Joachim Noller

 

“He who cannot be still and listen”

Wilhelm Müller and Music (without Schubert)

 

 

Translation: Philip Marston

 

Let me begin with a confession: I am also one of those who discovered Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827) as “Schubert’s poet”, first and foremost the author of the Winterreise. But I was so equally fascinated by both the music and the words that I soon came to the conclusion that there are only very few masterpieces of Western music for the voice to set a literary work which is already so masterly, artistically perfect, and fully valid in its own terms to music without making profound changes to it. Yet a long time went by before I could find the time to devote myself to study of the writer and his poetry - and to discover for myself the quality of those of his texts which have not been set to music. It is above all his lyrical poetry which has an immediate appeal to the reader, poetry which in Müller’s mind (can we perhaps call it typical of [German] Romanticism?) is always linked with the idea of the song and singing as a means of expression. And is it not a feature of this literature, as it stands, that it constantly alludes to and plays with the idea of music? Music is always present, as the subject or as an underlying idea encoded in esoteric, sometimes exoteric imagery (in the poetry itself, not just in the critical perspective of the cultural scholar[1]). These were the themes which occupied me when I came (a latecomer?) to examine the effect of the musical imagery as a form of words.

 

***

 

At the end of the Winterreise, poet and musician meet, the latter in the shape of the hurdy-gurdy man, a wretched figure (“barefoot on the ice” [I, 185[2]]) who unceasingly drones out his monotonous tune[3] although nobody is listening; and yet the poet not only considers taking the hurdy-gurdy player as his musical partner, but joining him on his wanderings (not: “do you want to go with me”, but: “shall I go with you?”) [I, 186]). This enigmatic coda to the cycle has been interpreted in many ways, and it has not infrequently been overlooked that the process of transformation into music (and with it the representation of the traveller’s existential situation) does not only begin in this poem, but is actually already the theme of the penultimate one, Mut! (Schubert places it third from last):

„[...] / When my heart speaks in my breast, / I sing a bright and cheerful tune.

I don’t hear what it tells me, / Have no ears, / Don’t feel when it bewails its sorrow, / Lamenting is for fools!

Merrily out into the wide world, / Battling against wind and weather! / [...]“

(I, 185).

When we read the first stanza, it is easy to think that the cheerful singing is itself the language of the heart, the expression of the inner state. But then the second stanza holds a surprise in store for us: the heart does not speak brightly and cheerfully, it bewails its sorrows, and the poetic “I” whose heart speaks thus does not, or refuses, to hear it. This “I” sings to drown out the heart’s message, brightly and cheerfully or, as the third stanza says, merrily out into the wide world. There seem to be two songs here: one expresses the inner feelings, while the other is not strictly speaking expression at all, but the manifestation of a will to live, in which the battle for survival asserts itself. And it is this song – although it seems hard to believe at first – which finds its complement in the hurdy-gurdy man’s music: he, too, is not playing music which expresses something, is not saying, “this is what I feel”, but only “I am”. And yet his music stands for another survival strategy, not battle, not drowning out (“and he lets it go by / Everything, just as it is” [I, 186]), the misery of existence is endured through the humdrum tune; he plays without interruption, come what may, barefoot and with fingers cramped from the cold, without any echo of material gain or human attention. At the metaphorical level, the constant turning of the wheel is a synonym for the wanderer’s journey: the human ego overcomes its weariness, (with the connotation of setting one foot methodically before the other, unspectacularly eating up the miles) dragging out one’s existence.

This text points in its radical realism to the experiential world of the twentieth century, in which basic humane principles are under threat as never before, and yet prove resistant. I am digressing, but I cannot help thinking of Adorno’s verdict (which he himself later relativized) that writing poetry is impossible after Auschwitz and, in direct contradiction to this, of reports from inmates of Nazi concentration camps which throw light on the value of artistic activity in sometimes agonizingly distressful circumstances. Many a poet or hurdy-gurdy man (or woman) was led by their violently curtailed “journey” into such camps, where he or she, far from ceasing to write poetry or play music, found that life could be asserted in such activities, and those who came after were admonished not to reject the legacy (even if it might be understood as the same old unvarying tune). But we are treading on thin ice with such associations, and semantics should not be reduced to scratching for an argument here, but merely, bearing in mind the huge bandwidth of possible interpretations, given as one example: in the hope that future generations may mine veins of meaning in their perspective on works which we cannot even imagine.

 

***

 

Let us just summarize for a moment the modes of making music described in the last two poems of Müller‘s Winterreise: at the end, we have a stoic instrumental performance in which it is not human grief and suffering which is being expressed, but rather ways and means of enduring them. Before that it is the wanderer whose heart prompts him to bewail his lot, but it is only mentioned in passing, and does not take on a form we can hear as a lament. The wanderer’s singing is his battle against the pressure of the inner lamento, it uses song as a countervailing form of expression. Does not this vehemently contradict the conventionalized conception of the Romantic aesthetic of feelings that has been simplistically imposed by force on thinking about music?

Music is similarly present as a theme in other cycles of poems (and on a comparably high level of literary excellence). Thus we find, e.g., the so-called Reiselieder (Songs of Travel), which were published in the first volume of Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten (Poems from the posthumous papers of a travelling horn player)[4]. In these, music-making and singing is the subject of the poems even more often than in the Winterreise: a musician from Prague finds that the strings of his fiddle snap while he is singing a song of farewell, evidently in a mood of “heart-breaking” anguish (I, 88). Another musician (I, 87) in a similar situation sings out against such feelings, “bis ich (..) auf der Brust mich leicht gefühlt” (“until I … felt the pain in my breast ease”). Here once again we have the expression of emotion set against compensating activity which neutralizes it.

This is apparently in line with Müller‘s understanding of music, as can be seen from critical remarks on Carl Maria von Weber‘s music which have come down to us. The latter’s melodic “sentimentality” (in the neutral sense of expressing emotion) – so we can read in Literarische Abendunterhaltungen auf dem Lande – is lacking in contrast, and interestingly enough it is not a musician who is held up as a model against this, but a writer: Jean Paul (IV, 376 f.). Writing of literature, Müller again uses the word “sentimentality” and contrasts it with “Räsonnement” – the analytical reasoning faculty (IV, 363). We can verify this in his poems: by means of “reasoning” - in a strikingly direct manner for contemporary lyrical poetry – the poet puts distance between himself and the “sentimental”, emotionally charged component by the device of ending some poems with a critical reflection on the poet’s writing of “songs”: “Heut hab ich dies Lied erdacht,/ Morgen wird es ausgelacht” (I, 76) (“Today I conceived this song/ Tomorrow it will be a laughing stock” or: “Dies Liedchen ist ein Abendreihn, [...]/ Und die es lesen bei Kerzenlicht,/ Die Leute verstehn das Liedchen nicht,/ Und ist doch kinderleicht” (I, 79) (“This song here is an evening round/ And those who read it by candlelight/ They do not understand what it says/ Although it is as simple as child’s play”). These verses exemplify Müller’s striving for simple form[5]: the “round” put thus into words (and imagined music) - so runs the poet’s prediction – will not be understood, for all the catchy simplicity of its words. It is almost as if the hurdy-gurdy man, whose simple musical form finds no-one who wants to listen to it, turns and addresses the audience with a discourse reflecting on the author’s own poetry.

But it is not as if contrast in Müller‘s texts only occurs through the interpolation of “reasoning” episodes: it is already an integral part in the representation of emotions. We cannot help constantly noticing the ambiguity of the message in the song itself. Mostly it is the counterplay of pleasure and pain, the carousel of positive and negative feelings: „Durch den Hain / Aus und ein / Schalle heut ein Reim allein: / Die geliebte Müllerin ist mein! / Mein! / Frühling, sind das alle deine Blümelein? / Sonne, hast du keinen hellern Schein? / Ach, so muß ich ganz allein, / Mit dem seligen Worte mein, / Unverstanden in der weiten Schöpfung sein!“ (“Through the grove/ In and out through the trees/ Only one rhyme shall be heard today,/ My beloved, the maid of the mill, is mine, / Mine! / Spring, is that all the flowers you have? / Sun, is that the brightest you can shine? / Then I must be the only man in the whole of Creation who is misunderstood with my blissful words”) (I, 53). Nature itself rejects the ecstasy of love and the festival of the human ego; but the contrast is not only in what the words say, the depressive mood being expressed is contradicted by the vitality of the artistic means used (vivid metaphorical language, playful rhyme schemes etc.). Müller‘s poetic ambiguity can be interpreted on multiple levels; the question arises again and again as to what the relationship really is between appearance and reality, i.e., the virtual (poetic) world and real life. The lyrical first person does not only express feelings and thoughts, but plays at doing so; it imagines them, invents situations in which it could think and feel this way or that, imaginary or fictional states of being which can be referenced to the realistic level. The repeatedly invoked absent beloved in the Reiselieder may be understood in this context as an imaginary figure, perhaps as an allegory of a state of being in which the poet would be liberated from the restless compulsion to journey ever further, albeit one which is never attained. The lyrical “I” itself is the object of the poet’s imagination: in the poem Hier und dort (quoted below) it is transformed in thought into a song which is set down on paper and delivered by post to the beloved’s hands. The song becomes a symbolic (and aesthetic) place where desires are fulfilled, where in a sense the constraints of the “I” are also dissolved: the dearly beloved woman would “sing and play only me” (“sänge und spielte nur mich”). Then the perspective cuts, as it were, to the tragic dimension: the change to the subjunctive mood of unreality already heralds the frustration of desire, and the lyrical first person seems to rail at a creation which does not allow lovers to come together. Then comes a second cut in which the perspective of the “I” is relinquished altogether; in relation to the existential issues dealt with in the preceding verses it is almost a descent into comical bathos: the singer of this song is a traveller who – coming from the Rhine – misses the wine he has enjoyed there. It is not only the contrast between “sentimentality” and “reasoning”; what we find juxtaposed here are different levels of imagination and perception, demarcated by differentiated linguistic registers. Human reality accrues from the summation of such contradictory elements.

 

Hier und dort

 

Mein Liebchen hat g'sagt:

Dein Sang mir behagt!

Ach, wenn ich doch selber

Ein Lied gleich wär,

Meinem Schätzchen zu Ehr!

 

Da wollt ich mich schreiben

Auf seidnes Papier,

Und wollte mich schicken

Per Post zu ihr.

Flugs tät sie erbrechen

Das Briefchen so fein,

Und schaute schnurgrade

Ins Herz mir hinein.

Und sähe und hörte,

Wie gut ich ihr bin,

Und wie ich ihr diene

Mit stetigem Sinn.

Und Liebchen tät sagen:

Du tust mir behagen!

Und sagte und sänge

Und spielte nur mich,

Und trüge im Mund und im Kopf und im Herzen

Mich ewiglich.

Hätt Gott mich gefragt,

Als die Welt er gemacht,

So hätt ich ein Liebchen,

Das wäre fein hier,

Und wär sie wo anders,

So wär ich bei ihr.

 

Dies Lied hat gesungen

Ein Wandrer vom Rhein.

Hier trinkt er das Wasser,

Dort trank er den Wein.

(I, 83 f.)

 

(My true love said

“Your singing makes me feel so good!”

Ah, if only I were a song myself

To do justice to my true love!

 

Then I would write myself down

On silken paper

And send myself to her by post.

She would hastily tear open

The neat little envelope

And look straight into my heart.

And would see and hear

How dearly I love her

And how I serve her

With unwavering love.

And my true love would say

“You make me feel so good”.

And speak and sing and play only me

And carry me around on her tongue and in her head

For evermore.

 

If God had asked me

When he made the world,

Then I would have a true love

Who was right here with me,

And if she was somewhere else

I would be there with her.

 

This is a song sung by

A traveller from the Rhine,

Here he must drink water

But there he drank wine.)

 

 

 

***

 

 

Müller takes issue in general with a one-sided aesthetic form of expression predicated on feelings both in lyric poetry and music, and in particular against heightened expressivity which explodes the bounds of form. He often succeeds in a masterly manner in relativizing emotions by means of rational discourse, ludic processes or fictional elements. But the expression of emotions is first and foremost restrained by binding them into an artistic form: „Ich kann nicht mehr singen, mein Herz ist zu voll, / Weiß nicht, wie ich’s in Reime zwingen soll“ (“I cannot sing any more, my heart is too full, I do not know how I should force it into rhyme”) (I, 53), we read in the poem from Die schöne Müllerin entitled, significantly, Pause. Müller does not permit the formal framework to be dissolved by the force of expression; the creative power of the artistic act is measured by how far it is able to harness expressive energies. It is this point which ignites his criticism of Carl Maria von Weber, whose melodies “often have such sentimental power that they could turn the heart to water and burst it asunder” (IV, 376). The Wolf’s Glen music (from the opera Der Freischütz), in his judgement, oversteps the permissible bounds of art and loses all equilibrium. Nevertheless, exactly what constitutes this equilibrium is only hinted at: the “pure and tranquil enjoyment of art” (ibid.) is perhaps rather too remote from our aesthetic vocabulary. In this, Müller implies the postulate of a cathartic effect with which art has been confronted in various periods and various (certainly not only European) cultures. In implementing such a cathartic effect, he practises (and indirectly requires the composer to practise) the sensitive perception of movements of the soul, but also their incorporation by means of a process of integration which transforms them and takes place through casting them into strong artistic form and representing them within that. Music which aspires to be the direct language of the heart would be, in Müller’s view, less than art, or artistically sub-standard.

It may seem problematic to place this idea in its historical context. The Romantic character seems – as is to be expected in Müller’s dialectic scheme of things – contrasted with classicist elements, although they cannot be limited to any one particular period. But perhaps this assessment is based on an inadequate understanding of what really constitutes Romanticism, one which is unfortunately the generally accepted version. The Romantic lied as a hybrid form partaking of both literary and musical elements should be regarded in general through the prism of its cathartic effect, focusing on the aspect of grappling with emotion, not intensifying it. And besides, the polar approach to things, in which material which is widely recognized to be “Romantic” is linked with its antithesis, is a feature found in other Romantic artists; it is present in particularly marked form in E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose fictional emotions – especially when depicting musical experiences - - vacillate between longing and ironic detachment, and whose ideas on musical dramaturgy (in particular concerning the revival of the opera buffa) aspire to bridge the gap separating the fantasy world and everyday life[6]. Contrast is advocated as a recipe for music, just as in Müller’s poetry, albeit with different accents, one which is hardly realizable in terms of contemporary music under the prevailing circumstances, but points to the future and anticipates in theory certain features of the music and music drama of the Modernist period.

 

***

 

Müller‘s poems are conceived as songs and present themselves as such. What is interesting for us is primarily the musical-poetological effect of those moments in the poetry where singing or instrumental playing is the explicit subject (also as a metaphor). That hardly ever occurs in the description of states of frustration, but rather in the endeavour to overcome them, singing to banish them, but above all in the manifest depiction of states of hedonistic pleasure, at celebrations and revels: at the spring festival where people throng the streets “with piping and fiddling” (I, 82), or when the musician from Prague comes home, and with his purse full of money decides to celebrate his wedding by playing together with his colleagues: “That will be a music to remember! [..] Blessed St. Cecilia!” (I, 87). Music is the expression of gaiety in the archaic sense. And yet this expression never occurs without being contrasted, framed, relativized. In the song quoted above, greeting Spring with pipes and fiddles, we see an allegory of Spring as a youthful boyish figure, who quickly tires of the hustle and bustle of the festivities. His one wish is peace and quiet, the music stops, the party is over. And the musician’s return with a bag full of coins, striking up a tune for the “wedding dance” (I, 87) once again suggests an imagined scene in a Utopian ideal world. Between the lines, the words themselves place a question mark over what they are saying.

But the strongest contrast to such merrymaking is found in the last poem of the Reiselieder: Schiff und Vogel (printed in full at the end of this essay). It is a little allegorical conceit (as in several other poems, it is a concentrated scenic sequence, a minidrama[7]) with the ship and the bird as its protagonists. The ship has a company of revellers on board: people who do nothing else all day long than strumming a song, dancing and leaping around. The bird is invited to come down and perch on the ship, but it does not want to. Seen through its eyes, the partygoers are creatures who “cannot be still and listen” (I, 92). They do not listen to his song, so different from the acoustic utterances by which humans express themselves, and which are a fundamental manifestation of his otherness.

Birdsong is heard everywhere, and yet “no scribbler or printer” will ever usurp it. It remains a sound of nature, is not transcribed into musical notes, so it is not incorporated into human culture and remains a zone to which human access is denied (in the poem Einsamkeit the birds twitter and trill and whistle “als ging’s in den Himmel hinein” (“as if they were entering into Heaven”) [I, 78], while the traveller trudges along his lonely path, without the joyful music making any impression on his mood). The revellers make a lot of noise to numb themselves, they make music which obviously bears the stamp of its creators’ alienated situation. Unalienated sounds are only produced outside this company. There exists an idea of music which resists the self-celebration of homo sapiens. This idea is confronted with the reality of the human situation: the reality of the drunken, music-numbed partygoers on the one hand and the reality of the hurdy-gurdy man in the Winterreise on the other (Schiff und Vogel and Der Leiermann demonstrate significant parallels, both being the final piece in a cycle of poems).

Nevertheless: despite these apparently insoluble contradictions, the author draws dialectical connections. And even if the metaphor of the monotonous, unceasing turning of the hurdy-gurdy causes us to jump to interpreting it in the light of post-existentialist and modern nihilistic ideas, we should at the same time not overlook the fact that Wilhelm Müller’s cultural achievement is precisely to have created an interactive correlation between idea and reality, between different realities. And this cultural competency takes an artistic form, in poetry of great creative power, rich in compelling images.

 

 

Schiff und Vogel

 

Die Flüsse rauschen in das Meer,

Vorüber an Burgen und Städten,

Die Winde blasen hinterher

Mit lustigen Trompeten.

 

Die Wolken ziehen hoch voran,

Wir Vöglein mitten drinnen,

Und alles, was fliegen und singen kann,

Nur nach, nur mit uns, nur von hinnen!

 

Ich grüße dich, Schifflein! Wohin, woher,

Mit dem flatternden goldenen Bande?

„Ich grüße dich, Vöglein! Ins weite Meer

Fahr ich hin aus dem engen Lande.

 

All meine Segel sind geschwellt,

Kein Berg ist mehr zu sehen:

Ich hab meine Sach auf den Wind gestellt,

Der Wind läßt mich nicht stehen.

 

Und willst du, Vöglein, mit hinaus,

Magst dich auf den Mastbaum stellen;

Denn voll zum Sinken ist mein Haus

Von glücklichen Gesellen.

 

Sie tanzen und springen den ganzen Tag,

Und klimpern und spielen und trinken,

Und wer nicht mehr tanzen und trinken mag,

Seiner Nachbarin muß er winken.“

 

Gesellen, die brauch ich und such ich nicht,

Lieb Schifflein, ich kann ja noch singen;

Dem Mastbaum wär ich ein böses Gewicht,

Lieb Schifflein, ich habe ja Schwingen.

 

Hoch über dem Segel, hoch über dem Mast,

Wer will mir die Lust verwehren?

Und hält deine wilde Gesellschaft Rast,

So sollst du mich singen hören.

 

Und wer nicht ruhen und horchen mag,

Gott gesegn‘ ihm die bessere Freude!

So schwing ich mich auf in den blauen Tag,

In die goldene Sonnenweide.

 

So sing ich meinen Jubelgesang

Hinaus in alle vier Winde,

Daß ihn mein und sein lebelang

Kein Schreiber und Drucker finde!

(I, 91 f.)

 

(The rivers rush headlong to the sea,

Down past castle and city,

The winds blow to speed them on their way,

With a joyful clamour of trumpets.

The clouds on high are scudding ahead,

We birds are in the thick of it.

All you who can fly and sing,

Join in, come with us, away from here!

 

My greetings, ship, where from, where to

With your golden pennants whipping in the wind?

My greetings, bird. To the ocean wide,

I am sailing out, away from the narrow confines of the land.

 

All my sails are billowing full,

The peaks have dropped out of sight below the horizon,

I have given over my fate into the hands of the wind

The wind will not let me stand still.

 

And if you will come out there with me, bird,

Then make my mast-tree your perch,

For my house is full to sinking

With merry fellows.

 

They leap and dance the whole day long,

And strum and play and carouse

And when they can no longer dance and drink

They at least wave a greeting to a lady companion.

 

I need no companions, neither do I seek any,

Dear ship, for I can still sing;

I would be an unwelcome burden to your mast-tree,

Dear ship, I have wings of my own.

 

High above sail, high above mast,

Who can deny me my joy?

And if your wild company would only stop for a moment

Then you shall hear my song.

 

And he who cannot be still and listen:

Why, I leave him to his better pleasures

And soar up on high into the blueness of the day,

Into the golden pastures of the Sun.

 

And so I sing out my carolling song

Out into all the four winds,

May no scribbler or printer find it

As long as he and I live!)