Oh dear, as long as you can love
Oh dear, as long as you can love is a poem by the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810–1876). Freiligrath wrote the poem at the age of nineteen in 1829. In 1845 the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt set the poem to music as an art song for solo voice and piano. Liszt used the melody of the song again in his Liebestraum No. 3 for piano , published in 1850 . In this version it became one of Liszt's most famous melodies.
The entire poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath, of which Liszt set the first four stanzas to music:
O dear, as long as you can love!
O dear, as long as you can love!
O dear, as long as you love!
The hour is coming, the hour is coming,
When you stand by graves and complain!
And make sure that your heart glows
And cherishes love and bears love,
As long as another heart
beats warmly towards him in love!
And whoever opens his breast to you,
O do him what you can too dearly!
And make him happy every hour,
And don't make him dull an hour!
And watch out for your tongue,
soon a bad word will be said!
Oh God, it wasn't meant badly, - But
the other goes and complains.
O dear, as long as you can love!
O dear, as long as you love!
The hour is coming, the hour is coming,
When you stand by graves and complain!
Then you kneel down by the crypt
And hide your eyes, cloudy and wet,
- You will never see the other one - In the
long, damp churchyard grass.
And say: O look down on me,
Who weeps here by your grave!
Forgive me for offending you!
Oh God, it wasn't meant badly!
But he
neither sees nor hears you. Don't come, that you should embrace him gladly;
The mouth that has often kissed you
never speaks again: I've long since forgiven you!
He that's, forgave you for a long time,
But many hot tears fell
around you and your bitter word -
But quiet - he rests, he has reached his goal!
O dear, as long as you can love!
O dear, as long as you love!
The hour is coming, the hour is coming,
When you stand by graves and complain!
reception
At the end of the documentary Marlene Dietrich - Portrait of a Myth (1984), Marlene Dietrich and Maximilian Schell recite the poem together, and Dietrich is moved to tears by the words.
A sample of the song by Franz Liszt in a recording of the master sextet from 1937 can be heard as the outro of the song Spiel mir das Lied vom Dieben (from the album Zombieactionhauptquartier, 2008) by the German metalcore band Callejon .
Individual evidence
- ↑ O dear, as long as you can love! in the Freiburg anthology.
- ^ O dear as long as you can love, p.298 (Liszt, Franz) : Sheet music and audio files in the International Music Score Library Project
- ^ Ferdinand Freiligrath's complete works. Volume 1. Friedrich Gerhard, New York 1858, pp. 400-402 ( digitized version ).
- ^ Ferdinand Freiligrath: Poems. Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-15-004911-3 ( online in the Gutenberg-DE project ).
- ↑ O dear, as long as you can love! The LiederNet Archive