Mozart's Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems

by Eduard Morike

  A thing or two; yet scholarship sat lightly on

  This man of steel and iron, who would more willingly,

  No doubt, have worn full armour than his monkish garb.)

  Thus on the past I mused, when quite by chance my eye,

  Glancing along the wall, came to a sudden stop:

  For what is this I see? Can that be the old clock?

  Indeed it was! And up and down its cheerful disc

  (No score unless you’re running) wagged as it used to do!

  There for a while I stood in front of it and gazed,

  And thought my thoughts, and heaved a sigh or two as well.

  But now a guest who had not spoken hitherto,

  An elderly man, my only fellow-visitor,

  Ein älterer Herr, mit freundlichem Gesicht zu mir:

  ‘Wir sollten uns fast kennen, mein ich – hätten wir

  Nicht schon vorlängst in diesen Wänden uns gesehn?’

  Und alsbald auch erkannt ich ihn: der Doktor wars

  Vom Nachbarstädtchen und weiland der Klosterarzt,

  Ein Erzschelm damals, wie ich mich noch wohl entsann,

  Vor dessen derben Neckerein die Mönche sich

  Mehr als vor seinem schlimmsten Tranke fürchteten.

  Nun hatt ich hundert Fragen an den Mann, und kam

  Beiher auch auf das Ührchen: ‘Ei, jawohl, das ist’

  Erwidert’ er, ‘vom seligen Herrn ein Erbstück noch,

  Im Testament dem Pater Schaffner zugeteilt

  Der es zuletzt dem Brauer, seinem Wirt, vermacht.’

  – So starb der Pater hier am Ort? – ‘Es litt ihn nicht

  Auswärts; ein Jahr, da stellte sich unser Enaksohn

  Unkenntlich fast in Rock und Stiefeln, wieder ein.

  Hier bleib ich, rief er, bis man mich mit Prügeln jagt!

  Für Geld und gute Worte gab man ihm denn auch

  Ein Zimmer auf der Sommerseite, Hausmannskost

  Und einen Streifen Gartenland. An Beschäftigung

  Fehlt’ es ihm nicht; er brannte seinen Kartäusergeist

  Wie ehedem, die vielbeliebte Panazee,

  Die sonst dem Kloster manches Tausend eingebracht.

  Am Abend, wo es unten schwarz mit Bauern sitzt,

  Behagt’ er sich beim Deckelglas, die Dose und

  Das blaue Sacktuch neben sich, im Dunst und Schwul

  Der Zechgesellschaft, plauderte, las die Zeitung vor,

  Sprach Politik und Landwirtschaft – mit einem Wort,

  Es war ihm wohl, wie in den schönsten Tagen kaum.

  Man sagt, er sei bisweilen mit verwegenen

  Heiratsgedanken umgegangen – es war damals

  So ein lachendes Pumpelchen hier, für den Stalldienst, wie mir deucht –

  Doch das sind Possen. Eines Morgens rief man mich

  In Eile zum Herrn Pater: er sei schwer erkrankt.

  Ein Schläglein hatte höflich bei ihm angeklopft

  Und ihn in größern Schrecken als Gefahr gesetzt.

  Auch fand ich ihn am fünften oder sechsten Tag

  Turned to me with a kindly air and said: ‘I think

  We must have met before somewhere – could it have been

  Within these very walls, and quite some time ago?’

  And sure enough, I recognized the man at once:

  The doctor from the neighbouring town who once had been

  Physician to the monastery (and as I

  Remembered well, an arch-rogue then, whom the monks feared

  More for his ribald jests than for his potent drugs).

  So now I had a hundred things to ask this man,

  And en passant we spoke about the clock. ‘Oh yes’,

  He answered, ‘that’s an heirloom handed down from his

  Late Reverence. The Prior left it to the Steward,

  Who in his turn bequeathed it to mine host the brewer.’

  ‘You mean the Steward died here?’ ‘He had gone out into

  The world, but couldn’t stand it. In a year, our giant

  Returned; we barely knew him in his coat and boots.

  ‘I’ve come back here to stay!’ he cried, ‘till you take sticks

  To drive me out!’ And so, for money and kind words,

  They let him have a room on the summer side, plain food,

  And a bit of a garden. He had plenty there

  To keep him occupied, distilling his chartreuse,

  That ever popular elixir, as before;

  Many a goodly sum it earned our holy house.

  Down here, where such a crowd of peasants used to sit,

  He’d spend his evenings with his tankard and his blue

  Handkerchief and his snuffbox by him; in the warm fug

  Of crowded revellers he’d chatter, read the news

  Aloud, and talk of politics and country things:

  In short, he was contented as in his best days.

  They say that now and then he entertained wild thoughts

  Of marriage – at that time, I think, there was a plump

  Merry young lass here, working as a stable-maid –

  But that’s all foolishness. One morning I was called

  Urgently to his bedside: he was gravely ill,

  They said. Well, a slight stroke had knocked politely on

  His door, alarming rather than endangering him.

  And five or six days later, sure enough, I found

  Schon wieder auf den Strümpfen und getrosten Muts.

  Doch fiel mir auf, die kleine Stutzuhr, welche sonst

  Dem Bette gegenüber stand und allezeit

  Sehr viel bei ihm gegolten, nirgend mehr zu sehn.

  Verlegen, als ich darnach frage, fackelt’ er:

  Sie sei kaputt gegangen, leider, so und so.

  Der Fuchs! dacht ich, in seinem Kasten hat er sie

  Zu unterst, völlig wohlbehalten, eingesperrt,

  Wenn er ihr nicht den Garaus etwa selbst gemacht.

  Das unliebsame Sprüchelchen! Mein Pater fand,

  Die alte Hexe fange nachgerade an

  Zu sticheln, und das war verdrießlich.’ – ‘Exzellent!

  Doch setzten Sie den armen Narren hoffentlich

  Nicht noch auf Kohlen durch ein grausames Verhör?’

  – ‘Je nun, ein wenig stak er allerdings am Spieß,

  Was er mir auch im Leben, glaub ich, nicht vergab.’

  – So hielt er sich noch eine Zeit? –‘Gesund und rot

  Wie eine Rose sah man Seine Reverenz

  Vier Jahre noch und drüber, da denn endlich doch

  Das leidige Stündlein ganz unangemeldet kam.

  Wenn Sie im Tal die Straße gehn dem Flecken zu,

  Liegt rechts ein kleiner Kirchhof, wo der Edle ruht.

  Ein weißer Stein, mit seinem Klosternamen nur,

  Spricht Sie bescheiden um ein Vaterunser an.

  Das Ürchen aber – um zum Schlusse kurz zu sein –

  War rein verschwunden. Wie das kam, begriff kein Mensch.

  Doch frug ihm weiter niemand nach, und längst war es

  Vergessen, als von ungefähr die Wirtin einst

  In einer abgelegnen Kammer hinterm Schlot

  Eine alte Schachtel, wohl verschnürt und zehenfach

  Versiegelt, fand, aus der man den gefährlichen

  Zeitweisel an das Tageslicht zog mit Eklat.

  Die Zuschrift aber lautete: Meinem werten Freund

  Bräumeister Ignaz Raußenberger auf Kartaus.’

  Also erzählte mir der Schalk mit innigem

  Vergnügen, und wer hätte nicht mit ihm gelacht?

  Him on his feet again, and in a high good cheer.

  But I did notice that the little clock, which had

  Always stood opposite his bed, and always been

  A thing he greatly valued, was no longer there.

  He was embarrassed when I asked him, told some tale

  Of how it had got broken, thus and thus, by some

  Mischance. Old fox! I thought, he’s l
ocked it up quite safe,

  Stuffed it into the bottom of his cupboard here,

  Or maybe he has smashed the thing with his own hands.

  That eery little motto! My good Reverend

  Had found the old witch’s nagging message more and more

  Irksome, till finally he’d had enough of it.’

  ‘Delightful! But, poor innocent, I hope you did

  Not question and torment him too unmercifully?’

  ‘Oh well, I grilled him just a bit, perhaps; and he,

  I think, never forgave me for it afterwards.’

  ‘So he lived on for some time yet?’ ‘The Reverend

  Continued healthy and as pink as any rose

  For four years longer, five perhaps, until at last

  The unchancy hour did indeed come, quite unannounced.

  Walk down the road towards the village, and you’ll find

  A little churchyard; that’s the good man’s resting-place.

  A white stone, bearing only his religious name,

  Asks modestly for an Our Father for his soul.

  As for the clock – well, cutting a long story short –

  It had completely disappeared. No one knew how.

  But no one now asked questions, and the whole affair

  Had been forgotten, when the brewer’s wife by chance,

  Behind the chimney in an out-of-the-way room,

  Found an old parcel, tied up tight and sealed ten times,

  From which the ill-omened timekeeper, triumphantly

  Unpacked, emerged again into the light of day.

  The label read: “To Ignatius Raußenberger, my

  Good friend, the master brewer at the Charterhouse”.’

  This the droll doctor told me, with much obvious glee,

  And who indeed would not have laughed to hear his tale?

  Erinna an Sappho

  Erinna, eine hochgepriesene junge Dichterin des griechischen Altertums, um 600 v. Chr., Freundin und Schülerin Sapphos zu Mitylene auf Lesbos. Sie starb als Mädchen mit neunzehn Jahren. Ihr berühmtestes Werk war ein episches Gedicht, ‘Die Spindel’, von dem man jedoch nichts Näheres weiß. überhaupt haben sich von ihren Poesien nur einige Bruchstücke von wenigen Zeilen und drei Epigramme erhalten. Es wurden ihr zwei Statuen errichtet, und die Anthologie hat mehrere Epigramme zu ihrem Ruhme von verschiedenen Verfassern.

  ‘Vielfach sind zum Hades die Pfade’, heißt ein

  Altes Liedchen – ‘und einen gehst du selber,

  Zweifle nicht!’ Wer, süßeste Sappho, zweifelt?

  Sagt es nicht jeglicher Tag?

  Doch den Lebenden haftet nur leicht im Busen

  Solch ein Wort, und dem Meer anwohnend ein Fischer von Kind auf

  Hört im stumpferen Ohr der Wogen Geräusch nicht mehr.

  – Wundersam aber erschrak mir heute das Herz. Vernimm!

  Sonniger Morgenglanz im Garten,

  Ergossen um der Bäume Wipfel,

  Lockte die Langschläferin (denn so schaltest du jüngst Erinna!)

  Früh vom schwüligen Lager hinweg.

  Stille war mein Gemüt; in den Adern aber

  Unstet klopfte das Blut bei der Wangen Blässe.

  Als ich am Putztisch jetzo die Flechten lös’te,

  Dann mit nardeduftendem Kamm vor der Stirn den Haar-

  Schleier teilte, – seltsam betraf mich im Spiegel Blick in Blick.

  Augen, sagt ich, ihr Augen, was wollt ihr?

  Du, mein Geist, heute noch sicher behaus’t da drinne,

  Lebendigen Sinnen traulich vermählt,

  Wie mit fremdendem Ernst, lächelnd halb, ein Dämon,

  Erinna to Sappho

  Erinna, a much-acclaimed young poetess of Greek antiquity, lived around 600 BC, a friend and pupil of Sappho at Mitylene on the island of Lesbos. She died as a nineteen-year-old girl. Her most famous work was an epic poem, The Distaff, of which however no details are known. Indeed nothing survives of her poetry but some fragments a few lines long and three epigrams. Two statues were raised to her, and the Greek Anthology contains several epigrams in her honour by different authors.

  ‘Many and various are the paths to the land of the dead’,

  Says an old song – ‘and one of them you yourself shall

  Walk, do not doubt it!’ Who doubts it, dearest Sappho?

  Does not each day say the same?

  But such a message lies only lightly on living

  Hearts, and the fisherman, at home by the sea since childhood,

  Has a dulled ear that hears the noise of the waves no longer.

  – And yet today my soul was wondrously startled. Listen!

  Bright morning sun in the garden, gleaming

  About the treetops, had enticed me early

  Out of my bed, where I love to linger (or so you chide me!)

  And out of its sultry warmth. My mind

  Was peaceful; but the blood in my veins

  Throbbed unsteadily, and my cheeks were pale.

  Now, at my dressing-table, as I unbound my hair

  And parted it with a spikenard-fragrant comb where it covered

  My brow – from the glass something struck me, strangely regarding me, a face to my face.

  Eyes! You eyes! I said, what are you looking for?

  You, my spirit, only today still safe in your house,

  Close-wedded there still to my living senses:

  With what alien gravity, almost smiling, as a daemon

  Nickst du mich an, Tod weissagend!

  – Ha, da mit eins durchzuckt’ es mich

  Wie Wetterschein! wie wenn schwarzgefiedert ein tödlicher Pfeil

  Streifte die Schläfe hart vorbei,

  Daß ich, die Hände gedeckt aufs Antlitz, lange

  Staunend blieb, in die nachtschaurige Kluft schwindelnd hinab.

  Und das eigene Todesgeschick erwog ich;

  Trockenen Augs noch erst,

  Bis da ich dein, o Sappho, dachte,

  Und der Freundinnen all,

  Und anmutiger Musenkunst,

  Gleich da quollen die Tränen mir.

  Und dort blinkte vom Tisch das schöne Kopfnetz, dein Geschenk,

  Köstliches Byssosgeweb, von goldnen Bienlein schwärmend.

  Dieses, wenn wir demnächst das blumige Fest

  Feiern der herrlichen Tochter Demeters,

  Möcht ich ihr weihn, für meinen Teil und deinen;

  Daß sie hold uns bleibe (denn viel vermag sie),

  Daß du zu früh dir nicht die braune Locke mögest

  Für Erinna vom lieben Haupte trennen.

  Now you nod at me, prophesying death!

  – Ah, how suddenly it pierced me then,

  Like a lightning-flash! as if a deadly arrow, black-feathered,

  Were passing close, grazing my temple!

  And with my hands I covered my face, staring

  Long and astonished, dizzily down into the night’s dreadful abyss.

  And I pondered the destiny of my death;

  Still dry-eyed at first, until

  I remembered you, dear Sappho,

  And all our friends,

  And the graceful art of the Muses:

  For then my tears fell fast.

  And there on the table it glinted, your gift, my beautiful head dress woven

  From precious linen, all covered with little golden bees.

  We shall soon celebrate the feast of the glorious

  Daughter of Demeter, a feast full of flowers:

  And this gift I will dedicate to her, for your sake and mine,

  That she may still show us favour (for her power is great),

  And that you may not too soon be cutting

  From your dear head a dark lock for Erinna.

  Postscript: Mörike and Hugo Wolf*

  In February 1903 the composer Hugo Wolf, aged forty-three, died in an asylum in Vienna to which he had been confined since October 1898. Like his near-contemporary the philosopher Nietzsche (and like the hero of Thomas Mann’s no
vel Doktor Faustus, for whom both he and Nietzsche were partial models), Wolf died of general paralysis of the insane, the final result of an early syphilitic infection. Most of his creative career, like Nietzsche’s, had stood under the sign of illness, and shown an astounding alternation between bouts of feverish inspiration and intervals of despairing unproductivity. His main creative period extended only from early 1888 to early 1889, and during it he wrote two of his most important collections of songs: about fifty from Mörike and fifty from Goethe. A third volume of twenty songs from Eichendorff was also completed at this time, and in addition, during the next year or so, Wolf composed most of his settings (about a hundred in all) from nineteenth-century German translations of Spanish and Italian poetry. The years 1892 to 1894 were totally sterile; then he was able to resume work and wrote about thirty more songs and a comic opera, Der Corregidor. The composition of a second opera was interrupted by his collapse into insanity in September 1897. As in Nietzsche’s case, the illness took the form of folie de grandeur (summoning his friends, for instance, he announced that he was taking over from Mahler as Director of the Vienna Opera, where in future only his work would be performed). Wolf had struggled for most of his life with poverty and insufficient recognition, though this had partly been due to his own difficult and domineering nature, his readiness to take offence, his treacherous ingratitude to many of the friends who tried to help him, in fact to a kind of self-aggrandizing pride which his genius excused but which seems to have anticipated, again like Nietzsche’s, his final pathological delusions. He did however live to see Hugo Wolf Societies set up in Vienna, Berlin and Stuttgart, betokening the degree of admiration and good will he had nevertheless inspired.

  Having been an enthusiastic and belligerently proselytizing Wagnerite since experiencing a kind of conversion to Wagner at the age of fifteen, he reacted with intolerance to the traditionalist teaching at the Vienna Conservatoire, and was dismissed from that institution when he was seventeen. His musical education was largely autodidactic, based on voracious score-reading and experimentation on the piano. For three years, from January 1884 to April 1887, he was employed as music critic of the Salonblatt, a popular Viennese Sunday magazine, in which his fiercely partisan views, anti Brahms and Dvořák, pro Wagner, Liszt and Berlioz, clashed with the predominantly conservative tastes of Vienna and its musical panjandrum Eduard Hanslick, whom Wagner had so detested. The offence his reviews gave to many persons powerful in the musical world was one of the reasons why he found it difficult to get his instrumental works performed. Though a few of these have remained in the general repertoire – the delightful Italian Serenade, one string quartet, very occasionally the opera Der Corregidor – it is for his songs (about 240 altogether) that Wolf is still remembered and valued.