Mozart's Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems

by Eduard Morike

There are two further outstanding cases in which Wolf has been inspired by Mörike’s contemplative visionary mood. Um Mitternacht, perhaps the most profound short evocation in German poetry of the tranquillity of deep night, has been composed in music of equal mastery. Time, weighed in two equal halves, seems to stand still; the silence is such that the mountain streams can be heard murmuring in the distance, and their movement is not antithetical to the night’s stillness, but balanced with it in a great harmony of night and day. The voice moves over a continuous accompaniment of quavers rocking ambiguously in 12:8 time, their only change being to modulate subtly to the major key when the streams enter the song. The other great vision of a natural scene or object is Auf eine Christblume (the ‘two’ poems under this title are simply two parts of a single conception). Mörike here contemplates the moon-child, the ‘Christmas rose’, the wintry hellebore growing by itself in a churchyard, a flower which takes on for him a religious significance enhancing and transcending its natural beauty. It seems both to symbolize the advent of Christ, born at night into the dead world of midwinter, and also to be at home in its own ‘magic kingdom’ of wandering elves and cold moonlight. Wolf recreates this world in strange, meditative music, in a tonality wandering through successive enharmonic changes, so free of a home key as to be nearly atonal, and reminiscent here and there of the sensuous austerity of Parsifal. In the second part, or second poem, the music is delicate to vanishing-point, poised on the very edge of silence and non-existence: it exactly follows Mörike’s rarefied vision of an invisible butterfly, doomed as a summer creature never to drink the nectar of this winter flower but still drawn to it out of season, drunk with desire like an unsatisfied ghost, or perhaps like a soul still seeking the grace it has been denied in life.

  In general it may be doubted whether Mörike himself would have appreciated Hugo Wolf’s settings of his work, kongenial or not, if he had lived long enough to hear them. His musical taste had been formed by Mozart and Haydn; he admired Beethoven but felt ill at ease with him, and found even Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s Erlkönig too wild and stormy. Wagner, however, he had heard, and rejected completely.* And yet, without Wagner’s inspiration and his musical innovations, it is hard to imagine that Wolf would ever have written the Mörike songs or for that matter anything else; and the publication of Wolf’s Mörike-Lieder in 1889 was a turning-point in Mörike’s posthumous reputation. As they gradually came to be heard by an ever wider public, they introduced his poetry to many who had never even heard of him. It was Wolf, above all, who carried Mörike’s name far beyond Germany, and profoundly changed the conventional perception of his personality and art.†

  G. W. M., D. L.

  Notes

  Mozart’s Journey to Prague

  1. Don Giovanni… 14 September: the first performance of Don Giovanni took place at the Estates Theatre in Prague on 29 October 1787. Mörike’s dates for Mozart’s journey, based on earlier biographies, are historically not quite accurate.

  2. wife of General Volkstett: this name does not in fact occur among Mozart’s known acquaintances, though Mörike may have been thinking of Baroness Waldstetten, who was a particular friend and patroness.

  3. Cosa rara… the Director’s intrigues: the comic opera Una Cosa Rara (the ‘rare thing’ is of course a woman’s constancy) was the work of the Spanish composer Vicente Martín y Soler (1754–1806), a protßgeß of Mozart’s envious rival Antonio Salieri (1750–1825), who was Director of the Italian Opera at the Imperial court. According to legend, Salieri deliberately sabotaged the première of Le Nozze di Figaro in May 1786 by bribing the Italian singers to perform badly; but Figaro was in any case eclipsed in Vienna by the enormous popular success of Una Cosa Rara. Mozart nevertheless quotes a few bars of Una Cosa Rara in the final scene of Don Giovanni, but for which Martín and his opera would now be totally forgotten.

  4. Bondini: Pasquale Bondini was the director of an Italian opera company in Prague. After his successful production of Figaro there in December 1786 he commissioned Mozart to write another opera for him. Mozart wrote Don Giovanni for an advance of 100 gold ducats.

  5. King of Prussia: according to a tradition which lacks supporting evidence, Frederick William II of Prussia offered Mozart the directorship of music at his court, with a salary of 3,000 thalers, an offer which Mozart refused out of misplaced loyalty to his patron the Emperor Joseph II. Mörike antedates this supposed proposal to 1787, before the production of Don Giovanni, though historically Mozart’s visit to Berlin and Potsdam did not take place until 1789.

  6. Tarare: when Don Giovanni was eventually produced in Vienna in 1788, it was no more of a success than Figaro had been: the public preferred Salieri’s Tarare, given in Vienna under the title Axur, Re d’Ormus, with words by Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte. In Constanze’s fantasy, intended to encourage her husband to seize the opportunity of moving to Prussia, Mozart generously conducts his arch-enemy’s mediocre work at the Berlin Opera in 1789.

  7. Schinzberg: the house and the family remain essentially fictitious, despite attempts to identify them.

  8. display of orange-trees: the word Orangerie usually implies a heated building, of the kind common in baroque or rococo architecture and formal gardens, for the indoor cultivation of oranges and other exotic fruit, but it can also, as here, mean simply a number of orange-trees in tubs temporarily set out in the garden during warm weather. The fruit itself is normally called Apfelsine in North German and Orange in the south; Mörike in the course of the story uses Orange interchangeably with Pomeranze, though strictly speaking Pomeranze is the smaller and bitterer Seville orange, whereas his first description of the fruit (‘magnificent rounded shape… succulent coolness’) appears to suggest the familiar larger and sweeter variety.

  9. Prince Galitzin’s: Prince Dmitri Mihailovitch Galitzin (1721–93), Russian Ambassador to Vienna and one of Mozart’s patrons.

  10. Hagedorn, Götz: Friedrich von Hagedorn (1708–54) and Johann Nikolaus Götz (1721–81) were representatives of the rococo or ‘anacreontic’ style in German poetry.

  11. Susanna’s aria: ‘Deh vieni, non tardar’ in Act 4.

  12. ‘Giovinette, che fate all’ amore… etc.’: Mörike, and the German editions following him, for some reason misquote the text as ‘Giovinette, che fatte all’ amore…’ and attempt to translate it accordingly, though ‘che fatte’ in fact makes no sense. ‘Fare all’ amore’ is an old-fashioned variant of ‘fare l’amore’, here meaning no more than verbal dalliance, as ‘to make love’ once did in English. With this emendation, Zerlina’s opening lines could be approximately rendered as: ‘You young girls who like kissing and flirting, / take your chance before youth passes by! / If your hearts are on fire and are hurting, / there’s a remedy here you should try: / oh, what fun we shall have, you and I!…’, etc.

  13. Parthenopean: in ancient myth, Parthenope was one of the Sirens and closely associated with Naples, which was originally called after her.

  14. Ninon de Lenclos’s house: Anne (known as Ninon) de Lenclos (?1620–1705) was famous both for her beauty and for her longevity and was well acquainted with many of the prominent writers of Louis XIV’s time, though the claim that she presided over a literary salon which was ‘a true centre of refined intellectual culture’ is probably exaggerated.

  15. the Marquise de Sévigné: Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626–96), is now remembered chiefly for her letters to her married daughter living in the provinces, which over a period of twenty-five years contain many vivid and witty evocations of Paris society under Louis XIV.

  16. Chapelle: Claude-Emmanuel L’Huillier (1628–86), known as Chapelle, a minor writer of the classical period.

  17. Phoebus: one of the names of Apollo, the god of (among other things) music.

  18. Chiron: a wise centaur, half-brother of Zeus, skilled in various arts which he learnt from Apollo and taught to Achilles and other heroes. His role (in the picture) as tutor to Apollo is possibly due to a
confusion by Mörike.

  19. he who on his shoulder… Apollo: the alcaic lines from Horace (Odes III 4) are

  … numquam umeris positurus arcum,

  qui rore puro Castaliae lavit

  crines solutos, qui Lyciae tenet

  dumeta natalemque silvam,

  Delius et Patareus Apollo.

  Mörike quotes them in a translation which in the German text he attributes to Karl Wilhelm Ramler (1725–98), though in fact it is his own. I have retranslated the passage directly from the Latin. Horace refers to Apollo’s bow (his deadly weapon, not the bow for a violin as the Count supposes) and to places associated with him: the island of Delos as his reputed birthplace, the coastal city of Patara in Lycia (Asia Minor) and the sacred stream of Castalia near his oracle at Delphi.

  20. Da Ponte and the clever Schikaneder: the Abbé Lorenzo da Ponte (1749–1838), writer for the Italian Opera at the Imperial Court, earned a measure of immortality as the author of the libretti for Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, as did Emanuel Schikaneder (1751–1812), a popular Viennese theatre director, who wrote the libretto of Die Zauberflöte.

  21. Signor Bonbonnière: ‘Bonbonnière’ was the nickname given by Mozart and his friends to Salieri, who was a compulsive eater of confectionery.

  22. modicum of truth: Mörike at this point adds a footnote stating that he had in mind a specific lifelike drawing of Mozart in profile which he found on the title page of a score. Although he does not further identify this portrait, it is possible that he is referring to the drawing by Doris Stock (1789), well known as an engraving.

  23. Prince Esterhazy… Haydn: Nicolas Joseph, Prince Esterhazy (1714–90) was an important patron of the arts and sciences, resident at Eisenstadt in what is now Burgenland, where he founded an academy of music. Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), the most eminent composer of the Viennese classical school after Mozart and Beethoven, was his Director of Music for over forty years. Mozart dedicated six of his greatest string quartets to Haydn.

  24. The Dušeks: the Bohemian pianist and composer Jan Ladislav Dušek (1760–1812) and his wife, the singer Josefa Dušek (1754–1824), were friends of the Mozarts.

  25. Florentine master… Ambras collection: the sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), whose remarkable autobiography Goethe translated, was commissioned by Cardinal Ippolito d’Este to model a gold salt-cellar, and this remains one of his most famous pieces. Schloß Ambras or Amras near Innsbruck was the seat of the Counts of Tyrol and housed a magnificent collection of weapons and works of art, most of which, including the salt-cellar, were later transferred to museums in Vienna.

  26. Leporello… Sillery: the Count, addressing his footman by the name of Don Giovanni’s servant, calls for a vintage champagne from the village of Sillery near Reims. This dry amber-coloured wine had been famous since the seventeenth century and remained in fashion long after Mozart’s time, being for instance consumed in large quantities by the Prince Regent. Today the name has been absorbed into the Moët empire and forgotten.

  27. Di rider finirai pria dell’ aurora: ‘You will have stopped laughing before dawn.’

  28. many a false prophet will arise: this has been read as an allusion by Mörike to Wagner and Liszt, whose music he disliked.

  29. Chevalier Gluck: the successful operatic composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87), known especially for his Orfeo ed Euridice, settled in Vienna and was ennobled by the Emperor as Ritter von Gluck. Historically he was still alive at the time of Mozart’s supposed allusion to him.

  Selected Poems

  ‘On a Winter Morning before Sunrise’ (1825): See note on ‘Urach Revisited’, below.

  ‘Peregrina I–V’: The third poem (‘A madness…’) is known to have been written in the summer of 1824, at the time of the Maria Meyer affair, and the other four not later than May or June 1828, but possibly at some time in the preceding four years. A version of II, I, III and V (grouped in that order and not including IV) was among quite a number of Mörike’s early poems to be scattered here and there in Maler Nolten and published in it in 1832; all five then appeared, revised and rearranged, as a cycle under the title ‘Peregrina’ and with the note ‘From Maler Nolten’, in the 1838 and subsequent collections. It is not certain, though probable, that all five of the poems refer directly or indirectly to Maria Meyer.

  ‘Two Voices in the Night’ (1825): This piece of dialogue, which could equally well be a monologue, is extracted from ‘The Last King of Orplid’, a fantastic verse intermezzo in dramatic form which Mörike inserted into Maler Nolten as a magic-lantern show. In this original version (written in 1825) the two speakers or singers are King Ulmon and the elfin princess Thereile. The lines were later published in the 1838 collection under the title ‘At night’ (‘Nachts’), and eventually in the final 1867 edition with the present title.

  ‘At Midnight’ (1827): The phrase ‘stieg… ans Land’ seems to suggest that the night has ‘come ashore’ from the sea, and thus that the imagined landscape is that of a mountain range on the sea coast, though Mörike had never actually seen any such place. The mysterious central image of an equally balanced pair of golden scales is given special emphasis by its occurrence in both stanzas: ‘Waage’, ‘in gleichen Schalen’; ‘Joch’ (= crossbar), ‘gleichgeschwungen’. In his 1838 collection Mörike placed this poem at the end of the book.

  ‘In the Early Morning’ (1828): I have not attempted to imitate Mörike’s slightly archaic language which gives this poem something of the character of a Lutheran hymn. See also the discussion of Hugo Wolf’s remarkable setting (Postscript, p. 200).

  ‘A Journey on Foot’ (1828): It has been interestingly suggested that the words ‘im leichten Wanderschweiße’ of the penultimate line are linked to the earlier references to Adam (lines 10,15) and thus subtly allude to the curse imposed after the Fall (Genesis 3, 19: ‘… in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’). In his present self-accepting mood, the poet seems to feel the curse only vestigially.

  ‘Intimation of Spring’ (1829): First published without a title in Maler Nolten (1832). From the 1838 and later collections it has become known as ‘Er ists!’, i.e. ‘he (the Spring) is here!’, but in 1844 Mörike prepared a manuscript copy of his poems for presentation to the King of Prussia (the so-called ‘Königshandschrift’), in which he gave this poem the more translatable title ‘Frühlingsgefühl’, a variant which I have here adopted.

  ‘In the Spring’(1828): An exactly similar physical intimacy with nature is experienced by the young Goethe’s Werther in his novel of 1774 (letter of 10 May).

  ‘Urach Revisited’ (1827): In 1818 the fourteen-year-old Mörike entered the Theological Seminary at Urach, where he studied for four years. He revisited Urach in 1825. Here he evokes his nostalgic memories, interweaving them with reflections on the mystery of nature and its changing relationship with the human soul. This poem, reminiscent in some ways of Wordsworth’s famous meditation on Tintern Abbey, ranks with ‘On a Winter Morning before Sunrise’ as a major expression of the poet’s youthful sensibility. It is commonly interpreted as the record of a frustrated attempt to recapture past experience and emotion, though like ‘On a Winter Morning…’ it ends with a sense of renewal.

  ‘Love Insatiable’(1828): This curious combination of old-fashioned proverbial worldly wisdom with bold erotic realism shocked some nineteenth-century critics who failed to distinguish naive sensuality from salaciousness and condemned the young Mörike’s reference to love-bites as immoral, savage and disgusting.

  ‘The Forsaken Girl’/‘The Forsaken Lassie’ (1829): The subtle folk-ballad-like simplicity of this lyric makes it as untranslatable as Gretchen’s ‘Meine Ruh ist hin’. We offer two alternative attempts. Gilbert McKay’s gives it a Scots colouring (less pronounced than in ‘The Auld Steeplecock’). In the fourth stanza, ‘tears’ and ‘nears’ should be read disyllabically.

  ‘The Song of Weyla’ (?1831): Mörike’s most elaborated, though st
ill brief, description of his mythical land of ‘Orplid’ is given in Book I of his novel Maler Nolten. Speaking as one of the characters, the actor Larkens, he recalls his youthful friendship with Bauer and their collaborative invention of the Orplid story: ‘When I was still at school, I had a friend whose artistic aims and way of thinking went hand in hand with mine. In our free time, following our natural bent, we soon constructed a poetic world which even now I cannot recall without emotion… For our literary purposes we invented a territory situated outside the known world, in complete seclusion, an island of which the supposed inhabitants had been a strong, heroic people, divided into various tribes and regions and with differences of character, but having a more or less uniform religion. The island was called Orplid, and we thought of it as being somewhere in the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and South America. Orplid was more particularly the name of the city in the most important kingdom: it was supposed to have divine founders, and was under the special protection of the goddess Weyla, after whom the island’s main river was also called. In fragmentary fashion, and selecting the most important periods, we would tell each other the history of these peoples. There was no lack of remarkable wars and adventures. Our theology had some points in common with Greek polytheism, but retained its own character on the whole; we also did not exclude the subordinate world of elves, fairies and goblins.

  ‘Orplid, once the treasure of the immortals, was doomed in the end to perish by their wrath, as gradually its ancient simplicity gave way to a corrupting refinement of thought and morals. A terrible fate snatched all living humanity away, even their dwellings sank out of sight; only Weyla’s favourite child, the castle and city of Orplid itself, was permitted to remain, extinct and desolate though it was, as a sad and splendid monument of bygone grandeur. The gods turned their faces from the scene for ever, and the noble goddess who ruled it now scarcely vouchsafed it a glance, and then only for the sake of a single mortal who by higher decree was destined long to outlive the general destruction…’