Epithalamium

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Epithalamium or Epithalamion (from Greek ἐπί epi "at" and ϑάλαμος thálamos "bedchamber"; Latin epithalamium ; German "wedding poem", "bride song"; plural: -ien) is an occasional poem, written and usually performed chorally to celebrate a Wedding . The ancient form of the wedding poem is also referred to as Hymenaios ( ancient Greek Ὑμέναιος , Latin Hymenaeus ). His personification in Greek mythology is the wedding god Hymenaios .

history

Antiquity

The term Hymenaios goes back to ὑμήν ( hymen ), a word of unclear meaning and etymology, which in repetition and multiple modifications as a refrain ( Ὑμὴν ὦ Ὑμέναιε Hymen o Hymenaie ) apparently formed the core of the wedding song sung in ancient Greece. A pre-Indo-European origin of the word was suspected, with Pindar and Sophocles a relationship between hymen and hymnos ( ὕμνος “song”) is assumed. As part of wedding customs, Hymenaios is first mentioned in Homer .

Among the Greeks and Romans it was a custom from the wedding cult that young women and men sang in front of the bedchamber of the newlyweds, according to tradition the evening before and the morning after. Lascivious verses ( Fescennini versus ) were dedicated to the young Roman who had entered into marriage; they underlined the deductio of the bride. The epithalamion, the wedding song, which above all shifts the gaze from the groom to the bride, and illustrates the stages on the way from unmarried to married woman, contrasts with these mysterious verses, which had their fixed and indispensable place in the wedding ritual . The song mainly contains blessings and prophecies of a happy future for the couple, with occasional invocations to the wedding gods such as Hymenaios . With the Romans, however, the epithalamium was only sung by girls and tended to be explicitly sexual.

Famous authors of epithalamies were the Greeks Sappho , Anacreon , Stesichorus , Pindar and Theocrit , as well as the Romans Ovid and Catullus . In particular, the 18th idyll of Theocritus, which celebrates the marriage of Menelaus and Helena , is considered a particularly outstanding example of the genre. Catullus tried to give the form , which had slipped into obscene, new dignity; His marriage is praised by Thetis and Peleus , which is based on a lost ode of Sappho.

The works of Statius , Ausonius , Apollinaris Sidonius and Claudianus fall into the late Roman period . Sidonius reports that the form was also common in Franconia as barbaricus hymen .

middle Ages

In the Middle Ages , the coarse wedding carmines stood as a counterpart to the courtly, pathetic form of wedding songs in gallant poetry . Late High German glosses and Middle High German texts mention the form of brûtliet , brûtesang and brûteleich ; they describe the songs sung together during the wedding celebrations, which were sometimes accompanied by dance. The allegorical poem The Wedding from the 12th century describes the bride being led home by the groom, which takes place with singing: hoy, as si dô sung, / dô si brought her home! The neo-Latin poets of the Renaissance, especially George Buchanan , Scaliger , Sannazaro, imitated the shape and thus became a model for vernacular versions (see also straw wreath speech ).

Modern times

The first Epithalamion in English was written by Edmund Spenser ( Epithalamium , 1595), which he wrote as a gift to his wife for his own wedding. His poem follows the sequence of the hours of his wedding day and night in an elaborate arrangement of stanzas and verses, combining pagan mythology, Christian dogma and the local Irish environment.

At about the same time in Great Britain, Ben Jonson , John Donne , Robert Herrick and Francis Quarles wrote epithalamies, whereby the various forms of the genre were adopted by Greeks and Romans insofar as, depending on the mood and the occasion, both crude and highly pathetic and subtle poems were created. Sir John Suckling wrote a parody of this form in his Ballad upon a Wedding .

Even Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a long poem Epithalamion . The conclusion of Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam AHH , which begins with a funeral, a Epithalamion forms to the wedding of his sister. AE Housman imitated the ancient form with the bride's song in He is Here, Urania's Son . Also WH Auden wrote a Epithalamion (1949).

On the French side, the experiments of Pierre de Ronsard , François de Malherbe and Paul Scarron arose , and Metastasio was active in Italy .

In Germany in the Baroque era, the wedding poem became the most important form of the occasional poem , alongside the funeral poem, the epicedium - there are hundreds by Simon Dach alone . This is also important in a material sense, as the routine writing of wedding and funeral poems was the basic content of many poets, such as Johann Christian Günther . As an example, the last two stanzas of a poem by Simon Dach on the wedding of Ludolph Holtorff and Barbara Nachtigall in 1643:

The day dawns from afar
through beautiful dawns,
The night is full of stars,
The Lufft knows no problem:
I should be surprised
when this great army of
heavenly favor and gifts give
an evil sign who?

But I wish you both.
In addition to that,
Gantz vnbekränckte Frewden
Sampt aller Gnüg vnd Rhue,
I, who I, driven
by your love, power this
wedding song written
today vmb the midnight.

In the 18th century the wedding poem began to play a minor role in lyric production. Johann Christoph Gottsched counted the form of the wedding poem as an elegy , according to him it must be written in epic Alexandrians . An example of the expression of the genre in German classical music is the wedding song by Johann Wolfgang Goethe , here the last stanza:

How your
breasts and full face tremble from your multitude of kisses ;
Her severity now becomes trembling,
For your daring becomes a duty.
Cupid quickly helps you undress her
And is not half as fast as you;
Then he holds mischievously and modestly
tightly both eyes.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pindar: Fragments, 128c.
  2. ↑ Sophocles: Antigone , 813-816.
  3. ↑ Homer: Iliad , 18, 491-496.
  4. ^ Philipp Witkop : Die Deutschen Lyriker. From Luther to Nietzsche. First volume: From Luther to Hölderlin. 2nd ed. Teubner 1921. Reprint Springer, ISBN 978-3-663-15552-2 , p. 43 f.
  5. ↑ Simon Dach: Poems. Volume 1. Halle adS 1936, p. 118 .
  6. ^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Berlin edition. Poetic works. Volume 2. Structure, Berlin 1960 ff., P. 45 .