Death among the corn

Do you remember the scene in North by Northwest with Roger Thornhill running through a cornfield, chased by a crop duster trying to kill him? Or the baseball players in another cornfield in Field of Dreams? Or Maximus’s hand brushing the wheat as he walks through a field in Gladiator? The beauty and vastness of cereal fields are very cinematic.

The Lied I’m proposing this week takes place in a wheat field, and we can also imagine it as a scene from a film, the final scene: a soldier lies dying in a wheat field; he has been agonising for two days and waits in vain to be found, because the ears of wheat hide him. In his last moments he remembers another field of grain, at home, with his people, in peace.

The poem is by Detlev von Liliencron, whom we know here for very different verses, the passionate words of Richard Strauss’s Ich liebe dich. In today’s poem, however, Liliencron is direct and realistic. Alexander von Zemlinsky sets the three four line stanzas to music using two musical strophes: the first, covering the first six lines and describing reality, and the second, with the remaining six lines, describing the dream.

In the first strophe the voice is almost declamatory, while the piano moves heavily and evokes the weary footsteps of soldiers crossing the battlefield exhausted. In the second strophe the atmosphere changes completely: the piano suddenly becomes delicate and evocative, and the vocal line is beautifully lyrical. This tenderness and this light accompany the soldier’s final moments. In the last line, when the soldier dies, the music darkens, and for two bars the piano sounds almost violent. Afterwards, the song closes with four bars that return to the lyricism of the second strophe and tell us that the soldier rests in peace.

Tod in Ähren (Death among the corn) is the last song of Alexander Zemlinsky’s Opus 8, Turmwächterlied und andere Gesänge. The first two songs of the set are nocturnes based on poems by the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen, in Robert Franz Arnold’s German version; some time ago we listened to the second one, Und hat der Tag all seine Qual, and we already commented on the poem’s complexity. The last two songs, both with poems by Liliencron, speak of war, and in this week’s poem we see that his words are as straightforward as a simple prose text. These are two very different atmospheres, and I honestly don’t know what led Zemlinsky to publish them together, but the result is a small cycle that is well worth hearing. So, as I always tell you, listen to it in full if you can.

For now, I leave you with Tod in Ähren, performed by Christian Immler and Danny Driver. A performance that is also very much worth hearing.

Tod in Ähren

Im Weizenfeld, im Korn und Mohn,
Liegt ein Soldat, unaufgefunden,
Zwei Tage schon, zwei Nächte schon,
Mit schweren Wunden, unverbunden.

Durstüberquält und fieberwild,
Im Todeskampf sein brechend Auge schlägt nach oben.
Ein letzter Traum, ein letztes Bild,
Sein brechend Auge schlägt nach oben.

Die Sense rauscht im Ährenfeld,
Er sieht sein Dorf im Arbeitsfrieden,
Ade, ade, du Heimatwelt -
Und beugt das Haupt und ist verschieden.

In the wheatfield, among corn and poppies,
lies a soldier, undiscovered
now for two days already, and two nights;
with heavy wounds, unbound.

Tormented by thirst and wild with fever,
in the throes of death, he rolls his breaking eyes upwards.
A last dream, a last image,
he rolls his breaking eyes upwards.

The scythe whispers in the cornfield,
he sees his village in peaceful toil,
adieu, adieu, you world of home -
and bows his head and departs.

(translation by Emily Ezust)