The creation of the violin
The creation of the violin is a fairy tale of the Transylvanian Roma . It was first recorded in 1890 by Heinrich von Wlislocki and included in the collection “Vom Wanderden Gigeunervolke. Pictures from the life of the Transylvanian gypsies ” translated into German.
content
A poor couple desires a child in vain until the woman complains of her suffering to an old woman whom she meets in the forest. She sends it home with the words: "Go home and break up a pumpkin, pour milk into it, and then drink it. You will then bear a son who will be happy and rich! ”By following the advice, the woman gives birth to a handsome boy, but soon becomes ill and dies. When the boy was twenty years old and his father died too, he went out into the world in search of happiness. He comes to a big city where a rich king lives. He has a beautiful daughter, whom he only wants to give to a man who can do something that no one in the world has seen before. Many men had tried their luck in vain and paid for their failure with their life. Somewhat stupid, the young man simply asks the king what he should do and is thrown into a dark dungeon for it. There it becomes light immediately and the fairy queen Matuya appears. She gives him a small box and a chopstick. He should rip her hair from her head and stretch it over the box and the chopsticks. Then he should stroke the hair of the box with the chopsticks to make a violin with which he can make people happy or sad. Matuya laughs and cries into the violin. The young man immediately demonstrates his new art to the king, who is beside himself with joy and gives him his beautiful daughter to wife. “This is how the violin was born” is the final sentence of the fairy tale.
Origin, comparison, distribution
In terms of type, it is a folk tale and belongs to the subgroup of magical tales . As a fairy tale , with the figure of Matuya, the traditional line of Indian magical tales can be recognized, as it can be found more often in Roma tales . Matuya can be found in the mythology of the Transylvanian, as well as Hungarian , Polish , Russian and Serbian Roma as the queen of the so-called Urmen or Ursitory . These fairies are unusually beautiful women who live in palaces in the mountains, love to sing and dance and thus also stand for music.
It is one of the better-known Roma tales that can be found in various collections, including those that are not specifically dedicated to Roma tales. It is more often told in public, performed for children as a radio play or fairy tale game , or used as teaching material. Another Roma fairy tale with the same title, which can also be found in Wlislocki, is hardly widespread, probably because of the rather disturbing story and the lack of a happy ending: A young woman gets involved with the devil because she desires a rich hunter who, however, does does not take note. One of the gifts of the devil, which are supposed to attract the hunter, is a violin, for which she sacrifices her whole family to the devil: the devil turns the body of the father into the violin, that of the four brothers becomes the strings and that of the Mother makes the bow. The fairy tale ends with the devil taking the young woman away because she does not want to worship him. The violin remains in the forest until it is found by a passing gypsy and taken away. Both fairy tales have in common that the violinist can make people laugh and cry with his instrument.
Since genesis stories mostly belong in the field of myths , it is one of the few fairy tales in which the creation of a musical instrument is described. The Hungarian fairy tale "The Violin" and the story of the making of the Mongolian horse head violin are among the few others . Both differ in content from the fairy tale dealt with here. From the mythical area, the story about the creation of the panpipe from the connection between the nymph Syrinx and the god Pan is known.
interpretation
Rosemarie Tüpker interprets the fairy tale using a hermeneutic analysis of the ideas of today's listeners and readers of the fairy tale. In addition to free ideas about the story as a whole, certain individual motifs were also highlighted, as in the dream analysis, such as B. “being poor and having no children for a long time”, “a rich king has a beautiful daughter”; "Being able to do something that no one in the world had seen before". In summary, a polarity between two “worlds” is emphasized, the transition of which is shown in the fairy tale. The initially ruling world is characterized by the category of poverty and wealth. This means the poor couple at the beginning of the story, who are not even capable of procreation, as well as the rich and powerful king who only owns a daughter and offers a prize without regard to her feelings. In this world everything revolves around having or not-having, success or failure, so that you can something make can or not. Competition also belongs to this sphere. But what is sought cannot be done or ordered, and so it is only with the help of the beings that do not come from this world, the old woman at the beginning of the story and the Matuya, that this psychological area can be exceeded.
The violin, which is a prototype for the music as a whole, marks a different world, one in which it is about feelings, about the ability to trigger feelings in others. Characteristically, what is new, something that no one has seen before, is something that has to be heard . The construction of the violin is also understood as a symbol for the bringing together of the feminine and the masculine and thus for a world in which there is a desire. Psychoanalytically, it is about achieving triangulation and generativity . From the masculine and feminine arises as a third the music, which can make you happy and sad. This means that a completely different power is at work than that of command and obedience, the power of feelings. They move inwardly and make relationship possible. The fact that this level was missing before is once again underlined by the fact that the listeners noticed that neither the youth nor the daughter seemed to come from a sexual connection. The father does not appear to be involved in the youth, and no mother figure appears in the context of the daughter.
With regard to the music and the violin, it is emphasized that all listeners agreed that both were part of it, laughter and crying, joy and sadness, love and death, just as music stands for all these feelings and these can express. The violin is felt to be a particularly soulful instrument. Unlike in the fairy tale, however, it actually takes years of practice to be able to express one's own feelings and make something vibrate in the other.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Heinrich von Wlislocki: From the wandering Gypsy people. Pictures from the life of the Transylvanian gypsies. History, ethnology, language and poetry. Richter, Hamburg 1890, p. 221 f ISBN 5-874-17525-3
- ↑ Hermann Berger: Mythology of the Gypsies. Original publication in: Hans Wilhelm Haussig , Heinz Bechert (Hrsg.): Gods and Myths of the Indian Subcontinent (= Dictionary of Mythology . Section 1: The ancient civilized peoples. Volume 5). Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-12-909850-X , pp. 773-824 ( online version as PDF , p. 44, accessed on March 1, 2016.
- ↑ Walter Aichele, Martin Bock (ed.): Gypsy fairy tales. Diederichs series »Fairy Tales of World Literature« Diederichs (first edition 1962) 1991 ISBN 3-424-00331-X
- ↑ Leander Petzoldt (Ed.): Musikmärchen . Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1994, p. 124 f ISBN 3-596-12463-8
- ↑ Paul Zaunert (Ed.): The Magic Flute. Fairy tales of the European peoples . Eugen Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1995
- ↑ The wondrous box. Around the world in 40 fairy tales. Radio play WDR (ed.). Random House Audio 2013 ISBN 978-3-8983-0562-4
- ↑ Magazine Märchenforum No. 57 - About Laughing and Weeping in Fairy Tales . Mutabor-Verlag, Lützelflüh (CH) 2013
- ↑ Performance of the theater in the Meerwiese Münster , accessed on March 1, 2016
- ↑ Marianne Seidel: Text work on the Roma fairy tale The Creation of the Violin , accessed on March 1, 2016
- ^ Heinrich von Wlislocki: From the wandering Gypsy people. Pictures from the life of the Transylvanian gypsies. History, ethnology, language and poetry. Richter, Hamburg 1890, p. 218 f ISBN 5-874-17525-3
- ↑ Rosemarie Tüpker: Music in fairy tales. Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden 2011, p. 65, p. 69 ff, p. 73 f ISBN 978-3-8950-0839-9
- ↑ List of individual motifs and fairy tale text , accessed on March 1, 2016
- ↑ Rosemarie Tüpker: Music in fairy tales. Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden 2011, pp. 53–57
- ↑ Rosemarie Tüpker: Music in fairy tales. Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden 2011, p. 51