To the Distant Beloved
" To the distant beloved ", Opus 98, is a song cycle by Ludwig van Beethoven from 1816. It is considered the first song cycle ever.
Origin and reception
According to the autograph “1816 in the month of April”, Beethoven finished the cycle . It has been in the Beethoven House in Bonn since 1907 (signature BH 69). The first edition was published in October 1816 by SA Steiner & Comp. in Vienna. It is dedicated to Beethoven's long-time patron Prince Joseph von Lobkowitz . The vignette on the title shows a singer with a lute on the right, sitting on a cairn, looking to the left at a cloud with his beloved.
Several researchers suspect that the work was commissioned by the prince - who incidentally also appeared as a singer - in memory of his wife, Princess Maria Karoline von Schwarzenberg. It would be a kind of secular “ requiem ”. The princess died on January 24, 1816 in Prague at the age of 40. Lobkowitz is said to have loved his wife very much and in the days that followed was "in a terrible state, as if destroyed".
In 2011, Birgit Lodes presented the hypothesis that both the text and the title page of the first edition actually point to a lover in “Heaven”. In addition, the six poems by Alois Jeitteles , on which the cycle is based, were apparently not printed separately. Lodes therefore describes it as obvious that "the otherwise unpublished text [...] was explicitly brought to Beethoven for setting or that op. 98 is a joint production by Jeitteles and Beethoven planned for Lobkowitz from the start".
Lobkowitz only survived his wife by a few months and died on December 15, 1816, shortly after the first edition appeared.
Some Beethoven researchers receive the work in connection with the famous letter to the “ Immortal Beloved ”, which the composer had already written in 1812.
Franz Liszt used the work as a template for one of his numerous piano transcriptions.
libretto
1. I sit on the hill, peering
On the hill I sit peeking
into the blue misty land, Seeing
the distant drifts,
Where I found you, beloved.
Far away I am separated from you,
mountain and valley separate
between us and our peace,
our happiness and our torment.
Oh, you can't see the look that
rushes to you so glowing,
And the sighs, they blow away
in the space that divides us.
Does nothing want to get to you anymore, nothing to be the messenger of love?
I want to sing, sing songs that
complain to you of my pain!
Because before the sound of a song
every space and every time escapes ,
And a loving heart reaches
What a loving heart consecrated!
2. Where the mountains are so blue
Where the mountains
look so blue
From the misty gray
look in,
Where the sun is fading,
Where the cloud is moving,
I want to be!
There in the quiet valley,
silence, pain and agony
Where in the stone
the primrose ponders,
The wind blows so softly,
I want to be!
Towards the sensuous forest
I
am urged by the violence of love,
inner pain
Oh, I don't hesitate from here,
I, dear, can be with you
forever!
3. Light sailors in the heights
Light sailors in the heights,
And you, little brooks small and narrow,
My darling could
see you, Greet you a thousand times.
You see, clouds, they then go
musing in the silent valley,
Let my image arise before you
In the airy heavenly hall.
Will she stand by the bushes Which are
now bald and autumnal.
Complain to you as it happened to me,
Complain to you, birds, my torment.
Silent vest, brings in the pains
Towards my choice of heart
My sighs that pass
like the last ray of the sun.
Whisper to her my pleading for love,
let her, small brooks small and narrow,
faithfully see
my tears without number in your waves !
4. These clouds in the heights
These clouds in the heights,
this lively bird,
Will see you, O grace.
Take me with you in an easy flight!
This waistcoat will play
Joking around your cheek
and chest,
digging in the silky curls.
I share this pleasure with you!
This brook hurries diligently to you from those hills .
If her image is reflected in you
, then flow back immediately!
5. The May returns, the floodplain blooms
The May sweeps, the floodplain blooms,
The air, it blows so gently, so lukewarm,
the brooks now run chatty.
The swallow, which returns to the real roof,
she builds her nuptial room so diligently,
love should dwell in there.
She
busily brings herself here and there from the back and forth, some softer pieces to the bridal bed, some
warming pieces for the little ones
Now the spouses live together so faithfully,
What winter divorced, May now united,
What loves, he knows to unite.
The May returns, the floodplain blooms.
The air, it blows so gently, so lukewarm.
Only I can't move away
When all that loves is united in spring,
only spring does not appear to our love,
and tears are all its gains.
6. Take them then, these songs
Take them then, these songs that
I sang to you, beloved,
Then sing them again in the evening
To the sweet sound of the lute.
When the twilight then drifts
Towards the calm blue lake,
And its last ray burns up
behind that hill;
And you sing what I sang,
What
sounded out of my chest without artfulness,
Only conscious of longing:
Then, before these songs,
What separated us so far,
And a loving heart reaches
What a loving heart consecrated.
literature
- Kurt Dorfmüller, Norbert Gertsch and Julia Ronge (eds.): Ludwig van Beethoven. Thematic-bibliographical catalog raisonné, Munich 2014, Volume 1, pp. 627–632
- John David Wilson: Songs and Chants after 1810 , in: Beethovens Vocal Music and Stage Works , ed. by Birgit Lodes and Armin Raab (= Das Beethoven-Handbuch , edited by Albrecht Riethmüller , Volume 4), Laaber 2014, pp. 365–385
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Advertisement in the Wiener Zeitung , No. 356 of December 21, 1816, p. 1416 ( digitized version )
- ↑ Beethoven in the Diaries of Johann Nepomuk Chotek , ed. by Rita Steblin , Bonn 2013, p. 221
- ↑ Birgit Lodes: On the musical accuracy of fit of Beethoven's compositions with dedications to aristocrats. “To the distant beloved” op. 98 in a new interpretation , in: Dedications by Haydn and Beethoven. People - strategies - practices. Report on the international scientific congress in Bonn, September 29 to October 1, 2011 , ed. by Bernhard R. Appel , Bonn 2015, pp. 171–202