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Whose Greatness Is So Beyond Dispute That We Would Rather Listen to Some- Thing Else"

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Whose Greatness Is So Beyond Dispute That We Would Rather Listen to Some- Thing Else whose greatness is so beyond dispute that we would rather listen to some- thing else". For I have witnessed electrifying performances (too few, alas) which gripped also the man in the street In fact, the last apotheosis is among the most sublime finales in all opera; it transcends Schiller's slightly perfunctory ending, just as Bizet's final duet in 'Carmen' (accord- ing to Busoni, "one of the supreme achievements in music") dwarfs Merimde's effective but hasty climax in the sombre forest. What does it matter if the setting happens to be less plausible, so long as the artist's genius is incomparably more dramatic and compelling ? That, too, is why I prefer Rossini's 'Tell', despite its dull patches, to the no doubt very exhilarating buffooneries of his most popular works. Besides, Rossini himself felt this very keenly; he explained his enigmatic silence after Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/LII/2/192/1122293 by guest on 27 September 2021 'Tell' by remarking sardonically: "Why should I go on chasing hares after I have killed the elephant?" Finally, instead of the usually rather unprepossessing picture of Rossini, which transforms him either into an inept caricature of the grossly corpulent Prince Regent, or else makes him pose self-consciously as the immortal creator of 'Tell', we have an original and attractive frontispiece: the title-page of an early edition of 'La Vie de Rossini par M. De Stendhal', signed, however, by M. H. Beyle. We can imagine the first great psycho-analytical novelist of the nineteenth century, with a sigh of heart-felt relief, shrugging his broad shoulders and, for a moment, allowing his shrewd gaze to rest, a trifle wistfully, upon the preliminary sketches of a work which meant infinitely more to him: his forthcoming masterpiece, 'Le Rouge et le Noir'. J. W. K. Der Berliner Gassenhauer. By Lukas Richter. pp. 435. (Deutscher Verlag fur Musik, Leipzig, 1969, £4.30.) It has frequently been asserted that nothing separates the English from the Americans so much as a common language. Whatever the truth of such a generalization, it is perhaps tempting to speculate why a common culture and some close historical links should ultimately result in Germany and England confronting each other in the two worst wars the world had yet known. While English musical life as we now know it would be unthinkable without the work of the great German and Austrian masters and English philosophy was overwhelmed by the ideas of men like Kant and Hegel, Kant in turn was deeply indebted to the British empiricism of Locke, Berkely and Hume, and German literature, shaking itself free from the trammels of French classicism, derived lasting and far-reaching inspiration from the freer and more natural style of the English drama. The modern German novel owes its beginnings to no small extent to the writings of Richardson and Fielding, reaching its first peak in Goethe's 'Werther', its hero absorbed in 'Ossian', which in its turn helped to kindle an enthusiasm in the German literary mind for the primitive and folk poetry of the past. Shakespeare became the supreme model for German dramatists and, as far as the subject of Herr Richter's book is concerned, Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry' is not without significance. In 1773 Gottfried August Burger's 'Lenore' appeared—a ballad suggested to the poet by a Low German Volkslied and the Scottish ballad 'Sweet William's Ghost' in Percy's collection. The ballad swept Europe, in- fluencing among many others Walter Scott, and was materially instru- mental in calling the Romantic movement to life. One of the many important literary aspects of the movement was its concern with "incidents and situations from common life, and to relate and describe them in a 193 selection of language really used by men", as the famous preface to the 'Lyrical Ballads' of 1798 has it, while in Germany the interest in folk poetry culminated in the collection 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn', edited and published between 1805-8 by Arnim and Brentano. The Gassenhauer, to summarize Herr Richter's lengthy definition, is the collective term for the popular songs of the city dwellers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sung in streets and other public places, bars and pleasure resorts, and generally accepted as part of German city folk culture. The great majority of the songs derive from folk and school songs, military marches (Berlin was an important military centre), popular dances, theatre songs and operatic arias and the like, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/LII/2/192/1122293 by guest on 27 September 2021 provided with new texts or parodied versions of the original words. They are, in short, a form of urban folksong, and as such clearly an offshoot of the Romantic revival of popular culture. It is, unfortunately, one of the chief failings of Herr Richter's otherwise excellent book that he in no way explores the antecedents of this Romantic revival, and omits any exam- ination of the songs in the literary context of their time. As a result, the value of the book is somewhat limited, unless one brings to it an adequate knowledge of German literature, widiout which the reader will have to rely on the extent of his interest in the subject alone, rather than that wider sphere of artistic creation which makes the period so fascinating to both literary and music historians alike. An example will perhaps make this clear. In the second section of the book, devoted to documents of the time, the author quotes from a piece by Adolf Glassbrenner, in which the names of popular ballads of the years around 1830 are mentioned. Two of these are 'Heinrich schlief bei seiner Neuvermahlten' and the already mentioned 'Lenore' by Burger; and looking at Part III of the book we find that the first of these two ballads owes a very obvious debt to Burger's famous poem. True, the characters have undergone, as one would expect, a certain alteration. The dead Wilhelm of Burger's poem becomes an equally dead Wilhelmine, appearing to her faithless lover in the middle of the night, with the result that he too must wander the earth as a ghost. In spite of deviations from the model, the similarities are too great to permit of mere coincidence. The date given for the publication of the parody is 1882 and yet, as we have seen, it was already a favourite more than half a century earlier. There is a note to the effect that the original source is a well-known horror-ballad by one J. Fr. A. Kazner, which first appeared in 1779, but this piece itself was clearly inspired by Burger's poem, which had appeared six years earlier still. Consequently, what at first is just another not very good jingle turns out to have a place, though a minor one, in the history of German literature. Other Gassenhauer are reminiscent of Goethe (one is in fact a splendidly sardonic parody of the Mignon song 'Kennst du das Land', which here becomes 'Kennst du das Dorf, wo die Kartoffeln bluhn'—a bitter revo- lutionary comment on the corrupt Germany of the VormSrz days), Heine and other poets; and it is here that one would welcome a critical approach, to establish the exact relationship of such Gassenhauer to the masterpieces of German verse of which they appear to be derivatives. Only a few of the texts have any real poetic value, many fail to rise above the level of the bawdy songs typical of a drunken evening out with the lads, and most are just plain doggerel of purely historical interest. One of the first Gassenhauer, Herr Richter tells us, was the 'Jungfernkranz' from Weber's 'Freischiitz' (in the documentary section of the book is a very funny account by Heine of how the song pursued him through Berlin), and it set a pattern of adaptation which continued down the years: Wagner, Verdi, Meyerbeer, Mozart, Suppe, Auber, Johann Strauss senior and junior, Weber, Bizet, 193 Rossini, Flotow, Lecocq, Mill6cker, the second subject of the first movement of Schubert's 'Unfinished' symphony, as well as a number of now forgotten composers, all succumbed to the Berliners' unbridled humour. It is in a way a comment on that society and its relationship to music, great or minor, that the two crudest parodies are of'La ci darem la mano' and 'In diesen heiligen Hallen'—both examples of unadulterated lavatory verse at its best, or worst, according to taste. In spite of the above-mentioned reservations, Herr Richter's book is a fine achievement, well illustrated with 32 pictures relevant to the subject and a nineteenth-century map of Berlin, about 200 music examples and copious footnotes. There are three main sections, a general discussion of the subject and analysis of individual songs, a documentary section with Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/LII/2/192/1122293 by guest on 27 September 2021 numerous extracts of literary and historical relevance, and finally a large collection of the songs and verses themselves. There is no proper index, which is a pity; but for the reader alive to what the author leaves unsaid, it is a mine of valuable information about the popular culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Berlin and, as such, a welcome addition to the field of German studies. R. T. B. Ludwig van Beethoven: Autograph Miscellany from circa 1786 to I7Q9- Ed. by Joseph Kerman. Vol. I: Facsimile. Vol. II: Transcription, pp.
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