Essence of the Romantic

The Poetry of Eichendorff in Settings from Mendelssohn to Reimann

Katy Hamilton

“Es träumt ein jedes Herz / Vom fernen Land des Schönen”— “Every heart dreams of the distant land of beauty.” This couplet beg ins a tiny poem that Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff wrote for Robert and Clara Schumann in January 1847. It is gratifying to think of these three meeting in Vienna: the poem pays tribute to Clara’s exceptional pianism, but also acknowledges the numerous settings Robert made of Eichendorff’s poetry, above all the Liederkreis Op. 39, which we hear in its entirety this evening. While Eichendorff’s own life can be read as a somewhat dismal reverse of the richly evocative landscapes and dreamworlds of his poetry— a fortune lost, security ever just out of reach—his reputation as one of the most important Romantic writers of his age remains secure. His poems are learned and remembered by all those raised speaking German; and even those of us working in an Anglophone tradition are familiar with him, through song. Tonight’s program is a rare oppor tunity to hear poetry spoken and sung, setting the music of Eichendorff’s contemporaries alongside the works of later composers.

Joseph von Eichendorff was born in 1788 in Upper Silesia and raised on the family estate of Schloss Lubowitz (now Łubowice in southern Poland). Although the Eichendorffs had a rich and noble history, their finances were crumbling, and Joseph and his siblings saw the sale of the estate in the early 1800s. The Napoleonic wars, the need for ready employment and Joseph’s engagement to Luise von Larisch when he was 21 (a match that vexed both sets of parents) propelled the young man through periods of study in Halle, Berlin, and Vienna and a disappointing stint in the army. He and Luise married in 1815 in Breslau and had a son, Hermann, later that year. Despite the disruptions and financial uncertainty, Joseph already had several sizeable publications to his name by the time he became a father—not to mention many poems, often published in magazines and periodicals. His most famous work of prose, the novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Goodfor-Nothing) was published in 1826, by which time he was working as a civil servant, striving to pay his family’s bills alongside his creative work.

Tonight’s recital begins with In der Fremde, surely best known as Schumann’s opening to the Liederkreis. Yet we hear it first in a setting by the young Johannes Brahms—inspired by Schumann’s example, although the two had not yet met when Brahms composed his song. While In der Fremde Op. 3 No. 5 has a youthful earnestness in its rocking rhythms, Schumann’s 1840 setting seems curiously other-worldly: there is a longing both hopeful and melancholy in its hypnotic rhythms and in the constant switches between major and minor that make it so bittersweet. But it did not originally stand at the head of the Liederkreis: that honor went to Der frohe Wandersmann, and it was only in 1850 that this poem from Taugenichts was removed from the order altogether in favor of its now-famous replacement. All at once, we enter the world of the wanderer—outdoor solitude is a crucial feature of many Eichendorff poems, though here it is exacerbated by the information that our singer is not even familiar in his own homeland. Within a few songs we encounter another wanderer, this one falling directly into the clutches of the Lorelei as horn calls ring out across the forest in Waldesgespräch

Berlin-born composer and pianist Aribert Reimann was a busy song accompanist in his 20s, and his numerous vocal works reflect his interest in, and knowledge of, the 19th-century lied repertoire.

Nachtstück was written in 1966 for baritone and piano, five movements bringing together poems that neatly encapsulate many of the key features of Eichendorff’s writing. Night is, of course, a time for dreaming and fantasy—of freedom from the constraints and harsh realities of the day. Within this magical moonlight, we hear nightingales calling and a castle is mentioned, a timeless landscape that suggests heroes and enchantment, and the power of the natural world. Across the course of the evening, four movements from Reimann’s piece are part of the program: bird calls and tolling bells populate the landscape, the pianistic textures intricate and often extreme in range, while the singer is frequently given high and graceful melismas when the text mentions beauty and happiness. And there is, even in Reimann’s choice of poetry, an echo of Schumann’s ravishing Mondnacht, not to mention the rustling treetops of Schöne Fremde

At the time of the Schumanns’ meeting with Eichendorff in Vienna (which also saw the poet attend a grand choral concert with Giacomo Meyerbeer, a timely reminder of the contemporary musical currents swirling around Western Europe at this time), another great admirer of his writings had only ten months still to live. This was Felix Mendelssohn, who also set Eichendorff’s poetry many times in solo and choral pieces. Mendelssohn’s charmingly tip-toeing Pagenlied dates from 1832, and the sunny vistas of Italy— of which Eichendorff wrote often, though he never visited the country—are evoked here, even though our page is intent upon playing to his love at night, that most precious time. Wanderlied was written a year after Schumann’s Liederkreis, full of sparkling energy and excitement at what is to come. But heartache is all too evident in Nachtlied, the final song Mendelssohn saw in print during his lifetime: now the night brings loneliness as the bells toll in the piano. It is difficult not to connect the sentiments of the poem with Mendelssohn’s own circumstances, after the death of his beloved sister Fanny several months earlier.

By the late 1820s, Eichendorff’s fame was growing not only through his own publications such as Taugenichts, but also thanks to the ever-increasing number of musical settings of his lyrics that were appearing in concerts and in print. (Indeed, some were already so popular that they were rapidly gaining the status of folksongs.) Yet his professional circumstances remained frustrating—both in terms of the stability of his employment and the cities in which he was required to work. He longed to be in Berlin, to more fully engage with cultural life in the Prussian capital—instead, he spent time in Danzig (present-day Gdansk) and Königsberg (Kaliningrad). Even after securing an early retirement in 1844 on the grounds of ill-health, he and his wife were to remain reliant on their son Hermann who was himself a civil servant and moved constantly from job to job (not least thanks to the revolutions of 1848).

Eichendorff died in Neisse—now Nysa in Poland—in November 1857 at the age of 69.

As Hugo Wolf reached maturity in the 1880s, then, Eichendorff was a figure of legend: a poet of home (that is, the newly unified Germany) and also of homesickness. Earlier musical settings also endured: it seems likely that the mournful, undulating planes of Wolf’s Die Nacht were inspired by Schumann’s In der Fremde. Several further Wolfian depictions of dreamy night-time are heard this evening, too: there are the mysterious circling figurations of Nachtzauber, a world of marble statues and the power of moonlight in the valley; the music-box lullaby and twinkling stars of Heimweh; and the magical serenity of Verschwiegene Liebe. But we also hear a different side of both poet and composer in a series of what might be described as character studies. The boisterous Seemanns Abschied presents a man far more wedded to the rumbling, churning ocean than his faithless lover (and Wolf pointedly ignores the supernatural promptings of mermaids and mermen in favor of the joyful groan and swell of the water). Der Soldat I nods and bobs like a hobby horse as its rider praises his steed over the idea of any princess attempting to trap him in a castle, while Der Soldat II gives us the flipside of the scenario: soldier and lover escape together on the horse, though whether the threat the soldier mentions is real or simply convenient to his own ends is not made clear. Finally, the delightful Der Musikant is perhaps the most telling of all, for as the piano strums and whistles along beneath our singer, it becomes clear that the very source of the minstrel’s music is his longing for love: “If we two were together,” he admits at the song’s close, “My singing might fade away.”

Among Wolf’s immediate successors, tonight’s program also includes settings by Korngold, Zemlinsky, and Pfitzner. These three songs move us one decade at a time away from Wolf’s lieder of the 1880s. From the 1890s, there is Zemlinsky’s Vor der Stadt: musicians sing and play their violin, the witty sound effects in the piano dissolving into dreamy harmonies at the mention of a possible lover hearing them. (One wonders if it is entirely coincidental that the

“violin” turns in the piano sound rather similar to Dvořák’s Songs

My Mother Taught Me.) Pfitzner published his Three Songs Op. 10 in 1901, the last of which is the wistful Zum Abschied meiner Tochter and although he was 32 at the time of writing this song, he did not yet have children of his own. The program’s final composer, Korngold, was still a child himself when he composed Nachtwanderer in 1911 at 14 years old. Yet it is a wonderfully evocative fairy-tale piece, the mysterious imagery of Eichendorff’s text reflected in the falling shards of the pianist’s right hand and the shifting, uncertain harmonies of night’s transformation into day. It is a fitting antecedent to the world-weary, ancient figure of Schumann’s Auf einer Burg

In the final three songs of his Liederkreis, the dark is presented as a place of fear but also a space of deep happiness embodied in nature. Zwielicht informs us that much can be lost in the night, and Im Walde suggests that we should be on our guard among the shadows; but in Frühlingsnacht it is the moon, the stars, and the nightingales that confirm love has arrived at last. It is the nebulous, the ambiguous, the looking forward and back through the eyes of man and nature, that seems at the core of Eichendorff’s poetry. Or, as Thomas Mann put it, he carries with him “a beguiling essence of the Romantic.”

Katy Hamilton is a writer and presenter on music, specializing in 19th-century German repertoire. She has published on the music of Brahms and on 20th-century British concert life and appears as a speaker at concerts and festivals across the UK and on BBC Radio 3.