5 “Dann Sang er”: Das Marienleben from Rilke to Hindemith

“Und dann sang er Lob!” (And then he sang praise!)1 scrawled Paul Hinde- mith on the autograph score of Das Marienleben (op. 27), his 1923 comple- ment/compliment to Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1912 cycle. The concluding line of Argwohn Josephs (Joseph’s Suspicion), the fifth of Rilke’s thirteen poems2, “Und dann sang er Lob!” dramatically consummates the revelatory mo- ment following Joseph’s anger and suspicion of Mary’s pregnancy. An ana- logy to the jubilant completion of his often frustrating musical journey through Rilke’s complicated language, Hindemith’s notation also expresses an aesthetic vision shared by the two artists concerning the relationship of religious images, especially Mary and the angels, to the spirituality of the creative artist. For both Rilke and Hindemith, song’s dynamic fusion of logos (the creative word) and musica (the music of the spheres) powerfully signified artistic inspiration. In all three versions of Das Marienleben3, Mary cor- responds to the artist, who intercedes on behalf of a suffering humanity through giving birth to a creative work, thereby negotiating the tension between material and spiritual. Likewise, angels and their songs represent the spiritual message entrusted to the artist, whose task it is to convey the celestial mystery through the work of art. When Joseph sings praise, or when Rilke writes or Hindemith composes, each is responding to divine revelation by echoing the song of the angels. In spite of a shared spiritual-aesthetic vision, Rilke’s poem cycle and both of Hindemith’s compositions of Das Marienleben emerge from distinctly different biographical-historical contexts, and must be read independently of one another. Rilke was an already established German-Bohemian poet when he wrote Das Marienleben during the personal and political crises 82 LITERATURE AND MUSICAL ADAPTATION that preceded the First World War. Hindemith’s 1923 version, on the other hand, was a youthful Weimar experiment that he later deprecated and re- vised in the 1930’s and 40’s, amidst the chaos and atrocities surrounding the Second World War. Consequently, there is a varying relationship be- tween both musical renderings of Das Marienleben to Rilke’s text, and also to each other, since each responds to a unique biographical and his- torical context.

Intersecting arts: Kandinsky, Rilke, and Hindemith In “A Musical Approach to Georg Trakl (1887–1914): A Study of Musical Settings of German Twentieth-Century Poetry,” Kurt von Fischer poses the questions: “Is it possible to set Trakl’s poems to music? And, if so, how can it be done?”4 The same could be asked of Rilke’s poetry, or any modern poet whose works are considered to be hermetically sealed up.5 Fischer quotes Ingeborg Bachmann, who identifies the task of the com- poser as creating “nicht dekorativer Umgebung aus Klang. Sondern Verei- nigung” (Not decorative coating from sound. Rather union)6 of poetic and musical works. The composer who effectively makes a text sing comple- ments its message without over-aestheticized obfuscation or understated banality. Daunted by the difficulty of balancing text and composition, Max Reger refused to set many “classic” texts to music, claiming that “they actually already say enough…the greatness of the poetry so overwhelms me that it appears to me as insanity to still wish to add something to the poem.”7 Hindemith, on the other hand, attempted to enhance the message of the texts of many German poets, including Trakl and Rilke. In the preface to his 1948 Marienleben, he outlined his intentions as follows: “In unserem Falle versuchen wir, gerade das, was in einem Konstruktionselement (Text) nicht gesagt wurde, im anderen (Musik) auszudrücken—und umgekehrt” (In our case, we are attempting to express in a second construction ele- ment (music) exactly that which was not said in the first (text)—and vice versa).8 The gap, what is “unsaid” in Rilke’s stark, ritualized language pri- marily refers to the implied emotional content of the figures, their psy- chological contours. Although he certainly continued the German tradition of interarts production in his quest to uncover the psychology of Rilke’s text, Hindemith was a “modern” composer, who “minutely inspects, looks for subtleties, and searches for psychological provocation.”9 Where German Romanticism