Anacreontics
Anakreontik (Greek) is a style of German and European poetry named after the ancient Greek poet Anakreon (6th century BC) in the middle of the 18th century ( Rococo ). She is playful and gallant and revolves around the topics of love, friendship, nature, wine and sociability. Anakreontik goes back to the poetry collection Anakreonteia .
The German anacreontic
In 1733 Johann Christoph Gottsched was the first to translate some of the ancient anacreontic poems into the German language, both stylistically and metrically. The main aim of these translations was to improve the poetic forms of expression in German. In 1743 the joking songs were published based on the model of Anakreon, edited by a Bauzner from Christian Nicolaus Naumann . Nevertheless, Naumann does not manage to trigger an anacreontic current in Germany. In his language he remains too caught up in metaphors and the style of the Baroque . In 1744, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim published his attempt in joking songs . A short time later, Johann Peter Uz and Johann Nikolaus Götz publish the Oden Anacreons in rhyming verse . This laid the foundations - the Oden Anakreons are completely translated into German for the first time, and a first publication that exclusively offers poems in the style of Anacreons is on the literary market. As a result, a lively imitation of Anacreon's poems developed, which is relatively narrow in its motifs and formal structure.
The themes of anacreontics are joy in the world and in life (“ carpe diem ”). This is expressed in the representation of love, friendship and sociability, the enjoyment of wine and the joy of nature. Poetry itself is also a frequent topic. The space depicted in the poem is often a graceful and lovely (amone) landscape (see locus amoenus ). Often personnel from the ancient world of gods appear. So in connection with the wine especially Dionysus and Bacchus , in connection with the love Cupid and Eros and especially with Gleim z. B. Cithere (after the Greek island of Kythira , where there was a sanctuary of Aphrodite ).
In terms of form, too, the framework remains relatively narrow: the meter of the anacreontics is the three- or four-part iambus , often with a female cadenza . In contrast to the baroque Alexandrian , this meter gives a light, dandy impression, so it adapts to the topic. The ending rhyme is also missing in a strictly anacreontic poem, as is the structure in stanzas . This means that other means of structuring are necessary. This is achieved above all through rhetorical figures of repetition on the sound, word and sentence level.
This leads to a strong redundancy of the texts. It becomes clear to the reader that a rationalist interpretation would be inappropriate; this poetry should be sensually received.
From around 1770 the poets Klopstock , Herder and soon also Goethe increasingly turned away from anacreontic poetry and instead turned to more sublime poetry based on Pindar . This is expressed, for example, in Goethe's poem The Eagle and the Dove from 1772.
German-speaking representatives of anakreontics were (temporarily):
- Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (at a young age)
- Friedrich von Hagedorn
- Johann Georg Jacobi
- Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
- Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
- Christian Nicolaus Naumann
- Friedrich Schiller
- Johann Peter Uz
- Johann Nikolaus Götz
- Albrecht von Haller (e.g. in Die Alpen )
- Eduard Friedrich Mörike
Leporello's register aria
While most of the works of German anacreontics have sunk into oblivion again after the end of this literary fashion, one work still lives on - although the context is not known - Anakreon's poem XXXII Auf seine Mädchen is one of many possible Templates that Lorenzo da Ponte used for Leporello's register aria in Mozart's Don Giovanni . It can be safely assumed that this allusion to anacreontic poetry was aware of the public at the time.
literature
- Anacreontic Enlightenment , ed. v. Manfred Beetz u. Hans-Joachim Kertscher, Hallesche Contributions to the European Enlightenment Vol. 28, Tübingen 2005. ISBN 3-484-81028-9 / 978-3-484-81028-0
