Josephine Caroline Lang

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Josephine Caroline Lang , since 1842 married Köstlin (born March 14, 1815 in Munich ; † December 2, 1880 in Tübingen ) was a German song composer , pianist and singer of the Romantic era .

Josephine Caroline Lang

Life

The daughter of the Munich violinist and member of the Munich court orchestra Theobald Lang (1783–1839) and the chamber singer Regina Hitzelberger (1788–1827) was considered a child prodigy. At the age of eleven, she performed as a piano soloist with variations by Henri Herz in a concert by the Munich society Das Museum . Before she started composing at the age of five , she had already taken piano lessons. She made enormous progress on the piano and gave her first piano lessons at the age of twelve. After her mother's death, she contributed to the family's livelihood by taking piano and singing lessons. Since she was born she suffered from poor health, which is why she initially received private lessons. Later she finally attended an institute, where she developed a great interest in modern languages ​​and literature, which later had an impact on her song compositions.

She often visited her godfather, the Munich court painter Joseph Karl Stieler , from whom her first name “Josephine” comes. His house became her second home, especially after her mother's death in 1827. At that time, many important musicians frequented this place, such as Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy , who later became the godfather of their first son Felix (1842–1868), and the music teacher Ferdinand Hiller . Mendelssohn in particular was impressed by her songs and wrote in October 1831:

"She now has the gift of composing songs and singing like I have never heard anything before, it is the most complete musical joy"

Mendelssohn also gave her lessons in counterpoint and figured bass . At his suggestion, she was supposed to move to Berlin to study with Adolf Bernhard Marx , Carl Friedrich Zelter and Fanny Hensel , but her father declined the offer.

The 1830s would be Josephine's most productive period. In 1831, supported by Felix Mendelssohn, her first collection of songs appeared in Munich. Further regular assignments as a court orchestra singer in Munich and at house and salon concerts followed in the following years. In 1838 she made a trip to Salzburg to the widow of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , the widowed State Councilor Constanze von Nissen , with whom she had a lively exchange of experiences. As early as 1835 she met the pianist and composer Stephen Heller at the annual concerts in Augsburg during the summer months . Through his mediation, she was accepted into the Royal Court and Church Chapel of Munich. In addition, he introduced her to the works of Robert Schumann . This in turn got to know and appreciate Lang's songs, and published and reviewed some in his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik . She also had a lasting friendship with Clara Schumann . She helped ensure that Lang's works were not only regularly reviewed or announced in the NZfM , but also occasionally in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung or the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikzeitung . In 1840 she was finally appointed court orchestra singer.

Her father's death a year earlier increased her enormous workload. In 1840, on the recommendation of the emperor's widow Karoline Auguste von Bayern , she took a cure in Wildbad Kreuth , where she met the Tübingen legal scholar and poet lawyer Christian Reinhold Köstlin , who she married two years later. Now living in Tübingen, she had to take care of the household, representational duties and sick family members, so she had to slow down artistically. During these years she gave birth to six children, of whom her son Theobald was paralyzed from birth. In 1850, her husband fell ill with a lung disease, to which he finally succumbed in 1856. After his death, Josephine Köstlin, herself with weakened health, was initially completely on her own and had to feed her family again with piano and singing lessons and new compositions.

Her best-known students at that time include Prince Wilhelm, who later became King Wilhelm II of Württemberg, and his cousin, Duke Eugen von Württemberg (1846–1877). Since she could not develop artistically in the previous years due to lack of time, her first publications did not have any great success at first. With the help of her long-time friend Ferdinand Hiller and Clara Schumann, she managed to find publishers for her works again. In the meantime, she had to suffer setbacks again and again, for example when her son Felix, who was initially a hopeful artist himself, became mentally ill at the age of around 20 and had to be admitted to the Winnenden sanatorium in 1862 , where he died in a fire in 1868 came. After her paralyzed son Theobald and her third son Eugen died in 1880 from the deported effects of typhus , their will to live dried up. Josephine Köstlin b. Lang died only a few months later on December 2, 1880 and was buried in the Tübingen city cemetery.

Artistic work

Josephine Lang was a versatile and talented artist in her profession and preferred both a simple and economical, almost chorale-like technique as well as virtuoso piano parts, which she often used as a dialogue with the singing voice. Stylistically, it was somewhere between Mendelssohn and Schumann. In her early years she preferred to use current poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Heinrich Heine , Friedrich Rückert , Justinus Kerner , Nikolaus Lenau or August von Platen-Hallermünde and many others as text templates , but also to poets such as those who were still relatively unknown at the time for example Wilhelm von Marsano , Christoph August Tiedge and Albert Zeller . Lang also set works by a number of female poets such as Luise Brachmann , Helmina von Chézy and others to music , as well as a considerable number of her husband's poems after their marriage, which he wrote under the pseudonym “C. Reinhold ”had published. Many of their composed pieces were transcribed by Mendelssohn, Friedrich Silcher and others for male choirs and performed, for example, on the "Tübinger Liedertafel ". Her 124 song works and some piano compositions were initially cataloged by Josephine Lang herself with opus numbers, but she got bogged down several times due to the family circumstances described above. Only her only surviving son, Heinrich Adolf Köstlin, revised this catalog raisonné, but it shows inaccuracies in some dates in some places. This son also published an extensive biography at Breitkopf & Härtel shortly after her death .

What is remarkable about the selection of her texts is a certain self-imposed biographical diary, as she herself put it in various letters. Based on the selected texts, their respective moods, their health, but also their familial strokes of fate can be understood. For Josephine Lang, composing should therefore take on a therapeutic function as personal self-expression. This became her trademark, she took the listener into her emotional world and moved them emotionally. It was inevitable that her compositions from the happy years up to around 1848 received consistently positive reviews, whereas between 1858 and 1862 the negative predominated. However, later publications no longer received any critical attention.

Modern song releases

  • Josephine Lang: Songs based on texts by Reinhold Köstlin . In: Monuments of Music in Baden-Württemberg , Vol. 20, ed. by Harald Krebs, Munich 2008.
  • Josephine Lang: Selected songs , ed. by Barbara Gabler, Kassel: Furore-Verlag 2010.

Fanny Hensel on Josephine Lang

The composer Fanny Hensel, who was herself a very talented song composer, describes in a letter to her brother, the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, her impression of surviving songs by Josephine Lang in July 1841:

"[...] I play it through, find [...] the Lang songs that I like so much that I play them and the like. play again, u. can't part with it, u. I finally put it aside to keep it, all day I sang the one alto song in particular, etc. told everyone about it [...]. The things are really musical in their deepest soul, the modulations are often so ingenious and. own that I take great pleasure in it. If I had got to know her in Munich like you did, I would certainly write to her to tell her that. "

family

Villa Köstlin, family residence and cultural center for numerous artists
Grave of the Köstlin couple in the Tübingen city cemetery . Lower entry: Josefine Caroline / geb. LANG / song composer.

Josephine Caroline Lang was married to Christian Reinhold Köstlin , son of the theology professor and senior consistorial councilor Nathanael Friedrich von Köstlin and Heinrike Schnurrer (1789-1819) since March 29, 1842 . With him she had six children, including the theology professor and church musician Heinrich Adolf Köstlin , the also artistically active but early deceased son Felix Reinhold Köstlin, (1842-1868) and the daughter Maria Regina (1849-1925), the industrialist and director of one Siemenswerk Richard Albert Fellinger (1848–1903) married. The family had a residence in the 1842 built Villa Köstlin in Rümelinstraße in Tübingen, which today together with the Köstlin's garden in the Biedermeier style under monument protection stands and in the after thorough restoration, which opened 16 January 2012 Center for Islamic Theology of the University of Tubingen set has been. Since 2016 a plaque on the building has been commemorating the couple's former residence.

literature

  • From the clay life of our time. Occasional by Ferdinand Hiller , Second Volume, Leipzig 1868, pp. 116-136 ( digitized version ).
  • Heinrich Adolf Köstlin : Josefine Lang , Leipzig 1881.
  • Heinrich Adolf Köstlin :  Köstlin, Josefine . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 51, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1906, pp. 345-350.
  • Robert Münster: women composers from three centuries . Booklet accompanying the exhibition in the music reading room of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, place and year not specified, not paged (1971). Bayerische Vereinsbank, curator Robert Münster, Munich September / October 1971.
  • Brigitte Richter: Women around Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy , Leipzig 1997, pp. 79–83.
  • Eva Weissweiler : female composers from the Middle Ages to the present day . Munich: dtv, 1999, ISBN 3-423-30726-9 , here pp. 212–245.
  • Emanuel Scobel: Art. "Lang, Josephine (Caroline)" . In: Music in Past and Present , Person Part 10, ed. by Ludwig Finscher , 2nd rework. Edition, Kassel u. a. 2003, col. 1156-1157.
  • Harald and Sharon Krebs: Josephine Lang. Her Life and Songs . Oxford University Press 2007.
  • Josephine Lang (1815-1880). Songs based on texts by Reinhold Köstlin (= Monuments of Music in Baden-Württemberg , Vol. 20), presented by Harald Krebs, Munich 2008.
  • Michael Aschauer / Rainer Bayreuther: "Josephine Lang (1815–1880)". In: Rainer Bayreuther / Nikolai Ott (eds.): Choir composers in Württemberg , Esslingen a. a .: Helbling 2019, ISBN 9783862274185 , pp. 240–245.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Munster: Josephine Karoline Lang, married. Kostlin . In: women composers from three centuries .
  2. ^ Eva Weissweiler: Female composers from the Middle Ages to the present . Munich 1999, p. 213f.
  3. ^ Robert Munster: Josephine Karoline Lang, married. Kostlin . In: women composers from three centuries .
  4. ↑ Anja Herold: Article “Lang, Josephine Caroline, m. Köstlin ” . In: European female instrumentalists of the 18th and 19th centuries . 2008. Online encyclopedia of the Sophie Drinker Institute, ed. by Freia Hoffmann.
  5. ^ Eva Weissweiler: Female composers from the Middle Ages to the present . Munich 1999, p. 216f.
  6. ↑ Sharon Krebs: Article "Josephine Lang" . In: Music education and gender research: Lexicon and multimedia presentations , ed. by Beatrix Borchard, University of Music and Theater Hamburg, 2003ff. As of September 6, 2012.
  7. ^ Eva Weissweiler: Female composers from the Middle Ages to the present . Munich 1999, p. 219
  8. ↑ Anja Herold: Article “Lang, Josephine Caroline, m. Köstlin ” . In: European female instrumentalists of the 18th and 19th centuries . 2008. Online encyclopedia of the Sophie Drinker Institute, ed. by Freia Hoffmann.
  9. ^ Eva Weissweiler: Female composers from the Middle Ages to the present . Munich 1999, p. 223.
  10. ↑ Anja Herold: Article “Lang, Josephine Caroline, m. Köstlin ” . In: European female instrumentalists of the 18th and 19th centuries . 2008. Online encyclopedia of the Sophie Drinker Institute, ed. by Freia Hoffmann.
  11. ^ Eva Weissweiler: Female composers from the Middle Ages to the present . Munich 1999, p. 244f.
  12. ↑ For the catalog of works, see: Sharon Krebs: Article “Josephine Lang” . In: Music education and gender research: Lexicon and multimedia presentations , ed. by Beatrix Borchard, University of Music and Theater Hamburg, 2003ff. As of September 6, 2012.
  13. ↑ Eva Weissweiler (ed.): Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn. Correspondence , Berlin 1997, p. 357f.
  14. ↑ Schwäbisches Tageblatt, article from January 22, 2016: “Back in the circle of important people in the city. A memorial plaque on the long-standing family seat commemorates the composer and musician Josephine Lang ”. Online at: https://www.tagblatt.de/Nachrichten/Eine-Gedenktafel-am-langjaehrigen-Familiensitz-erinnert-an-die-Komponistin-und-Musikerin-Josephine-La-273761.html
personal data
SURNAME Lang, Josephine Caroline
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kostlin, Josephine Caroline
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German song composer and singer of the Romantic era
DATE OF BIRTH March 14, 1815
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH December 2, 1880
Place of death Tubingen