Mozart's Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems

by Eduard Morike

  On the face of it, settling down at Cleversulzbach should have been entirely favourable to his genius: a peaceful sedentary existence, freedom from interference, time enough to wait for the moment of inspiration – this was exactly what he himself said it needed. And in fact, at Cleversulzbach, he published the first collection of his poems in 1838, and in 1840 a ‘Classical Anthology’ of Latin and Greek poetry, in his own translations or in edited versions of others. But the rural idyll of the contented country parson, the role in which Mörike was long to be stereotyped, was not what it seemed. Everything was to his liking – except his actual job of preaching, which remained a torment to him. He himself now required supply-preachers, he continued to ask for frequent sick leave, he borrowed sermons from his old friend and more dedicated colleague Wilhelm Hartlaub, who had his own parish not far away at Wermutshausen. Again the consistory was patient; but in the end Mörike had no option but to write formally (this being the démarche required in such cases) to the Landesvater, King William I of Württemberg, asking to be released from his office. His request was granted immediately: at thirty-nine, Mörike became a country parson in early retirement and on half pay. His mother had died at Cleversulzbach, and he and his sister Klara now stayed with Hartlaub and his family for six months, before moving to the health resort of Bad Mergentheim. Here again he was free to spend his days as he pleased, writing, reading, drawing, collecting stones, but marriage seemed financially impossible. In Mergentheim, however, Klara formed a bosom friendship with the twenty-seven-year-old Margarethe Speeth, the daughter of their landlord Valentin von Speeth, a retired army officer who had served in Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Mörike felt drawn into the relationship between the ‘two dear sisters’, partly because Margarethe, like Luise Rau, had recently become fatherless: the veteran of Borodino, commending his daughter to Eduard’s care, had died a few months after the Mörikes moved into his house. Apparently on the basis of a proposal of marriage which must in effect have been from the brother and sister jointly, the three continued to live together for six years, an arrangement which no doubt attracted some local comment, if only because Margarethe was a Catholic like everyone else in Mergentheim. The marriage was officially formalized in 1851, the parties having decided to move back to Stuttgart and settle there.

  Stuttgart, the capital of Württemberg, now became Mörike’s permanent place of residence, and it was here, in middle life, that he began to enjoy increased reputation, even something like fame. He found himself under royal patronage, received in audience by the King, appointed to give weekly lectures on literature at Stuttgart’s Katharinenstift, a finishing-school for young ladies founded by William’s previous wife Catherine. It was an aristocratic but relatively liberal institution, with an international clientele; its director was a friend and admirer of Mörike’s who had been active on his behalf. The Queen now even attended one of the poet’s lectures, accompanied by her ladies-in-waiting, her small dog and her knitting. His salary began very modestly but was rapidly and generously increased, and he was kept on full pay after his retirement in 1866. In 1852 he was awarded an honorary doctorate at Tübingen, and became a titular professor by royal decree four years later. His reputation was now spreading to other parts of Germany and beyond. In 1856 he received, but declined, an offer of patronage from King Maximilian II of Bavaria, who invited him to settle in Munich. In 1855 and 1857 respectively two eminent literary figures from the remotest north, the Novelle-writer Theodor Storm and the dramatist Friedrich Hebbel, entered into correspondence with him and came to visit him in Stuttgart; another visitor, in 1865, was Ivan Turgenev, who came to demonstrate to the poet that he could recite ‘The Auld Steeplecock’ (‘Der alte Turmhahn’, 1840, 1852) by heart. Mörike’s two daughters were born at this time, Fanny in 1855 and Marie in 1857. The marriage itself, however, was gradually and predictably being destroyed by the jealous tensions between Klara and Margarethe; a long overdue separation was agreed in 1873, Margarethe going to live with Fanny and Mörike with Klara and Marie. The last years of his life were increasingly barren and isolated. He found the growing number of admiring visitors irksome, and kept changing his lodgings to avoid them. After his separation from Margarethe he withdrew into seclusion with his sister and younger daughter, increasingly frail and refusing to see anyone except his oldest friends. He died, almost in penury, on 6 June 1875, after a show of reconciliation with Margarethe only a few days earlier.

  Mörike belongs to the elite of European poets who lack massiveness of output, and whom some would for this reason exclude from the category of greatness. By the same token, Goethe owes his commanding position in literature generally, his quasi-Shakespearian status, not least to the sheer volume and diversity of his writings. But we should remember that Coleridge, author of two of the greatest poems ever written in English (‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’), wrote virtually nothing else; and that much the same might be said of, for example, Hölderlin, Keats, Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot. As a compromise, Mörike has been called a great minor poet. Alternatively, certain features of his relatively exiguous work – his variety of forms, his development from a lush romantic manner in his youth to his own kind of classical maturity – perhaps qualify him to be described as a minor provincial Goethe. But Mörike, here again resembling Goethe, both invites and resists definition, as does the nineteenth century generally, which we must probably call the age of realism, or of the transition from romanticism to realism, or of realism in its various subclassifications such as poetic realism and bourgeois realism. If Mörike has a terminological home, it is somewhere here. For the early-to-middle part of the century there is also, as German literary historians tell us, the term ‘Biedermeier’ (the Biedermeier epoch, the Biedermeier style). Having originally done duty in literary and social satire, then in application to a modest and elegant style of furniture, interior decoration and painting, ‘Biedermeier’ was extended to serious literature by later critics but has never become very serviceable or fashionable for English readers. It does not designate a ‘school’ or project, but a trend, detectable in a certain number of writers in different genres and independently of each other, of whom Mörike was certainly one. It was appropriate to an epoch of extreme political conservatism, the Metternich police state, in which the intellectual middle classes could do little but retire, so to speak, to their respective provinces. If there is a ‘Biedermeier’ attitude, it is one of disillusioned withdrawal from political engagement of any kind, as well as from passionate love and anything else that might disturb the resigned tranquillity, the aurea mediocritas of life. This quietistic ideal is perfectly expressed by Mörike in at least two of his most characteristic poems, ‘Seclusion’ (‘Verborgenheit’, 1832) and ‘A Prayer’ (‘Gebet’, 1832, 1845–6). The term ‘Biedermeier’ is also often applied to the Austrian novelist and Novelle-writer Adalbert Stifter, the Austrian dramatist Grillparzer and some other less-well-known figures. But there is much to be said for preferring, in the case of Mörike, the label ‘poetic realist’, given the widely recognized special affinity between what is called poetic realism and the Novelle form as such, and given in particular the central importance, in his work as a whole, of his Novelle about Mozart.

  The term Novelle was borrowed by Goethe from the Italian word novella, a story or item of news. He saw it exemplified in Boccaccio’s Decameron, which he attempted to imitate, adopting in particular Boccaccio’s device of a cycle of stories within a narrative frame. Goethe thought of the Novelle as a story reporting some novel or interesting event, and as one that made some use of the framing technique. Since his time, these and certain other features (such as careful construction, condensation, flashback narratives, dramatic elements, a central symbolic object or moment) have more or less attached themselves to the Novelle tradition, though whether they are in fact formally essential to it is not certain. Some critics indeed have been content to define the Novelle simply as ‘eine Erzählung mittlerer Länge’, a tale of mi
ddling length, what we would call a long-short story. The matter remains controversial, and there is not even a generally agreed distinction of form or content between the Novelle and the Erzählung. The first and, some would say, still unsurpassed master story-teller in German literature, Heinrich von Kleist, published his tales (1810) simply as Erzählungen, and this was also, in the twentieth century, the term preferred by Thomas Mann and Kafka. On the other hand, we should probably try to distinguish the Novelle from the Märchen. Mörike wrote a small number of stories, none of them important except Mozart’s Journey to Prague; some of them (including Mozart’s Journey) he called Novellen and others Märchen, but he does not seem to have had in mind any clear criterion for the distinction. It seems probable, however, that a Novelle is intended as a more ‘realistic’ story, and that a realistic story is thought of as one excluding all fantastic or supernatural material, one that operates entirely within the world of social and historical reality. The word Märchen, on the other hand, is usually mistranslated into English as ‘fairy-tale’, which as Tolkien has pointed out would be all right if by ‘fairy’ we understood not a small white creature with wings, but the world of féerie (faery), the folk-tale world of wish-fulfilments, the world (as the brothers Grimm called it in their famous collection) of ‘once upon a time, when wishing still helped’ (wo das Wünschen noch geholfen hat), the world of magic spells, of be-wishments (Verwünschungen) which are bewitchments. ‘Realism’ only exists here in an indirect sense, as the communication of inner, psychological realities. Stories of this kind, which for clarity’s sake should really be called folk-tales (Volksmärchen) or tales of magic (Zaubermärchen), are anonymous or of obscure origin, like the traditional folk-songs (Volkslieder) which were seen as a parallel manifestation of the folk psyche. To German romanticism in its high phase, coinciding roughly with the period of the Napoleonic wars between 1805 and 1815, both were objects of the most intense interest, as attested by the collection by Arnim and Brentano of more than 700 German folk-songs under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn, 1805–8) and of the even more monumental Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Household Tales for Children, 1812–) by the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, which laid the foundation of European folklore studies. These were two of the most important documents of the German romantic movement.

  A further development was the artificial or literary Märchen (Kunstmärchen) which the author wrote under his own name, blending folk-tale material with his own narrative and themes and comments, usually to more or less ironic effect. These hybrid creations were denominated by coinages such as Märchen-Novellen or even Novellen-Märchen. The Danish tales (1835–) of Hans Christian Andersen, well known in England, belong to this mixed genre, and a brilliant example from the German romantic period is Adalbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (The Strange History of Peter Schlemihl, 1813), which uses several traditional folk-motifs: the devil’s bargain, the man without a shadow, the magic purse, the magic bird’s-nest, the cap of invisibility and the seven-league boots. It has been widely described as a pure romantic Märchen, though Thomas Mann called it ‘ eine phantastische Novelle’. Three years earlier, and in some ways standing apart from romanticism in general, the eight stories of Kleist appeared, a year before his suicide. None of them could be called a Märchen; some are chronicles as strictly realistic or naturalistic as present-day detective stories (Das Erdbeben in Chili [The Earthquake in Chile], Die Verlobung in Sankt Domingo [The Betrothal in Santo Domingo], Der Zweikampf [The Duel]); in others the supernatural intrudes to some extent (the ghost in Das Bettelweib von Locarno [The Beggarwoman of Locarno], the mysterious Doppelgänger-figures in Michael Kohlhaas, Der Findling [The Foundling] and Die heilige Cäcilie [St Cecilia]). Kleist calls this last story ‘a legend’, as if to disclaim responsibility for its historical truth. Another Christian legend, also involving a devil’s bargain, is the Swiss novelist Jeremias Gotthelf’s Die schwarze Spinne (The Black Spider, 1842), written at the height of the ‘Novelle’ period and transformed by compelling realistic detail and consummate art into one of the greatest examples of the genre.

  It is evident that in subtitling his story about Mozart ‘a Novelle’, Mörike was boldly attaching himself to a flourishing literary tradition of some fifty years’ standing, rich in its variety of conventions, and which still provokes critical controversy today. At the time of writing Mozart’s Journey he was at the height of his powers and had already produced most of his finest poetry. To give some rough indication of his development as a poet over nearly forty years, the poems in the present selection are arranged more or less chronologically and divided into two periods, the first nominally ending in 1838, the year of the publication of his first volume of collected verse. Successive editions, gradually enlarged over the years, followed in 1848 and 1856, with a final collection (the definitive ‘Ausgabe letzter Hand’) appearing in 1867, some years after he had stopped writing. There could be said to be a perceptible difference between the work of Mörike’s first, youthful period, the 1820s and 1830s, and that of his mature period after 1838. In the former, he normally wrote in rhymed forms of considerable diversity, often echoing romanticism in his adoption of the Volkslied style. In his maturity, with some important exceptions, rhymeless ‘classical’ forms predominated. Many of the earlier poems, being shorter and lending themselves more readily to musical setting than hexameters and pentameters, are partly for this reason relatively well known. A perfect synthesis of Mörike’s words and Hugo Wolf’s music, for instance, is achieved in ‘At Midnight’ (‘Um Mitternacht’, 1827), which rivals the status of Goethe’s ‘Über allen Gipfeln’ (‘Wanderer’s Night Song’) as the profoundest evocation of the stillness of night in German literature. The solitary observer watches the darkness slowly rise out of the sea and cover the mountains; in its silence he can hear the mountain streams murmur, representing the movement of time within its stasis, the diurnal cycle to which midnight also belongs. This is a detailed magic, the casting of an entirely realistic spell. Equally extraordinary, without the addition of music, is the longer ode ‘On a Winter Morning before Sunrise’ (‘An einem Wintermorgen, vor Sonnenaufgang’, 1825) which Mörike always placed at the beginning of his collections. Once again the solitary lyric self is totally absorbed, exploring the nuances of his emotions as they respond to the nuances of the natural world; the special quality of the light of a winter dawn mirrors the ambiguous state of the soul, its luminous darkness, its stillness still in motion, its state between waking and dreaming. In ‘Urach Revisited’ (‘Besuch in Urach’, 1827) he wanders nostalgically through the landscape of his youth, vainly trying to recapture the lost absorption, to understand the speech of the waterfall which is the earth’s perpetual self-colloquy. These are solitary lyrical utterances, as is the sonnet ‘To My Beloved’ (‘An die Geliebte’, 1830), one of several addressed to Luise Rau during the years of their engagement. Here the beloved is ethereal but evanescent. The tragic ‘Peregrina’ cycle, though written a few years earlier, betokens a maturer suffering: its note of authentic anguish is one which Mörike’s love poetry would never strike again.

  The romantic ‘folk’ style, on the other hand, a poetry of Märchen in the widest sense, could seem less personal in that the poet often disappeared behind a conventional role-figure: the speaker or ‘singer’ is the young huntsman, the humble groom or gardener winning the favour of the princess, the abandoned lover, the lover telling his story to the stream or the green leaves. The background is the landscape of forests and rolling hills, castles and medieval towns, rivers and mill-wheels murmuring in valleys – the abiding elements of a certain sort of German, and especially south German, romanticism, which those who have never fallen under its spell will call its paraphernalia and its clichés. This whole lost world is glimpsed in some of Mörike’s poetry of the 1820s and 1830s; most perfectly in the ballad ‘Sweet-Rohtraut’ (‘Schön-Rohtraut’, 1838), inspired, as he recalled, by the mere sound of the old Germanic na
me ‘Rohtraut’ which he found by chance in a dictionary. Other examples are ‘The Forsaken Girl’ (‘Das verlassene Mägdlein’, 1829), ‘A Huntsman’s Song’ (‘Jägerlied’, 1837) and in the comic manner ‘News from the Storks’ (‘Storchenbotschaft’, 1837). After 1838 the ballad and the Volkston largely disappear from Mörike’s poetry, with the notable exception of ‘The Auld Steeplecock’ (‘Der alte Turmhahn’, 1840, 1852). The brief visionary utterance of the Orplidian ‘Song of Weyla’ (‘Gesang Weylas’,?1831), an isolated and mysterious curiosity in the earlier work, remains without later parallel, while the free verse ode ‘To an Aeolian Harp’ anticipates in more ways than one the great classical valediction ‘Erinna to Sappho’ (‘Erinna an Sappho’, 1863) written twenty-six years later.