Schoenberg Lieder: The Composer and German Poetry

The present essay is an attempt to approach from the perspective of the literary scholar the question of Schoenberg’s relationship with the poetry of his contemporaries, looking in particular at what have been considered inconsistencies in his literary taste and at some of the elements that attracted him to particular poets. This will involve an examination of these poets in relation to each other as well as in relation to Schoenberg, and some assessment of their literary-historical context. I shall not attempt to analyze what Schoenberg as a composer made musically of the texts he chose, but will try to draw out some of the qualities that may have stimulated him as a reader, suggesting that his discretion and sensitivity in this respect are greater than is sometimes acknowledged. I shall suggest that there is a degree of unity in the criteria that Schoenberg adopted, consciously or unconsciously, in his selection from literary texts, and that these criteria are both stylistic and thematic. Between 1893 and 1916, Schoenberg was moved to set poems by some sixty different authors—poets whose names are nowadays almost completely unknown, such as Oskar von Redwitz, Ottokar Kemstock, and Wilhelm von Scholz, and better-known writers as disparate as Petrarch and Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rabindranath Tagore, Nikolaus Lenau and Richard Dehmel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Jens Peter Jacobsen, Gottfried Keller and Stefan George. Statistically, Ludwig Pfau, Richard Dehmel, and Stefan George emerge as the most significant, with fourteen, seventeen, and twenty texts respectively, and it is on these poets that I shall focus this essay.

Walter Bailey suggests that ‘in the tradition of Brahms and Strauss, Schoenberg’s choice of poetry was not at first guided by literary worth’ and implicates in this judgment Ludwig Pfau, the poet set most frequently before 1897. Karl Ludwig Pfau (1821-1894), one of the 1848 revolutionaries, was convicted of high treason and spent many years in exile in Switzerland and France before returning to Germany in 1863. Pfau was not only a poet; indeed, he was for a while best known for his journalism, editing the satirical magazine Eulenspiegel (named after the fourteenth-century practical joker, whose simple comic exploits passed into German popular tradition).

The rejected lover in ‘Du kehrst mir den Rücken’ [Are you turning your back on me?] shrugs his shoulders at the girl who rejects him and bouncily saunters into the big wide world to look for another. Furthermore, apart from the monosyllabic exclamations that end each stanza, the whole poem is in amphibrachs: the amphibrach consists of a stressed syllable sandwiched between two unstressed syllables, so in sequence they produce a jaunty, almost jigging rhythm. Schoenberg seems therefore to have been attracted to Pfau for his clarity and simplicity. Pfau was no poetic radical, but all the poems Schoenberg chose convey plain emotional states efficiently, if sometimes rather blandly. What they would represent for a late-nineteenth-century composer is perhaps a model of technical facility, a poet perfectly at home with the standard stylistic and rhythmic repertoire of the past fifty or sixty years.

The white swan in ‘Landung’ [Landing] and the black swan in ‘Der Richer’ (The Avenger], from his first collection, Erlösungen: Eine Seelenwanderung in Gedichten [Redemptions: A Soul’s Journey in Poems] (1891), are part of the iconography of Jugendstil, too. Beyond this, Dehmel’s whole artistic program had much in common with the Jugendstil aim of transfiguring reality via art, vitalizing the outside world through the intensity of inner experience.

Dehmel’s second collection, Aber die Liebe [But Love] (1893), develops a Nietzschean/Christian duality (an odd but powerful pairing that was to resurface again and again in expressionist literature) allowing it to crystallize around the dominant theme of love. On the one hand, he shows how the modern age’s hunger for individuality leads to isolation and alienation, but on the other he repeatedly returns to an affirmation of the healing power of love. Stylistically there is still some of the passionate rhetoric of Erlösungen, but there is also the distanced, observing manner of the impressionist. Schoenberg’s letters to Dehmel, written more than fifteen years after he set his first Dehmel texts, explain the significance of the poetry and the way in which it affected him: Your poems have had a decisive influence on my musical development. It was because of them that I was for the first time compelled to seek a new tone in lyric writing. That is, I found it without having to look, by reflecting in music what your poems stirred up in me. He expands on this in a letter written on the occasion of Dehmel’s fiftieth birthday, 18 November 1913: I have already said that a Dehmel poem marks almost every turning-point of my musical development, and that it was nearly always in responding to your tones that I found the new tone that was to be my own. This tone was conveyed to us by the content, which was difficult to understand at that time, but more importantly by the sound of your poetry, which we absorbed fully. I have always responded to you with my ‘sound-understanding’ [Klang-Verstand] and because of this have perhaps quickly been able to penetrate the ‘sense of the senses’ [Sinnen-Sinn].

Dehmel’s poem uses much of the same vocabulary and imagery as Heine’s but tums it inside out almost like a glove. Where Heine uses the blossoming of the flowers in May both to mirror and to motivate the (male) speaker’s declaration of love, Dehmel’s speaker is a girl, conscious nearly to the point of bursting that spring growth is rampant in nature, yet frustrated and unable to see why her beloved is not responding like Heine’s young man. Five of Heine’s eight lines share a rhyme sound, two in the first stanza as part of a familiar rhyme scheme, and three in the second, deliberately breaking up that familiar pattern—which helps to communicate the speaker’s rising emotion. Dehmel similarly plays with formal expectations, but to the opposite effect. The first stanza almost fulfills a standard aabccb pattern, but the penultimate line is split into two, producing three c-rhymes, one from the monosyllabic fifth line, which slows down the pace and introduces the note of tension. The second stanza’s mirroring device (putting the couplet at the end to produce deedff) fails to ‘round off’ the emotional content of the poem as one might expect, partly because the last word is negative, partly because the rhyme is itself used to articulate the gap between the yearning flowers and the indifferent boy.

Rhythmically, too, Dehmel does the opposite of Heine, who uses the regularity of the iambic meter to underline the fact that the first line of each stanza is longer than the last three, emphasizing the mounting emotion. Dehmel’s first lines are single evocative words, establishing no metrical expectation; lines two to four of stanza one and two to five of stanza two fall into something approaching regularity, the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables to accompany the construction of the girl’s romantic dream-picture; twice, however, an interruption is used to convey her profound unsettlement as the fifth line of stanza one splits and the fifth of stanza two is cut short, and in both cases the last line begins with two stressed syllables, to mark the bursting of the bubble.

Frisch notes that ‘the remarkable harmonic planning and control in “Mädchenfrühling” are complemented by—actually, inextricably linked to—Schoenberg’s sophisticated treatment of meter and rhythm,’ and explains a series of metrical ambiguities in the setting. Nonetheless, his explanation of Schoenberg’s omission of Dehmel’s line eleven highlights what is in effect a creative misreading of the original: Schoenberg created an abbreviated ternary or ABA’ form, where the A’ section if so short that he ‘may well have felt it necessary to truncate the poetry of the B section (‘Maisonnenregen’} somewhat to achieve a rounded musical form that would not be grossly imbalanced’. The original poem is, however, not ternary in structure but what one might call ‘modified binary’: each stanza begins with an evocation of the season (first April, then May), moves on to the activity of nature (first the buds breaking open, then the flowers growing towards the sun), and finally registers the failure of the boy to act in parallel with nature. In the second stanza the middle section is longer or broken off less quickly, which suggests the pain of waiting and the girl’s growing frustration with the boy’s inability or unwillingness to respond to the increasingly obvious ‘clues’ that nature is providing. In Heine’s poem there is no chronological development; Dehmel provides one; Schoenberg’s setting seems to have imposed a third emotional structure on a familiar romantic topos.

It is striking how often Dehmel’s love poems record problems, division, or dissatisfaction. Those of Weib und Welt, which caused such a scandal when they were published in 1896, are no exception, despite the fact that they emerged from Dehmel’s—ultimately fulfilled—emotions for Ida Auerbach. The first of the Dehmel settings of 1899, ‘Mannesbangen’ [Man’s Fear] is another such, even though it specifically evokes sexual fulfillment. The poem is a paradoxical conceit: the opening lines are almost defiant in self-defense, the central section then describes in sensual detail the very situation in which the speaker is most vulnerable, and it closes with an admission of fear and an accusation. But each element is double-edged: the woman running her hands through the man’s hair produces a sensation so acutely pleasurable that it becomes akin to pain; the accusation—’you sinner’—is not to be taken literally, but, given the position of the man’s head, should be read as an ironic declaration of complicity in sexual excitement; the trembling derives as much from sexual arousal as it does from fear—indeed, fear itself has only been evoked as an ironic way of expressing the true interpretation of the man’s trembling. The first two lines coolly fit themselves to the two clauses of the statement, but then the line lengths immediately begin to dislocate the statements, with a break after ‘deinen,’ and another after ‘solchen.’ The verb in the second of the subordinate clauses dependent on ‘wenn’ is delayed for four short, punchy lines by the comparison of hands with daggers, giving a sense of mounting tension released by the rhyme of ‘fahrst’ with ‘begehrst.’ Line 9, the longest in the poem, is also the most relaxed. After this release of tension, the last couplet reads more calmly than Frisch, for example, suggests. Nonetheless, the poem is acerbic to a degree not found in the earlier Dehmel collections, positing in its ironies an antagonism that keeps the partnership on edge, and there is nothing remotely folksy about it.

It is related in style and mood to the overtly sadistic ‘Warnung’ [Warning] from the same collection.

While Dehmel was abjuring the traditional influences that produced neo-romantic or symbolist poetry in German, Stefan George and Hugo von Hofmannsthal were espousing them. When Lublinski turned his back on Dehmel, so to speak, he added, ‘any discussion of the lyric poetry of the future for the moment means a discussion of the poetry of Stefan George’. Dehmel and George were openly hostile to each other; Dehmel’s second wife, Ida Auerbach, had once been one of George’s muses, so there are personal as well as professional reasons for George’s description of Dehmel’s work as ‘amongst the worst and most objectionable writing I have ever read’. Hofmannsthal was for several years caught between the two poets, and his behavior is almost a yardstick for the differences between them. When Hofmannsthal’s relations with George were cool, his correspondence with Dehmel livened up; when Hofmannsthal and George were on good terms, he dropped the correspondence with Dehmel. Their works were so different in style that, in the words of Julius Bab, ‘all serious connoisseurs of the arts in Germany are divided into those who admire Dehmel and those who admire George’. This was not true of Schoenberg, however. He wrote in 1913 that a poem by Dehmel stands at all the major turning points in his musical development, and it is clear that his settings of George mark an important stage in the transition to free atonality. How can it be that two such diametrically opposed writers occupy such important positions, especially as Schoenberg’s Viennese circle of friends included Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus, and the latter’s hostility to the artistic directions represented by George was implacable?

He resists, and there follow two poems in which his regal purity is reaffirmed and then, in the alternating rhythm that this section has, a poem that urges the poet to abandon his dreams of royal power and purity for a sybaritic life of sensuality. The last poem in this first section, ‘Friedensabend’ [Evening of Peace], describes a hot evening, dominated by threatening clouds, in which the voices from the suppressed destructive worlds call quietly to the poet—

He is nervous, afraid to enter the territory of other men, but encouraged that the woman appears to be trying to meet his gaze, and prepares rich gifts of silk and roses for her. He is paralyzed by his desire.

The alternation of fear and hope keeps the poet in a state of near despair, and physical contact with his beloved is like a drug to which he has become addicted—‘Wenn ich heut nicht deinen leib berühre / Wird der faden meiner seele reißen’ [If I do not touch your body today, the thread of my soul will break] (Nr. 8). The blooms in a flower bed symbolize his love, strong stems with goblet-shaped heads, some velvety-soft, all emitting an enticingly sweet smell, but surrounded by erotic purple thorns.

The eleventh poem is the consummation of their love—extraordinarily sexual writing from a poet normally so fastidious (it will be discussed further down)—and the last four evoke their gradual parting. The first of these [No. 12] enjoins the beloved to ignore the threats from outside: ‘denke der wächter nicht die rasch uns scheiden dürfen’ [do not think of the watchers who may quickly part us]; do not think either of the white sands that are ready to receive their blood.

But she will not step into the boat he has prepared for her.

Despite his pleading, she talks of evanescent things like the leaves on the trees and the delicate mutability of the dragonflies.

Before completing the George Songs, op. 15, Schoenberg had set ‘Ich darf nicht dankend an dir niedersinken’ [I must not sink down beside you in thanks] from Waller im Schnee (Pilgrim in the Snow]), as the first of Two Songs, op. 14 (in December 1907), begun two more settings, ‘Der Jünger’ [The Disciple] from Der Teppich des Lebens [The Tapestry of Life], and ‘Friedensabend’ [Evening of Peace], the last poem from section one of Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. He had also written the F-sharp minor String Quartet, op. 10 (March 1907—August 1908), whose third and fourth movements are settings of George’s ‘Litanei’ [Litany] and ‘Entrückung’ [Transportation] from Der siebente Ring (The Seventh Ring]. Schoenberg’s discovery of George, probably through the Ansorge Society, had opened up a poetic world of strong but controlled emotion, characterized by great formal and ethical rigor and above all by loneliness and the need for renunciation.

‘Entrückung’—which opens with the famous ‘Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten’ [I feel air from another planet]—describes the total dissolution of the poetic identity in sound and movement and its eventual reestablishment as a passive element of the greater spiritual whole: ‘Ich bin ein funke nur vom heiligen feuer / Ich bin ein dröhnen nur der heiligen stimme’ [I am only a spark from the holy fire, I am only a rumble of the holy voice].

Content aside, however, Schoenberg’s account of how his music arose in conjunction with George’s poetry, given famously in his essay ‘Das Verhiltnis zum Text’ [The Relationship to the Text] (1912), has curious similarities with the terms in which he accounted for his attraction to Dehmel’s poems in November 1913. The following predates his comments on Dehmel: A few years ago I was deeply ashamed to discover that in the case of some Schubert Lieder that were very familiar to me I had absolutely no idea of what was going on in the poems. When I had read these poems I found that it had not helped my understanding of these Lieder in the slightest, that I was not remotely required to alter my assessment of what the music presented. Quite the reverse: it was revealed to me that I had grasped the content, the true content, without knowing the poem, and had perhaps grasped it more profoundly than if I had remained on the surface of what thoughts the actual words were expressing. Even more decisive for me than this experience was the fact that I had completed many of my own Lieder intoxicated by the opening sounds of the first words of the text, without being remotely concerned with what happened in the rest of the poem, indeed without having even the faintest grasp of this in the midst of the whirl of composition. When one hears a line of a poem, a measure of a composition, one is able to grasp the whole. Thus I had perfectly assimilated the Schubert Lieder, poetry included, purely from the music, and perfectly assimilated Stefan George’s poems purely from their sound.

The fact that most musicologists seem to accept what Schoenberg says without question does not invalidate the literary scholar’s near-astonishment at such a claim: it is prima facie highly improbable that complex texts, whose every carefully crafted syllable adds to and refines the complete meaning of the poem, can be fully grasped even after several very close readings. Yet in the context of the expressionist journal in which Schoenberg’s account first appeared, the desire to emancipate the music from the superficial ‘meaning’ of the text is quite comprehensible, and this context may account for the sense that Schoenberg is exaggerating. But George’s verse has a peculiar incantatory quality that may also account for the gist of Schoenberg’s remarks. Take the seventh of Das Buch der hängenden Gärten poems. The poem evokes the state of desperate longing that has overcome the central figure because of his physical and emotional dependence. The first two lines convey the disorientation partly by means of displacing the verb in each to the final position, as if they were both formally subordinate clauses; there is, however, no subordinating conjunction, and they must have the sense of main clauses. The third line contains the only normal main verb in the poem, upon which the four subordinate dass-clauses in lines 4-7 depend, and thus assures the tight structure of the poem as a whole. These last four lines look regular enough, a litany of misfortunes, but the second of them is the only line in the poem that is not a perfect iambic pentameter, since it has only four feet, Interrupting the pattern this way (and breaking up the strong ‘dass ich’ pattern and inverting subject and object) helps to convey an additional weariness. There are only three rhyme sounds in the poem, whose scheme is thus abbcacc, a deliberately lopsided and irregular pattern. The content is quite unremarkable, and there is hardly an image in the poem that could be called original, but the familiar symptoms of a lover’s distress are expressed with such technical skill that the import is quite idiosyncratic and fresh.

Something similar can be said of the climactic eleventh poem. Again, the syntax makes the sense of the poem hover. It opens with a subordinate clause that forms part of a question—a question, moreover, that seems to cast doubt on the fact of their lovemaking. The memory of it is introduced slowly, the subject of the subordinate verb after ‘Ich erinnere dass’ is displaced by a comparison, ‘wie schwache rohren’; the ‘wir’ is unusually the penultimate word of its clause, but it has been anticipated in a strong position by ‘beide,’ emphasizing that the experience was fully shared. The trembling is conveyed partly by the sense, partly also by the alliteration of ‘b’ in ‘beide stamm zu beben wir begannen’. The deliciousness of the sensation and the slight haze of the memory is expressed partly by the use of ‘wenn’—this conjunction suggests that the trembling began whenever their bodies touched and not just at their first kiss. The penultimate line is also dependent on ‘ich erinnere,’ and the fact that the two memories are recalled side-by-side (instead of being linked, say, by ‘so that’) contributes to the subtle, but erotic, distancing of the experience. Lines 6 and 7 are also one foot shorter than the others, all iambic pentameters, which gives more urgency and allows for a meaningful pause before the full-length last line, more measured because of its five monosyllabic words.

There is a clear progression both in subject matter and theme in the poets Schoenberg set most often between 1894 and 1909. They are all love poets: Ludwig Pfau the simplest, dividing his positive and negative emotions between poems; Dehmel tortured by the coexistence in the same collections, within single poems, of the delights of Eros and its dangers; George most subtly wrestling with both himself and the imminence of loss within the one collection. In each case, the technical means have developed to suit the new tenor of the material. George’s finely tuned verses are only apparently a return to old-fashioned styles, and in reality, they are the vehicles for a rarified and profoundly melancholy world view. His is also the world in which emotions are most delicately displaced by form.

The ‘content’ of each poet’s work does in many respects appear to match Schoenberg’s state of mind as he set them—but it does not do so necessarily. Had he set Dehmel in 1907, it would doubtless have been possible to account for this biographically: Dehmel, too, wrote poems that would suit a mood of embattled rejection. By bringing out some of the technical and stylistic features of these three poets, I have tried to suggest that there is at least another strand, besides content, to the development of Schoenberg’s taste. Equally, this enables us to take Schoenberg at his word when he says that he is less concerned with the content of the poetry and respect the sincerity and meaningfulness of his choice of poems at the same time. Whatever else Pfau, Dehmel, and George may have been, they were in a sense ‘strong’ poets. It is true that all write of troubled emotions and the two rivals were both beset by fears and anxieties. Nevertheless, none doubted the importance of poetry and his own ability to contribute to—in George’s case dictate—the canon. Schoenberg’s accounts of his response to poetry implies that this was a major factor in his choice, and suggests, too, that his literary taste was rather more developed than is usually acknowledged.