'Independence of the Composer from the Poet'

‘Independence of the composer from the poet’: A comparative analysis of eight settings of Goethe’s Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt Ruben Adriaan Meijerink (10424156) – Master’s Thesis February 16, 2020 Thesis supervisor: Dr. R.M. Helmers Second reader: Prof. dr. J.J.E. Kursell Table of contents Introduction 3 Context of the poem and its settings 9 The poem itself 14 Method 16 Analysis 28 Mignon (lines 1-2) 28 Mignon (lines 3-4) 35 Mignon (lines 5-6) 41 Mignon (lines 7-8) 47 Mignon (lines 9-10) 54 Mignon (lines 11-12) 61 Conclusion 67 Appendix: scores 74 2 Introduction It is commonly held that music is a type of language. Since music and language both rely on organized sound, it is hard to make an absolute distinction between the two. We speak of the musicality of language, or even that music has a grammar. Musicality of language is particularly relevant in poetry. When reciting a poem, it is easily recognized that poetic language is ‘musical’, with its rhythms, pitches and rhetorical ebb-and-flows. In some poems, the sounds of the words are even more important than merely communicating their lexical meanings. Indeed, these non-referential components of poetry make the comparison with music especially apt: both a piece of music and a poem can be seen as a composition of ordered sounds. Poetry and music are often combined in song. In setting words to music, song composers, when presenting their musical material, need to grapple with an appropriate diction, as well as the poem’s rhythms and specific sounds. In studying text-to-music settings, then, it is an interesting analytical question how those ‘systems’ of music and language collaborate. In other words, how are the words accommodated within the vocal melody? What note goes with what syllable—is such text underlay arbitrary? Does rhythmic differentiation in the music align in one way or another with speech rhythm; or, divisions into syllables with divisions into musical beats? It has often been debated which of these domains—language or music—has the upper hand. The relationship between language and music is generally considered to be very strong in nineteenth-century art song, especially the German Lied. Since the eighteenth century, the idea of a union between music and poetry had been reinvigorated. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, this union was actualized by reflecting textual details in musical settings. Many composers of the German art song in this period were deeply interested in the relationship between poetic language and its musical setting. Lied composers turned to a wide range of poetry to set to music, some works being particularly fashionable. For example, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Mignon Lieder from his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre were set to music many times. As the novel designated these poems as ‘songs’ in the first place, such texts obviously reinforced composers' interest in the interrelations of poetry and music. The present thesis is about one of these Mignon Lieder, called ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’—abbreviated as ‘Sehnsucht’. It is a song sung by the character Mignon and constitutes 3 a single lyric moment without dramatic development. It is particularly short with an economic form that subtly balances regularity and irregularity. Many composers have been drawn to this short poem; it has even inspired some composers to write multiple versions. In this thesis, I look at eight settings of ‘Sehnsucht’, each by a different composer, to examine the interrelations between the sound and structures of language and the musical presentation thereof. On the basis of this poem, literary scholar Meredith McClain has set out an argument about music’s “independence” from lyrics in an 1987 article.1 McClain illustrates the development of the German Lied by reviewing seven settings by six composers of ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’ (from here on designated as ‘Sehnsucht’). She addresses the question to what extent the words are followed by the music or whether the composer’s music becomes independent. In her analysis, this selection of settings of the poem serves to illustrate a general “evolution” towards the independence of the composer from the poet. She starts tracing this evolution with Johann Reichardt’s strophic setting of ‘Sehnsucht’, a setting commissioned by Goethe himself. This setting would still be in accordance with Goethe’s own views, namely that music should follow the words. Similarly, the second composer that McClain discusses, Carl Friedrich Zelter, composed a simple strophic setting too. She explains that Zelter, just as Reichardt, was a “member of the Second Berlin Song School, so it is not surprising that his music supports and follows the poetic text.”2 What is more, these two early composers are quoted as saying that they read the poem out loud repeatedly, in order for the correct expression in the melody to arise naturally, instead of writing an instrumental melody first and couple music and words later.3 Indeed, Goethe himself famously endorsed such an aesthetic view, according to which words and music should be unified in the Lied.4 With the settings that follow, McClain describes a gradual divergence from this aesthetic. This development starts with Beethoven and Schubert: we are told, although the settings are still fluently singable, and articulate the syntax musically, one can glean something of the “evolving complexity and independence of 1 Meredith McClain. ‘Goethe and Music: “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’’’. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: one hundred and fifty years of continuing vitality. Ed. Ulrich Goebel. Lubbock, Texas: Texas University Press, 1984: 201–227. 2 McClain, p. 207. 3 Ibid. 4 Lorraine B. Bodley. Schubert's Goethe settings. New York: Routledge, 2017, p. 20. 4 the musical form in relation to the verbal structure”.5 In addition to a relatively more complex musical form, Beethoven “takes a liberty” to repeat and interpolate words, for example.6 Significantly, then, McClain discerns a watershed in Schumann’s setting, which for her exemplifies the “independence of the composer from the poet”.7 Schumann would represent a new direction, characterized by a great range of musical detail. McClain states that for this setting it is too difficult to “make a meaningful simple graphic reduction of its form”.8 Indeed, she designates the setting as completely through-composed, where the music “evolves without attention to syntactic breaks”.9 In other words, the text is made subservient to the composer’s will. McClain’s indeed states that “the music is in control of the text.”10 Consequently, McClain closes her discussion with Tchaikovsky's setting, published almost four decades after Goethe’s death and twenty years after Schuman’s setting. Whereas the early settings were designated as simple strophic and Schumann’s as through-composed, Tchaikovsky’s musical form is so complicated in articulating the poem’s structure, McClain holds, that it is now simply impossible to outline graphically.11 McClain’s reason for ending her survey with Tchaikovsky’s setting is the following: Of all the settings presented it is the only one in which the music was such a successful entity that it lives on in performances of instrumentalists [...] without the words and many people who today would recognize the melody would have no idea who Goethe was or that it was his poetry which had inspired the music12 Of course, it is not this proposition itself that is interesting (let alone plausible) but rather the idea that is implied: Goethe’s poem as a poem can hardly be recognized anymore because the music has become independent to such a large extent. She indeed writes that: “For this reason this setting completes the evolution we have been following since the discussion of the original Reichardt setting”13 However, a skeptical reader might reply: when such a piece of music exists independently from the words it was based on, what does this fact necessarily 5 McClain, p. 210 6 Ibid, p. 209 7 Ibid, p. 211 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 212 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 5 imply? Cannot it both be an independent piece of music and fit on the words as well? Indeed, McClain does address an interesting issue, namely what fate textual details have over time and to what extent the music may come to reign independently. The picture of development towards through-composed songs and a more independent role for the piano are indeed commonplace in histories of music.14 However, the particular idea that a poem dissolves in the musical setting, ceases to be poetry and becomes music as it were, has been criticized by recent authors. A recent article by Stephen Rodgers takes aim at such a view in musical analysis, dubbed the ‘assimilation model’ by Kofi Agawu.15 Rodgers explains this model as follows: Analysts who adhere to this view argue that a poem ceases to be a poem when it is set to music: ‘purely’ poetic elements, such as line length, meter, enjambment, assonance, alliteration and caesuras, are so thoroughly absorbed by the music that they cease to be very relevant to an understanding of the song.16 This paradigm, Rodgers proceeds to show, has been challenged before by various musicologists, such as Berthold Hoeckner (quoted by Rodgers) who writes: “Even when a poem has been molded into a through-composed song; even when its words have lost the rhythm of their original meter; and even when its text has been altered by the composer: the poetic text still remains an independent component of a song”17 . This insight is important for Rodgers, as he contends that precisely this independent component of the poem deserves more attention in the study of text-to-music settings.

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