For the early Romantics, nature was essential. Being in it was a journey towards oneself, a form of self-knowledge. And since they were only just discovering individuality as well, in a context in which individuals mattered little, contact with nature was indispensable for advancing along this path. They even believed that human beings and nature, ideally, ought to be a single unit; Friedrich Schelling, for example, said that “nature is visible spirit, and spirit is invisible nature.”
Novalis took this need to merge with the natural environment to the limit. Besides being a poet, he was, in modern terms, a mining engineer, and one of the things he liked most was to go deep into the mine galleries, when they were empty of workers, and stay there for hours. Because that was like being part of the earth and, therefore, a way of achieving maximum introspection. Miners have always seemed like heroes to me, people who risk their lives every day to earn a living, spending their working hours in an unhealthy environment, always with the risk of all-too-frequent accidents. I want to believe that conditions, at least in Europe have improved in recent decades —because in other places we know they have not—, but even so, miners are still heroes. And the idea that two hundred years ago someone would go into the deepest galleries for pleasure, absolutely alone, horrifies me.
The lied I’m proposing this week does not have a poem by Novalis, but it makes me think of him. It is Die Mutter Erde, and the poem is by Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg-Stolberg. The count (because he was a nobleman, hence this elaborate surname) was born in 1750, and his work corresponds to the Sturm und Drang, like Goethe’s, for example, with whom he was friends. But, like Goethe, he lived through those early years of the Romantic movement, even if only looking askance at his young and vehement colleagues. The poem in question, which he simply titled Lied, was written in 1780 and published in 1782 in the Musenalmanach edited by Johann Heinrich Voss in Hamburg. That is, a few years before Schelling, Novalis and other thinking minds developed their Romantic ideas.
Years later, the verses were published in Vienna in two collections that gathered the poems of Friedrich Leopold and his brother Christian: one in 1817 and the second in 1819. One of these two editions must have been the one Franz Schubert knew.
The poem speaks of how burdensome life is, and of how loving Mother Earth is, who welcomes us to her breast when death takes us away. We should not be afraid of her. Schubert composed the song —which he also titled Lied; it was not until it was published in 1838 that it became known as Die Mutter Erde— in April 1823. And since we know that around that time the composer was suffering the first symptoms of syphilis, the association between his personal circumstances and the poem is easily made.
Die Mutter Erde is a melancholy and serene song, reminiscent of a church hymn. I find it really beautiful, with those final two verses that are repeated with such a sweet melody. And I also think it is performed far too rarely, which is why I’m proposing it this week. I find the performance equally beautiful: it is the one by Florian Boesch and Roger Vignoles. I hope you enjoy it.
Des Lebens Tag ist schwer und schwül;
Des Todes Athem leicht und kühl:
Er wehet freundlich uns hinab,
Wie welkes Laub ins stille Grab.
Es scheint der Mond, es fällt der Thau,
Aufs Grab, wie auf die Blumenau;
Auch fällt der Freunde Thrän' hinein,
Erhellt von sanfter Hoffnung Schein.
Uns sammelt alle, Klein und Groß,
Die Muttererd' in ihren Schooß.
O sähn wir ihr ins Angesicht;
Wir scheuten ihren Busen nicht!
Life’s day is heavy and sultry;
Death’s breath is light and cool:
It floats down to us in a friendly way,
Like a faded leaf falling into a silent grave.
The moon shines, the dew descends
Onto the grave as it does onto a flowery meadow;
The tears of friends also fall in,
Lit up by the glow of gentle hope.
All of us, great and small, are collected –
Mother Earth takes us into her lap, into her womb.
Oh, if we could look into her face
We would not avoid her breast!
(translation by Malcolm Wren)
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All souls rest in peace
Schubert steadily appeared on Liederabend during the last few weeks, and more he will do so! Whatever the reason is, we often need him. I've been keeping the song we're listening today for months, Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen (Litany for the Fest of All Souls); in fact, it is on the Neue Schubert-Ausgabe with a slightly different name, Am Tage Aller Seelen and it's also called just Litanei. Robert Capell, the author of the book “Schubert's Songs”, published in 1929, says about this lied: "there was never a truer or more touching expression of simple devotion and consoled grief". And also: "the music rises from a pure well of affection and humility." After such words, I could just invite you to listen to the song, but first, let me tell you some more things about it.
Lost in translation
Lost in translation. That's what I thought when, just before a performance of Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden), a translation of the poem by Matthias Claudius was heard. Tod is a masculine noun; mort, the Catalan word for death, a feminine noun; as this point wasn't clarified, the original dialogue between a man (death) and a woman became a dialogue between two women. I told my friend J. that gender swap brought a twist to the story of seduction. And he said: what story of seduction? The conversation became general (that was a "Sopar Líric", a dinner concert at the 7 Portes, one of the oldest restaurants in Barcelona) and we forgot about it. The following day, J. sent me a WhatsApp saying that my comment was most intriguing; we spent some time exchanging messages and I told him that I would write this post about that Schubert's lieder.
