Tristan (Platen)
Tristan is a late romantic song written by August von Platen-Hallermünde in 1825 . It is based on the medieval story Tristan and Isolde and is about love that transcends borders and the death of love.
History of origin
August von Platen wrote the song while under arrest after he returned late from vacation in Italy as a lieutenant. This marked the point in time when Platen decided to turn his back on the army and move to Italy. The song was intended as part of the drama Tristan und Isolde , for which Platen first wrote all the chants; Incidentally, he did not get beyond sketched scenes. In a first edition, Platen published a version with an additional fourth stanza, which he put between the second and third. In the final version, this form can be found with three stanzas.
content
Whoever has looked at beauty with eyes,
has already given up to death,
will be no good for any service on earth,
and yet he will tremble before death,
who has looked at beauty with eyes!
The pain of love lasts forever for him,
Because a gate can only hope on earth,
To suffice such an impulse:
Whom the arrow of the beautiful ever hit,
the pain of love lasts for him forever!
Oh, he would like to fizzle out like a spring, suck
a poison
from every breath of air And smell death from every flower:
Whoever looked at beauty with eyes,
oh, he would like to fizzle out like a spring!
shape
The song consists of three stanzas and has a triptych structure, which encompasses the middle section (this may explain why Platen did not publish the fourth stanza - it would have ruined the architecture). Within the individual stanzas there is also an embracing structure through the cross rhymes : the second rhyme is embraced by the first and third rhymes, the third by the second and fourth, the fourth by the third and fifth rhymes. Another type of hug can be found in the verse structure, the first and last verse of a stanza are the same. In addition, in the last verse of the third stanza, the opening verse is repeated again. It is noticeable that the meter and the rhyme scheme are strictly adhered to. It is constructed in a five-legged trochee and always has a female cadence . Through the shape and its regularity, Platen creates a mood of harmony and melancholy.
interpretation
The first question that arises with this song is the question of the narrator. Is it Tristan himself speaking? Or is the poet speaking Platen? Or was the familiar “ lyrical me ” used here? For Jürgen Link, it is not Tristan himself who speaks here, but another character about Tristan, because in his opinion Tristan should bring himself into play with an “I”. However, this contradicts the fact that in the drama itself, the character of Tristan himself should probably hold this monologue. For Peter Wapnewski, ancient mythology appears in the song: Tristan as a symbol of Narcissus , who could only love himself and who took his own life, and Echo , who has to “wilt away” because Narcissus did not want to love her. For him, Platen merges the "drying up" of the source and the "sniffing" of life in the word "veriechen". The fact that the myth of Narcissus and Echo was one of Platen's favorite myths supports this thesis. In Wapnewski's opinion, Platen also built in the ancient god Amor with the name “Arrow of the Beautiful”. The man's beauty alludes to Platen's homosexuality, who was at a mental turning point because of this fate and the taboo on homosexuality. Jürgen Link also assumes this, as he assigns the voice to both a fictional character and the real Platen himself. It expresses the “real and spiritual prison” in which von Platen is located.
The song can also be seen as a typical example of late romantic literature with its death and delimitation longing of the individual, which is expressed in Tristan's longing for the death of love. Thomas Mann saw in the poem the "original and basic formula" of a world, "in which the command of life, the laws of life, reason and morality do not apply, a world of drunk, hopeless libertinage, which is at the same time a world of the proudest form and the severity of death" be.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Günter Häntzschel : Poems and Interpretations Volume 4: From Biedermeier to Bourgeois Realism . Stuttgart: Phillip Reclam jun. 1983. page 36.
- ↑ Collected works in one volume, Cotta 1839, p. 29 books.google
- ^ A b Marcel Reich-Ranicki: German poems and their interpretations Volume 4: From Heinrich Heine to Theodor Storm . Frankfurt am Main & Leipzig: Insel Verlag 2002. Page 39.
- ^ A b Günter Häntzschel: Poems and Interpretations Volume 4: From Biedermeier to Bourgeois Realism . Stuttgart: Phillip Reclam jun. 1983. page 39.
- ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: German poems and their interpretations Volume 4: From Heinrich Heine to Theodor Storm . Frankfurt am Main & Leipzig: Insel Verlag 2002. Page 40.
- ↑ Quoted from Rüdiger Görner , afterword in August von Platen: Who looked at beauty with eyes. A reader. Edited by Rüdiger Görner. dtv Klassik, Munich 1996, p. 280.