Poets of Sensibility 1 & 2

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803) studied theology and won his first reputation as a poet with the publication in 1748 of the first three songs of his biblical epic Der Messias (The Messiah). Throughout his life his religious and moral poems of experience were admired by, among others, Goethe and the poets of the Göttinger Hainbund. Klopstock spent almost twenty years of his life in Copenhagen, where the Danish King Friedrich V granted him a pension that allowed him to work without worrying on the completion of his Messias. In 1770 Klopstock returned to Germany and lived in Hamburg until his death. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many composers followed the expressed wish of the poet and set many of his works to music. With Schubert's Klopstock settings this tradition finds it's conclusion, with later generations of composers only sporadically devoting attention to his poems. Friedrich von Matthisson (1761-1831) began to study theology at Halle in 1778, but later turned to philology and pedagogy. As travelling companion and private secretary of Princess Luise of Anhalt-Dessau he became a popular member of court society and made many contacts in aristocratic and cultural circles. After the death of the princess he entered the service of King Friedrich I of Württemberg. He was given the title of Confidential Legation Counsel and was Chief Librarian and member of the directorate of the Stuttgart Theatre. In 1828 Matthisson left Stuttgart and returned to the princedom of Anhalt-Dessau. He died in 1831 at Wörlitz. During his lifetime there appeared sixteen authorised editions of his poems of sensibility; he published a twenty-volume anthology of poems and wrote for the important literary journals of his time. In his Memoirs he provides a résumé of his eventful life. His senior, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, was among the poets that he revered from his youth. They met for the first time in May 1784 and thereafter remained in general but friendly contact. The poet in Stimme der Liebe, D187, 1st Version, (The Voice of Love) reveals his sense of the rich emotional world of Empfindsamkeit: nature on a spring evening promises him in the whispering of the wind and in the song of the nightingale the 'joys of love' ('Freuden der Liebe'), which find their fulfillment when Laura came from the 'labyrinth of plane-trees' ('aus der Platanen Labyrinth'). Schubert set the poem as a tender strophic song that through small crescendi, unobtrusive chromatic moves and intensifying repetitions of closing lines aptly reflects the atmosphere of the poem, but at the same time also allows prominence to Schubert's individual reading of it. The gentle melancholy, for example, that sounds in the 'prophetic lament' ('prophetischen Trauerlied') of the cricket in Matthisson is only a momentary mood, but in Schubert, on the other hand, it becomes a central element of his strophic pattern and therefore of his whole musical interpretation. In Andenken, D99, (Remembrance), the poet embeds his repeated 'Ich denke dein' ('I think of you') (verses 1 to 3) in different images, moods and scenes and associates his confession with the plea 'O denke mein, / Bis zum Verein / Auf besserm Sterne!' ('Oh think of me, / Until we meet / Under a better star!') (verse 4). Schubert chooses the form of the varied strophic song so as to be able to accord with the different facets of the poem. The whole euphoric passion of his reading can be seen in the musical expansion of the fourth verse: he takes again the melody of the first verse, but builds it up through repetitions of the text, melodic expansions and dynamic increases to a passionate gesture. While in Stimme der Liebe and Andenken the gaze is directed to the present and the future, he looks back in Erinnerungen, D98, (Memories), to the past. One has the impression that the poet is singing alone, wandering through the countryside and thus recalls events with his beloved. Schubert chooses here, too, varied strophic form and through recitative and arioso passages (verses 4/5) increases the scenic effect of these memories. Schubert turned to Geistertanz (Dance of Spirits) on three occasions. The first two are fragmentary versions and the third, completed version works as macabre counterpoint in the otherwise inner emotional harmony of the Matthisson settings. Schubert wrote down the two fragments, D15 on one page in 1812 and it may be assumed that they were written one shortly after the other. Schubert seems to have played musically with the lay-out of the poem: textual omissions, shifts and twists show his joy in experiment as well as the rich fullness of his musical ideas, and the two fragments offer a completely individual form. The music is in the dramatic style of his early ballads and with tremolo effects, a quotation of the Dies irae, recitatives, word-painting and rapid changes of mood, brings to life the horrible drama of the midnight scene. Particularly impressive are the twelve hammer-strokes at midnight, heard in the piano in the first version. The third version from 1814, D116, is completely different. Here the colorful abundance of ideas gives way to one clear musical concept. Schubert chooses as his basis the dance character of the gigue and within this circle of associations enters into the changing aspects of the gloomy proceedings. He succeeds, moreover, in bringing together in the melody elements of recitative and song and thereby translates musically the verbal structure of the poem and the physical experience of a danse macabre.