Nachtviolen (art song)

The first five bars in C major

Nachtviolen ( D. 752) is the title of an art song by Franz Schubert for a voice and pianoforte . It's a short piece; a standard performance lasts about three minutes.

Emergence

Schubert composed the song in April 1822, according to other sources in December of the same year, based on a poem by his friend Johann Baptist Mayrhofer . However, he removed a total of three of the fifteen lines of the poem and replaced a few words, which not only changed the text, but also its message. A look at the original by Mayrhofer shows how Schubert changed the verses for his purposes.

The following table shows these differences. The literal deviations are highlighted in bold.

Schubert's lyrics	Mayrhofer's poem
Night violets, night violets!	Night violets, night violets!
Dark eyes, soulful,	Dark eyes, soulful,
It is blessed to be immersed	It is blessed to become deeper
In the velvet blue.	In the velvet blue.

Green leaves joyfully strive	Green leaves joyfully strive
To light you up, to adorn yourselves;	To light you up, to adorn yourselves;
But you look serious and silent	But you look serious and foreseeing
In the mild spring air .	In the mild summer air.

	Yes, that is how you bind the poet
With a lofty beam of sadness	With a lofty beam of sadness
If you met my faithful heart,	You met his faithful heart.

And now blooms in silent nights	And now blooms in silent nights
Away the sacred connection.	Away the sacred connection:
	Inexpressible, unfathomable,
	And the world doesn't reach them.

While Mayrhofer's poem depicts the relationship between subject and object and the world's inability to react to it, Schubert was only interested in a representation of pure experience.

In the last verse Schubert no longer mentions the “poet” himself, but with the very personally apostrophized “heart” - he changes “his” to “mine” - he erases the whole, slightly stilted phrase. This makes the poetry much more personal, but maybe also more self-centered.

The song marks the end of the fruitful collaboration between composer and poet, which has lasted since 1815 ( Die Freunde von Salamanka , D.326). From 1821 onwards there were growing differences, both personal and in the fact that Mayrhofer came to terms with censorship and intellectual repression under Metternich's influence and began to participate in this system himself. To what extent the changes made by Schubert are related to this estrangement between the friends cannot be proven. With forty-seven poems set to music after Goethe and Müller , Mayrhofer is Schubert's most important librettist .

publication

The song was only published 50 years after Schubert's death by the editor Eusebius Mandyczewski (1857–1929) in the Breitkopf & Härtel publishing house in 1872 under the title "Franz Schubert's Works, Series XX: Complete Songs and Songs, No. 403".

The song was published in C major , but according to the Witteczek - Spaun Collection , it was originally written in A major . However, no writing in this key has survived. The C major autograph is currently divided: one page is in the Oslo University Library (Udbye Collection, bars 1–24), the other in the Austrian National Library (bars 25 to the end).

The night violets were also used in other languages and translations, for example under the title “Dame's violet” in English and “Juliennes des dames” in French .

interpretation

In Romanticism , symbolism became an important means of expression. The blue flower from Novalis stands for longing and love . The rose was ascribed virginity and was considered a symbol of the female heart. In 1821 the dictionary of the language of flowers appeared under the title "The Selam of the Orient or the language of flowers" which was edited by the Berlin Johann Daniel Symanski (1789-1857). Here is the following to read about the night violet, recited from Wolfgang Adolf Gerle's flower language:

Only on holy night when the eternal stars shine,
I lament the love. Nobody suspects them in me during the day.

Surely the night violin song is not just a song on a flower. Many interpretations are possible. The conductor Stephen Jackson, for example, draws a parallel to Schubert's syphilis disease and sees the night violets, which are also considered Aphrodite's flowers , an image of poisoned love.

The night violets, which are rather inconspicuous in color - they have the biological name "Hesperis tristis" - only develop their sweet, heavy scent in the evening hours and are used metaphorically for loyalty and modesty. Music and poetry create this impression equally.

Schubert dresses the syllables of the word Nachtviolen in a simple harmonic sequence with overtones , thus creating a feeling of tender intimacy. The musicologist Alfred Einstein calls the piece a “masterpiece of dark [secret, confidential] intimacy” ( a masterpiece of mysterious intimacy ).

The small pitch range (es' - f ''), which moves dangerously high in the vocal range , depending on the transposition, soprano , alto , tenor or baritone , together with the repeated motifs, indicates a kind of permanence through thick and seems to be walking thin. At the beginning of the third stanza, the words "and now blooms in dumb nights" in the piano part have a counter-melody that goes against the sentimentality of the opening theme. Schubert almost completely dispenses with the accompaniment by the pianist's left hand . Only towards the end of the song is an accompaniment notated in the bass clef , the deeper resonances of which perhaps reinforce the "sacred connection". The diverging vocal and piano registers could also, as the English pianist and song accompanist Gerald Moore wrote, describe a “ leave-taking made with affectionate reluctance ”. These simplest musical means can be seen as symbols of modesty and humility.

literature

Stephen Jackson: “Franz Schubert. An Essential Guide to His Life and Work " . Pavilion Books, 1997, ISBN 1-85793-987-5 ( wordpress.com ).
Christopher H. Gibbs (Ed.): "Cambridge Companion to Schubert" . Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 978-0-521-48424-4 ( google.de ).