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Оглавление1“Eine wahre Olla Patrida [sic]”
Anna Milder-Hauptmann, Schubert, and Programming the Orient
ALL ONE NEED do to astonish present-day musicians is to display various early-nineteenth-century European concert programs, with their variety-over-unity approach to programming and their frequent mixture of certifiably “great” music (in the present-day canon) with lighter fare.1 In particular, today’s singers desirous of a theme for their programs or any other sort of coherent design are understandably flabbergasted by concerts such as this one given by the famous singer Anna Pauline Milder-Hauptmann on January 13, 1825 in Vienna (see table 1.1).2
1.The opening work was the overture to Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito. Opera overtures were a frequent component of programs organized by singers.3
2.Next came “Der Troubadour” and “Concertscene für Gesang, Orchester und Guitarre,” by Carl Blum, composed expressly for Anna Milder.4 Carl Wilhelm August Blum was a guitarist as well as a singer, librettist, and comic opera composer.5
3.Then came a harp fantasy, performed by Xavier Desargues, a visiting French harp virtuoso.6
4.The first half ended with a duet by Giacomo Meyerbeer, sung by the famous bass-baritone Eduard Devrient (1801–77)7 and Anna Milder. We discover in the review from Berlin (see note 2) that the duet was from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Margherita d’Anjou, first performed in 1820; whether the reference is to the “opéra en trois actes” or the two-act opera semiseria is not known.
5.The second half of the program also began with a Mozart opera overture, the overture to Le nozze di Figaro.
6.Next came “Große Scene” by Haydn—we find out in the Berlin review (see note 2) that it was Berenice, che fai, Hob. XXIVa: 10, from May 1795, composed during Haydn’s second London visit.
7.Subsequently was “Variations for the Violin,” composed by Carl Möser (“Moeser”) (1774–1851), who was a friend of Prince Louis Ferdinand (Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto was dedicated to him). I wonder whether the work in question could have been Carl Möser’s Fantaisie et variations sur des motifs de l’opéra “La vestale de Spontini,” op. 11 (Berlin: Paez, 1825), especially as Milder-Hauptmann performed the principal role of Julia, the young vestal virgin in this tragédie lyrique from 1805 to 1807.
Table 1.1. Program for a concert on January 13, 1825, with Anna Pauline Milder-Hauptmann.
| Concert: Anzeigen Donnerstag den 13. Januar 1825 Im Saale des Königlichen Schauspielhauses Großes Vocal= und Instrumental=Concert, Gegeben Von der Königlichen Sängerin Anna Milder. | |
| Erster Theil | |
| 1. | Ouvertüre aus der Oper: Titus, von Mozart |
| 2. | Der Troubadour, Gedicht von C. v. Holtei, als Concertscene für Gesang, Orchester und Guitarre, eigends für die Koncertgeberin componirt von Carl Blum, und gesungen von derselben. |
| 3. | Phantasie für die Harfe, ausgeführt von dem Königl. Kammermusikus und ersten Harfenisten Hrn. Desargus. |
| 4. | Duett von J. Meyerbeer gesungen vom Königl. Sänger Herrn Devrient und Anna Milder. |
| Zweiter Theil | |
| 5. | Ouvertüre aus der Oper: Figaro, von Mozart. |
| 6. | Große Scene von Haydn, gesungen von Anna Milder. |
| 7. | Variationen für die Violine, componirt von Carl Moeser, gespielt von dessen Schüler dem Königl. Eleven Carl Ebner. |
| 8. | Terzett von Beethoven, gesungen von der Königl. Sängerin Mad. Seidler, den Königl. Sängern Herren Stümer und Sieber. |
| 9. | Duett aus Romeo und Julietta, von Zingarelli, gesungen von Mad. Seidler und Anna Milder. |
| 10. | Die Forelle, Lied von Schubert, gesungen von Anna Milder. |
| Billets zu 1. Rthlr. sind in der Musikhandlung des Herrn Schlesinger, unter den Linden Nr. 34., und des Herrn Gröbenschütz, an der Schleusenbrücke; im Schauspielhause beim Kastellan Hrn. Adler, und Abends an der Kasse zu haben. Der Anfang ist 7 Uhr das Ende 9 Uhr. Die Kasse wird um 6 Uhr geöffnet. |
Source: Franz Schubert. Dokumente 1817–1830, vol. 1, ed. Till Gerrit Waidelich, assisted by Renate Hilmar-Voit and Andreas Mayer, document no. 302, p. 227. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1993.
8.Then came an unidentified vocal trio by Beethoven, sung by the soprano Karoline Seidler-Wranitzsky (the first Agathe in Der Freischütz), the tenor Heinrich Stümmer, and the bass Ferdinand Sieber. The Berlin critic says that the unnamed trio “seems to be an early work by the genial composer”; could it have been “Tremate, empi, tremate,” op. 116 of 1802 (revised, possibly in 1814)?
9.Next, we have an unspecified duet from Giulietta e Romeo of 1796 by Nicola Zingarelli, sung by Seidler and Milder. The work was probably “Dunque il mio bene,” clearly one of the most popular numbers in this very popular opera, albeit one that seems rather dull to contemporary eyes and ears. One notes that the part for Giulietta lies largely in the middle register (Milder’s forte), with only a few modest flourishes (not Milder’s forte) at the very end.8
10.And finally, the program closed with “Die Forelle, Lied von Schubert.” “Die Forelle” is the shortest work on the list, a bonbon (but a profound one) at the close of it all.
The variety, of course, is what astonishes contemporary musicians, as does the mixture of names they know well—the holy trinity of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—with names to which Time has not been kind. William Weber’s characterization of such programs as “variations on miscellany” is apt, but so too is his cautionary note that “miscellany” at that time was not a pejorative description.9 The mixture of local music and music from elsewhere, as well as the desire to include something for everyone, is also on display in that long-ago evening’s entertainment by some of the best musicians in Vienna.
This program was advertised as “beginning at 7 and ending at 9 o’clock,” but two hours is actually slim and trim compared to other contemporaneous concerts that must have really put people’s Sitzfleisch to the test—if they sat through the whole thing.10 A Berlin actor in late 1825 organized an “Abend-Unterhaltung,” an evening salon, described by a critic in Der Freimüthige for December 26 as “A true olla podrida, composed of all possible ingredients at hand.”11 The critic was, if anything, understating the degree of miscellany: the program included the overture to Ludwig Spohr’s opera Der Berggeist,12 a long poem by Friedrich Kind declaimed by a famous actress, and Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” sung by one Herr Bader at the piano. Marching onward, there was also an unidentified duet by Saverio Mercadante, sung by Milder and Devrient; an adagio and polonaise for cello by Antoine Bohrer;13 a vocal quartet setting of “Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe” by Friedrich Heinrich Himmel;14 an unspecified scene with chorus by Bernhard Adolf Marx, composed for Madame Milder; a work by the prolific male-quartet composer Franz Eisenhofer; the overture to Mozart’s La finta giardiniera, K. 196 (1775), followed by the first scene; a fantasy with variations by Friedrich Kalkbrenner;15 an aria with chorus from Rossini’s La Cenerentola (“Nacqui all’affanno, al pianto,” rondò with chorus from act 2, scene 3?); Mozart’s trio “Mandina amabile,” K. 480, composed for Francesco Bianchi’s 1783 comic opera La villanella rapita;16 the male quartet version of Schubert’s “Der Gondelfahrer,” D809; Carl Blum’s ballad “Der Goldschmiedgesell;”17 and a chorus of Russians from Ernst Raupach’s drama Alangbu, with guitar accompaniment.18 I would have needed strong drink to survive all that. The critic’s sarcasm in thus invoking olla podrida bespeaks an early ripple in a changing tide, a reaction already forming against the admixture of light works in popular taste with serious compositions on concert programs.
About Anna Milder
My current interest in such occasions centers on Anna Milder-Hauptmann, Beethoven’s first Leonore and one of the most extraordinary singers in the early nineteenth century. In particular, I look at the nexus of art song as an element in these miscellany concerts, Anna Milder’s influence on composers and concert programming, and the fashion for oriental subjects with Schubert’s Suleika songs as the focus (see fig. 1.1 for depictions of her).
I will happily echo Brahms in declaring that “Suleika I” is among Schubert’s loveliest works,19 and it subsequently gained a companion piece in another Suleika song created expressly for Milder. The genesis of “Suleika II” is a familiar tale, beginning with Milder’s attempt to make contact with Schubert in the autumn of 1824. He was in Hungary with the Esterházy family, and therefore, she wrote him on December 24, 1824, to say “how much I enjoy your songs, and what enthusiasm they arouse in audiences where I have performed them.”20 This was the prelude to her solicitation of both an opera and more songs from him; Schubert, whose pleasure at hearing from Leonore one can well imagine, duly sent her Alfonso und Estrella and several songs, including “Suleikas zweiter Gesang,” dedicated to her. She loved the song, she told him in a return letter from Berlin written on March 8, 1825, declaring it “magical” and telling him that it brought her to tears, as did the first Suleika song and “Geheimnis,” D491 from 1816, clearly also included in the package.21 I would guess that Schubert’s setting of “Geheimnis” was a case of the composer turning Johann Mayrhofer’s heartfelt compliment to him into a compliment to her: “You sing, and the sun shines and Spring is near,” the poet wrote, and what singer wouldn’t want to hear that?22 And yet, such rarefied beauty as was on display in “Suleika I” and “Geheimnis” were not, Milder told Schubert, meant for the public, who merely wanted their ears tickled. She turned down Alfonso und Estrella because it did not have a part suitable for her and requested a new opera from him, preferably in one act and on an oriental subject, with the soprano as the chief character.23 She also requested that he set to music “Der Nachtschmetterling,” which Walther Dürr has surmised was probably Johann Gottfried Ritter von Leitner’s poem “Der Jüngling und der Nachtschmetterling” (The youth and the moth),24 in a style “addressed to a wider public.”25 One can imagine her savoring the dramatic possibilities, the mothlike fluttering in both piano and vocal parts, afforded by this dialogue poem.
Fig. 1.1 a–b. Depictions of Anna Milder-Hauptmann. (a) Axis Images / Alamy Stock Photo (b) UtCon Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.
Well before the Christmas 1824 letter to Schubert, matters of taste and repertoire were part of her life story. At age sixteen, she was taken in hand and tutored by the composer Sigismund von Neukomm (1778–1858), who was one of Haydn’s students, and then by Antonio Salieri.26 In one thoroughly delicious anecdote, Neukomm brought her to Haydn, for whom she sang “a bravura aria from an old German opera much beloved by the Salzburgers” (I wish I knew what it was). After the aria, Haydn made his famous comment “My child, you have a voice like a house” (“Liebes Kind, Sie haben eine Stimme wie ein Haus”), upon which he turned to Neukomm and said, “You, however, should burn this score on the spot—she should not sing such trash.”27 In April 1803, at age seventeen, she was engaged by Emanuel Schikaneder for the Theater an der Wien, where she appeared for her debut as Juno in Franz Süßmayr’s Singspiel Der Spiegel von Arkadien of 1794. (This was an offspring of Die Zauberflöte with a libretto also by Schikaneder.)28 One of the most popular numbers in this work was the bravura aria “Juno wird dich stets umschweben,” its tempo allegro, its meter 4/4, its tessitura stratospheric, with an uncomfortable emphasis on the passagio and quite a few melismas, as one can see from Süßmayr’s exuberant treatment of the word Seite (see example 1.1).
But for Milder’s sake and to her specifications, the composer provided an alternate aria on the same words (most of them), its music conceived in a very different vein: here, the tempo is andante, the meter 6/8, the tessitura largely in the middle of the voice, and passage work placed only at the end, as shown in example 1.2. This version was published in Berlin in 1838, with a prefatory homage to the recently deceased singer; it is quite moving that her friends chose this earliest specimen of her fame to herald her passing, thereby tracing an arc from beginning to end and choosing a work emblematic of the singularity of her voice.29
From the start, Milder impelled change: composers wanted to write for her, and they tailored their works to her unique traits. There are numerous anecdotes in which writers try to describe how she sounded, stressing difference from everyone else as they did so. The Bohemian composer Johann Wenzel Tomaschek (Václav Jan Tomášek), in his Selbstbiographie, writes of attending the Akademie im großen Redoutensaal in Vienna at which Beethoven’s Der glorreiche Augenblick, op. 136, and Seventh Symphony, op. 92, were performed in 1814, with Milder-Hauptmann the soprano soloist in the cantata. Tomaschek invokes “the colossal voice of Madame Milder” resounding through the entire space, with the violin soloist helpless against such power.30 One of the most detailed descriptions of her sound, her technique, and her artistry comes from the Berlin composer and music critic Johann Carl Friedrich Rellstab, father of the Schubert poet Ludwig Rellstab and an important figure in Berlin’s musical life. He heard her in Vienna in 1811 and wrote a travel report from that city for the Vossische Zeitung, saying that no other performer had aroused his curiosity as much as she did and that he had studied her voice every day for the duration of his visit. Among the qualities that most impressed him was the particular beauty of her “middle voice” and the fact that from the top to the bottom, her voice was equally strong, full, and lovely. Trills and mordents were not her forte, he said, nor were bravura passages, but she had every nuance of soft and loud, strong and limpid—like the best Cremona violins, Rellstab rhapsodizes.31
Example 1.1. Franz Xaver Süßmayr, “Juno wird dich stets umschweben,” from Der Spiegel von Arkadien (1794).
In fact, her voice was often compared to instruments, especially the woodwinds. When she sang a role in Ignaz von Seyfried’s opera Cyrus in 1803, Haydn’s biographer Georg August Griesinger wrote to say that her tone was “purest metal” (“reinste Metall”), and that she was adept at sustaining notes powerfully and for a long time, without elaborate ornamentation (“Schnörkel”).32 Still another critic, writing about the July 18, 1814, performance of Fidelio for Der Sammler, wrote that Milder was not an adherent of any of the usual singing methods, that she was a “new school” unto herself, and that the “rare clarinet-like sound of her voice” was extraordinary.33 Schubert would exploit that quality, pairing it with itself, as it were, in “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen”; he may have first encountered Wilhelm Müller’s words for the first section in “Der Berghirt,” op. 4 no. 1, by Milder’s pianist-composer sister Jeannette Bürde (example 1.3, in which one notes Bürde’s use of by-then-customary Swiss yodel motifs).34
The echo effects between the clarinet and the voice in Schubert’s D965 would have been a nod both to Milder’s fame as the first Emmeline in Joseph Weigl’s Die Schweizer Familie of 1809—another hugely popular Singspiel in its day—and the timbral resemblance of her voice to that instrument. When Napoleon heard her sing Lilla in Martin y Soler’s Una cosa rara in 1809, he reportedly exclaimed, “Now there’s a voice—I have not heard such a voice for a long time” (Voilà une voix, depuis longtemps je n’ai pas entendu une telle voix).35 He offered her a royal position in Paris with perquisites galore, but she was romantically involved at the time with the court jeweler Peter Hauptmann; they married in 1810, and she bore him both a daughter (in 1811) and another child whose name is not known. But the marriage broke up, and Milder left Vienna in 1815; her life thereafter is actually bound up with the history of gay Berlin, and she took a cultivated Berlin Jewish woman named Friederike Liman (1770–1844), a close friend of the famous salonnière Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, as her partner around 1817. Liman had previously been in a liaison with the singer and actress Friederike Bethmann-Unzelmann, who died in 1815 (this after Liman’s youthful marriage to and separation from Carl August Liman). In a letter from Liman to Rahel on March 26, 1816, some seven months after Bethmann-Unzelmann’s death, Friederike describes Milder as “good-hearted … not stupid, as many believe, and somewhat childlike” (Hertzens gut … nicht dum, wie viele glauben und etwaß kindisches).36 The flare-up of sexual attraction—“my fever” was her designation for Milder—would burn out quickly, or so she reports (one is allowed to wonder), allowing her to become a “pure Plato or Plata,” a contemporaneous designation for platonic same-sex relationships.37 According to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense in his sketch of Liman’s friendship with Rahel, Liman’s attachment to Unzelmann had generated pernicious gossip, but Milder was so revered that no such unpleasantness troubled them thereafter.38 One hopes his account was true.
Example 1.3. Jeannette Bürde, “Der Berghirt,” op. 4 no. 1, measures 1–14.
Another, and quite wonderful, anecdote about Milder and her partner can serve as segue to a discussion of the two Suleika songs. In the summer of 1823, Liman and Milder were in Marienbad, where Milder visited Goethe on 15 August. After her departure, Goethe wrote to his daughter-in-law Ottilie and to Carl Friedrich Zelter, the latter on 24 August, that she sought to make small songs large and that the memory brought tears to his eyes; the songs were, we learn from Friederike, Conradin Kreutzer’s “Lebe wohl, lebe wohl, mein Lieb” and “Will ruhen unter den Bäumen hier” from Neun Wanderlieder von Ludwig Uhland of 1818. (Schubert respected this work.)39 “Goethe was completely dissolved in tears” (Gö war gans aufgelöst in trähnen), she reports. In 1828, Goethe would inscribe a “splendid edition,” a Prachtexemplar, of his drama Iphigenie auf Tauris for Carl Friedrich Zelter to present to Milder on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her ascending the stage; this ageless tale, the great poet declared, achieved a higher goal when it was set to music by Gluck and sung by her.40 It is Goethe’s repeated statement to both correspondents that she made small pieces of music large that I find fascinating; the word surely has connotations of something beyond the extraordinary size of her voice, as it identifies how she could imbue “small songs” with profundity and grandeur. The Suleika songs are, of course, also “large” in their amplitude: these are not miniature Lieder but extended Gesänge, each in two different tempi with rich tonal plans.
Having received the Suleika songs from Schubert, Milder performed either just “Suleika II,” with her sister accompanying, or both at a concert in Berlin on June 9, 1825, before leaving for Paris.41 Among the other works performed that evening were the overture to Così fan tutte, “Gruss an die Schweiz” by Carl Blum,42 a duet by Saverio Mercadante (perhaps the same one she had previously performed in Vienna in January), Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” and the overture to Rossini’s L’inganno felice. By quickly surveying Blum’s yodel-song written for Milder (example 1.4), we see the sort of strains Schubert would raise to a much higher level in “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen.” A reviewer describing this concert in the Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung, however, went into raptures about Milder’s “silvery-bright and golden-pure voice” (still more metal metaphors, but precious metals this time) as she portrayed these “noble children of Nature” (Swiss shepherds) in Blum’s bundle of clichés.43
According to a London review of this event in The Harmonicon, she sang “two airs from Goethe’s Westöstlichem Divan, the music by Franz Schubert, and Erlkönig, also by Goethe and Schubert … which pleased extremely. This lady has the judgment and good taste to select such pieces for her performance as are calculated to afford her an opportunity for her powers of moving the soul, not of showing off the compass of her voice.” The Janus-faced jab both at her somewhat restricted range and at bravura singing or, what Carl Maria von Weber called “Italian Larifari,” is clear.44
The Two Suleika Songs: Hafiz, Goethe, Marianne von Willemer, and Schubert
Schubert, of course, thought that Goethe wrote both of the poems he chose from the Divan; he knew nothing of Marianne, nor did any of the other composers drawn to these works. (Schubert’s Shakespearean ventriloquism in music is astonishing: a German male poet had, so he thought, assumed the sensibility of a pseudo-Persian female persona expressing herself in a Western adaptation of an exotic verse form, and he, a twenty-four-year-old Austrian man, would set these words to music.) “Suleika I,” D720, was, we know, composed in March 1821, in two versions that differ by one measure. The first version, the autographed manuscript of which resides in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, was published in 1822 by Cappi and Diabelli and dedicated to Franz von Schober. The autographed manuscript of the second, “Suleika II,” D717, is lost, and the date of composition is therefore uncertain. Was it composed alongside the first, “Was bedeutet die Bewegung?,” in 1821, as Otto Erich Deutsch thought was most likely, or did Schubert, at Milder’s request for something “oriental,” go back to Goethe’s Divan and pluck a pendant poem from the anthology in late 1824?45 If the latter is the case, one wonders whether he could have been at least slightly influenced by her words to him about the nature of the first song as too profound for hoi polloi. Schubert was hardly one to kowtow to diva behavior from singers, but such was his respect for Milder that choosing and fashioning a second song that would slant somewhat more to “the public taste” seems not unlikely, if its genesis was in 1824. Andreas Mayer has aptly suggested that “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen,” composed four years later, is located somewhere in the middle ground between “popular” and “pure” taste in accord both with the singer’s desires and the composer’s refusal to write dross on command.46 With “Suleika II,” she could have her cake and eat it too: she could charm the public and do so with music of genuine worth, on the sort of “oriental subject” she had requested for an opera. She was born in Constantinople, we remember; she was only there for five years in infancy, but perhaps early childhood impressions as well as musical fashion influenced her attraction to orientalism in music.
Example 1.4. Carl Blum, “Gruss an die Schweiz,” measures 1–29.
If she performed both Suleika songs on that June day in 1825, the listeners could have heard what the two songs share, in Graham Johnson’s typically astute observations:47 the busy accompaniments with the imputation of continuous breeze, the incessant alternation of major and minor modes, the phrase repetitions, the importance of leaps of a sixth in the vocal lines (the ballon, the lilt, of this music is due in part to this element), and the doubling in thirds or unison or octaves between the voice and piano, especially the right-hand part. The contours of the vocal line at the start of “Suleika II” (“Ach, um deine feuchten Schwingen”) recall “Ach, die wahre Herzenskunde” in “Suleika I,” and the melody of “Eile denn zu meinem Lieben” in “Suleika II” is so closely akin to “Und so kannst du weiter ziehen” in number I as to defy mere coincidence (see example 1.5).
Schubert clearly had a mind somewhat like a computer, in which instantaneous recall of gestures from years earlier was a matter of nanoseconds. Furthermore, the two songs are complementary opposites in terms of large-scale design. Not only do both engage strophic variations, but also number I ends with an “Etwas langsamer” section and number II with an “Etwas geschwinder” section whose jog-trot rhythms bespeak messages borne more by horse-drawn coach than by wind: a galop (a lively dance of Hungarian or German origin that became popular in Vienna in the 1820s, just in time for Schubert to appropriate it) in 3/4 meter rather than the customary duple meter.48 But if there is undeniably complementarity, there is also difference, possibly originating with the composer’s awareness of Milder’s preference for popular taste in the second song. The East Wind song, composed in Beethoven’s “dark key” (“schwarze Tonart”) of B minor, is remarkable for profundity without intrusion by anything “popular.” The West Wind song, in contrast, is in B-flat major, as far away tonally as one can go from B minor, while the clip-clopping galop is recognizably a nod to Vienna’s Redouten.
We owe a small troupe of bygone people thanks for the existence of these songs, beginning with one of medieval Persia’s most important poets, Khwaja Shams-ud Din Muhammed Hafez-e Shirazi, best known by his pen name Hafiz, born in the garden city of Shiraz in south central Persia (Iran) circa 1315. He died there in 1389 or 1390. The 486 ghazals in his Divan, or anthology, were meant to be sung (Hafiz was famous for the sweetness of his singing voice), and they are exceptionally complex, even for such a sophisticated form as this—easy comprehensibility was not his stock-in-trade.49 All ghazals are written in couplets called “beyts,” or “houses,” each with a fixed rhyme at the end of the second line, except for the “matla” (which means “orient” or “rising”), that is, the first couplet with the rhyme in both lines; this couplet sets the stage by stating the subject matter and establishing the atmosphere of the poem. The other couplets are reactions to the matla and feature actions that change, viewed from different angles and progressing from one point to another along a deepening trajectory until we reach the “maqta,” the objective of the ghazal contained in the final couplet and usually including the poet’s name. Hafiz’s ghazals often tell of the movement of opposites toward unity, such as lover and beloved, friendship and solitude, life and death, ignorance and wisdom, grief and bliss, the world that is passing and God who never dies, separation and union, the soul yearning to be united with itself, and so on, and they had a rich afterlife.50 These marvelous poems entered the German-speaking world through the auspices of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, born in Graz in 1774 and trained at Vienna’s Oriental Academy, founded by Empress Maria Theresa to teach diplomats the languages and customs of the Ottoman Empire. His translation of Hafiz was the first complete rendering into German, and it electrified Goethe when the publishing firm of Cotta sent him “some novelties” along with the books he had ordered from them in early 1814.51 “Hafiz is my sibling,” he wrote, in reaction to their shared fascination with the sensuous pleasures of life, precisely because they were both so aware of the temporal, transitory dimension of existence.52 The vital and erotic power of this poetry, its antidogmatic skepticism, and its typically Persian conversion of images from Nature into a substitute mythology drew him into another world, one that Marianne von Willemer joined after Goethe gave her a copy as a gift later that year and began writing poetry in which she is named Suleika and he becomes Hatem.53 When Marianne invokes “Athem,” or “breath” in “Suleika I,” it is a West-East play of words on the name Hatem, from the Arabic “hātim” (one who ordains or decrees) and “khātim” (which means a seal, signet ring, or stamp).54 Goethe also translated the Song of Solomon, and it was there that he discovered the Hebrew “hotem” or “seal,” cognate with the Arabic: “Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thy arm: for love is strong as death” (Song of Sol. 8:6). The words Siegel and siegeln thereafter resound throughout the Divan as part and parcel of its secret-encoded passion. Ciphers, games, masks, and veils are everywhere in this collection.
Example 1.5. Comparisons of Franz Schubert, “Suleika I,” D720 and “Suleika II,” D717.
a. “Suleika I,” measures 109–14; “Suleika II,” measures 9–12.
b. “Suleika II,” measures 129–34; “Suleika I,” measures 82–89.
When Marianne in 1814 gave Goethe her poem “Hochbeglückt in deiner Liebe,” which Hugo Wolf would later set to music so beautifully, Goethe had to recognize that she loved him. Responding as he often did to erotic situations that he accepted as hopeless (in this instance, both parties were married and of disparate ages, Goethe 65, Marianne 20), Goethe fled to Heidelberg to confer with some learned orientalists—but both Willemers followed him there. On 23 September, Marianne gave Goethe a poem beginning “Was bedeutet die Bewegung?” that she had written in the coach on the way to Heidelberg, and when they parted for the last time three days later, she gave him “Ach, um deine feuchten Schwingen.” Goethe would incorporate her three poems, lightly edited, into his Buch Suleika in the Divan and would, shortly before his death in 1832, send her back the letters she had written him over the years, as “witness to the loveliest of times.”55 It was not until nine years after her death in December 1860 that Herman Grimm (his father and uncle were the Brothers Grimm) revealed the true authorship of the three poems many had already identified as among the most beautiful in the volume.
Marianne’s exquisite poem “Was bedeutet die Bewegung?” begins with multiple questions about meaning—precisely the sort that so often impels poetry.56
| Was bedeutet die Bewegung? Bringt der Ost mir frohe Kunde? Seiner Schwingen frische Regung Kühlt des Herzens tiefe Wunde. Kosend spielt er mit dem Staube, Jagt ihn auf in leichten Wölkchen, Treibt zur sichern Rebenlaube Der Insekten frohes Völkchen. Lindert sanft der Sonne Glühen, Kühlt auch mir die heißen Wangen, Küßt die Reben noch im Fliehen, Die auf Feld und Hügel prangen. Und mir bringt sein leises Flüstern Von dem Freunde tausend Grüße; Eh’ noch diese Hügel düstern, Grüßen mich wohl tausend Küsse. Und so kannst du weiter ziehen! Diene Freunden und Betrübten. Dort wo hohe Mauern glühen, Dort find’ ich bald den Vielgeliebten. Ach, die wahre Herzenskunde, Liebeshauch, erfrischtes Leben Wird mir nur aus seinem Munde, Kann mir nur sein Atem geben.57 | What does this stirring portend? Does the east wind bring me joyous tidings? The refreshing motion of its wings Cools the heart’s deep wound. It plays sweetly with the dust, Chasing it about in light clouds, And drives the happy swarm of insects To the shelter of the vine leaves. It gently tempers the burning heat of the sun, And cools my hot cheeks; Even as it flies, it kisses the vines That adorn the fields and hillsides. And its soft whispering brings me A thousand greetings from my beloved; Before these hills grow dark, I shall be greeted by a thousand kisses. And now you may pass on, And serve friends and those who are sad. There, where high walls glow, I shall soon find my dearly beloved. Ah, the true message from the heart, The breath of love, renewed life, Will come to me only from his lips, Can be given to me only by his breath. |
Breezes from both east and west as messengers between lovers are a recurring element of medieval Persian verse, and both Goethe and Marianne availed themselves of it. “The musky morning breeze will gently blow again, / Once more the old world will turn young and grow again,” Hafiz writes at the start of one ghazal,58 “Sweet breeze, convey the dust of our existence to that place / Where Splendor reigns” in another. “At dawn, upon the breeze, I caught the scent of my beloved’s hair,” he tells us in the initial couplet of yet another poem and “Last night, news of my departed friend was brought to me upon the wind” at the start of another.59 “O morning breeze, abet me now, tonight, because to blossom as dawn lies in wait is what I long for,” and “The east breeze at daybreak brings a perfume from the beloved’s hair” are other lovely specimens—Marianne surely took note of the latter.60 Dust as metonymy for both an earthly place and humanity’s envelope of flesh is also a frequent motif in Persian poetry; hence its appearance in Marianne’s poem (“Kosend spielt er mit dem Staube”); if I have not been able to find a happy swarm of insects in Dick Davis’s or Hammer-Purgstall’s translations, her invention of them is in accord with Persian poetic conversion of Nature into symbols with mythological power.61 Throughout five stanzas, Marianne-Suleika imagines reunion with the beloved, but in the final verse, her underlying fear that “Wiedersehen” will become “Trennung” breaks through. The Persian cliché of breezes as go-betweens (winds bring ill news, breezes bring love messages) now become something deeper: the beloved’s actual breath, which is also the bearer of his poetic words and of his very life. One notices the reflexive emphasis Marianne gives the words “Wird mir” and “Kann mir” at the accented beginning of the final two lines, underscoring heartfelt personal urgency. There’s a wonderful ghazal, again in Davis’s superb translation, that always makes me jump forward mentally several centuries to Goethe’s time when I read it because of motifs shared with the Suleika poems and the Buch Suleika, including its invocations of memory and hence of separation, lips and life’s breath, secrecy, and lovers who edit one another’s poetry. Here are a few beyts from it:
May I remember always when / your glance in secrecy met mine,
And in my face your love was like / a visibly reflected sign.
May I remember always when / your chiding eyes were like my death
And your sweet lips restored my life / like Jesus’s reviving breath.
May I remember always when / I was a canopy unfurled
That shaded you, and you were like / the new moon riding through the world.
May I remember always when / the jewels of verse Hafez selected
Were set out properly by you, / arranged in order, and corrected.62
“Ach, um deine feuchten Schwingen” also “turns,” like the east wind ghazal, in the end to go deeper, to arrive at the heart of the matter. The message-bearing breeze at first purports to be sorrow-laden, invoking the tears of lovers’ grief shared by all of nature (and it is Schubert’s singular perception to see that melancholy underlies rapture throughout much of “Suleika I,” while determined optimism underlies enunciated sorrow throughout most of “Suleika II”). It is here that we remember Goethe’s home was in the east of Germany, in Weimar, while Marianne’s was in the west, in Frankfurt am Main.
| Ach, um deine feuchten Schwingen, West, wie sehr ich dich beneide: Denn du kannst ihm Kunde bringen Was ich in der Trennung leide! Die Bewegung deiner Flügel Weckt im Busen stilles Sehnen; Blumen, Auen, Wald und Hügel Stehn bei deinem Hauch in Tränen. Doch dein mildes sanftes Wehen Kühlt die wunden Augenlider; Ach, für Leid müßt’ ich vergehen, Hofft’ ich nicht zu sehn ihn wieder. Eile denn zu meinem Lieben, Spreche sanft zu seinem Herzen; Doch vermeid’ ihn zu betrüben, Und verbirg ihm meine Schmerzen. Sag ihm, aber sag’s bescheiden: Seine Liebe sei mein Leben, Freudiges Gefühl von beiden Wird mir seine Nähe geben. | Ah, West Wind, how I envy you Your moist wings: For you can bring him word Of what I suffer being parted from him! The motion of your wings Awakens a quiet longing within my breast. Flowers, meadows, woods, and hills Grow tearful at your breath. But your soft, gentle breeze Cools my sore eyelids: Ah, I should die of grief If I had no hope of seeing him again. Hasten then to my beloved, Speak softly to his heart; But forebear from causing him distress And conceal my suffering from him. Tell him, but tell him humbly, that his love is my life, and that his nearness will bring me a joyous sense of both. |
By now, the message-bearing wind is heavy, sorrow-laden, and the tears of lovers’ grief are shared by all of nature. But at the hinge-word doch, Suleika refuses to surrender to despair, despite confessing that the thought of never seeing him again would be her death. Then in the last two stanzas, she describes the pure, unselfish quality of her love for Hatem, and she ends in affirmation and in hope. The final verb is not subjunctive possibility but firm expectation of future reunion.
West-East reciprocity in words was one thing, but what of music? While the occasional German traveler had ventured into Persia and written travelogues about their experiences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ethnomusicology was not yet a recognized scholarly discipline; the Abbé Vogler had traveled to North Africa and transcribed some of the music he heard there, but such ventures were few and far between. The perceptions of music from elsewhere were inevitably filtered through Western ears, as in Engelbert Kaempfer’s 1712 Amoenitatum exoticarum, in which he writes of “a noise rather than an ensemble” on display in Persia and of music “unencumbered by any rules of harmony but nevertheless neither confused nor disagreeable;” he knew nothing of the dastgāh system of Persian melody types on the basis of which a performer produced extemporized works.63 Instead, Western composers resorted to stereotypes of Janissary music on the one hand and sultry arabesque melodies laden with augmented seconds on the other; we find both in popular light operas such as Michael Kelly’s Illusion, or, The trances of Nourjahad: An Oriental Romance of 1813—a specimen of what Ralph Locke has dubbed music of “cutthroats and casbah dancers.”64 In these works, a vague and generalized East functions as sign or metaphor, as imaginary geography, against which Westerners constructed a varied sense of self. Schubert would have known all the clichés: in fact, the opera in which he invested his greatest hopes, Fierrabras, is about a Moorish prince who converts at the end both to Christianity and to Charlemagne’s armies. A reviewer in the Berlinische Nachrichten for June 11, 1825, praised Schubert for the way he “marvelously captured in tones the Oriental spirit of a poem that breathes love’s ardent, radiant desire;” aside from general praise for the “rhythms, modulations, melody, and accompaniment,” he does not elaborate, nor does he define Schubert’s way of fashioning subliminal hints of things Oriental by indubitably Western means.65 Had “Suleika II” been truly “Oriental,” he would hardly have known what to make of it.
For Cognoscenti and Hoi Polloi
Given boundaries of length and space, I will restrict my contrast between utmost radical refinement on the one hand (Suleika I) and a more popularizing tone (Suleika II) to beginnings and endings, the frames around these two songs. Schubert begins “Was bedeutet die Bewegung?” with a bit of enigmatic magic at the outset, namely five famous introductory measures that are a masterpiece of ambiguity. These winds blow from who knows where, nor can we divine their purpose immediately. We can hear this evocative rise from pianissimo depths up to those two rolled chords that at last define a key in several ways: on the level of onomatopoeia, as winds rolling in gently from foreign places, bearing the symbolic dust of Persian poetry with them (the figure at the beginning of example 1.6 will be used soon after for the light clouds of dust in stanza 2).
On the level of subjectivity brought to sounding life in music, we can hear some sort of sensuous/melancholy/erotic presentiment rising from the depths of the psyche, while on the level of musical logistics, we hear a nontonic beginning with an initially ungrounded German sixth chord (Schubert loved that harmony) that finally goes to the dominant seventh and thence to tonic in measure 6, when the dust settles. Not until the wind finally arrives is B minor a certainty. The chromatic dust particles swirl around the initial harmony as it arrives in three stages, three cumulative beginnings that rise higher and higher until they come to full awareness, if not to understanding, with Suleika forced to ask, “Was bedeutet die Bewegung?”
Example 1.6. Franz Schubert, “Suleika I,” D717, measures 1–5.
The winds, having arrived, begin to harp on their message in the piano before Suleika puts her query into words, and its repetitive swaying motion is one Western musical signifier of the Oriental languorous-exotic, here contained in scalewise motion within the span of a diminished fourth D C-sharp B A-sharp. So many elements at the beginning of this song add up to foreboding, from the open fifth in the bass with the ostinato repeated pitch emphasis on the fifth scale degree (very “Gretchen am Spinnrade”) to the Beethovenian rhythmic tattoo in the tenor voice: Marianne’s Suleika may wonder whether the east wing brings her “happy tidings,” (“frohe Kunde”), but Schubert’s music tells us that darker possibilities (“tiefe Wunde”) haunt his Suleika. We also hear his Suleika’s effort to persuade herself that reunion is in the offing, as manifested in the relative major and parallel major mode invocations of the words “seiner Schwingen frische Regung kühlt des Herzens tiefe Wunde”: D major and B major are the “frische Regung,” Suleika thus converting B minor melancholy to doubly warmer major modes, major in the plural. We hear motions of mind and exercises in willed hope on display here. Notice too that the sequence in the vocal line in measures 19–22 states a descending perfect fourth three times, thus multiply correcting the lamenting diminished fourth contour from earlier. And the wedge marks at the start of each measure in measures 6–17 and thereafter, with certain exceptions, can have a temporal dimension, indicating an ever-so-slight lengthening of the pitches and harmonies to which they are adjoined. By this means and many others at the start, Schubert brings longing, with an undercurrent of loss already manifest, to musical life.
The “Etwas langsamer” section (example 1.7) at the close is this song’s culminating glory: no wonder it so captivated Brahms. Schubert changes the key signature to B major: all other instances of parallel major earlier in this work have been inscribed in a thicket of accidentals, but now his Suleika insists that parallel major mode shall be the tonal climate. The “heartbeat”-tolling dominant pitches, which multiply in their doubling in measures 133–40, are expectation made incarnate, with a palpable admixture of obsession and awareness of passing time and the ticking clock; by the end, they sound at virtually every level. But B minor insists on reasserting itself at measure 118 and measure 130, two slight but telling specimens of her recognition that “he” is not there and that only his physical presence is the breath of life, not the inadequate breeze amanuensis. Schubert repeats the words of the final stanza three times; this is arialike repetition, and here it functions almost like an incantation or charm, meant to bring Suleika’s beloved to her by the magic powers of this music. Schubert also fashions the figures in both voice and piano to yearn upward to the emphasized second beat, this after all those downbeat emphases throughout the “etwas lebhaft” first section; much of the character of this last section derives from these ascending inflections.
When Suleika repeats the entire opening passage of the section, there is a significant change in the piano, with the right hand shifting upward by an octave, now exactly doubling Suleika’s part; both this detail and the pianissimo dynamics indicate, in classic Schubertian fashion, withdrawal into an inner world. The closing arpeggiated chord in the postlude has the third chord degree on top and the hollow open fifth from the start of the vocal part sounding at the bottom: she is still waiting. What is remarkable about this music, as so many of Schubert’s subtlest songs, is its portrayal of ambivalence, of mixed emotions and unresolved feelings. It is this, in sum, that distinguishes “Suleika I” from “Suleika II,” for all the undeniable fact that the second song is not merely an empty vehicle for high notes and digital dexterity, as Graham Johnson has correctly observed.
“How many different ways can I incorporate subtle, swaying motion—gracefully, charmingly seductive—into these words?” Schubert must have asked himself when he created the introduction to “Suleika II.” Just tallying the layers at the beginning, we find once more the combination of an ostinato on the dominant pitch (this fuels the mood of erotic anticipation) and twofold swaying motion: the rocking back-and-forth octaves in the right hand, like the tintinnabulation of little bells, and the left hand that breaks up individual harmonies into lighter components and sends them swinging and swaying as well. Even the written-out turning figure in measure 4, with the downbeat dissonance of E against F, is a small, spicy, seductive touch (example 1.8).
Example 1.7. Franz Schubert, “Suleika I,” D717, measures 109–43.
When the voice enters, it is with a vocal line filled with intervallic gestures that also sway back and forth, the curvature luscious to a degree. The “come hither” quality to the upward tilt of “Schwingen” that links this phrase to the one following, beginning with the words “West, wie sehr,” is another wonderful detail. Furthermore, there is a palpable Janissary effect to the “thump” of the low bass notes on the downbeats, vaguely reminiscent of mehter music, or mehterhane bands whose shrill winds and large percussion batteries were aped in alla turca works by Mozart, Beethoven, and many more. (It is a curious tidbit from history that the mehter ensemble was banned in 1826 and replaced, by Sultan Mahmud in 1828, with a European-style band trained by Donizetti.) In the Victoria and Albert instrument collection, there is a piano from circa 1825 by Georg Haschka with five pedals: a sustaining pedal, one with a bassoon stop, an una corda pedal, a percussion pedal, and one for cymbal and bell effects in the lower octaves, all of it perfect for Orientalizing music. We notice that the right hand is silent on the downbeat to permit the percussion pedal to resound; when Suleika bids the zephyr hurry to speak to her beloved in the “Etwas geschwinder” final section (example 1.5b), the plunge down to the percussion pedal pitches happens on every beat in three-four meter. Patting your stomach while rubbing your head seems positively easy by comparison. And with the second section in measures 40–76 (example 1.9), Schubert combines a lighter version of the Janissary thump with accented offbeat ostinato tones in a rhythmic pattern to which Hugo Wolf would later be partial, here to tell of newly awakened “stilles Sehnen” (example 1.9). In the ongoing war between hope and longing, passion and anxiety that is this song, Schubert has the piano corridor in measures 36–39 seem as if about to deliver us to G minor, the B-flat major tonic key’s melancholy kin, but he deflects the song to the pastoral zephyr’s F major at the last minute. (This is a temporary deferral.) The mere mention of “Sehnen,” longing, darkens Nature and the music alike and does so by stages.
Example 1.8. Franz Schubert, “Suleika II,” D720, measures 1–16.
At the end of the first section, Suleika repeats the words “Ach, für Leid müsst’ ich vergehen, / hofft’ ich nicht zu sehn ihn wieder,” three times (measures 92–120). On the first statement, it is the final word “wieder” that trips the end of the returned music from the beginning (measures 84–99) and a move to G major—the reiterated E-flat neighbor note to D helps convey the mixture of hope and suffering in this passage. At the end of this stanza, in the piano interlude in measures 120–27, we seem to be returning to B-flat major, but then Schubert’s Suleika stops short of resolution for one of this composer’s trademark measures of silence: a held breath, a pause in which resolutions are made, in which suffering turns into new hope. This moment always makes me think of “Dove sono” and the countess’s sudden resolve “di cangiar l’ingrato cor” at the end of an aria that begins with passive pain. What follows the arresting pause in “Suleika II” is the irresistibly light and lively galop, with the characteristic hoofbeat rhythms made almost weightless. A quite difficult piano part must sound effortless. For the dance-mad Viennese, this would have been as catnip to a cat, and its charm is only heightened by the tiny touches of B-flat minor (measures 139–42), D flat major (measures 153–55), and G minor (measures 160–63) along the way, as this Suleika too repeats Marianne’s words over and over, not to bring out the different emotional layers but to revel in the dance of love (example 1.10).
In the end, Milder received from Schubert music for those who could easily appreciate such vivacity, as do we, but Schubert refuses to end with all-out display. The dreamy musing “mit halber Stimme” (“with half voice”) as the scherzo dies away restores a measure of interiority to a Suleika II who is elsewhere less profound than the singer we meet in “Suleika I.” How lovely that her final vocal phrase begins as a fanfare, loud and triumphant, and yet hints at the end, by the descent to quietude, at her capacity to mull over the totality of love in more inward fashion.
Whenever I hear the two Suleika songs, I recall Marianne von Willemer’s poem “Was ist Gesang?” written, we are told, for a singer.
Example 1.9. Franz Schubert, “Suleika II,” D720, measures 35–49.
Example 1.10. Franz Schubert, “Suleika II,” D720, measures 135–58.
| Was ist Gesang? | What Is Song? |
| Was ist Gesang? Was, kaum gehört, | What is song? It’s that which no sooner |
| Dich faßt, dich hält, dich mit sich nimmt | Heard, takes you, holds you, carries you along |
| Und, wie durch Liebe schön bethört, | And, as when delightfully perturbed by love, |
| In seinen Ton die Seele stimmt, | Attunes your soul unto its harmony, |
| Dich Ernst macht, dann bald hoch dich schwingt | Brings you down to earth, then swings you high, |
| Zu dem was heilig, ewig groß, | Up to what is eternal, holy, great, |
| Bald dich zum Mitgefühle stimmt | Soon to attune you to sympathy |
| Mit Erdenschönheit, Menschenloos, | With the world’s beauty, the fate of men, |
| Was du erlebt, in dir erneut | Revives within you your experience |
| Und rein und mild dir’s nun gewährt, | And with purity and gentleness grants it |
| So daß, was schmerzte, sich verklärt, | Currency, so that which pained you is now |
| Was freute, inniger erfreut. | Transfigured, what brought you joy is more heartfelt and sincere. |
| Was dieß nicht wirkt, ist nicht Gesang, | Is nought but sound, a pretty sound at best. |
| That which fails to bring about all this, that is not song, | Ist Klang nur, höchstens hübscher Klang.66 |
Schubert resists “merely pretty sound” in both Suleika songs, but the allusions to Viennese Gemütlichkeit and pseudo-Oriental charm in “Suleika II” are nowhere in evidence in “Suleika I”: pure “Gesang” in Marianne’s most elevated sense.
* * *
In the fascinating diary of Lili Parthey, whose father Gustav Parthey once praised Milder for “ennobling the thoroughly frivolous content of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro”[!] with her performance of Susanna,67 we encounter still more lively anecdotes of this extraordinary singer. Lili, who married the composer Bernhard Klein, was herself a singer, albeit not of professional quality, and is touchingly possessive about “Dove sono”—“my aria,” she called it—and was a trifle jealous when someone else sang it at a salon with the young Felix Mendelssohn as the main attraction and Anna Milder performing as well.68 The anecdote she recounted on Whitsunday, May 18, 1823, is utterly charming: Milder and Klein went to dine with friends in the Tiergarten, and then the little group sang their way through Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf’s Der Apotheker und der Doktor of 1786. “None of us knew the notes,” she confided.69 In another entry for June 6, 1823, Lili described a piano rehearsal with Milder singing the role of Dido in Klein’s opera of the same name and wrote, “I cannot describe how beautiful, how directly appealing to my heart, and how inwardly moving is this lone woman as portrayed by Milder. I could sit still forever and just listen and watch.”70 Anna Milder had that effect on a great variety of people fortunate enough to hear her. We are fortunate that Schubert was among her fans; that Lieder were an occasional component of “olla podrida” programs; and that he wrote immortal songs for her.
Notes
1.The proper term in the chapter title is not “Olla Patrida” but “olla podrida,” a Spanish stew of pork, beans, and a variety of other ingredients that depend on what is at hand. See William Weber, Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), for much more on this subject. Weber (1–2), however, rightly warns against placing too much emphasis on “miscellany programs” and observes that there were limits, that formal and informal types of music were usually kept apart; that is, no tavern songs or the less refined specimens of male-chorus songs were to be found in programs featuring the likes of Anna Milder-Hauptmann.
2.See Till Gerrit Waidelich, Renate Hilmar-Voit, and Andreas Mayer, Franz Schubert: Dokumente 1817–1830 (Tutzing, Ger.: Hans Schneider, 1993), 1: 227 (doc. no. 302), for a facsimile of the program. In the review of the concert in the Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung (later the Vossische Zeitung) for January 19, 1825 (229–30), we are told that “Die Forelle” was the tenth “dish” in this “Kunst-Soupés” and made a truly delicious dessert; the writer points out that Schubert, “who has also composed numerous operas,” was not yet well known in Berlin.
3.For example, the program for a concert directed by the violin prodigy and conductor Franz Joseph Clement (he commissioned Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, op. 61)—advertised in the Wiener-Zeitung for January 13, 1825, 37—included Schubert’s male quartets “Geist der Liebe,” D747 (1822, text by Friedrich Matthisson) and “Frühlingsgesang,” D740 (1822, text by Franz von Schober), began with the overture to Luigi Cherubini’s Lodoïska (1791), and ended with Mozart’s Don Giovanni overture (Waidelich, Hilmar-Voit, and Mayer, Franz Schubert, 1: 226 [doc. no. 300]).
4.Other works composed for or dedicated to Anna Milder are Conradin Kreutzer, Lieder und Romanzen von Uhland mit Begleitung der Guitarre, op. 70 (Leipzig: Probst, 1826), Bernhard Klein, Vier geistliche Gesänge (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1819), and Joseph Wolfram, “Lied” (Bonn: Simrock, 1820).
5.This work and its composer, Carl Wilhelm August Blum (1786–1844), who studied with Antonio Salieri in Vienna and was named composer at the Prussian royal court in 1820, are invoked in The Harmonicon 1825, 162. The critic writes, “The concert of the greatest attraction has been that of the celebrated Madame Milder on which occasion she sung, with great effect, the Troubadour, a new song, composed expressly for her by Carl Blum, accompanied by him on the guitar” (165). Blum’s operatic and vaudeville works include Aladin die Wunderlampe (1828), Gänserich und Gänschen (1822), and Doctor Johannes Faust, der wundertätige Magus der Nordens (1829); he also arranged Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz for guitar accompaniment.
6.The French court harpist Xavier Desargues wrote Cours complet de harpe, advertised in the Journal général de la littérature de France (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1811), 14: 281.
7.The singer, actor, theater historian, and librettist Eduard Devrient wrote Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1848–74) and Briefe aus Paris, 1839: Ueber Theaterschule, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1846); the libretto for Heinrich Marschner’s opera Hans Heiling (for which he sang the title role); and Meine Erinnerungen an Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy und seine Briefe an mich (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1869)—to which Wagner responded with the venomous Eduard Devrient und sein Style: Eine Studie über dessen Erinnerungen an Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Stilke and Van Muyden, 1869).
8.See Nicola Zingarelli and Giuseppe Foppa, Giulietta e Romeo: Tragedia per musica, da rappresentarsi negl’ imperiali regi Teatri di Corte (Vienna: Gio. Batta Wallishausser, 1806); my excerpted copy of “Dunque il mio bene!: Duetto in the opera of Romeo e Giulietta” was published in London by S. Chappell circa 1825. Other excerpted versions include “Naught e’er should sever” (= Dunque il mio bene) (London: Dicks, 1873) and “Dunque il mio bene: Duetto, sung by Made. [Giuseppina] Ronzi de Begnis and Made. [Giuditta] Pasta” (London: Goulding and D’Almaine, ca. 1825).
9.Weber, Great Transformation, 14.
10.For more on the topic of listening at music venues in Europe and England, see William Weber, “Did People Listen in the Eighteenth Century?,” Early Music 25, no. 4 (November 1997): 678–91, and James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), among others.
11.See Waidelich, Hilmar-Voit, and Mayer, Franz Schubert, 1: 257–58, for the program, and 258–59, for the review in Der Freimüthige.
12.Clive Brown, in Louis Spohr: A Critical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 170, has unkind (but accurate) words to say about the libretto for this work.
13.I have not been able to locate this work by Anton/Antoine Bohrer (1783–1863).
14.Friedrich Heinrich Himmel, Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, von C. W. Hufeland, für 4 gemischte Stimmen, op. 29 (Leipzig: A. Kühner, by 1810).
15.Kalkbrenner was a prolific composer of fantasy and variation sets: I wonder whether the Fantasie pour le piano-forte published in Vienna by Diabelli in 1825 could have been the chosen work, as the preference for “new” works on such programs would suggest.
16.See Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, Series II/7: Arias, Scenes, Vocal Ensembles, and Choirs with Orchestra, vol. 3, ed. Stefan Kunze (Kassel, Ger.: Bärenreiter, 1971), 143–74.
17.Carl Blum, “Der Goldschmiedsgesell,” Gesänge der Heiterkeit und Laune (Mainz, Ger.: Schott, 1830s?), male-quartet to a text by Goethe; Ludwig Berger, Schubert, and Zelter also set this ballad to music.
18.I have not been able to locate a musical setting of the chorus of Russians from Ernst Raupach’s three-act historical drama Alangbu about strife between the Mongolians led by the historical Batu-Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan and founder of the Golden Horde, and various principalities of the Rus’. The drama was first performed at court on February 15, 1825, in Berlin and published in Orphea: Taschenbuch für 1827, Vierter Jahrgang (Leipzig: Ernst Fleischer, 1827).
19.Max Kalbeck recalls Brahms saying that “Die letzte Strophe des Schubertschen Suleika-Liedes ‘Was bedeutet die Bewegung?’ ist die einzige Stelle, wo ich mir sagen muß, daß Goethesche Worte durch die Musik wirklich noch gehoben worden sind. Sonst kann ich das von keinem andern Goetheschen Gedichte behaupten. Die sind alle so fertig, da kann man mit Musik nicht an” (Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, vol. 3, 1874–1885 [Tutzing, Ger.: Hans Schneider, 1976], 87).
20.See Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: Die Dokumente seines Lebens (Kassel, Ger.: Bärenreiter, 1964), 267–68.
21.Deutsch, Schubert, 280–81. See also Walther Dürr, “Schubert’s Songs and Their Poetry: Reflections on Poetic Aspects of Song Composition,” in Schubert Studies: Problems of Style and Chronology, ed. Eva Badura-Skoda and Peter Branscombe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 8. Dürr in the early 1980s was dispelling the myth that Schubert set to music any and every kind of mediocre or worse text set in front of him.
22.Mayrhofer published “Geheimnis: An F. Schubert” in Johann Mayrhofer, Gedichte (Vienna: F. Volke, 1824), 9. Schubert’s setting (D491) dates from October 1816; deviations in wording between song text and published version were probably due to revision from handwritten copies earlier given to the composer. See the invaluable Graham Johnson (one of the greatest Schubertians of them all), Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 2: 315.
23.Milder’s roles included Namouna in Gaspare Spontini’s Nurmahal, oder das Rosenfest von Caschmir (based on Thomas Moore’s famous “Eastern Romance” Lalla Rookh, 1817), first performed in 1821. In the history of exoticism in opera, it is worth noting that she also played the role of Lady Anne in Antonio Salieri’s 1804 “Caribbean” Singspiel Die Neger. Monostatos had company on the operatic stage in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe.
24.Johann Gottfried Ritter von Leitner, Gedichte (Vienna: J. P. Sollinger, 1825), 13–15, a dialogue poem in which a moth attempts to console a disconsolate, lovelorn youth (“I am too weak with grief to bear this like a man”) and the youth replies that if the moth were to know just such a love, it too would be consumed in the flames.
25.Deutsch, Schubert, 281.
26.See the Österreichisches biographisches Lexikon und biographische Dokumentation (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003), 294, and Carl von Ledebur, Tonkünstler-Lexicon Berlin’s von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (Berlin: Rauh, 1861), 374–77. For more information on the singer, see also Anke Charton, “Anna Milder-Hauptmann und die ‘deutsche’ Opernschauspielkunst,” in Akteure und ihre Praktiken im Diskurs: Aufsätze, ed. Corinna Kirschstein and Sebastian Hauck (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2012), 228–47; Joseph Kürschner, “Milder, Pauline Anna,” Allgemeine deutsche Biographie 21 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1885), 742; August Pohl, “Beethovens erste Leonore: Zum 150. Geburtstag Anna Milder-Hauptmanns,” Zeitschrift für Musik 102 (1935), 1232–34; Till Gerrit Waidelich, “Anna Milder-Hauptmann (1785–1838); Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (1804–1860): ‘Wenn das Orchester […] tobt, und die Sängerin sich dazu wie eine Furie geberdet.’ Cordelia (1823), Conradin Kreutzers Oper über ‘eine wahre Begebenheit im Jahre 1814’ für zwei Primadonnen,” in Vom Salon zur Barrikade: Frauen der Heinezeit, ed. Irina Hundt (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 111–28. On the 25th anniversary of her ascending the stage, she was presented with a vase with the names of her most important roles on it (Leonore in Fidelio, Emmeline in Die Schweizerfamilie, the title roles in Gluck’s Alceste and Armida, Clytemnestra in Gluck’s Iphigenie in Aulis, Elvira in Don Giovanni, the title roles in Cherubini’s Faniska and Lodoïska, Astasia in Salieri’s Axur, and more); see Jürgen Ponert Dietmar, “Ein Stück Musikgeschichte auf Berliner Porzellan,” Keramos 73 (1976): 29–36.
27.Cited in Ledebur, Tonkünstler Lexicon, 374.
28.See Franz Xaver Süßmayr, Der Spiegel von Arkadien (Vienna, 1794; repr., Madison, WI: A–R, 2014), parts 1, 2, and 3. “Juno wird dich stets umschweben” appears in vol. 2, act 2, 313–23.
29.Franz Xaver Süßmayr, Arie aus der Oper “Der Spiegel von Arcadien” (Berlin: Moritz Westphal, [1838?]): “Zum besten des Nicolaus Bürger Hospitals und zur Erinnerung an die unvergessliche Sängerin,” with a biographical note on Anna Milder.
30.This passage from Tomaschek’s autobiography first published in the periodical Libussa, vol. 5 (Prague: Medau, 1846), 357–61, is reproduced in Klaus Kopitz and Rainer Cadenbach, eds., Beethoven aus der Sicht seiner Zeitgenossen (Munich: Henle, 2009), 2: 994.
31.Johann Rellstab, “Reisebericht aus Wien,” Vossische Zeitung (Berlin), the description of Milder’s voice quoted in Ledebur, Tonkünstler Lexicon, 376: “Bei meiner ersten Anwesenheit in Wien war sie verreist, bei meiner Rückkehr aus Italien fand ich sie aber und hörte und studirte ich ihre Stimme alle Tage. Sie hat einen Umfang von a bis 3 gestrichen c. In diesem Umfange sind sämmtliche Töne gleich schön, gleich stark, gleich voll; sollte man aber doch einige vorziehen können, so wären es die bei andern Stimmen so selten schönen Mitteltöne, d1 bis 2 gestrichen d. Es ist der Ton einer wirklich echten Steiner Geige, die ich noch der Cremoneser vorziehe. Triller, Pralltriller und Mordenten macht sie nicht, aber den Doppelschlag, Schleifer und Anschlag sehr gut punktirt und gleich. Eigentlich grosse Bravour-Passagen macht sie eben so wenig, aber sanfte gute Volaten, voluble und deutsch, auch hat sie alle Nuancen der Stärke und Schwäche.”
32.Georg August Griesinger, writing to Breitkopf and Härtel in Leipzig on December 7, 1802: “Mademoiselle Mildner [sic] macht den Cambyses [Ignaz von Seyfried’s opera Cyrus]; ihre Stimme tönt was so selten der Fall ist wie das reinste Metall, und die giebt, da ihr Lehrer [Sigismund von] Neukomm aus der Haydenschen Schule ist lange kräftige Noten ohne Schnörkel und überladene Verzierungen” (Otto Biba, ed., “Eben komme ich von Haydn—”: Georg August Griesingers Korrespondenz mit Joseph Haydns Verleger Breitkopf und Härtel, 1799–1819 [Zurich: Atlantis Musikbuch, 1987], 213).
33.The critique of the July 18, 1814, performance of Fidelio appears in Der Sammler 6, no. 118 (July 24, 1814), 471: “Es ist ein hoher Genuß, Mad. Milder singen zu hören, den sie zieht, obgleich ihr keine der hier gebräuchlichen Methoden eigen ist, und sie gleichsam eine neue Schule constituirt, immer durch den seltenen klarinett-gleichen Ton ihrer Stimme [italics mine] zur Bewunderung hin.”
34.Jeannette Bürde, “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen,” in Vier Lieder von Wilhelm Müller, op. 4 (Berlin: Trautwein, 1829).
35.Ledebur, Tonkünstler Lexicon, 375.
36.Birgit Bosold, Friederike Liman: Briefwechsel mit Rahel Levin Varnhagen and Karl Gustav von Brinckmann sowie Aufzeichnungen von Rahel Levin Varnhagen und Karl August Varnhagen PhD diss., University of Hamburg, 1996 [unpaged], letter no. 38, March 26, 1816.
37.Bosold, Friederike Liman, from Karlsruhe to Rahel in Berlin, letter no. 44, January 30, 1818.
38.Bosold, Friederike Liman, “Notiz über Friederike Liman” and “Aufzeichnung ‘frühesten Jugendfreundinnen Rahels’ vom Dezember 1835,” March 26, 1816, p. 87 and letter no. 44, January 30, 1818, p. 97. Karl August wrote, “Hatte man über die Freundschaft zur Unzelmann oft üble Nachrede geführt, so achtete und ehrte man die zur Milder nun allgemein, lobte die Treue, die Zärtlichkeit einer solchen Zuneigung, durch welche der Werth beide Frauen nur erhöht schien.”
39.Emil Wachtel and Friedrich Fischl, Aus Goethes Marienbadertagen (Mariánské Lázně, Czech Rep.: J. J. Weber, 1932), 88. A thrilled Friederike also describes the encounter in a letter to Rahel from Marienbad on August 16, 1823 (Bosold, Friederike Liman, letter no. 54). In another letter, written to Rahel from Wiesbaden on August 14, 1827, she recounts a concert Milder performed in Göttingen, after which students crying “Hurrah” followed their coach from the venue to the hotel (Bosold, Friederike Liman, letter no. 55). When the duo traveled to Saint Petersburg in 1830 and Milder performed for Nicholas I and the czarina Alexandra Feodorovna, Milder sang, we are told, act 2, scene 1, of Spontini’s Olympie (1819) and Carl Blum’s “Gruss an die Schweiz: für eine Singstimme mit Begleitung des Pianoforte oder der Guitarre” (Munich: Joseph Aibl, [183–?]). See Bosold, Friederike Liman, letter no. 56.
40.Ledebur, Tonkünstler Lexicon, 377. The poet’s encomium is as follows: “Dies unschuldsvolle, fromme Spiel, / Das edlen Beifall sich errungen, / Erreichte doch ein höh’res Ziel, / Betont von Gluck, von Dir gesungen.”
41.See Waidelich, Hilmar-Voit, and Mayer, Franz Schubert, 1: 245–49 (doc. nos. 335–40).
42.Carl Blum, “Gruss an die Schweiz, grosse Scene und Lied, furs Orchester componirt” (Berlin: E. H. G. Christiani, [1829?]), and Blum, “Gruss an die Schweiz: für eine Singstimme.”
43.Waidelich, Hilmar-Voit, and Mayer, Franz Schubert 1: 247 (doc. no. 338).
44.Andreas Mayer, ‘“Gluck’sches Gestöhn’ und ‘welsches Larifari’: Anna Milder, Franz Schubert und der deutsch-italienische Opernkreig,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 52, no. 3 (1995), 171–204. Mayer points out (p. 184) that welsches in Weber’s context has a double meaning, encompassing both the French occupiers of Vienna, who savored Italian opera, and the creators of Italian operatic styles.
45.Otto Erich Deutsch et al., Franz Schubert: Verzeichnis seiner Werke in chronologischer Folge (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch; Kassel, Ger.: Bärenreiter, 1983), 173.
46.Mayer, “Gluck’sches Gestöhn,” 194–204.
47.Graham Johnson’s Franz Schubert, 3: 288–91, argues convincingly that “Suleika II” is “no empty vehicle for high notes and digital dexterity,” that it is an effective foil to the profundities of “Suleika I” and outlines the links between the two songs.
48.See Gloria Giordano, “Il Galop, un ‘frenetico tumult,’” Chorégraphie 1, no. 1 (1993): 89–94. The title refers to the use of galops as rousing finales for balls.
49.The most useful introduction to Persian poetics, the history of the ghazal, and Hafiz for those not conversant with medieval Persian is the introduction by Dick Davis to Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (Washington, DC: Mage, 2012), ix–lxxii.
50.For more on Hafiz, see Michael Glünz and Johann Bürgel, eds., Intoxication, Earthly and Heavenly: Seven Studies on the Poet Hafiz of Shiraz (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991); Leonard Lewisohn, Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014); Annemarie Schimmel, “Hafiz and His Contemporaries,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. Peter Jackson and Lawrence Lockhart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 929–47.
51.See Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Der Diwan von Mohammed Schemsed-din Hafis (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1812–13). See also Hannes Galter and Siegfried Haas, eds., Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall: Grenzgänger zwischen Orient und Okzident (Graz, Austria: Leykam 2008); Baher Elgohary, Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856): ein Dichter und Vermittler orientalischer Literatur (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Heinz, 1979); Paula Fichtner, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1840 (London: Reaktion, 2008); Ingeborg Solbrig, Hammer-Purgstall und Goethe: “dem Zaubermeister das Werkzeug” (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1973).
52.Siegfried Unseld, Goethe and his Publishers, trans. Kenneth Northcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 220. Because Goethe’s Der west-östliche Divan, first published by Cotta in Stuttgart (1819), is such an important and beautiful work of literature, there is a massive scholarly bibliography on the subject; I will cite only a few: Katharina Mommsen, “Orient und Okzident sind nicht mehr zu trennen”: Goethe und die Weltkulturen (Göttingen, Ger.: Wallstein, 2012), 45–242 in particular; Marina Warner, “Oriental Masquerade: Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan,” chap. 15 in Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Edgar Lohner, ed., Studien zum West-östlichen Divan Goethes (Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971); and Shafiq Shamel, Goethe and Hafiz: Poetry and History in the West-östlicher Divan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013).
53.For more on Marianne von Willemer, see Carmen Kahn-Wallerstein, Marianne von Willemer: Goethes Suleika (Frankfurt: Insel, 1984); Dagmar von Gersdorff, Marianne von Willemer und Goethe: Geschichte einer Liebe (Frankfurt: Insel, 2003); Hans-Joachim Weitz, Marianne und Johann Jakob Willemer: Briefwechsel mit Goethe; Dokumente, Lebens-Chronik, Erläuterungen (Frankfurt: Insel, 1965); Jürgen Behrens, Petra Maisak, and Christoph Perels, eds., Leben und Rollenspiel Marianne von Willemer, geb. Jung 1784–1860: Ausstellung Freies Deutsches Hochstift—Frankfurter-Museum (Frankfurt: Freies Deutsches Hochstift—Frankfurter Goethe Museum, 1984); “Denn das Leben ist die Liebe …”: Marianne von Willemer und Goethe im Spiegel des West-östlichen Divans (Frankfurt: Freies Deutsches Hochstift—Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, 2014); Markus Wallenborn, Frauen. Dichten. Goethe: Die productive Goethe-Rezeption bei Charlotte von Stein, Mariann von Willemer und Bettina von Arnim (Tübingen, Ger.: Niemeyer, 2006); and Hans-Joachim Weitz, ed., Sollst mir ewig Suleika heissen: Goethes Briefwechsel mit Marianne und Johann Jakob Willemer (Frankfurt: Insel, 1995).
54.See Dorothee Metlitzki, “On the Meaning of ‘Hatem’ in Goethe’s West-Östlicher Divan,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117, no. 1 (January–March 1997), 148–49.
55.Dated March 3, 1831, the poem enclosed with the package of Goethe’s letters is very moving: “Vor die Augen meiner Lieben, / Zu den Fingern, die’s geschrieben–/Einst mit heissestem Verlangen / So erwartet, wie empfangen— / Zu der Brust, der sie entquollen, / Diese Blätter wandern [“wandern”] sollen; / Immer liebevoll bereit, / Zeugen allerschönster Zeit” (Bettina von Brentano, Goethe und Marianne von Willemer: Die Geschichte einer Liebe [Kassel, Ger.: Harriet Schleber, 1945], 85).
56.One thinks irresistibly of Heine’s (very different) Lorelei poem, beginning “Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten.”
57.Goethe altered Marianne von Willemer’s original in small but significant ways: for example, where she wrote “Ostwind” in line 2 (“Bringt der Ostwind frohe Kunde”), Goethe substitutes “Ost mir.” Marianne’s beginning is one of joyous anticipation of an imminent reunion, whereas Goethe’s alteration tilts the balance toward something more personal, with a tinge of uncertainty. And Marianne’s fourth stanza reads “Und mich soll sein leises Flüstern / Von dem Freunde lieblich grüßen; / Eh’ noch diese Hügel düstern, / Sitz’ ich still zu seinen Füßen” (“Before these hills grow dark, I will sit quietly at his feet”). She always stoutly maintained the superiority of her version over Goethe’s, with its more conventional “thousand kisses,” the number “thousand” being his preferred symbol for things that are infinite and uncountable. Her line was a statement of fact: she did, poetically speaking, “sit at his feet” and greet him lovingly.
58.Davis, Faces of Love, 126 and 22.
59.Davis, Faces of Love, 54 and 31.
60.Davis, Faces of Love, 14.
61.“Though longing for you scatters on the wind / All my life’s work, / Still, by the dust on your dear feet, I have kept faith with you” (Davis, Faces of Love, 26); “My cypress-slender love, by the dust on which you tread, / Don’t hesitate to visit my dust when I am dead” (108); “My body’s dust is as a veil spread out to hide / My soul—happy that moment when it’s drawn aside!” (124); and “Sit by my dust with wine and music: from my imprisonment / Beneath the ground, within my grave, Dancing, drawn by your scent, I will arise” (120).
62.Davis, Faces of Love, 76–77 (beyts 1–2, 7, and 9).
63.Engelbert Kaempfer, Amoenitatum exoticarum politico-physico-medicarum fasciculi v (Lemgo: H. W. Meyer, 1712), and Walther Hinz, ed., Am Hofe des persischen Großkönigs (1684–1685) (Thienemann: Tübingen, 1977).
64.Ralph Locke, “Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins and Timeless Sands: Musical Images of the Middle East,” 19th-Century Music 22, no. 1 (Summer 1998): 20–53.
65.Waidelich, Hilmar-Voit, and Mayer, Franz Schubert, 1: 248.
66.Theodor Creizenach, Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Marianne von Willemer (Suleika); herausgeben mit Lebensnachrichten und Erläuterungen von Theodor Creizenach (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1878), 325.
67.Gustav Parthey, Jugenderinnerungen: Handschrift für Freunde (Berlin: Schade, 1871), 2: 325, has a long passage devoted to Anna Milder on 83–87. See, in particular, “In Mozarts Figaro sang die Milder die Susanne, zwar nicht mit der Leichtigkeit einer französischen Soubrette, aber mit jenem bezaubernden Schmelz der Stimme, der sogar den durch und durch frivolen Inhalt des Stückes adelte. In der Erkennungsscene des zweiten Aktes [sic!—Act III] zwischen Bartolo, Marzelline und Figaro waren ihr verwunderten Ausrufe: Seine Mutter! Sein Vater! Von so hinreißender Gewalt, daß sie niemals verfehlten, einen lauten Beifall hervorzurufen. Der alte Zelter sagte in seiner derben Art: dem Weibsbilde kömmt der Ton armsdick zur Kehle heraus!”
68.Lili Parthey, Tagebücher aus der Berliner Biedermeierzeit, ed. Bernhard Lepsius (Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel, 1926), 269. How one would have liked to be at this soirée for some sixty people at Milder’s house, with Carl Friedrich Zelter, Caroline Seidler, the Reichardts, Rahel von Varnhagen, the beautiful Friederike Robert (Heine was captivated), the Mendelssohns, and more! See also David L. Montgomery’s marvelous introduction to this important source in “From Biedermeier Berlin: The Parthey Diaries; Excerpts in Translation, with Commentary and Annotation,” Musical Quarterly 74, no. 2 (1990): 197–216.
69.Parthey, Tagebücher, 275. At an earlier rehearsal of Klein’s Dido, on January 29, Lily was deeply moved by Milder’s performance of the final scene. “And how she sang it! This is a unique woman and voice” (Parthey, Tagebücher, 265). Similar notices are a leitmotif of the diaries, as when she heard a performance of Spontini’s Olympe/Olympia on January 14, 1822: “Milder had wonderful numbers—and how marvelously she sings!” (207) and her praise for Milder in La Vestale (“superb,” 112).
70.Parthey, Tagebücher, 277.
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SUSAN YOUENS is J. W. Van Gorkom Professor Emerita of Music at the University of Notre Dame. She is author of Schubert, Müller, and “Die schöne Müllerin”; Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs; Schubert’s Late Lieder: Beyond the Song-Cycles; and Heinrich Heine and the Lied.
