while Agnes sings. “It seemed to be old Catholic church music . . . at times the organ predominated and at times the maiden’s voice,” Mörike tells us. The most striking piece, we are told, is a Latin penitential song, “Jesu benigne,” in E major (this is the key of Ludwig Hetsch’s setting published with Maler Nolten).47 Mörike cites one verse, translated into German in a footnote – this is the text of “Seufzer” – and tells the reader that three more verses follow. Henni’s organ postlude to the penitential hymn leads into another song, beginning “Eine Liebe kenn’ ich, die ist treu” (I know one love which is true), later entitled “Wo find’ ich Trost.” These are the last words we hear from Agnes, who disappears the next morning.48 After a day of frantic searching, they find her drowned in the forest well. When Nolten returns to the villa two days later, old before his time, glassy-eyed and mute, the President attempts to console him, saying that those selected by Fate for the heaviest sorrows are destined for an especially godly hereafter. Nolten rejects such consolation: life and death are indecipherable riddles, he declares, and he wants no more of “yesterday and today and tomorrow.” The night before Agnes’s burial, a storm arises, and Nolten is awakened at midnight by organ music. When he goes to the old chapel, he finds Henni and the gardener and calls for a candle; not a minute later, father and son hear a loud cry, then a fall, and find Nolten stretched out lifeless at the open door. The next day, blind Henni tells of seeing (how, he cannot say) Elisabeth’s and Nolten’s ghosts locked in a passionate embrace. The piercing glance Nolten’s ghost casts on the living youth is full of misery; the incorporeal lips move, but without distinguishable words.49 Compressed in this fashion, the end of Mörike’s novel sounds very grand-Guignol, complete with ghosts, a Fury-figure, and Jacobean heaps of dead, a confabulation too ghoulishly Baroque to take seriously. But what is mythified here was, is, real. Mörike had seen society’s rejection of women on the sexual margins (he had participated in it), and he knew of religious sublimation of sexuality (his sister Luise). In the real world of Vormärz Germany, women were afraid of marriage and abandoned by men. With this novel, Mörike tried to justify his rejection of Maria Meyer by casting erotic passion as a destructive force, at all times; one questions the totality of the characterization, but no one could deny that Eros can kill. Mörike knew from his own experience the failure of belief in God and the anguish of such failure; religion is no comfort for erotic misery in Maler Nolten, and the afterlife glimpsed at the end has nothing to do with Christianity. Behind the literary tropes, the gypsies and ghosts and haunted chapels, are human realities. O F S I G H S, S I N, A N D Q U E S T I O N S : T WO M A D S O N G S

In her last days, Agnes tries (and fails) to find comfort in religion, and therefore her mad songs are cut from religious cloth. “Seufzer” and “Wo find’ ich Trost” are fashioned entirely or in part from Lutheran hymnody, but what is hymned here is the inability to believe and the failure to find consolation for earthly distress in heavenly remedies. The sources are truncated at the point of despair. The text of “Seufzer” has an interesting genesis.50 In a letter to his brother Karl of 22 February 1832, Mörike tells of finding – when, he does not say – a book of devotional 79

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs songs at a village inn somewhere between Nürtingen and Tübingen.51 “The expression of religious sorrow is inimitably great, moving in its simplicity and as if made for musical composition,” he writes, and then begs his brother for a setting of the poem. “Seek out and strike the holiest strings of your soul and compose with that deep fire in which Mozart set down his Requiem,” he commands Karl (an impossibility, given his brother’s musical limitations).52 Agnes is only hours from her end when she sings this song, and Mörike wanted death-music of the highest quality: Jesu benigne! A cujus igne Opto flagrare Et Te amare; – Cur non flagravi? Cur non amavi Te, Jesu Christe? – O frigus triste!

Kind Jesus, in Whose flame I wish to burn, and to love You, why have I not burned? Why have I not loved You, Jesus Christ? Oh, sad coldness!

In the novel, Agnes sings the verse in the original Latin, and Mörike, for the sake of readers with no knowledge of ancient languages, provides a translation-paraphrase in German in a footnote. A revised version of that paraphrase with the title “Seufzer” subsequently appears in the poetic anthologies, where the Latin stanza is printed before the German text and identified only as an “old song” (“Altes Lied”).53 However, in virtually all editions of Wolf ’s songs and many twentieth-century editions of Mörike’s poetry, the Latin strophe is identified as coming from the Passion hymn “Crux fidelis” by the Merovingian poet Venantius Fortunatus (ca. 540 – ca. 600), a somewhat perplexing misattribution. Mörike did indeed translate two stanzas from Fortunatus’s Easter hymn “Pange lingua,” the translation being entitled “Crux fidelis” because it is with those words that the first of Mörike’s two stanzas (first published in the Nachlaß54) begins, but “Jesu benigne” is not from that famous poem. The first edition of the Mörike songs in 1889 mystifyingly attributes the Latin to Fortunatus, and the error has appeared over and over again thereafter.55 Nine years after Maler Nolten, Mörike pointed the way to some of the actual sources for this text. On 22 February 1841, he wrote to Wilhelm Hartlaub about his discovery of Johann Anastasius Freylinghausen’s (1670–1739) Geistreiches Gesang-Buch. Den Kern Alter und Neuer Lieder, Wie auch die Noten der unbekannten Melodeyen und dazugehörige nützliche Register in sich haltend (Spiritual Songbook, Containing Essential Old and New Songs, also the Notes of Unfamiliar Melodies and a Useful Table of Contents) – one of the most important Pietist hymnals – in an edition from the 1730s.56 Scattered amidst the 1158 pages (impressed by its encyclopedic bulk, he tells Hartlaub how long the book is) were a dozen or so Latin hymns, including “Jesu benigne.”57 Mörike did not, it seems clear, find the hymn originally in Freylinghausen, but since he either could not remember the author, compiler, provenance, and title of the book or else deliberately suppressed mention of it, one is grateful for the later naming of a work that makes it possible to trace the poem’s origins in part and to correct the misattribution to Fortunatus. Freylinghausen’s source for “Jesu benigne” was a small anthology entitled Neuer Helicon mit seinen Neun Musen, Das ist: Geistliche Sitten-Lieder von Erkäntnus der wahren 80

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman Glückseligkeit und der Unglückseligkeit falscher Güter (New Helicon with its Nine Muses, That Is: Spiritual Songs of Piety about the Knowledge of True Happiness and the Unhappiness of False Boons) of 1684 by a scholar-poet named Christian Freiherr Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–89). The collection includes both newly written Pietist hymns and translations of Latin devotional poems by earlier poets, “Jesu benigne” (and Fortunatus’s “Pange lingua”) among the latter. Knorr von Rosenroth cites the Latin text, translates the poem into German, and gives the melody to which the German version should be sung, but identifies the original only as “Aus dem Lateinischen” (From the Latin). Whose Latin, he does not say and may not have known.58 Mörike was passionately drawn to the first verse but tells Hartlaub that he found stanzas 2–4 poetically inferior. The Latin is indeed idiosyncratic: Jesu benigne Gentle Jesus (stanzas 2–4 of 4, all four in the meter known as Adonics) 2. Pelle algorem / et da amorem, / te Drive away the cold and give love, I shall love you with deperibo, / et non peribo. / Ignibus abandon and I shall not be lost. I shall glow with fiery gliscam, / ne persentiscam / Dei ardor, that I may not come to know the ultimate pyre amantis, / rogos damnantis. of God who condemns although He loves. 3. Sunt causae mille, / cur velit ille / semper amari, / semper laudari, / Primus amavit, / et viam stravit / ad se amandum, / ad se laudandum.

There are a thousand reasons why He wishes always to be loved, always to be praised. He loved us first and fashioned the way for us to love Him, for us to praise Him.

4. Dum me creavit, / primus amavit, / dum me redemit, / poenis exemit, / Exemplum Dei / amantis mei / sequar amando, / cor dedicando.

When He created me, He loved me first; when he redeemed me, He freed me from torment. The model of God who loves me, I shall follow by loving, by dedicating my heart.

Mörike makes of the first stanza a self-sufficient poem, enclosed in a bell jar of claustrophobic despair. The poetic persona of the complete hymn can envision a future in which the agony at the beginning will be healed and the suffering mortal who sings these words reunited with God, but that is no longer possible for the persona of Mörike’s poem. If Mörike embarked on this translation in order to include it in the novel, the second, third, and fourth stanzas would not have been appropriate for Agnes’s situation at the end, even if he had liked them as poetry, but there might also have been an element of elective affinity in singling out only the first verse. Remembering Mörike’s inability to reassure his dying sister that he loved Christ wholeheartedly, one can imagine that he might have seen his own face in the mirror of this poem. One doubts Mörike ever expended as much energy on his sermons as he did on the translation of these eight brief lines. In the 1832 letter to his brother, he was particularly concerned about the cry “O frigus triste!”, whose rending quality – ”cutting through flesh and bone” – he wished to preserve in the German, and therefore he tinkered obsessively with the ending en route to Wolf ’s text (“O Reueschmerzen!”, “Falschheit im Herzen! / O Höllenschmerzen!” and “War Eis im Herzen / O Höllenschmerzen” are among the earlier alternatives). The statement in Latin, “I have not burned, I have not loved,” becomes in German the gentler failure to tend, to foster, and it is tempting to see the alteration not 81

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs merely as a search for rhyming couplets (pflegen, hegen) but also as psychologically driven: Seufzer Dein Liebesfeuer, Ach Herr, wie teuer Wollt’ ich es hegen, Wollt’ ich es pflegen! Hab’s nicht geheget Und nicht gepfleget, Bin tot im Herzen – O Höllenschmerzen!59

Sigh Thy fire of love, O Lord, how dearly I would foster it, would tend it! I have not fostered it, have not tended it. I am dead in my heart – oh, pains of hell!

One notes the invocations of God’s fire at the beginning and hellfire at the end, bracketing the strophe on either side, and the stress in each line of iambic dimeters on the first accented syllable. Furthermore, every line ends with an unaccented syllable, the rhythmic effect both litany-like and halting, gasping, with a stop imposed after each line (a rhythmic effect lost in musical setting). “I hope that I haven’t, by all this vacillating, deprived the thing of its first fresh fragrance . . . recite the Latin original aloud for a couple of hours, or a night [!], and the bloom will be restored,” Mörike tells his brother, stipulating that he wants a setting for only one, or at the most, two voices. For Wolfians, “Seufzer” is one of this composer’s ne plus ultra creations. There is, for the faithful, no greater torment than to perceive oneself deficient in love for Christ and hence as irreparably sinful; to tell of such hell, Bach filled his cantatas and Passions with writhing chromaticism, while Wagner’s Amfortas and Parsifal went to the ends of the tonal earth. In their wake, Wolf devises the most deep-dyed chromaticism in his oeuvre for this song about impossibility, about the simultaneous desire and inability to love God. The poetic persona’s enclosure in a torment only partially expressible is something Wolf conveys by encasing the texted body of the song in lengthy piano passages: an eightmeasure introduction and seven-measure postlude frame a mere sixteen measures of texted lied. That texted interior is, despite a few gasping rests in the vocal line, virtually nonstop, as if this slow, sustained cry of agony (the langsam tempo intensifies the effect of the pervasive chromaticism by prolonging it) were being compelled from the singer, the stifling airlessness of this lied one of its most powerful aspects. The implication is that inner agony inflicts pain before the poetic persona can find words for it and that the serpent continues to gnaw when the words cease. Indeed, greater pain follows the withdrawal of language, as if intensified by admission in words. But most of the claustrophobia comes from the tonal language, tortured from beginning to end. If it is characteristic of Wolf to delay arrival at the tonic, he does so more intensively here than anywhere else in his oeuvre, and the denial of tonal terra firma in this context is analogous to the inability to love God; the persona is thus deprived of the “feste Burg” (mighty fortress) that Lutheran theology dictated could only be found in God. From the start, one wonders, “What hell is this? Where are we?” Looking at the key signature and the final chord, one deduces a tonal center on E, but this is remarkably difficult, indeed impossible, to hear at the beginning. The D  “leading tone” on the first beat moves, appoggiatura-like, upwards to E, but tonal clarity is denied by the left-hand motion to F
, which 82

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman then passes through E to E Ü in m. 2 while the right hand moves up to F
: a two-bar voice exchange, rhythmically disjunct to increase the already considerable tension, on the pitches D  /E Ü , E, and F
. Ascending motion in the right hand is, we see, mirrored askew by descending motion in the left hand. We are told from the outset that this is a world of intervallic mirrors and transformations, where nothing is secure and yet everything derives from the same small cell. Wolfians will hear in “Seufzer” a foreshadowing of Wolf ’s Michelangelo song “Alles endet, was entstehet” of March 1897; in fact, the rising, then falling semitones of the topmost voice in the piano in mm. 9–10 (B–C–E–D  ) bear an uncanny resemblance to the “cambiata-figure” reiterated and transformed throughout “Alles endet.”60 Both poems hail from a Hell of one sort or another, and both songs trap the listener in claustrophobic chromaticism, the queasiness akin. Somewhat fancifully, one can hear the “push” towards E in m. 1 – one notes the crescendo/forte accent to the flatted II7 with E in the soprano – as the goal of the poetic persona’s desire, but that desire is frustrated, and the composer embarks on a search for some sort of tonal surety. The medieval origins of the text might well have impelled the hints of Phrygian modality one finds from the beginning, especially evident in the emphasis on C, the subfinalis in Phrygian mode, and on F
, the semitone relationship between the finalis and the second scale degree one of the most distinctive features of that mode. (Wolf, one remembers, studied late Beethoven assiduously in his youth – more encouragement to mix modal references into his tonal palette.) Did this composer know that Phrygian mode was associated in the ancient Greek ethos of music with the wildest grief? The simultaneity which finally materializes out of the shifting chromatic voice-leading by the end of mm. 2 and 4 could be described as a dominant seventh of B Ü (were there only sufficient context to clarify the matter), a tritone away from where the key signature and the initial figure in the soprano voice indicate we should or might be. The sustained soprano–bass dissonances, especially the major seventh F–E in mm. 1 and 3, tell of pain, and the progression grinds briefly to a halt in irresolution and confusion. When the same initial figure is repeated, it comes to the same clouded conclusion: this is not the way out of the impasse. In the second half of the introduction (mm. 5–8), the musical protagonist tries other means – sequential motion – to arrive at some sure place to be, the tension rising with the sequences. The omnipresent linear chromaticism is marshaled into an inexorable pattern of one-measure units ascending by semitones; if there is no solid ground, the shape-shifting world is nonetheless rigidly organized. Anguish has its own laws. Ironically, the intervallic fifth relationship between the E Ü in the bass with which m. 4 ends and the A Ü in the bass at the beginning of m. 5 would seem to indicate some sort of tonal definition, but that is not what follows. The voice-leading in mm. 5, 6, and 7, or the first three units of the sequence, culminates each time in the formation of an augmented triad at the end of the measure, emphasized still more by the fourth-beat accents – an electric cattle-prod to jar the motion further upward to the next chromatic link in the sequence (D–E Ü –E
). For tonal processes to be twisted as they are in “Seufzer,” they must still be dimly apparent; here, augmented triads retain their traditional connotation as dissonances created by passing motion in the voice-leading, engines to drive the music forward and indices of great tension. 83

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Wolf conceived the introduction as the poetic protagonist thinking anguished thoughts before he or she finds ordered words for them and therefore brings back the introduction in the texted body of the song . . . but only after the first two vocal phrases in mm. 9–12 at the words “Dein Liebesfeuer, / ach Herr! wie teuer . . .,” the statement that God’s love is an incomparable treasure. Because the persona dwells in the introduction on the inner agony caused by spiritual incapacity, the music of such painful thoughts recurs when the failure of belief is made explicit (“Wollt’ ich es hegen, wollt’ ich es pflegen, hab’s nicht geheget”). For the invocation of God’s “Liebesfeuer,” Wolf devises musical symbolism that is truly chilling. Looking at the bass line of the harmonic progression in mm. 9–10, repeated almost literally in mm. 11–12 (C–F  –A  –B, leading by continued chromatic ascent to C and a restatement of the same figure, from thence to a restatement of mm. 1–4 in the piano), one realizes both that the bass figure is circular and that it is a variation of the bass pitches in mm. 1–2 (C–F–E–E Ü ). The perfect fifth interval C–F is now the tritone C–F  , followed by a transposed inversion of the three-note chromatic figure; where before Wolf descends chromatically from the second pitch of the intervallic perfect fifth (F–E–E Ü ), he now ascends chromatically back to the first pitch (A  –B–C). The music with which the tortured persona tells of God’s “Liebesfeuer” is a warped mirror image of the original cell-figure. He can see the fires of divine love, can name it, knows God is there but on the other side of a mirrored boundary he cannot cross. (Furthermore, when we hear the conjunct, diatonic ^ in the vocal line of mm. 9–10, we hear another foreshscalewise descent from 5^ to 2 adowing of “Alles endet,” whose vocal line begins similarly.) The mirroring, inversions, and turning, twisting transformations of an intervallic cell dominated by the semitones so often associated with lamentation in Western music – or, closer to home, a Wagnerian hell of desire – are precisely mapped substitutes for the loss of tonal surety. Dante, one remembers, gave Hell a geography as rigorous as that of Heaven (Ex. 3.5). When the introduction returns, it is changed, at first slightly, then more radically. The rhythmic profile of mm. 1–4 is varied in mm. 13–16 such that the second simultaneity occurs on the third beat of the measure rather than the second beat, an alteration probably made in order that Wolf might first place the crucial verb “wollt’” each time on the accented fourth beat of the preceding measure and then sustain it across the barline, while the word “ich” is subsequently placed on the second beat. As the piano continues to sustain the downbeat harmony, “I” can sound more starkly on the weak beat, underscoring the tortured awareness of personal failure. From the same intervals, the same pitches of the basic figure, Wolf constructs a vocal line that both grows from and grates against the simultaneities in the piano; for example, just where one expects the repeated vocal phrase in m. 12 to continue downwards, the leap of a fifth upwards at the adjective “teuer” invests the word with breathtaking urgency. The fervency of the desire to tend, to foster, is apparent when the singer continues to speak in fifths and tritones (the C–F at the verbs “hegen” and “pflegen” echo the bass in the preceding measure), especially given the dotted rhythms that make the fall to the flatted second heavier and wearier. When the second half of the introduction (mm. 5–8) recurs in the texted body of the song, there is a crescendo of alterations to match the crescendo of rising anguish, the chromatic sequence extended to six measures rather than the original four. Although the vocal line doubles various chord tones in the piano, one finds the vocal pitches C , F  , and 84

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman Ex. 3.5

Wolf, Seufzer, mm. 1–16 Langsam und schmerzlich

!

² ðý Š  ²² ŁŁŁ ðð ýý [ Ł Ý ²  Ł ¦ð ¦ ðm 5

!

ŁŁ ýýý ¦¦ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ Ł  \ −ð ý −ð ý

Ł Ł

ŁŁ ¹ Ł  Ł
¹ Ł

rit.

Ł ð ý −ð ý Š ¦ −Ł ðý −ð ý ² Ł ðý ¦ ð ý ¦Ł −Ł ¦ Ł Ł −ð ý ¦ Ł −ð ý ²Ł ¦ðý n n n \\ cresc. dim. ݲ −Ł ¦ Ł ð −Ł ¦ Ł −ð Ł −Ł ¦ ð − Ł ¦Ł ð ¦ ð − − ð Ł −Ł ¦ Ł Ł 9 ² (sehr innig) Ł Ł Ł Ł ¼ Ł Ł ¹ ð Š Ł ð  ² Š ¦ ðð ¦ð \\ ݲ ð ð ² Š ²Ł

13

!

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²

Dein Lie

!

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-

bes - feu - er,

ðð ð

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ach

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he

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¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ¦Ł Ł 

Herr!

wie

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wollt’

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Ł ¹ ð ð Ł

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¼ ŁŁ ¹ Ł  Ł
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D  spelled otherwise in the piano, D Ü , G Ü , and E Ü . While the conflicting spellings are justified by what precedes them or by the direction of the voice-leading (for example, the initial vocal pitches in m. 17, C  and F  , are outgrowths of the terminal vocal pitches in the preceding phrase, C and F
, while the piano duplicates the flatted pitches of m. 5), it is also the case that the visual tension between the piano and voice – which sound conjoined – contributes in an ineffable way to the performers’ understanding of the tensions rending the persona’s soul. Beyond enharmony, the sequence itself is changed. In the introduction, each subsequent one-measure unit after the establishment of the initial unit in m. 5 begins with the bass line retreating downward a half-step while the right hand retains, albeit in 85

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs enharmonic respelling, the chord tones with which the previous measure ended; hence, each measure begins with consonance – given Wolf ’s association of second-inversion triads with longing in Mörike’s poems, it is significant that the consonances are six-four chords each time – and leads to dissonance. But for the anguished admission of failure in mm. 17–22, Wolf only allows consonance at the beginning of each two-bar unit, the augmented triadic dissonances more prominent than ever. Failure of faith leads to Hell, and Hell, in keeping with the warped mirrors of this song, is a variation of “Dein Liebesfeuer.” As in mm. 9–12, the progression leads from “VI” to a culmination on “V” (one only discerns functions through a glass darkly), but now it moves through the Phrygian flatted second rather than F  . We are, in a sense, returned to the beginning, to m. 1, for this culminating cry of pain: the sequence rises to D  for the dead heart (the enharmonic E Ü of “todt”), leading to the pains of love (mm. 22–23) which begin on E in the topmost voice as the “Liebesfeuer-chorale” returns. There are times when the major mode is more tragic than the minor, consonance more powerful than dissonance; here, “Höllenschmerzen” blazes forth fortissimo on C major (the voice adds the seventh) – it is as if all comes clear at this moment – and F major chords. Wolf understood that there is no end in sight for the “pains of hell,” that a closed ending for the texted body of the song would not do. Chromatic miasma, lack of resolution, deceptive motion – this is how the words “end,” or rather, fail to end. Instead, a “dominant” harmony once again does not proceed to tonic, but moves deceptively back to C in the bass for the beginning of the postlude, and it is a register of deeper despair as the lied shades from words to wordlessness that one perceives these deceptive motions as stronger than before (Ex. 3.6). Throughout “Seufzer,” Wolf makes pervasive chromaticism and enharmony symbolic of the confrontation with something Janus-faced: “Liebesfeuer” and “Höllenschmerzen” are paradoxically both different and the same. That there is no tonal repose in this song is only right, but how is one to end the setting of a poem whose last words are a recognition of unending torment? Wolf was not so much a radical that he would abjure the period at the end of the sentence; it was more in character for him to extend the poetic scenario in the postlude, and he does so again here, but not by repeating the introduction. In this linear hell in which everything changes and yet everything remains the same, the introduction is the wordless quest for a name to put to agony, the body of the song is its naming, and the postlude is its aftermath. When the act of naming is done, the persona continues to pray, but wordlessly. The piano in mm. 25–26 repeats “Thy Love, Thy Love,” that is, the voice-leading and harmonies of “Dein Liebes-[feuer]” from m. 9 twice in what one can only construe as an appeal to that love. In Wolf ’s script, the appeal increases in fervency, then lapses into despair – but not without a struggle. The first one-bar statement of the “Liebe”-figure is marked by the flatted second degree of “Höllenschmerzen,” while the più forte second statement replaces F
with F  . The third statement begins more strongly still, but it is a long descent to defeat, one in which the modal pitches F  / F
, C  / C
battle it out to the cadence. One can hear the sforzando replacement of C
with hugely accented C s in mid-measure of m. 29 as an attempt to utter a proper plagal cadence, an “Amen” to divine love, but the attempt collapses immediately. C  sinks to C
, then to the Phrygian flatted II in root position for the first 86

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman Ex. 3.6

Wolf, Seufzer, mm. 17–31

² \ Š ²Ł

17

Hab’s

!

² Š ¦ −Ł ðý ¦Ł ݲ −Ł −Ł 19 20 ² Š Ł

²ð

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−ð ý −ð ý

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−ð

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o

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−ð

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bin

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im

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¦ ðð ¦ð ð ð 28

len -

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ðý ðý

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ŁŁ ŁŁŁ Ł [[ ðð ð

Ł ð ð ð ¦ Ł Ł ð ð ð ²Ł ¦Ł Ł ð ²Ł Ł ð piu` [ [ ð ð ðð ðð ðð ðð ð ð n ðÐŁ ¦¦ ðð ² ð Ł Ł Ł ^[ n ðÐ ²ð Ð

87

¦ ÐŁ Ł ð Ð \ ¦ Łð Ł ¦¦ ððð ð

ðð ðð

½

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Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs and only time, and finally to E minor, also for the first and only time. From this hell, there is no exit. There is surcease elsewhere . . . but only – as we shall see – in Wolf, not in Mörike. Moreover, Mörike enchains the texts of “Seufzer” and “Wo find’ ich Trost?” in Maler Nolten and places them side by side in the Ausgabe letzter Hand (“Seufzer” dated 1832 and “Wo find’ ich Trost?” “circa 1827”), but Wolf separates them. Wo find’ ich Trost? Eine Liebe kenn’ ich, die ist treu, War getreu, solang’ ich sie gefunden, Hat mit tiefem Seufzer immer neu, Stets versöhnlich, sich mit mir verbunden.

Where can I find solace? One love I know that is faithful, was faithful ever since I found it, that with deep sighs ever renewed, forever forgiving, has bound itself to me.

Welcher einst mit himmlischem Gedulden Bitter bittern Todestropfen trank, Hing am Kreuz und büßte mein Verschulden, Bis es in ein Meer von Gnade sank.

It is He Who with heavenly patience bitterly drank death’s bitter droplets, hung on the Cross and atoned for my fault until it sank into a sea of grace.

Und was ist’s nun, daß ich traurig bin, Daß ich angstvoll mich am Boden winde? Frage: “Hüter, ist die Nacht bald hin?” Und: “was rettet mich von Tod und Sünde?”

And why is it that I am now sad, that I writhe in anguish on the floor? I ask: “Watchman, will the night soon be over?” and: “What will save me from death and sin?”

Arges Herze! ja gesteh es nur, Du hast wieder böse Lust empfangen; Frommer Liebe, frommer Treue Spur, Ach, das ist auf lange nun vergangen.

Wicked heart! confess it truly: you have once again conceived wicked pleasure; pious love, pious fidelity’s trace – alas, that is now long vanished.

Ja, das ist’s auch, daß ich traurig bin, Daß ich angstvoll mich am Boden winde! Hüter, Hüter, ist die Nacht bald hin? Und was rettet mich von Tod und Sünde?61

Yes, that is why I am sad, why I writhe on the floor in anguish! Watchman, watchman, is the night soon over? And what will save me from death and sin?

There is a close relationship between “Gebet” (whose second stanza appears in Maler Nolten as one of the mad Agnes’s prayers – see chap. 5) and “Wo find’ ich Trost”: these personae attempt to pray as true believers, marshalling Scripture and theology to the desire for faith, but fail in the attempt. 62 In the first two stanzas of “Wo find’ ich Trost,” one finds commonplace Christian themes – the assertion of Christ’s love as an eternal verity and the sinner’s consciousness of sin – but Mörike hints from the start that the sins troubling this persona are carnal and that Christ’s love provides no reassurance. The poem is in trochaic pentameters, the length of the lines and the first-beat stresses already telling of heaviness, while the initial phrase should be a red flag to the reader, its syntax convoluted and its poetic rhythms arranged such that we understand Love to exist only in the singular: “One love I know that is true,” the persona says, implying that all other love is false. Wolf took note and adjusted the musical prosody accordingly: “Ei-[ne]” is placed on an offbeat, the composer avoiding a blatant stress on the article but nevertheless prolonging its accented syllable slightly and echoing the piano’s pitch immediately preceding on the downbeat. The emphasis is subtle, but it is there. Only in the second stanza is the faithful love hymned in the first stanza identified with Christ, who “hung on the Cross and redeemed my sin” but is not named directly; “Welcher einst,” we see, not “Jesus Christus,” and the omission suggests that the persona does not 88

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman feel worthy of speaking His name. When Mörike begins stanza 3 with the word “Und,” stressed both by the trochaic accent on the first syllable and by the alliteration in the words “Und was ist’s nun,” he emphasizes the connection between knowledge of Christ’s love and the keener awareness that this is no use in present misery, a “now” in which religious teachings only compound anguish whose physicality is unbearable. “Böse Lust” (“wicked pleasure,” or sexual sensations) is the cause, we learn in stanza 4, and Mörike implies a poetic kinship between the interlacings of sexual congress, the Satan-serpent of original sin winding on the ground, and the writhings of someone in torment. Unable to take any comfort in the thought of Christ’s love, the persona culls desperate appeals for God’s aid from the Bible and from hymnody, the borrowings distilled to the bone. In Luther’s translation of Isaiah 21: 11–12, one finds the immense cry: 11. Man rufft zu mir aus Seir: Hüter, ist die nacht schier hin? Hüter ist die nacht schier hin? 12. Der hüter aber sprach: Wenn der morgen schon kommt, so wird es doch nacht seyn. Wenn ihr schon fraget: so werdet ihr doch wieder kommen, und wieder fragen.63 (They cry to me from Seir: Watchman, is the night almost over? But the watchman said: As the morning comes, so will it be night. As you already asked, so will you come again and ask again.)

The watchman’s invocation of repeated nights of anguish and repeated cries of desperation lurks just behind Mörike’s truncated quotation, haunting it. Mörike substitutes the word “bald” (soon) for Luther’s “schier” (almost), and the small alteration perhaps tells yet again of Goethe’s impress on Mörike. At the end of “Wandrers Nachtlied II,” Goethe writes “Warte nur, balde, / Ruhest du auch” (Only wait, soon you too will rest), words which rank among the most famous expressions of the longing for surcease in the German language. Agnes too longs for “Ruh’,” more desperately and with less hope than Goethe’s wanderer. The chiming -a vowels of “bald” and “Nacht” are more sonorous than Luther’s “Nacht schier hin,” and Mörike may have changed the Biblical wording for that reason, but it is at least possible to speculate that a trace-element of Goethe is to be found in this poem. The cry from Isaiah reappears in various Lutheran hymns, including one beginning “Hüter, wird die Nacht der Sünden / Nicht verschwinden?” (Watchman, will the night of sin never vanish?) by the late seventeenth-century Pietist poet Christian Friedrich Richter (1676–1711):64 Hüter, wird die Nacht der Sünden (stanzas 1 and 7) Hüter, wird die Nacht der Sünden Nicht verschwinden? Hüter ist die Nacht schier hin? Wird die Finsternis der Sinnen Bald zerrinnen, Darein ich verwickelt bin? ...... Das Vernunftlicht kann das Leben Mir nicht geben; Jesus und sein heller Schein, Jesus muß das Herz anblicken Und erquicken, Jesus muß die Sonne sein. 65

Watchman, will the night of sins Watchman, will the night of sins never vanish? Watchman, is the night almost over? Will the darkness of the mind in which I am entangled soon tear asunder? ...... The light of reason cannot give me life; Jesus and His bright light, Jesus must look into the heart and revive it, Jesus must be the sun.

89

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Jesus is the Sun who banishes the darkness of sin if the sinner will only cry out to God the Night Watchman for help and renounce rationalism for faith. The emphatic reiteration of “muß [must] . . . muß,” the images of light in the final stanzas, and the lightness of the second and fifth lines in dimeters – they almost dance – convince us of the hymn-singer’s surety of faith; the hymn is a tunnel which begins in the dark and emerges to bright light at the end. But Mörike’s persona cannot muster such faith. There is neither light nor lightness in the nocturnal world of “Wo find’ ich Trost,” and no rescue. Lutherans in Mörike’s day who read his poem did so against the backdrop of hymns like this one and would have noticed the absence of any saving grace the persona could trust. The cry at the end, “What will save me from death and sin?” (“what,” not “who” one notices), is also paraphrased from Scripture. In the seventh chapter of his epistle to the Romans, Paul laments the sins of the flesh: Romans 7: 5 – Denn da wir im fleisch waren: da waren die sündlichen lüste, welche durchs gesetz sich erregten, kräftig in unsern gliedern, dem tode frucht zu bringen. 7: 18–19 – Denn ich weiß, daß in mir, das ist, in meinem fleisch, wohnet nichts gutes . . . Denn das gute, das ich will, das thue ich nicht: sondern das böse, das ich nicht will, das thue ich. 7: 24 – Ich elender mensch, wer wird mich erlösen von dem leibe diese todes?66 (Because we were of flesh, there were sinful pleasures which, against the commandments, were strongly aroused in our members, bringing death to fruition. For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwells nothing good . . . For the good that I wish to do, that I do not, but the evil that I do not wish, that I do. . . Miserable man that I am, who will save me from this bodily death?)

This hatred of fleshly desires is precisely what afflicts Mörike’s persona. The multiplication of “fromme . . . fromme” (pious), hammering home the dichotomy between agape and eros in the persona’s world, is cheek-by-jowl with the multiplication of “bitter bittern” and the percussive -t’s and -tr’s of “Todestropfen trank,” the language emphatic, apocalyptic, throughout. The entire ocean of Christ’s mercy is not sufficient to outweigh the persona’s sense of sinfulness; in Maler Nolten, the invocation of sin sinking into a sea of grace is in tragic-ironic counterpoint to Agnes’s subsequent suicide by drowning. One of the most significant details of “Wo find’ ich Trost?” is the different punctuation of the two Biblical questions in the last half of stanzas 3 and 5. In stanza 3, Mörike uses colons both to indicate that the words which follow are borrowed and as an echo of Luther’s punctuation in Isaiah 21: 12, “Wenn ihr schon fraget: so werdet ihr doch wieder kommen.” “Frage” too is a stark abbreviation, the indication of self (“ich”) omitted and the act of questioning emphasized by placement at the start of the line. But in Mörike’s final stanza, the word “Frage” and the colons disappear, the verb of questioning replaced by an additional cry to the “Hüter” (the watchman, unresponsive to the first plea, must now be called twice), while the connective “und” at the beginning of the last line merges seamlessly with the plea for rescue. No longer are the questions presented as quotations; rather, the speaker has taken them unto herself, made them hers. Perhaps when he read this poem, Wolf saw something analogous to a formal principle in tonal music: that literal repetition of a previous block of music is both recognized as repetition and yet heard in some way differently because of what has preceded it. This poem traces a mental journey from the statement of religious convictions to the recognition that they provide no comfort and from there to anguish; it is the reverse of the progression in 90

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman Richter’s hymn. Mörike’s persona answers the questions of stanza 3 in stanza 4 and the first half of stanza 5 (“Ja, das ist’s auch”) and then repeats the questions, no longer Biblical but personal. Now we hear them differently, several shades darker, because of the abjuration of piety just before. If “fromme Liebe, fromme Treue” are gone, who indeed can save the persona from death and sin? Wolf ’s structure, with its unusual block-sectional repetitions, is crafted to the poetic content: the music of the introduction and stanza 1 provides the musical material for the rest of the setting in a design one might graph as A B C B C (keeping in mind that B and C are actually variations on A), each section a setting of one stanza. One would expect any composer to take Mörike’s cue to repeat the music of stanza 3 for stanza 5, but Wolf also does likewise for stanzas 2 and 4, explicitly linking Christ’s death agonies on the Cross and the poetic persona’s “böse Lust.” Christ redeems human sin; original sin is sexual; “mein Verschulden” is sexual as well. For Agnes in Maler Nolten, sexual flesh is a Cross to which she is helplessly bound, and the opposition between piety and sexual desire could not be more acutely limned than it is here – except in Parsifal. For a Wagnerite as passionate as Wolf, Mörike’s poem was guaranteed to evoke reminiscences of Wagner’s last opera. The desire for purity brought to defeat by “böse Lust” is a common thread between the giant opera and the small song; Amfortas uses those same words in his memories of the “Wonnegarten” (garden of rapture) where he was pierced in the groin by the same spear with which Longinus wounded Christ’s side and which Klingsor has wrested from Amfortas’s keeping: Die Wüste schuf er [Klingsor] sich zum Wonnegarten, d’rin wachsen teuflisch holde Frauen; dort will des Grales Ritter er erwarten zu böser Lust und Höllengrauen.

He transformed the desert into a garden of wonders in which grew devilishly beautiful women; there he awaits the Grail knights, tempting them to evil pleasure and hellish torments.

There have been few figures in the history of opera as obsessed with the purity of renunciation as Wagner, who had a “Klingsor-like propensity for denying sexuality and, at the same time . . . conjuring up a hell of wanton pleasure.”67 Parsifal and Agnes are even similar in that sexual guilt is something they know more through psychological apprehension than through their actual limited physical experience; Kundry’s and Nolten’s kisses are sufficient to unleash a volcano of suffering and a passion/Passion of renunciation. In Monsalvat and Maler Nolten, sinless carnality is a fairy tale, and no one believes in it. Wolf was surely aware that he was quoting Wagner in this song; it is difficult to imagine that such blatant citations were the product of unconscious processes. The figure of the rising scalewise diminished fourth, repeated sequentially throughout much of the piano part, brings back what earlier Wagnerians called the leitmotif of the Spear.68 This figure is, as many have pointed out, closely related to the conclusion of the Dresden Amen heard so many times in the opera – ”Selig im Glauben,” the boy sopranos sing to that ascending fourth figure at the end of act 1 – but the two figures are rhythmically and harmonically differentiated, the diatonic solidity of the Amen unlike the chromatic stabbing of the spear. In act 2, one hears rising, sequential repetitions of the Spear figure in the orchestra when Kundry is seducing Parsifal by invoking the lad’s dead mother Herzeleid and Parsifal asks himself reproachfully how he could have forgotten her – how apropos for Wolf, who could 91

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 3.7

Richard Wagner, from Parsifal, act 2

PARSIFAL

Š 00 ½

¹

Sehr langsam

3
Ł Ł Ł Ł
Ł Ł Konnt’ ich ver - ges

!

¹ Ł
Ł ý Š 00 ¼ ¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ýý \\
Ý 0
¾ 3−Ł ¹ ² ŁŁ ŁŁ ýý Ł ð 0Ł ²Ł Ł ~  3 ¹ Ł ¾ ¹ý  Ł Ł −Ł ¦ Ł Š ¼ −Ł  Ha!

!

!

Š Ł
−Ł Ý Łð ² Ł ¦ Ł ð


Ł


²¦ ŁŁŁ 

-

½

sen!

¹

¹  3 ¦ Ł −Ł
¹ ¼   −Ł

3

¹ý

¼

Was Al-les ver-gass ich wohl noch?

¹ n n n −Ł ý ð ý −Ł Ł Ł

ð


Ł

² Łn Łn Łn Ł ý \\ espr. ¹ ý Ł ² Ł Ł −Ł ½


Ł − ŁŁ

−Ł  Wess’

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−−ððð

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Ł

Ł ý −Ł ¦ Ł −Ł ŁŁ

  Ł ý 
¾ Š Ł ¾ −Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł  −Ł −Ł ¹ ¼   war ich je noch ein ge-denk? n ¹ n −Łn −Ł

¦Ł ý Š ŁŁ −Ł Ł Ł − Łý Ł ²ð − Ł Ł − ŁŁ \ −− ŁŁ Łý Ł Ý −ðð −Ł ¦Ł

not forget Wagner (Ex. 3.7). A few moments later, the same figure returns even more emphatically as Parsifal, overwhelmed by knowledge of Amfortas’s suffering, sings, “Redemption’s rapture, divinely gentle, trembles throughout the far distance in all souls: only here, in my heart, will the pain not soften. There, I understand the Savior’s lament for the profaned sanctuary”. Agnes too sings of “Erlösungswonne” (redemption’s rapture) for all souls save hers and of anguish that His “sea of mercy” cannot assuage. The same spear inflicts the same wound. Wolf even creates a similarly Wagnerian rising sequential development of the Spear figure in his setting of Mörike’s second and fourth stanzas, such that all sense of tonal location is obscured. As in “Seufzer,” hell is chromatic miasma (Ex. 3.8). But before Wagner’s spear stabs another soul in torment, Wolf locates Christ’s love in more diatonic realms, an echo – at a Wagnerian distance – of a Lutheran chorale. The piano introduction is a study in increasing fragmentation and rising intensity which 92

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman Ex. 3.8

Wolf, Wo find’ ich Trost, mm. 12–17

− Š − − Łý

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¼ −ð [ ¼ −ð −ð

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slumps into quiet grief at the end. The four bars are all spun from m. 1, whose descending ^ –2 ^ –1 ^ in the topmost voice is met by voice-exchange and contrary motion in the motion 3 bass, the voices coming together like walls closing in on a trapped mind. The consequences of this quasi-Baroque Spiegelbild figure are massive. Already chromaticism begins to invade the alto voice, an F  passing tone whose enharmonic reincarnations as G Ü are important in the later climactic passages of this song. The chromaticism intensifies in m. ^ –2 ^ –1 ^ figure, 2 as a result of Terzensteigerung, the chromatic constriction of the original 3 and the “sighing figure” semitone motives in the alto and tenor voices, prefiguring the still greater emphasis on the semitone motives in m. 3 (this second measure also foreshadows the two tonal zones of stanza 1, C minor and E Ü major, since the variation of the figure from m. 1 culminates in an appoggiatura-intensified secondary dominant of the relative 93

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs major). With m. 3, the figure is fragmented, the contrary motion of m. 1 multiplied in a virtual concatenation of semitones. With the fourth measure, the tessitura drops like a stone, as if rising tension were suddenly overcome by leaden depression, and we hear the quadrupling of sighing figures en route back to the C minor we never really left. Finally, as the dynamics dim to sad softness, a clear dominant seventh of tonic C minor emerges by the end of the measure, its resolution elided with the return of m. 1 as the body of the song begins. Even before the 1888 Mörike songs, Wolf had already made conflict between the voice and piano a hallmark of his songs. In the setting of stanza 1, there is a subterranean drama played out in the convergence or non-convergence of the piano and the singer in order to make the listener understand that the persona does not really believe her own words of religious affirmation and that the “deep sighs ever renewed” are hers more than they are Christ’s. As she sighs/sings the words “die ist treu” in m. 6, the harmonic progression attempts to pull away from the tragic key of C minor but with the most blatant possible parallel fifths in the bass, filling the entirety of m. 6. The effect of this compositional “no-no” is negation, or at the least, conflict – how can something be true if it is said to parallel fifths? – and hollowness. Aware of imperfect belief, she tries harder, asserting Christ’s faithfulness over time (“War getreu, so lang ich sie gefunden”) to an ascending harmonic sequence in the piano (mm. 7–8) that is a construction in increasing tension. Wolf understood that this poetic persona tries to believe, and he makes of stanza 1 a harmonic battle for a better place to be, a place founded on a bedrock of religious belief. Briefly, she succeeds and wins her way to E Ü major, just after the word “gefunden.” The setting of stanza 1 is thus tonally progressive (as is the entire song). The initial C minor tonality is that of the poetic persona’s grief-clouded world and the closely related (“mit mir verbunden”) key of E Ü , that of Christ’s forgiving love – and Wolf surely knew the Bachian associations of E Ü major with the Trinity, by extension, with Christian faith itself. ^ –2 ^ –1 ^ figure The first phrase on E Ü major in m. 9 is a beautifully spacious variant of the 3 from m. 1, even to the contrary motion voice-exchange between soprano and bass: with a resolution all the more heroic because doomed to failure, the persona attempts to convert grief into the certainty of divine love. The richness of the chords, the short-lived diatonicism, the brightness of major mode, and the breadth of the chord-voicing suggest, not walls closing in, but Christ’s love enfolding and surrounding the persona. Such calm beauty does not last, however. At the word “Seufzen” (sighs), Wolf destabilizes the newlyemergent E Ü major by means of a diminished seventh chord on E
– the new tonic is undermined almost immediately. Another sequence is necessary before the persona can find her way back to E Ü major, and one notes that this sequence is characterized by the contrary motion and voice-exchange of “eine Liebe,” varied, transposed, lengthened, reharmonized. The bass of m. 11 (A Ü –A
–B Ü ) brings back, in a lower register, the unsuccessful approach to E Ü in the “bass” of m. 2, but this time, the modulation is completed and culminates in a full authentic cadence. There is even tonic closure in the vocal line. Over and over, throughout stanza 1, the persona fights – quietly – to leave her native climate of grief and attain safe harbor in Christ. But the hard-won repose lasts only for the duration of a single eighth note before it is immediately, emphatically, destroyed; indeed, Wolf uses the tonic and leading tone pitches 94

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman of E Ü to lead away from the assertion of Christ’s love and into the realm of death and pain (the latter half of m. 12). As the Parsifalian sword stabs the poetic persona over and over, all tonal surety is lost; from m. 13 through m. 18, no one could say where we are. As in “Seufzer,” hell has its precise topography, however, every note of it appropriately fashioned from the music of stanza 1: Hell is awareness of Heaven’s loss. The first (unharmonized) stroke of the spear leads to premonitory G Ü s, although one cannot yet hear that pitch as a constituent of E Ü minor – that comes later, massively so. The introduction, one recalls, was saturated with appoggiaturas, in evocation of longing and of sighing, and so too is stanza 2; each thrust of the spear is repeated at its former pitch, leading each time to a “sighing” appoggiatura-chord, the first resolving downwards, the second upwards in order to impel the next jab of the spear transposed to a higher level. The chromatic terrain could not be more precisely plotted. Out of torment eventually comes surcease, or so it seems. When the poetic persona sings “bis es in ein Meer von Gnade sank” at the end of stanza 2, the chromatic turmoil of mm. 12–18 subsides into diatonic clarity as into rest after long travail. The six preceding measures are as harrowing as anything in Wolf, and the relief when the stabbing of the Wagnerian spear ceases is something one feels physically, the tension induced by the rising sequence relaxing with such suddeness as to leave the listener limp. But the phrase in mm. 19–20, with its motion back towards the redemptive E Ü major and its increasing diatonicism, ends deceptively on C minor, not E Ü . Wolf ’s poetic persona does not believe that his or her sins have truly sunk into a sea of mercy and sinks instead back into a sea of grief, the piano interlude in mm. 21–22 returning us, like a tape-loop, back to the beginning of stanza 1. This time, however, the battle to sustain belief will end differently. It is with the music of “Eine Liebe kenn’ ich, die ist treu” that the persona asks, “Why am I now so sad?” at the beginning of stanza 3. The listener, remembering the earlier words, hears the larger query, “If I truly know this faithful love, then why am I sad?” in the returning strains and notices that the parallel fifths so prominent in the bass of m. 6 are corrected in m. 24. The hollowness beneath the words “die ist treu,” words she does not truly believe, is no longer necessary when she sings the truth of her sadness (“traurig bin”), and Wolf adjusts the lower voices accordingly. The rising sequence from mm. 7–8 (“war getreu, so lang ich sie gefunden”) is innately tense, but what Wolf does with it upon its recurrence in stanza 3 is a fiery furnace by comparison. This time, it is the piano alone which completes the sequences and rushes headlong into the anguished questions from Isaiah. Wolf takes the eighth note – quarter note – eighth note rhythmic pattern (a favorite of his) at the end of m. 8 – a “drive-to-cadence” quickening – and both diminishes it rhythmically in the right hand and varies it by syncopation. The indication “drängend” seems almost redundant for such built-in harmonic and rhythmic urgency. In the addition of chromatic passing-tones to the broken-chordal figures in the right hand, one notices the prolongational emphasis on G Ü (the third beat of m. 26), premonitory of the arrival at, not E Ü major but E Ü minor. Before, the attempt to assert Christ’s love as a certainty could move the music briefly to a warmer, calmer major mode, but that is no longer possible now. Throughout Parsifal, Wagner contrasts chromatic zones with relatively diatonic zones, although “diatonicism” in late Wagner is always prone to incursion by chromatic extremes. Wolf does likewise, but in a fashion tailored to this text. The anguished questions 95

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs in lines 3 and 4 have a wrenching urgency, the language stripped of all embellishment, and it was perhaps this directness which inspired Wolf to set the questions to pure triadic harmonies; the “Hüter” is God, and Wolf elsewhere invokes supernatural beings with pure triads in unorthodox, “unearthly” progressions.The tessitura, span, and voicing of the chords in m. 27 (“Frage: Hüter, ist die . . .”) are essentially the same as in m. 9, darkened to minor, but in the subsequent three measures of this outcry, Wolf flings the pianist’s hands more widely apart, an abyss opening up in the middle. The voice-exchange and contrary motion from before are now rendered immense. It was Wolf ’s vivid addition to Mörike’s poem that the pianist sounds trumpet fanfares, as if calling the soul to the Last ^ –2 ^ –1 ^ figure, and those fanfares trace a stepwise Judgment, between each iteration of the 3 ascent from E Ü to F and finally to a massive G major harmony. The anguished cries for rescue are poised in tonal mid-air – no longer E Ü minor, not quite C minor – when the words temporarily cease, the persona waiting for an answer during the piano interlude in mm. 31–34 while the last echoes of the trumpets of judgment fade away. The fortissimo dynamics of the anguished questions die down exhaustedly, the piano’s block-chordal harmonies, their wing-span contracting, falling downwards in two stages. As they fall, they heighten G major harmonically, as if turning towards the dominant. But in mid-measure (m. 32), the figure is arrested on a diminished triad on G , sustained throughout much of mm. 32–34 while the inner voice taps out the fanfare figure as a soft ostinato; the root of the prior G major is altered, thrown into doubt. One hears in this moment the poetic persona’s refusal to confess the cause of her anguish; arrested on a chromatic harmony emblematic of open-endedness, instability, and fear, she attempts to defer confrontation with a hideous admission. When she can do so no longer, the D fanfares, appropriately in the inner voice, grow ominously louder and lead directly into the recurrence of stanza 2 as stanza 4. Is there still another echo of Parsifal as well in this piano interlude? When Titurel in act 1 asks Amfortas, “Shall I again today look on the Grail and live? Must I die without my Savior’s guidance?”, his unaccompanied vocal phrases are separated by soft, ominous, fanfare-like triplets in the timpani, figures similar to those in Wolf (Ex. 3.9). Could the words “rettet/Retter” and the fact that both poetic personae are poised on the boundary between life and death have impelled the later composer to this reminiscence? Never, one notes, is there an instant of silence anywhere in the accompaniment. As the sounding analogue to a tormented inner consciousness, it is incessantly active. In Maler Nolten, “Wo find’ ich Trost?” is followed by Henni playing the organ on and on, “as if he could not bring this endless pain to any conclusion in music.”69 “Finally, all was still,” we are told, and those who have been listening outside of the chapel are given a glimpse inside when Henni’s little sister emerges, leaving the door open. What they see is “an image of peace,” with Henni sunk in thought at the organ keyboard and Agnes asleep at his feet. Did Wolf accord his unusually lengthy postlude with the novel, with Henni playing music of “endless pain” in search of closure? If so, there is a complex discrepancy between poem, novel, and song. Mörike resolves the scene, not the fictive music, in momentary peacefulness. He says nothing about how the music ends, only that it does, and the tension-fraught “peace” – its image (Bild), not its reality – is soon followed by catastrophe. By the end of the poem, Isaiah’s questions are rhetorical; the music, unable to resolve “endless pain,” simply stops; and an Agnes convinced that no rescue is possible kills 96

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman Ex. 3.9

Wagner, from Parsifal, act 1

Ý −− − ¼ Ł Ł Ł −

!

− Š − −−

Soll ich den

Ý −− − −

!

Ý −− − −

ÿ

heut’ noch er - schau’n

und le - ben?

ÿ

ÿ

ÿ

ÿ

ÿ

Muss ich

ÿ

Gral

Ł ¹ Ł Ł Ł ¹  

ÿ

Ý −− − ¼ −ð −−Ł −ð − − Š − −−

Ł Ł −Ł  

ð

ÿ ÿ

(Langes Schweigen)

ÿq Ł ¹ Ł Ł3 Ł Ł ¼q

−Ł ý Ł Ł ¦Ł − Ł ½ ¹ Ł Ł  Ł 

ster - ben,

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herself. But Wolf devises a closure for his song which is at odds with Mörike’s meanings. The end of the lied is dramatic, it is moving – and it is not Mörike. Wolf had a dilemma on his hands, one which Schubert had confronted before him and also Schumann, a composer known for making endings problematical. When a poetic text ends with an unanswered question, what is one to do to bring about formal closure in a lied? In a similar situation, Schubert, faced with his friend Johann Mayrhofer’s anguished questions, “Wann enden diese Qualen? Wann?” (When will these torments end? When? – the same question that Mörike’s persona asks), at the end of “Fahrt zum Hades” (Journey to Hades), brings back the initial section, a repetition which both “rounds out” the formal structure and grants to the poetic persona a measure of dignity for his last words.70 That is not a possibility here, however, not after the answer in stanzas 4 and 5. One can, and Wolf often does, end the texted body of the song inconclusively and then work out a resolution of the form in the piano postlude, but one must still decide what, if any, poetic meanings the instrumental ending will bear. Wolf devises a conclusion which invites texted associations after a fashion similar to the postlude of “Auf ein altes Bild” (see chap. 5). As before, the repeated-note fanfares lead to momentary halt on a diminished seventh chord, but the continuation does not lead back to words this time. Over the continued ostinato D in the left hand, a fortissimo E Ü major harmony on the downbeat of m. 56 galvanizes the atmosphere like a bolt of lightning, followed by progressively softer (mezzo-forte and piano) C  and E Ü dissonances against the bass D in m. 57 until all dissonance melts into the euphony of a bright D major harmony at the close. Because the continuation is so shocking, because it proclaims violent tonal clashes leading to peacefulness, because there are no more words to follow, the listener is virtually 97

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 3.10

Wolf, Wo find’ ich Trost, mm. 49–60

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bidden to look for associative meaning in the last half of the postlude. In the thunderbolt at m. 56, one can perhaps hear the instant of the persona’s death, the subsequent softer dissonances symbols of the lessening stabs of pain before all pain ends. When the last E Ü in the inner voice of m. 57 dissolves to the final dying-away D major chords – we end “elsewhere,” in mid-air – and the music ebbs away altogether, the sense of relief is massive (Ex. 3.10). After so many previous references to Parsifal, it is impossible not to hear in this ending a transmuted echo of the prophecy “Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Thor, harre sein’, 98

The fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenth-century madwoman den ich erkor” (Through compassion made knowing, the pure fool, wait for him, the appointed one) at its first appearance in the opera, in particular, the motion to the E Ü harmony at “Thor” answered by the motion to a cadence on D major at “erkor.” Did Wolf have in his mind’s ear the radiant D major cadence in act 3, when “Mitleid” (compassion) works its magic and Amfortas’s wound is healed by the same spear that wounded him? Wolf, in Wagner’s wake, grants a persona similarly tormented by sensuality surcease at last for anguish born of the flesh. The trumpets of the Lord, calling to judgment, fade away and are subsumed into the ever-softer brightness of the final major harmony; the dwindling fanfare in the inner voice, from four pitches to two to a single note, at the end is among the song’s most eloquent gestures. The night is over, says Wolf, who had already stilled the nocturnal torment of “In der Frühe” (composed some five months earlier on 5 May 1888) with D major chords ebbing away into quietude and does so again for the deeper anguish of “Wo find’ ich Trost.” This is not what Mörike, more pessimistic than Wolf, had in mind. For his poetic persona, death and sin are too overwhelming for alleviation, and the thought of Christ only increases guilt. As the poem unfurls, it answers the question posed in its title and does so in the negative: there is no “Trost” anywhere, no “höchsten Heiles Wunder” (highest miracle of healing) of the sort granted to Amfortas.71 For whatever reason, Wolf rejected the poet’s ending and devised another, more Parsifalian finale. It was Wolf ’s privilege as a composer to extend his chosen poems in the postludes, but the point of divergence between Dichter and Tondichter is, on this occasion, most acute at the end. The Wagner-steeped strains are ironically, given Mörike’s detestation of Wagner, apropos for the hell of concupiscence which causes the persona of “Wo find’ ich Trost?” so much pain. Where poet and composer differ, it is on the not-so-minor matter of redemption, musical and otherwise. Agnes is a fascinating mish-mash of a character, a compound of contemporary psychiatry, supernaturalism, “good girl” piety, references to Goethe, Mörike’s own life, cultural critiques of society, and more. She is portrayed as the product of an upbringing and a society in which “one can hardly speak” (the title of a recent critical study of Maler Nolten72), of circumstances in which the sexual ignorance of middle-class young women of the period was exacerbated to the point of madness. Mörike makes both the odds against Agnes and her struggles to break out of her genetic-cultural-historical trap clear, and he portrays spirited, educated women (Margot) and mature female sexuality (the Countess) in the novel, but it is the mad women who are the major characters; successful women are allotted only minor roles. For those who know something of Mörike’s life, it seems overdetermined that he would explore abnormal psychology, both male and female, and that he might displace his own conflicts onto a fictional woman who had Shakespeare’s and Goethe’s permission to sing of Eros denied. Eros not denied can be equally destructive, as we shall see in the next chapter.

99

Chapter 4

Sung desire: from Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied

Looking at a portrait of the twenty-nine-year-old Mörike, one sees what could be the archetypal image of a shy, refined poet (Illus. 1). But twenty-nine-year-olds have usually, then and now, learned the difference between roseate love in literature and the grittier stuff of sex in real life, fraught with contingencies of pain, power, disease, pregnancy, exploitation, and the ephemerality of attraction. If they were writers, they could, and often did, speak of sexuality in their works along a gamut which runs from pornography (its purposes prurient and commercial rather than aesthetic) to high poetic art, the latter inevitably more rare than the former, and what they wrote is a mirror of their own erotic psychology and of the society that shaped them. The balance between frankness and euphemism, fantasy and fact, society’s stereotypes and individuality, varies from one work to another – and there are many works which partake of erotica, even where they are not defined as such. The best writers traffic in what truly matters, and the coupling (or not) of sex with love in heart and mind appears on anyone’s short list of life’s larger concerns. They were certainly fodder for poetry in Mörike’s world because he conceived of a problematic link between eroticism and the making of art, and he wrote of that vexed pairing in multiple literary guises. Those of Mörike’s erotic poems set to music by Wolf and included for discussion in this chapter (“Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens,” “Der Knabe und das Immlein,” “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag,” and “Der Gärtner”) are arranged along a spectrum from lieder whose sexual content is explicit to those in which sexuality finds other modes of expression, where hints and symbols take the place of more graphic language. But what happens when a citified avatar of fin-desiècle Vienna, in which claustrophobic sexual mores co-exist with psychological probing of sexuality, sets to music earlier investigations of Eros, penned under different circumstances? The composer inevitably reads Mörike from his (Wolf ’s) own view of desire between the sexes, his post-Wagnerian musical concerns, his wish to revise his predecessors. Where Mörike’s erotic poems meet Wolf ’s turn-of-century music is the subject of this chapter. R E - I M AG I N I N G P O R N O G R A P H Y: “ E R S T E S L I E B E S L I E D E I N E S M Ä D C H E N S ”

One of the most startling poems Mörike ever wrote was “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens” (A Maiden’s First Love Song), one of the poems “written with blood” and exemplary of 100

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied

Illus 1

Pastel portrait of Eduard Mörike by Johann Georg Schreiner, 4 May 1824

“daemonic truth” which Wolf so admired. It is indeed astonishing, so much so that Wolf is one of only two composers in the nineteenth century who set it to music, Mörike’s friend Ludwig Hetsch being the other.1 The poet, perhaps emboldened by his recent sexual adventures (whatever they were), flirted with the boundaries between pornography and high poetic art; sixty years later, a composer living covertly outside the bounds of sexual convention appropriated the poem and gave it his own turn-of-the-century twist. Both poem and lied are bold in different senses, but the poem has a sadder level of meaning as well, one that I believe Wolf missed in his excitement over the poem’s daring evocation of intercourse and its psychological acuity. The genesis of the poem is a window through which we can see how Mörike and his friends, all in their hormone-driven twenties, spoke of sexual matters among themselves – if only from hints in the written record. In 1828, Mörike sent the Green Notebook to his sister-in-law Dorothea Mörike and, on 19 June of that same year, also sent the seven poems collectively entitled Neue weltliche Lieder (New Secular Songs) to Adelheid Mörike, the wife of his cousin Heinrich. Both manuscripts include the “Lied eines Mädchens,” the title of the poem later being made more specific (a maiden’s first love-song) for publication in the Jahrbuch schwäbischer Dichter (Yearbook of Swabian Poets) of 1836 and Mörike’s poetic anthology of 1838; one deduces the poet’s pride in this amazing poem from his display of it in venues both public and private . The complete title of the Neue weltliche Lieder unfurls like a Baroque banner: 101

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs             Lieder / just nicht / fürs Klavier / aber zum geringen Beweis / dass die Stadt / Buchau / keinen unpoetischen Himmel habe; / wurden nämlich sämtlich gedichtet / im dortigen Park sowie im Badgarten / nunmehr dankbarlich ge- / widmet / der / hochgeschätzten, / lieben Frauen /         / von / ihrem Vetter / dem dermalen vagierenden / bei Grazien und Musen / vikarierenden / Vikar/ Eduard Mörike.2 (         Songs / not precisely / for piano / but as a paltry demonstration / that the city / of Buchau / has no unpoetic sky; / [they] were all together written / in the park there, as well as in the spa garden / now gratefully de – / dicated / to the / highly prized, / beloved wife /         / from / her cousin / the at present straying / by the Graces and Muses / vicaraging / vicar / Eduard Mörike.)

Here, Mörike invokes music so that he may claim its powers for poetry – words, not music, will work this erotic magic. Released for a while from his hated religious bondage, he converts the word “Vikar” into a neologism for poetic purposes and puts roaming from poem to poem in company with the Muses and Graces ahead of the doubly damned vicarage duties. Mörike was in fact roaming about from one small vicarage to another at the behest of his own restlessness, so the words “vagierenden” and “vikarierenden” were yoked realities as well as designations of the opposition between his breadwinner’s job and his true vocation. The little collection begins, one notices, with a “Bacchanal” – Mörike’s suitably erotic version of the traditional invocation of the gods at the start of a literary enterprise – and ends with this “love”-song, the works in between thus, in one sense, seductions leading up to the deflowering at the close. One notes that these manuscripts were sent to women, albeit married women whose knowledge of sexual reality Mörike could assume, furthermore, members of his own family who would not be offended by such frank evocations. However, he also sent the poem, via a male intermediary, to a young woman on the verge of marriage, hinting that it would become, might indeed already be, an apt description of her deflowering. Writing to Ernst Friedrich Kauffmann on 7 July 1828, Mörike told his friend that he was enclosing a poem which he had hummed the previous day while walking along the path to the vineyards at Schloß Weissenau near Ravensburg, a poem he offers “not as a wedding song but as a love-song” for Marie Lohbauer, Kauffmann’s fiancée and Rudolf Lohbauer’s sister. (The distinction is between the public venue of a wedding song, its representations of love idealized, and a “Liebeslied” which is more intimate and physical.) Kauffmann, Mörike directs, should set it to music and give it to Marie on her “Braut-Morgen” (the morning after the wedding) with a kiss, asking her “when she sings it, if the song does not, to a hair’s breadth [italics Mörike’s], express all of the rapture that you experienced in the first days of your love.”3 “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens” is also a riposte to Goethe in which the younger poet rewrites and “one-ups” the looming literary presence in his life. From the third stanza on, Mörike tells Kauffmann, the poem is “after the melody of ‘Was zieht mir das Herz so,’” implying the Lutheran practice of contrafacta when he actually means something more complex than the adaptation of new words to old music. “Was zieht mir das Herz so” is the opening line of Goethe’s “Sehnsucht,” whose iambic-anapaestic dimeters Mörike echoes for stanzas 3–6 of his “Liebeslied” (the changing rhythms in stanzas 1–3 are one feature of the poem’s virtuosity). Kauffmann had previously cited the opening lines of Goethe’s 102

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied famous poem as the motto to a letter he wrote Mörike on 15 July 1827, and Mörike had replied on 1 August 1827, telling his friend of a visit to the Neidtlinger valley. There, on seeing a kite abandon itself to the will of the winds, he thought of Goethe’s poem and Marie’s singing voice: Sehnsucht (stanzas 2 and 3 of 5) Nun wiegt sich der Raben Geselliger Flug; Ich mische mich drunter Und folge dem Zug. Und Berg und Gemäuer Umfittichen wir; Sie weilet da drunten, Ich spähe nach ihr.

Longing Now the ravens hover in companionable flight; I join them and follow their course. And mountains and ruins we fly above; she dwells below, I look for her.

Da kommt sie und wandelt; Ich eile sobald, Ein singender Vogel, Zum buschigen Wald. Sie weilet und horchet Und lächelt mit sich: “Er singet so lieblich Und singt es an mich.”

There she comes and walks along; I hurry right away, a singing bird, to the bushy forest. She lingers and listens, and smiles to herself: “He sings so sweetly and sings to me!”

At the end, the poetic speaker returns to his beloved, lies at her feet, and proclaims his happiness, the goal of his longing achieved. The eroticism of flight, birds, song, bushes, and gathering darkness culminates in an open-ended lieto fine, bliss already fulfilled in fantasy and awaiting only physical enactment. Had Kauffmann already married Marie, Mörike asks in the letter of 1827?4 Almost a year later, he recalls their earlier bandying about of Goethean desire and provides a replacement-poem in which Goethe’s male speaker becomes a woman and “Sehnsucht” becomes sexual experience. After longing, sex itself: Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens Was im Netze? Schau einmal! Aber ich bin bange; Greif ’ ich einen süßen Aal? Greif ’ ich eine Schlange?

A Maiden’s First Love-Song What’s in the net? Take a look! But I’m afraid! Will I grab hold of a sweet eel? Will I grab hold of a snake?

Lieb’ ist blinde Fischerin; Sagt dem Kinde, Wo greift’s hin?

Love is a blind fisherwoman. Tell your child where to reach out!

Schon schnellt mir’s in Händen! Ach Jammer! o Lust! Mit Schmiegen und Wenden Mir schlüpft’s an die Brust.

It’s already jumping about in my hands! Ah sorrow, ah delight! With its twisting and turning, it is slipping onto my breast.

Es beißt sich, o Wunder! Mir keck durch die Haut, Schießt’s Herze hinunter! O Liebe, mir graut!

How astonishing! It bites me boldly right through my skin and shoots down my heart! O Love, I’m frightened!

103

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Was tun, was beginnen? Das schaurige Ding, Es schnalzet da drinnen, Es legt sich im Ring.

What should I do, what should I begin? The frightful thing is leaping inside of me, it’s coiling itself up.

Gift muß ich haben! Hier schleicht es herum, Tut wonniglich graben Und bringt mich noch um.

I must be poisoned! It’s crawling around here, digging about rapturously, and it will end by killing me!

In this poem, Mörike concocts a salty stew of literary allusions, compounded of fairy tale motifs, echoes of Shakespeare and themes from Hintertreppenliteratur (“back stairs literature” or pornography) in a unique way; if there are works by the thousands which tell of deflowering virgins, few can claim anything approaching this level of complexity. What this poet borrows, he transforms, and the magpie assemblage of topoi from elsewhere undergoes a sea-change into something rich and strange. In the so-called “animal husband” tales from the fairy story repertoire, a repulsive beast, sometimes a lion or bear, sometimes a slimy water-creature who represents the phallus (such as the “The Frog Prince” in the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales5), metamorphoses into a handsome and loving prince upon further acquaintance; many fairy tales constitute a pedagogy of sexual discovery in which girls are allowed to be desirous of new experience and yet initially repulsed by the strangeness of it all. The ending is usually a happy one in the traditional stories, but not so here. When the “maiden” – the title is ironic – is curious about where to grasp the slippery object invading her, Mörike thereby establishes his persona’s preliminary ignorance of sexual matters, but this is no fairy tale; the phallus does not become friendly, and there is no “happily ever after.” Nor does one find verbal re-enactments stage-by-stage, as if in medias res, of sexual intercourse in Märchen: that belongs to erotica, which this poem both is and is not. In “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens,” Mörike ponders the mixed pleasure and pain in sex, the sadism of arousal by the infliction of suffering, and the solipsism of sexual encounter, possibly as a metaphor for something larger and non-sexual. But one is still left to grapple with the reactions elicited by deliberately shocking content. Mörike plays games with the borderline between what is covert and overt in sexual language; if he uses symbols rather than precise anatomical names, we are nonetheless not allowed to understand the poem as anything innocent. His poetic persona tries to identify the creature she grasps either as a snake or a sweet eel, something poisonous and biting or something sweet to the taste and touch (or perhaps mutating from one to the other), images drawn from tradition. The snake is an echo of the Biblical serpent-tempter in the Garden of Eden, Satan as phallic tempter (and yet, snakes are also female emblems6), but its coupling with a “sweet eel” suggests that watery worlds form the backdrop to this song of sex. In this realm, sea creatures become metonymies of sex organs both male and female in a dissolving world of sensation. Entire schools of ichthyological symbols form the backdrop to Mörike’s eel-and-snake images. Shakespeare devised perhaps the most notorious fishing metaphors in all of literature in the badinage between Cleopatra and her attendant Charmian in act 2, scene 4 of Antony and Cleopatra, just before the messenger enters to tell the queen that Antony and Octavia have wed: 104

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied        : Give me mine angle – we’ll to the river: there, My music playing far off, I will betray Tawny-finn’d fishes; my bended hook shall pierce Their slimy jaws; and as I draw them up I’ll think them every one an Antony, And say, Ah ha! you’re caught. : ’Twas merry when You wager’d on your angling; when your diver Did hang a salt fish on his hook, which he With fervency drew up.        : That time, – O times! – I laugh’d him out of patience; and that night I laugh’d him into patience: and next morn, Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed; Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst I wore his sword Philippan.7

It would indeed require audacity on Mörike’s part to equal such daring piscine metaphors, complete with cross-dressing at the close. The “tawny” fins, the adjective suggestive of Orientalizing exoticism; the fervent drawing-up of the “hook;” the eroticism of crossing the boundaries between sexes to mimic one’s opposite; and music (“Give me some music; music, moody food / Of those that trade in love,” Cleopatra says) all lend their erotic charge to the scene. Mörike went fishing in the same pool and drew up similarly slimy, leaping creatures both in “Erstes Liebeslied” and in his novella Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag, where the fictive Mozart tells of Neapolitan water games in which a fish danced about, “sometimes here, sometimes there, between the legs of the one, between the chest and chin of another,” as male swimmers approach a barge with a bevy of girls. The maidens break into frightened screams: Eros, Mörike says over and over again, is a god to be feared.8 Mörike would probably have known his fellow Württemberger Christian Friedrich Schubart’s “Die Forelle” of 1782, in which a fisherman, who is condemned by the poetic speaker as a cold-hearted thief, hooks an innocent trout, his “rod” quivering in the pursuit. Lest anyone miss the moral of the tale, Schubart’s final stanza bids young women be wary of men with rods: Die Forelle (final stanza) Die ihr am goldnen Quelle Der sichern Jugend weilt, Denkt doch an die Forelle; Seht ihr Gefahr, so eilt! Meist fehlt ihr nur aus Mangel der Klugheit. Mädchen seht Verführer mit der Angel! Sonst blutet ihr zu spät.9

The Trout To those who linger by the golden springs of sure youth, think of the trout; see its danger, then hurry away! Most of you err only from lack of knowledge. Maidens, see the seducer with his rod! – or else, too late, you will bleed.

The reference to “bleeding too late” is sufficiently explicit that none but the naïve could mistake its drift, although Schubert’s deletion of the final stanza throws open the sexual reading as it throws out the moral.10 One also recalls Heine’s “Du schönes Fischermädchen” from the Buch der Lieder: “Without care, you entrust yourself every day 105

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs to the wild sea,” the cozening poetic speaker says to the fisher-girl with whom he wishes to dally; immersion in wild waters is tantamount to sex in its elemental force, its threat of death, its surrender to fluid sensuality. Fisher-girls know of sex, the speaker implies – how could they not?11 Sea creatures aside, “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens” also belongs to a long tradition of poets writing the occasional erotic poem, including Goethe.12 At the more elevated end of the spectrum, the penultimate poem in Goethe’s Venetian epigrams of 1790 celebrates exclusively male sensations of sex and does so in classical hexameters and pentameters, evoking recollections of Catullus and the Latin erotic epigram. Here, the poet proclaims that it is even better to feel the motions of the penis within the vagina than to hold the beloved in one’s arms, sex being preferable to love when one is on Roman holiday: Epigramm 102 (lines 1–6 of 10) Wonniglich ists, die Geliebte verlangend im Arme zu halten, Wenn ihr klopfendes Herz Liebe zuerst dir gesteht. Wonniglicher, das Pochen des Neulebendigen fühlen, Das in dem lieblichen Schoß immer sich nährend bewegt. Schon versucht es die Sprünge der raschen Jugend; es klopfet Ungeduldig schon an, sehnt sich nach himmlischem Licht.13

Epigram 102 Rapturous it is, to hold the beloved longingly in your arms, when her beating heart for the first time makes you understand love. Even more rapturous, to feel the throbbing of the newly-living one [penis] that in the beloved womb ever nourishingly moves, Already it assays the leaps of brash youth; it already knocks impatiently, yearns for heavenly light.

It is a man, not the woman, whose virginity ends in the epigram, but deflowering maidens was by far the favorite subject of erotica and pornography alike; it was not only Don Giovanni who preferred “la giovin principiante.” As Peter Gay observes, any set of instructions for the nineteenth-century pornographer would include a description of the initial pain for novices, which usually gives way to pleasure as the man drives his always-huge instrument into the receptive woman.14 The added titillation of sexual instruction for those as yet uninitiated provides a writer with an excuse for language, but it is a rarity for that language to be both sexually explicit and literarily worthwhile, for style or wit to come into play. One thinks of Cherubino’s hints of masturbation, if no other relief for raging teenage hormones is at hand, at the end of “Non so più, cosa son” – “Parlo d’amor con me,” he tells the assembled women in the room – and realizes that Lorenzo da Ponte could do more with innuendo in a single phrase than the likes of Johann Gabriel Büschel (1758–1813) could do in an entire poem, its euphemisms concealing nothing (and not meant to). Büschel’s “Erinnerung (An Henrietten),” is doubly obscene by virtue – not the mot juste – both of the content and of the candy-coated grandiloquence of the language. One need not be puritanical to object to this, just a lover of poetry: Erinnerung (An Henrietten) (stanza 5) Noch denk’ ich immer mir die Szene, Wo ich zuerst die heiße Träne Der Wollust in den weichen Schoß Des liebesiechen Mädchens goß.

Memory (To Henrietta) I will always recall the scene when I first poured the hot tears of voluptuousness in the soft lap of the love-sick maiden.

106

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied Auch du gedenkst gewiß der Stunden, Wo ich dein Heiligtum entdeckt, Und durch die schönste aller Wunden Mit Purpur dein Gewand befleckt, Wo du der Liebe Glück empfunden, Wo deine weiche Lilienhand Zuerst den Pfeil der Liebe fühlte, Und mit der goldnen Locke spielte, Bis daß er schnell vor dir verschwand, Und sich in deinem Schoß versteckte, Und zärtlich von dem Rosenrand Den Tau geheimer Liebe leckte.15

You too surely remember the hour when I disclosed your holiness, and through the most beautiful of all wounds bespotted your gown with red, where you experienced love’s joy, where your soft, lily-white hand first felt the arrow of love, and played with golden hair until it quickly disappeared before you and hid in your womb, and sweetly from the rosy borders the dew of secret love leaked out.

In the fifth of the Zehn Sonette of 1799, attributed to Friedrich Schlegel, the poetic persona revels in the exercise of power, dismissing the woman’s pain more brutally than Büschel. One notes the choice of sonnet, among the most stylized of verse forms, for the impropriety of pornographic verse: So liegst du gut! Gleich wird sich’s prächtig zeigen, So lie there obediently! Straight away it will be Wie klug mein Rat. Ich schiebe meinen Dicken magnificently shown to you how clever is my In dein bemoostes Tor. Man nennt das “Ficken.” counsel. I shove my member in your mossy Du fragst: warum? Davon laß mich jetzt gate. One calls that “fucking.” You ask: why? schweigen! Of that let me for now be silent! Schon seh’ ich Schmerz in deinen blauen Blicken. Das geht vorbei. Du mußt zurück dich neigen, Gleich wird dein Blut dir jubeln wie die Geigen Von Engel . . .16

Already I see pain in your blue gaze. That will pass. You must bend back, your blood will immediately rejoice within you like the angels’ violins . . .

The white limbs and blue eyes, the woman’s pain followed by hints of her sexual insatiability, are all in accord with the dreary conventions of pornography. Angelic violin music is the last straw. Like the sonnet above, “Erstes Liebeslied” purports to be in the present and in the midst of the action, but the woman in this poem is not mute, nor was she invented solely to titillate. (The intent to “épater les bourgeois” is, however, plain to see.) Here, Mörike avails himself of certain conventions of the deflowering topos in order to make complicated use of them. For example, character does not count for much in the usual sorts of erotica, only body parts, nor does narrative richness matter, the personae being devoid of histories, origins, tales to tell. The man’s customary power is evident not only in greater or lesser sexual brutality but in narrative control, male speakers voicing male views and characterizing women according to fantasies few women would recognize as congruent with their own experience. Mörike turns the tables: it is a woman’s voice we supposedly hear, ricocheting back and forth between statements of what the phallus is doing at that moment and her own reactions, dominated by fear and increasing panic. In accord with the conventions of pornography, the lover is nothing but a phallus, without a name, a face, or personal history, and we are told nothing of what led to this act, where they are, or anything of the context. The claustrophobic enclosure of the act and the anonymity of its actors heightens its intensity. But that intensity is artificial, the language of this poem remarkable for its ambiguity of address, audience, and tone. The first stanza seems to be the maiden speaking to the lover, 107

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs to whom she says peremptorily, “Show me!”, but the second stanza is as if narrated by a third party who speaks in allegorical terms, the maiden distancing herself from the action and calling herself “the child” (the standard term of address for a sweetheart, especially a young or virginal girl). From the third stanza on (where the Goethe-meter begins), we understand that the woman speaks to herself, that this is an inner voice which recounts the phallus’s invasion along a crescendo of panic. Or rather, that is the feint. Mörike confounds poetry’s self-conscious pattern-making, its distance from the content it symbolizes, with the pretense of immediacy created by the liberal sprinkling of exclamation marks and questions; the spontaneity thus aped is actually a Janus-faced compound of mockery and terror. Far from stream of consciousness before the fact, Mörike here spoofs the language of erotica, its hokey substitution of grandiloquence for what is often wordless, or at best linguistically limited, in life. What real woman exclaims “Oh, pain, oh pleasure! . . . Oh, wonder!” or conjures up personifications of Love as a “blind fisherwoman” at such a moment unless she is the product of male fantasy à la Büschel or the creation of a poet mocking the literary traditions of erotica? But if the language is not credible as a chronicle of experience, the terror it evokes is; the garden-variety pornographer would end with the woman’s adoration of the man after climax, but not so here. Words need not be naturalistic in order to be psychologically apt. It is also possible that the poetic persona is no maiden at all, but a poet (the “female” voice of a male poet) raped by a Muse (a male rapist substituting for a customarily female allegorical personage). Poetic creation, Mörike says in this poem, can be likened to sexual possession, its violence such as to threaten death. One can read the words of stanza 1 as those of a true innocent who wonders what it is she sees and holds, or one can understand the word “maiden” ironically. With each new poem, each act of possession by the invading creative spirit, one must wonder “what’s in the net,” whether for pleasure or pain. A post-Revolutionary poet with a historically confirmed distaste for the grand passion, Mörike tells in “Erstes Liebeslied,” and elsewhere in his oeuvre, of physical endangerment brought about by passions ricocheting out of control. The quest for new experience, an imperative that cannot be denied, at first releases fantasy, but that same outpouring of intuition and imagery has the potential to overwhelm consciousness, putting the poet in mortal danger. Each creative act brings on this peril, and each time, the poet is a “maiden” yet again. No wonder the poem ends where it does, just short of the brink. The poet still retains the control necessary to continue speaking in verse and rhyme, but one more second, he implies, and that control might vanish. That he has survived the near-fatal encounter is evinced in the poem’s survival. Mörike mimics the threatened loss of control without, for one second, relinquishing it. In the first stanza, the poetic persona believes, wrongly, that she has power over the situation and manifests it by means of imperatives in strongly accented trochees (“Was im Netze? Schau einmal!”), each line end-stopped for further emphasis. The pace quickens in stanza 2, the lines shorter and more breathless (dimeters rather than the tetrameters and trimeters of stanza 1), while the quasi-naturalistic diction of the first stanza is replaced by a display of poetic craft. Lines 1 and 2 (“Lieb’ ist blinde / Fischerin”) of stanza 2 reiterate the cliché that “Love is blind” but in self-consciously artsy arrangement, with allegory and enjambement marshaled into service. With the third stanza, the panic deepens, and the 108

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied trochees cede to weaker iambs, while the dimeters are hastened still further by an admixture of anapaests – more syllables to rush through in a frenzy, although the poem never loses its dancelike lilt and its sing-song rhymes. At the end, those rhymes even turn into rimes riches (“Gift muß ich haben . . . tut wonniglich graben”), the rhyme-words so close together that we hear them chime. If the raptor is poetic inspiration, possessing body and mind, then its victim will perforce speak in rhythm and rhyme. Ultimately, what possesses the poet in this poem is fear of death: Eros and Thanatos, those Siamese twins of the Romantic universe, are paired once again. Like a tragedy-queen in a melodrama, the “maiden” cries out, “Gift muß ich haben!”, at the beginning of the final stanza, a wonderfully hokey exclamation with multiple under- and overtones: “I cannot bear this: I must take poison!” – ”I must have been poisoned!” – ”Love is poison, but I must have it!” We are perhaps meant to hear all of those possibilities compressed into a single outcry, its four words arranged in such a way that “Gift,” “poison,” is the first accented syllable in a dactylic foot (dactyls are often the poetic rhythm of choice for comedic matters), the first interruption of the established iambic meters since they first appeared in stanza 3, line 1. The cry for poison touches off a crescendo of death throughout the stanza, the word “graben” (to burrow, dig, etc.) in line 3 containing the etymologically related noun “[das] Grab” (the grave) and the verb “umbringen” in the last line making the fear of death at the hands of the possessor overt. To be possessed by a lover, by the creative force, can kill, and its violence impels the desire for death at one’s own behest. And yet, Mörike writes of such serious matters in a mixture of the mock-rhapsodic, parodistic-poetic, high artifice aping the naturalistic, melodrama on the verge of the laughable – a bouillabaisse of ingredients, designed to leave the reader in a whirl. So does Wolf ’s song, but not in the same way. In the midst of fin-de-siècle Vienna’s febrile sexualities, Wolf invented for this poem music which is graphic in its stylized sexual suggestiveness. Eschewing Wagnerian recipes for sexuality in music, the younger composer culled a different musical tradition for his song, making of the waltz something wickedly warped. Carl Schorske wrote in Fin-de-siècle Vienna of Maurice Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales as symptomatic of the new modernism, no longer Straussian strains for convivial balls but the register of darker psyches; even before Ravel, Wolf devised “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens” as a waltz on speed for a dance à deux of a different sort. The choice of a waltz was peculiarly appropriate because the dance was associated with subversive eroticism from the beginning. Unlike group dances such as ecossaises or polonaises, the waltz was performed by couples locked in an embrace, the physical proximity and turning motion (“walzen” means “to turn”) conducive to sexual suggestiveness. A fire-and-brimstone moralist in late eighteenth-century Germany published an unintentionally funny fulmination on the subject entitled Beweiss dass das Walzen eine Hauptquelle der Schwäche des Körpers und des Geistes unserer Generation sey: Deutschlands Söhnen und Töchtern angelegentlichst empfohlen (Proof that the Waltz Is a Chief Source for Our Generation’s Weaknesses of Body and Mind: Germany’s Sons and Daughters Most Urgently Advised),17 and the chroniclers of the Congress of Vienna indulged in lubricious gossip about the licentiousness of the balls given by Austrian aristocracy for visiting heads-of-state.18 One can only imagine with what glee Wolf seized on the tradition linking the waltz to sexual intercourse for his “Erstes Liebeslied,” its frenetic 109

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs transformation of the dance all of a piece with fin-de-siècle explorations of sexuality’s dark side. Intercourse requires two bodies, here rendered musically as the female poetic speaker in the voice and the male persona in the piano: poets speak through that which is feminine in them, Mörike implies, and the creative principle is male and murderous. The metaphorical sex in “Erstes Liebeslied” may begin consensually, but it soon becomes rape on one side, terror on the other, and the two presences do not “communicate”; the rapist is a stranger, an alien neither known nor understood, and Wolf therefore devises entwined yet separate parts for an agonistic waltz. It is the wordless possessor who acts, the voice who reacts, and consequently, the piano leads at all times, the voice forced to adapt to its harmonies but out-of-kilter with it rhythmically; for Wolf thus to hint that men and women are not sexually “in sync” exemplifies both his avowed aesthetic of “Truth to the point of terror” and a certain “in your face” frankness that might have been a safety valve for a composer who decried the sexual hypocrisies of his day, and had reason to do so. The voice and piano never merge completely (with the exception of a single cadence, of which more later), their twisted interlocking phrases emblematic of a tortured conjoining in which the voice responds to the piano. For example, the first vocal phrase follows immediately upon the last pulsation of mm. 3–4 (these repeated chords in the accompaniment are a waltz cliché given a sexual connotation, hinting at the throbbing which follows the plunge of the penis, the latter enacted in the intervallic leap downwards) and proceeds directly from it, the initial pitch F  arising from the E in the piano’s topmost line (albeit transposed down a seventh, enclosed within the “net” of the piano part). Before the singer finishes her first query, “Was im Netze?”, the piano repeats its initial phrase exactly; if this is a stock procedure in classical phrase structure, it conveys sexual narcissism in this context, the piano going its way without responding to the singer’s questions. The musical manifestations of “Schmiegen und Wenden” in stanza 3 (mm. 69–75), with the piano and voice intertwining and parting, slithering and leaping, are so physical as to be shocking even in this day and age. The first four bars may seem at first blush a standard piano introduction, but not really: the song proper, or rather improper, is underway from bar 1, beat 1, in a marathon designed to leave performers feeling as drained as they might after actual sex. But if the personae are separate and distinguishable, they are not independent. Any pianist who must play this difficult part (a large percussion instrument seems all too appropriate to the subject matter) soon realizes why. A “compleat” waltz consists of melody-andaccompaniment in the archetypal lilting triple meter, but this piano part has nothing lyrically melodious; rather, the two figures of which the accompaniment is composed are repeated over and over, varied by means of transposition, dynamics, doubling at the octave, and register, and by occasional extension or fragmentation throughout 137 measures. The first figure consists of basic tonic-and-dominant harmonies, while the second figure (first stated in mm. 9–16), which is actually bipartite, is the means to travel to the next location so that the first figure may then return in transposition – the piano “digs in” for an instant at a given spot, then moves on to fresh sensations, which are actually the same thing in another tonal place (Ex. 4.1). The transpositions are most often rather literal, the figures never transformed so thoroughly that they are unrecognizable on first 110

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied Ex. 4.1

Wolf, Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens, mm. 1–16

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hearing. Insistent repetition at different levels is the order of the day, and the piano’s actions remain essentially the same throughout. If the accompaniment moves about, speeds up, becomes more furious, the strokes and plunges seldom change. A comically realistic physiological fact – faster, slower, higher, lower, it’s all the same, this music suggests – is translated into the musical structure. In fact, Wolf packs the two figures in the piano with as many sexual innuendos as a non-verbal, non-visual medium will allow. He also makes sport of his destiny as a postWagnerian composer – this after years of agonizing about the matter – by appropriating his idol for irreverent purposes. Wolf incorporates into the first figure (mm. 1–4) allusions to the Tristan leitmotif of “Desire,” the descending form of the linear chromatic fragment (E–D  –D
) elided with the ascending form (A–A  –B) in the inner voice – ”Schmiegen und Wenden” indeed, the contrary motion converging in a manner so suggestive as to make the listener feel like a voyeur. This purple patch of chromaticism occurs, one notices, between the tonic and dominant seventh chords which frame the first figure, Wolf tailoring a commonplace convention of tonal music (establishing the principal chords of the key in the initial phrase) to the poetic context and, furthermore, making the dominant harmony suggestively open-ended. The leap of a seventh, or occasionally a sixth, downwards with which the first figure culminates each time reiterates the second-beat emphasis already established in m. 1 but by means of a sexualized intervallic plunge, the thrusting motion all the more suggestive given the crescendo to the forte at the first beat of m. 3. Wolf ups the ante of innuendo in the second figure, which follows the singer’s peremptory words “Schau einmal!”, when the smallest semitone 111

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs atom from the first figure turns into sexualized panting in the right-hand part while the bass traces the Desire figure downwards (A–G  –F), en route to new sensations. The singer both echoes the piano (“aber ich bin bange”) – she melds with “his” C  and elides with his syncopations across the barline – and yet holds herself rigid, without the semitone inflections of the piano. As she does so, the piano rises from A major to C  major harmonies: Terzensteigerung to match Steigerung of another kind. The chromatic voiceleading, its ancestry as erotic symbol traceable to Mörike’s favorite Mozart opera Don Giovanni (“che mi sembra di morir,” Donna Elvira sings, while the orchestra winks and tells us that “the little death” of sex is what she really means19), is thus a link between the first and second figures, such that the entire song is permeated by the sexualized chromatic motion. Surveying the transpositions of the figures, we can see that the entire song “legt sich im Ring” (stanza 5, last line), words to which Wolf clearly paid attention. For any Wagnerite as passionate as Wolf, a “Ring” would inevitably recall Wagner’s tetralogy and its ending in the hugest “Umbringen” of them all and in ringlike return to the Rhine waters. None of the harmonic locations outlined in “Erstes Liebeslied” lasts for long, and hence, none is firmly established (these are fleeting sensations), the tonicizations rising largely by thirds until they return to their starting point on A major: AM m. 1

C M m. 17

DÜM m. 25

EÜM m. 33

EM m. 57

AÜM m. 73

CM m. 89

DÜM m. 105

AM m. 121

Looking at the tonal architecture, one sees smaller rings within a larger ring: two parallel arches are formed by the A major passages at either end of the lied with its dominant E major in the middle, while other arches are created by the sections on D Ü at analogous points in the structure and by the relationship between the E Ü and A Ü major subsections on either side of the center. The first motion away from A major in mm. 17–27 is remarkable for Wolf ’s use of enharmony to ironic effect at the point where the protagonist asks herself whether she grasps a sweet eel or a snake, the former set to C  major chords (the first of the two figures in the piano) which then turn into a D Ü major harmony (m. 25 at the start of the second figure, a “travelling” passage, each time en route somewhere new) just before she voices the poisonous possibility of a snake. Eel or snake, the two are really the same, says Wolf, just respelled and wearing a different tonal skin. Although the conversion of C  to D Ü recurs in mm. 103–05 at the words “es legt sich im Ring,” thus underscoring the phenomenon of return, there are no longer any C  major harmonies; it is the darker flat key which dominates from mm. 105–12 at the words “Gift muß ich haben.” By then, the “fearful thing’s” identity as a biting, killing creature is clear, all possibility of a “sweet eel” gone. Throughout much of the song, one notices, Wolf alternates between harmonies on the flat side and harmonies on the sharp side of the tonal spectrum, as if veering back and forth between polarized possibilities, between male and female, pleasure and pain, sweet eel and snake, light and dark. Not until m. 41 is the bass line actually in the bass register; until that point, it is in the treble, Wolf perhaps availing himself of the traditional symbolism by which treble register = female, lower register = male. From the beginning, the piano overpowers the voice, enveloping it, swirling it along at the raptor’s rapid pace, but at the start, the poetic speaker 112

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied fancies herself in control, and therefore we hear of events initially from her register until m. 41. But at the question “Sagt dem Kinde, wo greift’s hin?”, the control she thought was hers slips out of her grasp, and what began as consensual sex becomes forcible possession. The heavier, lower, “male” register appears for the first time as the woman wonders what she holds, and is regnant for most of the remainder of the song, the initial hush soon giving way to a maelstrom of fortissimo and sforzando indications, more than in any other lied by Wolf. The dynamics change constantly, the abrupt shifts from soft to loud and the crescendi and diminuendi within cramped spaces telling of exacerbated sensation and extremes of fear, but the climate is principally loud–louder–loudest; the woman may whisper “das schaurige Ding” in terror (mm. 99–102), but the battering ram soon resumes its pounding. The frenzied postlude is one of Wolf ’s most daring instrumental scenarios to cap off his chosen poetry and also one of the most amusing in its use of cliché. To confound mystical ecstasy with sexual ecstasy, to hear bells ringing at the moment of orgasm, is a commonplace of pornography, and Wolf plays on those same chimes at the end. An extended version of the “Desire” chromatic fragment is repeated over and over in the right-hand part, harmonized in the parallel thirds endemic in nineteenth-century geistliche Lieder, here accented out-of-kilter with the 3/8 meter of the song and played as loudly and rapidly as possible. One finds similar parallel thirds in Wolf ’s setting of “Zum neuen Jahr” (At the New Year), a paean of praise to God in the same key of A major, and, later, in “Nun wandre, Maria” from the Spanisches Liederbuch, but the cliché of sacred music is put to decidedly “impure” and unchurchly ends in “Erstes Liebeslied.” As the accents crowd closer together in the final measures, the reiterated chromatic figure finally explodes in the final tonic chord – orgasm in music (Ex. 4.2). More to the point, her orgasm: Wolf perhaps returns to treble register at the end in order to suggest that the climax is the woman’s, that the (male) piano is doing its uttermost to the (female) treble register so that she may reach resolution in orgasm – or is this simultaneous orgasm, Wolf spoofing a pornographic convention?20 But for all the brilliance of this song, the composer parts company with his poet at the end, and the result is a certain diminishment of the poem when it becomes a lied text. Wolf chose the shocking surface of the poem rather than its innermost core and turned away from the fear at the heart of Mörike’s words: destruction at the hands of one’s daimon, the poet putting an end to the poem at the point where the “maiden” fears annihilation. For that fear, sexual possession, however frankly adumbrated, is only the symbol. Wolf refuses to go there, and his refusal was perhaps doubly overdetermined. One notices that the composer’s maiden declares that her lover “bringt mich noch um” to a curiously undramatic tonic cadence in the vocal line of mm. 119–21 (especially after her intervallic leaping ^ –3 ^ –2 ^ –1 ^ prone to being about earlier in the song), its dullish traversal of the scale pitches 4 drowned out by the piano and lacking the emphasis Mörike’s verb “umbringen” would seem to demand. Wolf perhaps does so because the “umbringen” at the end was “la petite mort” of sex, not death, and it happens in a jangle of bells after the words cease. Music, not words, will bring one to climax. But one also wonders if Wolf could not bring himself to acknowledge the triad of sex/death/creativity at the heart of the poem. His own “Umbringen” nine years after the 113

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 4.2

Wolf, Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens, mm. 119–37

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creation of this song was wrought by sex, by syphilis already contracted some ten years earlier, but a composer newly jubilant over the floodtide of song in 1888 did not perhaps wish to see farther than the surface of Mörike’s poem. Wolf already knew something of the Muse’s fickleness and would know still more later; he preferred her incarnation as lifegiving “Liebeshauch” (breath of love) in such poems as “Auf einer Wanderung” to representations of her destructive potential or her mysterious withdrawals, leaving her human subjects desperate or dead. Possibly that is why he turned a blind eye to the fear of destruction by one’s own Muse in “Erstes Liebeslied,” and instead matches Mörike’s mixture of comedy, brutality, and virtuosity with his own brew of the same qualities. Wolf ’s pride in this lied is justified, but it is a detour from Mörike, and the speculative reasons for that detour are sad to contemplate. 114

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied PA I R E D S O N G S, U N PA I R E D P E R S O NA E : D E S I R E I N T H E B L A N K S PAC E S

Wolf was prone to pairing songs, sometimes at the poet’s behest (“Auf eine Christblume I & II”), but not always. One pair of Mörike songs is perhaps indebted to Schumann’s practice of grouping together separate poems by the same poet in a way that alters the tone and temper of the poetry, for example, mitigating Heine’s corrosive bitterness in Dichterliebe. Wolf likewise paired his settings of “Der Knabe und das Immlein” (The Boy and the Little Bee) and “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” (An Hour before Daybreak), with no carte blanche from the poet to do so. The musical connectives are not a matter of subtleties to be teased out by the cognoscenti upon deep structural analysis, but unmistakable: the lament is based upon the same musical material one finds in the first page of “Der Knabe und das Immlein,” implying that the grief in “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” is the outcome of what happens between the two songs. But if Wolf is blatant about the musical connection in one sense, he is curiously reticent about the matter in every other way. The songs were composed on the same day (22 February 1888) and follow one another as nos. 2 and 3 in the volume, but there is no directive that they should be performed together, and they usually appear as separate items on recitals and recordings. What impelled him to put these two poems together? At the simplest level, “Der Knabe und das Immlein” and “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” are both poems in iambic trimeters, hence, adaptable to the same music, but connectives deeper than rhythmic similitude were probably what prompted Wolf to build tonal bridges between the two poems. One notes a certain parallelism of opposites between the “Tierlein” – a little bee – who refuses to carry messages from an amorous youth to the girl he desires in “Der Knabe und das Immlein” and the “Tierlein” – a swallow – who cannot be deterred from proclaiming the end of love to a young woman in “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag.” In both, a voice from the world of Nature (the world to which sexual drives belong) instructs human lovers, male and female, about the “plaisirs d’amour, chagrins d’amour,” and in both poems, the verb “herzen” appears at crucial points. The youth who declares at the end of “Der Knabe und das Immlein” that nothing is better than cuddling and kissing means what he says, and the words have darker imputations of infidelity in Wolf ’s pairing. When tired of “cuddling” one sweetheart, the youth will move on to someone else without a twinge of conscience to disturb his pleasures – ”Herzt er ein Lieb in guter Ruh’” the little swallow of “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” announces. The birds in stanza 2 of “Der Knabe und das Immlein,” birds who are silent in the summer sultriness evocative of sexual heat, are doubly symbolic in Wolf ’s dyad: the sweetheart is too young and therefore no “flying,” no sexual intercourse (vögeln), can happen as yet, and hence the talking birds of folklore are momentarily mute, postponing their traditional ill tidings of strayed love until the next song. What Wolf created when he paired these poems was the most compressed possible narrative of a love affair, consisting only of the pre-history and ending. Everything in the middle – courtship, seduction, initial bliss, cooling-off, jealousies, suspicions – is omitted, as if the tale were so commonplace that there is no need to tell it any longer; one can simply “fast forward” from attraction to abandonment (that this is related to Wolf ’s condensation of the Peregrina cycle, which also consists only of pre-history and aftermath, is apparent). 115

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs The lad’s eagerness for sexual pleasure with a schoolgirl he barely knows (“She has scarcely seen you,” the bee scolds), is not the omen of a lasting love, in Wolf ’s reckoning; Cassandra-like, he hints at tragedy from the start, but neither we nor the maiden can read its riddle until it is too late and that which he prophesied in tones has come to pass. Wolf darkens our understanding of “Der Knabe und das Immlein” when he invents enigmatic strains at the start and then explains the enigmas in “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag,” such that we cannot understand the boy and the bee as innocent. Before considering the musical links between the two songs, one should look at the individual poems in more detail. Der Knabe und das Immlein Im Weinberg auf der Höhe Ein Häuslein steht so windebang, Hat weder Tür noch Fenster, Die Weile wird ihm lang.

The Boy and the Little Bee In the vineyard on the heights a little house stands so wind-afraid; has neither door nor window, and boredom makes the day long.

Und ist der Tag so schwüle, Sind all verstummt die Vögelein, Summt an der Sonnenblume Ein Immlein ganz allein.

And when the day is sultry all the songbirds are silent, a honeybee buzzes, all alone, around the sunflower.

Mein Lieb hat einen Garten, Da steht ein hübsches Immenhaus: Kommst du daher geflogen? Schickt sie dich nach mir aus?

My sweetheart has a garden; in it stands a darling beehive: have you come flying from there? Has she sent you out after me?

“O nein, du feiner Knabe, Es hieß mich niemand Boten gehn; Dies Kind weiß nichts von Lieben, Hat dich noch kaum gesehn.

“Oh no, you fine lad, no one told me to send messages. That child knows nothing about love; she has barely looked at you yet.

Was wüßten auch die Mädchen, Wenn sie kaum aus der Schule sind! Dein herzallerliebstes Schätzchen Ist noch ein Mutterkind.

What do you expect girls to know when they are hardly out of school! Your dearly-beloved little sweetheart is still her mother’s child.

Ich bring’ ihm Wachs und Honig; Ade! – ich hab’ ein ganzes Pfund; Wie wird das Schätzchen lachen, Ihm wässert schon der Mund.”

I am bringing her wax and honey; Goodbye! – I have a whole pound. How the darling will laugh; her mouth is already watering.”

Ach, wolltest du ihr sagen, Ich wüßte, was viel süßer ist: Nichts Lieblichers auf Erden, Als wenn man herzt und küßt!21

Ah, if you wanted to tell her, I know something that’s much sweeter: there is nothing lovelier on earth than hugging and kissing!

The mysterious conjunctions in the first stanza are the keys to the poem. The little house on the heights in the midst of a grape arbor at first seems a designation of place until one encounters the neologism “windebang” (wind-fearful) – a syntactically peculiar compound of adjective and adverb – and realizes that the folklike beginning conceals depths; at the end of line 2, the poem becomes rich and strange, the word “windebang” lengthening the line by an extra foot from the trimeters of line 1. If the stanza read “Im Weinberg auf der Höhe / Ein Häuslein steht so bang, / Hat weder Tür noch Fenster / Die Weile wird 116

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied ihm lang,” it would still speak in symbols, but less powerfully. Was it perhaps this word, hinting that “wind,” or sexual passion, is something to be feared, that spurred Wolf to pair this poem with a lament for an affair gone the way of all flesh? The association of storm winds with passion is a recurring motif in Mörike, from its lighter incarnations in “Begegnung” (Encounter) to such dark ballads as “Die schlimme Gret und der Königssohn” (Evil Greta and the King’s Son) in which the prince is crushed to death by the demonic “bride of the winds” at the end. The legendary robber Jung Volker, whose tale is told in Maler Nolten, is wont to announce his arrival with a merry song about his gypsy mother, a sun-browned (a folkloric designation of lower-class origins and sensuality) free spirit who wanted nothing to do with men or marriage but was foiled by “the wind”: from “Jung Volkers Lied” Sie scherzte nur und lachte laut Und ließ die Freier stehen: “Möcht’ lieber sein des Windes Braut, Denn in die Ehe gehen!”

From “Jung Volker’s Song” She only joked and laughed loudly And left her suitors standing: “I’d rather be the wind’s bride than marry!”

Da kam der Wind, da nahm der Wind Als Buhle sie gefangen: Von dem hat sie ein lustig Kind In ihren Schoß empfangen.

Then came the wind, the wind Took her as its lover, From it she got a merry child In her womb.

No actual house lacks doors and windows or knows boredom, and therefore we are led to understand the “Häuslein” as an anthropomorphized symbol for a young girl who is almost but not quite sexually mature. As we have seen in chap. 2, the domestic enclosure of a house is a traditional symbol of the female, of vaginal chambers and wombs, but this one lacks windows or doors through which the “wind” might enter. The aroused youth who longs for her has as yet no access to those virginal chambers. To be barred from sex must be boring, he suggests disingenuously, unable to imagine any other way a girl might pass the time which would be half so interesting. Wolf ’s delicately lubricious grace-noted leap upward in the vocal line at the word “lang,” coupled with the little dotted rhythmic kick of excitement in the inner voice of the accompaniment, tells us that the poetic persona, as he invokes the girl’s “boredom,” envisions the perfect solution to the problem. Wolf ’s poetic persona is a philanderer-in-the-making, and it is yet another measure of Wolf ’s literary acuity, for all the misreadings and altered purposes proposed in this book, that he could see beyond the irresistible youthful ardor of this poem to a dark future for the “Schätzchen” thus desired. Every detail of the mise-en-scène is symbolic and sexual, although the symbolism is less graphic than that in “Erstes Liebeslied.” The grape arbor in which the little house sits is an antique symbol of fertility and Dionysiac sexuality, a promise of fructifications to come, and yet, the “Häuslein”/girl is presently on the inaccessible heights, out-of-reach of the men who wish to enter her. The sunflower (a female symbol) turns its face adoringly to the (male) sun which gives it life, and it depends upon the bee to pollinate it so that the bee in turn can make honey in the hive – fertility emblems galore. “My love has a garden,” the lad says, resorting to the ages-old symbol of the hortus conclusus, or the garden of love, and in it is a beehive from which honey flows; the vaginal garden, clitoral beehive, and the 117

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs honey of sexual secretions are not difficult to decode. The sweetheart’s mouth waters at the mere thought of honey, the bee declares; she is almost ripe for sexual pleasures and will soon develop a taste for a more adult kind of mouth-watering sweetness. The images of bees and honey in “Der Knabe und das Immlein” come from a venerable literary tradition.22 Mörike, who loved ancient Greek and Latin lyric poetry, devises in “Der Knabe und das Immlein” a pseudo-folklike Teutonic cousin to the myth of Eros and the bee, in which the small god of love is stung by a creature hitherto unknown to him as he is plundering either a rose or a hive filled with honey, both emblems of female sexuality. When he runs crying to his mother Venus, she laughingly tells him that this pain is nothing compared to the wounds he inflicts on mortals with his arrows. One of the most famous early versions of this tale is that by Anacreon in the sixth century BC, a poem Mörike translated in 1864 as “Der verwundete Eros” (The Wounded Eros): (stanza 2 of 2) “O weh mir, liebe Mutter! Ach weh, ich sterbe!” rief er: “Gebissen bin ich worden Von einer kleinen Schlange Mit Flügeln – Biene heißet Sie bei den Ackersleuten.” Sie sprach: “Kann so der Stachel Von einem Bienchen schmerzen, Was meinst du, daß die leiden, Die du verwundest, Eros?”23

“O woe is me, dear mother! Ah woe, I die!” he cried. “I was bitten by a little snake with wings – the farmers call them bees.” She said: “Just so can the sting of a bee cause pain. What do you think they suffer, those you wound, Eros?”

Theocritus also told the tale in his nineteenth idyll, which the eighteenth-century poet Johann Heinrich Voss translated in classicizing hexamaters as “Der Honigdieb” (The Honey Thief): Einst ward Eros, der Dieb, von den zornigen Bienen gestochen, Als er Honig dem Korb entwendete. Vorn an den Händen Hatten sie all’ ihm die Finger durchbohrt; er blies sich die Hände, Schmerzvoll, sprang auf den Boden und stampfte. Jetzo der Kypris Zeigt er das schwellende Weh’ und jammerte, daß so ein kleines Tierchen die Biene nur sei und wie mächtige Wunden sie mache. Lächelnd die Mutter darauf: “Bist du nicht ähnlich dem Bienlein? Schau, wie klein du bist und wie mächtige Wunden du machst!”24

Once was Eros, the thief, stung by angry bees as he stole honey from the hive. Right on his hands they pierced each finger; he blew painfully on his hands, jumped up and stamped his feet. Then to Cypris he showed the swelling hurt and lamented that the bees were only such little animals and yet they made such mighty wounds. Smiling, his mother then said: “Art thou not similar to the little bee? Look, how small you are and what mighty wounds you make!”

This is Eros’s own deflowering, and later poets by the score were drawn to this Ur-mythology of love as pain and penetration, however delicate the rendering or pastoral the context. What seems in Mörike like a versified village folk-tale from Swabia has all the auctoritas of ancient Greece behind it. 118

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied The tale was told in art as well: it was a favorite of Lucas Cranach the Elder, whose many versions of the scene each depict an elegantly naked and amused Venus standing next to a chubby Cupid crawling with bees and grimacing in pain.25 Reading the following passage from an idyll by Carl Philipp Conz (1762–1827, a professor of classics at Tübingen), one feels something of the same Schadenfreude shiver impelled by Cranach’s canvasses: Als wir tiefer kamen ins Dunkel des heiligen Haines, Lag wie ein purpurnes Äpfelchen hold, der Knabe Cytherens, Ab den Bogen gelegt und den pfeilverwahrenden Köcher; Diese hingen am Baum, vom säuselnden Laube geborgen. Lächelnd lag er, von Schlummer umstrickt, auf Blättern von Rosen. Goldene Bienen umkrochen des Schlafenden wächserne Lippen, Krochen hinein und heraus und sogen den Honig der Liebe.26

As we went deeper into the dark of the holy meadow, there gently lay, like a ripe little apple, the Cytherean’s lad, his bow laid down and the quiver with its arrows; these hung on the tree, hidden by rustling branches. Smiling, he lay there, by sleep entangled, on rose-petals. Golden bees crept over the sleeping god’s waxen lips, crept in and out and sucked the honey of love.

The lengthy poetic retelling of the Cupid-and-the-bees myth in Des Knaben Wunderhorn is even entitled “Schadenfreude” (Pleasure in Pain), lest one miss the point.27 The bee (male) who sleeps (post-coitally) in rose petals (female sex organs) from which it took honey (sexual secretions) in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s “Die Biene” (The Bee) is about as potent an assemblage of erotic symbols as one could find anywhere; his Amor takes artful revenge for his ages-old hurt by turning himself into a bee and stinging a maiden who comes to pick flowers: (stanza 2 of 2) Durch diesen Stich ward Amor klüger. Der unerschöpflicher Betrüger Sann einer neuen Kriegslist nach: Er lauschte unter Nelk und Rosen; Ein Mägdchen kam, sie liebzukosen, Er floh als Bien’ heraus und stach.28

Through this sting was Amor made wiser. The untiring deceiver concocted another battle-plan: he lurked beneath the carnations and roses and when a maiden came to pick them, he flew out as a bee and stung her.

The boy in “Der Knabe und das Immlein” who says that nothing is sweeter than hugging and kissing, not even honey from the honeycomb, has numerous kith-and-kin in literature. The love-struck young man of “Naturtrieb” (Natural Instinct) in Des Knaben Wunderhorn argues disingenuously that just as bees are impelled to give “a hundred thousand kisses” to all manner of flowers and plants, so he is driven to seek his food and wine on the sweetheart’s lips, while the bee who speaks in “Die Rose” (The Rose) announces: Die Rose blüht, ich bin die fromme Biene, Und rühre zwar die keuschen Blätter an, Daher ich Tau und Honig schöpfen kann . . . 29

The rose blossoms, I am the pious bee, and stir the chaste petals so that I can create dew and honey . . .

For all the protestations of piety and modesty, the sexual implications are clear. In Johann Christoph Friedrich Haug’s (1761–1829) love poem à l’antique, the lovely Celestine is 119

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs “stung in the lips by a lewd bee” (we are invited to hear innuendos of labial lips and the “stinging” penis), and the man in turn is stung by love (“The honey stayed in my mouth, / the sting went into my heart”) and thereby inspired to poetry. When Goethe wished to hymn “Meine Göttin” – Imagination – – in 1780, he gave her “bee lips” with which she “sips lightly nourishing dew from the blossoms.”30 But Eros also kills. In a variation on the legend of the moth to the flame, Heine substitutes a bee symbolic of erotically-driven youth in “Lehre,” or “Lesson” (Robert Franz set this poem to music as the fifth of his Sechs Lieder von Heinrich Heine, op. 41); “Mother to the little bee: beware of the candle’s flame!”, the poem begins, but the bee does not heed the warning and dies in the fire. “Beware of maidens, little son, little son!”, the eponymous mother warns her eponymous son at the end. And bee imagery of love and death reappears in Mörike’s works in the late poem “Erinna an Sappho,” when Erinna vows to make an offering to Demeter of a golden hair-net embroidered with bees, a gift to her from Sappho, if the goddess will keep death at bay from the two poets – but Erinna herself dies soon thereafter.31 Although Wolf did not set “Erinna an Sappho” to music, he surely knew it, knew that the “Bienlein” of Eros make the women who partake of their honey vulnerable to tragedy. By itself, Mörike’s “Der Knabe und das Immlein” is merry, sensual, honeysweet, and Wolf acknowledges every iota of its sweetness in his music, but by pairing it with “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag,” he bids the listener count the cost of such love in grief. This, Wolf says, is where the treble trilling and honeyed sweetness of the first song can lead. The bird in “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” also comes from a long literary ancestry of avian messengers to lovers, for good or ill. Des Knaben Wunderhorn includes several comic versions of the theme, such as “Wechselgesang” (Dialogue song) in which a nightingale brings a lover’s marriage proposal to a young woman, and “Frau Nachtigall” (Lady Nightingale), whose lovestruck young man begs the bird of love to tell him “wie ich mich verhalten soll” (how I should comport myself)32 – Wolfians will recognize that Mörike quotes the latter poem in his own “Auftrag,” whose comically desperate young man implores his cousin Christel for a treatise on lovers’ etiquette. But the time for such pleasantries is long gone when the “Stündlein” of this lament arrives. Women formerly wooed by nightingale intermediaries learn in folksong of their lovers’ betrayal from the self-same bird in “Die Nachtigall,” yet another variation on a familiar theme: Die Nachtigall (stanza 1 of 6) “Nachtigall, klein Vögelein, Willst du diese Nacht mein Bote sein?” – “Ich will wohl dein Bote sein, Nur bin ich so’n klein Vögelein.”33

The Nightingale “Nightingale, dear little bird, will you be my messenger tonight?” – “I will gladly be your messenger, even if I am only a little bird.”

(It is against the backdrop of Nature’s message service in folklore that the boy in Mörike’s “Der Knabe und das Immlein” expects word of his sweetheart from the little bee, his expectation overturned when the bee replies, “No one told me to bring a message” – Mörike often flirts with folkloric motifs in this way.) In another folk poem, “Waldvögelein” (Little Forest Bird), a young woman bids a nightingale sing to her sweetly of her lover: 120

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied Waldvögelein (stanzas 1–2 of 6) Ich gieng durch einen grasgrünen Wald, Da hört ich die Vögelein singen; Sie sangen so jung, sie sangen so alt, Die kleinen Vögelein in dem Wald: Die hör ich so gerne wol singen.

Little Forest Bird

Stimm an, stimm an, feins Nachtigall, Sing mir es von meinem Feinsliebchen, Sing mir es so hübsch, sing mir es so fein: “Bis Abend da will ich bei ihr sein, Will schlafen in ihren Armen.”34

Sing, sing, dear nightingale, sing to me of my beloved, sing of him so sweetly, sing of him so well: “This evening, I will be with him, will sleep in his arms.”

I went through a grassy-green forest, there I heard the little birds singing, they sang so young, they sang so old, the dear little birds in the forest that I so gladly hear singing.

The lover proves false, however, and other nightingales in other poems warn of betrayal and dishonor: “He sticks a feather in his cap and leaves good girls to their shame,” says the nightingale in the aptly named “Warnung” (Warning).35 The skeleton of earlier laments for sexual betrayal and abandonment is evident in Mörike’s poem: Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag Derweil ich schlafend lag, Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag, Sang vor dem Fenster auf dem Baum Ein Schwälblein mir, ich hört’ es kaum, Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag:

An Hour before Daybreak While I lay sleeping, about an hour before daybreak, a little swallow sang to me – I barely heard it – from the tree in front of my window, an hour before daybreak.

“Hör an, was ich dir sag’! Dein Schätzlein ich verklag’: Derweil ich dieses singen tu, Herzt er ein Lieb in guter Ruh, Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag.”

“Listen to what I tell you. I accuse your sweetheart: as I am singing this to you, he hugs another love, quite content, an hour before daybreak.”

O weh! nicht weiter sag! O still! nichts hören mag! Flieg ab! flieg ab von meinem Baum! – Ach, Lieb’ und Treu’ ist wie ein Traum Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag.36

Oh woe! speak no further! Oh, be quiet! I don’t want to hear of it! Fly away, fly away from my tree! – Ah, love and faithfulness are like a dream, an hour before daybreak.

Mörike wastes few words on the personae or the mise-en-scène. All we need is the sparest of references to bedroom, window, and tree in stanza 1 and to the pronoun “er” in stanza 2 to realize that here, a female poetic voice mourns the lover who has just abandoned her. Within the confines of a small poem, polarities abound, in the discrepancy between the small “Stündlein” (diminutives appear in every stanza) and the enormity of what it brings, between the beautiful bird and the horror of what it says, between night and day, fidelity and betrayal, waking and dreaming. The love the woman thought was hers has proven to be as insubstantial as a dream, incompatible with the daytime world of cruel fact to which she has awakened. The remarkably constricted rhyme-scheme (a a b b a / a a c c a / a a b b a) is dominated, one notices, by the sound of “Tag,” the vowel of lamentation (“Ach”) tolling throughout the poem in a tocsin of grief. One can understand the messenger-bird in one sense as a sibylline voice from within the 121

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs woman herself, an apprehension of truth that comes to consciousness at the pre-dawn hour when denial – a defense-mechanism of wakefulness – is weakened. She can barely hear it, she says, and no wonder; inner voices saying what we do not wish to hear are faint for that very reason. Every attribute of the bird seems symbolic, even the choice of a swallow rather than the nightingale; one thinks of the English expression, “One swallow does not make a summer” and wonders whether the poet knew it. Like the nightingale, it sings, which renders its unwelcome words beautiful, and it flies away at the end, the very symbol of inconstant love, unlike the woman-tree, rooted in place. The dash at the beginning of stanza 3, line 4 seems a hieroglyph representing the brief time in which the bird obeys the heartbroken imperative “Fly away,” leaving the woman alone with her sad musings in the last two lines. Mörike, so often obsessed in his poetry with the operations of Time, makes of it both title and refrain, the point to which each stanza circles back at the end. The pre-dawn darkness – it is, we are told, “well” before day, the word “wohl” in ironic contrast with the deprivation of all well-being this hour brings – will not, so the reiterations of the refrain tell us, go away as love did; the poetic speaker inhabits the moment of loss, reliving it over and over. (After the longer iambic tetrameters in lines 3–4, the return to iambic trimeters in line 5 gives the refrain added epigrammatic emphasis. Furthermore, lines 1, 2, and 5 – the shorter lines – are end-stopped, slowing down the lament; the longer lines 3–4 flow smoothly in stanza 1, then become progressively more fragmented in the succeeding stanzas. The control of phrase rhythm is absolute.) The speaker’s complex experience of time – time which passes and time frozen in place, both inexorable, with past and present tragically intertwined – is conveyed by verb tenses whose sequence is a key to the poem. The first stanza tells us that the “Stündlein” happened in the past, while the second and third stanzas shift to present tense; the “past” recounted in the first stanza is in the imperfect, denoting a past that continues into the present, while the present tense of the subsequent verses tells us that the poetic persona in stanzas 2 and 3 re-lives the moment of revelation as if it were happening then and there. From these verbs and from the grammatical parallelism between the lines “Derweil ich schlafend lag” in stanza 1 and “Derweil ich dieses singen tu” in stanza 2, one understands that the bird sings, the unfaithful lover lies with another woman, the speaker laments, all at the same time. The “Stündlein” is both a moment and infinity, and it has, at this moment, the dreadful power to go on and on, without end. The hour of undoing, of realization, is what Wolf foreshadows at the beginning of his setting of “Der Knabe und das Immlein,” but so enigmatically that the meaning of the music for stanzas 1 and 2 only becomes apparent when we hear the second song. The function of many piano introductions in nineteenth-century lieder is the establishment of the tonality and of the principal musical material in advance of the words, but that is the last thing Wolf wanted for a song whose beginning he wished to cloak in enigma, so he omits the introduction altogether. The compositional decision is all the more apropos because the poem begins like a fairy tale or fable (“In such-and-such a place, there was such-andsuch a person . . .”), and Wolf accordingly adopts an “erzählend” quarter-note tactus perfect for story-telling at the start of his song. But at the same time, the initial phrases are so incomplete and ambiguous, so filled with unexplained hints, that we have no way of 122

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied knowing whether the tale to follow will be happy or sad. Do the harmonic intervals – sketches of chords, none of them complete – of the anacrusis and m. 1, for example, belong to B Ü major or G minor? The motivic echo in the left-hand part at m. 2, repeated in m. 4, might seem to weigh the balance in favor of G minor because of the F  –G semitone voice-leading, but what happens above does not clarify matters, quite the opposite. The piano accompaniment lacks solid ground on which to stand, hovering instead in mid-air without a firm bass footing until m. 7, when a cadential formula appears at the words “die Weile wird ihm lang” – this the poetic speaker says with conviction, manifested in an authoritative concluding formula, followed by clarification of the tonal identity as G minor in mm. 8–9 (soon to cede to G major for stanza 3 onward). What most clouds the identification of tonal locus at the beginning are the phraseendings for the first two lines of Mörike’s poem, the second phrase an almost identical repetition of the first. The C s of “Höhe” and “[win]-debang” are a chromatic anomaly, a pitch we sense as an intruder in whatever key this turns out to be, and its repetition, with no explanation on either occasion, deepens the sense of mystery. The augmented sixth is not only prolonged for an unusual length of time, Wolf thereby calling attention to it all the more, but fails to resolve in any expected fashion, indeed at all. Wolf merely shifts the voiceleading beneath the enigmatic C  and returns to the harmonic fragments of m. 1, repeated as m. 3; at the end of m. 4, he respells C  enharmonically as D Ü in order to descend sequentially, the transposed repetition also culminating in chromatic alteration (C Ü at the word “Fenster”) – but the voice-leading proceeds more logically, and we are not made to sense the same chromatic impasse as before. Furthermore, the elided, transposed, varied echoes of the right-hand figure for m. 1 (D–E Ü –B Ü –C–C ) in the left hand at mm. 2 and 4 on the pitches A–B Ü –F  –G does not, significantly, culminate in a chromatic shock-effect comparable to the C s above it. Wolf doubtless knew the tradition of a chromatic “surprise” at or near the beginning of a work which then requires later formal working-out, and he would have used the device self-consciously (Ex. 4.3). What does it mean here, in this dyad-cycle? We do not find out until the piano introduction of “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag,” which, like the introduction to “Peregrina II,” acts as a bridge between the two songs. Throughout the setting of stanzas 1 and 2 of “Der Knabe und das Immlein,” before the boy speaks to the bee, Wolf harps on the minor mode and on repetitions of the initial musical enigmas. The piano interlude which is the corridor between the symbol-laden initial stanzas and the boy–bee dialogue prolongs the C  intruder high in the treble register throughout mm. 16–17, while the echo-variant of the principal motive (A–B Ü –F  –G) is repeated three times in a row beneath it, the chromatic pedal point all the more insistent because trilled. Fond of pictorialism and here given licence to indulge in it by his poet, Wolf begins a suitably beelike humming and buzzing in the piano with the verb “summt” (buzzed), but perhaps he did so for a reason beyond mere onomatopoeia. In this way, we are made to understand that the enigmatic warnings of something ominous merge with the voice of Nature, that the darkness foreshadowed here is part of Nature’s script. Wolf, one notices, only turns towards the major mode at the last minute – in m. 19, immediately before the dialogue begins. That dialogue is duly given all the honey-sweetness and lively motion Mörike’s words demand – a riot of trilling, buzzing jubilation, a dazzle of diatonic brightness in major mode – but the auguries of melancholy persist until just before the boy speaks. 123

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 4.3

Wolf, Der Knabe und das Immlein, mm. 1–8 Ma¨ssig, zart

− (leise) Ł Ł Š−  Ł Ł Im

!

Wein-berg auf

− Š −  ŁŁ \\ Ý −−  ¼

½

− Š− ½

Š

Ł

we - der Tu¨r noch

− Š − −ŁŁ −ŁŁ

Ho¨

-

Ł ² ð ýý Ł ðn

¼

− Š − ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ¦ Ł

!

der

ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ

6

hat

Ł ²ð

−¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ

Ł Ł

Ł Ł Ł ¦Ł

he ein

Ha¨us-lein steht so

ŁŁ

Ł Ł ²Ł Ł

½

−ð

Ł

−Ł ý

Fen

-

ster, die

−ð ý −ð ý

Ł ¦Ł

rit.

Łð

rit.

Ł ¦Ł

Ł −Ł ¦ Ł

Ł

Ł

Wei - le wird ihm

ðð ð

Ý

ð ð

−Ł ¦Ł

Ł Ł

¼ Ł
Ł Ł

¹

win - de-bang;

ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł ² ð ý Ł ðný

Ł

Ł

² Ł Łý 

Łý

Ł

²Ł Ł


ð ²Ł

¼

lang.

ðý ²Ł ¦ð ¦ ŁŁ ý Ł ² ðð

In the lament, all is made clear. The motivic echo from mm. 2 and 4 of “Der Knabe und das Immlein” returns at the beginning of “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag,” repeated three times in a row without pause or break, in the piano alone. We have heard similar invocations of this figure in the piano interlude between stanzas 2 and 3 of the first song, but now the repeated figures are re-cast so that the four-note motive is in the topmost voice, and therefore brought to our attention more forcefully. The repetitions are crucial: we are thereby made to realize that the figure is circular, that it could theoretically go on and on forever, a snake devouring its own tail. In “Der Knabe und das Immlein,” the same figure in mm. 2 and 4 stops short of completing the circle each time, while the C s in the righthand part and the vocal line can be understood as an attempt to bar the repetitions, to stop the circling motion – but, ironically, the chromatic pitch also acts to emphasize the return of the deferred pitch D when it begins the circle again. The motive D–E Ü –B Ü –C–C  is a broken ring, the chromatic intruder C  a harbinger of infidelity in a single note, while the echoed variant of that motive originally stated on the pitches A–B Ü –F  –G/A–B Ü –F  –G, and so on, forms the “eternity symbol” of an unbroken ring – but the ourobouros is contained within the lamentation interval of a diminished fourth, the plangent “Monteverdi fourth” associated with grief from the Baroque onward. Its shape, one notices, is a perfect circle – a whole-step in the middle (G–A), bounded by semitones on either side (F  –G, A–B Ü ) – which renders impossible any sense of rootedness; although these pitches are diatonic in a minor-mode context, the fulcrum here is the supertonic, not the tonic, and the figure therefore never comes to rest. Even the fact that it originally sounds as an elided echo of the broken ring harks back to an earlier tradition of echo-laments in the wake of love gone 124

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied wrong (one thinks again of the echo-lament at the beginning of act 5 of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo). Love and lamentation, we are told via antique symbols, are musical kin, one proceeding from the other, the former broken and the other unbroken, perpetual. Wolf understood that not only is the “Stündlein” circular, doomed to recur in the woman’s memory over and over, but that her plight belongs to an eternal cycle, and he suggests by every means at his disposal that it has happened before and will happen again. Part of Nature’s design, youths throughout Time will sing of love’s sweetness to young women who will succumb to them and then be abandoned. Wolf therefore fashioned his dyad-cycle as a series of circles within circles, large and small, broken and unbroken, cyclical recurrence the foremost compositional determinant of the dyadic design. The circular motives in “Der Knabe und das Immlein” subsequently become a circular modulating schema in “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” (of which more later), spiralling both up and down, then returning at the “end” to the song’s beginning; not only is “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” cyclical and circular by itself, but it recycles “Der Knabe und das Immlein.” In the most revealing detail of all, the second song does not really “end,” but is instead suspended, hovering in mid-air on the dominant triad of G minor. The D in the topmost voice of that un-final “final” harmony is the same pitch at the same level one hears at the beginning of “Der Knabe und das Immlein” – in other words, the story is poised to begin all over again, back at the point where thoughts of seduction first enter the picture and the ages-old tragedy of the boy and the bee, the girl and the little swallow, is set in motion yet again. No one has a name in these two poems, one notices, only archetypal designations as “The Boy” and “The Sweetheart” – innumerable lads and their innumerable sweethearts from time immemorial. If the tragedy recurs, it is because Eros is indeed a mighty god. Wolf understood, as did Mörike before him, the beauty of desire in its early days, and he gives that ecstasy full expression in his setting of stanzas 3 through 6 of “Der Knabe und das Immlein.” Not only does the key signature change to G major at the start of the dialogue, but the lad sings his first words, “Mein Lieb hat einen Garten,” to an initial leap of a sixth (always a special gesture in Wolf) from D to B, giving the raised third degree of the major mode added emphasis, its newness all the more sparkling after the multitudinous B Ü s which darken the first two stanzas. When Wolf lifts the second and third stages of the sequence in mm. 20–23, with its parallel shifts from G major to E minor to C major harmonies, higher each time, the listener cannot help but succumb to the truly seductive sweetness of these strains. It is here Wolf introduces the offbeat rhythms that will acquire, throughout the dialogue, more and more sexual connotations, the shift upwards to a new harmonic plane in the piano occurring each time on the second beat of the measure (mm. 21–22). Whereas the sequential passages in stanzas 1 and 2 darken, descending for short periods of time to places with more flats and shadows, this sequence rises (Wolf ’s favorite Terzensteigerung) to rest briefly on B major and a dazzle of sharps. And so do most of the phrases thereafter, although not via that same harmonic sequence each time. It is one feature of this dialogue that, for all Wolf ’s differentiation of the two speakers, with a frothing cascade of trills for the insect, the boy and the bee share a common purpose. Both embody the male principle, and both exist to make honey and to fructify women/flowers, and therefore Wolf gives to each a harmonic progression leading from the initial G major, 125

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs a key traditionally associated with themes of springtime and love (this is the tonality of “Er ist’s”) to a cadential articulation on B major – higher, brighter, sweeter. B major, one notices, does not appear either in the setting of stanzas 1 and 2, where lamentation is first foreshadowed, or in “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag,” where it comes to pass. Seduction has a harmonic identity of its own, but for all its repetitions, it is never firmly established. Desire is a fleeting, sometime thing, not a place to set down roots and linger. Each of the boy’s two phrases in his stanza 3 question to the bee, “Did she send you to me?” (one thinks of Wilhelm Müller’s miller boy in Die schöne Müllerin asking in “Danksagung an den Bach” if the miller’s lovely daughter sent the brook to him), is based on this progression from G major to B major (mm. 20–23, 24–27), and so are the three sections into which the bee’s reply is divided (mm. 27–35, 36–43, 44–51). Realizing this, one also realizes that the formal structure of this dyad-cycle is comprised of circles within circles in an ingenious pattern. The bee’s reply to the boy is a miniature A B A form – a ring or circle – which is itself the B section of a still-bigger A B A form (extending from m. 20 to m. 66) created by the dialogue (boy–bee–boy), which is in turn the B section of the largest A B A form of them all, the A sections consisting of stanzas 1 and 2 of “Der Knabe und das Immlein” and the entirety of “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag,” while the dialogue constitutes the B section. Only the bee’s A B A form is perfectly symmetrical, however, each segment being divided into two phrases and the second A section the exact length of the first; the little creature’s purpose and message are clear, contained, without the warping of proportions created by human emotion, which swells and increases upon return. The bee’s B section (mm. 36–43) differs from its surrounding A sections not in the harmonic progression but in the figuration for the piano: instead of bee-buzzing trills, we hear fluttering appoggiatura motives in the high treble, skittering figures that suggest both the insect’s fluttering wings and the playfulness of a girl barely out of school. The lad’s ardor at the thought of “herzen und küssen” (by this time, the offbeat rhythms become sexualized panting of the sort made even more explicit in “Nimmersatte Liebe”) expands the returned A section of the dialogue, and the lament of “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” is the last and largest expansion of all (nineteen bars for stanzas 1 and 2 of the first song, thirtynine bars for the lament). It is the side-slipping divagation to a brief patch of Neapolitan A Ü major harmonies in mm. 58–59 at the first invocation of the words “herzt und küßt” that necessitates the repetition of the last two lines of the poem to tonic harmonies (even here, there is a small, significant chromatic touch of darkness in the flatted sixth E Ü at “herzt”), hence the expansion of the second A section of the dialogue. More than a momentary darkening of the music to give added weight to the verbs at the heart of it all (especially the six-four harmony at “küßt,” a harmony associated in the Peregrina songs with longing and here emphasized by the upward leap of a sixth in the vocal line), the sidestepping maneuver is also premonition and veiled threat, although we cannot realize it until the next song. A more complex enactment of the same semitone ascent, this time from G minor to A Ü minor, is part of the formal structure of “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag,” and we hear a foreshadowing of it here. Wolf ’s lad really does know whereof he speaks when he invokes “herzen und küssen,” as the composer tells us in the postlude. It does not require much imagination to hear in these four bars a wickedly graphic suggestion of passion rising, reaching climax, and then 126

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied subsiding into detumescence and lassitude. Wolf ’s dynamic and tempo markings tell the tale: from soft beginnings on the poet’s last word “küßt,” the customary elision of the end of the texted body of the song with the beginning of the postlude thus given sexual meaning, the music heats up quickly to a fortissimo peak of passion, followed by dolcissimo, diminuendo, and ritardando descent by languid degrees to quiescence and ending. It is even possible to hear, as in “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens,” two different points of sexual climax suggested for the man and the woman (although a student of mine once proposed that the boy’s masturbation while imagining delights to come was an equally plausible scenario). The right-hand part in m. 63 (the first bar of the postlude) is, one notes, a more fully harmonized restatement of the lad’s words “wenn man herzt und küßt” in the preceding measure – the boy’s part, which reaches climax with the downbeat of m. 64, while the sequential chromatic swell in the inner voice suggests the woman’s passion, rising to its apex on the flatted sixth degree . . . the E Ü of the dark premonitions . . . at the end of that same measure. In the downward-drifting, dying-away figures at the end (m. 65), Wolf mimics ebbing sexual pulsations in the right-hand rhythms and then slows to a halt in mid-measure, a gentler ending than downbeat placement for the final tonic chord. But depiction of this sort is banished from “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag.” Unlike many of the composers drawn to this poem, Wolf abjured all birdlike twittering and fluttering in the piano; he realized that the poetic persona remembers the “Stündlein” with such intensity that onomatopoeia from the external world has no place.37 Instead, Wolf combines rhythmic austerity with great tonal richness. Understanding the centrality of Time to this lament, he fashions the quarter-note tactus as if it were the ticking of an inexorable clock. It is perhaps for this reason that Wolf runs lines 3–5 of each stanza one after the other in unbroken succession, the refrain proceeding from the couplets before it without a break, while the circular motive in the left hand maintains the tactus during the breaks in the vocal part between lines 1 and 2 of each stanza. Wolf pays no heed in his music to Mörike’s dash in the third stanza (the symbol for the moment in which the bird flies away), although he retains it in his song-text; the poet’s typographical shorthand to evoke one kind of time co-exists with the composer’s evocation of Time in another fashion. Only twice does the quarter-note ticking pause briefly, the first instance at the end of the piano introduction (m. 4), where the half-note on the downbeat both emphasizes the dissonant appoggiatura chord to the dominant seventh and articulates the moment where wordlessness gives way to words. A longer pause marks the end of the piano interlude between stanzas 1 and 2 (mm. 15–16), with its quarter-note beat of complete silence – the only one in the entire song – before the swallow’s words, such that one understands the pause as emblematic of dread, as reluctance to name the cause of this lamentation. There is no such break between stanzas 2 and 3, where grief presses hard on the heels of realization and piercing dissonance takes the place of the former silence. No longer can the music hold its breath and stop the clock. “Tonal richness” is hardly an adequate phrase for Wolf ’s treatment of tonality, harmony, modulation, and voice-leading in this song. I know of no other work in the nineteenth century whose formal structure is predicated upon two successive semitone modulations upward (“the Mantovani maneuver,” an irreverent theorist of my acquaintance calls it): the setting of the first stanza begins in G minor, the second stanza in A Ü minor, the third stanza in A minor, increasing angst impelling the music to inch upwards by semitones.38 127

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Within each stanza, a harmonic sequence carries us from the beginning tonality to the dominant chord of the next tonality, the voice-leading which produces each half-cadence reserved for the piano alone, never for the voice. The word “day” which brings betrayal is always set as a chromatic intruder, an “outsider” in whatever context, at both the beginnings and ends of stanzas; only in the wake of that word can the piano at the last minute clear away the chromatic mist to reveal the new dominant triad. Because that triad emerges at the end of a “travelling” progression, we cannot yet know it as a new dominant, and therefore the new tonic which follows comes as a shock. The sequence within each stanza, however, sinks downward by whole-tones, touching upon F minor, E Ü major, and D Ü major harmonies in the first stanza and F  minor, E major, and D major harmonies in the second stanza, before repeating the lamentation-circular motive from the beginning of the stanza transposed to a new level. Each stanza is thus circular, but circular by spirals which move downward and upward simultaneously in stanzas 1 and 2. In the final stanza, Wolf breaks the pattern so that the music can return to the dominant of G minor at the end, the spiral broken at the point where the bird is told to fly away. Perhaps in order to deter comparisons with his great predecessors, Wolf shied away from labelling these two songs as a cycle or a pair, but they are just that and should be performed as such. When Wolf put together poems the poet conceived separately, he made of the two songs cause-and-effect; the crucial moments in the trajectory of love, so says this foreshortened plot, are the moments when desire is first made known and when one or the other lover recognizes the fact of betrayal. The ways in which Wolf knits these songs together vie with ancient Celtic ornamentation for the number of interlacing strands; if many of those strands are familiar musical gestures (“wrong-note” intrusions, major mode versus minor mode, ring figures, and the like), that is perhaps only appropriate to the subject, in which one of the oldest scripts of all is made new again. D E S I R E W I T H O U T E N D : “ D E R G Ä RT N E R ”

In Mörike’s world, desire is sweetest when it appears as a distillate of yearning beyond fulfillment and therefore distanced from tragedy, when it lacks all plot and its rapture cannot ever change to pain. In “Der Gärtner” (The Gardener), Mörike created a Märchen vignette, preserved in amber, about a princess loved from afar by an ardent young gardener in her employ. The poem is the poet’s response to a predecessor, and so is the song: Mörike rewrote a passage by Joseph von Eichendorff, and Wolf rewrote Schumann’s earlier setting of Mörike’s poem. Wolf knew his poet’s source – Eichendorff’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-for-nothing) was one of the composer’s favorite works – and it is intriguing to speculate that he was perhaps aware of the poet’s project of revision. Wolf ’s entanglement with a powerful prior presence can thus be understood as an echo of Mörike’s similar endeavor and for a similar purpose, both expunging the darkness from their predecessors’ creations. Behind the pairing of Wolf and Mörike stands an older pair, whose gardens of love were not so idyllic. The choice of a gardener who falls in love, at a discreet class-induced distance, with a princess was calculated. The symbolic associations of gardens with sites for love, gardeners with male desire, women with flowers, are very old poetic themes, as we have already seen in “Der 128

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied Knabe und das Immlein.”39 Virtually every aspect of a gardener’s occupation can be sexually construed, for example, planting seeds in furrows, plucking or breaking flowers, fertilizing growing things, and so on, the symbolism sometimes gilded and sweetened, sometimes spelled out in merrily unsubtle double-entendres. Gardeners are usually male and the flowers they tend female, but in the folksong “Die Gärtnerei ist ja führwahr” (Gardening Is Truly a Wonderful Thing), the traditional symbolic order is reversed: the “flower” to be “planted” is the phallus, with its testicle “buds,” tough and erect stalk, and plentiful seed. Whoever devised this song gives the language of flowers a comically salacious twist: (A young woman visits a gardener – stanzas 3–4) Ich frage gleich: “Was wünschen Sie, was ist denn Ihr Begehr?” Sie sagte drauf ganz leis zu mir: “Ein Blümlein hätt ich gern; ein Nelkenstock wär meine Freud, dies glaubens mir gewiß, ich bitte, daß Sie mir ihn geb’n, weil er mein Freud nur ist.”

I asked her at once: “What do you wish, what is your desire?” She said quite softly to me: “I would very much like a little flower, a carnation would give me joy, of this I am sure, I beg of you, give it to me since this only is my joy.”

Ich sagte: “Ja, – gleich – warten Sie, Ich such mir nur mein Rock, dann gehen wir ins Gartenhaus, dort ist ein Nelkenstock, er hat zwei Knospen und ein Stiel, ist von der besten Art, er hat des guten Samens viel, der Steng’l ist zäh und hart.40

I said: “Yes – at once – wait, I am only looking for my jacket, then we will go into the greenhouse. There is a carnation plant It has two buds and a stalk of the very best kind; it has many good seeds, the stem is tough and hard.”

Mörike’s poem has nothing this earthy. More refined writers also got out their literary trowels to delve into the Liebesgarten tradition and transplant its themes to their own purposes, including Johann Martin Miller in Siegwart. Near the end of the novel, Siegwart takes a job as a gardener in the convent where his beloved Mariane is being held and, hidden behind a bush, sings a sad song, “Es war einmal ein Gärtner” (Once There Was a Gardener) in his beloved’s hearing: (last verse of 7) Du liebes Gärtnermädchen: Mein Leben welket ab. Darf ich nicht bald dich küssen, Und in den Arm dich schliessen, So grab’ ich mir ein Grab, So grab’ ich mir ein Grab.41

You lovely gardener-maiden, my life is withering. If I cannot kiss you soon and clasp you in my arms, I will dig my grave, I will dig my grave.

Eichendorff’s poetic speaker in “Der Gärtner” observes how many beautiful women there are in the world – “In my garden, I find many beautiful flowers . . . I make many garlands from them, and I weave a thousand thoughts and greetings into them”42 – but it was his prose that provided the model for Mörike’s poem. In the second chapter of Eichendorff’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, the protagonist takes a job as a gardener at a castle on the Danube (his short-lived employment in such a capacity is emblematic of galant-style versifying and is not the Taugenichts’ true métier), 129

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs and has fallen in love with the young woman he believes is the daughter of the noble household.43 Every evening, he leaves a bouquet of flowers for her on a table in the castle garden (he is living in a toll-house outside the castle precincts, separated from the aristocracy by a wall), and every morning, the bouquet has disappeared, fuelling his continued desire. One evening, when he leaps over the wall to gather his nightly offering, he encounters “my beautiful lady herself, in a green riding habit, with nodding feathers on her hat, slowly, as if lost in thought, riding down the allée.” Overjoyed and anxious in equal measure, he stammers, “Most beautiful, gentle lady, please accept this flower garland from me, and all the flowers from my garden, and all that I have. Oh, if only I could leap through fire for you!” Wordlessly, she takes the bouquet from him and disappears.44 Thereafter, she leaves his floral tributes on the table, and the dispirited lad allows the weeds to grow and the flowers to wither in the untended garden. When a mischief-making chambermaid tells him that his lady desires another bouquet that evening, the Taugenichts pulls up the weeds, uprooting his former melancholy, and tidies his garden plot/writing tablet for a return to gardening/poetry. After gathering red roses (her mouth), blue convolvulus (her eyes), and white lilies (all of her) for his bouquet, he goes into the garden, whose paths are freshly strewn with sand, to wait for his beloved lady.45 The malicious chambermaid brings out, not the beautiful young woman he loves, but an older aunt in masquerade (the lad, perched in a tree, does not have to confront either undesired woman). In the midst of a nocturnal garden ball, complete with a serenade by the household retainers, the Taugenichts discovers to his sorrow that his beautiful lady is married “. . . and that I was a great fool.”46 Throwing his flowers into the air, he departs for Italy and new adventures. For his “Der Gärtner,” Mörike took certain elements from Eichendorff – the aristocratic lady on horseback riding down an allée, the gardener’s offering of all his flowers, the freshly-strewn sand on the pathway – and erased every trace of suffering, his poetic distillate of Eichendorff’s prose purified of plot and pain alike: Der Gärtner Auf ihrem Leibrößlein, So weiß wie der Schnee, Die schönste Prinzessin Reit’t durch die Allee.

The Gardener On her little horse, as white as the snow, the loveliest princess rides down the tree-lined avenue.

Der Weg, den das Rößlein Hintanzet so hold, Der Sand, den ich streute, Er blinket wie Gold.

On the path on which her little steed prances so gracefully, the sand that I sprinkled, it glistens like gold.

Du rosenfarbs Hütlein, Wohl auf und wohl ab, O wirf eine Feder Verstohlen herab!

You rose-colored little cap bobbing up and down, oh, throw a feather secretly down for me!

Und willst du dagegen Eine Blüte von mir, Nimm tausend für eine, Nimm alle dafür!

And if you want in exchange a flower from me, take a thousand for one, take all of them for it!

Mörike crowds an astonishing number of sexual metaphors into this poem while ensuring that we understand them as unsullied by any hint of darkness – by reality, in other 130

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied words. Princesses are by definition daughters, hence desirable, marriageable, and this one is “the most beautiful” of all, a fairy-story creature. The snow-white horse she rides is a multiply meaningful steed since horseback riding (although princesses would undoubtedly have ridden side-saddle, not astride), or having a large animal in proximity to the genital area, has long had sexual connotations. This animal furthermore is a “Leibrößlein,” the word “Leib” and the diminutive hinting that the “little horse” is symbolically equated with the princess’s sexuality (“Leib,” or “body,” can also mean “womb”); that the horse is “white as snow” tells us that she is virginal, hence, all the more desirable. Even the fact that she rides through a tree-lined corridor seems rife with sexual associations, suggesting female pubic hair lining a labial allée. Martin Ulrich writes that the relationship of the gardener and the princess echoes the ideal relationship of vassalage and aristocracy in the classical age, in which the menial worker gladly accepts his servitude and believes that the presence of this beautiful aristocrat ennobles his labor, but it is the sexual symbolism which seems primary to me, stronger than the element of class distinction (the latter, however, is crucial for Eichendorff).47 The sexual symbols accumulate throughout the poem in a crescendo of desire. The “rosy little hat” in stanza 3 is metonymy for the princess, the roses of love tinting a cap easily recognizable in post-Freudian symbolism as a displacement of the maidenhead; one notes that the “Hütlein” is not a “Rotkäppchen,” not the red of blood shed upon deflowering, but rose-colored, still virginal. The cap’s bobbing motion up and down, “wohl auf und wohl ab” is also sexually suggestive, the doubled “wohl” hinting that this action is well and good. When the gardener pleads for a feather from this rosy cap, he is begging for sexual flight with her, the feather a metonymic invocation of the birds symbolic of human sexuality – “Come fly with me, fly, fly away” comes to mind. The princess is to give the feather to the gardener in secret (“verstohlen”), one notes, lest the classical order of life be transgressed openly, and in return, he promises her a thousand flowers (one thinks of millefleurs backgrounds in medieval tapestry) in exchange for a single blossom: the “flower” of her maidenhead. The words “eine,” italicized for extra emphasis, and “dafür” in the last stanza are the most delicate of euphemisms, but no one could mistake their meaning. Although the concatenation of erotic symbols is such that any explication might seem to require plain brown paper wrappers, never was sexual desire more pure than it is here, all idealized emotion and no action, the symbols themselves objects of beauty – no eels and snakes in sight. “Der Gärtner” is sheer song. There is no story, no moral, no ending, only this single tableau, which one can imagine illustrated by Walter Crane. Without context, without beginning or ending, it is literally an enchanted moment, desire uncontaminated by consequences; in these gardens, death and time have no sway. Perhaps most important of all, there is no response from the princess. It would break the spell if there were, for the whole point of the enterprise is to clothe desire in song, not to consummate it. (Less charitably described, this is another instance of the woman as mute object of desire.) The gardener goes no farther than longing for an exchange of eloquent symbols, and the reader neither expects nor wants her to respond; this is not Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and we do not wish the soap-bubble social order of the song’s unreal realm disturbed. The song should not become a story, and desire should not seek completion but instead revel in yearning for its own sake. 131

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 4.4

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Wolf took note, and he did so in an ingenious way. His gardener sings the last words of the poem (“Nimm alle dafür!”) to a conventional cadential melodic pattern in the vocal line, complete with tonic closure on the final syllable of text, but the piano-“Leibrößlein” does not provide a full tonic chord on the downbeat of m. 44 where we do expect it, the absence compelling our questioning attention: why does Wolf do this? For the first and only time in the song, the composer withholds the bass pitch on the downbeat that is an integral element of this dance-song, providing as it does a stable and sure foundation for each measure – this is the ground on which we dance (Ex. 4.4). When a bass line does appear at the end of the second beat of m. 44, it sounds the repeated pitch A, suggesting, in company with the sustained D in the voice, a tonic six-four harmony which is then confirmed on the last beat of the measure by full harmonization . . . but the complete version belongs to the postlude, is the anacrusis to it, while the incomplete version belongs to the words. What does m. 44 mean? Does the princess briefly halt the horse’s lilting motion to listen to her would-be suitor? Or is the momentary emptiness indicative of the impossibility of a response? Maybe, but I hear the rhythmic glitch in another way: Wolf perhaps suggests that if the princess were to give the gardener the one flower he wishes, it would break 132

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied the dance, ending it or turning it into something else. The piano, as if it were a sentient being and had suddenly recognized its danger, not only resumes the dance rhythms after the brief, telling silence but insists upon the six-four harmony we have already come to associate with longing for a love that cannot be, with impossible yearning, at the end of “Peregrina II.” The piano in “Der Gärtner,” having denied tonic closure “dafür” with the ^ in the bass, then uses the fully harmonized six-four chord as the bridge back scale degree 5 to the piano introduction, repeated as the postlude and varied only in its typically Wolfian dying-away close, the princess and the song itself vanishing into the treble empyrean. The repetition of prelude as postlude does more than provide the customary classical framework around a song: it confirms that the lied is circular and therefore eternal. “Es war einmal” a gardener and a princess is forever and without end, all the more precious because we are told – in a single instant of silence in one part – how fragile this realm is, how susceptible to destruction. Mörike casts the sexual desire of “Der Gärtner” in the same dancelike iambic-anapaestic dimeters of “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens,” stanzas 3–6, but Wolf ’s two songs could not be more different. Where the piano-lover in “Erstes Liebeslied” pounds out a frenetic waltz-on-amphetamines while the singer twists and struggles and screams, “Der Gärtner” dances gently, lyrical desire infusing voice and piano. In the piano introduction, Wolf establishes the 6/8 clip-clopping staccato figures of the “Leibrößlein,” figures whose buoyancy comes in large measure from the intervallic motion “wohl auf und wohl ab.” One could actually dance to the ballroom Schwung of these strains, the “pastness” of its rarified diatonicism evocative of a fairytale world. The vocal part dances as well, its ascending and descending intervals balanced in perfect symmetry and without a trace of Wolf ’s famed declamatory manner; in this world, one need not speak, just sing, and it does not matter that less important words, such as the preposition “Durch,” receive the same first-beat emphasis as more important words. “Correct” prosody is here subordinated to dance. There is something at once exultant and yearning in the upwards motion of the left-hand figures to meet the right-hand figures, their buoyancy largely conferred by range (they span as much as two octaves in the space of four eighth-note beats), as if everything in the song were about coming together. In mm. 1–2, one hears the same figure repeated, with intervening rests, until finally the third statement sets in motion the nonstop accompaniment; this “striking up the dance” can also, somewhat fancifully, be imagined as the princess mounting her horse – two preliminary swings and then it’s off and away. The half-diminished seventh chord in m. 3, an inflection of the prolonged dominant seventh chord which constitutes the introduction, is a particularly affective gesture, recurring in the piano interludes which follow stanzas 1 and 2 (one notes the slurs in these interludes, mm. 12–14 and 22–24, which direct the pianist to articulate the right-hand figures as small, upwardswinging cells, buoyant as puffs of breeze). These first two stanzas “end” with cadences on the dominant, impelling the tonal motion forward, and the interludes convert A major back to its principal identity as the dominant of tonic D major. The atmosphere of this song is diatonic and non-modulatory – this is desire that goes nowhere – and yet that very desire tinges the diatonic air with chromatic intensity, including the half-diminished seventh chord whose lowered seventh scale degree (C
) is a premonition of the C major harmonies later in the lied and whose neighbor-note inflections hint ever so subtly at erotic content. 133

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs As was his wont, Wolf seems to create (there is a subtlety at work here, of which more shortly) the vocal line and the piano part as two separate personae, princess and gardener, singer and dance orchestra, and the details of the relationship between them are among the delights of the song. For example, the vocal line is situated below the right-hand part throughout the greater portion of the first stanza (repeated as stanza 2), the gardener thus literally lower than the princess, his words enclosed in the crystalline bubble of piano figuration whose chord voicing and octave-displaced wing-span are beautifully crafted. The sixteenth-note rest which follows the downbeat in the piano in almost every measure, often twice per measure, renders the song as light and airy as a soufflé, the very look on the printed page distinctive. At the end of the first four-bar phrase, the vocal line rises to the level of the right hand, soaring up to join it in a remarkably buoyant gesture. If the singer is the only one granted a continuous stream of lyrical melody, the right-hand part is a semi-merger of figuration and melody, coming to the ear as motion up and down and yet bordering on song. Because we hear of the princess through the filter of the gardener’s desire, it is no wonder that the vocal line and the piano part are harmonically in utter concord, devoid of the tensions Wolf was so adept at creating. This is made especially clear in the second half of the song. Virtually every nineteenthcentury composer who set this poem to music recognized the intensification of desire in stanzas 3 and 4, beginning with the turn to direct address (“Du rosenfarbs Hütlein”), and they all – Wolf included – translated this intensification into harmonic terms.48 Each of the first three phrases begins with the shift to a momentary tonicization somewhere other than tonic D major, a chain of heightened harmonies rising as the singer’s desire rises. The first of these shifts occurs at the words “Du rosenfarbs Hütlein” to a patch of G major whose way has been paved by the G major chords in the first half of the song – Wolf need only flip basic chords of the key around so that “I” becomes “V” (the sudden hush of pianissimo dynamics following the mf indication for the preceding piano interlude is another index of new emotional depths at the midway point). With each shift, Wolf ups the ante, but without altering the figurational and melodic patterns already established; the second half of the song flows from the first half in unbroken unity (except for the brief break in m. 44). At the plea “O wirf eine Feder,” Wolf shifts via his favorite Terzensteigerung to a phrase on B minor (mm. 29–32), the first and only appearance of minor mode in the entire song, its tinge of darkness a new element of intensification. These harmonic shifts begin, one notices, close to home and then move farther away each time, with the most intense harmonic maneuver of them all reserved for the third and last stage. Unlike the first half of the song, there is no piano interlude between the third and fourth stanzas to break the sequence of enchained shifts, the most magical of them all the semitone transport upward to C major for the final plea, “Und willst du dagegen / eine Blüte von mir . . .” – C major for the most fervently sexual plea of the entire song. If anything else were needed to assert the fairy-tale purity of desire in “Der Gärtner,” this is it. Where the harmonic planes are as “diatonic” as they are here, pure triads in “tonic” and “dominant” relationship, the effect of the displacement a half-step higher is particularly concentrated and sweet. One notices furthermore that the pleading verbs “wirf ” and “willst” are highlighted, set aglow by being the words on which the latter two shifts occur, and that with each shift, the bass line reaches down more deeply, the song striking closer to the 134

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied depths of desire and expanding its compass as it nears the words at the heart of the poem, the goal towards which the earlier stanzas are directed. After twelve measures of bell-like root position triads, the final plea, “Nimm tausend für eine, nimm alle dafür!”, impels a single half-diminished seventh harmony in m. 37 (a harmony that can turn in many different directions), and yet, the “dissonance” is voiced in such an airy way as to be purged of some, if not all, of its innate tension, lightened and sweetened in accord with the song at large. As we have seen, Wolf knew how to render sexual torment into tone as few others could do, but for this poem, he and Mörike alike refuse to go there. When Wolf composed “Der Gärtner,” he was, I suspect, revising Schumann. Wolf does not, to my knowledge, mention Schumann’s op. 107, no. 3 setting of this text in his extant letters or in the anecdotes recounted by his friends, but the fact that he knew it, and knew it well, is written all over his own setting. Wolf ’s D major tonality and the dotted rhythmic figures in the piano are echoes of Schumann, although Schumann’s setting is in 2/4 and Wolf ’s in 6/8; the earlier composer’s triplet eighth-note motives, however, are foreshadowings of the compound meter to come. Nor does it seem happenstance that both Schumann and Wolf locate pure triadic harmonies from outside of the tonic key somewhere in their settings of stanza 3, in both instances, with a telling glimpse of C major. Schumann’s G major and D major harmonies in the piano interlude at m. 19, just before the words “Du rosenfarbs Hütlein wohl auf und wohl ab” perhaps become Wolf ’s same harmonies reinterpreted for those same words, and both composers sound an especially evocative intervallic leap of a sixth in the vocal line for the thrown feather. The ancestry of the turnof-century lied is obvious for all to see and hear. But Wolf rewrites Schumann massively. Despite the indication “Mit Anmut” (Gracefully) at the beginning and the directive to the pianist “To be accompanied sweetly and lightly,” Schumann’s song is oddly tension-filled, fragmented, the figuration in the piano unpredictably discontinuous; this horse has more gaits at his disposal than any thoroughbred. Schumann composed “Der Gärtner” in early 1851, and it exemplifies many aspects of his so-called “late style,” including his preoccupation with folklike song, the eschewal of virtuosity, and his awareness of Lisztian-Wagnerian chromatic practices. Whether the tensions and the occasional awkwardness (especially the prosody) manifested here are due to a falling-off of creative powers or are merely the result of Schumann’s newly-modern practices has been, probably will continue to be, a matter of debate. Schumann’s “Der Gärtner” belongs to a set of six songs on poems by five different poets, the set strung together by a loose thematic thread of the composer’s devising: the first five songs are all vignettes of unrequited love, while the sixth and final song is an attempt to cast off, with heaven’s help, the fear and pain which have oppressed the singer’s heart until now (this is similar to the emotional trajectory of the earlier Eichendorff Liederkreis, op. 39). Schumann pairs his setting of Titus Ulrich’s “Die Fensterscheibe” (The Window Pane) in B minor (no. 2 in the set) with “Der Gärtner” (no. 3) as its lighter, brighter cousin in relative major, the brief piano introduction to the Mörike song a variant of the muted minormode fanfare at the beginning of the Ulrich song. Both poetic protagonists are servants who gaze from afar at the nobleman or noblewoman they love (the pianist Graham Johnson whimsically suggests that the two work at the same palace49); the maidservant 135

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs who sees “him” go proudly by in “Die Fensterscheibe” cuts her hand on the pane of glass she is washing, its bleeding symbolic of the heart’s blood that flows when he does not pay any heed to her. Whatever the superficial similarity of situation, however, the two poems differ greatly, not just in poetic technique (Ulrich a scribbler, Mörike a master), but in tone. Ulrich’s maidservant is heartbroken and says so, the B minor that was Beethoven’s “schwarze Tonart” (black key) well-suited to her unhappiness, but Mörike’s gardener dances with desire and pleads, delightedly, for a “feather” and a “flower.” Yet Schumann’s nervous, discontinuous setting, lyrical in spurts but not as a sustained venture, preserves very little of the poetic gardener’s sweet verve. There is something sad about this musical reading of Mörike’s garden-poem because Schumann makes so much more of tension and anxiety than the poet does. A longtime Eichendorff aficionado, Schumann seems to have transferred the Taugenichts’ pain to Mörike’s gardener and fashioned his song accordingly, but one wonders what other factors, both musical and personal, might have molded the setting in this way.50 Two indices of tension in particular merit mention for their role in creating the sense of a peculiar modernity in this lied. Schumann understood that this is a song of desire and marks that understanding by means of rising chromatic bass lines, each instance slightly longer than the preceding one. The first of these subterranean surges of eroticism – a small one – occurs in m. 17 beneath the words “blinket wie Gold”; the second in mm. 25–27 as an elision which joins the phrases “wohl auf und wohl ab! / O wirf . . .” in order to emphasize the verb “wirf ”; and finally in mm. 37–40 beneath the culminating plea, “Nimm tausend für eine, nimm alle dafür.” The effect is more disturbing with each occurrence, as when it tells us that all is not “wohl” in the sexualized motion of “wohl auf und wohl ab.” It is here that Schumann locates a semitone harmonic shift downwards from a C major chord to a B minor chord whose dominant is prevented from resolving to B minor by the rising chromatic line in the bass (Ex. 4.5). This is, of course, the same semitone shift which Wolf later reverses in his setting of “Der Gärtner” and locates elsewhere in the text; rather than sliding downwards and rendering the words “wohl auf und wohl ab” creepy, dark, and tension-filled, as Schumann does, Wolf shifts ecstatically upward for the thrown feather. Schumann’s reading impels a shiver; Wolf would have none of it and restores Eros to joy, at least for the duration of this song. Even where Wolf repeats Schumann’s rising chromatic bass line in mm. 36–38, the chromaticism is limited and subsumed into the lilting dance strains. One of the most notable aspects of Schumann’s “Der Gärtner” is the way in which the vocal line and the accompaniment, at times also the left- and right-hand parts, jostle one another rhythmically, the phrase-rhythms often “out of sync.” For example, in mm. 21–22 at the words “Du rosenfarbs Hütlein,” the piano states a cadential progression on an E minor harmony heard only here, then moves to a phrase briefly situated on C major and F major chords (impossible to tell which is being “tonicized” because the music jumps, flealike, to the next inflection a mere two bars later) while the singer is still completing the vocal cadence on E minor (the pitches B–E at the word “Hüt-lein”). The singer and piano are not conjunct; they seldom merge and then only when the presence of an “other” is obliterated by the singer’s angst-ridden desire. In those instances (“wohl auf und wohl ab” in mm. 24–26, “nimm tausend für eine, nimm alle dafür” in mm. 39–41, for example), a 136

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied Ex. 4.5

Robert Schumann, Der Gärtner, op. 107, no. 3, mm. 24–30

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ŁŁ 3

block-chordal texture replaces the jumpy dotted rhythms and triplet figures, as if the singer’s tension were so great that he can no longer hear the piano’s many rhythmic patterns. The single dominant seventh chord sustained throughout m. 43 while the voice likewise sustains a single pitch – an anomaly in the song – gives the accented syllable of “al-[le]” (“Take    of them for it”) a slight insistent edginess that is, in the final analysis, unpleasant. Furthermore, the piano figuration constantly changes; it is this above all which Wolf “corrects” in his setting, its unity in contrast to Schumann’s disunity. The earlier composer ricochets from duplets to triplets to dotted rhythms to two-against-three to quarter-note tactus to syncopations across the barline in a fashion so unpredictable as to be bewildering, the music unable to settle on any figurational pattern for longer than a few bars. The effect is one of nervousness predominating over charm; when the pianist neither lingers nor breathes after the D major chord of resolution on the downbeat of m. 38, but repeats the same incomplete tonic harmony on the weak second half of the beat in order to drive forward to a more chromatic setting of the same words, we hear both another example of sudden figurational change and the jittery angst peculiar to this song. Nor do the multiple tensions meet with resolution in the characteristically lengthy postlude, its seamless asymmetry (seven measures) full of syncopations across both the barline and the midmeasure beats. Despite the tonic pedal point, the threatened dissolution of rhythmic solidity, along with the repetition through an entire bar (m. 48) of the diminished seventh chord from earlier in the song, renders the postlude curiously open-ended. Even the disposition of the final cadence compels attention for its weakness, its lack of finality 137

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs (Schumann had already experimented in 1840 with an altered understanding of endings in lieder). In place of the customary dominant seventh as the penultimate chord, Schumann gives us a dominant ninth, voiced without the fifth degree of the harmony and ^, in the topmost voice. It all sounds resolving to a tonic chord with the scale degree 5^, not 1 remarkably “up in the air,” tentative, an exercise in how to make reiterated tonic and dominant pitches in the bass and a V–I cadence at the end of a song sound unfinal. Schumann, from the evidence of this music, read class conflict and unrequited passion into Mörike’s poem, thus muddying the Märchen waters considerably; if the fairy-tale beauty did not escape him altogether, he certainly complicates the poem-turned-song text with tensions perhaps taken from Eichendorff and made part of the quintupled hopeless love in the op. 107 set. For Schumann, Mörike’s gardener and princess seem an odd mixture of “Once upon a time” fictions and actual flesh-and-blood creatures, one of whom – the man – suffers, and therefore the song Schumann gives his gardener to sing is likewise a queasy mixture of fairy-tale delicacy and all-too-human pain. Wolf restores Schumann’s Mörike to innocence when he sets “Der Gärtner,” and in so doing joins forces (if only for a moment) with the emerging fin-de-siècle image of Mörike as a purveyor of wistful idylls and enchanted tales. That Wolf knew sexual desire was at the heart of the poem cannot be doubted, but when he writes “Leicht, graziös” (Light, graceful) at the start of his setting, he means it. Symmetry replaces Schumann’s asymmetry, singer and piano ride together in perfect harmony, the exhilaration of anticipatory lover’s joy replaces the mid-century tensions, and Schwung supersedes Angst – this in Freud’s Vienna, no less. Lawrence Kramer has argued that Wolf incorporates Schubert’s Mignon-music into his own Wilhelm Meister songs because helpless to do otherwise, but that is not, I believe, the mechanism at work here. Did Wolf revise Schumann self-consciously, aware of the borrowed elements and their transformation into music which says something quite different from its model? Surely the answer is yes.51 Although there is something a trifle Oedipal in his desire to replace the earlier song with his own, to “correct” what he probably saw as a misreading of Mörike, there is also homage to Schumann in the form of healing: what was fraught with tension in Schumann’s song, Wolf would restore to ordered beauty, even to gaiety. If Wolf ’s “Der Gärtner” is lovely in and of itself, the loveliness gains in lustre when one realizes from whence it comes and what additional purpose it serves. Mörike could be astonishingly frank about eroticism, even when he writes of it in symbolic terms. His way was paved for him by earlier crusades against “Schamhaftigkeit,” or “Engländerei,” as false modesty was sometimes dubbed, but the explicit nature of the poetic content in a few instances is still startling.52 Mörike could see the beauty of erotic life, but he locates it principally in idealized yearning or youthful sensual appetite, before body meets body. Once contact is made, we are vulnerable to deaths of several kinds, and Mörike knew it. Wolf knew it too; in fact, he and his poet found out at approximately the same age (both in their late teens, Wolf at seventeen or eighteen, Mörike at nineteen) that more than physical innocence is lost with the advent of erotic experience. Less timorous than his poet, Wolf decried hypocrisies of body and mind, but his longstanding love affair with a middleclass married woman entailed discretion and secrecy for both their sakes. If there is an “in 138

From Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied your face” quality to the voicing of things sexual in his settings of “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens” and “Nimmersatte Liebe,” one can imagine that the relish might have been in part compensatory. That he also brooded on the consequences of erotic life seems apparent as a subtext to his Schumannesque bringing-together of “Der Knabe und das Immlein” and “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag.” The words, of course, were not his, but the choice of poems for musical setting and the manner of their setting are never disinterested and were hardly so in these instances.

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Chapter 5

Believers and doubters: case-studies in the geistliche Lieder

Song is a compound art, and its words and music often have their own large tales to tell, sometimes ones that intersect, sometimes ones that set off on radically different paths. After the eighteenth-century resurgence of song, with composers for the most part setting the poetry around them (Goethe, Claudius, Hölty), Romantic song composers discovered the delights of disjunction, such as the appropriation of Minnesong texts,1 or other poetic repertoires hailing from different times, places, purposes, and points of view, for contemporary use. Occasionally, the attempted merger of entities was too grotesque, oil and water that refused to be combined, as when Anton von Spaun (the brother of Schubert’s friend Joseph von Spaun) in 1840 set the opening stanzas of the Nibelungenlied to the music of various folk dances in an attempt to prove Austrian authorship of the medieval masterpiece,2 but if the composer was sufficiently skillful, music could and did take unto itself words from eras not its own. Wolf even asserted that certain earlier poetic works had to await a later time before successful musical setting was possible; if there is a certain selfjustificatory tone evident in the assertion and the ever-present sense of competition with Schubert (settings of Goethe were the issue), he was able on occasion to demonstrate that the proposition had merit.3 In devotional songs, for which there was a large market in the nineteenth century, there was the possibility of still other disjunctions, with complex consequences.4 What happens when a composer with one set of religious beliefs (and disbeliefs) sets to music religious verse by a poet whose spiritual sensibilities issue from a different dogmatic tradition? Are the differences encoded in the music, or does music’s conversion of the words into art obliterate theological concerns? Where both poet and composer were partial skeptics, where spiritual doubts or even negations enter the picture, the cross-currents are still more complicated. Such is the case with Wolf ’s settings of Mörike’s poems on religious subjects: a quasi-Nietzschean composer (although Wolf did not accept Nietzsche’s philosophy wholesale, any more than he accepted his mother’s Catholicism) sets to music poetry on sacred matters by a reluctant Lutheran pastor, too much the poet to be a theologian and racked by ambivalence in matters of faith throughout his life. What did Wolf find composable in these poems, and can one speculate why? Is it a possibility that his own religious background and speculative spiritual yearnings influenced his compositional decisions for certain passages in the Mörike songs? What follows are two case-studies where the nominally Protestant poet and ex-Catholic composer meet and diverge, Wolf ’s musical purposes 140

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder different from Mörike’s poetico-mystical grapplings with a God he could not trust. Ironically, it is the later agnostic composer who confers on his dead collaborator a faith more complete than the poet ever knew. “ I H AV E B E C O M E – A V I CA R . . . CA N YO U B E L I E V E I T ? ” : M Ö R I K E , G O D, A N D P O E T RY

Before looking at “Gebet” (Prayer) and “Auf ein altes Bild” (On an old painting), one should know something of Mörike’s tortured involvement with the Lutheran faith, a bondage he lamented in letters to his friends and in his poetry, especially poems not intended for publication and hence unknown until the appearance of the Nachlaß. Wolf, one must remember, could not have encountered most of the poet’s letters from the 1820s to the early 1840s which chronicle his unhappiness with his breadwinning occupation (see chap. 1) or those poems on religious subjects not included in the poetic anthology. Although there were enough testaments to Mörike’s spiritual doubts and anti-dogmatic views in the sixth edition for Wolf to realize that this poet was hardly “the compleat Christian,” he could not, deprived of the letters, have apprehended in 1888 the full extent of Mörike’s pastoral misery. Knowing more than Wolf did, we can better understand the backdrop to the poems, can see more clearly how Wolf read or misread Mörike’s poetic reflections on matters of faith. In his reminiscences of Mörike, the writer Theodor Storm (1817–88) expressed astonishment that Mörike had once spoken a prayer at mealtime, explaining that he (Storm) had never come across anything of the kind in Mörike’s poems.5 Although it is true that Christianity appears less often in Mörike’s oeuvre than other components of his imaginative world, he was a Lutheran pastor until his thirty-ninth year, and aspects of his religious life are duly present and accounted for in his poetry:6 his detestation of writing sermons, his frustration with the intellectual exercises of theology, his simultaneous attraction to/revulsion from the rival religion of Catholicism, and his great desire to believe in the resurrection of all things, the “Wiederbringung aller Dinge.” He did hold certain tenets of Christianity dear.7 But from the beginning, the pastoral profession made him ill, and biographers recount a long litany of psychosomatic ailments from start to finish of his life in religion. “I will never be able to find happiness as a theologian,” he told Luise Rau on 30 March 1831 (“daß ich als Theologe mein Heil nimmermehr finden werde” – one notes the ironic use of the word “Heil,” which also means “grace,” “salvation,” “redemption”). Unable to accommodate himself to other means of earning an income, he struggled on for another dozen years in the Lutheran Church before leaving the village of Cleversulzbach – his one pastorate after a succession of short-lived curacies – on his birthday, 8 September 1843, the date of departure symbolically indicative of his desire for rebirth and a new life, free from the ninety-five theses at Wittenberg and all they represented.8 For a while, the ploy worked, but remarkably unhappy unconscious convictions formed in childhood eventually all but silenced Mörike’s creativity in the last twenty years of his life, with the exception of a few great poems on the subject of death, notably, “Erinna an Sappho” of 1863 and “Besuch im Kartause” (Visit to the Carthusian Priory) of 1862.9 Theology was not his only problem. 141

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs To become a theologian was not his choice but rather the career path selected by his elders and sanctified by family lore. One branch of the Mörike family took great pride in their possession of a silver goblet which once belonged to Luther himself; Mörike’s grandfather on his mother’s side was the pastor Friedrich Beyer, and a favorite uncle, Christoph Friedrich Neuffer (the father of Mörike’s youthful love Klärchen Neuffer), likewise a minister, wanted his nephew to follow in his footsteps. In 1818, the year after Mörike’s father died, the young poet became one of more than thirty students in the newly founded Klosterschule in Urach, and while there, wrote a prayer on 23 July 1819 in which his devotion to his family is evident: “Father! Give my mother comfort – give her happy days! Keep my brothers and sisters and relatives worthy! Make me better! Chastise me! Give me courage and comfort! Give me times in which I may go within myself, in which I may rejoice in Your nature, in which I remember the days with my good father! O give him peace! Maintain in me innate childish innocence and devotion to my family!”10 Whatever the orthodoxy of this prayer, unlike “Gebet,” one notes the implicit struggle with adolescent sexual awareness – he was fifteen at the time – evident in the plea for childish innocence and the equation of religion with “Trost,” or the desire for comfort. This longing for solace is a leitmotif of his conflict-ridden dealings with religion, but he seldom, if ever, found it, and he soon came to question the very principle of a God whose “love” is manifested in the suffering He visits upon believers. After Urach, Mörike enrolled in the theological seminary at Tübingen, whose students from an earlier generation had included Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel.11 It was at the Stift, one guesses, that the family tradition soured for Mörike. The required lectures in church history, dogmatics, Old and New Testament exegeses, homiletics, catechism, and more were not to the taste of an emerging poet, unhappy in scholarly endeavors and already beginning to fashion the first great poems. We now remember his Tübingen years for the invention of Orplid, for the Peregrina poems, for “Um Mitternacht”(At Midnight), not because an eminent theologian received his training at that time. Words newly animated in poetry were one thing, but words bent to sermonizing were another matter altogether, as he discovered to his horror. In one revealing anecdote from his seminary years, he was assigned to preach on Matthew 5: 44–45 and only received a “third-class” grade from his examiners, this for one of the finest artificers of the written word in German literature. In a letter of 1 August 1827 to Ernst Friedrich Kauffmann from Mörike’s first curacy in the town of Köngen, the poet lamented: As I said, I could hardly be in a better place. My mother and sisters are only one-and-a-half hours from here – but what tugs at my heart so? What lures me away? [Mörike is quoting the first two lines of Goethe’s “Sehnsucht:” “Was zieht mir das Herz so? / Was zieht mich hinaus?”] Just this: that in this sort of life and this occupation, I not only cannot employ my own true powers unhindered, but can hardly do so at all. As a religionist, particularly as a vicar, I mean, as a young preacher, such as we are under utterly stifling hymnbook influences . . . I often wish, in the true sense of those words, to escape where there is no “out” [hinaus wo eben kein Loch ist].12

At the end of this cri-de-cœur, he cites a remedy for melancholy that he had found “in a book by an old curmudgeon of a doctor” (the writer is not identified) in which a change of occupation is prescribed. Although Mörike jokingly tells his musical friend that the 142

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder passage would make the perfect text for a basso profundo aria or song, with a drone bass on “two monotonous pitches” – it would be easy to compose, he declares – the letter is far from humorous, every word drenched in despair. Two years later, he would write to Ludwig Bauer from Nürtingen on 3 January 1829 to say, “I have become – a     ; it is already done. Can you believe it?”13 He could hardly believe it himself; incredulity is stamped all over the page. Hating his “Vikariatsknechtschaft” (servitude as a vicar) from the beginning, he begged Johannes Mährlen, himself a vicar in Zell unter Aichelberg, in February 1828 for news of “Everything, but nothing religious! Here I am entirely and thoroughly crippled. God may punish me if this is merely rash, frivolous, wanton babbling.”14 “I am a shorn spirit with preaching,” he wrote to Kauffmann in a letter of 1 August 1827,15 and in the postscript of a letter to Ludwig Bauer written sometime after 19 June 1828, he cried, “I simply cannot preach, even if you strapped me to the rack.”16 (Did he destroy his sermons at some point? – not a single one of them remains, only two of the essays in Latin or German which young vicars were required to submit to the synod yearly. Both essays were written in 1827 at his first pastorate in Köngen, where the senior vicar sympathized with his poetic aspirations and shared his love of music.17) Mörike tried to flee religious life by taking a position as a writer and editor for the Stuttgart Damenzeitung in the autumn of 1828, but found to his dismay that he could not write fiction on command and under the pressure of deadlines any more than he could write the detested weekly sermons under similar constraints. Mörike was probably describing his own situation when he wrote of Larkens in Maler Nolten: Moreover, there came the disadvantage that, to the practicing artist, his poetic productivity was much more obstructive than beneficial. He wanted to live in the kingdom of his own poetry and found it distressing when the tricks of his trade interrupted in the midst of the happiness of creativity . . . this inimical conflict between the poet and the tradesman brought forth the first blockage and disorder into his life.18

He told Bauer on 9 December 1828 that the abdominal distress caused by the writing of stories was worse than that of sermonizing,19 but he changed his tune when he returned to churchly duties. After the failed experiment in Stuttgart, Mörike took a post as vicar in February 1829 in the town of Pflummern. Upon opening the church registry for the first time, he told his mother in a letter of 18 February 1829, “I said softly to myself: now, Muses and Graces, flee far away from here! . . . But to have nothing else at hand except         ! I can hardly trust myself to look out at the gently sunlit mountains and forests that, close by, already dream of springtime and nightingales.”20 His family, as we have seen, were major players in the dramas of his early life, especially the torment over Maria Meyer and over his vocation; if he ultimately complied with their wishes and retreated into their midst, he could nevertheless on occasion punish them with hints of what this had cost him, and he does so here. Mährlen was the recipient of the following jeremiad on 26 March 1829: I have not written to you for so long because for the entire time here, with the exception of a single week, I have listened, not to myself, not to a single human being on this earth, only to the thought of my misfortune. Take this for exaggeration, for whatever you will, but I think you will understand when I tell you that since a month-and-a-half ago, I bear once again the yoke I threw off 114⁄ years

143

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs ago. You have no idea of my situation. With gnashing of teeth and weeping, I gnaw on the old meat that must surely poison me. I tell you, he alone commits the sin against the Holy Ghost who serves the Church with a heart such as mine.21

The phrase about gnawing on poisoned food is horribly vivid. For Mörike, “pastoralia” was literally a Brotberuf, undertaken to earn money for bread, and the food – material and spiritual alike – was thereby poisoned. In consequence, he was a damned soul among the living, condemned to weeping and gnashing of teeth while still on earth. It was not only the discrepancy between his poetic calling and the need to earn money that tormented him: he knew his belief in God to be a wavering, ambivalent thing.22 When Mörike wrote to his sister Luise’s friend Charlotte Späth on 3 April 1827 to tell her of Luise’s burial, he confided that Luise had asked him on her death bed, “‘Do you believe in the Savior, Eduard?’ at which, unhappily, I could not answer her right away,” both honesty and lingering resentment of her power over him perhaps stopping his tongue. Luise then, Mörike continued, reproached both herself and him, saying that her best efforts had been to no avail.23 When he fell in love in 1829 with the pious Luise Rau (who seems a love-object chosen in conformity with his dead sister’s wishes – the two women had the same name, one notes – and hence originating to some degree in guilt and attempted expiation), he tried to make his peace with the pastoral life for her sake, telling her on 4 January 1830, “It will happen that I grow more and more reconciled with ‘black’ [the color of preachers’ garb] . . . we are already on the point of becoming best friends.”24 It was, he then writes to Mährlen on 11 February 1830, a matter of “manliness” that he should remain “a whole, undivided person” within the service of the church.25 If one did not already suspect that his love for Luise was the engine driving this resolution, the reference to manliness would confirm it. As if impelled to bring poetry into the picture, he copies for Mährlen the Württemberg religious poet Albert Knapp’s poem “Die ewige Kluft” (The Eternal Chasm), a poetic commentary on Luke 16: 19, telling his friend that these were poems issuing from “a healthy nature . . . [poems] from which one can deduce dogma [italics Mörike’s].”26 That Mörike was attempting to demonstrate to himself that one could fuse poetry and the ministry seems obvious, but was he also trying to frighten himself back into conformity with Lutheran dictates? Die ewige Kluft (stanza 1 of 6) Vergeblich ruft aus Flammentiefen Die Seel’ um einen Kühlungsthau Sie sieht die Lebensbäume triefen Und Edens Ströme duftigblau; – Denn zwischen jener Himmelshöhe Und zwischen dieser Feuergruft Und zwischen ew’gen Heil und Wehe Wölbt sich unendlich eine Kluft. 27

The Eternal Chasm In vain, the soul cries out for a cooling dew from the depths of the flames; it sees the trees of life trickle water and Eden’s rivers sweet-scented blue – then between these heights of heaven and between this abyss of fire and between eternal healing and pain arches unendingly a chasm.

In Knapp’s Michelangelesque divide between the elect and the damned, there is no “holdes Bescheiden” (gentle moderation), no middle-ground between salvation and damnation anywhere in sight. Mörike’s resolution did not endure for more than a few months. By 11 June 1830, he could only speak of his situation in tones of bitter resignation. “It would be best if the stink144

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder ing Augsburg Confession were finally broken,” he wrote, but, trapped, saw no way out and wearily promised Luise to make the best of the matter. The letter, however, begins with a hand-drawn postmark of a tombstone with a crude cross on it – life in the church is death, says the sketch.28 By the end of the summer, he was once again desperate, telling Luise on 20 February 1831, “I have never felt a livelier need, a thirstier longing for that peace which my calling brings with it, and yet I have never felt myself more incompetent than when I lay hands to the work and attempt to give form to my feelings. The Scripture held out to me its entire promise of peace . . . but what I found here belongs only to me, only to you – I cannot find the bridge to preaching and what was purest gold there becomes dullest lead when I set my pen to it.”29 Anecdote after anecdote tells of his detestation of sermonwriting, which he saw as a betrayal of words, poetry, and faith all at once.30 He often deferred the task until literally the eleventh hour, telling Mährlen on 7 May 1829 of a visit from his brother which had provided the perfect excuse to procrastinate. Finally, his brother went to sleep at half-past eleven, and Mörike began work. When matters did not go well, he turned to the Schiller–Goethe letters which Mährlen had sent him; the spirit of those two great men guided him, he relates, and gave him the best ideas.31 “Poetry, not theology,” is the readily decipherable subtext to the tale. Periodically, his patience snapped. On 21 May 1832, he sent Mährlen a blisteringly sarcastic, blasphemous, obscene parody of a sermon, bestrewn with Latin expressions in capital letters after the Baroque fashion; examples include the phrases “                                     ” (a mish-mash of parodistically Aquinas-like Latin which means – sort of – ”Assuredly whichsoever of them, if only they were to be revoked”) and “                    ” (the contrition of conscience). That we do not know the antecedent of “they” and “them” is hilarious, the pomposity thus deprived of a context. The “sermon” is part of a dream-fantasy in which the perpetrator of this bitter buffoonery preaches the second part of a sermon on “Unkeuschheit” (sexual impurity); the first part, Mörike declares, was entitled “Was heißt Hurerei?”(What is whoring?). The poet characterizes his sermon as a “homiletische Haspel,” a “winch” or “winding engine” of religious exegesis, an unstoppable machine spinning multiple tangled threads. A “hot shower of nonsense” spews from the preacher’s mouth as if driven by a “           ” (a storm wind of fanaticism), until finally, he descends from the chancel at ten o’clock and tells his congregation to abandon the God of their fathers and pray to       (Frenzy), the “sole, sweet goddess.” The entire fulmination is capped off by mockery of theological disputation, that is, whether or not a certain “Schmidt” had pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes (“ein X für ein U vormachen”) in his Idiotikon. In the sublunary world at the end of all things, such stupidities would be no more, he declares. It is an astonishing diatribe, and those who do not know this side of Mörike do not really know him.32 Mörike’s rejection of things theological found another comic outlet in another dreamfantasy, a poem whose title consists both of a drawing and the explanatory words “[Schilderung eines Traums],” or “(Description of a dream).” In a classic examination nightmare, the poet’s former professor of Hebrew returns as a “grammatical monster” in the form of a Kamez or Kamez Chatuf – the poetic protagonist is, comically, not sure which. (The long “ah-” sound is indicated in the early medieval system of Hebrew diacritical 145

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs

Illus. 2 Drawing by Eduard Mörike to accompany his Schilderung eines Traums (Description of a Dream)

marks, or points, by the Kamez, which resembles a tiny “T.” The same diacritical mark in other contexts indicates the short “aw-” vowel and is then called the Kamez Chatuf. The contextual distinctions between them, for those like the young Mörike newly initiated into Hebrew, can indeed impel nightmares.) Whatever the vowel, the grammatical monster is bent on murder, and the poetic protagonist only saves himself by invoking mercy in the name of Christian Friedrich Dettinger, who was first in Mörike’s class of forty-one seminarians. Mörike’s pen-and-ink drawing of the apparition is comic, but the source of the humor is horror at the more prolonged nightmare that was his bondage to religion (Illus. 2).33 Comedy is a coping mechanism, and Mörike converted his religious miseries into humor on numerous occasions. In one example, his hatred of thick theological tomes is coupled with a foray into the contemporary controversy swirling around David Friedrich Strauß (1808–74, likewise trained in theology at Tübingen), a friend of Mörike’s, if never as close as Hartlaub or Mährlen. The poem is among the Wispeliaden, purportedly the utterances of the grotesque comic creature Liebmund Maria Wispel, a barber posing as an artist and therefore emblematic of the falsity of art in a Philistine world (he appears as Sigismund Wispel in Maler Nolten). Strauß’s Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, critically examined) of 1835–36, an academic study of the historicity of the gospel narratives by a twenty-six-year-old seminary teacher, impelled a firestorm of criticism – this was the most controversial book on Christianity in the nineteenth century – from cultural critics, government officials, and Hegelians.34 The Tübingen theologians Johann Christian Friedrich Steudel (1779–1837)35 and Johann Friedrich Bahnmeier (1774–1841), also 146

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder the philosopher Adam Karl August Eschenmayer (1768–1852), to whom Mörike refers in his comic squib, were among Strauß’s fiercest opponents:36 Meine B Ansicht (stanzas 2 and 3 of 5) Strauß hab’ ich noch nicht gelesen Weil der Preis zu diffizil; Doch sei er zu plump gewesen, Selbst in Hinsicht auf den Stil. Steudel, Bahn- und Eschenmaier Lieben keine Straußeneier.

My B[ahn] View I haven’t read Strauß yet because the terms are too difficult; he has become too ponderous even in regard to style. Steudel, Bahn-, and Eschenmayer do not love any Strauß offshoots/ostrich eggs [!].

Aber schröcklich ist zu hören Strauß will durch sein Teufelswerk Die Unsterblichkeit zerstören Auch sogar in Württemberg! Dieses zeigt doch mehr und minder Einen ganz verstockten Sünder!37

But it is dreadful to hear that Strauß, through his devil’s work, would destroy immortality even in Württemberg! This indicates, more or less, an entirely obdurate sinner!

The pun on “Straußeneier” is hilarious – the mental image of stern theologians confronted with large eggs they find quite disagreeable is enough to make a cat laugh, but there is also a whiff of the poet’s own displeasure. Strauß, who had resumed his association with Mörike in 1838 after ten years of silence, had criticized Mörike’s reliance on fantasy, which he felt should be superseded by a more historical approach. Mörike, for all his gentleness not someone to take suggestions about how he should conduct his poetic enterprise, wrote Strauß a long letter on 12 February 1838 to which he appended a “compliment” from Herr Wispel: this poem.38 We know furthermore that the resurrection of the body at the end of time was one tenet of Lutheran Christianity precious to Mörike, for personal reasons. In a letter of 19–21 March 1825, he told Mährlen that “I felt myself all of a sudden at August’s side [the brother who died in August 1824], for the first time without sorrow, for the first time in the certainty that I will see him again. Oh, resurrection! [O Wiedersehen!]”39 Many years later, the same wonder would give birth to “Auf eine Christblume I & II” (On a Christmas Rose), in which the poet asks whether the spirit of the butterfly (the antique emblem of the soul) may not in springtime encircle (the circle an antique emblem of perfection) the spirit of the “Christblume,” or winter-blooming helleborus niger. Mörike did not publish the prickliest of his jabs against religious hypocrisy in his anthologies, but he and his friends kept them, and they have since found their way into the Nachlaß. In the little dialogue-poem entitled “Pfarrer und Bauer” (Pastor and Farmer), a pastor lyrically enjoins a farmer not to worry about the morrow, to realize that the God who feeds the sparrows will surely take care of him as well, to which the farmer responds: “That’s all very well, Pastor! But without meaning to offend, seen in the light of day, that is a bird’s consolation.” The poem has a political as well as a religious barb at its core, since the situation for small-town farmers in Vormärz Germany was often miserable.40 In another brief squib (these outbursts seldom last long), Mörike wishes to be a heathen or a Jew converted to Christianity by the good vicar Flad – or does he wish to be a heathen or a Jew, a state preferable to his own condition as a reluctant Protestant 147

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs pastor? (That he would thus pair “Heiden–Juden” hints additionally at the anti-Semitism endemic in nineteenth-century Germany and, earlier, in Luther’s famous “war against the Jews.”41) [Auf einen Cleversulzbacher Pfarrvikar] Der Herr Vikare Red’t immer das Gute und Wahre, Es ist ein Staat, Wie der Herr Flad Prediget Und gleichsam die Leute nötiget Zu dem Wahren und Guten, Er bekehrt Heiden und Juden; Nein, auf Ehre, Wenn nur ich so wäre!42

[On a Pastor in Cleversulzbach] The honorable vicar never gossips or lies – it is splendid how that Mr. Flad preaches and urges, as it were, the people toward the true and the good, he converts heathens and Jews; No, by my honor, if only I were so!

Long before Ogden Nash, Mörike knew the comic effects of varying line lengths and sudden changes of meter. “Herr Flad” was probably Hartlaub’s and Mörike’s friend Rudolf Flad, dead before Mörike’s Cleversulzbach years; as we shall see in the discussion of “Gebet,” the living Flad had failed, despite ardent efforts, to convert Mörike to the “proper” acceptance of Lutheran dogma. And if Mörike detested sermonizing, he was nevertheless stung to the quick when members of his congregation criticized his endeavors. In “Pastor an seine Zuhörer” (Pastor to his Listeners), Mörike’s sense that he was too aristocratic of spirit for his humble vicarages comes bubbling to the surface – and this poem he published in the 1838 anthology, as if to declare to the world which read poetry his loathing of his breadwinner’s trade (by the time of the second edition in 1848, Mörike was no longer a minister, and this poem disappears from the anthologies): Gefall’ ich euch nicht, so bleibt doch zu Haus Oder geht zu einem andern! Der zieht euch die Zähn’ mit dem Stiefelknecht aus; Wir sind noch von den Galantern.43

If I don’t please you, then stay at home or go to another! – he’ll extract your teeth with a bootjack. We are still from the gallant class.

“Zahnziehen” is a metaphor for freeing someone, usually painfully, of false beliefs and hence is deliciously appropriate to this context. Mörike’s farmers would not have used a bootjack, which is neither a dental instrument (!) nor part of a humble farmer’s domestic equipment, but wealthy landowners claiming membership in “galant” society might well own such an object. “Galanteren” is the correct term, and the alteration of the ending to rhyme with “andern” is, hilariously, a peasant rhyme. By the deletion of a single letter, Mörike hints that his alter ego is perhaps not really among the galant class, as he claims. The poet could laugh both at his situation and at himself . . . on occasion. Mörike also published gentler jabs, such as “Pastoral-Erfahrung” (Pastoral Experience), in which he observes, “My good farmers tickle me very much: a ‘sharp sermon’ is what they desire.”44 “Erfahrung” is pastoral pragmatism, or rather, rustic bribery: if they do not criticize him for his sermons, he promises them salad greens from his garden, which they can pick stealthily after eleven o’clock of a Sunday night. An acerbic sermon will be the vinegar with which to dress the salad, while a gentle conclusion to the tongue-lashing will provide the oil. Mörike could even tease God Himself – but with a Doubting Thomas’s 148

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder anger also in evidence – about His incomprehensible ways in “Hülfe in der Noth” (Help in Need): Hülfe in der Noth Ein rechter Freund erscheint uns in der Noth Zu rechter Zeit und sicher wie der Tod. Doch offen, Bester, sag’ ich dir, Du hast ein ganz verwünschte Manier! Du trocknest mir den Jammerschweiß, Und machst mir doch die Hölle heiß, Du bringst das ganze jüngste Gericht Mit dir – bei Gott, so meint’ ich’s nicht!45

Help in Need A true friend appears to us in need, at the right time, as surely as death. But frankly, best one, I say to you, you have an utterly damnable way with you! You dry the sweat of sorrow from my brow and yet you make hell hot for me; you bring the entire Last Judgment with you – by God, that’s not what I meant!

The measured solemnity of the iambic pentameters in lines 1–2, with their conventional piety, gives way to quicker-paced, tongue-in-cheek scolding in shorter lines. Mock-aghast at his own brazenness, he pretends to take it all back in the final line, complete with the appropriate oath “by God” – but the final line also suggests the counter-meaning, “By God, I don’t believe it.” “Pastoral-Erfahrung” and “Hülfe in der Noth” are both in the sixth edition, and Wolf would have known them. Mörike also published in the editions of 1848, 1856, and 1867 what is perhaps his most memorable portrait of a pastor in “An Longus,” the very poem Emil Kauffmann gave to Wolf in 1890 as a token of appreciation (Longus was a Greek romancer, known for investing conventional stereotypes with vivid individual traits; it is the people, not the plot, we remember from works such as Daphnis and Chloe): An Longus To Longus (lines 44–57) O hättest du den jungen Geistlichen gesehn, Oh, if you had just seen the young pastor Dem ich nur neulich an der Kirchtür hospitiert! with whom I chatted at the church door! Wie Milch und Blut ein Männchen, durchaus A peaches-and-cream mannikin, quite musterhaft; exemplary; Er wußt’ es auch: im wohlgezognen Backenbart, he knew it too: in his well-groomed whiskers, Im blonden, war kein Härchen, wett’ ich, in his blondness, with, I’ll wager, not a ungezählt. single Die Predigt roch mir seltsam nach Leier und little hair uncounted. The sermon smelled to Schwert, me Er kam nicht weg vom schönen Tod fürs Vaterland; strangely of The Lyre and Sword; he stopped Ein paarmal gar riskiert’ er, liberal zu sein, just short of the “beautiful death for the FatherHöchst liberal, – nun, halsgefährlich macht’ er’s land.” A couple of times, he actually risked nicht, seeming to be liberal, highly liberal – well, Doch wurden ihm die Ohren sichtlich warm dabei. he didn’t put his neck on the block, but his ears became visibly warm thereby. Zuletzt, herabgestiegen von der Kanzel, rauscht At last, descending from the pulpit, Er strahlend, Kopf und Schultern wiegend, rasch head and shoulders swaying, vorbei he swished brilliantly past the Dem duft’gen Reihen tiefbewegter Jungfräulein, perfumed rows of deeply moved maidens Und richtig macht er ihnen ein and quite properly paid them a Sehrkompliment.46 “very”-compliment.

The gloves are off this time, and Mörike delivers, not a gentle jab but a politicized depiction of someone we can almost see (was there, one wonders, a real-life model?). The poem 149

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs satirizes a succession of “Sehrmänner,” an expression from Rügener Plattdeutsch meaning “a first-rate chap,” “a fine fellow,” or, in Mörike’s lexicon, just the opposite: a specimen of pomposity (“very”-men). Mörike detested the Burschenschaft mentality, the “Nur ein Deutscher und ein Christ”-crowd; in his view, their mixture of religiosity and bloodthirsty nationalism à la Theodor Körner – who was a bad poet to boot – was despicable.47 The jab-and-thrust at German liberalism has its subtext in Mörike’s brother Karl’s jail sentence for pro-liberal political activities and the claim of some liberals, such as the “Lichtfreunde” (Friends of Light) society for religious reform, to spiritual justification.48 Mörike did not agree. If he shared some of the dissatisfactions of the cultured middle class, he was not in accord with their political manifestations, and yet he realized that it required courage to be a liberal, courage his milksop of a pastor in “An Longus” lacks. At least, his brother stood up and was counted, to his cost. Mörike also found aspects both of Swabian Pietism and of Catholicism matters for mockery, despite his attraction to certain elements of each. Eighteenth-century Württemberg developed its own forms of Pietism which flourished at the Tübingen Stift, where Mörike read works by such Swabian fathers of the faith as Johann Valentin Andreae, Johann Albrecht Bengel, Georg Conrad Rieger, and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, all of them invoked by name and with affection in the 1852 idyll “Der alte Turmhahn” (The Old Weather-Cock). But the Pietists’ emphasis on a personal relationship with God and on the Bußkampf, or the sinner’s war with the self for repentance, often led to a sickly pleasure in breast-beating, a self-indulgence at which Mörike poked fun. In another of the Wispeliaden entitled “Sarkasme / wider / den Pietism” (Sarcasm against Pietism . . . with the dividing slashes, Mörike apes the multipartite titles of Pietist prayerbooks), Wispel offers a recipe for a penitent’s drink: Sarkasme / wider / den Pietism Wer wissen will, wie baigen, wie pikant Der Christianism öfters Hand in Hand Mit feinem Sünden-Reize webt, Dem biet’ ich folgendes Rezept: Mir wismet’ es ein Pietist, Der doch zugleich Lyäens nicht vergißt.

Sarcasm / against / Pietism Whoever would like to know how tastily, how piquantly, Christianity often goes together hand-in-hand with the cultivated pleasure in sinfulness, to them I offer the following recipe: it was given to me by a Pietist who had not forgotten Lyäos.

Man nimmt ein altes Evangilen-Buch, Um es in lauem Branntwein einzuwaichnen, Bringt’s unter die Kompreß’, um es dann durch ein Tuch Bis auf den letzten Tropfen auszulaichnen: So hast du einen Extrait d’Evangile, Der mit Bedacht goutiert sein will, Du hast – ein Tröpfchen unter deinen Wein – Ein wonne-schmerzlich Reu- und Buß-Tränklein!49

One takes an old gospel-book and soaks it in lukewarm brandy, compresses it and then strains it through a cloth until the last drop is squeezed out: then you have Extract of Gospel, which should be savored with care; you have – one little drop in your wine – a wondrously sorrowful Repentance and Penitence drinklet!

Even the diminutive “Tränklein” satirizes the “Brünnlein,” “Blümlein,” etc., diminutives commonplace in Pietist tracts. The auto-intoxication of soul-searching, the quest for an intensification of religious experience, and the desire to have one’s cake and eat it too, that is, to retain sensualist pleasures while professing piety at the same time, are con150

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder flated in the image of scripture soaked in brandy and then compressed to produce a rare liqueur, its Frenchified designation perhaps the single funniest detail in the poem. (The brandy, one notes, should be lukewarm.) The reader can almost see bottled “Extrait d’Evangile” ranged alongside the Bénédictine and Armagnac on the sideboard of an epicure who “had not forgotten Lyäos.” This Teutonized form of the Greek Luaios or Latin Lyaeus is a cult name for Dionysos – the implicit comparison between Pietists and Dionysiacs as sects is another delicious detail – and means “the one who sets free.” Pietists, says Mörike, have worked things out so that they need not abjure intoxications of several kinds. Nor did Mörike spare Catholicism (the rival religion, after all) the lash.50 In one angry poem (not surprisingly, unpublished), he excoriates both a priest who had offended him and the “bells and smells” of Catholic ritual, the latter, paradoxically, an aspect of Catholicism which appealed to him:51 Katholischer Gottesdienst (stanza 1 of 3) Siehst du den schettergoldnen Mariendienst Mit Baldachinen, Fahnen und Sing-Sang Den Markt hin prangen? Wie sie räuchern Und auf dem Turm die Glocken plagen!52

Catholic Worship of God Do you see the fool’s-gold image of Mary, with baldachins, banners and sing-song glittering in the marketplace? How they fume the air with incense and torment the bells on the tower!

“Mariendienst” is in opposition to the “Gottesdienst” of the title (it is Protestants, the squib implies, who really worship God), while the verb “räuchern” hints that the smoky incense will blind the followers of Mary to the finer truths of the Word as Protestants understand it. There was a long tradition in Württemberg of poems pro and contra Catholicism; the Reformation century produced such propaganda as “Ein new lied wider die lutherischen predicanten und ire anhenger” (A new song against the Lutheran preachers and their adherents) of 1531 and many others.53 The princely house of Hohenlohe was itself divided into Lutheran branches (the Ingelfingen, Langenburg, and Kirchberg branches of the Neuenstein line) and Catholic branches (the Waldenburg, Bartenstein, and Jaxtberg dynasties), the two sides enacting their own War of Religion in the mid-eighteenth century until a treaty in 1782 put an end to the hostilities. Trace-elements of religious antagonisms two and three hundred years old, and still very much alive, peer from behind Mörike’s anti-Catholic spasms, although the fits of pique were personal, not doctrinal. Furthermore, the poet fell in love on two occasions with Catholic women (the schoolmaster’s daughter in Scheer and his wife Margarethe von Speeth), their religion speculatively one element which made erotic attraction to them possible.54 But Lutheranism was his chief torment. In lighter moods, Mörike could jest about his predicament, calling Shakespeare’s Falstaff to his defense in an 1837 letter to Hermann Kurz: “Where the scent of the sacristy is concerned, I must sadly say along with Sir John, ‘An I have not forgotten what the inside of a church is made of ’” [the passage from Henry IV, Part I, continues, “I am a peppercorn, a brewer’s horse: the inside of a church! church! Company, villanous company, hath been the spoil of me.”].55 Jest was only possible on occasion, however, and his predicament eventually proved intolerable. In 151

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs 1843, Mörike left the church, telling Wilhelm Hartlaub on 20 March of that year that, despite his “continuing inclination toward Christianity [fortdauernden Neigung zum Christentum],” which had grown stronger in the previous three years (that this is hardly a ringing endorsement must strike any reader), there was an unbridgeable chasm between the use he could make of religion for himself and preacherly duties to others.56 Upon petitioning Wilhelm I, King of Württemberg, on 3 June 1843 for release from his profession on the basis of multiple illnesses (which he lists, lest the monarch be in any doubt about the precarious state of his health), Mörike left the pulpit for good.57 The result was a new lease of life which brought him marriage, children, and a period of renewed creativity until the mid-1850s, when the ineradicable conflicts within his personality all but silenced him thereafter. Only upon leaving Cleversulzbach could Mörike gradually become reconciled with his former occupation, telling Theodor Storm in 1854 that he actually longed for the rustic pastoral life.58 In “Der alte Turmhahn,”59 he created an idealized portrait of a Swabian country pastor’s life. Safely removed from the actuality, he could even gild the oncedetested concoction of sermons, from the procrastination which preceded the work to its delivery on a sunny Sunday morning. One is tempted to fall back on clichés and say that time does indeed heal some wounds – as long as one stays away from the cause of the injury – if it were not that the poet is also challenging Goethe’s Knittelvers poem “Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung” (Hans Sachs’s Poetic Mission). Sachs was an ardent early Lutheran and the author of “The Wittenberg Nightingale,” also in Knittelvers. For Mörike to write an idyll of Lutheran life in an antiquated poetic manner identified with Sachs and revived by Goethe was thus to do more than cloak his years of pastoral servitude in the amber glow of idealized remembrance. From Mörike’s poems on religious subjects, Wolf chose, however, not the idyll (too long for music), not the comic squibs, but the poet’s serious religious poems, and he made of them songs which diverge from the poet as much as they converge with Mörike’s meanings. What follows are two case-studies.

T H E CA S E O F “ G E B E T ” : G O D, T H E W I L L , A N D A RT

Of all Mörike’s poems, “Gebet” was one of the most popular with nineteenth-century composers before Wolf, owing in large measure to the market for devotional songs. HansJoachim Erwe, in his catalogue of music based on Mörike’s texts, lists 132 settings of “Gebet,” mostly by composers now long forgotten (Max Bruch is the most eminent after Wolf); only “Das verlassene Mägdlein” elicited as many settings, 133 in all, religious sentiment and erotic lamentation thus vying with one another for popularity among composers.60 Wolf ’s setting is still one of the most frequently performed songs from his Mörike volume: Gebet Herr! schicke, was du willt, Ein Liebes oder Leides; Ich bin vergnügt, daß beides Aus deinen Händen quillt.

Prayer Lord! send me what You will, For good or ill; I am satisfied that both come from Your hands.

152

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder Wollest mit Freuden Und wollest mit Leiden Mich nicht überschütten! Doch in der Mitten Liegt holdes Bescheiden. 61

Do not overwhelm me with joys and with sorrows! In the middle lies gracious moderation.

But it is very ironic that this poem has been so popular with composers, because it is a versified quarrel with Lutheran doctrine, beginning with compliance but ending with what Luther would consider an unacceptable assertion of human will.62 Did other composers somehow not notice the divergence from dogma? – from the evidence of their music, several of them “didn’t get it.”63 At the start, the poet mimics traditional formulae for prayer, the archaic verb-form “willt” in line 1 hinting that earlier generations have uttered the same or similar words and that the poetic persona wishes to emulate them, to be of their number. The seeming simplicity of the first stanza almost succeeds in masking the theological difficulty at its core: sorrow comes from God’s hands, we are told, and must be accepted gladly. “Leides,” one notices, is the rhyme-word in the pairing of “Liebes oder Leides,” stronger in its placement and, implicitly, the more likely possibility. To be thus “vergnügt” requires great strength of faith, but this poetic persona cannot bear the thought and, horrified, takes back in stanza 2 what he has just said in stanza 1. Now he wants God restrained and the outpouring of God-given joys and sorrows hemmed in, or better yet, kept away from him altogether. The exclamation “Wollest mit Freuden / Und wollest mit Leiden / Mich nicht überschütten!” starts with Biblical parallelisms and the implicit Godly “Thou,” but the speaker abandons the conventions of sacred poetry and begins to turn away from doctrinal compliance by the third line of the stanza (“Mich nicht überschütten”) when purely personal terror takes over. The change of sonority between lines 1–2 and line 3 from liquid -l’s to consonant clusters of sputtering panic, to a clump of clotted -ch, -sch-, -cht sounds, underscores the swerve, as does the altered rhythm. By the end of the stanza, the poetic persona no longer even speaks to God. To whom are the last two lines addressed? Who is being counseled to “gentle moderation” (a phrase thereafter associated with Mörike), and what is meant by the words “in the middle”? If the middle perhaps designates a classicizing “golden mean,” a peaceful oasis in which the persona need no longer flee the dread twins of joy and sorrow, God seldom metes out such peace in life, so this poem suggests, preferring instead those extremes which rack the soul and flay the believer either into hotter belief or hottest hell. The ultimate impression is that the poem ends with words spoken into a void or to himself, with no expectation that anyone – certainly not Luther’s God – listens any longer. It is no wonder that Mörike inscribed only the first stanza of “Gebet” in his sister Klärchen’s prayerbook and also in an album for one Bertha Bettenmayer in 1862.64 I wonder whether Mörike, when he wrote this poem, perhaps remembered a letter his friend Rudolf Flad had written to him on 31 July 1827, indeed, whether the poem was born of the letter. If not, it indubitably came into being as a reaction against the dogmas taught at Tübingen and expounded in this missive by the deeply religious Flad, who acted as Mörike’s spiritual adviser until his (Flad’s) death at the age of twenty-six. Knowing that Mörike suffered from what Flad calls “geistliche Grisgram” (an expression which seems to 153

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs demand Victorian translation as “spiritual megrims”), he counsels his friend to cultivate what he calls “a narrow conscience” (“enges Gewissen”) and a broad heart. “You must understand what is meant by narrow conscience,” he continued: a refined, or as the Apostle says: practiced mind to find the will of God, eyes eager for any sign from the King of Heaven, a listening ear – these are synonyms. It is a property of such a will, utterly captivated and taken by love for Him, that it a priori does not will what He does not will, and wills everything that He wills . . . the joyousness of such abandonment is an attainable ideal . . . Oh, that is a blessed state when one can be thus delighted to the very soul [seelenvergnügt]. When one has just such a loving will, given over to Christ, then one truly knows that nothing in life will happen wrongly: death or life, happiness or misfortune, joy or none at all, here or there, it is all the same to me so long as I know that it is His will.65

Many of Flad’s words and phrases seem premonitory of “Gebet,” from the verb “vergnügt sein” to the polarities at the end, reminiscent of Mörike’s “Liebes oder Leides.” Most of all, Flad harps on the relinquishment of self-will and the omnipotence of God, the young theologian repeating the word “will” both as verb and noun until the reader is faintly dizzied by it. One infers from the letter that the issue of total abandonment to God’s will was a major sticking-point for the poet, that this element of Lutheran doctrine was one he found impossible to swallow. According to Luther, God has two wills, one revealed and one hidden, and the hidden will – beyond all power of human reason to penetrate – ordains sin, with the consequence that some of humanity is ineluctably damned. Those who are truly elect are capable of resigning themselves to hell itself if this should be the will of God for them (the resignatio ad infernum), and the congregation of the faithful is exhorted to interpret suffering as a sign of God’s love because the believer is thereby strengthened in his yearning for God. A deus absconditus (hidden God) predetermines salvation and rejection, and everything thus comes to pass by divine necessity, God alone deciding whether an individual shall be devout or not. Those who are rejected can never see God as wholly good, and this lack of faith was, Luther insisted, the root of their hell.66 Flad speaks in his letter as a convinced Lutheran, expounding to one far less deeply dyed a major tenet of his Church’s faith, but if “Gebet”is any indication, Mörike would not, could not follow suit. In the swerve from a dutiful echo of orthodox doctrine to rejection of its minatory harshness is the voice of a soul Luther might well have considered damned. The genesis of “Gebet” is a curiosity in Mörike’s works. In the Ausgabe letzter Hand, Mörike assigns the date 1832 to the poem, but that is probably only the terminus ad quem of what was to become the second stanza (lines 5–9) in the final version. That single stanza was first published as an untitled inset-poem in Maler Nolten, where it is spoken, not sung, by Agnes shortly before her suicide. While in Henni’s company, Agnes turns her back on a young woman they encounter on the path and says to the blind youth, “I don’t like it when I see Käthe. Yesterday I heard her call to a farmer boy over the wall: did you know that the young lady who is staying with us has gone mad? What a stupid man. Who is mad? No one is mad. Providence is merciful. That is what I said in my morning prayer today: ‘Do not overwhelm me with joys and with sorrows! In the middle lies gentle moderation.’ Yes, nothing equals contentment. God be praised, this I have; only the One lacks it, alas, only the One!”67 Eleven years after the publication of the novel, Mörike separated this one stanza from its prose envelope and copied it out with the new title “In Demuth” (In 154

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder Humility), the manuscript dated 21 April 1843.68 Sometime before 31 January 1846, however, he added an equally small prayer to precede it, the two stanzas numbered as “Gebet 1. 2.” in both the second and third editions of Mörike’s anthology, with a horizontal line in mid-page separating them.69 The second prayer is a consequence of the first; we are told in pictographic symbols that after an unknown lapse of time, a very different prayer ensues, fraught with fear of God’s unpredictable propensity to inflict grief. “Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” the poetic persona tries to say at the beginning, but the thought of what this might mean awakens the demons of doubt. By the time of the Ausgabe letzter Hand, Mörike had evidently concluded that “Gebet” should be a single prayer embodying a drastic swerve in mid-stream, with the white space between the stanzas all that is required for the persona’s true desires, at odds with the dictates of faith, to emerge.70 Did Wolf, I wonder, know Maler Nolten and therefore know lines 5–9 in another context? There is no trace of any musical madness in Wolf ’s setting, and rightly so; Mörike restored the speaker of this prayer – no longer Agnes – to sanity when he took the poem out of the novella and augmented it. In the final version, the process by which piety cedes to rejection is mirrored in the formal structure. The “I” of the poem begins not only saying a conventional prayer but writing a “proper” poem which displays its creator’s knowledge of such conventions as rhyme, alliteration, and meter, all tidily deployed. The doctrinally correct submissiveness of the first stanza is disposed as a compact quatrain in a b b a rhyme, the rhymes ordered and exact (“willt – quillt, Leides – beides”). The acclamation “Herr!” at the beginning is a single accented poetic foot, followed by lines 2–4 in iambic trimeters; God’s power and primacy are thus established in the appropriate place, before the gentler “human” meter appears. Even the trimeters seem expressive of the believer’s modesty, of the acceptance of limitation, without either the grandiloquence conferred by longer line lengths or the austerity and rapidity of dimeters. Furthermore, the internal couplet, “Leides – Beides,” has unaccented or weak line endings, while the framing lines 1 and 4 have accented endings, “willt – quillt.” What God wants, the poet imbues with strength, while human experience is softer, weaker. The symmetry of the first stanza, however, is no longer possible for the second. In his fear at the thought of what Luther’s God might inflict upon him, the speaker is no longer capable of neat poetic structures: stanza 2 spills over into an extra line, and the rhymes are inexact (“Freuden – Leiden, überschütten – Mitten” in lines 5–8). The words “Leiden – Bescheiden” at the ends of lines 6 and 9 constitute the only true rhyme, and they are separated by distance and asymmetry. The crucial verb “Wollest” – a plea in the imperative – in this poem about divine and human will at cross-purposes is placed at the beginning of stanza 2 and repeated in the next line, but the words “Mich nicht überschütten” overthrow the prior parallelisms. Although one can scan this third line as trochaic trimeters by reading it with forced regularity, a more natural declamation would place equal or nearlyequal weight on each of the first two words, both “me” and negation crowding to the fore and heavy with urgency. The tension between regular/pious scansion and irregular/personal rhythms persists to the end of the second stanza, but is, appropriately, moderated in the final two lines. There is even a gentle lilt perceptible in the words “holdes Bescheiden.” What did Wolf make of this quiet, but immense disagreement with Luther’s angry God? 155

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Did he recognize the doctrinal rejection at its heart? He was raised a Catholic, after all, despite being little happier with its dogmas than Mörike was with his, and Catholicism does not espouse either predestination or Luther’s brand of unfree will. From the evidence of his music, Wolf certainly understood that the pious acceptance of God’s almighty power in the first stanza is not just qualified, but rejected outright in the second stanza, that the poetic speaker metaphorically leaves the church somewhere in mid-song, but in Wolf ’s conception, he leaves any and all churches – not just the Lutheran edifice – for art and therein finds true spirituality. His “Mitte” is not Mörike’s but music. Wolf ’s poetic persona begins by invoking certain conventions of nineteenth-century religious music (this is the concomitant to Mörike’s persona parroting conventional formulae for prayer), then cannot bear it and gradually frees himself from its constraints. This geistliches Lied-with-a-difference stems from a tradition still very much alive in Wolf ’s day. There were numerous devotional songs for solo voice and keyboard composed in the late eighteenth century and exemplified by works such as Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s collections of “spiritual odes and songs,”71 and they continued to be a distinct repertoire throughout the nineteenth century (one largely neglected by scholarship). Carl Loewe’s Novalis settings “Wenn ich ihn nur habe” and “Wenn alle untreu werden” of op. 22 (1833) were specimens that Wolf, an avowed partisan of the ballad-master par excellence, might have known – textbook cases of the genre’s block-chordal writing dressed up with Baroque suspensions and chromatic passing tones, hymn-like rhythmic squareness, and undemanding melodies in the middle register, although “Der Hirten Lied am Krippelein” and “Der nahe Retter” from the same opus are less bone-simple. Closer to Wolf ’s own day, Peter Cornelius (1824–74) composed a song cycle on the Lord’s Prayer, Vater unser: Neun geistliche Lieder, op. 2 of 1856, replete with even more of the plummy harmonies that Wolf employs in the first half of his “Gebet.”72 The Lisztian-religious vein in music was one Wolf himself had aped in his youthful oratorio Christnacht; the conventions he undoes in “Gebet” are ones he knew well. Because the conventions of nineteenth-century sacred music are so often so cloying and because Wolf did not mean to mock the poetic persona’s initial desire to be a proper Christian, he sustains a difficult balancing act throughout the setting of stanza 1 between musical indices of sincere piety and the syrupiness to which the genre was prone. In the eight-bar “organ” prelude at the beginning, Wolf mimics swell-pedal effects – the crescendo to the heightened dominant harmonies in mm. 6–7 hovers on the brink of the parodistic, although he never quite crosses the line – and the seamlessness of saccharine organ improvisation. The quarter-note tactus and foursquare downbeat beginning of each two-bar unit are hallmarks of religious music, as is the decoration of diatonic harmonies with a plethora of passing tones, appoggiaturas, and suspensions. That the first of four symmetrical two-bar units is a tonic–subdominant progression, with a raised 5^ passing tone in the alto voice en route to a 7^–6^ appoggiatura at the exact mid-point of the introduction proclaims churchliness before a single word is sung, and so does the sequential variant of the same two-bar figure in mm. 3–4 and the chromatic descent in the bass in mm. 5–7 from the raised fifth ^. One can almost see the organist side-stepping his way down the organ pedals. degree to 2 Because the singer wants to believe, he or she continues the musical evocation of things sacred already set in motion in the introduction, for example, entering in elision 156

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder with the “organist” at the moment of tonic resolution (m. 9) and joining with the inner voice on the third degree of the tonic chord, as if thereby indicating the inwardness of the address to God. The eighth-note rest following the acclamation “Herr!”, situated strongly on the downbeat, is a typically Wolfian precise detail which substitutes for Mörike’s exclamation mark an enforced breath of wonder. Furthermore, this phrase circles within a a close tangent around God, that is, the neighbor-note pitches closest to the G  with which He is named, while the piano has the more active role and the wider range, as if it had been assigned the task of expressing those otherwise unnameable motions of the pious heart. But hints of doubt are already apparent beneath the singer’s first words, although one realizes it only in retrospect, when those doubts are full-blown and take center stage. The initial vocal phrase in mm. 9–12 is articulated midway by a deceptive submediant inflection, significantly, at the verb “willt” (what You will). Here, Wolf tells us, doubt first intrudes. The invocation of God’s will as a verb, as an active force, induces this slight but significant harmonic darkening, all the more effective because the contrary motion so strongly adumbrated in the soprano and bass voices of the piano chorale narrows to this focused point; it is at the crucial words “du willt” that the piano dips beneath the level of the singer’s part, exposing the verb to the open air. This small, seemingly innocuous gesture, melded with the indices of piety surrounding it, begins a process of increasing disquiet throughout the first verse. In the subsequent phrase, “ein Liebes oder Leides” (mm. 11–12), we hear a doubled, intensified variant of the same linear progression from 5^ to raised 5^ to 6^ that we heard in mm. 1–2 of the piano introduction. The possibility of “Leid” was thus, we understand with twenty-twenty hindsight, there from the start, Wolf making the very gestures of church music expressive of religious doubt beneath the surface (Ex. 5.1). The disquiet gathers force. Realizing that the poetic persona is far from “vergnügt,” Wolf sets that word to the secondary dominant of the previous C  minor submediant harmony at the word “willt” in m. 10, a dark, tense harmony – the thorn that was the thought of God’s will now rankles even deeper. As if attempting to overthrow the doubt which is at present only evident (faintly) in the music, not in the words, the singer for the first time forsakes the restricted intervallic motion of chorale melodies for a dramatic leap upward to the tonic pitch E at the crucial word “Beides.” The crescendo “swell” to this word corresponds to the fortissimo swell of mm. 6–7, while the first syllable is sustained across the barline of mm. 14–15 in unmistakable emphasis – a trifle too emphatic to be credible. Wolf understood that the poetic protagonist “doth protest too much,” that the thought of “Liebes oder Leides” impels an even stronger reaction when lumped together and repeated as “Beides.” The assertion and the stanza conclude with an authentic cadence in mm. 15–16, but it is a cadence on the dominant, not the tonic, and the resolution lasts for only a single quarter-note beat. This is not the end of the matter: the poetic persona may state compliance with God’s will as if it were a fait accompli, but a Fortsetzung is bound to follow, ordained by the laws of tonal form. And it follows immediately. Wolf probably did not know the earlier incarnation of this poem as “Gebet 1. 2,” only its final form as a single prayer. In his conception, the true inner self cannot “settle” on the statement of stanza 1; even as the singer sustains the word 157

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 5.1

!

Wolf, Gebet, mm. 1–17

²²²² Getragen Š ð ð \ Ý ²²²²  ð ð ²² Š ²²

!

ðŁ Ł ð ¦ ðð ¦ð

² ² (fromm und
innig) Š ²² Ł Ł ¹ Ł Ł Herr!

!

Ł

Łð ý

Łð ² Ł

ð ð

Ł ð

Ł

ðð

Ł ף ð

²Ł ð × ðŁŁ ² Ł ² ðð [ ² ²² ððð × ŁŁð ¦¦ ŁŁ

ðð ðð [[ ðð ð

ð ¦ ð Ł ²Ł

Ð Ł ÐŁ \ ÐŁ ¦ Ł Ð

Ł ¦Ł

ð

Ł ¼

ðð

schi - cke

was

ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł

²² Š ²² ¼ Ł Ł Ł

!

Ý ²²²² ðð

Ł

du willt,

Lie - bes

o - der

Lei

-

ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł

² ðŁ Ł ðð ²Ł Ł ð

ð ð

ŁŁ ŁŁ

ðð

ð

Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ²Ł  

Ł

ðð

ŁŁ ² ŁŁ

Ł Ł ð Ł Ł ²ð

ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ

-

des aus dei - nen

ðð ð [ ðð ð

ð ðð ðð ð

Łý

Ł

des;

ðð ð

ich bin ver - gnu¨gt, dass bei

Ł Ł Ł Ł

ein

Ł

ŁŁŁ ŁŁ ðð ð ŁŁ ŁŁ ð

13

²² Š ² ² ðð

ðð ð


Ł Ł Ł ¹ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł

9

²² ð Š ² ² ðð \\ ² Ý ²² ² ðð ð

¦ Łð

Ł Ł

5

ð ð ][ Ý ²²²² ¦² ²² ððð

ðð

ð ýŁ ý Ł ð 

Ł Ł


Ł ðð

Ł

ðŁ ² Ł

ðð Ł ð 

¼

Ha¨n - den quillt.

Ł Ł ŁŁ Ł \\ ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł

ŁŁ ŁŁ

ŁŁ

ŁŁ ŁŁ

ŁŁ

“quillt” in the vocal line, the organ-like harmonies are already on the move, going somewhere else. Mörike’s speaker attempts at the beginning of the second stanza to retain the words of stanza 1, and therefore its piety, to no avail, and Wolf, understanding this, does likewise in music, but with signs of tension, of impending separation evident from the start. Although he retains the quarter-note tactus and the chordal writing from before throughout almost half of the setting of stanza 2, the progression of two chords slurred across the barline between mm. 16–17 tells of rhythmic strength already eroding underfoot, the normally weak fourth beat strengthened and the downbeat weakened. And the chorale continues to erode, the music of proper piety coming apart by degrees, by inches; 158

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder Ex. 5.2

Wolf, Gebet, mm. 17–24

²² Š ²² ¼

17

Ł Ł Ł Wol - lest

!

mit

²² Š ² ² ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł

²Ł Ł

ð Freu

-

den und

ðŁ Ł ² ŁŁ ŁŁ

Ý ²²²² ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł

¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł

²² Ł Š ² ² Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł Ł

²Ł Ł ½

21

!

Ý ²²²² ¦ Ł Ł Ł Ł

Ł ¦ ² ŁŁ Ł \ ŁŁ ŁŁ

Ł ð Ł ²Ł Ł ð ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł

wol

-

lest

mit

Doch

in

Ł 

der

²Ł Ł

ð Lei

¦Ł ŁŁ Ł ][ ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ Ł ² Ł ¦ ŁŁ ²Ł ²Ł ¦Ł

× ŁŁ ðð

¼ Ł ¹ Ł

nicht u¨ - ber - schu¨t-ten!

²² Š ²² Ł Ł ¦Ł Ł

¦Ł Ł

ð

-

den

mich

Ł Ł Ł Ł ²Ł Ł ^[ ¦ Ł Ł ¦ ŁŁ Ł Ł

Ł ²Ł ½ Mit - ten,

Ł ²Ł Ł Ł ²Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł (zart und ausdrucksvoll) ² ŁŁ ² ŁŁ Ł \\ ² ŁŁŁ ² ŁŁ ² ŁŁ Ł ²Ł Ł Ł Ł ²Ł Ł

the poetic persona holds on to its constituent elements as long as he can until, finally, he breaks loose. The corridor between the two poles is fraught with rhythmic and harmonic tensions, the triads and simpler seventh chords of the hymn at its beginning no longer in evidence. Instead, a succession of seventh chords in mm. 17–18 (“Wollest mit Freuden . . .”) leads into increasingly chromatic territory, rife with appoggiaturas and weak-beat emphases. There is no tonal terra firma in this passage, despite the fact that the persona desperately repeats the dominant pitch B as an inner pedal, an anchor, throughout much of mm. 17–20. To no avail: as the other voices slip and slide around the once and former dominant, any clear sense of location founders. The bass line sinks by degrees, and the slurred figures in the piano eventually take over entirely in mm. 20, 21, and much of 22; the quarter-note tactus of a standard hymn may continue doggedly, but the rhythmic stolidity characteristic of a chorale is no more. The sforzando emphasis on a highly dissonant appoggiatura at the end of m. 20 on the word “mich,” the word prolonged across the barline in unmistakable emphasis, speaks volumes about the tension that overwhelms the poetic speaker at this instant (Ex 5.2). Wolf is the tone-poet par excellence of such angst-filled ambiguity; perhaps he also wished to make a sly point about how close such chromatic turbulence lies to the syrupy certainties of geistliche Musik, or how minimal is the terrain that separates doubt from belief. With the plea “mich nicht überschütten,” the chorale is riven even farther apart. Although the vocal line of the second stanza begins with the stepwise motion and limited compass one finds in most of the first stanza, fear quickly sends it out of its boundaries. The intervals of a third one finds in stanza 1 are expressively warped, in particular, the 159

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs setting of the words “und wollest mit Leiden” as a distorted variant of the words “ein Liebes oder Leides” in mm. 11–12. One notices also the prosodic detail by which the first invocation of the verb “Wollest” begins on the second, or weak, beat of the measure, while the second appearance of the same word is placed in a higher register, on the downbeat, and sustained. What was at first a somewhat tentative pronouncement of the persona’s own will, his own “wollen,” grows stronger and the tensions warping the chorale even greater. The vocal phrase at the words “mich nicht überschütten” (mm. 20–22) is contained within the same G  to E compass as the words “daß Beides aus deinen Händen quillt” at the end of stanza 1, but as a distorted echo. The chorale itself is by now almost completely “überschüttet.” Even as Wolf ’s shaken poetic persona completes the verb “[über-] schütten,” the bass line breaks free from the chorale strains of orthodoxy and begins, quietly, to dance, joined by the right-hand part in the next measure (m. 23, at the first statement of the words “Doch in der Mitten”). Wolf celebrates the moment by clothing it in quasi-Chopinesque strains distant indeed from hymnody, marked “Zart und ausdrucksvoll” (Delicately and expressively). There is something charming about the reticence with which the vocal line puts forward the final statement of the prayer, as if aware that this is temerity, while the inmost self in the piano feels no such hesitation, the melody in the piano “spinning out” in confident, Chopinesque elegance. The singer, however, tentatively proposes “Doch” on the weak second beat of the measure, as the piano is already overtopping it with its own unhesitant melody, then breaks off before proposing the phrase “in der Mitten,” with the word “Mitten” each time set as an appoggiatura “sighing” figure so that we understand via this traditional musical emblem that the “middle” is an object of longing. The harmonic heightening of C  major in mm. 23–24, that is, the first two measures after the last remnants of the hymn vanish in m. 22, seems doubly significant: it is the major mode corresponding to the submediant harmony for the verb “willt” in m. 10, with the E  chord tone thus altering both the former tonic pitch E and the minor-mode chord associated with God’s will. The vocal line at “[über]-schütten,” one notices, curls upward, sounding what will soon become the leading tone and tonic pitches of a briefly tonicized C  major, God and the church overthrown even as the verb is voiced. The expression of one’s own wishes liberates the artist within, who then sings, not of the Church, but of music itself.73 It is music which has the last “word” in the postlude – not poetry, not religion, but Wolf. The Chopinesque right-hand ascent into the treble empyrean in mm. 27–29 is followed in the postlude by a descent back to earth over a long-drawn-out pianississimo plagal cadence of the sort to which Brahms was addicted, but not Wolf. “Amen” cadences are unavoidably ecclesiastical in aura, but this one says something unchurchly: that a more beautiful spirituality is achieved in art (one can almost hear Wagner’s Grail knights applauding in the background). Wolf, who knew the value Mörike placed on the Muse’s “breath of love,” on “song-intoxication,” may even have thought he was echoing Mörike’s sentiments by devising this extension of the poem in the postlude, but the poet’s situation was unhappier than that. Mörike’s obsession with death, the greatest “Leid” of all, could find no alleviation either in religion or, finally, in poetry itself, nor does he define the “middle” as his own creativity – that is Wolf ’s suggestion. Ultimately, one understands the postlude of “Gebet” to be homage on Wolf ’s part both to “göttlicher Mörike” and to a sense of divinity which 160

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder the composer locates in music. Mörike said something else, and yet the discrepancy between what the poet and composer did is as much a source of the song’s success as Wolf ’s evident grasp of the complexities other composers missed in this deceptively simple prayer. T H E CA S E O F “AU F E I N A LT E S B I L D ”

“Auf ein altes Bild” is another example of Wolf converting a poem about religion (and art and vision and poetry) into a song about music and extending the religious scenario of the poem in a manner not Mörike’s. This is the first of Mörike’s ekphrastic poems, or picturepoems, but no one knows whether the “old painting” of the title is what John Hollander calls “unassessable actual ekphrasis” (a poem which invokes an unnamed, lost, or untraceable work of art) or notional ekphrasis (a purely fictive work of art).74 There is a long history of notional ekphrasis in literature, from the Anacreontic poets to Wallace Stevens; in fact, Mörike had already contributed to the tradition when he began Maler Nolten with the description of two fictive canvases. An actual painting by the Renaissance artist Francesco Albani inspired “Schlafendes Jesuskind” (Sleeping Child Jesus), another ekphrastic poem by Mörike on the same theme of the Christ Child and the Cross together, and therefore one cannot help wondering whether another actual canvas impelled this poem. Certainly I remain alert, on forays to museums and while paging through art books, for summer landscapes, reed-adorned brooks, and Mother and Child in their midst. But if I never locate the source, that is only right – I doubt Mörike wanted readers to have a tangible object in front of them. As Martin Ulrich has pointed out, the poet describes what cannot be literally present in the painting and yet claims it is there. “Dort, im Walde,” he says, and only after he sees in his mind’s eye the future Cross in a tree among other trees in the forest can we see it. By refusing to identify the artist and the work, Mörike forces us to rely entirely on his vision; he is the insider, we the outsiders.75 Does he describe the entire canvas? A portion of it? Does the artist indicate that one of the trees will become the Cross? We cannot know, Mörike thus making an implicit claim that poetry’s removal from the object gives it greater, not less, authority than the visual representation. The injunction “Schau’” at the beginning of line 3 (a rhythmic disruption between two rhyming couplets) has as its chief purpose to underscore the impossible: “Look,” the poet says, and yet, we cannot look – we can only read: Auf ein altes Bild In grüner Landschaft Sommerflor Bei kühlem Wasser, Schilf und Rohr, Schau, wie das Knäblein Sündelos Frei spielet auf der Jungfrau Schoß! Und dort im Walde wonnesam, Ach, grünet schon des Kreuzes Stamm!

On an Old Painting In the green landscape’s summer haze, by cool water, reed and sedge, Look, how the Child Sinless freely plays in the Virgin’s lap! And there in the blissful forest, alas, the Cross tree is already greening!

The poem is framed in green that is passive, present, merely there at the beginning but becomes active at the end, transformed as the final verb of the poem. As the Child will grow, so does the instrument of His death, “greening” or maturing over time to its appointed future; beyond the moment frozen on the canvas, immense forces are already in 161

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs motion. Mörike thus demonstrates what poetry can do that a painting cannot; static in its two dimensions, the canvas presents itself to the eye all at once, whereas a poem unfolds over time. This poem makes of time something dizzyingly complex, present, past, and future mingled together; it tells of immanence and prophecy, but prophecy of what is already long past. In this memento mori, nothing in the canvas of words will remain as it appears: the beautiful forest contains the Cross of death, the Child who “plays freely” (the words “frei spielet” are the brightest verbal patch in the poem) is not “free” but ordained for death, summer will become wintry death (“Flor” also means the crepe bands of mourning), the vanished artificer of the “old painting” is long dead, and the sinless infant will assume the sins of the world and die for them. Behind all the beauty one sees depicted in art as if it were eternal is death. If, as John Hollander wittily laments, “whoever writes about writing about artistic images will be a sort of triple fool,”76 then writing about music about writing about art can only compound the confusion by introducing another medium into the mix. However, the attempt should be made because Wolf went one better than Mörike. If the poem sees what is not in the painting, the music ventures still farther into the unseen in a manner Wolf may have thought was congruent with Mörike’s purposes but is not, and yet this is one of Wolf ’s best songs. It is also, like “Gebet,” in part about the uses a fin-de-siècle song composer could make of past musical traditions. Did Wolf perhaps imagine a Flemish or Italian Renaissance painting and hence devise vocal phrases whose stepwise motion and symmetry recalls, at a distance, Palestrina or even Josquin? The first vocal phrase in mm. 5–6 at the words “In grüner Landschaft Sommerflor” could, deprived of Wolf ’s rhythmic values, be a quasi-mimicry of Gregorian plainsong, while the next phrase in mm. 7–8 at the words “bei kühlem Wasser, Schilf und Rohr” could come, mutatis mutandis and not in F  minor, from a motet by Vittoria. (Wolf would have known this key as the tonality for Schubert’s settings of Franz von Bruchmann’s “Schwestergruß,” D. 762 and Franz Xaver von Schlechta’s “Totengräberweise,” D. 869; in these songs F  is the emblem for a rich, strange state in which life and death are present simultaneously.) Frequent recourse to the minor dominant harmony amidst the shifting minor–major chord colors in this song is another echo of modality, while the treatment of meter and rhythm also contributes to the quasiantique atmosphere. For example, the phrase in mm. 1–2 features gentle, mid-measure durational emphases, while the consequent phrase in mm. 3–4 loosens the sense of meter still more by lingering on weak beats sustained through strong beats, recalling, but at a remove, the rhythmic fluidities of stile antico. The Caecilian movement, one remembers, was well launched in the Vienna of Wolf ’s day, and the composer had opportunities to hear early music and thereafter evoke its presence in this lied.77 One of the most striking aspects of “Auf ein altes Bild” is the fact that the top and bottom voices in the piano accompaniment are mirrors in contrary motion of one another for much of the song. The mirroring is blatant, accordion-like, throughout almost all of each two-bar phrase in the introduction and is even more noticeable when the vocal line doubles the bass line in mm. 5–6. Such contrary motion is absent from only a few places in the song, impelling one to wonder why Wolf chose to harp on this compositional device in this context. One reason could be that Wolf calls attention in this way to linear motion, to the contrapuntal relationship of different melodic lines, within a homorhythmic texture 162

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder and hence, evokes olden music at a modern remove. An actual Renaissance composer would not do likewise, but a fin-de-siècle composer seeking to recall the Renaissance by means of purified gestures, a kind of musical metonymy for the motets and masses of yore, does. Somewhat fancifully, one can also hear the short-breathed passages of contrary motion as symbolic within a symbol-ridden lied. Wolf perhaps saw the simultaneous polarities/complementarities of life and death, spirit and flesh, present and future in this poem and therefore devised mirror-image figures in which, to paraphrase Paul to the Corinthians, we hear through a glass clearly. What more precise way could there be to suggest, in company with these words, that opposites are really the same? In his setting of this ekphrastic poem, Wolf mixes his own pigments, shifting between light and dark (major and minor chord colors) according to a strict pattern, not sfumato – blurredly mystical and indistinct – but crystal-clear. Each two- or four-bar phrase (mostly the former) ends with a cadential progression culminating with major-mode tonic, subdominant, or dominant chords where the voice-leading had previously produced minor harmonies (Ex. 5.3). The fact that “Auf ein altes Bild” consists, in one summation, of a string of Picardy-third cadences in close proximity tells of endings, of eschatology, with all the Baroque symbolism of the Picardy third intact from its earlier enthronement in Bach’s cantatas and Passions. Mörike’s poem shudders to a halt at the thought of the Child’s future (⫽ past) death on the Cross, but Wolf pushes the poet-painter’s prophecy even farther, to the enactment of that death and beyond, to the culmination of Christian myth in human salvation. Before he does so, the lieto fine of the Passion story for believers is foretold in the phrase endings of mm. 1–18; the song is steeped in the musical rhetoric of redemption. One of those phrase endings is especially remarkable. Nowhere else but in mm. 14–15 does the voice participate in the return to minor chord colors after the recurrent Picardy thirds; here, the slippage downward from D  to D
at the words “Und dort [im Walde wonnesam]” clothes the word “dort” in darkness (the singer’s repetition of the pitch D  also underscores the fact that “und” is a connective, a very powerful one in this poem because it links the “free play” of the infant Christ to His predestined death78). The long German tradition of “Baum, Wald, Kirche” (tree, forest, church), of Gothic churches as petrified forests, resounds in Mörike’s alliterative phrase “Walde wonnesam,”79 but it was the adjective “wonnesam” which captured Wolf ’s imagination as a locus for the tonal symbolism pervasive in this song. This is the only place in the vocal line where one finds larger intervals: after the previous confinement to smaller intervals – half-steps, whole-steps, and thirds – we hear two successive, neighboring parallel leaps upward of a perfect fourth, the “perfection” of the interval perhaps meaningful. Only here does the Picardy-third cadence insist on upward motion. If one wishes to be truly fanciful, one can find in the half blackkey (G –C ), half white-key (B  –E ) pitches of the sequential leaps a symbol for wonders both light and dark, for life and death. But in the Christian myth, death must intervene before “Wonne” is possible and hence, both minor mode and dissonance return in the piano interlude which begins at the end of m. 16 and continues through m. 18. Twice in the last half of the song (the end of mm. 12–14, 16–18), Wolf states a transposition of the initial phrase (mm. 1–2) from which the entire lied is constructed as piano interludes which reassert dark tensions and break the 163

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 5.3

Wolf, Auf ein altes Bild, mm. 1–12 Langsam

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pianissimo hush regnant until the end of m. 12. Like invocations of the Holy Family in Giovanni Gabrieli’s polychoral motets for St. Mark’s, the naming of the Virgin (“Jungfrau Schoß” – “Schoß” can mean “womb” as well as “lap,” the fruit of her womb named along with her) elicits a block-chordal blaze of brightness which the piano then contradicts, abruptly leaving the warm middle register given to Mary for a higher plane. One notices that Wolf places the mezzo-forte indication on the tonic minor chord which sounds on the 164

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder last half of the fourth beat of m. 12 while the singer is still sustaining tonic F  – the time for major mode to triumph has not yet arrived, the piano insists. In m. 16, the singer shares the Picardy-third E  with the piano (“[wonne]-sam”) – this is the only time it does so in the entire song – but must relinquish that pitch when the piano forges ahead with a new phrase: the reiteration of the prior interlude in mm. 16–18, varied so that it ends this time on the tonic rather than the subdominant. Wolf, one speculates, did not want the clash of F  against E  to mar the beauty of bliss, however brief, and therefore both articulates the vocal and instrumental phrases as separate and yet makes their relatedness crystal-clear, the tonic minor harmony and topmost F  pitch proceeding from the word “wonnesam” and a response to it. That the Picardy thirds are symbolic of redemption is confirmed at the end of the texted body of the song, where the direct invocation of the Cross (“des Kreuzes Stamm!” – the last three words of the poem) makes the brightness of promised redemption momentarily impossible, makes it literally stick in the throat. Wolf again overlaps the end of the piano interlude with the start of the texted phrase, making it apparent that the one responds to the other, that they are intertwined beings. The redemption-minded piano, quietly insisting that the end must be a bright, salvific blaze, nonetheless acknowledges that salvation grows from grief, that death must precede the lieto fine of resurrection. With the word “Ach,” which turns tonic major into a seventh chord en route elsewhere, on the move, like Time itself, the singer slips down from the major chord while it is still sounding and falls, by degrees, the length of “wonnesam” (the E to G  traversed here is the minor obverse of the G  to E  leap of wonder). There is something of the inexorability of time, of the relentless way in which it carries all things to their appointed end, that Wolf conveys in this gesture, especially since the singer enters just below the tonic pitch in the piano’s topmost voice, once again making their close relationship apparent. The descent halts at a cadence clotted with Baroque dissonance and arrested just short of resolution, the mezzo-forte dynamic marking for the dominant seventh chord an echo of the earlier mf indications in the previous piano interludes and confirmation of their symbolic significance. Unable to bring himself to speak of Christ’s death directly, the poet refuses to go further . . . but Wolf does. Music has the last word – or rather, Word – and paints the last picture. Mörike’s subjects in this poem were death and time, not redemption through Christ, of which he says nothing. The act of seeing what is not there in a painting is emblematic of seeing what we do not wish to see in life: death. Wolf, however, makes of his setting a drama of Christian salvation whose final triumph sounds in the postlude – and never was a postlude less incidental, more crucial than here. Wolf did understand the poet’s fear of death and signifies his understanding when he repeats m. 1 of the piano introduction three times in the postlude before continuing onward. The motivic stammer compels curiosity about its meaning, and its continuation hints strongly at symbolic purposes. Wolf breaks off the repeated figure in m. 23 and interjects a sforzando diminished seventh harmony on the fourth and weakest beat of the measure, the lone sforzando moment in a setting which is mostly pianissimo and one which occurs only after all words have ceased. When the dissonant diminished seventh resolves, it is to the richest, longest-sustained tonic Picardy third in the song, the major third A  emphasized by its placement in the topmost voice of the chord (Ex. 5.4). It is possible to hear the motivic stammering as reluctance to continue 165

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs Ex. 5.4

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onward to that which every sinner must confront in the redemptive scenario of Christianity, that is, Christ’s death on the cross, while the diminished seventh “blow” can be interpreted as the moment of that death, Christ’s giving up the ghost on Golgotha symbolized by the harmony emblematic above all others of the horrific. The placement of the dissonant gesture on the fourth beat furthermore recalls the rhythmic anomaly of the word “frei” at the same place in the measure – did Wolf thereby wish to underscore the paradox that Christ’s predestined death was freely chosen? If this admittedly fanciful reading of the postlude has any validity, then there is something very moving in the swift resolution of the diminished seventh to a perfect authentic cadence, with meter and rhythm likewise restored to tranquillity and a deep, firm foundation in the low bass for the first and only time in the song. We need not wait long for the salvific effects of that death-blow, for its aftermath in humanity’s redemption, this music tells us. One can even be fanciful about the final tonic chord, separated as if to confirm for all time – not only as the immediate resolution of Christ’s death – the vanquishment of minor by major, darkness by light, death by eternal life. The whole conception is ingenious 166

Case studies in the geistliche Lieder and moving, but it is not Mörike. The irony is that one can read the poem as pointing to humanity’s salvation through the agency of Christ’s death, but only because that is part of the Christian myth, not because Mörike invokes redemptive futures in the poem. He does not, and it is a crucial absence. If Mörike sees what it is not there in his imaginary painting and tells of it, Wolf sees what is not there in Mörike’s poem and suggests the unseen in sound. One cannot, I have been told, draw conclusions about Wolf ’s religious beliefs from his settings of other people’s poems as lieder: the words were not his, and a lied is not liturgical music. Wolf prided himself on his ability as a Protean shape-shifter, able to assume varying characters at will, while nineteenth-century composers could and did write sacred works without necessarily believing in the religious content of the words they set to music. Nor is it unusual for Wolf to extend a poem’s scenario beyond the end of the words; he seems to have believed as a basic tenet of song composition that the postlude should proclaim itself as continued poetic reading. There is even a possibility that he wished to make evident the poet’s faith as the composer understood it from what was then available to him of Mörike’s poems and prose. But there is also the speculation that Wolf ’s repeated attraction to spiritual poetry for musical setting (the six Eichendorff choruses, Mörike’s poems on sacred subjects, the ten geistliche Lieder at the beginning of the Spanisches Liederbuch) and his compositional decisions in such songs as “Gebet” and “Auf ein altes Bild” tell of an inner life possibly influenced by the Catholicism in which he was reared, despite his adult rejection of its observances and the transferral of any putative spiritual yearnings into the artistic realm. It is, after all, a “strong reading” on Wolf ’s part to take the poet’s doubt and fear in stanza 2 of “Gebet” and the fear of death on Golgotha in the “altes Bild” and turn them into triumphs as much spiritual as musical, more religious in their substance than many a conventional specimen of the genre. It is Wolf who, thirteen years after the poet’s death, fulfills Mörike’s yearnings for belief where the poet could not. These two songs and the other songs discussed in this book exemplify a peculiar collaboration between poet and composer, peculiar on several fronts. Their lives overlapped, Mörike’s old age coincident with Wolf ’s youth, but they were dissimilar creatures, and the differences find their way into the music. A compound of ruthlessness and reverence characterizes Wolf ’s attitude towards Mörike: he loved whatever was fantastic, psychological, ambivalent, tormented, and angry-comedic in Mörike, and he read the poems inside out from a desire to milk as many of their meanings for music as he possibly could, but those readings tell of Wolf as much as they do of Mörike. One thinks of another Wolf–Mörike song, “Denk’ es, o Seele!”(Think it, O Soul!), in which the poet is able, for a moment, to place death in the larger context of Nature’s life-cycle, individual deaths furthering the continuance of life in a beneficent and beautiful order, before being overwhelmed by personal fear of death at the very end of the poem. Wolf, however, resident in a city known for its love of funerary pomp (the Bestattungsmuseum, or death-and-burial museum, and the Kapuzinergruft, or imperial funeral crypts, are tourist attractions of present-day Vienna), read the poem as predestination of dread death; that the cause of his own future encounter with the grim reaper was known to him perhaps tipped the balance in favor of this reading. The result is, yet 167

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs again, divergence between the poet’s purposes and the composer’s interpretation of the poem, a divergence probably unintended and unconscious in this instance. Wolf knew, I believe, Mörike’s use of “Denk’ es, o Seele!” at the end of Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag, where it foretells Mozart’s impending death, if only because the latterday composer uses the D minor of Mozart’s Requiem for his song. One infers the wish, here and elsewhere, to devise forms, harmonies, rhythms, gestures of all kinds, in accord with the verbal complexities which so pleased him in this poet, and yet inherently non-poetic musical imperatives and the composer as human being – his life, beliefs, experiences – ineluctably shape the song: Wolf himself, in propria persona, peers out at us from within Mörike’s words and “Wölferl’s own howl.” The richness of the Mörike-Lieder stems in considerable measure from the polyphony of two lives, two cultures, and two artistic missions preserved in amber in each and every song.

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Notes

1 “Göttlicher Mörike!”: an introduction to Eduard Mörike and Hugo Wolf 1 The exclamation “Göttlicher Mörike!” comes from a letter to Emil Kauffmann on 24 November 1893 in which Wolf thanks his friend for sending an account of the genesis of Mörike’s “Auf eine Christblume” (On a Christmas Rose), which Wolf had set to music five years earlier. See Hugo Wolf, Briefe an Emil Kauffmann (Berlin: G. Fischer, 1903), p. 114. 2 These lines come from the poem “Besuch in Urach” (Visit to Urach), written after a visit in 1827 to the school Mörike had attended when he was fourteen years old. 3 Wolf, Briefe an Kauffmann, letter of 5 June 1890, pp. 13–14. In this letter, Wolf states his aesthetic credo, “The first principle of art for me is inexorable, harsh, strong truth, truth to the point of terror” (p. 13). 4 Ernst Friedrich Kauffmann, a mathematician and composer, was born in Ludwigsburg in 1803 and taught in Heilbronn and Stuttgart. See Ernst Häussinger, “Eduard Mörike und sein musikalischer Freundeskreis,” Schwäbische Heimat: Zeitschrift zur Pflege von Landschaft, Volkstum, Kultur 25/3 (July–September 1975): 235–40, and Hanns Wolfgang Rath, “Mörikes musikalische Sendung mit unveröffentlichtem Material aus dem Nachlaß des Dichters und Wilhelm Hartlaubs,” Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde 10/8–9 (1918–19): 208–13. 5 See Adolf Frey, Erinnerungen an Gottfried Keller, (3rd aug. edn., Leipzig: H. Haessel, 1919), p. 31. 6 Wolf, Briefe an Kauffmann, p. 5. 7 In a letter to his friend Johannes Mährlen on 12 March 1830, Mörike wrote of finding a sample of Heine’s “political bosh [Wischi-Waschi]” in the wrapping paper his friend had recently brought him and finding the stuff nauseating. See Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XI: Briefe 1829–1832, ed. Hans-Ulrich Simon (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985), p. 98. 8 See Heinrich Werner, Hugo Wolf in Perchtoldsdorf (Regensburg, 1924) and Frank Walker, Hugo Wolf: A Biography (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1968, repr. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 202–07. 9 See the author’s Hugo Wolf: The Vocal Music (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), chap. 2, pp. 80–88 for a discussion of “Muse und Dichter” and the comic lied “Warnung” (Warning), in which a poet has the temerity to summon his Muse in a fit of post-alcoholic grandiosity. 10 Mörike, Briefe 1829–1832, letter to Vischer from Ochsenwang, 20 and 26 February 1832, p. 263. 11 Ibid., pp. 58–59. 12 Wolf, Briefe an Kauffmann, p. 18. S. S. Prawer, in Mörike und seine Leser: Versuch einer Wirkungsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1960), p. 33, points out that Wolf, in the letter to Kauffmann of 5 June 1890 (cited in n. 3 above), did not rank Mörike with Goethe and the Greeks, but with Kleist and Wagner. 13 Those forty-three songs, in order of composition, are: Der Tambour – 16 February

169

Notes to page 5 Der Knabe und das Immlein – 22 February Jägerlied – 22 February Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag – 22 February Der Jäger – 23 February Nimmersatte Liebe – 24 February Auftrag – 24 February Zur Warnung – 25 February Lied vom Winde – 29 February Bei einer Trauung – 1 March Zitronenfalter im April – 6 March Der Genesene an die Hoffnung – 6 March Elfenlied – 7 March Der Gärtner – 7 March Abschied – 8 March Denk’es, o Seele – 10 March Auf einer Wanderung – 11 March Gebet – 13 March Verborgenheit – 13 March Lied eines Verliebten – 14 March Selbstgeständnis – 17 March Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens – 20 March Fußreise – 21 March Rat einer Alten – 22 March Begegnung – 22 March Das verlassene Mägdlein – 24 March Storchenbotschaft – 27 March Frage und Antwort – 29 March Lebewohl – 31 March Heimweh – 1 April Seufzer – 12 April Auf ein altes Bild – 14 April An eine Äolsharfe – 15 April Um Mitternacht – 20 April Auf eine Christblume I – 21 April Peregrina I – 28 April Peregrina II – 30 April Agnes – 3 May Er ist’s – 5 May In der Frühe – 5 May Im Frühling – 8 May Nixe Binsefuß – 13 May Die Geister am Mummelsee – 18 May 14 The nine songs, in order of composition, are: An den Schlaf – 4 October Neue Liebe – 4 October Zum neuen Jahr – 5 October Schlafendes Jesuskind – 6 October Wo find’ ich Trost? – 6 October Karwoche – 8 October Gesang Weylas – 9 October Der Feuerreiter – 10 October An die Geliebte – 11 October 15 Hugo Wolfs Briefe an Oskar Grohe (Berlin: G. Fischer Verlag, 1905), p. 64. 16 Ibid., p. 103.

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Notes to pages 6–9 17 Wolf, Briefe an Kauffmann, p. 70. This daguerreotype from June 1855 is reproduced as the frontispiece to Hanns Wolfgang Rath’s edition of the Briefwechsel zwischen Eduard Mörike und Moriz v. Schwind (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1914). 18 The reference to “our poet” comes in a letter from Wolf to Kauffmann on 23 December 1893, in which Wolf thanks his friend for the gift of Julius Ernst von Günthert’s Mörike und Notter (Berlin and Stuttgart: W. Spemann, n.d.). See Wolf, Briefe an Kauffmann, pp. 119–20. 19 Ibid., pp. 82–83. The photograph of Mörike in Gedichte von Eduard Mörike. Vierte vermehrte Auflage. Mit einer Photographie des Verfassers (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1867), is of a scowling, withdrawn-looking older poet, his thinning hair parted low on one side and combed over. See Manfred Koschlig’s “Unbekannte Bildnisse Mörikes und seiner Freunde” in the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 10 (1966): 130–59, which includes a pen-and-ink drawing by “H. W.” from circa 1840 of a plumper, pipe-smoking, informally clad poet and an oil painting, possibly by Alexander Bruckmann, after 1847. 20 Wolf, Briefe an Kauffmann, p. 87. 21 Rudolf Krauß, Eduard Mörike als Gelegenheitsdichter: Aus seinem alltäglichen Leben (Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1895). 22 Wolf, Briefe an Kauffmann, pp. 138–40. 23 Ibid., pp. 79–80. See Kristin Rheinwald, Eduard Mörikes Briefe: Werkstatt der Poesie (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 1994). 24 Among the few items of Mörike bibliography available in the 1880s were Jakob Bächtold, “Von Eduard Mörike,” Deutsche Rundschau 41 (October–December 1884): 269–84; Bächtold, ed., Briefwechsel zwischen Hermann Kurz und Eduard Mörike (Stuttgart: Gebrüder Kröner, 1885); Bächtold, “Briefwechsel zwischen Theodor Storm und Eduard Mörike,” Deutsche Rundschau 58 (January–March 1889): 41–68. In the Deutsche Rundschau 66 (January–March 1891): 146, one finds a review of Bächtold’s edition of the Briefwechsel zwischen Moritz von Schwind und Eduard Mörike (Leipzig: Arthur Seemann, Verlag des literarischen Jahresberichtes, 1890) in which Mörike is characterized as a relic of a bygone era and a master of the gentle, twilight idyll. Harry Maync published “David Friedrich Strauß und Eduard Mörike. (Mit zwölf ungedruckten Briefen)” in the Deutsche Rundschau 115 (April–June 1903): 94–117, shortly after Wolf ’s death on 22 February; that same year, Maync also published an essay, “Eduard Mörike im Verkehr mit berühmten Zeitgenossen. Mit ungedruckten Briefen von Mörike, Geibel, Auerbach, Hebbel, Robert Franz und Ludwig Richter,” in Westermanns Illustrierte Deutsche Monatshefte 93 (October 1902–March 1903): 487–502. 25 Hugo Wolf, Letters to Melanie Köchert, ed. Franz Grasberger, trans. Louise McClelland Urban (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991), p. 156. 26 Eduard Mörike und Wilhelm Waiblinger: Eine poetische Jugend in Briefen, Jagebüchern und Gedichten, ed. Heinz Schlaffer (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994), p. 25. 27 Mörike, Briefe 1829–1832, p. 201. See also Ruth Lüssy-Goetz, Der Dämonien-Ruf. Ein Versuch zu Eduard Mörikes Dichtung, Ph.D. diss., University of Zurich (Aarau: Keller AG Aarau, 1976). 28 Ludwig Bauer shared his friend Mörike’s passion for Mozart, as one can see from his poem named after the composer: Nicht Ton, nicht Klang, Nicht Melodie, Ein Schwung, ein Drang, Ein Jauchzen – Sphärenharmonie, Ein Strahl aus Gott erwacht, Als er die ew’ge Liebe dacht’!

Not tone, not sound, not melody – a bound, an impulse, a rejoicing – music of the spheres, a ray awakened by God as he conceived eternal love!

See Joseph Müller-Blattau, “Das Mozartbild Mörikes und seines Freundeskreises,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 117 (1956): 327. 29 See Walker, Hugo Wolf: A Biography, p. 31. 30 Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, p. 216. 31 See Hermann Josef Dahmen, Friedrich Silcher, Komponist und Demokrat: Eine Biographie (Stuttgart: Edition Erdmann in K. Thienemanns Verlag, 1989).

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Notes to pages 9–13 32 Eduard Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. X: Briefe 1811–1828, ed. Bernhard Zeller and Anneliese Hofmann (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1982), pp. 73–74. 33 Mörike, Briefe 1829–1832, p. 299. 34 See Michael Kienzle and Dirk Mende, “Vergangenheit schlägt Gegenwart: Zu Mörikes ‘Ach, nur einmal noch im Leben!’”, Der Deutschunterricht 31/2 (1979): 61–84. 35 A translation of this poem by Howard Stern appears in Jeffrey Adams, ed., Mörike’s Muses: Critical Essays on Eduard Mörike (Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, Inc., 1990), pp. 20–23. 36 In a letter of December 1827 from Ernst Friedrich Kauffmann to Mörike, Kauffmann promises “musizieren” galore for the holiday celebration, including a finale from Domenico Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto of 1793; this, Kauffmann tells Mörike, is a “sicherer Mann” opera, the “sicherer Mann” being the turnip-eating giant Suckelborst, one part Caliban, one part Swabian peasant, who was first invented as an inhabitant of the mythical realm of Orplid and then given the starring role in Mörike’s lengthy poem, “Märchen vom sichern Mann” (Tale of the safe and secure man). Exactly what Kauffmann meant when he paid Cimarosa this chronologically inverted compliment is not certain, but one remembers that Suckelborst wins out over the Devil and thereby delights the gods; perhaps Kauffmann meant to say something about the victory of beautifully ordered comedic art over forces of evil. 37 Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XII, Briefe 1833–1838, ed. Hans-Ulrich Simon (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986), p. 122. See also Eduard Mörike, Freundeslieb’ und Treu’: 250 Briefe Eduard Mörikes an Wilhelm Hartlaub, ed. Gotthilf Renz (Leipzig: Leopold Klotz, 1938), p. 55. 38 Mörike, Briefe 1833–1838, p. 120, and Mörike, Freundeslieb’ und Treu’, p. 55. The two friends had only recently gotten back in touch with one another, after seven years’ absence. 39 Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XIII Briefe 1839–1841, ed. Hans-Ulrich Simon (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988), p. 98, and Mörike, Freundeslieb’ und Treu’, p. 109. In a letter to the Hartlaub family before and on 6 December 1839, Mörike wrote that he liked Hetsch’s setting but found its echoes of “that Sicilian tune ‘O sanctissima’” unsettling. “Artists and poets should, wherever possible, avoid such reminiscences, not only to salvage their originality but because the refined listener would then not have his pleasure disturbed by an idea from an external source,” he declared. Falling unawares into imitation (in his case, of Goethe) was a constant threat; this fear was one he and Wolf shared, for all their differences. See Mörike, Briefe 1839–1841, p. 76. 40 Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, pp. 219–20. See also Reinhold Köstlin, “Die schwäbische Dichterschule und Eduard Mörike,” Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst 19 (1839): 145. 41 Mörike, Briefe 1833–1838, p. 228. 42 Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, pp. 275–76. This poem was first published in the Jahrbuch für Kunst und Poesie, ed. Ludwig Wihl (Barmen: Langewiesche, 1843), p. 293. 43 Thomas Haynes Bayly, Songs, Ballads, and Other Poems, vol. II (London: Richard Bentley, 1844), p. 219, and Ludwig Erk, Erk’s Deutscher Liederschatz. Eine Auswahl der beliebtesten Volks-, Vaterlands-, Soldaten-, Jäger- und Studenten-Lieder (Leipzig: C. F. Peters, n.d.), p. 89. 44 Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XIV: Briefe 1842–1845, ed. Albrecht Bergold and Bernhard Zeller (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1994), p. 93. 45 Mörike, Freundeslieb’ und Treu’, p. 392. 46 Mörike, Briefe 1833–1838, p. 193. 47 Ibid., pp. 200–01. This opus includes “Romanze aus den Spanischen” (“Einmal aus seinen Blicken”) on a poem from Emanuel Geibel’s Spanisches Liederbuch, which would later become one of Wolf ’s textual sources. 48 Mörike, Freundeslieb’ und Treu’, p. 342. 49 Cited in Hanns Wolfgang Rath, “Mörikes musikalische Sendung,” p. 212. Brahms did not fare any better with Hartlaub, who wrote to the poet’s sister on 17 October 1883 to say that he had heard a concert which included Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem. “Shrill, powerful things, such as the new music loves and seeks out, since simplicity is no longer the order of the day,” Hartlaub fussed; see ibid., p. 213.

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Notes to pages 13–21 50 Martin Karl Ulrich, for his Ph.D. dissertation “Eduard Mörike among Friends and ‘False Prophets’: Words, Tones, and Images in the Mozart Novella, the Poetry, and the Lieder of E. F. Kauffmann and Hugo Wolf ” (University of Chicago, 1992), discusses the Kauffmann–Strauß correspondence in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek archives. The letter of 30 October 1851 cited here is no. 122 in the archives and appears in Ulrich, p. 16. 51 Letter from Strauß to Kauffmann, Cologne, 11 October 1852, no. 124 in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek archives. See Ulrich, “Eduard Mörike among Friends,” pp. 16–17. 52 Ulrich, “Eduard Mörike among Friends,” p. 18. 53 Cited in Rath, “Mörikes musikalische Sendung,” p. 211. 54 Ibid., p. 14. See also Ernst Friedrich Kauffmann, Lieder u. Gesänge für eine Singstimme mit Begleitung des Pianoforte, 6 vols. (Stuttgart: Eduard Ebner, n.d.). 55 Ibid., p. 157. 56 Ibid., p. 18. Hetsch and Kauffmann collaborated on the publication of the Lieder schwäbischer Dichter componirt für eine Singstimme mit Pianoforte und Guitarre-Begleitung von L. Hetsch und E. F. Kauffmann (Stuttgart: Imle & Liesching, n.d.), published in two parts. The poets for these thirteen songs were Justinus Kerner, Ludwig Uhland, Mörike, and Carl Grüneisen; the Mörike settings were Hetsch’s “Frühlingsgefühl” (“Er ist’s!”) in Part 1, “Lied” (“Rosenzeit! Wie schnell vorbei”) and “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens” in Part 2, also Kauffmann’s “Die traurige Krönung” in Part 2. 57 Mörike, Briefe 1833–1838, p. 85. 58 Bernhard Zeller, Walter Scheffler, Hans-Ulrich Simon, et al., eds., Eduard Mörike 1804–1875–1975. Gedenkausstellung zum 100. Todestag im Schiller-Nationalmuseum Marbach am Neckar. Texte und Dokumente, 2nd edn. (Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1990), pp. 451–52. 59 Settings of “Suschens Vogel,” “Die Tochter der Heide,” “Der König bei der Krönung,” and “Mausfallensprüchlein” preceded the 1888 songs. 60 Eduard Hanslick, Fünf Jahre Musik (1891–1895) (Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein für Deutsche Litteratur, 1896), pp. 270–71. 61 Youens, Hugo Wolf: The Vocal Music, pp. 26–62. 62 Cited in Prawer, Mörike und seine Leser, p. 75. 2 Peregrina revisited: songs of love and madness 1 The most recent include Teresa Emde, Peregrina: Ein Roman um die Liebe des jungen Mörike (Tübingen: Verlag der Gral/Gerhard Maerlender, 1952); Peter Härtling, Die dreifache Maria: Eine Geschichte (Darmstadt: Lüchterhand, 1982); Utta Keppler, Peregrina: Mörikes geheimnisvolle Gefährtin, biographischer Roman (Esslingen: Bechtle, 1982); and Hermann Lenz, Erinnerung an Eduard: Erzählung (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1981). 2 The chronology of the poems is expounded in Adolf Beck, “Peregrina. Zur Berichtigung und Ergänzung des Buches von Hildegard Emmel: ‘Mörikes Peregrinadichtung und ihre Beziehung zum Noltenroman,’” Euphorion 47/2 (1953): 194–217, reprinted as “Eduard Mörikes Peregrina” in Beck, Forschung und Deutung (Frankfurt am Main, 1966), pp. 311–45. See also Hans-Henrik Krummacher, “Mitteilungen zur Chronologie und Textgeschichte von Mörikes Gedichten,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 6 (1962): 253–310. 3 Claudia Liebrand, “Identität und Authentizität in Mörikes Maler Nolten,” Aurora 51 (1991): 119. 4 Stuttgart, Württemberg Landesbibliothek Cod. poet. et phil. Q 144, was probably assembled in late 1831 and contains two dozen poems from the period 1820–31. 5 Hermann Fischer, Eduard Mörike. Ein Lebensbild des Dichters (Stuttgart: Th. Knapp, 1881). In Rudolf Krauß, Eduard Mörike als Gelegenheitsdichter: Aus seinem alltäglichen Leben (Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1895), pp. 5–6, Krauß invokes “a mysterious stranger named Maria Meyer. . . probably from Hungary” – one of Maria’s own fabrications – who proved to be unworthy of Mörike for unspecified reasons. 6 Hugo Wolf, Letters to Melanie Köchert, ed. Franz Grasberger, trans. Louise McClelland Urban (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991), pp. 23–24.

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Notes to pages 21–28 7 Raymond Immerwahr, “The Loves of Maler Nolten,” Rice University Studies 57/4 (Fall 1971): 73–87. 8 Beck, “Peregrina. Zur Berichtigung und Ergänzung des Buches von Hildegard Emmel,” p. 200. 9 Eduard Mörike, Neue weltliche Lieder. Faksimile der Handschrift, ed. Hans-Henrik Krummacher (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1975), pp. 14 and 36. 10 See Victor Areco, Das Liebesleben der Zigeuner (Leipzig: Leipziger Verlag, [1909 or 1910]). See also Kirsten Martins-Heuss, Zur mythischen Figur des Zigeuners in der deutschen Zigeunerforschung (Frankfurt: Haag & Herchen, 1983); Susan Tebbutt, ed., Sinti and Roma: Gypsies in Germanspeaking Society and Literature (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998); and Thomas Fricke, Zwischen Erziehung und Ausgrenzung: Zur württembergischen Geschichte der Sinti und Roma im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991). 11 Paul Corrodi, Das Urbild von Mörikes Peregrina (Kirchheim an der Teck: Jürgen Schweier, 1976, originally published in the 1923 Jahrbuch der Literarischen Vereinigung Winterthur). 12 Corrodi, Das Urbild von Mörikes Peregrina, pp. 6–7. 13 Ibid., p. 8. 14 It was Friedrich Notter, in Eduard Mörike: Ein Beitrag zu seiner Charakteristik als Mensch und Dichter (Stuttgart, 1875) who reported that Maria might have joined Madame Krüdener’s followers. See Friedrich Notter, Eduard Mörike und andere Essays, ed. Walter Hagen (Marbach am Neckar: Schiller-Nationalmuseum, 1966), p. 87. The most recent study of Madame von Krüdener is Petra Hieber’s Auf der Suche nach dem Glück. Juliane von Krüdener-Vietinghoff (1764–1824): Selbstwahrnehmung im Spannungsfeld gesellschaftlichen Wandels (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995). 15 See Johann Georg Müller, “Frau von Krüdener in der Schweiz,” Protestantische Monatsblätter für innere Zeitgeschichte. Studien der Gegenwart für die evangelischen Länder deutscher Zunge, ed. Heinrich Gelzer, 22 (July–December 1863): 195–218. 16 Corrodi, Das Urbild von Mörikes Peregrina, pp. 9–12. 17 Ibid., p. 13. 18 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 19 Ernst Münch, Erinnerungen, Lebensbilder und Studien aus den ersten sieben und dreißig Jahren eines teutschen Gelehrten, mit Rückblicken auf das öffentliche, politische, intellektuelle und sittliche Leben von 1815 bis 1835 in der Schweiz, in Teutschland und den Niederlanden, vol. I (Carlsruhe: Chr. Fr. Müller’sche Hofbuchhandlung, 1836), pp. 347–58. 20 In Henry and Mary Garland, The Oxford Companion to German Literature, 3rd edn. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 584–85, Maria Meyer’s fictions about her origins are repeated, namely, that she came from a well-to-do family and that her parents had refused to take her back after she joined the Krüdener sect. 21 Münch, Erinnerungen, Lebensbilder und Studien, vol. I, pp. 348–50. 22 Ibid., p. 351. 23 Corrodi, Das Urbild von Mörikes Peregrina, p. 22. See Karl Ludwig von Woltmann, Memoiren des Freiherrn von S—a, 3 vols. (Prague and Leipzig: Im Deutschen Museum, 1815–16), pp. 90–93. 24 Münch, Erinnerungen, Lebensbilder und Studien, vol. I, pp. 352–53. 25 Corrodi, Das Urbild von Mörikes Peregrina, p. 27. 26 See Wilhelm Lang, “Rudolf Lohbauer” in Württembergische Vierteljahrsheft für Landesgeschichte (1896): 149–88. In the letter of February 1840 (cited on p. 152), Lohbauer writes that “years later I stood at her grave, deeply moved, honored her spirit once more, and begged her forgiveness. Later I learned that she thought of me on her deathbed and had prayed for me, that she had charged a friend to exhort me to the good, to leave the pathway to ruination. This friend was named Charlotte Späth.” 27 Eduard Mörike, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. X: Briefe 1811–1828, ed. Bernhard Zeller and Anneliese Hofmann (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), p. 40. 28 See W. Camerer, Eduard Mörike und Klara Neuffer: Neue Untersuchungen (Marbach am Neckar: A. Remppis, 1908) and Hanns Wolfgang Rath, “Von des Knaben, der mir so lieb war, frischgrünendem Hügel”: Erinnerungen eines Widmungsexemplars Ed. Mörikes (Ludwigsburg: Carl Fr. Schulz Verlag, 1924).

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Notes to pages 28–34 29 Eduard Mörike, Werke und Briefe, vol. III: Maler Nolten, ed. Herbert Meyer (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1967), p. 195. 30 Bernhard Zeller, Walter Scheffler, Hans-Ulrich Simon, et al., eds., Eduard Mörike 1804–1875–1975. Gedenkausstellung zum 100. Todestag im Schiller-Nationalmuseum Marbach am Neckar. Texte und Dokumente (2nd edn. Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1990), pp. 112–13. Also cited in Harry Maync, “Das Urbild von Eduard Mörikes ‘Peregrina.’ Eine Dichterliebe,” Westermanns Illustrierte Deutsche Monatsheft 46/1 (1901): 42–43. 31 Cited in Marianne Behrendt, “Die Figur der Elisabeth in Eduard Mörikes Roman ‘Maler Nolten’” in Romantik und Moderne: Neue Beiträge aus Forschung und Lehre. Festschrift für Helmut Motekat, ed. Erich Huben-Thoma and Ghemela Adler (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986), p. 55. 32 Zeller, Scheffler, Simon, et al., Gedenkausstellung, p. 113. 33 See Thomas Rudi, Christian Philipp Köster (1784–1851). Maler und Restaurator. Monographie mit kritischem Oeuvreverzeichnis (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999). 34 Maync, “Das Urbild von Eduard Mörikes ‘Peregrina,’” pp. 40–57, and Zeller, Scheffler, Simon, et al., Gedenkausstellung, p. 113. 35 Mörike, Briefe 1811–1828, p. 48. 36 Ibid., p. 55. 37 Zeller, Scheffler, Simon, et al., Gedenkausstellung, pp. 113–14. 38 Ludwig Amandus Bauer, Briefe an Eduard Mörike, ed. Bernhard Zeller and Hans-Ulrich Simon (Marbach, 1976), p. 173. 39 The volume of Luise Mörike’s diary containing the summer 1824 entries is on exhibit in the Schiller Nationalmuseum in Marbach. See also Albrecht Bergold, Jutta Salchow, and Walter Scheffler, eds., Kerner – Uhland – Mörike. Ständige Ausstellung des Schiller-Nationalmuseums und des Deutschen Literaturarchivs Marbach am Neckar (Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1980, 3rd edn., 1992), pp. 91–92. 40 Ibid., pp. 55 and 64. The town’s medical officer certified the death as a “nervous stroke,” perhaps to spare the family of his dead young colleague (August was an apothecary’s assistant), and Eduard was one of the few who probably knew the truth. 41 Eduard Mörike und Wilhelm Waiblinger: Eine poetische Jugend in Briefen, Tagebüchern und Gedichten, ed. Heinz Schlaffer (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994), p. 55. 42 Bauer, Briefe an Eduard Mörike, p. 35. 43 Zeller, Scheffler, Simon, et al., Gedenkausstellung, pp. 116–18. On 3 August, Luise writes that Eduard must be treated like a sick child, but the next day, he insisted on reading to her from Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities). Luise hated the book, wondering in her diary why such prodigal talents as Goethe seized on just one aspect of life, “and truly not the purest side.” She was offended by Goethe’s tale of a marriage and lives destroyed when both the husband and the wife experience desire for someone else. Ibid., p. 118. 44 Mörike and Waiblinger, Eine poetische Jugend, p. 56, and Zeller, Scheffler, Simon, et al., Gedenkausstellung, pp. 118–19. 45 In a letter to August dated 9 August, Mörike writes a teasingly affectionate letter in which he tells of passing the Zumsteeg house and hearing someone play the Don Giovanni overture on the piano, but badly, in a “jungfräulich” manner. One would never guess that Mörike was in pain. See Mörike, Briefe 1811–1828, pp. 56–57. 46 Bauer described the fire in a letter of 25 November 1824 to his fiancée Mariane Rommel; see Mörike and Waiblinger, Eine poetische Jugend, pp. 62–63. Bauer was so horrified by Waiblinger’s actions that he wrote him in December 1824 to say, “You are an evil man! Become a good one!” See ibid., p. 67. Mörike wrote Waiblinger a milder admonishment on 4 April 1825 but never sent it (ibid., pp. 72–73). 47 Mörike, Briefe 1811–1828, pp. 57–58, also Mörike and Waiblinger, Eine poetische Jugend, pp. 58–62. 48 Cited in Zeller, Scheffler, and Simon, et al., Gedenkausstellung, pp. 170–71. 49 Bauer, Briefe an Eduard Mörike, pp. 19–21. 50 Mörike, Werke, ed. Hannsludwig Geiger (Wiesbaden: Emil Vollmer Verlag, n.d.), p. 265.

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Notes to pages 34–41 51 Ernst Münch, Erinnerungen, Reisebilder, Phantasiegemälde und Fastenpredigten aus den Jahren 1828–1841, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1841–42), vol. II, pp. 65–69. 52 I suspect Münch made the painting up, but genre scenes like it proliferated in nineteenthcentury Europe. See Fahrendes Volk: Spielleute, Schausteller, Artisten: [Ausstellung] 2. Mai – 5. Juli 1981, Städtische Kunsthalle (Recklinghausen, 1981). 53 Ibid., pp. 66–67. Cited in Corrodi, Das Urbild von Mörikes Peregrina, pp. 44–45. 54 Münch, Erinnerungen, Reisebilder, Phantasiegemälde und Fastenpredigten aus den Jahren 1828–1841, vol. II, p. 69, also cited in Corrodi, Das Urbild von Mörikes Peregrina, p. 47. 55 Eduard Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XIV: Briefe 1842–1845, ed. Albrecht Bergold and Bernhard Zeller (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1994), p. 96. 56 See Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Riverhead Books, 1993) and Marjorie Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth: The Magdalen’s Origins and Metamorphoses (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975). 57 See Corrodi, Das Urbild von Mörikes Peregrina, pp. 48–58. 58 Mörike, Neue weltliche Lieder: Faksimile der Handschrift, pp. 10 and 26. 59 Heinz Gockel, in “Venus-Libitina: Mythologische Anmerkungen zu Mörikes Peregrina-Zyklus,” Wirkendes Wort 24/1 (January–February 1974): 46–56, finds in Mörike’s cycle the antique theme of “Venus libitina,” the erotic goddess who wanders, homeless and barefoot, to mourn the death of Adonis. 60 Mörike, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike. Vierte vermehrte Auflage. Mit einer Photographie des Verfassers (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1867, pp. 178–79. 61 The early version of this poem entitled “Die Hochzeit” which appears in Maler Nolten is different in numerous ways. In stanza 1, the snakes are living creatures, not bronze sculptures, and the black-haired weeping willow of the final version replaces what was simply “Bäume vom Nachttau troffen” in the earlier variant. There is no kissing, no fountain, no eyelashes like butterflies, and it is the speaker, not Peregrina, who falls asleep. Upon revision, the poet abrogates power back to the man, not the woman, so that the familiar erotic scenario of a man gazing at a sleeping woman replaces the former depiction of Peregrina as a powerful enchantress. See Mörike, Maler Nolten, pp. 362–63. 62 See Justinus Kerner, Reiseschatten von dem Schattenspieler Luchs in Kerners Werke, vol. 1, part 3: Reiseschatten–Dramatische Dichtungen, ed. Raimund Pissin (Berlin and Leipzig: Deutsches Verlagshaus Bong & Co., n.d.), p. 140, and Beck, “Peregrina. Zur Berichtigung und Ergänzung des Buches von Hildegard Emmel,” pp. 206–07. 63 Gerhart von Graevenitz, Eduard Mörike: Die Kunst der Sünde. Zur Geschichte des literarischen Individuums (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1978), pp. 16–17. 64 Kerner, Reiseschatten, pp. 102–03. 65 Mörike, Briefe 1811–1828, p. 65. 66 Verstoßung, ranging from formal repudiation in an orderly arrangement agreed upon by the husband’s and wife’s families to the lawlessness of murder, served the interest of patrimony: adultery, tolerated among men, was condemned in women lest issue from another man claim inheritance rights. See Georges Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, trans. Jane Dunnett (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). 67 Peter von Matt, in Liebesverrat: Die Treulosen in der Literatur (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1989), p. 181. 68 Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, pp. 180–81. The earlier version includes sixteen lines omitted from the final version: Von der Zeit an Kamen mir Träume voll schöner Trübe, Wie gesponnen auf Nebelgrund, Wußte nimmer, wie mir geschah, War nur schmachtend, seliger Krankheit voll. Oft in den Träumen zog sich ein Vorhang Finster und groß ins Unendliche,

From that time on, nebulous dreams filled with beautiful riddles came to me as if spun against a foggy netherworld; I never knew what had come over me, was only longing, filled with blessed illness. Often in these dreams a curtain was extended, immense and dark, to infinity,

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Notes to pages 41–59 Zwischen mich und die dunkle Welt. Hinter ihm ahnt’ ich ein Heideland, Hinter ihm hört’ ich’s wie Nachtwind sausen; Auch die Falten des Vorhangs Fingen bald an, sich im Sturme zu regen, Gleich einer Ahnung strich er dahinten, Ruhig blieb ich und bange doch, Immer leiser wurde der Heidesturm – Siehe, da kam’s!

between me and the dark world. Behind it I imagined a heath country, behind it I heard what seemed like the night wind blowing; soon too the folds of the curtain began to move with the storm. Like a foreboding force, it raged behind it; I stayed calm and yet fearful; calm overcame the storm on the heath – See, there it came!

69 In Maler Nolten, the phrase is “Fort in die graue, / Stille Welt hinaus.” Mörike subsequently deleted the distracting adjective “stille.” See ibid., p. 363. 70 In a letter to Mährlen from Scheer on 13 May 1828, Mörike copies out his newly composed poem, with the line “Doch, Du [Liebe] und die Lüfte – haben kein Haus” (later changed to “. . . ihr habt kein Haus”). See Mörike, Briefe 1811–1828, p. 215. 71 Ibid., p. 216. 72 Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, p. 177. 73 A facsimile of stanza 1 can be found in Zeller, Scheffler, Simon, et al., Gedenkausstellung, p. 111. 74 The seaman-turned-miner Elis Fröbom dies in the mines on the night before his marriage, after telling his fiancée Ulla that a “cherry red sparkling almadine enclosed in chlorite and mica, on which is inscribed the chart of our life” is down in the mine shaft. His body is discovered fifty years later on the anniversary of the wedding day; at the sight, the elderly Ulla dies. See E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Die Bergwerke von Falun” from Die Serapions-Brüder (Munich: Winkler-Verlag, 1965), pp. 171–97. 75 See Christian L. Hart Nibbrig, Verlorene Unmittelbarkeit: Zeiterfahrung und Zeitgestaltung bei Eduard Mörike (Bonn: Bouvier, 1973). 76 Reproduced in Jonathan Miller, On Reflection (London: National Gallery Publications Ltd., 1998), p. 170. 77 Robert Rosenblum, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1967), p. 164. 78 Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, pp. 46–50. 79 Ibid., pp. 154–56. 80 Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, ed. Gottfried Weber (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), lines 11,724–29, p. 327. 81 Mörike was perhaps familiar with Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft of 1808, in which one reads “that gold, when it is used purely, will always have a pleasant effect on magnetized sleepers.” See Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Eschborn: Verlag Dietmar Klotz, 1992, facsimile of the 1st edn., Dresden: Arnold, 1808), p. 336. Maria Meyer evidently practiced animal magnetism. 82 Mörike, Maler Nolten, p. 116. 83 For Mörike’s generation, the first line of the poem would also have been a dual reminiscence of Friedrich Matthisson’s “Ich denke Dein” and Goethe’s “Nähe des Geliebten.” 84 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Eduard Mendelson (New York: Vintage International, 1991), p. 282. 85 Ibid., “Detective Story,” p. 151. 86 Schubert did likewise much earlier. The words “An dich hab’ ich gedacht” are repeated wordlessly in the lower voices of the piano postlude to “Gute Nacht,” the first song of Winterreise. 87 Mörike wrote of the performance in a long letter to Wilhelm Hartlaub of 20–25 March 1826. See Mörike, Briefe 1811–1828, p. 121. 88 See Jack Zipes, ed., The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2nd edn. (New York: Routledge, 1993); Marianne Rumpf, Rotkäppchen: Eine vergleichende Märchenuntersuchung (Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 1989); and Alan Dundes, ed., Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 89 Mörike, Werke, ed. Geiger, pp. 259–61. 90 Liebrand, “Identität und Authentizität in Mörikes Maler Nolten,” p. 119. 91 See Otto Brahm, Karl Stauffer-Bern. Sein Leben, seine Briefe, seine Gedichte (Stuttgart: Göschen

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Notes to pages 60–63 1892), also Bernhard von Arx, Der Fall Karl Stauffer: Chronik eines Skandals (Bern and Stuttgart: Verlag Hallwag, 1969), revised as Karl Stauffer und Lydia Welti-Escher: Chronik eines Skandals (Bern: Zytglogge Verlag, 1991), and Alfred Bader, Künstler-Tragik. Karl Stauffer, Vincent van Gogh: Zwei Zeitgenossen. Eine Gegenüberstellung für Kunstfreunde mit einem Deutungsversuch über Begabung, Schaffensart und Tragik der Künstler (Basel: B. Schwabe, 1932). 3 Agnes’s songs: the fictional misfortunes and musical fortunes of a nineteenthcentury madwoman 1 See Georg Reuchlein, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Psychiatrie und Literatur: Zur Entwicklung der Wahnsinnsthematik in der deutschen Literatur des späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1986). 2 One thinks, for example, of the neurasthenic women treated by animal magnetism both in reality and in fiction; see Jürgen Barkhoff, Magnetische Fiktionen: Literarisierung des Mesmerismus in der Romantik (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1995) and Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). 3 Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XI: Briefe 1829–1832, ed. Hans-Ulrich Simon (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985), December 1829, p. 65. 4 In a letter to Luise Rau of 10–11 December 1831, Mörike tells his fiancée that before going to sleep, he had been reading Wilhelm Meister again. “No matter how often I read a single page of it, it is like bright sunshine to my spirit, and I feel myself in the presence of all that is beautiful. It puts me wonderfully in harmony with the world, with myself, with everything. That, it seems to me, is the truest criterion of a work of art.” See Mörike, Briefe 1829–1832, p. 239. In another letter to Luise of 8 April 1832, Mörike reacts to the news of Goethe’s death, saying, “Truly our old Poet-Father’s death has shaken me too, and I too have sunk into deep reflection.” He then copies out for her a portion of a letter from Mährlen, who wrote, “After him [Goethe],         has only a couple of men; when these are dead and buried, then the apes and monkeys will have free rein to play with the Hesperidean apples from the golden crowns of art and knowledge.” Ibid., pp. 276–77. 5 See Ursula Mahlendorf, “The Mystery of Mignon: Object Relations, Abandonment, Child Abuse, and Narrative Structure,” Goethe Yearbook (1994): 23–39. Mignon’s mother Sperata did not want her; Mignon was then cast out by the rest of her family. The actors in the troupe where Wilhelm encounters Mignon also mistreat her. Mahlendorf notes such symptoms of child abuse as Mignon’s refusal of gender identity, inability to refer to herself in the first person, difficulties learning language, hyperkinetic or mechanical movements, alternation between submissiveness and rebellion, nervous tics and ascetic self-abnegation, and repressed sexuality, with infantile characteristics (in “Kennst Du das Land,” she refers to Wilhelm as “Vater,” “Geliebter,” and “Beschützer”). 6 Gustav Schwab, in Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, nos. 20–21 (1833), reproduced in Mörike, Werke und Briefe, vol. V: Maler Nolten. Lesarten und Erläuterungen, ed. Herbert Meyer (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1971), p. 52. 7 William Buchan, Domestic Medicine: or, A Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases by Regimen and Simple Medicines (Edinburgh: Royal College of Physicians, 1769), p. 561. 8 Mörike, Briefe 1829–1832, p. 234. 9 Mörike, Werke und Briefe, vol. III: Maler Nolten, ed. Herbert Meyer (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1967), p. 42. Larkens knows that his angelic image of Agnes is a construction – “wenigstens wär’ mir leid um das goldreine Christengelsbild, das ich mir so nach und nach von dem Mädchen construirte” (p. 47). 10 Mörike’s wife Margarethe Speeth, whom he married in 1851 in his late forties, conforms in certain respects to the stereotype; because she was Catholic, he could marry her without the guilt induced by Protestant love-objects. In Karl Walter’s “Ungedruckte Briefe Mörikes an David Friedrich Strauß,” Das literarische Echo: Halbmonatsschrift für Literaturfreunde 24/10 (15 February 1922): 598, one finds a letter written by Ernst Friedrich Kauffmann to David Friedrich Strauß on 19 March 1954 about Mörike’s wife: “Seine Frau ist ein einfaches, schlichtes Wesen, ganz Hingebung für ihn.” 11 “Hysteria” comes from the Greek meaning literally “condition/disease of the womb.” For recent

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Notes to pages 63–69

12

13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

28

29 30

reevaluations of hysteria theory, see Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994); Evelyne Ender, Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter, Hysteria Beyond Freud (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993). See Joachim Heinrich Campe, Väterlicher Rath für meine Tochter. Ein Gegenstück zum Theophron. Der erwachsenern weiblichen Jugend gewidmet, 7th edn. (Braunschweig: In der Schulbuchhandlung, 1809). In the frontispiece engraving, an older man in flowing robes seated beneath a tree in full leaf on a hilltop overlooking a classical landscape looks up earnestly at his daughter (with fillets binding her hair à la grecque and wearing a toga-like garment) and speaks, Nature and antiquity thus being united in dual authority over women’s destinies. Campe inveighs at length against “Gelehrsamkeit und Schriftstellerei” for women (ibid., pp. 59–96). In ibid., p. 53, Campe declares that of women artists (music, drawing, embroidery, and dancing are the only arts where he concedes a few women mastery, or at least a reputation for excellence), barely one in 100 know how to fulfill their wifely responsibilities properly. Where men are ennobled by culture, women are enfeebled by it (p. 55). Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 190. See pp. 197–229 for the section on “Schamhaftigkeit und Keuschheit.” Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., pp. 208–09. In a footnote to p. 209, Campe advises that young persons who wish to know more about “the greatest shame of all – impurity with oneself ” can order a pamphlet with the title Höchstnöthige Belehrung und Warnung für junge Mädchen zur frühen Bewahrung ihrer Unschuld, von einer erfahrnen Freundinn (Braunschweig, 1790). Campe, Väterlicher Rat, pp. 213–14. Mörike, Maler Nolten, pp. 49–50. Ibid., pp. 41–46. Ibid., pp. 60–61. Ibid., pp. 283–88. Mörike plays with tradition in his pseudo-folk poems: no folkloric hunter would give in to a woman the way this one does. See Corinna Wernz, Sexualität als Krankheit. Der medizinische Diskurs zur Sexualität um 1800 (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1993); Hilke Hentze, Sexualität in der Pädagogik des späten 18. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt and Bern: Peter Lang, 1979); and Regina Schaps, Hysterie und Weiblichkeit: Wissenschaftsmythen über die Frau (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1982). Mörike, Maler Nolten, p. 281. Examples include the “thousand-colored morning” and the “thousand streams” of “Harzreise im Winter” (Winter Journey in the Harz Mountains), the thousandfold riot of flowers in “Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen” (The Metamorphosis of Plants), and the poem “In tausend Formen” (In a Thousand Forms) from the West-östlicher Divan. The meadow is the archetypal site where maidens lose their virginity. In one erotic folk song, we are told, “Auf der grünen Wiese / Hab ich sie gefragt, / Ob sie sich mal ließe; / ‘Ja’ hat sie gesagt”; see Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, “Erotisches Lied” in Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Lutz Röhrich, and Wolfgang Suppan, eds., Handbuch des Volksliedes, vol. I: Die Gattungen des Volksliedes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1973), p. 575. Eduard Mörike, Briefe an seine Braut Luise Rau, ed. Friedhelm Kemp (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1965), pp. 10–11. In Hans Heinrich Füßli’s anthology of Lieder der Deutschen (Zurich: Orell, Geßner, Füßli & Comp., 1784), p. 85, one finds a “Lied einer Schnitterinn” whose poetic speaker, addressing the harvested wheat, says in stanzas 3–5 of 6, “Abends bindt man dich in Garben, / Führt dich jauchzend heim: / Menschen kamen auch und starben; / Alles kehret heim. / / Einst auch fall ich, Schnittermädchen, / So dahin, dahin – / Und es regt sich wohl kein Blättchen, / Daß ich nicht mehr bin. / / Aber Frühlingsodem wehet / Ueber Grab und Flur, / Und aus todter Hülle gehet / Schönere Natur.”

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Notes to pages 69–81 31 Mörike, Maler Nolten, p. 292. One hopes that both Mörike and Wolf knew Goethe’s 1812 poem “Den Originalen,” whose first part proclaims, “Ein Quidam sagt: ‘Ich bin von keiner Schule; / Kein Meister lebt, mit dem ich buhle; / Auch bin ich weit davon entfernt, / Daß ich von Toten was gelernt.’ / Das heißt, wenn ich ihn recht verstand: / Ich bin ein Narr auf eigne Hand.” 32 Hans-Joachim Erwe, Musik nach Eduard Mörike, vol. II: Ein bibliographisches Verzeichnis (Hamburg: Karl Dieter Wagner, 1987), pp. 165–66. 33 The latest is Eduard Mörike, Mozart’s Journey to Prague. Selected Poems, trans. David Luke (London: Libris, 1997). 34 Jeffrey Sammons, “Fate and Psychology: Another Look at Mörike’s ‘Maler Nolten’” in Lebendige Form: Interpretationen zur Deutschen Literatur, ed. Jeffrey L. Sammons and Ernst Schürer (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1970), pp. 211–27. 35 Mörike, Maler Nolten, p. 309. 36 Ibid., p. 315. 37 The scene in the labyrinth begins ibid., p. 359, and ends on p. 368. 38 The inset-tale is found in ibid., pp. 370–72. 39 Ibid., pp. 372–75. 40 Roy Porter, “The Body and the Mind, The Doctor and the Patient” in Hysteria Beyond Freud, p. 254. 41 Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind (London: Macmillan & Co., 1873), p. 79. 42 Mörike, Maler Nolten, p. 384. 43 Ibid., pp. 387–88. 44 Ibid., p. 398. 45 Ibid., p. 399. 46 Ibid., p. 400. 47 Ibid., the Latin verse on pp. 400–01, the German translation on p. 401. For Hetsch’s setting, see Mörike, Maler Nolten. Lesarten und Erläuterungen, pp. 271–72. 48 Mörike, Maler Nolten, “Eine Liebe kenn’ ich” on pp. 401–02. 49 Ibid.; Agnes’s death appears on p. 404, the dialogue between the President and Nolten on pp. 405–06, and Nolten’s death-scene on pp. 407–09. 50 Mörike, Gedichte (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1838), p. 144. The poem is untitled in the novel, but in the 1838 first edition of Mörike’s poems, the Latin source is entitled “Suspirium,” the German “Seufzer”; the Latin title is omitted thereafter in the other three editions supervised by the poet. 51 In Mörike’s footnote to the Latin verse in Maler Nolten (p. 401), he tells the reader that he found these lines in a “very old, probably long out-of-print prayerbook.” 52 Mörike, Briefe 1829–1832, the letter of 22 February 1832 on pp. 253–57. 53 Mörike, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike. Vierte vermehrte Auflage. Mit einer Photographie des Verfassers (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1867), p. 234. 54 Mörike, Werke, ed. Hannsludwig Geiger (Wiesbaden: Emil Vollmer Verlag, n.d.), p. 289. 55 The misattribution of “Jesu benigne” to Fortunatus is repeated in the critical notes to Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XIII: Briefe 1839–1841, ed. HansUlrich Simon (Suttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988), p. 492. 56 Mörike, Briefe 1839–1841, p. 157. In Mörike, Freundeslieb’ und Treu’. 250 Briefe Eduard Mörikes an Wilhelm Hartlaub, ed. Gotthilf Renz (Leipzig: Leopold Klotz, 1938), p. 104, the letter is incorrectly dated 1840. 57 Johann Anastasius Freylinghausen, Geistreiches Gesang-Buch. Den Kern Alter und Neuer Lieder, Wie auch die Noten der unbekannten Melodeyen und dazugehörige nützliche Register in sich haltend (Halle: In Verlegung des Waysenhauses, 1741), p. 581, in a section entitled “Von der Liebe zu Jesu” (Of Love for Christ). The Latin text, Freylinghausen directs, should be sung to the melody of “Jesu, mein treuer, laß doch Dein Feuer” – the melody of the German version. 58 Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Neuer Helicon mit seinen Neun Musen, Das ist: Geistliche SittenLieder von Erkäntnus der wahren Glückseligkeit und der Unglückseligkeit falscher Güter; dann von den Mitteln zu wahren Glückseligkeit zu gelangen und sich in derselben erhalten, etc. (Nuremberg: J. J. Felßeckers, 1684), pp. 179–81. For more about this poet, see Johann Caspar Wetzel, Hymnopoeographia, oder, Historische Lebens-beschreibung der berühmtesten Lieder-dichter, 4 vols. (Herrnstadt: Samuel Roth-Scholtzen, 1719–28), vol. II, p. 916.

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Notes to pages 82–101 59 Knorr von Rosenroth’s translation of the first verse of “Jesu benigne,” which he dubs “Aria 69. Andacht von der Liebe Jesu,” in the Neuer Helicon, p. 179, is as follows: “Jesu mein Treuer / Laß doch dein Feuer / Stets in mir brennen / Und uns nicht trennen! / Solt ich mit schmachten / Nicht nach dir trachten / Aber ich spüre / Daß mich stets friere.” 60 See the author’s “’Alles endet, was entstehet’ – The Second of Hugo Wolf ’s Michelangelo-Lieder” in Studies in Music (University of Western Australia) 14 (1980): 87–103. 61 In Maler Nolten, the second line of stanza 1 reads “War getreu, seitdem ich sie gefunden,” whereas the later version substitutes the more musical “so lang,” with a liquid -l in the middle rather than two consonantal stops. Stanza 4, line 3 in the novel is “Frommer Liebe, alter Treue Spur,” whereas Wolf ’s text is “Frommer Liebe, frommer Treue Spur,” the adjective “pious” doubled for emphasis. Only the -ie of “Liebe” is bright; the rest of the line is darkened. 62 See Ernst Gerhard Rüsch, “Christliche Motive in der Dichtung Eduard Mörikes,” Theologische Zeitschrift 11 [1955]: 206–23. Rüsch attempts to claim Mörike as a Christian poet by citing this poem, but the poetic persona’s inability to derive comfort from thoughts of Christ is insufficiently acknowledged. 63 Evangelische Deutsche Original-Bibel von 1741: Hebräischer und Griechischer Original-Text mit der Deutschen Originalübersetzung Martin Luther, vol. II (Berlin: Eva Berndt-Verlag, 1986, facsimile edn. of Züllichau: Gottlob Benjamin Frommann, 1740 [1741]), p. 685. 64 I wonder whether Mörike came across another variation of Isaiah in the hymn “Hüter, wird die Nacht der Sünden” by Christian Gottlob Barth (1799–1862): “Hüter! ist die Nacht verschwunden? Hüter! ist die Nacht schier hin? Ach, wir zählen alle Stunden, Bis die Morgenwolken blühn, Bis die Finsterniß entweichet, Bis der Sterne Schein erbleichet, Und der Sonne warmer Strahl Leuchtet über Berg und Thal” (seven more verses follow). The hymn was published in Albert Knapp’s Evangelischer Liederschatz für Kirche und Haus of 1837, with the indication that it was to be sung to the melody of “Alle Menschen müssen sterben.” See Albert Knapp, Evangelischer Liederschatz für Kirche und Haus: Eine Sammlung geistlicher Lieder aus allen christlichen Jahrhunderten, vol. I (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1837), pp. 507–08. 65 Cited in Eckhard Altmann, Christian Friedrich Richter (1676–1711): Arzt, Apotheker und Liederdichter des Halleschen Pietismus (Witten: Luther Verlag, 1972), p. 167. 66 Evangelische Deutsche Original-Bibel von 1741, p. 187. 67 See Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 372. 68 Ernest Newman, in The Wagner Operas (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991, reprint of original edn. by Alfred Knopf in 1949), begins his chapter on Parsifal with a disquisition (pp. 635–40) about the process by which Wagner came to identify the spear of Amfortas’s undoing with Longinus’s spear. 69 Mörike, Maler Nolten, p. 402. 70 See the author’s Schubert’s Poets and the Making of Lieder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 187. 71 The desire for “Trost” – comfort for existential anguish – is a leitmotif in Mörike. In “Trost,” dated 1837 in the Gedichte of 1867 (pp. 185–86), the poetic persona laments that his happiness is lost, his friends have forsaken him, and the gods have turned their backs on him, then comforts himself: “And I spoke to my heart: let us keep fast to one another, for we know each other as the swallow knows its nest, the singer his zither.“ 72 Irene Schüpfer, “Es war, als könnte man gar nicht reden.” Die Kommunikation als Spiegel von Zeitund Kulturgeschichte in Eduard Mörikes Maler Nolten (Frankfurt and Berlin: Peter Lang, 1996). 4 Sung desire: from Biedermeier erotica to fin-de-siècle lied 1 Ludwig Hetsch’s setting appears in the Lieder schwäbischer Dichter componirt für eine Singstimme mit Pianoforte und Guitarre-Begleitung, Part 2 (Stuttgart: G. A. Zumsteeg, n.d.), where it is the fifth and final song; one notices that they did not place such a text at the beginning. Three twentiethcentury composers set this text to music after Wolf ’s death: Hugo Distler, whose setting op. 19,

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2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17

18

no. 36 appeared in 1939; Arthur Furer, whose op. 1, no. 4 setting was composed in the 1940s; and Leonhard Metzner. Eduard Mörike, Neue weltliche Lieder: Faksimile der Handschrift, ed. Hans-Henrik Krummacher (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1975), pp. 18 and 40. Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. X: Briefe 1811–1828, ed. Bernhard Zeller und Anneliese Hofmann (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), pp. 222–24. Ibid., p. 165. See Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), pp. 273–318, and Maureen Duffy, The Erotic World of Faery (London, 1972). Snake ⫽ woman is an antique and negative equation: poisonous, sneaky, secretive, allies in depriving mankind of paradisaical immortality. The Furies’ snake-tresses make of the long hair emblematic of female sexuality something deadly, and yet the snakes are also phallic. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra from The Annotated Shakespeare, vol. III: The Tragedies and Romances, ed. A. L. Rowse (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978), p. 491. Mörike, Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag in Werke, ed. Hannsludwig Geiger (Wiesbaden: Emil Vollmer, n.d.), pp. 981–82. Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, Sämmtliche Gedichte, vol. II (Stuttgart: J. Scheible, 1839), p. 119. See Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 81–88. Still another fictive fisher-girl on Mörike’s reading list was the principal character Dortchen in Goethe’s Singspiel libretto Die Fischerin, who begins the drama by singing “Der Erlkönig,” possibly written before the Singspiel. That she does so in part to alert the audience to the dangers of imagination run amuck (a grand imagination warning playgoers against what imagination can conjure up) gradually becomes clear in the course of the drama, which tells a lighter, brighter tale of such dangers. It is a remarkable maneuver by which Goethe gives his spirited, likable fisher-girl a song as steeped in perverted sexuality (homosexual child seduction, rape, and death) as this one and places it at the beginning of the action. See Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, vol. VI: Die Weimarer Dramen, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1954), pp. 895–915. See Heinz Schlaffer, Musa iocosa: Gattungspoetik und Gattungsgeschichte der erotischen Dichtung in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971); see also Klaus Budzinski and Hans Reinhard Schatter, eds., Liederliche Lieder. Erotische Volkslieder aus fünf Jahrhunderten (Munich, Bern, and Vienna: Scherz, 1967). Goethe, Gedichte, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981), epigram no. 42, pp. 183–84. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. I: The Education of the Senses (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 370. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, ed. Dein Leib ist mein Gedicht: Deutsche erotische Lyrik aus fünf Jahrhunderten (Bern: Rütten & Loening in der Scherz-Gruppe, 1970), p. 150. Ibid., p. 160. Salomo Jakob Wolf, Beweiss dass das Walzen eine Hauptquelle der Schwäche des Körpers und des Geistes unserer Generation sey: Deutschlands Söhnen und Töchtern angelegentlichst empfohlen, 2nd edn. (Halle: Johann Christian Hendell, 1799). Auguste Louis Charles, comte de La Garde-Chambonas, Anecdotal Recollections of the Congress of Vienna, trans. Albert Vandam (London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1902), p. 40, wrote of the balls as follows: “After the departure of the sovereigns, the bands struck up a series of waltz tunes, and immediately an electric current seemed to run through the immense gathering. Germany is the country that gave birth to the waltz; it is there, and above all in Vienna that, thanks to the musical ear of the inhabitants, dance has acquired all of the charm inherent in it. It is there that one ought to watch the apparently whirl-like course, though in reality regulated by the beat of the music, in which the man sustains and carries away his companion, while she yields to the spell with a vague expression of happiness enhancing her beauty. It is difficult to conceive elsewhere the fascination of the waltz. As soon as its strains rise into the

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Notes to pages 112–27

19 20

21 22

23

24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37

38

air, the features relax, the eyes become animated, and a thrill of delight runs through the company.” See Daniel Heartz, “Donna Elvira and the Great Sextet” in Mozart’s Operas (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 207–16. There is another instance of musico-sexual climax in “Wenn du mich mit den Augen streifst und lachst” from the Italienisches Liederbuch (no. 38). Wolf creates a vocal line as one protagonist (the speaker of the poem) and the piano as a wordless other personage (the beloved, who is the person being addressed in the poem), their lines interlacing in a palpable chromatic ecstasy. They reach climax at two different points – the singer on the high G in the middle of m. 15 at the word “aus[brechen]” and the piano at the fortissimo on the downbeat of m. 16 – before cadencing together at m. 17. Mörike, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, Vierte vermehrte Auflage. Mit einer Photographie des Verfassers (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1867, pp. 12–13. See Johann Glock, Die Symbolik der Bienen und ihrer Produkte in Sage, Dichtung, Kultus, Kunst und Bräuchen der Völker. Eine kulturgeschichtliche Schilderung des Bienenvolkes auf ästhetischer Grundlage (Heidelberg: Weiß’schen Universitäts-Buchhandlung Theodor Groos, [1897]). See Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. VIII, part 1: Übersetzungen, ed. Ulrich Hötzer (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1976), p. 446, and Mörike, Anakreon und die sogenannten Anakreontischen Lieder (Stuttgart: Krais & Hoffmann, 1864). Theokritos, Bion und Moschos, trans. Johann Heinrich Voss (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1808), XIX, “Der Honigdieb.” Mörike translated some of Theocritus’ poems for his Classische Blumenlese. Eine Auswahl von Hymnen, Oden, Liedern, Elegien, Idyllen, Gnomen und Epigrammen der Griechen und Römer (Stuttgart: Schweizerbart, 1840) and also for his Theokritos, Bion und Moschos. Deutsch im Versmaße der Urschrift von Dr. E. Mörike und F. Notter (Stuttgart: Hoffmann, 1855), but neither collection includes this poem. Cranach’s depictions of Venus with Cupid stealing honey are in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, the New York Historical Society, and various private collections. See Max J. Friedländer and Jakob Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1978), plates 244, 245, 247, 248, 395, 396, 398, 400 and pp. 118–19, 149, and 201. Carl Philipp Conz, Gedichte, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Laupp 1818–19). Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Alte deutsche Lieder, ed. Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (Essen and Stuttgart: Phaidon Verlag, 1986), pp. 557–60. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. II: Werke 1751–1753, ed. Jürgen Stenzel (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), pp. 613–14. Ibid., “Naturtrieb” on pp. 352–53 and “Die Rose” on pp. 159–60. See Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Selected Poems, ed. Christopher Middleton (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 75–76. Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, p. 156. Mörike’s bringing together of these two poets is historically inaccurate, since Sappho was born in the late seventh century BC while Erinna is believed to have lived in the fourth century BC. Erinna did, however, die at age nineteen. Des Knaben Wunderhorn, “Wechselgesang” on p. 447,“Frau Nachtigall” on p. 59. Ludwig Erk and Wilhelm Irmer, Die deutschen Volkslieder mit ihren Singweisen, vol. I (Berlin: Plahn’sche Buchhandlung, 1838), p. 57. Ludwig Erk, Deutscher Liederhort. Auswahl der vorzüglichern Deutschen Volkslieder aus der Vorzeit und der Gegenwart mit ihren eigenthümlichen Melodien (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1890), p. 247. Ibid., p. 667. Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, p. 21. “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” was almost as popular as “Rosenzeit! wie schnell vorbei” with composers; see Hans-Joachim Erwe, Musik nach Eduard Mörike, vol. II: Ein bibliographisches Verzeichnis (Hamburg: Karl Dieter Wagner, 1987), pp. 182–84. Was “Erlkönig” the source for this tonal design? The child’s repeated cries “Mein Vater, mein Vater!”also rise a semitone higher each time, while the bone-jarring tone cluster at the beginning

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39 40

41 42 43

44 45 46 47

48 49 50

51

52

of each cry seems a forebear of Wolf ’s “O weh! . . . o still!” in stanza 3 of “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag.” Schubert’s jolt upwards from D minor to repeated E Ü harmonies when the Erlking proclaims “Ich liebe dich” was possibly revised by Wolf as the directive “Flieg’ ab,” and the two songs even share the same G minor tonality. See Michael Niedermeier, Erotik in der Garten-Kunst: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Liebesgarten (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1995). See Emil Karl Blümml, Erotische Volkslieder aus Deutsch-Österreich, mit Singnoten (Vienna: privately printed, [1907]), p. 70; a Viennese dialect version appears in Blümml’s edition of Schamperlieder. Deutsche Volkslieder der 16.–19. Jahrhunderte. Mit Singweisen (Vienna: R. Ludwig, 1908), pp. 91–93. Cited in Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, “Erotisches Lied” in Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Lutz Röhrich, and Wolfgang Suppan, eds., Handbuch des Volksliedes, vol. I: Die Gattungen des Volksliedes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1973), p. 608. Johann Martin Miller, Siegwart, eine Klostergeschichte (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1971, facsimile of 1st edn., Leipzig: Weygand, 1776), pp. 1004–05. Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, Werke und Schriften, vol. I: Gedichte, Epen, Dramen (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1957), pp. 199–200. Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts und das Marmorbild: Zwei Novellen nebst einem Anhange von Liedern und Romanzen (Berlin: Bereinsbuchhandlung, 1826). According to Carel ter Haar, Joseph von Eichendorff. Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts. Text, Materialien, Kommentar (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1977), p. 166, Eichendorff associated the art of gardening with the rococo poetry of his day; see also Walter Rehm, “Prinz Rokoko im alten Garten. Eine Eichendorff-Studie” in Walter Rehm, Späte Studien (Bern and Munich, 1964), p. 122. Joseph von Eichendorff, Werke in einem Band, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995), pp. 758–59. Ibid., p. 762. Ibid., p. 765. See Martin Ulrich, “Eduard Mörike among Friends and ‘False Prophets’: Words, Tones, and Images in the Mozart Novella, the Poetry and the Lieder of E. F. Kauffmann and Hugo Wolf,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Chicago, 1992), pp. 190–97. Other settings of “Der Gärtner” include Robert Kahn, Gesänge und Lieder, op. 16, no. 1 (Leipzig, Leuckart), and Robert Emmerich, Sechs Gesänge, op. 41, no. 6 (Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel). See the pianist Graham Johnson’s program-booklet for the recording The Songs of Robert Schumann, vol. I, with Christine Schäfer, soprano (Hyperion CDJ33101, 1995), p. 25. Eric Sams noted the relationship of Mörike’s poem to Eichendorff’s novella and then criticized Wolf for failing to register the gardener’s “hopeless and humble” situation and instead composing music he likens to a “Fragonard canvas in white, gold and rose.” See Eric Sams, The Songs of Hugo Wolf, rev 2nd edn. (London: Eulenburg Books, 1983), pp. 92–93. Wolf mentioned knowing Schumann’s setting of “Das verlassene Mägdlein” and liking it; his setting, he said, just came to him (a notably disingenuous statement). He reported to Melanie Köchert on 12 October 1890 that the singer Eugen Gura thought Wolf ’s Harper songs to be “far better than Schumann’s and Schubert’s.” See Hugo Wolf, Letters to Melanie Köchert, ed. Franz Grasberger, trans. Louise McClelland Urban (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991), p. 19. See Paul Kluckhohn, Die Auffassung der Liebe in der Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts und in der deutschen Romantik, 3rd edn. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1966). 5 Doubters and believers: case-studies in the geistliche Lieder

1 Wilhelm Müller’s Blumenlese aus den Minnesingern (Berlin: Maurer, 1816) ends with fold-out music folios containing settings of Konrad der Junge’s “Liebes-Klage im Mai” (Love Lament in May) and der von Kürenberg’s “Klage des verlaßnen Fräuleins” (Lament of an Abandoned Maiden) composed by Theodor Gäde (1787–1829). 2 Anton Ritter von Spaun, Heinrich von Ofterdingen und das Nibelungenlied. Ein Versuch den Dichter und das Epos für Oesterreich zu vindiciren (Linz: Quirin Haslinger, 1840). At the end, Spaun sets

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Notes to pages 140–43

3

4

5

6

7

8 9

10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17

the first four strophes of the Nibelungenlied to nine different Austrian folk melodies – mostly dance tunes – with piano accompaniment. The forced wedding between folk dances and a darkly grim thirteenth-century masterpiece is an incongruity with a nationalistic purpose: Spaun was attempting to prove that the “Austrian Minnesinger Heinrich von Ofterdingen” (now believed to be purely fictitious) was the author of the epic. In a letter of 22 December 1890, Wolf wrote to Emil Kauffmann, saying “What you have written to me about ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Ganymed’ deeply delighted me. I am also of the opinion that Schubert did not succeed with the composition of these two poems and that these great poems had to await the post-Wagnerian era before they could be set to music in a truly Goethean spirit.” See Hugo Wolf, Briefe an Emil Kauffmann, ed. Edmund von Hellmer (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1903), p. 25. See Heinrich W. Schwab, “Beispiele zum Problem des ‘Religiösen’ in Liedersammlungen des 19. Jahrhunderts” in Triviale Zonen in der religiösen Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts, foreword by Walter Wiora (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1971), pp. 50–75. Storm, who first read Mörike’s 1838 anthology as a student in Kiel in the early 1840s and began writing to Mörike in 1850, visited the poet in late summer of 1855 and, twenty years later, shortly after Mörike’s death in 1875, recorded his memories of the occasion. See Theodor Storm, Theodor Storm – Eduard Mörike. Theodor Storm – Margarethe Mörike. Briefwechsel mit Storms “Meine Erinnerungen an Eduard Mörike”, ed. Hildburg and Werner Kohlschmidt (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1978), pp. 150–51. See Ilse Hafferberg, “Das Christliche in Mörikes Leben und Werk,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Munich, 1951); Isabella Rüttenauer, “Vom verborgenen Glauben in Eduard Mörikes Gedichten,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Würzburg, 1940); and Ernst Gerhard Rüsch, “Christliche Motive in der Dichtung Eduard Mörikes,” Theologische Zeitschrift 11 (1955): 206–23. See Friedhelm Groth, Die “Wiederbringung aller Dinge” im Württembergischen Pietismus: Theologiegeschichtliche Studien zum eschatologischen Heilsuniversalismus Württembergischer Pietisten des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984). Eduard Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XI: Briefe 1829–1832, ed. Hans-Ulrich Simon (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985), p. 188. See Ursula Mahlendorf, “Eduard Mörike’s ‘Mozart On The Way To Prague’: Stages and Outcomes of the Creative Experience” in Mörike’s Muses: Critical Essays on Eduard Mörike, ed. Jeffrey Adams (Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1990), pp. 95–111. The death of Mörike’s father was attributed by the family to overwork, and hence, Mahlendorf speculates, Mörike may have come to associate hard work, achievement, and emotional exertion with death. It seems apparent from his letters that theology is implicated in his conflicts because religious instructors took the place of a father who abjured instruction. Cited in Rudolf Krauß, Eduard Mörikes Leben und Schaffen nebst einer Auswahl seiner Briefe (Leipzig: Max Hesses Verlag, [1908]), p. 37. Mörike describes his siblings in kind terms, especially his beloved younger brother August, but is harsh on himself: “irate, willful, defiant, proud,” he writes severely. See Joachim Hahn and Hans Mayer, Das Evangelische Stift in Tübingen. Geschichte und Gegenwart – Zwischen Weltgeist und Frömmigkeit (Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss Verlag, 1985). In a photographic facsimile facing p. 137, one finds a critique of sermons by Mörike from 1848 and 1849 – after he had retired from the church. The sermons were judged “logical and suitable” (not exactly a ringing endorsement), while the delivery was “‘not simple enough and not without wrong assertions.” Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. X: Briefe 1811–1828, ed. Bernhard Zeller and Anneliese Hofmann (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), p. 167. See Mörike, Briefe 1829–1832, p. 11. Mörike, Briefe 1811–1828, p. 167. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 219. See Hans Peter Köpf, “Zwei theologische Aufsätze Eduard Mörikes,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 10 (1966): 103–29. The first essay was on the theme “Is a Christian allowed to swear?”, a subject which might have made Mörike himself swear.

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Notes to pages 143–46 18 Eduard Mörike, Werke und Briefe, vol. III: Maler Nolten, ed. Herbert Meyer (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1967), pp. 177–78. Nolten’s father is a pastor who is described in terms reminiscent of Mörike himself: shy, hypochondriac, good company on occasion, well-meaning, possessed by “an almost horrific laziness.” See ibid., p. 199. 19 Mörike, Briefe 1811–1828, p. 253. 20 Mörike, Briefe 1829–1832, pp. 16–17. 21 Ibid., p. 21. 22 In a gigantic letter to Mährlen from Pflummern on 7 May 1829, Mörike wrote that he would try to do his duties as a country vicar with a good will, but lamented, “Was mir aber für einen großartigen Zweck im Poëtischen so nöthig – ach! viel nöthiger als irgend einem Andern ist – das geht ja dort ganz verloren! – eine lebhafte Berührung mit Diesem oder Jenem, der ein gleiches Bestreben oder wenigstens Liebe zu dem Meinigen und Liebe genug für mich hätte, um mich nicht einschlafen zu lassen.” See ibid., p. 32. In a postscript, he rejoices in the thought that he has not preached a sermon in two weeks (p. 34). 23 Mörike, Briefe 1811–1828, pp. 147–48. 24 Mörike, Briefe 1829–1832, p. 71. 25 Ibid., p. 80. 26 Ibid., p. 82. 27 Albert Knapp’s Christliche Gedichte, vol. II, 2nd edn. (Basel: Neukirch, 1835), pp. 30–31, and Mörike, Briefe 1829–1832, pp. 82–84. 28 Mörike, Briefe 1829–1830, p. 122. 29 See ibid., pp. 180–81. 30 Mörike preached his first sermon on 15 April 1824 – in the midst of the Maria Meyer crisis – in Bernhausen, where his uncle Christoph Friedrich Neuffer was pastor. In her diary for 17 April 1824, Luise Mörike wrote of her gratitude to God that Eduard was following this path in life and her assessment of the sermon: “a novice’s work . . . but from the heart.” 31 Mörike, Briefe 1829–1832, pp. 29–30. Earlier, in mid-September 1827, he wrote his mother to say, “I see each sermon-day approach with the greatest feelings of pain. My good pastor . . . told me that already by Wednesday, each Sunday appeared before him like a ghost.” See Mörike, Briefe 1811–1828, p. 180. 32 See ibid., pp. 284–85. 33 Eduard Mörike, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike. Vierte vermehrte Auflage. Mit einer Photographie des Verfassers (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1867), p. 419. In place of a title, Mörike substitutes the offending diacritical mark “fleshed-out” in the shape of a ghost with a fiendishly smiling, laurel-wreathcrowned head. The clarification of Dettinger’s identity as “Primus der Classe” is given, apropos this academic reminiscence, in the form of a footnote. The larger pen-and-ink drawing of the scene is reproduced as Plate LXVII in Renate von Heydebrand, “Eduard Mörikes Gedichte zu Bildern und Zeichnungen” in Bildende Kunst und Literatur: Beiträge zum Problem ihrer Wechselbeziehungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970). See also Rudolf Krauß, Eduard Mörike als Gelegenheitsdichter. Aus seinem alltäglichen Leben (Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1895), p. 172, where one finds a reproduction of two sketches which Krauß labels as “Mörike’s reminiscences of his Hebrew instruction”: a variation of the Hebrew nightmare and a sketch of a jester with fool’s-cap and bells dancing atop a thistle and encircled by an inscription in Hebrew. On either side of the jester is an inscription which says “‒” (Oblivion ⫽Health). 34 David Friedrich Strauß, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 2 vols. (Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, 1835–36). 35 Steudel was the author of an anti-Strauß treatise with the jawbreaking title Vorläufig zu beherzigen bei Würdigung der Frage über die historische oder mythische Grundlage des Lebens Jesu: wie canonischen Evangelien dieses darstellen, vorgehalten aus dem Bewusstseyn eines Glaubigen, der den supranaturalisten beigezählt wird zur Beruhigung der Gemüther (Tübingen: Ludwig Friedrich Fues, 1835). Jonathan Friedrich Bahnmeier (1774–1841) was a Tübingen theology professor and author of the Feier des dritten Saecular-Festes der Reformation auf der Universität Tübingen (Tübingen: L. F. Fues, 1818), while works by the philosopher Adam Karl August Eschenmayer

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Notes to pages 147–50

36

37

38 39 40

41

42

43 44

45 46 47

(1768–1852) include the Religionsphilosophie, 3 vols. (Tübingen: H. Laupp, 1818–24), Psychologie in drei Theilen als empirische, reine, und angewandte zum Gebrauch seiner Zuhörer (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1817), and the journal Archiv für den thierischen Magnetismus (Altenburg: F. A. Brockhaus, 1817–24). See Bernhard Zeller, Walter Scheffler, Hans-Ulrich Simon, et al., eds., Eduard Mörike 1804–1875–1975. Gedenkausstellung zum 100. Todestag im SchillerNationalmuseum Marbach am Neckar. Texte und Dokumente, 2nd edn. (Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1990), p. 87. Mörike knew the combatants personally, as he had taken courses with Eschenmaier and Steudel while at the Stift. Political officials as well as theologians took up cudgels against Strauß’s anti-supernaturalism, his assertions that no biblical history can be accepted as valid without testing by historical criteria which Christology largely fails. The Prussian government official Ludwig von Gerlach sent an urgent Christmas Day plea to the theologian Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg to challenge the dangerous effect of Das Leben Jesu on all German institutions, not just the church. See Marilyn Chapin Massey, Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of The Life of Jesus in German Politics (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p. 11; David Friedrich Strauss, In Defense of my Life of Jesus against the Hegelians, trans. and ed. Marilyn Chapin Massey (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1983); and Edwina G. Lawler, David Friedrich Strauss and His Critics: The Life of Jesus Debate in Early Nineteenth-Century German Journals (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986). See Mörike, Wispeliaden: Sommersprossen von Liebmund Maria Wispel, in Eduard Mörike, Werke, ed. Hannsludwig Geiger (Wiesbaden: Emil Vollmer Verlag, n.d.), p. 776. The Wispeliaden were first published in Eduard Mörike’s Werke, ed. Karl Fischer, vol. II (Munich: G. D. W. Callway, 1908), pp. 209–23 (the edition is riddled with flaws). A “Wispel” is an agricultural measurement of corn, with one “Wispel” approximating twenty-four bushels. See also Walther Eggert Windegg, Liebmund Maria Wispel und seine Gesellen. Des Dichters Wispeliaden unter Abbildung von Handschriften und Zeichnung (Stuttgart: Strecker und Schröder, 1919). See Karl Walter, “Ungedruckte Briefe Mörikes an David Friedrich Strauß,” Das literarische Echo: Halbmonatsschrift für Literaturfreunde 24/10 (15 February 1922): 594–95. Mörike, Briefe 1811–1828, p. 84. One thinks of Strauß telling his first congregation of farmers in the tiny village of KleinIngersheim, farmers who had just lost their crop of grapes, that “it is better to perish from lack of earthly bread than suffer from a lack of heavenly sustenance – the word of God! Better to go without the fruit of our vineyards than the spiritual drink from the Rock which is Christ!” See Theobald Ziegler, David Friedrich Strauß (Strasbourg: K. J. Trübner, 1908), pp. 68–69. See Walther Biener, Martin Luther und die Juden (Frankfurt: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1982). In the second part of his 1837 poem “Erzengel Michaels Feder” (Archangel Michael’s Feather), Mörike tells of the miraculous healing and conversion of the deaf-mute Jewish girl Rahel; although her wealthy merchant father Aaron and her mother are depicted as generous people and their daughter as beautiful and good, Jews were nonetheless considered “incomplete” until converted. See Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, pp. 335–46. “[Auf einen Cleversulzbacher Pfarrvikar]” is not included in the Gedichte of 1867 and was first published in Mörike, Werke, ed. Harry Maync, vol. II (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, [1909]), p. 300. The actual Cleversulzbach vicar was probably a man named Schleich who took over for Mörike during a stay in Stuttgart in late 1838 and whom Mörike describes in a letter to his mother and sister on 13 December 1838 as “a very good man, gifted and knowledgeable, with a solid religious foundation.” Mörike, Werke, ed. Geiger, p. 214. The inception of the poem is unknown, but it was first published in Gedichte von Eduard Mörike (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1838), p. 226. Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, p. 424. Mörike first sent the poem to Hartlaub as a Müsterkärtchen in 1837 and then published it in company with “Pastor an seine Zuhörer” in the 1838 anthology, p. 226. Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, p. 425. Ibid., p. 309. Körner was the poet of the patriotic anthology Leier und Schwert (Lyre and Sword), published in

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Notes to pages 150–54

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59

60

61 62 63 64

65 66

1814 by his grieving father after his twenty-one-year-old son’s death during the War of Liberation in August 1813. See James Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 7–48. Mörike, Werke, ed. Geiger, p. 775. Visitors to present-day Ludwigsburg can still see the Reformed church and the Catholic church confronting one another from opposite sides of the town’s market square. See Hans Janssen, “Mörikes Verhältnis zum Katholizismus,” Ludwigsburger Geschichtsblätter 39 (1986): 181–84. The priest of the little poem “[Auf einen fanatischen Priester]” reproached Mörike for not taking his hat off as a funeral went by. See Mörike, Werke, ed. Geiger, both poems on p. 281. Karl Steiff and Gebhard Mehring, Geschichtliche Lieder und Sprüche Württembergs (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1912), pp. 380–84. Mörike in 1832 wrote a sketch of “small, Catholic, poetic traces from life in Scheer,” compounded of such Romantic elements as an old castle, iron tracery on the windows, burning incense tapers, syringa blossoms on the organ, and the butterflies emblematic of souls pinned like specimens on display all around the burning candles. The fantasy culminates with the church in ruins, while one of the characters goes on a moonlit walk in the churchyard with his sweetheart, an erotic incident limned in Latin. There is a hint of hostility in the depiction of the Catholic Church as a butterfly-collector, affixing in place the souls it has amassed in an ornamental display to adorn a cathedral, and yet, in the “Bruchstücke eines Romans,” the Lutheran protagonist falls in love with the Viennese Countess Helene, a “Katholikin.” See Mörike, Werke, ed. Geiger, pp. 1117–18. Eduard Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XII: Briefe 1833–1838, ed. Hans-Ulrich Simon (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta), letter of 19 June 1837, pp. 98–99. Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XIV: Briefe 1842–1845, ed. Albrecht Bergold and Bernhard Zeller (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1994), p. 91. Ibid., pp. 109–11. Storm, Briefwechsel mit Storms “Meine Erinnerungen an Eduard Mörike”, p. 38. “Der alte Turmhahn” was begun in June 1840 as “Aus Gelegenheit der Kirchthurm-Renovation im Juni 1840” and was augmented in 1845 but not completed until 1852. Did Mörike know Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s poem “Des alten Pfarrers Woche” from her Eppishausen poems of 1835–36? See Friedrich Sengle, Kleine Beiträge zur Droste-Forschung 3 (1974–75): 9–24, for a comparison of the two poems. Hans-Joachim Erwe, Musik nach Eduard Mörike, vol. II: Ein bibliographisches Verzeichnis (Hamburg: Karl Dieter Wagner, 1987), pp. 188–90. Hugo Kaun (op. 98, no. 1), Hugo Distler (three settings, op. 5, no. 50, and op. 19, nos. 31 and 33), Othmar Schoeck (op. 62, no. 33), and Felix von Weingartner (op. 41, no. 2) are also among the better-known composers who set this text to music. Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, p. 237. See Peter Härtling, “Der Pfarrer Mörike” in Theologie und Literatur: Zum Stand des Dialogs, ed. Walter Jens, Hans Küng, and Karl-Josef Kuschel (Munich: Kindler Verlag, 1986), pp. 17–23. See Erwe, Musik nach Eduard Mörike, vol. II, pp. 188–90. The Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach has in its possession Clara Mörike’s copy of the Neue Rothenburgische Seelen-Harfe zum Preis des Dreyeinigen GOTTES, zu Erweckung der Andacht, Förderung der Erkänntniß, Glauben, Heiligung, etc. (Rothenburg: Georg Christian Holl, 1767), with the first stanza of “Gebet” on a fly-leaf and Margarethe Mörike’s inscription of another verse beginning “Ich ruf zu Dir” immediately following. Bertha Bettenmayer’s Stammbuch, with an autograph copy of “Gebet,” stanza 1, from October 1862 is also in the DLA. However, there is a copy of the complete poem in a mother-of-pearl miniature album begun on 15 March 1868 for Camilla Paulus; the copy of “Gebet” is signed and dated “Nürtingen, d. 21. April 1871.” Zeller, Scheffler, Simon, et al., Gedenkausstellung, pp. 96–97. Luther’s principal treatise on the subject of free will is De servo arbitrio (Wittenberg: Hans Lufft, [1525]). See Martin Luther on the Bondage of the Will: A New Translation of De servo arbitrio (1525),

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Notes to pages 154–63

67 68 69 70 71

72

73

74 75

76 77 78

79

trans. James Innell Packer and Olaf Raymond Johnston (London: J. Clarke, 1957); Ferdinand Kattenbusch, Luthers Lehre vom unfreien Willen und von der Prädestination nach ihren Entstehungsgründen untersucht (Göttingen, 1875); Lennart Pinomaa, Der Zorn Gottes in der Theologie Luthers (Helsinki: Druckerei A. G. der Finnischen Literaturgesellschaft, 1938); and Fredrik Brosché, Luther on Predestination: The Antinomy and the Unity Between Love and Wrath in Luther’s Concept of God (Stockholm: Liber Tryck, 1977). Mörike, Maler Nolten, p. 386. See Hans-Henrik Krummacher, “Chronologie und Textgeschichte von Mörikes Gedichten,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 6 (1962): 261–62. See Gedichte von Eduard Mörike. Zweite, vermehrte Auflage (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1848), p. 187. Mörike, Gedichte of 1867, p. 237. See Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Herrn Professor [Christian Furchtegott] Gellerts geistliche Oden und Lieder, 3rd edn. (Berlin: G. L. Winter, 1764), also Zwölf geistliche Oden und Lieder als ein Anhang zu Gellerts Geistlichen Oden und Liedern (Berlin: Winter, 1764). These songs have been reprinted in facsimile (Hildesheim and New York: G. Olms Verlag, 1973) and in modern editions, including Christian Eisert, ed. (Neuhausen-Stuttgart: Hanssler-Verlag, 1988). C. P. E. Bach also composed two volumes of Herrn Christoph Christian Sturms Geistliche Gesänge mit Melodien zum Singen bey dem Claviere (Hamburg: Johann Heinrich Herold, 1780–81). See Peter Cornelius, Musikalische Werke, ed. Max Hasse, vol. I: Einstimmige Lieder und Gesänge mit Pianofortebegleitung (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1905, reprinted Westmead, England: Gregg International Publishers Limited, 1971), pp. 34–60. Cornelius based each of his nine songs in part on a plainsong incipit, with the German texts consisting of elaborations by Cornelius himself on each segment of the prayer. “The popular Gebet,” Frank Walker writes, “begins rather feebly, but improves towards the end, with a soaring cantilena like an angelic violin solo.” He was right, but without understanding what purpose the “feebleness,” or rather, the apt imitation of church music, served or what the “improvement” in the second half signified. See Walker, Hugo Wolf: A Biography (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1968), p. 22. John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 34. Martin Karl Ulrich, “Eduard Mörike among Friends and ‘False Prophets’: Words, Tones, and Images in the Mozart Novella, the Poetry, and the Lieder of E. F. Kauffmann and Hugo Wolf,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Chicago, 1992). The passage on “Auf ein altes Bild” is found on pp. 121–26. Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit, p. 3. See Hubert Unverricht, ed., Der Caecilianismus: Anfänge, Grundlagen, Wirkungen. Internationales Symposium zur Kirchenmusik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1988). When in m. 10, Wolf emphasizes the first syllable of “Sün-[delos]” by means of an appoggiatura on the downbeat, with the final syllable “-los” given relatively short shrift, he emphasizes the poet’s sense of sinfulness. One notes Mörike’s allegorical designation of the Christ-child as “the Child Sinless,” with the adjective “Sündelos” capitalized – a detail revelatory of the poet’s preoccupation with sin. See Rainer Graefe, “Baum, Wald, Kirche” in Bernd Weyergraf, ed., Waldungen: Die Deutschen und ihr Wald (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1987), pp. 86–94.

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Adams, Jeffrey, ed. Mörike’s Muses: Critical Essays on Eduard Mörike. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1990. Arnold, Heinz Ludwig, ed. Dein Leib ist mein Gedicht: Deutsche erotische Lyrik aus fünf Jahrhunderten. Bern: Rütten & Loening in der Scherz-Gruppe, 1970. Bahr, Hermann. Buch der Jugend. Vienna: K. Heller, 1908. Batka, Richard. “Hugo Wolfs Mörike-Lieder,” Der Kunstwart 12/6 (1898–99): 195–98. Bauer, Ludwig Amandus. Briefe an Eduard Mörike, ed. Bernhard Zeller and Hans-Ulrich Simon. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1976. Baum, Günther. “Zur Vor- und Enstehungsgeschichte des Mörike-Liederbuches von Hugo Wolf,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 132 (December 1971): 648–49. Beck, Adolf. “Mörikes Verhältnis zu Hölderlin. Bezauberung und Grenze des Verstehens,” Schwäbische Heimat 26 (1975): 370–91. “Peregrina. Zur Berichtigung und Ergänzung des Buches von Hildegard Emmel: Mörikes Peregrinadichtung und ihre Beziehung zum Noltenroman,” Euphorion 47 (1953): 194–217. Reprinted as “Eduard Mörikes Peregrina” in Beck, Forschung und Deutung, pp. 311–45. Frankfurt am Main, 1966. Behrendt, Marianne. “Die Figur der Elisabeth in Eduard Mörikes Roman ‘Maler Nolten’” in Romantik und Moderne. Neue Beiträge aus Forschung und Lehre. Festschrift für Helmut Motekat, ed. Erich Huber-Thoma and Ghemela Adler, pp. 55–75. Frankfurt am Main, Bern, and New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Beizer, Janet. Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. Berend, Eduard. “Mörike auf Tiecks Spuren,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 12 (1968): 315–17. Bergold, Albrech, Jutta Salchow, and Walter Scheffler, eds. Kerner–Uhland–Mörike. Ständige Ausstellung des Schiller-Nationalmuseums und des Deutschen Literaturarchivs Marbach am Neckar, 3rd edn. Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1980. Böschenstein, Bernhard. “Mörikes Gedicht ‘Auf eine Christblume,’” Euphorion 56 (1962): 345–64. “Zum Verhältnis von Dichtung und Musik in Hugo Wolfs Mörikeliedern,” Wirkendes Wort 19 (May–June 1969): 175–93. Borchmeyer, Dieter. Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Boylan, Paul Charles. “The Lieder of Hugo Wolf: Zenith of the German Art Song.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1968.

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Select bibliography Bruch, Herbert. Faszination und Abwehr. Historisch-psychologische Studien zu Eduard Mörikes Roman “Maler Nolten.” Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1992. Busse, Eckart. Die Eichendorff-Rezeption im Kunstlied: Versuch einer Typologie anhand von Kompositionen Schumanns, Wolfs und Pfitzners. Würzburg: Eichendorff Gesellschaft, 1975. Challier, Ernst. Grosser Lieder-Katalog: Ein alphabetisch geordnetes Verzeichniss sämmtlicher einstimmiger Lieder. Berlin: Published by the author, 1885. Corrodi, Paul. Das Urbild von Mörikes Peregrina. Kirchheim an der Teck: Jürgen Schweier, 1976. Dahlhaus, Carl. “Ein Dilemma der Verskomposition,” Melos/Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 3 (January 1977): 15–18. Decsey, Ernst. Hugo Wolf, 4 vols. Berlin and Leipzig: Schuster & Loeffler, 1903–06. Eckstein, Friedrich. Alte unnennbare Tage: Erinnerungen aus siebzig Lehr- und Wanderjahren. Vienna: Herbert Reichner, 1936. Egger, Rita. Die Deklamationsrhythmik Hugo Wolfs in historischer Sicht. Tutzing: Hans Schneider Verlag, 1963. Emmel, Hildegard. Mörikes Peregrinadichtung und ihre Beziehung zum Noltenroman. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1952. Ender, Evelyne. Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Eppstein, Hans. “Zum Problem von Hugo Wolfs Liedästhetik,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 46 (1989): 70–85. “Zum Schaffensprozeß bei Hugo Wolf,” Die Musikforschung 37 (1984): 4–20. Erwe, Hans-Joachim. Musik nach Eduard Mörike, 2 vols. Hamburg: Karl Dieter Wagner, 1987. Etter, Hans Jürg. Eduard Mörikes Peregrinadichtung. Zurich: Juris Druck, 1985. Feise, Ernst. “Eduard Mörikes ‘Denk’ es, o Seele,’” Modern Language Notes 68 (1953): 344–47. Funk-Schoellkopf, Beatrice. Eduard Mörikes “Der letzte König von Orplid”. Zurich: Juris, 1980. Geyer, Hans-Herwig. Hugo Wolfs Mörike-Vertonungen. Vermannigfaltigung in lyrischer Konzentration. Kassel and Basel: Bärenreiter Verlag, 1991. Gilman, Sander L., Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter. Hysteria Beyond Freud. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993. Glauert, Amanda. Hugo Wolf and the Wagnerian Inheritance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Gockel, Heinz. “Venus-Libitina: Mythologische Anmerkungen zu Mörikes Peregrina-Zyklus,” Wirkendes Wort 24/1 (January–February 1974): 46–56. Goes, Albrecht. Mit Mörike und Mozart. Studien aus fünfzig Jahren. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1988. Graevenitz, Gerhart von. Eduard Mörike: Die Kunst der Sünde. Zur Geschichte des literarischen Individuums. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1978. Grasberger, Franz. “Johannes Brahms und Hugo Wolf,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 15 (February 1960): 67–69. Groth, Friedhelm. Die “Wiederbringung aller Dinge” im Württembergischen Pietismus: Theologiegeschichtliche Studien zum eschatologischen Heilsuniversalismus Württembergischer Pietisten des 18. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984. Grunsky, Karl. Hugo Wolf. Leipzig: Kistner & Siegel, 1928. Gülke, Peter. “Sterb’ ich, so hüllt in Blumen meine Glieder . . .: zu einem Lied von Hugo Wolf,” Musica 33 (March–April 1979): 132–40. Härtling, Peter. Du bist Orplid, mein Land! Texte von Eduard Mörike, Ludwig Bauer, u.a. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1982.

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Select bibliography “Der Pfarrer Mörike” in Theologie und Literatur: Zum Stand des Dialogs, ed. Walter Jens, Hans Küng, and Karl-Josef Kuschel, pp. 17–23. Munich: Kindler Verlag, 1986. Hafferberg, Ilse. “Das Christliche in Mörikes Leben und Werk.” Ph.D. diss., University of Munich, 1951. Hatch, Christopher. “Tradition and Creation: Hugo Wolf ’s ‘Fussreise,’” College Music Symposium 28 (1988): 70–84. Heckel, Karl. Hugo Wolf in seinem Verhältnis zu Richard Wagner. Munich and Leipzig: Georg Müller, 1905. Hellmer, Edmund von. Hugo Wolf: Erlebtes und Erlauschtes. Vienna and Leipzig: Wiener Literarische Anstalt, 1921. Henel, Heinrich. “Mörikes ‘Denk’ es, o Seele’: Ein Volkslied?” in Festschrift Richard Alewyn, ed. Benno von Wiese and H. Singer, pp. 379–83. Cologne and Graz, 1967. Heydebrand, Renate von. “Eduard Mörikes Gedichte zu Bildern und Zeichnungen” in Bildende Kunst und Literatur: Beiträge zum Problem ihrer Wechselbeziehungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch, pp. 121–55 Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970. Eduard Mörikes Gedichtwerk. Beschreibung und Deutung der Formenvielfalt und ihrer Entwicklung. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1972. Hollander, John. The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Hull, Isabel V. Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. Immerwahr, Raymond. “The Loves of Maler Nolten,” Rice University Studies 57/4 (Fall 1971): 73–87. Jancik. Hans. “Die Hugo Wolf-Autographen in der Musiksammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek” in Beiträge zur Dokumentation: Franz Grasberger zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Günter Brosche. Tutzing: Hans Schneider Verlag, 1975. Janssen, Hans. “Mörikes Verhältnis zum Katholizismus,” Ludwigsburger Geschichtsblätter 39 (1986): 181–84. Jarosch, Wilhelm. “Die Harmonik in den Liedern Hugo Wolfs.” Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 1927. Jennings, Lee B. “Geister und Germanisten: Literarisch-parapsychologische Betrachtungen zum Fall Kerner–Mörike” in Psi und Psyche. Neue Forschungen zur Parapsychologie, ed. Eberhard Bauer, pp. 95–110. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1974. Kalbeck, Max. Johannes Brahms I: Erster Halbband, 1833–1856, 3rd edn. Berlin: Deutsche BrahmsGesellschaft, 1912. Kanth, Gustav. “Hugo Wolf als Kritiker Brahms,” Die Musik 2/3 (1911): 148–60. Kluckhohn, Paul. Die Auffassung der Liebe in der Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts und in der deutschen Romantik, 3rd edn. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1966. Kneisel, Jessie Hoskam. “Mörike and Music.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1949. Köhler, Reinhold. “Mörikes Gedicht ‘An den Schlaf ’ und seine Vorläufer” in Köhler, Kleine Schriften zur neueren Litteraturgeschichte, Völkerkunde und Wortforschung, vol. III, ed. Johannes Bolte, pp. 203–12. Weimar: E. Felber, 1908. Koelink, J. P. A. “De achtergrond van Hugo Wolfs Peregrina-liederen,” Mens en melodie 7 (September 1952): 274–77. Kohlschmidt, Werner. “Wehmut, Erinnerung, Sehnsucht in Mörikes Gedichte. Ein Beitrag zur Wirkungsgeschichte des romantischen Zeitbewußtseins,” Wirkendes Wort 1/4 (1950–51): 229–38.

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Select bibliography Köpf, Hans Peter. “Zwei theologische Aufsätze Eduard Mörikes,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 10 (1966): 103–29. Kolbe, Jürgen. “Tragik und Bildung: Eduard Mörikes Roman ‘Maler Nolten’” in Kolbe, Goethes “Wahlverwandtschaften” und der Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts, pp. 56–85. Stuttgart and Berlin: W. Kohlhammer, 1968. Koschlig, Manfred. “Mörikes barocker Grundton und seine verborgenen Quellen: Studien zur Geschichtlichkeit des Dichters,” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 34–35 (1975–76): 231–323. “Unbekannte Bildnisse Mörikes und seiner Freunde,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 10 (1966): 130–59. Kramer, Lawrence. “Decadence and Desire: The Wilhelm Meister Songs of Wolf and Schubert,” 19th Century Music 10/3 (Spring 1987): 29–42. Reprinted in Music at the Turn of Century: A 19th-Century Music Reader, ed. Joseph Kerman, pp. 115–28. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. “Hugo Wolf: Subjectivity in the Fin-de-Siècle Lied” in German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Rufus Hallmark, pp. 186–217. New York: Schirmer Books, 1996. Krauß, Rudolf. Eduard Mörike als Gelegenheitsdichter: Aus seinem alltäglichen Leben. Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1895. Eduard Mörikes Leben und Schaffen nebst einer Auswahl seiner Briefe. Leipzig: Max Hesses Verlag, 1908. “Eduard Mörike und seine Komponisten,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 25 (1904): 467–79. Kravitt, Edward. “The Ballad as Conceived by Germanic Composers of the Late Romantic Period,” Studies in Romanticism 12/2 (Spring 1973): 499–515. The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Krummacher, Hans-Henrik. “Chronologie und Textgeschichte von Mörikes Gedichten,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 6 (1962): 261–62. Kunisch, Hermann. “Eduard Mörike: Peregrina” in Wege zum Gedicht, ed. Rupert Hirschenauer and Albrecht Weber, pp. 237–56. Munich and Zurich: Schnell & Steiner, 1956. Lahnstein, Peter. Eduard Mörike: Leben und Milieu eines Dichters. Munich: Paul List Verlag, 1986. Lang, Wilhelm. “Rudolf Lohbauer,” Württembergische Vierteljahrshefte für Landesgeschichte 5 (1896): 149–88. Legge, Walter. “Hugo Wolf ’s Afterthoughts on His Mörike Lieder,” Music Review 1 (August 1941): 211–14. Liebrand, Claudia. “Identität und Authentizität in Mörikes Maler Nolten,” Aurora 51 (1991): 105–19. Märtens, Ilse. “Die Mythologie bei Mörike.” Ph.D. diss., University of Marburg, 1921. Mahlendorf, Ursula. “Eduard Mörike’s ‘Mozart On The Way To Prague’: Stages and Outcomes of the Creative Experience” in Mörike’s Muses: Critical Essays on Eduard Mörike, ed. Jeffrey Adams, pp. 95–111. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1990. Martin, Philip W. Mad Women in Romantic Writing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Matt, Peter von. Liebesverrat. Die Treulosen in der Literatur. Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1989. Mayer, Adolf. “Meine Erinnerungen an den Maler Christian Köster” in Neues Archiv für die Geschichte der Stadt Heidelberg und der Kurpfalz, vol. XIII, pp. 1–28. Heidelberg: Gustav Köster, 1928. Mayer, Gregor M. Mörikes Liebeslyrik. Eduard Mörike, der “aufgelegte SchweinIgel” mit schöner Seele. Reinheit und Obszönität im Spannungsfeld von sinnlicher und poetischer Erfüllung. Studien zur Entwicklung der Liebeskonzeptionen in Mörikes Lyrik von 1819 bis 1869 – mit dem Versuch einer

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Select bibliography literaturtheoretischen Fundierung von Liebe, Erotik und Sexualität. Kaufering: Gregor M. Mayer, 1989. Mayer, Hans. “Ein unvermuteter Zwischenfall. Eduard Mörikes ‘Auf einer Wanderung’” in Frankfurter Anthologie, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, pp. 55–58. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1976. McKinney, Timothy. “Harmony in the Songs of Hugo Wolf.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Texas, 1989. Meier, Ernst. Deutsche Sagen, Sitten und Gebräuche aus Schwaben. Stuttgart, 1852. Schwäbischer Volkslieder mit ausgewählten Melodien. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1855. Meyer, Herbert. “Mörikes Legende vom Alexisbrunnen,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 2 (1952): 225–36. Middleton, J. C. “Mörike’s Moonchild: A Reading of the Poem ‘Auf eine Christblume,’” Publications of the English Goethe Society, New Series 28 (1959): 109–36. Miller, Johann Martin. Gedichte. Ulm: Johann Konrad Wohler, 1783. Mörike, Eduard. Briefe, ed. Karl Fischer and Rudolf Krauß, 2 vols. Berlin: O. Elsner, 1903–04. Briefe an seine Braut Luise Rau, ed. Friedhelm Kemp. Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1965. Briefwechsel zwischen Eduard Mörike und Friedrich Theodor Vischer, ed. Robert Vischer. Munich: C. H. Bech, 1926. Briefwechsel zwischen Eduard Mörike und Moriz v. Schwind. Stuttgart: J. Hoffmann, 1914. Freundeslieb’ und Treu’. 250 Briefe Eduard Mörikes an Wilhelm Hartlaub, ed. Gotthilf Renz. Leipzig: Leopold Klotz, 1938. Gedichte von Eduard Mörike. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1838. Gedichte von Eduard Mörike. Zweite, vermehrte Auflage. Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1848. Gedichte von Eduard Mörike. Dritte, vermehrte Auflage. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1856. Gedichte von Eduard Mörike. Vierte vermehrte Auflage. Mit einer Photographie des Verfassers. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1867. Neue weltliche Lieder. Faksimile der Handschrift, ed. Hans-Henrik Krummacher. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1975. Werke und Briefe, vol. III: Maler Nolten, ed. Herbert Meyer. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1967. Werke und Briefe, vol. V: Maler Nolten. Lesarten und Erläuterungen, ed. Herbert Meyer. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1971. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. VIII, part 1: Übersetzungen, ed. Ulrich Hötzer. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1976. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. X: Briefe 1811–1828, ed. Bernhard Zeller and Anneliese Hofmann. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XI: Briefe 1829–1832, ed. Hans-Ulrich Simon. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XII: Briefe 1833–1838, ed. Hans-Ulrich Simon. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XIII: Briefe 1839–1841, ed. Hans-Ulrich Simon. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XIV: Briefe 1842–1845, ed. Albrecht Bergold and Bernhard Zeller. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1994. Mörike, Eduard, and Wilhelm Waiblinger. Eduard Mörike und Wilhelm Waiblinger: Eine poetische Jugend in Briefen, Tagebüchern und Gedichten, ed. Heinz Schlaffer. Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994. Müller-Blattau, Joseph. “Das Mozartbild Mörike’s und seines Freundeskreises,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 117 (1956): 325–29.

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Select bibliography Münch, Ernst. Erinnerungen, Lebensbilder und Studien aus den ersten sieben und dreißig Jahren eines teutschen Gelehrten, mit Rückblicken auf das öffentliche, politische, intellektuelle und sittliche Leben von 1815 bis 1835 in der Schweiz, in Teutschland und den Niederlanden. Carlsruhe: Chr. Fr. Müller’sche Hofbuchhandlung, 1836. Erinnerungen, Reisebilder, Phantasiegemälde und Fastenpredigten aus den Jahren 1828–1841, 2 vols. Stuttgart: J. F. Cast, 1841–42. Mundhenk, Alfred. “‘Der umgesattelte Feuerreiter.’ Eine Studie zu Mörikes Ballade und ihren beiden Fassungen,” Wirkendes Wort 5 (1955): 143–49. Newman, Ernest. Hugo Wolf. London: Methuen, 1907. Nibbrig, Christian L. Hart. Verlorene Unmittelbarkeit: Zeiterfahrung und Zeitgestaltung bei Eduard Mörike. Bonn: Bouvier, 1973. Nicolaisen, Carsten. “Coitus interruptus? ‘An die Geliebte’” in Nicolaisen, Rimets musikalske klapperslange, pp. 32–45. Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1975. Niedermeier, Michael. Erotik in der Garten-Kunst: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Liebesgarten. Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1995. Nordheim, Werner von. “Die Dingdichtung Eduard Mörikes. Erläutert am Beispiel des Gedichts ‘Auf eine Lampe,’” Euphorion 50 (1950): 71–85. “Die Einsamkeitserfahrung Eduard Mörikes und ihre Aussprache im dichterischen Werk.” Ph.D. diss., University of Hamburg, 1954. Notter, Friedrich. Eduard Mörike und andere Essays, ed. Walter Hagen. Marbach am Neckar: SchillerNationalmuseum, 1966. Oppel, Horst. Peregrina: Vom Wesen des Dichterischen. Mainz: Verlag Kirchheim & Co., 1947. Oppert, Kurt. “Das Dinggedicht. Eine Kunstform bei Mörike, Meyer und Rilke,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 4 (1926): 747–83. Ossenkop, C. David. Hugo Wolf: A Guide to Research. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988. Pongs, Hermann. “Eduard Mörike. ‘Die schlimme Greth und der Königssohn” in Pongs, Das Bild in der Dichtung, vol. III, pp. 126–30. Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1969. Poos, Heinrich. “Hugo Wolfs Klavierlied ‘An den Schlaf ’: Eine ikonographische Studie” in MusikKonzepte 75: Hugo Wolf, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Richn, pp. 3–36. Karlsruhe: Präzis-Druck, 1992. Prawer, Siegbert Salomon. “Mignons Genugtuung. Eine Studie über Mörikes ‘Maler Nolten’” in Deutsche Romane von Grimmelshausen bis Musil, ed. Jost Schillemeit, pp. 164–81. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1971. “Mörike’s Second Thoughts,” Modern Philology 57 (1959): 24–36. Mörike und seine Leser. Versuch einer Wirkungsgeschichte. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1960. Rath, Hans Wolfgang. “Mörikes musikalische Sendung. Mit ungedrucktem Material aus dem Nachlaß des Dichters und Wilhelm Hartlaubs,” Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde 10 (1918–19): 208–13. Rauchberg, Heinrich. “Neue Lieder und Gesänge. Gedichte von Mörike und Eichendorff componirt von Hugo Wolf,” Österreichisch-Ungarische Revue 8 (1889): 106–15. Reininghaus, Frieder. “Studie zur bürgerlichen Musiksprache. Mendelssohn’s ‘Lieder ohne Worte’ als historisches, ästhetisches und politisches Problem,” Die Musikforschung 28 (1975): 34–51. Reuchlein, Georg. Bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Psychiatrie und Literatur: Zur Entwicklung der Wahnsinnsthematik in der deutschen Literatur des späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1986. Rostand, Claude. Hugo Wolf: L’homme et son œuvre. Paris: Seghers, 1967; reprinted Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1982.

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Select bibliography Rüsch, Ernst Gerhard. “Christliche Motive in der Dichtung Eduard Mörikes,” Theologische Zeitschrift 11 (1955): 206–23. Rüttenauer, Isabella. “Vom verborgenen Glauben in Eduard Mörikes Gedichte.” Ph.D. diss., University of Würzburg, 1940. Saary, Margarete. Persönlichkeit und musikdramatische Kreativität Hugo Wolfs. Tutzing: Hans Schneider Verlag, 1984. Sammons, Jeffrey L. “Fate and Psychology: Another Look at Mörike’s Maler Nolten” in Lebendige Form: Festschrift for Heinrich E. K. Henel, ed. Ernst Schürer, pp. 211–27. Munich: Fink, 1970. Sams, Eric. “Hugo Wolf ” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 6th edn., ed. Stanley Sadie, vol. XX, pp. 475–502. London: Macmillan, 1980. The Songs of Hugo Wolf. London: Eulenburg Books, 1961; rev. enl. 2nd edn. 1983. Schalk, Joseph. “Neue Lieder, neues Leben” in Gesammelte Aufsätze über Hugo Wolf, Berlin: S. Fischer, 1898–99. Schlaffer, Heinz. Musa iocosa: Gattungspoetik und Gattungsgeschichte der erotischen Dichtung in Deutschland. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971. Schmalzriedt, Siegfried. “Hugo Wolfs Vertonung von Mörikes Gedicht ‘Karwoche,’” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 41/1 (1984): 42–53. Schneider, Ferdinand Joseph. “Das Religiöse in Millers ‘Siegwart’ und seine Quellen,” Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 64 (1939): 20–40. Schneider, Wilhelm. “Eduard Mörike. Gesang zu zweien in der Nacht” in Gedicht und Gedanke. Auslegungen deutscher Gedichte, ed. Heinz Otto Burger, pp. 244–53. Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1942. Schüpfer, Irene. “Es war, als könnte man gar nicht reden.” Die Kommunikation als Spiegel von Zeit- und Kulturgeschichte in Eduard Mörikes Maler Nolten. Frankfurt and Berlin: Peter Lang, 1996. Schur, Gustav. Erinnerungen an Hugo Wolf, nebst Hugo Wolfs Briefen an Gustav Schur, ed. Heinrich Werner. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1922. Schwab, Heinrich W. “Beispiele zum Problem des ‘Religiösen’ in Liedersammlungen des 19. Jahrhunderts” in Triviale Zonen in der religiösen Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts, foreword by Walter Wiora, pp. 50–75. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1971. Sengle, Friedrich. Biedermeierzeit. Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, 3 vols. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1971–80. Steglich, Rudolf. “Zum Kontrastproblem Johannes Brahms und Hugo Wolf ” in Kongreß-Bericht der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung Lüneburg 1950, ed. Hans Albrecht, Helmuth Osthoff, and Walter Wiora. Kassel and Basel: Bärenreiter, 1952. Stahlmann, Hans. “Das ‘Elfenlied’ von Eduard Mörike. Eine Gedichtbehandlung in der Unterstufe,” Wirkendes Wort 1/5 (1950–51): 280–82. Stein, Deborah. Hugo Wolf ’s Lieder and Extensions of Tonality. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985. Stein, Jack. “Poem and Music in Hugo Wolf ’s Mörike Songs,” The Musical Quarterly 53 (1967): 22–38. Poem and Music in the German Lied from Gluck to Hugo Wolf. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971. Steiner, Jacob. “Kunst und Zeit in Mörikes Maler Nolten” in Geschichte, Deutung, Kritik. Literaturwissenschaftliche Beiträge dargebracht zum 65. Geburtstag Werner Kohlschmidts, ed. Maria Bindschedler and Paul Zinsli, pp. 186–98. Bern: Francke Verlag. Stern, Joseph Peter. “Eduard Mörike: Recollection and Inwardness” in Idylls and Realities: Studies in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 76–96. Storm, Theodor. Theodor Storm – Eduard Mörike. Theodor Storm – Margarethe Mörike. Briefwechsel mit Storms “Meine Erinnerungen an Eduard Mörike”, ed. Hildburg and Werner Kohlschmidt. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1978.

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Select bibliography Strack, Friedrich. “Das religiöse Geheimnis der Natur. Zu Mörikes Gedicht Im Weinberg” in Gedichte und Interpretationen, vol. IV: Vom Biedermeier zum bürgerlichen Realismus, ed. Günter Häntzschel, pp. 94–107. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1983. Strauß, David Friedrich. “Nekrolog: Louis Hetsch,” Schwäbische Chronik 184 (4 August 1872): 3025–26. Strauss, Heinz. “Der Klosterroman von Millers Siegwart bis zu seiner künstlerischen Höhe bei E. T. A. Hoffmann. Ein Beitrag zur Literaturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Ph.D. diss., University of Munich, 1922. Suppan, Wolfgang. “Wolfiana in der ‘Sammlung Wamlek,’ Graz,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 15 (February 1960): 103–06. Tausche, Anton. Hugo Wolfs Mörikelieder in Dichtung, Musik und Vortrag. Vienna: Amandus, 1947. Thiele, Herbert. “An eine Äolsharfe. Zu dem Gedichte von Eduard Mörike,” Wirkendes Wort 8 (1957–58): 109–12. Thiessen, Karl. “Johannes Brahms und Hugo Wolf als Lieder-Komponisten. Eine vergleichende Studie,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27 (4 January 1906): 145–49. Thorau, Christian. “’In der Frühe’: Mörikes ‘Zeit’ in Hugo Wolfs Musik” in Musik-Konzepte 75: Hugo Wolf, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn. Karlsruhe: Präzis-Druck, 1992. Ulrich, Martin Karl. “Eduard Mörike among Friends and ‘False Prophets’: Words, Tones, and Images in the Mozart novella, the poetry, and the Lieder of E. F. Kauffmann and Hugo Wolf.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1992. Unger, Helga. “Zur Mörikes Gedicht ‘Im Weinberg.’” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 85 (1966): 240–50. Veith, Ilza. Hysteria: The History of a Disease. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1965. Vischer, Friedrich Theodor. “Gedichte von Mörike” in Kritische Gänge, ed. Robert Vischer, 6 vols., vol. II. Munich: Meyer & Jessen [1921–22]. Walker, Frank. Hugo Wolf: A Biography, 2nd edn. London: Dent, 1968; reprinted Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992. Walter, Karl. “Ungedruckte Briefe Mörikes an David Friedrich Strauß,” Das literarische Echo: Halbmonatsschrift für Literaturfreunde 24/10 (15 February 1922): 594–95. Werba, Erik. Hugo Wolf und seine Lieder. Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1984. Werner, Heinrich. Hugo Wolf in Maierling: Eine Idylle. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1913. Hugo Wolf in Perchtoldsdorf: Persönliche Erinnerungen, nebst den Briefen des Meisters an seine Freunde Dr. Michael Haberlandt, Rudolf von Larisch und andere. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1925. Willforth, Manfred. “’Peregrina II’ in der neuen Hugo-Wolf-Gesamtausgabe,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 126 (1965): 420–22. Windegg, Walther Eggert. Liebmund Maria Wispel und seine Gesellen. Des Dichters Wispeliaden unter Abbildung von Handschriften und Zeichnung. Stuttgart: Strecker und Schröder, 1919. Wiora, Walter. “Die Romantisierung alter Mollmelodik in Liedern von Schubert bis Wolf,” Deutsches Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft (1966): 5–16. Wittkowski, Wolfgang. “Mörike’s Mozart in Light of Eichendorff’s Categories” in Mörike’s Muses: Critical Essays on Eduard Mörike, ed. Jeffrey Adams, pp. 126–50. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1990. Wolf, Hugo. Briefe an Emil Kauffmann, ed. Edmund von Hellmer. Berlin: S. Fischer, 1903. Briefe an Frieda Zerny, ed. Ernst Hilmar and Walter Obermaier. Vienna: Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1978.

197

Select bibliography Briefe an Heinrich Potpeschnigg, ed. Heinz Nonveiller. Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1923. Briefe an Henriette Lang, nebst den Briefen an deren Gatten Prof. Joseph Freiherr von Schey, ed. Heinrich Werner. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1923. Briefe an Hugo Faisst, ed. Michael Haberlandt. Stuttgart and Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1904. Briefe an Melanie Köchert, ed. Franz Grasberger. Tutzing: Hans Schneider Verlag, 1964. English trans. Letters to Melanie Köchert, trans. Louise McClelland Urban. New York: Schirmer Books, 1991. Briefe an Oskar Grohe, ed. Heinrich Werner. Berlin: S. Fischer, 1905. Hugo Wolf: Eine Persönlichkeit in Briefen, ed. Edmund von Hellmer. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1912. Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hans Jancik and Leopold Spitzer. Vienna: Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1963–94. “Ungedruckte Briefe Hugo Wolfs an seine schwäbischen Freunde,” Süddeutsche Monatsheft 1/5 (1904): 397–406. Woodtli-Löffler, Susi. “‘Windebang.’ Die Bedeutung des Windes bei Eduard Mörike,” Trivium 3 (1945): 198–217. Youens, Susan. “‘Alles endet, was entstehet’: The Second of Hugo Wolf ’s Michelangelo-Lieder,” Studies in Music (University of Western Australia) 14 (1980): 87–103. “Drama in the Lied: Piano vs. Voice in Wolf ’s Serenades,” Studies in Music (University of Western Australia) 23 (1989): 61–87. Hugo Wolf: The Vocal Music. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992. “The Song Sketches of Hugo Wolf,” Current Musicology 44 (1990): 5–37. Zeller, Bernhard, Walter Scheffler, and Hans-Ulrich Simon, et al., eds. Eduard Mörike 1804–1875–1975. Gedenkausstellung zum 100. Todestag im Schiller-Nationalmuseum Marbach am Neckar. Texte und Dokumente, 2nd edn. Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1990. Zemp, Werner. “Gespräch über Mörike” in Das lyrische Werk/Aufsätze/Briefe, ed. Verena Haefeli, pp. 121–58. Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1967.

198

Index

Albani, Francesco, 161 Anacreon, 118, 183 Andreae, Johann Valentin, 150 Auber, Daniel François, 12 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 48–49, 177 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 156, 189 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 82, 94, 163 Bahnmeier, Johann Friedrich, 146–47, 186 Barth, Christian Gottlob, 181 Bauer, Ludwig, 27, 30, 31, 33–34, 40, 63, 143, 171, 175 Bayly, Thomas Haynes, 12, 172 Beck, Adolf, 39, 173, 174 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 11, 12, 136 Bengel, Johann Albrecht, 150 Beyer, Friedrich, 142 Brahms, Johannes, ix, 1, 62, 69–71, 73, 75, 160, 172 “Agnes,” 69–71 Ein deutsches Requiem, 172 “Maria ging aus wandern,” 69 “Von ewiger Liebe,” 53 49 Volkslieder, 69 Bruch, Max, 152 Bruchmann, Franz von, 162 Buchan, William, 178 Büschel, Johann Gabriel, 106–07, 108 “Erinnerung (An Henrietten),” 106–07 Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 63, 179 Theophron, 63 Väterlicher Rath für meine Tochter, 63–64, 179 Chopin, Frédéric, 160 Cimarosa, Domenico, 172 Il matrimonio segreto, 172 Conz, Carl Philipp, 119, 183 Cornelius, Peter, 156, 189 Vater unser: Neun geistliche Lieder, 156 Corrodi, Paul, 23, 27, 174, 176 Cranach the Elder, Lucas, 119, 183 Crane, Walter, 131 Debussy, Claude, 2 Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 119, 183 “Die Rose,” 119, 183 “Die Nachtigall,” 120

“Frau Nachtigall,” 120, 183 “Naturtrieb,” 119, 183 “Schadenfreude,” 119 “Wechselgesang,” 120, 183 Dettinger, Christian Friedrich, 146, 186 Distler, Hugo, 181, 188 Doré, Gustave, 12 Eckstein, Friedrich, 2, 3, 5 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 5, 41, 128, 135, 136, 138, 167, 184 Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, 128, 129–30, 131, 136, 184 “Der Gärtner,” 129 “Verschwiegene Liebe,” 5 Emmerich, Robert, 69, 184 Erk, Ludwig, 12, 172, 183 Erwe, Hans-Joachim, 152, 180, 183, 188 Eschenmayer, Adam Karl August, 147, 186 Faißt, Hugo, 6 Fischer, Hermann, 20, 173 Flad, Rudolph, 27, 31, 32, 147, 148, 153–54 folk songs, 120–21, 129 “Die Gärtnerei ist ja führwahr,” 129 “Lied einer Schnitterinn,” 179 “Waldvögelein,” 120–21 “Warnung,” 121 Fortunatus, Venantius, 80, 81, 180 “Pange lingua,” 80, 81 Franz, Robert, 13, 120, 171 “Lehre,” 120 Sechs Lieder von Heinrich Heine, 120 Freylinghausen, Johann Anastasius, 80, 180 Geistreiches Gesang-Buch, 80, 180 Fried, Jakob, 23 Freud, Sigmund, 65, 182 Gabrieli, Giovanni, 164 Gäde, Theodor, 184 Gay, Peter, 106, 182 Geibel, Emanuel, 172 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, viii, 2, 8, 14, 15, 18, 19, 24, 29, 45, 60, 61, 62, 68, 89, 99, 102, 103, 106, 108, 120, 140, 142, 145, 152, 169, 175, 178, 179, 182, 183

199

Index Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (cont.) “Den Originalen,” 180 “Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen,” 179 Die Fischerin, 182 Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 175 “Erlkönig,” 12, 182 “Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung,” 152 “Harzreise im Winter,” 179 “Meine Göttin,” 120 “Sehnsucht,” 102–03, 142 Torquato Tasso, 60 Venetian epigrams, 106 “Von Krüdener,” 24 “Wandrers Nachtlied II,” 89 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, ix, 8, 19, 22, 60, 61, 65, 67, 68, 178 Gottfried von Strassburg, 46, 177 Graevenitz, Gerhart von, 39 Grillparzer, Franz, 40 Grimm brothers, 104 Grohe, Oskar, 5, 170 Gugler, Bernhard, 13

Knapp, Albert, 144, 181, 185 “Die ewige Kluft,” 144 Knorr von Rosenroth, Christian, 81, 180, 181 Köchert, Heinrich, 20, 58, 59 Köchert, Melanie, 6, 20, 58, 59, 171, 173, 184 Körner, Theodor, 150, 187 Leier und Schwert, 149, 150, 187 Köster, Christian Philipp, 29, 30, 175 Kohler, Andreas, 36, 37 Kotzebue, August von, 24 Kramer, Lawrence, 138 Krauß, Rudolf, 6, 171, 173, 186 Krüdener, Barbara Juliane von Vietinghoff, Freifrau von, 23–24, 25, 26, 174 Kurz, Hermann, 6, 171

Hanslick, Eduard, 15, 173 Härtling, Peter, 173, 188 Hardegg, Hermann, 11 Hartlaub, Wilhelm, 8, 11, 13, 14, 17, 22, 28, 30, 36, 40, 80, 81, 146, 152, 169, 172, 177, 180, 187 Haug, Christoph Friedrich, 119 Haydn, Joseph, 11 Heine, Heinrich, 2, 15, 46–47, 115, 169 Buch der Lieder, 47 “Wo wird einst,” 2 Hetsch, Ludwig, 11, 13, 14, 79, 101, 172, 173, 180, 181 Hiller, Ferdinand, 69 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 18, 142 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 44, 177 Holländer, Alexis, 69 Hollander, John, 161, 162, 189 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 45, 177 Jäger, Ferdinand, 4 Johnson, Graham, 135, 184 Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich, 23 Kahn, Robert, 184 Kauffmann, Emil, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 20, 40, 149, 169, 171, 185 Kauffmann, Ernst Friedrich, 1, 9, 13, 14, 20, 34, 102, 103, 142, 143, 169, 172, 173, 178, 184, 189 “Die traurige Krönung,” 14 Kaun, Hugo, 188 Keller, Gottfried, viii, 1, 29, 169 Keppler, Utta, 173 Kerner, Justinus, viii, 15, 39–40, 173, 175, 176 Reiseschatten von dem Schattenspieler Luchs, 39–40, 176 “Zur Ruh’, zur Ruh’”, 15 Klaiber, Julius, 20 Klopstock, Friedrich, 68 “Das Rosenband,” 68

Lachner, Ignaz, 11 La Garde-Chambonas, Auguste Louis Charles, comte de, 182 La Motte, Jeanne Marie Bouvier de, 26 Lang, Edmund, 3, 5, 20 Lang, Marie, 3, 5, 20 Lenz, Hermann, 173 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 119, 183 “Die Biene,” 119 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 60 Liebrand, Claudia, 19, 173, 177 Lindpaintner, Peter Joseph von, 11 Liszt, Franz, viii, 13, 14, 156 Loewe, Carl, 156 “Der Hirten Lied am Krippelein,” 156 “Der nahe Retter,” 156 “Wenn alle untreu werden,” 156 “Wenn ich ihn nur habe,” 156 Lohbauer, Karl Philipp, 28 Lohbauer, Marie, 34, 102, 103 Lohbauer, Rudolph, 27, 28, 102, 174 Luther, Martin, 89, 90, 92, 153, 154, 155, 156, 181, 187, 188 Mährlen, Johannes, 9, 12, 31, 43, 143, 144, 145, 146, 169, 176, 178, 186 Mary Magdalen, 36, 39, 176 Matt, Peter von, 40, 176 Maudsley, Henry, 78, 180 Mayrhofer, Johann, 97 Mendelssohn, Felix, 13 “Erntelied,” 13 incidental music to Sophocles’s Antigone, op. 55, 13 Lieder ohne Worte, 13 Metternich, Clemens Lothar Wenzel, Prince, 24 Meyer, Helena, 23 Meyer, Maria, viii, ix, 18–37, 57, 58, 62, 63, 69, 79, 143, 173, 174, 177, 186 Meyer, Johann Georg, 23 Miller, Johann Martin, 25, 129, 184 “Es war einmal ein Gärtner,” 129 Siegwart, eine Klostergeschichte, 25, 129, 184 Monteverdi, Claudio, 68, 125 L’Orfeo, 68, 125 Mörike, Adolph, 9 Mörike, Adelheid, 101

200

Index Mörike, August, vii, 31, 32, 68, 175, 185 Mörike, Dorothea, 101 Mörike, Eduard “Ach, nur einmal noch im Leben,” 9–10, 172 “Agnes,” or “Rosenzeit! wie schnell vorbei,” ix, 35, 61, 62, 66–69, 183 Agnes, die Nonne, 19 Agnes’s character in Maler Nolten, 60–66, 75, 77–79, 154–55 “Alles mit Maß,” 16 “An die Geliebte,” 28 “An eine Äolsharfe,” 68 “An einem Wintermorgen, vor Sonnenaufgang,” 4 “An Longus,” 2, 149–50 “An Wilhelm Hartlaub,” 11–12 “Auf eine Christblume I & II,” 147, 169 “Auf einer Wanderung,” 8 “Aufgeschmückt ist der Freudensaal,” 19, 21, 22, 37–38, 39 “Auftrag,” 120 Ausgabe letzter Hand, 15, 88, 154, 155 “Begegnung,” 117 belief in resurrection, 147 “Besuch im Kartause,” 141 “Besuch in Urach,” 5, 45, 169 daguerrotypes of, 6, 171 departure from church service, vii, 152 “Das verlassene Mägdlein,” 152 “Der alte Turmhahn,” 150, 188 “Der Feuerreiter,” 16 “Der Gärtner,” ix, 128–31 “Der Jäger,” 61, 66 “Der Knabe und das Immlein,” ix, 42, 115–18 Der letzte König von Orplid, 47, 62 “Der Tambour,” 3, 16 “Der verwundete Eros,” 118 “Die Hochzeit,” 176 Die Regenbrüder, 10 “Die Schatten,” 16 “Die schlimme Greth und der Königssohn,” 8, 117 “Die schöne Buche,” 16 “Die Schwestern,” 14 “Die Soldatenbraut,” 14 disapproval of Schubert, 12–13 “Ein Irrsal kam in die Mondscheinsgärten,” 19, 21, 41 “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag,” ix, 42, 115, 116, 120, 121–22, 183 “Erinna an Sappho,” 45–46, 120, 141, 183 “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens,” ix, 1, 43, 100–09, 133 “Erzengel Michaels Feder,” 187 first encounter with Maria Meyer, 27–28 “Gebet,” 61, 88, 148, 152–55, 188 Gedichte, 15 Green Notebook, 19, 22, 44, 47 hatred of church duties, 102, 141–43 “Hülfe in der Noth,” 149 hypochondria, vii “Im Freien,” 19, 33 “Im Frühling,” 43 “Im Park,” 16 “In Demuth,” 154

“Josephine,” 8, 43 Jung Volker in Maler Nolten, 117 “Katholischer Gottesdienst,” 151 “Lang, lang’ ist’s her!”, 12 letters, viii “Liebesvorzeichen,” 43 “Lied eines Jägers,” 14 “Lied vom Winde,” 61 love of Mozart, 8, 9, 10 Ludwigsburg, vii, 8, 27, 188 Maler Nolten, vii, ix, 19, 21, 22, 28, 29, 35, 44, 45, 47, 58, 62, 63, 73, 90, 96, 99, 117, 154–55, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 185, 189 “Märchen vom sichern Mann,” 172 “Mausfallen-Sprüchlein,” 2 Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag, viii, 13, 75, 105, 168, 180, 182, 185 Mörike and Catholicism, 151, 188 Mörike and Lutheranism, x, 141–52 Mörike as classicist, 9 “Muse und Dichter,” 3 “Nachklang,” 34 Nachlaß, viii, x, 141, 147 Neue weltliche Lieder, 22, 37, 101, 102, 174, 182 “Pastoral-Erfahrung,” 148 “Pastor an seine Zuhörer,” 148 Peregrina, ix, 19, 20, 21, 37–49, 142, 173, 174, 175, 176 Pietism, 150–51 poetic many-sidedness, 4 portrait in pastel, 100–01 rejection of Maria, 30 “[Rotkäppchen und Wolf]”, 56–57 “Sarkasme / wider / den Pietism,” 150 “Scheiden von ihr,” 21, 44 “[Schilderung eines Traums]”, 145–46 “Schlafendes Jesuskind,” 161 “Schön-Rohtraut,” 10 “Seltsamer Traum,” 8 “September-Morgen,” 16 “Seufzer,” 61, 62, 79, 82, 88, 180 “Storchenbotschaft,” 5 theological studies in Tübingen, 27, 142 “Um Mitternacht,” 142 “Und Wieder,” 21, 22 views about music, 7–15 “Verzweifelte Liebe,” 22, 37 “Vicia faba minor,” 16 “Vom Sieben-Nixen-Chor,” 16 “Wanderlied,” 12 “Warnung,” 21 Wispeliaden, 146–47, 150, 187 “Wo find’ ich Trost?”, 61, 62, 79, 88–80 Mörike, Karl, 9, 14, 15, 62, 79, 80, 150 Mörike, Klara, vii, 11, 188 Mörike, Luise, 9, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 79, 144, 175, 186 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, viii, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 105, 106, 112, 168, 171, 173, 183, 184, 189 Die Entführung aus dem Serail, 9, 11 Die Zauberflöte, 5 Don Giovanni, 8, 13, 106, 112, 175, 183

201

Index Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (cont.) La clemenza di Tito, 9 Le nozze di Figaro, 8, 106 Requiem, 168 Müller, Wilhelm, 126, 184 Blumenlese aus den Minnesingern, 184 “Danksagung an den Bach,” 126 Die schöne Müllerin, 126 Münch, Ernst Hermann Joseph, 25, 26, 30, 34, 35, 36, 42, 174, 176 Erinnerungen, Lebensbilder und Studien, 25–26, 174 Erinnerungen, Reisebilder, Phantasiegemälde, 34–35, 176 Neuffer, Christoph Friedrich, 142, 186 Neuffer, Klärchen, 28, 63, 142, 174 Nibelungenlied, 140, 184–85 Notter, Friedrich, 29, 171, 174

Schwind, Moritz von, 7, 171 Shakespeare, William, 61, 99, 104, 151, 182 Antony and Cleopatra, 104–05, 182 Hamlet, 61, 65, 66 Henry IV, Part I, 151 Silcher, Friedrich, 9, 171 Späth, Charlotte, 144 Spaun, Anton von, 140, 184 Spaun, Joseph von, 140 Speeth, Margarethe, vii, 151, 178 Spiess, Christian Heinrich, 60 Stauffer, Karl, 59, 177, 178 Steudel, Johann Christian, 146, 147, 186 Stevens, Wallace, 161 Storm, Theodor, 7, 141, 152, 171, 185, 188 Strasser, Josef, 3 Strauß, David Friedrich, 12, 13, 36, 146–47, 173, 178, 186, 187 Das Leben Jesu, 146, 187

Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph, 150 Rath, Hanns Wolfgang, 169, 171, 172, 174 Rau, Luise, vii, 8, 60, 63, 68, 69, 144, 145, 178, 179 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich, 15 Reinick, Robert, 2 Richter, Christian Friedrich, 89, 91, 181 “Hüter, wird die Nacht der Sünden,” 89 Rieger, Georg Conrad, 150 Sachs, Hans, 152 Sams, Eric, viii Sand, Carl Ludwig, 24, 25 Schebest, Agnes, 12 Schiller, Friedrich, 10, 15, 145 Schlechta, Franz Xaver von, 162 Schlegel, Friedrich, 107 Schoeck, Othmar, 188 Schorske, Carl, 109 Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 109 Schubart, Christian Friedrich, 105, 182 “Die Forelle,” 105 Schubert, Franz, 2, 4, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 50, 97, 138, 162, 184 “Das Rosenband,” 68 “Erlkönig,” 12–13, 183–84 “Fahrt zum Hades,” 97 “Gute Nacht,” 177 “Schwestergruß,” 162 “Totengräberweise,” 162 Wilhelm Meister songs, 138 Winterreise, 177 Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich, 177 Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, 177 Schumann, Robert, x, 4, 7, 13, 14, 15, 97, 128, 135, 184 “Das verlassene Mägdlein,” 4, 184 “Der Gärtner,” x, 4, 128, 135–38 Dichterliebe, 115 “Die Fensterscheibe,” 135, 136 “Die Soldatenbraut,” 4 Liederkreis, op. 39, 135 Romanzen und Balladen, 4

Theocritus, 118, 183 Tieck, Ludwig, 56 Leben und Tod des kleinen Rotkäppchens, 56 Uhland, Ludwig, 15, 175 Ulrich, Martin, 131, 161, 173, 184, 189 Ulrich, Titus, 135, 136 Verlaine, Paul, 2 Vischer, Friedrich, 3, 169 Voss, Johann Heinrich, 118 “Der Honigdieb,” 118 Waiblinger, Wilhelm, 7, 32, 33, 171, 175 Wagner, Richard, viii, 1, 2, 7, 8, 13, 14, 62, 75, 91, 92, 95, 160, 169, 181 Der Ring des Nibelungen, 112 Lohengrin, 13 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 2 Parsifal, ix, 5, 8, 62, 82, 91–82, 95, 96, 98–89, 181 Tristan und Isolde, 111 Weber, Konrad, 23 Welti-Escher, Lydia, 59, 178 Wolf, Hugo “Abschied,” 17, 170 “Agnes,” or “Rosenzeit! wie schnell vorbei,” ix, 16, 71–75, 76, 170 “Alles endet, was entstehet,” 83 “An den Schlaf,” 5, 170 “An die Geliebte,” 5, 170 “An eine Äolsharfe,” 16, 50, 170 arrangement of Mörike songs into Hefte, 16–17 attraction to Mörike’s poetry, 3–4 “Auf ein altes Bild,” x, 17, 97, 141, 161–67, 170 “Auf eine Christblume I,” 17, 50, 115, 169, 170 “Auf eine Christblume II,” 5, 17, 49, 115 “Auf einen Klavierspieler,” 14 “Auf einer Wanderung,” 16, 170 “Auftrag,” 170 “Bei einer Trauung,” 170 championship of Mörike’s poetry, 4–5 “Charwoche,” 17, 50, 170

202

Index Christnacht, 156 composition of the Mörike songs, 2–3 compositional block, 5–6 “Denk’ es, o Seele!”, 167–68, 170 Der Corregidor, 7 “Der Feuerreiter,” 16, 17, 170 “Der Gärtner,” ix, 100, 128–35, 170 “Der Genesene an die Hoffnung,” 16, 170 “Der Knabe und das Immlein,” ix, 3, 100, 115–18, 119, 120, 122–27, 139, 170 “Der Tambour,” 3, 169, 170 “Die Geister am Mummelsee,” 17, 170 “Die Tochter der Heide,” 173 Drei Michelangelo-Lieder, 15 “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag,” ix, 3, 100, 115, 116, 120, 121–22, 123, 124–28, 139, 170, 184 “Elfenlied,” 16, 170 “Er ist’s,” 170 “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens,” ix, 3, 100, 109–14, 127, 133, 139, 170 “Frage und Antwort,” 170 friendship with Emil Kauffmann, 1–2 “Fußreise,” 170 “Ganymed,” 185 “Gebet,” x, 88, 141, 156–61, 167, 170, 189 Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, viii, 2 “Gesang Weylas,” 17, 170 “Gesellenlied,” 2 “Im Frühling,” 16, 170 “In der Frühe,” 17, 99, 170 Italienisches Liederbuch, 4, 21, 183 “Jägerlied,” 3, 170 knowledge of Mörike’s letters, 6–7 “Lied eines Verliebten,” 170 “Lied vom Winde,” 170 “Mausfallen-Sprüchlein,” 2, 173

“Neue Liebe,” 17, 170 “Nimmersatte Liebe,” 3, 139, 170 “Nixe Binsefuß,” 17, 170 “Nun wandre, Maria,” 113 “Peregrina I & II,” 18, 20–21, 49–56, 115, 123, 133, 170 philosophy of art, 1 “Prometheus,” 185 “Rat einer Alten,” 170 “Schlafendes Jesuskind,” 17, 170 Sechs Gedichte von Scheffel, Mörike, Goethe und Kerner, 2 Sechs Lieder für eine Frauenstimme, 2 “Selbstgeständis,” 170 “Seufzer,” ix, 17, 62, 82–87, 88, 92, 170 Spanisches Liederbuch, 113, 167 “Storchenbotschaft,” 5, 17, 170 string quartet in D minor, 11 “Suschens Vogel,” 173 “Verborgenheit,” 16, 170 “Verschwiegene Liebe,” 5, 170 Vier Gedichte nach Heine, Shakespeare und Lord Byron, 2 “Wenn du mich mit den Augen streifst und lachst,” 183 “Wo find’ ich Trost?”, ix, x, 17, 62, 88, 90–89, 170 “Wo wird einst,” 2, 3 “Zitronenfalter im April,” 170 “Zum neuen Jahr,” 113, 170 “Zur Ruh’, zur Ruh’,” 15 “Zur Warnung,” 3, 170 Woltmann, Karl Ludwig von, 26, 174 Zumsteeg, Emilie, 14, 175 “Die Soldatenbraut,” 14 Zumsteeg, Johann Rudolph, 14, 15

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