The Poetical Self in Robert Schumann's Myrthen

Die singenden Blumen: The Poetical-Political Self in Robert Schumann’s Myrthen A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in German Studies. ________________________ ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Abstract ............................................................................................................................... v Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 A wedding ....................................................................................................................... 1 The Problem is its Solution: Notes on Methodology ...................................................... 5 Chapter I | Land & Lieder: Germany as a Romantic Nation .............................................. 8 The Borders of Language: The German Art Song .......................................................... 8 The Smallest Circle: Lied to Liederkreis ...................................................................... 13 Chapter II | Love in the Tower of Babel ........................................................................... 22 Spatial Recursivities: Rückert’s Untitled Dedication ................................................... 23 Metaphor and Mimesis: Aus den ‘Östlichen Rosen’ .................................................... 28 Chapter III | Highlands and Hermeneutics ........................................................................ 33 “Their mutual light”: Burns and Goethe ....................................................................... 33 Songs of Displacement ................................................................................................. 36 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 42 Appendix A: The Poems and Poets of Myrthen................................................................ 45 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 47 iii Acknowledgements iv Abstract Through a deep reading of Robert Schumann’s Myrthen, this thesis explores how expressions of Romantic aesthetics, particularly in the genres of Lied and Liederkreis, interacted with the burgeoning nationalist sentiment of mid-19th century Germany. I devote particular attention to these genres as political phenomena, emerging not merely concomitantly with but as a result of a swelling petit bourgeois class and an attendant move toward democratizing artistic production and consumption. I further explore the rich complications of hermeneutic power dynamics as manifest in Myrthen: how Robert Burns, consummate bard of the Scottish brogue, is its most-represented poet, and how Fredrich Rückert’s work as a translator and imitator of “Oriental” poetry may inform one’s reading of his poems in the cycle. I conclude by asking questions of Clara (née Wieck) Schumann’s role in the creation of Myrthen, which was presented to her as a wedding gift, not only as a corrective to the occlusion of women’s agency in classical music but as a proposed reimagining of the act of artistic creation as one which demands a more radical, reciprocal openness from the creator than the fetish of genius auteur allows. Throughout, I propose to meet Myrthen on its own terms—that is, Romantically, embracing an incomplete or fragmentary analysis as not only legitimate but necessary. v Introduction A wedding Robert Schumann first met Clara Wieck in 1830 when he entered the tutelage of her father, Friedrich Wieck, in piano and composition. Young Schumann, then twenty years old, was nine years Clara’s senior. He was from the very first overawed by her prodigious skills as a pianist, and the two would go on to become fast friends and musical coconspirators, mutually admiring the other's talents. It is unknown when these affections turned to love. On 12 September 1840, they were married at in a church in Leipzig. It was a union born of many long years in tortured anticipation: Friedrich opposed the marriage in acrimonious legal battles on the grounds that Robert would be unable to provide for his daughter and that the obligations of motherhood would abort her celebrated career as a touring pianist. To assuage these doubts, Robert threw himself into his work, both as critic and editor through his popular publication Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and in composition, producing over 150 songs in the year 1840 alone. This would come to be known as his Liederjahr: Year of Songs. On the day of their wedding, Robert presented twenty-six of these songs as a gift to Clara. This Liederkreis (literally “song circle,” often called “song cycle”) was one of the largest ever written, setting the texts of nine separate poets1. Its words are a stirring collection of nature poetry, of love poetry, of a young man's hopes and trepidations for a 1 See Appendix A for a complete list of the poems and poets of Myrthen. life bound to another soul. In honor of the flowers woven into the bridal crown, Robert named the cycle Myrthen: myrtles. Even as the couple celebrated their new-won union, the people of Germany—such as it was—asked if they would ever be united as a single nation. While the midnineteenth century was not precisely the watershed moment of the German national project, which would achieve its first bud-break with the Märzrevolution of 1848, no large thing happens immediately, nor in a vacuum. The first half of the nineteenth century bore forth some of the most seminal and influential products of German culture concomitantly with dynamic and dramatic challenges to and reevaluations of the bounds of German political power, identity, and territory. Myrthen was among these. The Germans produced no paucity of artistic artifacts through which to trace these cultural sea changes. Among the most enduring of these was the art song or “Lied” tradition, the setting of popular poetry to original music for performance by solo vocalist and pianist. The explosion of this genre in 19th-century Germany, I argue, was not only an artistic reflection of political and demographic reality, but a quintessentially Romantic one. The very first words of André Boucourechliev's Schumann contain no mention of its eponymous biographical subject, but rather proceed thus: Romanticism was a revolution—a total revolution. It overthrew at one and the same time the sensitivities and ethics of an epoch, its art forms, its literary, philosophical and religious thought. For those who dedicated themselves to it, it was like a conversion. No country adhered more absolutely to its tenets or brought as much genius to its shrine as Germany. And one might say that everything that was of consequence in that country, from 1770 right up to the end of the nineteenth century, was romantic.2 2 André Boucourechliev, Schumann., Evergreen Profile Book ; Bk (New York: Grove Press, 1959). 2 That even the preeminent biography of Schumann situates itself—and its subject—first and foremost in the tidal wave of Romanticism informs the trajectory of this project: I posit, in concurrence with Boucourechliev, that any exploration of Schumann or his works absent this grounding in Romanticism—to which I will consistently and obstinately refer in the capital form—is fruitless. Boucourechliev's identification of Germany as the Romantic nation is telling, particularly given that there was no German nation in 1770 and that that which existed at the end of the nineteenth century is wholly different from that which exists today. In the pursuit not even of national sovereignty, per se, but simply the cultural cogency to foster the political will thereto, the Romantics— Schumann among the greatest of their composers—were perhaps the greatest drivers of German nationalism from its inception. Boucourechliev goes on to say that “Schumann not only brought romantic music to its zenith, and was through his personality, his inspiration and his destiny a romantic figure par excellence, but he also responded as a fervent initiate to all the appeals of his epoch.”3 The precocious son of a bookstore owner, Robert was indeed a voracious literary consumer, and rather prone to fits of emotional excess. He had memorized the entirety of Faust by the age of twelve and likely much of Schiller and Richter, his other favorites, besides. With such an irrepressible zest for life and learning, a preternaturally keen eye to artistic aesthetics, and a dramatically variable emotional temperament, young Schumann was in many ways the prototypical young Romantic, who “developed for 3 Boucourechliev. 3 himself . . . a sensibility and a taste that were astonishingly diverse and romantic”4 by his early teen years. Thus, both of them born into a golden age of Romanticism, the composition that heralded Robert and Clara Schumann's wedding bears greater attention to its political implications than has ever been given. Stemming from this point of union and entanglement, this thesis will explore Myrthen in its myriad complexities. A dearth of scholarship on Myrthen itself will necessitate recourse to analyses of Schumann's other better-known and more-studied cycles. Using David Ferris' scholarship on Schumann's celebrated Eichendorff cycle, along with the research of Kate Brown and Celia Applegate on the political dimensions of the Lied and Liederkreis, I will examine how Myrthen responded in confounding ways to the nationalist politics of the long 19th century. This will lay the groundwork for my own textual analyses. I will begin with two poems by Friedrich Rückert. Following Rückert, I will analyze two poems by Robert Burns, whose poetry constitutes a full third of Myrthen, considering both their original tongue and the German translation by Wilhelm Gerhard which Schumann set to music. I have selected these poets because of their particularly rich entanglement in the discourse of nationalism. Rückert was a translator and Christian proselyte, a staunch nationalist, and such an outspoken critic of the government of Württemberg that he was threatened with banishment5. Burns remains the national poet of Scotland and of Scottish independence, and his masterful play with language and dialect performs in miniature the same questions of place and identity which undergirded Germany’s nationalist 4 Boucourechliev. Tuska Benes, “Transcending Babel in the Cultural Translation of Friedrich Ruckert (1788-1866),” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 1 (April 2011): 61–90, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1479244311000059. 5 4 movement. Yet there can be no discussion of German nationalism without Goethe, nor could one compose Lieder in the nineteenth century without him: four of his poems appear in Myrthen.6 Therefore, while restricting my focused analyses to the poetry of Rückert and Burns, I will consider also the heavy shadow of Goethe where it falls across them. I will devote particular attention to Goethe's own appreciation for Burns as expressed in his long correspondence with British translator Thomas Carlyle. By virtue of their investment in nationalism and in translation, I argue that Rückert and Burns are of greatest relevance to this project as I have set it out. Schumann thus gave voice to his hopes and fears for his union to Clara by using those of poets who concerned themselves with similar questions of identity and belonging, both national and individual. In a small and wonderful symmetry, this marriage, so long awaited and so vociferously opposed by Clara’s father, played a soft counterpoint to the eventual actualization of a German nation in the face of great tumult and violence. Here arises the tension with which this thesis will ultimately occupy itself: I contend that the poetic visions of the self articulated in Myrthen are radically destabilizing visions which utilize love and nature to trouble, extend, and otherwise reconfigure the conventional boundaries of individual and interpersonal subjectivity, even as their poets implicated themselves in movements which called for the creation of a fixed and cohesive national identity. The Problem is its Solution: Notes on Methodology 6 Indeed, it often seems that there could be no German Studies or even world literature without Goethe. While I acknowledge that this bears no small freight of patriarchal Eurocentrism and other questions besides, neither they nor Goethe can be wholly dissected here. 5 The primary problem of this thesis—beyond the problem of writing a thesis—is the form with which it is concerned. The Liederkreis is a unique genre, one that is radically interdisciplinary, inherently fragmentary, and confoundingly inconsistent. I will later explore the particulars in greater detail, but we must own them here and now before delving into the flower patch. The necessary question, then, is this: what mode ought I employ to best analyze this peculiar genre? I have some thoughts. Myrthen is not simply a collection of poetry. Any analytical eye with such a squint would, I believe, be consigned to failure from the very outset. To take the text(s) of Myrthen on the level of text alone, even situated in appropriate historical context, fundamentally misapprehends the very power and significance of their assemblage in a Liederkreis and would therefore result in an incomplete reading. Even if I were to set out in this mode, I could not adequately read and analyze twenty-six poems in the span of forty-odd pages. That is to say that examining the totality of only a single element of Myrthen could fill a book; to compass the cycle holistically, accounting for performance history, music theory, and any pertinent biographia besides could fill several. Such a project would be outside my area of expertise, such as it is: I am not an historian or musicologist, nor am I a critic, theorist, or composer of music. These admissions guide me to the most crucial exigent question of this specific project: if it cannot be done completely, why do it at all? Robert Schumann was not a gifted poet, nor was he a political philosopher of any note. A hand injury forestalled his dreams of piano virtuosity and even in his composition he displayed both strengths and weaknesses. Though its composer, I do not believe Robert Schumann himself would have been able to furnish a holistic academic 6 assessment of Myrthen, and therein lies something like a solution. I propose to meet Myrthen on its own terms: as fragmentary while whole, both the effusive and eager offering of a brilliant young man to the woman he had loved for many long years and as the product of a contentious political moment. I posit that Myrthen is a Romantic object in every conceivable sense, and to examine it without any attempts at Classical notions of totality is, in fact, the most fruitful and effective method. I approach it cognizant both of my inexpertness and of the fact that it does not detract from the project at hand. At the same time, I approach it confident in my adroitness as a reader and writer and as an experienced singer and great lover of music, these songs included, with a belief that these will provide some insight into this work of art. In short, I approach Myrthen Romantically. 7 Chapter I | Land & Lieder: Germany as a Romantic Nation Napoleon scarred the 19th century. Particularly heavy in the German consciousness weighed their crushing defeat at Battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, which drove Johann Gottlieb Fichte away from the city for a time. Two years later, he would pen his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Address to the German Nation) in which one can detect a heightened zeal for the dream of a German state. That the German Romantic project bloomed in Napoleon’s shadow was no coincidence: the palpable threat of conquest, and thus the loss of even state and provincial political sovereignty, informed the nationbuilding fervor. I explore in this chapter exactly how the emergent genres of Lied and Liederkreis were implicated in such national anxieties. The Borders of Language: The German Art Song The impact of Reden an die deutsche Nation was vast. Though hardly a Romantic, Fichte articulated in it an intellectual thread that would find a particular home in Romanticism: To begin with, and above all else, the first, original and truly natural frontiers of states are undoubtedly their inner frontiers. Those who speak the same language are already, before all human art, joined together by mere nature with a multitude of invisible ties; they understand one another and are able to communicate ever more clearly; they belong together and are naturally one, an indivisible whole.7 7 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reden an Die Deutsche Nation, trans. Gregory Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 8 As a distillation of, among many things, culture, place, and history, language appears in Fichte to be the great ligament of cultural cohesion and thus the seed from which a fully formed nation might grow. Nor does this relationship go only in one direction; rather, the creation of art and an intellectual tradition in a given language only reinforces and refines its alignment with a people; thus, a language is inherently political. Fichte was not alone in this thinking. The Brothers' Grimm masterwork Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary) is perhaps the single most significant manifestation of the German search for identity expressed through language. I invoke Fichte here to highlight the flow of such thinking over time: Reden an die deutsche Nation was published in 1808, fully thirty years before the Grimms began their work on the Deutsches Wörterbuch. In the intervening time, Robert Schumann was born, was educated, met Clara Wieck, and began his career. Schumann and his contemporaries waded in this intellectual history, of which we can loosely take Fichte’s alignment of language and the state to be more or less representative. Of particular interest is how Schumann would rework this notion of linguistic unity to encompass translation, a nuance which will be further explored in Chapter III. There is great resonance between this primacy of language and the art song or Lied tradition. The Liederkreis did not enjoy a spontaneous and immaculate conception but was born out of this preexisting form. This is significant not only insofar as it expresses a continuity and interdependence of forms, but because the Lied's complex relating of music and text would carry over to the Liederkreis. Per Jane K. Brown, the Lied's use of popular poetry afforded it a unique stance from which to articulate the evolving artistic attitudes of the nation; crucially, however, she does not fret over the 9 chicken or the egg. “Rather than ask how poetry results in the Lied or what poetry is best suited to musical treatment, it makes more sense to explore what new or changing cultural attitudes are manifest both in German song and in the poems that composers chose to set. In other words, what made this partnership suddenly thrive[?]”8 I am intrigued by Brown’s scholarly position here, choosing to examine the relationship between music and text as a phenomenon in itself. While I am unconvinced that we need not investigate the nuances of the relationship between music and poetry, her question stands. Art songs were radical for their cultural articulateness; the form arose in a particular moment for a particular reason. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Germany's burgeoning petit bourgeois were becoming the greatest consumers and patrons of the arts. The patronage of kings and the largesse of the aristocracy which had birthed such mammoth masterworks as Händel's Messiah and Mozart's Requiem were no longer the primary engines of musical production. Similarly, an increasingly modern and decreasingly Catholic church was turning its interest away from stirring masses, sung by professionals to swell the domes of cathedrals, and was instead investing greater time and resources in the production of modest hymns sung in stolid Lutheran four-part by the congregation, doubled by an organ.9 This trend drove music instead to the parlor, the courtyard, the antechamber, environs of the comfortable domesticity in which Germany's newly-minted intelligentsia spent its leisure hours. The creation and popularization of the 8 Jane K. Brown, “In the Beginning Was Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Lied, ed. James Parsons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12. 9 See David Ferris, Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis and the Genre of the Romantic Cycle (Cary: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2000), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/whitman/detail.action?docID=272656. 10 Lied was the perfectly commensurate response to this demand: written for two performers using perhaps the most ubiquitous instruments, they required neither great space nor great virtuosity to sing. (This is not to denigrate the skill and musicality brought to bear in their performance, but to acknowledge their relative technical simplicity.) Lieder offered an enormous emotional and affective range; they set to music popular poetry with which their educated audiences were familiar. The popularization of the Lied marked a movement toward the masses and away from the rarified, polydactyl enclaves of nobility. This movement presented an artistic opportunity. In his 1830 review of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Schumann wrote the following: “With second-rate talents it suffices that they abide by the traditional forms. With first-rate talents we acknowledge their right to extend them. Only the genius may fly free.”10 While the Lied was hardly new in 1830, it was enjoying something of a cultural explosion; the moment was ripe, then, for the “genius” to perfect and “extend” the form. This extension of the form, rather than manifesting in technical showboating, was bound to the democratizing spirit of the Lied. Simplicity, elegance, and economy became its aesthetic benchmarks.11 Yet Brown raises sharp questions of the “concept of simplicity itself. Despite the value placed on spontaneity, both it and simplicity are already clearly willed in the songs of the mid-eighteenth century; simplicity was, as we have seen, a slogan of reforms in vocal music.”12 Anticipating Wordsworth's infamous entreaty for poetry to be brought 10 Robert Schumann, Schumann on Music: A Selection from the Writings (New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1988). 11 This was a notable departure from the primacy of the symphony, of which Schumann wrote in the same review, “Form is the spatial envelope of the imagination. The larger the form the grander the imagination required to fill it. In instrumental music the term ‘symphony’ has heretofore signified the largest of forms,” (80) and thus the largest of minds. “A total revolution,” indeed. 12 Brown, “In the Beginning Was Poetry.” 23. 11 “near the language of men,” the Lied and later Liederkreis would apply this doubly to their musical praxis. Even the amateur voice, barring irreparable tone deafness, could make a reasonable effort at their performance. This reform of overlarge and inaccessible music had a noble and democratic spirit, but one that ultimately rang hollow. The piano part almost invariably required a far greater level of skill and sophistication: only the voice, the communicator of text, was bound to democratizing ideals. Writes Brown, this need for instrumental virtuosity would ultimately return the art song to the environs from which it first escaped: “If most of Schubert and much of Schumann can be sung by untrained voices, both require considerable keyboard training…By the end of the nineteenth century, art song has become a genre for the concert hall rather than for the home. The professionalization of song runs counter not only to the conditions that created the Lied, but also to the close alliance of art song with folk song.”13 As the great democratic genre, folk song provided the blueprint for the art song: just as the contemporaneous Kunstmärchen movement adapted both the form and in some cases content of more ancient tales into more literary form, art songs employed melodies with a folksy simplicity and a minimalism that, while it did not truly universalize the means to their performance, ensured at least some accessibility and mobility. Just as Tieck, Hoffmann, and Novalis pursued the creation of some more cohesive German national mythology in Kunstmärchen, so too did art songs seek to express something quintessentially, Romantically German. The Germans as a people of nature and a people of interiority were only too happy to originate and arguably perfect an artistic form that modeled those same traits. 13 Brown. 12 The prevailing, if ultimately unrealized, sense of accessibility was attended by a similar vision of aesthetic simplicity as a means to some revelation. Though larger forms were ostensibly the province of larger minds, the obverse was not necessarily the case in Schumann's artistic vision: modest forms were not solely occupied by mediocre intellect. Shortly after Schumann assumed editorial control of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1835, the publication's song reviewer Carl Banck wrote on the artistic merits of the Lied: “The Lied is the purest expression of our feelings, presented in the most natural form; it should truly express what one truly feels, but with both the appeal of novelty and the dignity of simplicity.”14 Banck's string of superlatives echoes Fichte: just as language provided “the first, original, and truly natural frontiers of states,” the Lied was the “purest…most natural form.” Couched within purity of expression is a necessity of articulateness, of sufficiently great language. Thus, situated in the intellectual thread expressed by Fichte, the Lied demanded a level of political engagement given its primary interest in language. The emergent Liederkreis would take this baton and run it well into the bounds of the Romantics. The Smallest Circle: Lied to Liederkreis The genre of the song cycle expresses in its form and practice a quintessentially Romantic aesthetic. The constituent songs of a cycle are short, often fewer than thirty measures, and often their text would include only a portion of their source poem. Furthermore, the performance of an entire cycle in one sitting was rare, and composers 14 Banck, Carl, “Neue Zeitschrift für Musik” in Ferris, Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis and the Genre of the Romantic Cycle. 13 themselves were often ambivalent about this fact. In contrast to the Classical conceit of wholeness, the apprehension of the laws of Nature by either syllogistic or symphonic logic, both the form and convention of song cycles dictated they be necessarily fragmentary, situating them in a thoroughly Romantic mode of aesthetics.15 In conversation with Winckelmann’s formula of “edle Einfalt und stille Größe” (noble simplicity and calm grandeur)16, Brown puts it rather succinctly: “Noble simplicity” evokes neo-classical beauty with its homogeneous clarity. Calm grandeur, however, evokes the parallel category of sublimity…Winckelmann’s tentative linkage of simplicity and sublimity was accentuated in the 1770s as simplicity became bound to Herder’s concept of the folk. The kind of simplicity associated with sublime grandeur…becomes instead the simplicity of folk song with meaningless refrains, fragmentary narrative, and supernatural themes.17 Aligned with folk music and abnegating classical totality, the Liederkreis was able to access this sublime simplicity to an even greater degree than the Lied. Its form enabled a fragmentary approach; songs could be performed singly or in a handful. Narrative cohesion across the cycle could be as strict or as loose as the composer wished. The sublimity of the song cycle was not at all unlike the fond imaginings of the German nation found in the concomitant swell of the nascent nationalist movement. Cycles also afforded a malleability of scale that ostensibly grander works did not: while the molecules of the cycle remained themselves small, there was no formal limit to the 15 For a comprehensive examination of the fragmentary in Romanticism, see: Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). 16 See Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Gedanken Über Die Nachamung Der Griechischen Werke in Der Malerei Und Bildhauerkunst,” n.d., https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjAvOqnLf0AhXXFzQIHZ84C6IQFnoECFUQAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbooks.ub.uniheidelberg.de%2Farthistoricum%2Freader%2Fdownload%2F445%2F445-17-83748-1-1020190115.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0vQEw7ySCKhHovVac5pnvb. 17 Brown, “In the Beginning Was Poetry.” 23. 14 quantity which could be bound together. A full performance of Myrthen's 26 songs lasts approximately 53 minutes, significantly longer than any of Schumann's own symphonies. Not at all unlike the unification of many millions of people to form the body politic of a nation, the assemblage of Lieder into Liederkreis comprised a sort of body musical, in which each song could serve the dramatic flow of the collection but could just as well stand on its own. The composers of Liederkreis appeared themselves somewhat ambivalent to this, Schumann among them, alternately referring with apparently neither rhyme nor reason to such works as “Liederkreis,” “Liedercyklus,” or something else entirely.18 David Ferris examines this thread further, pointing to a subtle strain of valuation in the prevailing scholarship on Schumann's cycles to which I should like to respond. Since so many of these songs and pieces are extremely brief—often no more than twenty or twenty-five measures—he [Schumann] clearly needed to place them within larger collections for publication. And since he tended to compose in concentrated bursts... it was natural for him to then publish the group as a whole. It is not surprising, given this method of composing, that there are such strong resemblances and connections among the works of each opus…[W]e classify Schumann's publications in terms of the unity, or coherence, of the songs and pieces within them. This process of generic classification is implicitly a process of evaluation as well: we are distinguishing Schumann's “true cycles” from his “mere collections.”19 Save Ferris, few scholars of Schumann make such efforts to bring analyses of the Liederkreis down from their theoretical pedestals into pragmatic reality. Composing is demanding work; few composers spurn the invitation of their Muse when freely offered. 18 19 Ferris, Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis and the Genre of the Romantic Cycle. Ferris. 15 Schumann's well-documented bouts of feverish output provided a natural rhythm for the publication of those works—at regular enough intervals to supply consistent income— and thus, while the temporal proximity of their creation may have woven in some common thematic threads, they were not necessarily conceived in holistic unity. Those cycles of Schumann considered “true cycles” were then those of deeply cohesive narrative material, and this unity was invariably supplied by text. Schumann's great canonical cycles each drew their lyrics from a distinct collection of poems. Frauenliebe und Leben adapted a Chamisso collection of the same name; Op. 39, simply titled Liederkreis but more commonly called the Eichendorff Cycle, used Joseph von Eichendorff's Intermezzo collection; finally, the all-eclipsing and oft-studied Dichterliebe set sixteen poems from Heinrich Heine's Lyrisches Intermezzo. The human voice is the only instrument which may make use of text and language: the song cycle was not and could not have been invented for any other instrument. Donald Sanders, in this same discourse, contends that “Often a cycle was conceived by the poet as a continuous narrative . . . The texts of Myrthen were obviously not originally envisioned as a whole. Although there is no narrative thread, most of the poems have common references to love, commitment.”20 If we consider solely the diverse authorship of Myrthen’s poetry, Sanders appears to be onto something, and thus encourages a break from Brown’s method of considering the relationship between music and poetry as a thing in itself. Though their developments were closely temporally linked, the primacy of poetry appears to have been the greater driving force in the production of Lieder and Liederkreise. Germany's increasingly educated, literate, politically inclined populace 20 Donald C. Sanders, Experiencing Schumann: A Listener’s Companion, Listener’s Companion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). 16 demanded an increasingly educated, literate, politically inclined mode of art that made use of the common referential vocabulary of a burgeoning bourgeoisie. Heine, Eichendorff, and Chamisso each enjoyed no small measure of fame during their lifetimes: these were known poems, which ensured in turn some measure of public interest in their musical settings and thus some commercial viability. Per Sanders: “The conjunction of the Liederjahr (song year) and the marriage year were not coincidental. Schumann was the quintessential romantic . . . But the notion that all the songs of 1840 are totally autobiographical is misleading. Not all the products of the Liederjahr express an ecstatic view of love. Indeed many of them deal with the disappointment and despair of love gone wrong.”21 Sanders’ intervention here is important: while head-scratching over the composer’s intent is a futile exercise, some resonances between Schumann’s life and composition are perhaps too strong to dismiss out of hand. It is also worth noting that Friedrich Wieck opposed Robert’s marriage to his daughter in part for fear that he would prove unable to financially support her; the composition of Lieder proved relatively lucrative for Schumann. But it is from this point of Wieck’s own opposition to the wedding that I also must push back on Sanders somewhat: that some of the products of the Liederjahr express anxieties about love does not mean that they are not to some extent autobiographical. A cloud hung over Robert’s love life; the wedding to Clara was hard-won. That a young man of decidedly variable emotional temperament should then experience and express anxieties in such straits should come as no surprise. If we were to entertain a biographical reading of Myrthen, the breadth of the cycle’s emotional spectrum would only serve to strengthen such a 21 Sanders. 17 reading. I invoke what I consider to be a poor example of such a reading here not to stake my own claim to any authoritative biographical insights on Schumann, in which I have no interest, but rather to pinpoint the troubling shortcomings in a prevailing stream of Schumann scholarship so as to highlight the need for further and better research beyond this attempt at a corrective. Turning back to Ferris, then, and considering this centrality of text, it should be asked to which category Myrthen belongs: true cycle or mere collection? Authorially, it is one of Schumann's most scattered works, employing nine separate poets of diverse national origins: two British, a Scot, and Irishman, and five Germans, this last one being, as has been said, not yet a cohesive nationality as such. Thematically, it does not restrict itself to marital love, nor to a singular place. Does Myrthen’s apparent cosmopolitanism, combined with its thematic breadth, bar it from being considered a “true cycle?” I am unconvinced by the very premise which both Ferris and Sanders entertain, to say nothing of the rather snobbish implication that cycles such as Myrthen were somehow inferior to their more textually unified counterparts. Such positions fundamentally ignore the work of not only seeking out a great breadth of distinct poems and poets but then assembling them in such a way as to make them thematically and narratively cohesive. The suggestion that a readily apparent narrative thread is a prerequisite to being considered a “true cycle” has no grounding in Schumann’s own aesthetic positioning—who was remarkably laissez faire in his terminology—and in fact runs contrary to the Romantic sensibilities of the Liederkreis movement at large. Although the Romantics certainly allowed for narrative cohesion, as they were nothing if not storytellers, the movement also made distinct and explicit motions to challenge, question, and rework the familiar 18 comforts of completion and wholeness in its exploration of the fragmentary. To use narrative continuity and homogeneity as the barometric to assess the merit of a Romantic form when the form actively questions these traits is fundamentally out of touch. To draw genre back into conversation with nationalism, we must consider the internal porosity of the European continent. The extraordinary intellectual commerce between its nations rewarded forms which were not bound to regional context, or perhaps even to language. Nietzsche points toward something like this in his critique of Schumann and the Romantics. (While invoking Nietzsche to corroborate a point is something academically akin to playing Russian roulette with five live chambers, his polemicizing not only provides a welcome counterpoint to the more saccharine inclinations of the Romantics but is here truly illuminating.) Nodding toward a Kantian cosmopolitanism,22 Nietzsche took Schumann and his ilk to task in Beyond Good and Evil: . . .[H]ow strange to our ears sounds the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, Byron in whom together the same European destiny that in Beethoven knew how to sing found its way into words! - Whatever German music came afterwards belongs to romanticism, that is to say to a movement which was, historically speaking, even briefer, even more fleeting, even more superficial than that great interlude, that transition of Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon and to the rise of democracy . . . Schumann, with his taste which was fundamentally a petty taste (that is to say a dangerous inclination, doubly dangerous among Germans, for quiet lyricism and drunkenness of feeling), continually going aside, shyly withdrawing and retiring, a noble effeminate delighting in nothing but anonymous weal and woe, a kind of girl and noli me tangere from the first: this Schumann was already a merely German event in music, no longer a European even, as Beethoven was, as to an even greater extent 22 See Kant, Immanuel. Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. 19 Mozart had been – in him German music was threatened with its greatest danger, that of losing the voice for the soul of Europe and sinking into a merely national affair.23 In this vein, Nietzsche championed European universality (Euniversality?) in artistic production. Sufficiently great art would not only transcend national boundaries but had to. Nietzsche’s assault on Schumann’s tastes as “petty” is especially telling, particularly with regards to the national character: among Germans, behind the terse exterior, Nietzsche perceived a “doubly dangerous” inclination to sentimentality, which the Romantics readily embraced. It was a grand thing, then, for Beethoven not only to have overcome these traits but to have translated the cosmopolitan commonalities of all Europe into German. Yet if the greatest danger to German music was “losing the voice for the soul of Europe,” did this not then reinstantiate a primacy of the German nation, and with it a variation on the same solipsistic nationalism of which Nietzsche accused Schumann? Celia Applegate responds with some force to Nietzsche’s critique: “I suggest that neither of these characterizations (the national or the cosmopolitan) is accurate as one choice between two mutually exclusive alternatives,” pointing to the antisemitic mobilization of cosmopolitanism in Wagner’s “Judaism in Music.”24 Schumann’s nationalism was of a more complex and in some sense radically European strain: “For Schumann was a nationalist of his era, but as with other national intellectuals at midcentury his sense of German community and identity lay in his efforts to create—and contribute 23 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Group, n.d.). Celia Applegate, “Robert Schumann and the Culture of German Nationhood,” in Rethinking Schumann, ed. Roe-Min Kok and Laura Tunbridge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 24 20 to—a particular kind of community that he conceived of as both progressive and therefore necessarily national . . . as progressive and available to all Europeans, each in his or her own nation . . .”25 This so-called “party of movement” is perhaps the best political blueprint with which to apprehend Schumann and Myrthen: one which affirms the porosity of boundaries and the interconnectedness of peoples and lands even while advocating for some consistency in an understanding of landed nations. 25 Applegate. 21 Chapter II | Love in the Tower of Babel Friedrich Rückert was a confounding character. As both a brilliant translator and writer of poetry, he enjoyed “cult-like status among educated middle-class Germans”26 in the latter stages of his life and career. Purported to be the master of some thirty Asian and Near Eastern languages, his extensive work as a translator was inspired by a purpose he felt to be divine. Writes Tuska Benes: Translation was Rückert’s preferred mechanism for elevating German national culture to universal significance. A tradition of reconciling the universalizing claims of Christianity with love for the nation provided a model for imagining Germany’s place in world culture…Germans were a people chosen by God to transform their mother tongue into a new version of the language spoken in paradise and thus to open a new chapter in the history of salvation. The German language could transcend Babel, he believed, by systematically incorporating foreign texts into the national literary canon. For Rückert, German cultural dominance in postNapoleonic Europe depended on a controlled form of what one might term globalization.27 This was something altogether separate from Schumann’s party of movement and would certainly have been excoriated by Nietzsche. Unlike Beethoven and Mozart, who articulated something collectively European, Rückert’s unabashed valorization of the German as beloved of God could never have given voice to “the soul of Europe.” The transcendence of Babel in Rückert’s fashion was less a unification than a domination, no matter how ostensibly noble the aim. Yet Rückert’s own poetry, to which I now turn, 26 27 Benes, “Transcending Babel in the Cultural Translation of Friedrich Ruckert (1788-1866).” 61. Benes. 22 expressed a radical and shockingly egalitarian vision of love and place relative to his political aims as laid out by Benes. Spatial Recursivities: Rückert’s Untitled Dedication Setting the tone for the entirety of Myrthen is a short and beautiful poem, set to a song titled “Widmung” (“Dedication”). Notably, the title is Schumann's own invention: Rückert never gave it a name. That Schumann not only chose to invent a title but chose the title he did—and opened the cycle with it—establishes “Widmung” as the programmatic poem of Myrthen, introducing its themes and questions and the methods of their exploration. For this reason, and in the spirit of seeking to meet Myrthen halfway, I choose to begin my analysis with “Widmung,” as its title, position, and content all indicate it to be the broadest articulation of the cycle’s concerns. Immediately, the anonymity of the object is apparent: abstract and gender-neutral pronouns dominate the poem. The title reflects this: though we could reasonably fill in the title as “Widmung an Clara” (“Dedication to Clara”) or “Widmung bei einer Hochzeit,” (“Dedication at a wedding”) Schumann did not do so. We are made aware of a tension undergirding Myrthen. Though extraordinarily intimate and specific, it is concerned with the universal, and thus telegraphs its ensuing efforts to destabilize a conventional, subjective self. “Widmung”—Friedrich Rückert Du meine Seele, du mein Herz, Du meine Wonn', o du mein Schmerz, Du meine Welt, in der ich lebe, Mein Himmel du, darein ich schwebe, O du mein Grab, in das hinab Ich ewig meinen Kummer gab! Du bist die Ruh, du bist der Frieden, Du bist vom Himmel mir beschieden. Dass du mich liebst macht mich mir wert, Dein Blick hat mich vor mir verklärt, Du hebst mich liebend über mich, Mein guter Geist, mein bess’res Ich! 23 “Dedication”—tr. Richard Stokes You my soul, you my heart, You my rapture, O you my pain, You my world in which I live, My heaven you, to which I aspire O you my grave, into which My grief forever I’ve consigned! You are repose, you are peace, You are bestowed on me from heaven. Your love for me gives me worth, Your eyes transfigure me in mine, You raise me lovingly above myself, My guardian angel, my better self!28 The first stanza presents a fervent catalog of rapturous phrases from the speaker to his29 beloved that revel in both highs and lows of love.30 The beloved is constructed as many pleasant things—“Du meine Seele,” “Herz,” and “Wonn[e]” (“You my soul,” “heart,” “bliss”)—that are placed in contrast to her role as “Schmerz” (“pain”). Notably, all are phrased possessively: not merely heart and soul, but his heart and soul, his pain, through his love for her. These juxtapositions continue in the following couplet but are externalized as places. The beloved is the locus of the lover's very life, the “Welt, in der ich lebe,” (“World in which I live”) paralleling the heart; she embodies some rapturous, gravity-defying paradise as “Himmel . . . darein ich schwebe” (“Heaven . . . wherein I float”) in parallel to “Seele” and “Wonn[e].” At the same time, however, the beloved embodies death: “mein Grab, in das hinab / Ich ewig meinen Kummer gab” (“my grave, into which / I have forever consigned my grief”). The “total agony” of the beloved is 28 Friedrich Rückert and Richard Stokes, “Widmung,” Oxford Lieder, accessed November 26, 2021, https://www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/song/406. 29 Though no gender is expressed with the poem itself, for the sake of clarity and consistency, I will refer to the speaker as “he” by proxy for Robert and the beloved as “she” by proxy for Clara. 30 For my part, my mind leaps here to Liam Neeson and Thomas Brodie Sangster perched on a public bench in Love, Actually: “Worse than the total agony of being in love?” “Right, yeah. No, total agony.” 24 rearticulated but is forever consigned to the grave in an apparent triumph of love over pain. Rückert thus constructs a spatial and almost metaphysical blueprint for love: the beloved, the object, both exists within and enfolds the lover, the subject, in direct parallel to the highs and lows of love, but ultimately the sweetness and succor of married life overshadow its tribulations. This reading of the poem would be all well and good, if a little flaccid, but for Rückert's marvelous manipulation of space. Revisiting the final couplet of the first stanza, we see a recursive, self-reflexive nature in the beloved: if she is both sorrow and grave, then confoundingly, she is consigned into herself in lines 5 and 6. (Considering Rückert’s keen interest in Asian and Near Eastern philosophy, it is possible that these lines are making oblique reference to the death of the self as in the Zen tradition.) The very sound of the text points to its import, subtly varying the rhyme scheme. The preceding couplets employ end rhyme, as in “Herz / Schmerz” and “Lebe / Schwebe.” Lines 5 and 6 add an internal rhyme to this scheme: “Grab” is rhymed with “hinab” in line 5, and the end rhyme of “gab” with “hinab” resolves the stanza in line 6. Schumann reinforces this sonic alteration. In order to invite a greater intimacy, the vocal line decrescendos to “Grab”, which returns the melody to the tonic over a dominant seventh: a harmonic resolution, but an ear-catching and unstable one. The two syllables of “hinab” are split over a bar line between beats 4 and 1 in a musical mimicry of enjambment. 25 Finally, a ritardando is written as “gab” is sung in measure 13 before a key change, extending the moment of paradox and using it as a springboard into the bridge section. This transition between the stanzas and sections deepens the entanglements of subject and object. If the beloved be both an internal component of the lover and the external environment in which he is situated, then she becomes her own subject and object. She, as a part of the lover, is acted upon by herself as his Figure 1: Schumann, Robert. Op. 25, No. 1, "Widmung." Frankfurt: C.F. Peters. external environment. She contains herself as grave and grief. But there is peace and repose in the grave. The lover enjoys his beloved as calm, as peace, lying forever at rest in the grave into which he relinquished his care and woe. This repose is Heaven-sent, hearkening back to the representation of the beloved as Heaven itself—another iteration of her recursivity. It is set off rhythmically as well: while most of the poem employs octameter, this couplet and the second couplet of the poem contain nine syllables per line. A sonic line then underscores the common thematic territory of these couplets and places them in conversation with one another. Embracing the recursivity of the beloved, we need not worry if she is Heaven itself or Heaven-sent; as both interior and external to the lover, the distinction is moot. This embrace of entanglement reaches its pinnacle in the final four lines of the poem. Drawing the lover floating in some heavenly peace, Rückert finally deigns to share 26 a significant piece of information: “Dass du mich liebst, macht mich mir wert” (“That you love me gives me worth,” my emphases). The lover is himself beloved, his love requited. The figure who has, prior to this point, been the grammatical and phenomenological subject of the poem thus becomes the object in both these senses, and it is only through this reversal—through the gaze of the other—that he is transformed: “Dein Blick hat mich vor mir verklärt.” The experience of the speaker comes to mirror that of the beloved, and the poem echoes its earlier devices to accomplish this. As the poet is lifted “liebend über mich,” we see again a spatial impossibility which can only be rectified if the poet comes to exist in an all-encompassing totality like that of the beloved. Having thus blurred not just the lines between subject and object but also lover and beloved, self and other, the poem concludes as it could only conclude: ambiguously. Whether the “guter Geist” and “bess’res Ich” are some rarified fragments of the speaker’s spirit, his literal body, or his beloved is inconsequential; such distinctions are not in question, having been made irrelevant. This, however, is not how Schumann’s setting of the text concludes. “Widmung” adapts the two stanzas of Rückert’s poem into a strophic form, the text of the first stanza providing the A section, the second stanza the B section in a different key, and a variation on the first stanza forming an A’ section. The closing text of this A’ section mixes lines from the first and second stanza of the original poem, proceeding as follows: “Mein Himmel du, darein ich schwebe, mein guter Geist, mein bess’res Ich!” While the closing words are the same, their context is altered: the good spirit and better self are expressly a part of the heaven in which the speaker—in this case, singer—floats. 27 It is from this inflection point that the entirety of Myrthen proceeds, and it is one which actively questions, reconfigures, and destabilizes conventional notions of selfhood and subjectivity. If we widen the scale from the interpersonal to the intranational, we might ask how such a project squares with German nationalism. A state is not so enamored of fluid borders, and challenges to its sovereignty are more often met with violence than love songs. This establishes the tension between understandings of the selfin-love, which I hereafter refer to as the poetical self, and the political self which is explored over the rest of the cycle. Metaphor and Mimesis: Aus den ‘Östlichen Rosen’ Rückert's 1822 Östliche Rosen remains one of his quintessential collections, containing both Near Eastern poems in his own German translation and original poetry composed in the same style. The poem set by Schumann, appearing in Myrthen under the title “Aus den ‘Östlichen Rosen’” is another of Rückert's untitled original works. What was accomplished in “Widmung” with spatial manipulation is recapitulated and complicated here through metaphor and nature imagery. Untitled—Rückert Ich sende einen Gruss wie Duft der Rosen, Ich send’ ihn an ein Rosenangesicht. Ich sende einen Gruss wie Frühlingskosen, Ich send’ ihn an ein Aug voll Frühlingslicht. Aus Schmerzensstürmen, die mein Herz durchtosen, Send’ ich den Hauch, dich unsanft rühr’ er nicht! Wenn du gedenkest an den Freudelosen, So wird der Himmel meiner Nächte licht. 28 From ‘Eastern Roses’—tr. Stokes I send a greeting like the scent of roses I send it to a rose-like face. I send a greeting like spring’s caressing, I send it to eyes that brim with spring’s light. From anguished storms that rage through my heart I send a breath—may it cause you no harm! When you think of me in my sadness, The sky of my nights will then be made bright.31 Mechanically, this poem is extremely simple. It is a pair of iambic ABAB quatrains 32, each A line having eleven syllables and each B ten. Its punctuation is consistent, the first line of each couplet ending in a comma and the following line concluding the sentence with either a period or exclamation mark. Fittingly, this form recapitulates Rückert's accustomed interest in recursivities. The “Gruss wie Duft der Rosen” is apparently modeled after the rosiness of the “Rosenangesicht;” the “Gruss wie Frühlingskosen” is tendered unto eyes full of spring light. The pattern of the speaker's offering to the beloved is determined by the form of the beloved, or perhaps the speaker's perception thereof: were the lover of a more empirical disposition, we might be treated to a greeting to a coconut head instead of a rose face. We are thus given a vision of the poetic lover as reactive: creative, yes, but as a response to the stimuli filtered through the poet's experience. The question that then looms is whether this sort of poesis is a merely an echo of Nature's scenes or a refinement. The specificity of natural imagery in “Östlichen Rosen” would suggest some measure of both, furthering an inquiry into the limits of poetic representation and 31 32 Friedrich Rückert and Richard Stokes, “Aus Den „Östlichen Rosen“,” Oxford Lieder, accessed November 26, 2021, https://www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/song/602. A note on line breaks: as rendered here, I have added the indentations as to accommodate the poem in columns. 29 mimesis—particularly by constructing the work of the lover as, in some fashion, impossible. (As to the roses themselves, we need not dwell too long on the words Shakespeare, or Bret Michaels of Poison, to be reminded that roses embody not just love’s delights, but its attendant pangs and anguish—recalling the “Schmerz” of “Widmung.”) As in “Widmung,” the beloved is heavily painted with metaphor: her eyes brim with the light of spring (“Aug voll Frühlingslicht”) within her rose-face (“Rosenangesicht”). Nowhere is the beloved compared to a rose or to spring; rather, they are impossibly, metaphorically part of her. In contrast, the offerings of the lover are communicated by simile: the greeting tendered to the beloved is like the scent of roses (“einen Gruss wie Duft der Rosen”) or the like caresses of spring (“wie Frühlingskosen”). This word is itself a neologistic nod to the more familiar “liebkosen,” to snuggle or to cuddle. Though “kosen” itself bears essentially the same meaning, “liebkosen” colors it with greater affection and intimacy. Similarly, “Frühlingskosen” brings with it the warmth of the first spring sun and the scent of flowers. It is this sensory imagery of the “Duft der Rosen” that runs almost unnoticed through the poem. The literal olfactory dimension of its “Duft” (scent) pervades our imagination of the “Gruss” (greeting). Yet in its poetic applications, “Duft” carries the secondary connotation of a fine mist, conjuring the physicality of the rose: a cloud of golden pollen, perhaps, hung suspended in the air about the mouth of the flower, as if in an exhalation. This is the dust that settles on the “Rosenangesicht.” This imagery of breath deepens in line six with the sending of the “Hauch,” which could be translated either as “breath” or “breeze.” As the “storms of sorrow” (“Schmerzensstürmen”) ease, we can picture the speaker's sigh of relief, mimicking the gentle breezes that are the only 30 remnants of the gales. Schumann’s musical settings underscores this with a gradual crescendo to a ritardando on the words “rühr er nicht.” The suggestion is that perhaps some elements of nature, or some swells of emotion, are too great to be captured by the artifice of the poet; in true Romantic fashion, one must undergo these extremes and then soberly reflect on them at a proper remove in order to communicate them poetically. Thus, any value judgement is detached from the reality of mimesis. It is no fault of the poet’s that a storm cannot literally be conjured on the page, because removal is necessary for some kind of transcendence. The same is true here, though communicated through natural imagery, of love. Lacking any art to form something as perfectly as Nature formed his beloved, the poet seeks to answer her on her own terms as best he can. Synthesizing these limitations of mimesis, then, with Rückert’s mimicry of Eastern poetry, we might also wonder if he is not displaying some modicum of self-awareness here, recognizing that his own German compositions may never fully capture the forms and tongues they seek to emulate. In this pattern, the second quatrain breaks from the pattern of the first by decentralizing the “Ich” which leads each line of the preceding quatrain. Possessive pronouns instead dominate: the speaking subject, though still the dominant narrative force, is now defined relationally to the objects of his attention. Here also the object is directly addressed for the first and only time in the poem: “Wenn du gedenkest.” The second quatrain is paradoxical: it intensifies the preceding metaphorical conceits of breath and wind, but also contains the only confirmation that this is, in fact, an address from one person to another (all in the intimate familiarity of the du-form), further grounding the poem in concrete reality. 31 The text above is one of his own composition, yet even this stylistic translation is heavily freighted with meaning. As Benes puts it, “An effacement of power in the act of translation accompanied European imperial conquest. The illusion that languages were mutually compatible concealed how effectively translation has served as a strategy of containment and a technology of domination.”33 If we apply the same logic to the translation of form—given the politics of genre, on which I have lavished such attention—then we must acknowledge some measure of power imbalance in Rückert’s apparently rosy vision of love. Friedrich Wieck’s concerns that Clara’s marriage to Robert would affect her career were not entirely without merit: she bore eight children, and the life of a touring musician is hardly friendly to a pregnant woman, least of all in an era of decidedly more crude medical care. The objectification of the female, even on the grammatical level, is consistent in Rückert’s poetry, conforming to domination of the feminized Oriental subject by the masculine, imperial Occident. Whether Schumann’s composition complicates this dynamic remains an open question; however, within the assemblage of Myrthen, Schumann uses Rückert’s poetry to pose the opening questions of a reimagined poetic self and, following from there, a more dynamic and flexible political self. 33 Benes, “Transcending Babel in the Cultural Translation of Friedrich Ruckert (1788-1866).” 62. 32 Chapter III | Highlands and Hermeneutics Despite Rückert’s extensive career in translation, none of his translated works appear in Myrthen. Yet a substantial portion of the cycle’s poems do appear in German translation of English, most of these Wilhelm Gerhard’s translations of Robert Burns’ poetry. Unfortunately, little is known of Gerhard, and so I will first turn my attention to the German who was perhaps most responsible for Burns’ popularity in Germany: Goethe. “Their mutual light”: Burns and Goethe A discussion of European nationalisms would be incomplete without at least a gesture toward Robert Burns. His marvelously lyrical evocations of Scottish pastoralism were often told in their usual and accustomed brogue, slyly providing a Trojan horse for his critiques of the English crown and his advancement of Scottish independence. Burns’ vision of freedom had many afterlives: there are more public statues of Burns in the United States than of any American poet. Neither did the Bard of Ayrshire restrict himself to the page—though not precisely a musician in his own right, his oeuvre is recognizably divided into both poems and songs, or at least the lyrics to songs. That both proved popular in Germany should then follow naturally. Not only was the sheer literary merit of his work immediately evident to the erudite and well-lettered in Germany, but it came near ready-made for assimilation into the growing body of Lieder of which that class was so enamored. Goethe himself was an enthusiastic proponent of Burns' work, himself serving something of an analogous role in Germany as its imagination-in-chief. It was through his correspondence with British writer Thomas Carlyle that Goethe came to his full appreciation of Burns. Carlyle, who had translated 33 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre into English, struck up a years-long correspondence with Goethe as part of his research into the life of Schiller. Their far-reaching conversations eventually reached the topic of Burns, for whom Carlyle held a fervent admiration that Goethe would come to share: We English, especially we Scotch, love Burns more than any other poet we have had for centuries. It has often struck me to remark that he was born a few months only before Schiller, in the year 1759; and that neither of these two men, of whom I reckon Burns perhaps naturally even the greater, ever heard the other's name; but that they shone as stars in opposite hemispheres, the little Atmosphere of the Earth intercepting their mutual light.34 The resonances between Schiller and Burns were indeed too strong to ignore: beyond their mere contemporariness, both lavished great attention on linguistic aesthetics. While they had different strengths and styles and likely never encountered the other's work, their wavelengths were evidently nonetheless compatible: a “mutual light.” Something, Carlyle seems to suggest, was in the air: that both these mammoth figures should simultaneously have produced such tremendous and influential bodies of work with no knowledge of the other was no mere coincidence. The revolutionary fervor of the late eighteenth century, perhaps, or maybe something closer to celestial intervention was at play. It was this parallel to Schiller, with whom he was of course deeply familiar, that prompted Goethe to revisit the Scottish poet, and from there waxed both his love for and frustration with Burns. Following their lengthy correspondence—friendship, even— Goethe offered to write the dedication and introduction to the translation of Carlyle's Life 34 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle., A Marandell Book (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1970). 34 of Friedrich Schiller. Therein, exploring those same resonances to which Carlyle had alerted him, Goethe wrote the following on Burns: Those of his [Burns'] Poems that we have made our own, convinced us of his extraordinary talent, and we regretted that the Scottish dialect proved a hindrance precisely where he must have attained his finest and most natural expression.35 Much great poetry is about poetry, to some degree or another; Burns' dialectic playfulness elevated this to new heights. Goethe’s language of “finest and most natural expression” also recalls Banck’s discussion of the Lied. Burns, it seemed, had accessed the same universal truth of purity in simplicity, working as he was in the tongue of the common people. He did not simply choose to write about Scotland in Scotch; he had to. Fichte would be pleased. Thus, however, Goethe’s problem: those poems that Germans had “made [their] own” could never be fully adopted. The hermeneutic leap was too great—and yet it was precisely that confounding Scottish dialect that prevented German audiences from full appreciation which so elevated the poetry. This problem, in Goethe's mind, did not occur in a vacuum; rather, it was the inevitable result of a tumultuous and increasingly connected, literate Europe. There has for some time been a question of a Universal World-Literature, and indeed not without reason: for all nations, after having been clashed together by the most dreadful wars, and then severally settled down again, could not but notice that they had imbibed many a foreign thing, and here and there become conscious of spiritual needs hitherto unknown. Hence arose a sense of their relationship as neighbours, and instead of shutting themselves up as heretofore, the desire gradually awoke within them to become associated in a more or less free intellectual commerce.36 35 36 Goethe. Goethe. 35 The vast, revolutionary interchange of materials and ideas during Europe's early modernity had successfully drawn the nations' gazes beyond their own borders and to the continent at large. The dual vision expressed by Goethe, the recognition of porous borders, calls to mind Schumann’s “party of movement,” a liberal thinking which embraced and in fact advanced elements of cosmopolitanism as part and parcel of its nationalism. As is discussed above, Rückert took this as a call to wage his poet's crusade. This “Universal World-Literature” was to be the German Word of God; with tongues of Pentecostal fire, Germans would forge their new nation as the city on the hill at the center of a newborn international Christendom. Goethe lacked such zealotry, as, I believe, did both Schumann and Wilhelm Gerhard, whose German translations of Burns appear in Myrthen. Nevertheless, echoes of that same spirit can be heard in Goethe and Carlyle's correspondence, absent such absolute centrality of German. Songs of Displacement In the Scottish Highlands, a great forced eviction of landed tenants to allow for sheep agriculture occurred from the mid-18th to mid-19th century. These Highland Clearances were profoundly complicated events of which I have only scratched the surface.37 They did, however, create a Scottish diaspora which found no dearth of exploration in the national art and literature. Burns’ “My Heart’s in the Highlands,” appearing in Myrthen as “Hochländers Abschied” (Highlander’s Farewell) may be read in part as a response to the Clearances. 37 See Eric Richards, “Debating the Clearances,” in Debating the Highland Clearances (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 3–25, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1r205v.7. 36 This poem bears perhaps the least apparent thematic connection to rest of the cycle. It makes no mention of marriage, and though it is a stirring proclamation of love, that love is directed to a place and not a person. Thus, it is in this poem that nationalist sentiment of any kind is most apparent. Included here is Burns’ original text rather Wilhelm Gerhard’s German translation. To best explore what elements of the poetry may have attracted Schumann to begin with, I focus my analysis on the original English; thus, having established a baseline, I may draw attention to what alterations Gerhard made. “My heart’s in the Highlands”—Robert Burns My heart’s in the Highlands, my Farewell to the mountains high heart is not here; covered with snow; My heart's in the Highlands, aFarewell to the straths and green chasing the deer; valleys below; Chasing the wild deer, and Farewell to the forests and wildfollowing the roe— hanging woods; My heart's in the Highlands Farewell to the torrents and loudwherever I go. pouring floods. Farewell to the Highlands, My heart’s in the Highlands, my farewell to the North, heart is not here; The birthplace of valour, the My heart’s in the Highlands, acountry of worth; chasing the deer; Wherever I wander, wherever I Chasing the wild deer, and rove, following the roe— The hills of the Highlands for ever My heart’s in the Highlands I love. wherever I go.38 38 Robert Burns, “My Heart’s In The Highlands,” BBC, accessed November 26, 2021, http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/my_hearts_in_the_highlands/. 37 Set beside “Widmung,” Burns offers us a somewhat familiar vision of love-in-place or love-as-place. The Highlands are not the metaphysical “Welt” of Rückert's beloved, but a real location. Yet they too, through the act of being loved by this speaker, are translated to a metaphysical plane: the speaker's heart and thoughts dwell not on them, but in them even in absentia, even as the Highlands inhabit the speaker in turn. (This deep mourning for place recalls also Virgil’s first eclogue and the very birth of pastoral poetry.) This celebration of place turns too toward an implicit call for, if not strictly nationalism, the valorization of a place and its beneficial effects on its inhabitants. It is in running among the fast-flowing streams, snow-capped mountains, and tumbling brooks that freedom and courage are born; the conditions of the land inspire in its people a liberation and nobility of spirit to which the speaker, in departing the land, appears to bid farewell. Whether that same character will be carried within him beyond the Highlands is the unspoken question of the poem. Gerhard's translation, however, takes this embrace of place and nation one step further. “Lebt wohl, mein Hochland” (emphasis mine), or “Farewell, my highland” ascribes a possessive to the Highlands which is nowhere to be found in Burns's original text. Might a displaced and evicted tenant still consider that land theirs? Gerhard makes a further alteration, translating “Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods” as “Ihr stürzenden Bächlein im farbigen Schein” (You tumbling rivulets in colorful shine/gleam). Not only does this translation soften the imagery by attaching the diminutive -lein suffix to Bach (stream/creek), but a wholly new visual element is introduced. The “green valleys” are the sole color in the original; these trickling rills of Gerhard’s, in contrast, 38 appear to shine with all the colors of the rainbow. The privileging of the visual is reiterated in the following poem and will be explored more there. Now—why is this song included in a cycle of wedding songs? What have the Highlands to do with marriage? In the context of the cycle, the expression of deep and abiding love for a place is a direct correlate to love of a person; they have been drawn not necessarily as the same, but so closely aligned with one another in the programmatic outlay of “Widmung” that one invokes the other. Following this pattern, anxieties of exile echo anxieties of alienation and separation from a beloved; thus, the Highlander’s farewell just as easily expresses the fond farewell of husband to wife or wife to husband as one leaves the other to, say, leave on tour. A somewhat contrary dynamic is expressed in “Out o’er the Forth,” appearing in Myrthen as “Im Westen.” “Out o’er the Forth”—Robert Burns Out o’er the Forth, I look to the North; But what is the north and its Highlands to me? The south nor the east gie ease to my breast, The far foreign land, or the wide rolling sea. But I look to the west when I gae to rest, That happy my dreams and my slumbers may be; For far in the west lives he I loe best, The man that is dear to my babie and me.39 “Im Westen”—Wilhelm Gerhard Ich schau’ über Forth hinüber nach Nord: Was helfen mir Nord und Hochlands Schnee? Was Osten und Süd, wo die Sonne glüht, Das ferne Land und die wilde See? Aus Westen winkt, wo die Sonne sinkt, Was mich im Schlummer und Traume beglückt; Im Westen wohnt, der mir Liebe lohnt, Mich und mein Kindlein ans Herz gedrückt!40 39 40 Robert Burns, “Out Over The Forth,” accessed November 26, 2021, http://www.robertburns.org/works/313.shtml. Wilhelm Gerhard, “Im Westen,” Oxford Lieder, accessed November 26, 2021, https://www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/song/596. 39 There are notable contrasts between this poem and “Hochländers Abschied” beyond its being told from a woman's perspective: whereas the first expresses nostalgia and longing for the Highlands, “Im Westen” disavows not only that same place, but the mode by which place as understood. Whereas the “Highland” is a more self-contained concept in the preceding poem, all four cardinal directions are expressed relative to the speaker’s position on the banks of the Forth. Though not so explicitly displaced as in “Abschied,” this speaker nonetheless appears even more displaced. Gerhard's translation, unfortunately, fails to capture a distinctive rhetorical move made in the original Burns, an assignation of agency to the speaking subject rather than to the place of which she is speaking. In Burns's original brogue, line 5 reads thus: “But I look to the west when I gae to rest.” The poem begins with the speaker looking North toward the Highlands over the River Forth, which flows east from its source below Loch Ard out to the North Sea. Presumably that “man that is dear” lives upstream, westward along the Forth. Crucially here, the speaker chooses to look westward of her own volition, so “That happy my dreams and my slumbers may be”—she knows precisely how she may obtain some happiness and opts to do so. Gerhard's translation radically alters the timbre of the final stanza. He conjures explicitly the image of the sunset that is only implied in Burns's original—while we might reasonably assume that Burns's speaker is going to rest at sunset and that, in looking west, she is taking in its vistas, we are not told so outright. Gerhard not only puts this image to page but assigns it the agency that is retained by the speaker in the original. “Aus Westen winkt, wo die Sonne sinkt, / Was mich im Schlummer und Traume beglückt.” (“From the west beckons, where the sun sinks, / What makes me happy in 40 slumber and dreams.”) Whereas in the original the speaker was the subject and the West the object, here it is inverted: that thing which brings the speaker joy seizes the grammatical agency, and this accompanies the explicit imagery of the sun's sinking. As the speaker beholds the sunset, we can imagine the long ribbon of the river catching light, fairly seeming to flow from the sun itself, recalling the insertion of the “farbigen Schein” in the preceding poem. The apparent primacy of the gaze in Gerhard’s translation harkens to early German Romanticism41, thus effecting a “cultural translation,” to borrow once again from Benes. This iteration, however, is less in the school of Rückert and more along the lines of Goethe’s musings on a “universal world-literature.”42 Though certainly failing to capture the nuances of Burns’ context, Gerhard’s translation does make a goodfaith effort at unifying the regional concerns of the Highland with a more German aesthetic mode. Schumann’s use of these translations, in turn, furthers an understanding of Myrthen as a product of the “party of movement,” articulating an open and paradoxically European mode of nationalism. 41 David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism, Meridian (Stanford, Calif.) (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996). 42 Indeed, the “specularity” of Romanticism owed much to Goethe’s early lyric poetry as per David Wellbery’s The Specular Moment: “Goethe’s lyric innovation derives from and transforms idyllic intimacy, constitutes a specifically lyric intimacy as the movement toward the Source of both poetry and subjectivity, figures this Source as the specular exchange with the beloved/addressee, but in the very statement of this exchange fissures the original unity with the difference internal to articulation” (27). To paraphrase for the purposes of this thesis, the intimacy of lyric poetry as achieved through an intimate gaze between the mutual parties of belover/beloved, as in “Widmung,” simultaneously effects an insurmountable division in the poetry itself through the subject/object mechanics of language, requiring the reader to inhabit an imaginary and affective space with can overcome this division in order to properly grasp poetic articulations of love. 41 Conclusion A great deal of scholarship remains to be done on Myrthen for the sake of research alone. Here I have read four of 26 poems. I have only touched upon gender, but Marianna von Willemer and Catherina Maria Fanshawe made no small marks of their own upon Myrthen. Of musical analysis I have attempted but very little, yet that this oft-dismissed song cycle should spawn three of Schumann's most popular Lieder in “Widmung,” “Die Lotosblume,” and “Du bist wie eine Blume” indicates a degree of musical cohesion and sophistication in Myrthen that has been overlooked in favor of other cycles. I believe this omission stems at least in part from a bias in studies of Lieder toward what Ferris refers to as “true cycles,” a valuation which is recapitulated by Sanders and which I believe to be entirely without merit. The academic fixation on cohesive and categorizable units of art allows little space for the study of the Romantics’ more unruly output. These, as I have argued, are perhaps truest to the Romantic project(s) in their form, or at the very least provide fresh, fruitful, and under-explored avenues for the study of Romanticism by allowing us, as I have attempted to do, to meet the movement halfway. Robert Schumann attempted suicide in 1854. He was committed to a mental institution where he would die two years later. Clara would live until 1896, enjoying a celebrated musical career and witnessing the first actualization of the German nation in 1871. That nation would ebb and flow over the following century, most recently crystallizing in the Wiedervereinigung (Reunification) of 1990. Yet with influxes of refugees and swells in both extreme left- and right-wing sentiment, Germany’s national identity is, in some senses, as friable and fluid as it was in 1840. Does the study of Myrthen and other cycles provide avenues toward understanding such fractious 42 identities? Or does the continued exaltation of the canon simply reinforce the alienation of women, non-white Germans, and all the historically marginalized? While I believe that we must meet the world halfway in order to both properly critique and inhabit it, just as I have attempted to model in my engagement with Myrthen, these questions remain open and demand continued engagement. I believe it significant that Myrthen was a gift. Much like the “Duft wie Frühlingskosen” offered to the “Aug’ voll Frühlingslicht,” Robert’s offering of a composition to a musical prodigy may well have felt much the same as art’s pale imitations of nature. While, in the spirit of Barthes’ “Le Mort d’Auteur,” I do not attempt to read Schumann himself as I would a text, I do believe the specificities of Myrthen open a door toward resisting the lowercase-r romantic fantasy of troubled, solitary, genius auteur. Lewis Hyde puts it best in The Gift: “I would take . . . gifts given in marriage as the types for the class of gifts that bring people together and make one body out of several.”43 Clara influenced not only the trajectory of Robert’s life, but his musical life. They shared a teacher; they shared a roof; they shared a diary over the whole course of their marriage. They shared a life, and to Hyde, they shared a body. The dynamic entanglement of love and marriage is the subject so marvelously explored within Myrthen, and in order to take this seriously, we must at least acknowledge the possibility that Robert himself believed that his own self was neither wholly static nor individuated. I am a singer. My body is my instrument. The sound I produce is determined in part by the shape of my bones. Yet when I stand upon a stage and sing to an audience, they participate in the creation of that sound. The invisible vibrations I produce are 43 Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1983). 43 empirically, materially altered by the bodies in the seats. To sing a Lied for an audience is then to invite shared expression. Just as the exercise of my talent is a gift to the audience, so too is the dedication of their time and attention a gift to me; thus, any music so created makes “one body out of several.” To live in a moment of political polarity—as we do and as did the Schumanns—is to question identity, both national and individual. The gulf of scale between these senses of self is not easily overcome, but perhaps we need not try. Inhabiting our own fragments and embracing their importance is no less legitimate than attempting to effect national change, and it is certainly the starting point for any goals of social change on a grander scale. In summation, Myrthen expresses a peculiar and in many ways radical nationalism, one which begins with a radical understanding of the self. This understanding destabilizes the self as such, not only allowing for but demanding poetic interaction with others. While a political entity is likely incapable of such dynamism, Schumann’s attempt at outlining an ethics for the political self through his use of political art forms is striking and critically underexplored. We need not drink the Romantic KoolAid (likely blue, like the flower) to study the Romantics, but good-faith efforts to seriously acknowledge their own sincerity are, I believe, required. Form and methodology are not unfreighted, but necessarily inform the politics of their product, both in art and in academia. The object is interior and exterior. 44 Appendix A: The Poems and Poets of Myrthen Where the name of the poem has been altered or entirely invented by Schumann, its original title follows. I. “Widmung,” Untitled. Friedrich Rückert. II. “Freisinn.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. III. “Der Nussbaum.” Julius Mosen. IV. “Jemand,” Somebody. Robert Burns, trans. Wilhelm Gerhard. V. Lieder aus dem Schenkenbuch im Divan No. 1 “Sitz ich allein.” J.W. von Goethe. VI. Lieder aus dem Schenkenbuch im Divan No. 2 “Setze mir nicht, du Grobian.” J.W. von Goethe. VII. “Die Lotosblume.” Heinrich Heine. VIII. “Talismane.” J.W. von Goethe. IX. “Lied der Suleika.” Marianne von Willemer. X. “Die Hochländer-Witwe,” The Highland Widow. Robert Burns, trans. Wilhelm Gerhard. XI. Lied der Braut I “Mutter, Mutter! Glaube nicht.” Friedrich Rückert. XII. Lied der Braut II “Lass mich ihm am Busen hangen.” Friedrich Rückert. XIII. “Hochländers Abschied,” The Highlander's Farewell. Robert Burns, trans. Wilhelm Gerhard. XIV. “Hochländisches Wiegenlied,” Highland Lullaby. Robert Burns, trans. Wilhelm Gerhard. 45 XV. Aus den “Hebräischen Gesängen,” From “Hebrew Melodies.” George Gordon, Lord Byron, trans. Karl Julius Körner. XVI. “Rätsel,” Riddle on the Letter H. Catherine Maria Fanshawe, trans. Karl Kannegiesser. XVII. Zwei Venetianische Lieder I “Leis' rudern hier!” Row Gently Here (Venetian Air). Thomas Moore, trans. Ferdinand Freiligrath. XVIII. Zwei Venetianische Lieder II “Wenn durch die Piazzetta,” When Through the Piazzetta (Venetian Air). Thomas Moore, trans. Ferdinand Freiligrath. XIX. “Hauptmanns Weib,” The Captain's Lady. Robert Burns, trans. Wilhelm Gerhard. XX. “Weit, Weit,” Far, Far. Robert Burns, trans. Wilhelm Gerhard. XXI. “Was will die einsame Träne?” Heinrich Heine. XXII. “Niemand,” Nobody. Robert Burns, trans. Wilhelm Gerhard. XXIII. “Im Westen,” Out Over the Forth. Robert Burns, trans. Wilhelm Gerhard. XXIV. “Du bist wie eine Blume.” Heinrich Heine. XXV. Aus den “Östlichen Rosen.” Friedrich Rückert. XXVI. “Zum Schluss,” Untitled. Friedrich Rückert. 46 Bibliography Applegate, Celia. “Robert Schumann and the Culture of German Nationhood.” In Rethinking Schumann, edited by Roe-Min Kok and Laura Tunbridge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Benes, Tuska. “Transcending Babel in the Cultural Translation of Friedrich Ruckert (1788-1866).” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 1 (April 2011): 61–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1479244311000059. Boucourechliev, André. Schumann. Evergreen Profile Book ; Bk. New York: Grove Press, 1959. Brown, Jane K. “In the Beginning Was Poetry.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Lied, edited by James Parsons, 12. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Burns, Robert. “My Heart’s In The Highlands.” BBC. Accessed November 26, 2021. http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/my_hearts_in_the_highlands/. ———. “Out Over The Forth.” Accessed November 26, 2021. http://www.robertburns.org/works/313.shtml. Ferris, David. Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis and the Genre of the Romantic Cycle. Cary: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2000. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/whitman/detail.action?docID=272656. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Reden an Die Deutsche Nation. Translated by Gregory Moore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Gerhard, Wilhelm. “Im Westen.” Oxford Lieder. Accessed November 26, 2021. https://www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/song/596. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle. A Marandell Book. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1970. Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Random House, 1983. Levinson, Marjorie. The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Group, n.d. Richards, Eric. “Debating the Clearances.” In Debating the Highland Clearances, 3–25. Edinburgh University Press, 2007. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1r205v.7. Rückert, Friedrich, and Richard Stokes. “Aus Den „Östlichen Rosen“.” Oxford Lieder. Accessed November 26, 2021. https://www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/song/602. ———. “Widmung.” Oxford Lieder. Accessed November 26, 2021. https://www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/song/406. Sanders, Donald C. Experiencing Schumann: A Listener’s Companion. Listener’s Companion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Schumann, Robert. Schumann on Music: A Selection from the Writings. New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1988. Wellbery, David E. The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism. Meridian (Stanford, Calif.). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. 47 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. “Gedanken Über Die Nachamung Der Griechischen Werke in Der Malerei Und Bildhauerkunst,” n.d. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2a hUKEwjAvOqnLf0AhXXFzQIHZ84C6IQFnoECFUQAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbooks.ub.u ni-heidelberg.de%2Farthistoricum%2Freader%2Fdownload%2F445%2F445-1783748-1-10-20190115.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0vQEw7ySCKhHovVac5pnvb. 48