Erich Wolfgang Korngold published his first collection of lieder in 1916, at the age of nineteen. They were the Sechs einfache Lieder, op. 9, and the title, “Six simple songs”, must have been a small joke or an irony, because simple, strictly speaking, they are not.
Three of the songs had been taken from a set of twelve, with poems by Eichendorff, which he had composed five years earlier as a birthday present for his father (yes, you counted correctly: Korngold was fourteen at the time). This week I wanted to talk about one of them, Nachtwanderer, which could just as well be a cherry of Zwielicht as of Erlkönig. It shares with both the mysterious nocturnal atmosphere, the fear that permeates it, the apparitions and, in the case of Erlkönig, the night ride.
The parallels with Erlkönig may be due to the fact that Eichendorff knew Goethe’s poem, written thirty years earlier, or simply to the general Romantic atmosphere of the time. The parallels with Zwielicht are much more evident, not only because both poems were written by the same hand, but because both belong to the same work, Ahnung und Gegenwart (Presentiment and Present, 1812), which tells how the young Count Friedrich leaves his comfortable and quiet life as a university student to begin a journey that will force him to face difficult experiences and situations that will ultimately make him mature as a person. In other words, we are talking about a Bildungsroman, a novel of formation, like Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.
We find the poem Er reitet nachts auf einem braunen Roß at the end of the second chapter. After a long day, Friedrich stops to rest in a clearing in the forest when the sun is already low; he falls asleep, and when he wakes up it is already deep night. He mounts again, aware that riding at night is not the best idea; not only because bandits might attack him, but because the darkness in the middle of the forest prevents him from following the path. Lost, he heads toward a light he sees in the distance; it turns out to be a mill, and he asks for shelter. Around midnight he still hasn’t managed to fall asleep and, sitting at the window of his room, he sings. Yes, our poem is a song within the novel, like the songs in Wilhelm Meister.
The song has four stanzas, which tell us about a rider travelling at night. In the first, the poetic voice warns him of the dangers of the darkness, asking him to stop at a castle; in the second, a beautiful young woman by a pond tells him not to stop, because she is afraid of the child. What child? And why should a man be afraid of a child? In the third, a water spirit appears to him, seemingly without bad intentions, but its presence is unsettling enough. The last stanza, at dawn, with the horse dying, tells us that something terrible has happened.
If we didn’t have the context of the novel —and normally we don’t, because the poem is known mainly as part of a collection of Eichendorff’s poems published in 1837— we could interpret it purely in a Romantic key. But since we do have it, it may well be that the song is warning Friedrich of the danger he is in; perhaps his subconscious (a concept much later than the period) is interpreting the signs he has received. For instance, because he lost track of time, he couldn’t spend the night where he had planned, and now he is in a place he doesn’t know at all. Not only that, but the miller did not welcome him very kindly. And a beautiful young woman he met there might have been trying to warn him about something.
The point is that, in some way, the song saves his life. Still awake, he hears a dog barking in the yard and footsteps approaching his room. He has just enough time to grab his weapons and face the attackers—the miller among them—who expected to find him asleep; it would have been very easy to kill him and steal his belongings. Wounded, Friedrich manages to escape, leaving his horse behind.
Since the poem speaks of a rider and repeats this idea several times, we might expect Korngold’s music to evoke the horse’s gallop, but it doesn’t. Surprisingly, in Nachtwanderer we don’t hear the horse at all. Korngold seems more focused on conveying the unease of the scenes described in the verses and, using an apparently strophic structure, he does so with many details in both the vocal line and the accompaniment. If you have time, listen to the song a couple of times, in the performance by Wolfgang Holzmair and Imogen Cooper, because it truly deserves it.
I hope you enjoy it, and I’m saving for later two more songs based on the poem (both of them, this time, with the horse clearly present).
Er reitet nachts auf einem braunen Roß,
Er reitet vorüber an manchem Schloß:
Schlaf droben, mein Kind, bis der Tag erscheint,
Die finstre Nacht ist des Menschen Feind!
Er reitet vorüber an einem Teich,
Da stehet ein schönes Mädchen bleich
Und singt, ihr Hemdlein flattert im Wind:
Vorüber, vorüber, mir graut vor dem Kind!
Er reitet vorüber an einem Fluß,
Da ruft ihm der Wassermann seinen Gruß,
Taucht wieder unter dann mit Gesaus,
Und stille wird's über dem kühlen Haus.
Wann Tag und Nacht im verworrnen Streit,
Schon Hähne krähen im Dorfe weit,
Da schauert sein Roß und wühlet hinab,
Scharret ihm schnaubend sein eigenes Grab.
Please follow this link if you need an English translation.
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