Whose Mourning?: Schumann’s Requiem für Mignon

Eftychia Papanikolaou is assistant professor of musicology and coordinator of music history studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her research (from Haydn and Brahms to Mahler’s fi n-de-siècle Vienna), focuses on the interconnections of music, religion, and politics in the long nineteenth century, with emphasis on the sacred as a musical topos. She is currently completing a monograph on the genre of the Romantic Symphonic Mass.

CHORAL JOURNAL Volume 51 Number 2 19

famous poetic inter-polations from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Leh-

rjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship], especially the “Mignon” lieder, hold a prestigious place in nineteenth-century lied literature. Mignon, the novel’s adoles-cent girl, possesses a strange personality whose mysterious traits will be discussed further later. Goethe included ten songs in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, eight of which were fi rst set to music by Johann Fried-rich Reichardt (1752–1814) and were included in the novel’s original publication (1795–96). Four of those songs are sung by the Harper, a character reminiscent of an epic rhapsode, and four by Mignon.1 Numerous composers, from Zelter and Beethoven to Liszt and Wolf, set Mignon’s and the Harper’s songs as lieder for solo voice with piano accompaniment.2 In 1849, a year that witnessed numerous celebrations surrounding the centenary of Goethe’s birth (an anniversary with obvi-ous nationalistic overtones), Schumann chose to commemorate him in his Szenen aus Goethes Faust (1844–53)3 and by creating a comprehensive opus out of all the songs in Wilhelm Meister. With the exception of only one (an anonymous satire, “Ich armer Teufel, Herr Baron” from Book 3, Chapter 9), Schumann wrote mu-sic for all remaining nine songs and, in an unconventional turn, he chose to cap this collection of lieder with a musical setting of Mignon’s funeral rites, a passage that appears later in the novel and that had never been set to music before.

Schumann’s lied cycle and Mignon’s Exequien (as Goethe called the funeral scene) appeared in 1851 under a uni-fi ed opus number, titled Lieder, Gesänge und Requiem für Mignon aus Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Op. 98.4 In the fall of 1850 Schumann moved to Düsseldorf to assume the duties of music director, and

it was there that the Requiem für Mignon (subsequently the second Abteilung, Op. 98b), received its premiere as an inde-pendent composition on November 21, 1850. With this dramatic setting for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra Schumann’s Wilhelm Meister project was completed. In under 12 minutes, this “charming” piece, as Clara Schumann put it in a letter, epito-mizes Schumann’s predilection for music that defi es generic classifi cation. This article will consider the elevated status choral-orchestral compositions held in Schumann’s output and will shed light on tangential connections between the com-poser’s musico-dramatic approach and his engagement with the German tradition.

A Bildungsroman?The idiosyncratic style and content of

Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre has led many scholars to dispute its categorization as a Bildungsroman. Only a couple of years after its publication, Friedrich Schlegel called the book “absolutely new and unique.” He asserted that we “can learn to understand it only on its own terms. To judge it accordingly to an idea of genre drawn from custom and belief, accidental experiences and arbitrary demands, is as if a child tried to clutch the stars and the moon in his hand and pack them in his satchel.”5 If Faust, especially Part II, still resists traditional stage presentation, largely due to its philosophically oriented aesthetic nuances, then Wilhelm Meister’s illusive classifi cation as a Bildungsroman seems to fail to do justice to the excep-tional qualities of this work.

In the course of the novel’s eight books (which vary in length from 9 to 17 chap-ters each), Wilhelm undertakes a process of self-discovery and education, but it is Mignon, one of the main characters (some might even say the protagonist)6 who radically evolves and tragically perishes at

The

20 CHORAL JOURNAL Volume 51 Number 2

the end of the book. Early on we learn that she was “taken from her parents when she was very young by a company of acrobats,” and she became Wilhelm’s adoptive daugh-ter, with whom she formed a strange attach-ment, at once fi lial and erotic.7 Mignon is “the prey of strong emotions,” and her personal-ity “consists almost entirely of a deep sort of yearning: the longing to see her mother again, and a longing for [Wilhelm]”—those, actually, seem to be “the only earthly things about her.”8 Fragile and vulnerable (indeed she suffers from “terrible convulsions” when emotionally disturbed),9 Mignon is a mar-ginalized personality until she undergoes a major transformation. Starting with Book 6, Mignon, who had worn boys’ clothes all

her life, is no longer the strangely looking, androgynous creature Wilhelm saved. When she is asked to participate in a theatrical play as an angel, we witness her for the fi rst time “clothed in a long, thin white garment with a girdle of gold around her chest and a golden crown in her hair.”10 Immediately afterwards she sings her last song in the novel, “So lasst mich scheinen,” whose text relates immediately to this transformative experience. It also sadly offers a prolepsis of her impeding death: Wilhelm encounters her shortly thereafter, still decked out in her “long white dress, her thick brown hair partly hanging loose”; at the sight of Wilhelm kissing another woman, Mignon suffers a seizure and dies.11 Afterwards, we learn that the Harper (who is also dead) was her father, and Mignon was born of an incestu-ous relationship with his sister. As strange as this story seems, even if read allegorically in Goethe’s superbly crafted prose, it neverthe-less helps elucidate the constant yearning, isolation, and poignancy of the novel’s ten lyrical interpolations. It will also help us un-derstand the elaborate scene of Mignon’s Exequien and how such a non-traditional musico-dramatic setting forms the perfect analog to the novel’s unconventional content.

ExequienThe prose text for Requiem für Mignon

comes from the opening of Book 8, Chapter 8 of Goethe’s novel, in which the author dramatizes the funeral rites that follow the unexpected death of Mignon. Its location, the Hall of the Past, with the “four large marble candelabras” in the corners, was already described to the readers before, when Natalie and Wilhelm observed the “exquisite craftsmanship” of a sarcophagus—an eerie prolepsis of the fate that they know Mignon would soon succumb to. In that scene, their observation of the “semicircular openings” for the “choirs of singers, so that they may remain unseen”12 had prompted Natalie to relate her uncle’s account on vocal music—a discourse on romantic aesthetics that deserves to be cited in its entirety:

We have been spoiled too much by theaters, where music only serves

the eye, accompanying movements, not feel ings. In orator ios and concerts the physical presence of the singer is disturbing. Music is only for the ear. A lovely voice is the most universal thing one can think of, and if the limited individual producing it is visible, this disturbs the effect of universality…. when someone is singing, he should be invisible, his appearance should not prejudice me in his favor or distract me. With singing it is a case of one organ addressing another, not one mind speaking to another, not a manifold world to a single pair of eyes, not heaven to a single man.13

(Book 8, Chapter 5)

It is immediately after this account that Mignon dies. A couple of chapters later, Mignon’s funeral takes place in this familiar Hall, as if it were “an elaborately staged dra-matic performance.”14 This time Mignon’s embalmed body lies inside the ornamented sarcophagus, and four boys and two invisible choirs, as if “disembodied” in the manner described earlier, intone in “gentle strains.”15

After a detailed stage description of the Hall of the Past, Goethe relates a dramatic exchange that takes place between the four boys sitting near Mignon’s coffi n and the two invisible choruses. Schumann’s melopoiesis of this short dialogue, which resembles a dramatic scene, constitutes Requiem für Mignon.

Schumann, appropriately, gave the texts of the four boys to two solo soprano and two solo alto voices, while the two choruses are represented by a single chorus on the score.16 Unlike what one would expect from the nature of the text, Schumann does not set this dialogue in an antiphonal manner. Instead, he creates a miniature dramatic presentation in six parts, performed without a pause. As he had done before, and espe-cially in his setting of scenes from Faust,17

Schumann followed Goethe’s text quite faithfully: with the exception of occasional repetitions and/or alterations, the prose serves almost as a libretto (Table 1 outlines Schumann’s division of the text vis-à-vis Goethe’s original). This music-as-literature

"Whose Mourning? Schumann's Requiem für Mignon""Whose Mourning? Schumann's Requiem für Mignon"


"Whose Mourning? Schumann's Requiem für Mignon"

J. W. von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Leh-rjahre, 1795–96. In Sämtliche Werke, Abteilung 1, Band 9, ed. Wilhelm Voßkamp and Herbert Jaumann. Frankfurt am Main: Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1992.

Am Abend lud der Abbé zu den Exequien Mignons ein. Die Gesellschaft begab sich in den Saal der Vergangenheit und fand denselben auf das sonderbarste erhellt und ausgeschmückt. Mit himmelblauen Tep-pichen waren die Wände fast von oben bis unten bekleidet, so daß nur Sockel und Fries hervorschienen. Auf den vier Kandelabern in den Ecken brannten große Wachsfackeln, und so nach Verhältnis auf den vier kleinern, die den mittlern Sarkophag umgaben. Neben diesem standen vier Knaben, himmelblau mit Silber gekleidet, und schienen einer Figur, die auf dem Sarkophag ruhte, mit breiten Fächern von Straußenfedern Luft zuzuwehn. Die Gesellschaft setzte sich, und zwei unsichtbare Chöre fi ngen mit holdem Gesang an zu fragen: »Wen bringt ihr uns zur stillen Gesellschaft?« Die vier Kinder antworteten mit lieblicher Stimme. »Einen müden Gespielen bringen wir euch; laßt ihn unter euch ruhen, bis das Jauchzen him-mlischer Geschwister ihn dereinst wieder aufweckt.«

ChorErstling der Jugend in unserm Kreise, sei willkommen! mit Trauer willkommen! Dir folge kein Knabe, kein Mädchen nach! Nur das Alter nahe sich willig und gelassen der stillen Halle, und in ernster Gesellschaft ruhe das liebe, liebe Kind!

KnabenAch! wie ungern brachten wir ihn her! Ach! und er soll hier bleiben! Laßt uns auch ble-iben, laßt uns weinen, weinen an seinem Sarge!

J. W. von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, edited and translated by Eric A. Blackall. Goethe’s collected works, Vol. 9. New York: Suhrkamp, 1989.***

In the evening the Abbé summoned everyone to the funeral rites for Mignon. The whole company proceeded to the Hall of the Past; they found it strangely decorated and illumi-nated. The walls were almost entirely draped with tapestries of azure blue, so that only the base and the frieze remained uncovered. Large wax candles were burning in the four big candelabras at the corners of the room, and others of appropriate size in the four smaller ones surrounding the sarcophagus in the center. Four boys were standing beside the bier, dressed in silver and blue, fanning with sheaves of ostrich feathers a fi gure that lay on top of the sarcophagus. The assembled company all took their seats, and two in-visible choruses intoned in gentle strains: “Whom do you bring to those at rest?” The four boys replied with lovely voices: “A weary playmate we bring you; here let him stay and rest till the rejoicing of his heavenly sisters shall wake him once more.”

CHORUSChild so young for this our realm, we wel-come you! We welcome you in sorrow! May no boy, nor girl follow thee! Old age alone shall wend its way, eagerly, calmly, here to this silent Hall, but thou, dear child, shalt rest here too, rest in solemn company.

BOYSAh, reluctantly we brought him here! Ah, and here shall he stay! We too will stay, let us weep and mourn, shed our tears above his corpse!

Robert Schumann, Requiem für Mignon aus Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Op. 98b, für Chor, Solostimmen und Orchester. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1851.

Am Abend [lud der Abbé zu den Exequien Mignons ein] fanden die Exequien für Mignon statt. Die Gesellschaft begab sich in den Saal der Vergangenheit und fand denselben auf das sonder-barste erhellt und ausgeschmückt. Mit himmelb-lauen Teppichen waren die Wände fast von oben bis unten bekleidet, so da[ss] nur Sockel und Fries hervorschienen. Auf den vier [C]andelabern in den Ecken brannten gro[ss]e Wachsfackeln, und son-ach [sic] Verhältnis auf den vier kleiner[e]n, die den [mittlern] Sarkophag umgaben. Neben die-sem standen vier Knaben, himmelblau mit Silber gekleidet und schienen einer Figur, [die] welche auf dem Sarkophag ruhte, mit breiten Fächern von Strau[ss]enfedern Luft zuzuwehn. Die Ge-sellschaft setzte sich und zwei [unsichtbare] Chöre fi ngen mit holdem Gesang an zu fragen:

[No. 1, Chorus, SS/AA, Ch]Chor »Wen bringt ihr uns zur stillen Gesellschaft?« [Die vier Kinder antworteten mit lieblicher Stimme.]Knaben»Einen müden Gespielen bringen wir euch; laßt ihn unter euch ruhen, bis das Jauchzen himmlisch-er Geschwister ihn dereinst wieder aufweckt.«Chor»Erstling der Jugend in unserm Kreise, sei willkommen! mit Trauer willkommen! Dir folge kein Knabe, kein Mädchen nach! Nur das Alter nahe sich willig und gelassen der stillen Halle, und in ernster Gesellschaft ruhe das liebe, liebe Kind!«

[No. 2, S/A]Knaben»Ach! wie ungern brachten wir ihn her! Ach! und er soll hier bleiben! Laßt uns auch bleiben, laßt uns weinen, weinen an seinem Sarge!«

Table 1 Indications of Modifi cations in Schumann’s Setting

[roman] = alternate spelling [italics] = entirely omitted underlined = new or modifi ed text italics = repeats text from before


[No. 3, Ch, SS/Ch] Chor»Seht die mächtigen Flügel doch an! seht das leichte, reine Gewand! wie blinkt die goldene Binde vom Haupt! seht die schöne, die würdige Ruh!«Knaben»Ach! die Flügel heben sie nicht; im leichten Spiele fl attert das Gewand nicht mehr; als wir mit Rosen kränzten ihr Haupt, blickte sie hold und.«Chor»Seht die mächtigen Flügel doch an! seht das leichte, reine Gewand! wie blinkt die goldene Binde vom Haupt! seht die schöne, die würdige Ruh!«

Chor» Schaut mit den Augen des Geistes hinan!

[No. 4, Ch, SS/A/Ch] Chor» In euch lebe die bildende Kraft, die das Schönste, das Höchste hinauf, über die Sterne das Leben trägt!«Knaben»Aber ach! wir vermissen sie hier, in den Gärten wandelt sie nicht, sammelt der Wiese Blumen nicht mehr. Laßt uns weinen, wir lassen sie hier! laßt uns weinen und bei ihr bleiben! «Chor»Schaut hinan mit den Augen des Geistes hinan!«

[No. 5, Bass, SS/AA, Ch] Chor»Kinder! kehret ins Leben zurück! Eure Tränen trockne die frische Luft, die um das schlängelnde Wasser spielt. Entfl ieht der Nacht! Tag und Lust und Dauer ist der Leb-endigen Los.«Knaben»Auf, wir kehren ins Leben zurück. Gebe der Tag uns Arbeit und Lust, bis der Abend uns Ruhe bringt und der nächtliche Schlaf uns erquickt.«

[No. 6, Ch, SS, Ch] Chor»Kinder! eilet ins Leben hinan! In der Schön-heit reinem Gewande begegn’ euch die Liebe mit himmlischem Blick und dem Kranz der Unsterblichkeit!«Knaben»Auf, wir kehren ins Leben zurück! Auf!«Chor»Auf! Kinder! eilet ins Leben hinan! Auf!«

ChorSeht die mächtigen Flügel doch an! seht das leichte, reine Gewand! wie blinkt die gold-ene Binde vom Haupt! seht die schöne, die würdige Ruh!

KnabenAch! die Flügel heben sie nicht; im leichten Spiele fl attert das Gewand nicht mehr; als wir mit Rosen kränzten ihr Haupt, blickte sie holdund freundlich nach uns.

ChorSchaut mit den Augen des Geistes hinan! In euch lebe die bildende Kraft, die das Schön-ste, das Höchste hinauf, über die Sterne das Leben trägt!

KnabenAber ach! wir vermissen sie hier, in den Gärten wandelt sie nicht, sammelt der Wiese Blumen nicht mehr. Laßt uns weinen, wir lassen sie hier! laßt uns weinen und bei ihr bleiben!

ChorKinder! kehret ins Leben zurück! Eure Tränen trockne die frische Luft, die um das schlängelnde Wasser spielt. Entfl ieht der Nacht! Tag und Lust und Dauer ist das Los der Lebendigen.

KnabenAuf, wir kehren ins Leben zurück. Gebe der Tag uns Arbeit und Lust, bis der Abend uns Ruhe bringt und der nächtliche Schlaf uns erquickt.

ChorKinder! eilet ins Leben hinan! In der Schön-heit reinem Gewande begegn’ euch die Liebe mit himmlischem Blick und dem Kranz der Unsterblichkeit!

CHORUSSee how the mighty wings, see the light un-spotted robe, the golden circle gleaming in his hair; see the beauty and grace of his repose!

BOYSAh! They lift him not, those mighty wings. His garments fl oat no more in easy play. His head we crowned with roses, sweet and friendly was his gaze.

CHORUSLift the eyes of the spirit!

CHORUSLift the eyes of the spirit! May in you dwell the power that transports what in life is fi nest, loveliest, highest, beyond the stars.

BOYSBut ah! Down here he is lost to us now. In gardens he wanders no more, fl owers he gath-ers no more. Let us weep and leave him here! Let us weep and stay with him!

CHORUSChildren, return to life! Your tears shall be dried in freshness of air circling water’s edge. Flee the night! Day and joy and continuance are the lot of the living.

BOYSUp! We turn to life again. The day will give us labor and joy, till evening brings us rest, and night refreshing sleep.

CHORUSChildren! Hasten to life! And beauty clothed in raiment pure shall bring you love with heavenly gaze and the crown of immortality!

*** The translation has been modifi ed in order to restore the male pronouns of Goethe’s original.

Table 1 continued


generic implications for the music—it also infers a fusion of religious outlooks. Titled after a ritual that partakes of the Catholic tradition, that is, an offering on behalf of the dead, this requiem exhibits few of the quali-ties associated with other works that belong in that genre—especially those that utilize the Latin text. Instead of placing emphasis on death and the afterlife, Goethe’s “exequien” text (a word that rather aptly defi nes the Protestant tradition) eulogizes the departed but also comforts those still alive—in other words, it functions as a sort of a Nänie, a song of lamentation, to borrow from Friedrich Schiller’s poetry. Consequently, Schumann’s music alludes to both musical traditions, and his musico-dramatic setting responds not only to the quasi-religious content of the text, but also captures the essence of Goethe’s eccentric protagonist whose me-morial we witness.

The MusicThe opening music (Nos. 1 and 2) func-

tions as a framework for the mourning

atmosphere experienced by those gathered at Mignon’s funeral. The work begins with a soft, slow and solemn orchestral introduction (Langsam, feierlich; Figure 1). In less than two measures Schumann establishes a lugubrious C-minor soundworld which, interestingly, seems to have been in existence long before. The dotted eighths in the orchestration al-lude to a funeral march procession, and we can easily imagine this music having started earlier, while the company was being as-sembled in the Hall of the Past. This sense of the music starting in medias res is intensifi ed by the entrance of the chorus on the upbeat of m. 2 on a iv7–V7–i progression—thus we are called to participate in the exchange between the choruses and the boys, but dramatically the ritual has started before even a single note has sounded.

Goethe’s emphasis on the physical ap-pearance of Mignon’s embalmed body in No. 3 is a vivid reminder of life’s ephemeral nature. “Even beauty must die,” apostro-phized Schiller in his famous poem, and Schumann seems to be celebrating the ethereal references of the text with the

approach, whereby the text is taken and used verbatim from a preexisting source, was rather radical for Schumann’s time, and attests to the composer’s reverence for Goethe’s text.

Schumann’s score opens not with music, but with Goethe’s description of the Hall of the Past where Mignon’s body lies. The few modifi cations that Schumann made to Goethe’s text warrant a short discussion. As Table 1 indicates, Goethe never called this section of Wilhelm Meister a requiem; in fact, Schumann changed Goethe’s opening line, “Am Abend lud der Abbé zu den Exequien Mignons ein,” to “Am Abend fanden die Exequien für Mignon statt.” He retained the archaic form of “Exequien” to denote the requiem practice—that is, exactly the type of funeral rites that would have taken place in a Protestant setting, as Adolf Nowak has claimed.18 But, although semantically the expression remains the same, changing “Ex-equien Mignons” to “Exequien für Mignon” easily led to the subsequent substitution of “Requiem” for “Exequien.” This alteration, however, has further than just typological or



addition of the harp, while also alluding to Mignon’s mysterious relationship with the Harper.19 The texts intertwine as Boys and Chorus freely exchange lines, culminating in a choral exhortation with the text that should have opened No. 4: “Schaut mit den

Augen des Geistes hinan!” (Lift the eyes of the spirit!; Figure 2). The “borrowing” of text from the next section’s opening lines indi-cates Schumann’s desire to use it freely, as a libretto, in order to interpret the dramatic narrative. Here he chooses to close with

this text in order to musically announce the pivotal point that the text of No. 4 holds, as a lament for the departed, before the concluding affi rmation of life (Nos. 5 and 6).

In No. 4, Schumann changes the meter to alla breve, and completes his allusion to the



parochial musical world of the Baroque with a fragmented quasi-chorale setting starting on In euch lebe das bildende Kraft [May in You Dwell the Power], fi rst introduced in closed part harmony by the male voices (Figure 3) and then repeated by the entire chorus. (Figure 4). While the Boys still weep for Mignon’s death, the linearity of their melodic line is constantly frac-tured by the insistent interjec-tions of the chorus singing “Schaut hinan, mit den Augen des Geistes hinan” (Figure 5). That was the opening line that Schumann had removed before the chorale, only to bring it back compressed in incessant repetition. For many composers in the nineteenth century, including Schumann, the evocation of the chorale as a sacred musical topos had become a common dialect in their arsenal of musical styles, and its connotations would be recognizable to the wider audiences. The Boys’ dirge, however, fails to achieve its purported goal—instead of regressing into the lamenting atmosphere of the opening, the chorus tears fi ssures in the musical fabric to proclaim a powerful exhortation toward life: “Lift [up] the eyes of the spirit!” Schumann had also followed the same trajectory toward light and exultation in his Faust Szenen.

Goethe’s text continues with an affirmation of life in the form of another ex-hortation by the Chorus. In Schumann’s setting, however, it is not the voices of the chorus but a solo bass singer who synechdochically represents the mass of people urging the children to “return to life” (No. 5). The Boys’ voices (two


soprano and two alto soloists) emphatically reiterate the message of consolation for those left behind with subtle reminders from the trumpets that life is a constant battle.

The concluding music (No. 6) emphasizes the optimistic side of death, that of the hope of eternal life, complete with trombones and timpani. Schumann illustrates powerfully the antithesis: from the elegiac C-minor dirges of the fi rst part, we move to an exalted choral peroration in F major, fashioned after the most grandiose Handelian settings. The Chorus continues until the end to incite the children to “hasten to life,” enhanced by the momentary repetition of the Boys’ previous affi rmation that “Auf, wir kehren ins Leben zurück” [Up! We Turn to Life Again]. Their vis-ible presence (note in Table 1 that Schumann deleted Goethe’s description of “invisible” from his score) seems to gradually fl oat away (or up?) as the music extinguishes into a


sustained “auf ” (Figure 6 ). The last measures exude a serene and elegiac tranquility that parallels Mignon’s contemplative character.

The fact that an excerpt of secular litera-ture becomes connected musically with a genre that for centuries has been associated with biblical text and ecclesiastical context only “projects,” to use Daverio’s words, “a personal, quasi-religious message in universal, humanistic terms.”20 Canceling any pes-simistic feeling that might arise, Requiem für Mignon “is not a morose lament for the dead but rather an exhortation to the living.”21

“Poetic Music”In his distinguished biography on

Schumann, John Daver io descr ibed Schumann’s idiosyncratic compositions for chorus and orchestra—such as the Faust Szenen, Das Paradies und die Peri, Der Rose

Pilgerfahrt, and other similar oratorio-like settings—as products of the composer’s “unfl inching faith in . . . the possibility of a poetic music.”22 Not surprisingly, Schumann’s idea resonated with Franz Liszt, another fervent advocate of the fusion of music and literature. In his writings, Liszt praised Schumann for broadening “the range of subjects” in his works for chorus and orches-tra: “He transplanted church and theatrical works into the concert hall and thereby discovered poetic terrain no less sublime and pure than that of the oratorio, but not as exclusively religious.”23 He acknowledged that Requiem für Mignon “performed the rare service of enriching the consummate creation of a master with a new idea”—that is, the music did not detract from but instead illuminated the content of Goethe’s novel. Liszt saw in Schumann’s setting of the Exequien a synesthetic image of Goethe’s

Mignon described musi-cally in the most perfect hues: “This last lament, this thousandfold sigh repeated above a grave covering so much suffering and beauty, so much yearning and misfortune, is like the fi nal chord of an earthly lot full of painful dissonances.”24

The numerous large- and small-scale works Schumann composed be-tween 1848 and 1849 in a surge of “unbounded creativity,”25 may also speak of the composer’s own renewed interest in writ-ing music for large choral-orchestral forces and the elevated status of these works in his output and critical writings. As Daverio has shown, “for Schumann the combination of instru-mental and vocal forces on a large scale offered an ideal medium for the resolution of the tensions between freedom and unity,”26 that is, ideas that reflect Schumann’s own



engagement with the revolutionary politics of the time. “Chorus and orchestra lift us beyond ourselves,”27 Schumann quoted in a letter of 1853, the year he also wrote “Neue Bahnen” [New Paths], his famous laudatory article in which he urged the twenty-year-old Brahms to compose for “massed forces, in the chorus and orchestra,” since “there lie before us still more wondrous glimpses into the secrets of the spirit world.”28 Dan-iel Beller-McKenna sees in his Deutsches Requiem the fulfi llment of that prophecy, since in that work Brahms simultaneously “engage[d] the German cultural tradition” and embarked “on the specifi cally German path as Schumann bade him.”29 Schumann’s own homage to the “German cultural tradi-tion” may lie in his own compositions for chorus and orchestra, and the particular associations to the precarious political atmo-sphere around the time of the composition of those works.30

Alongside his espousal of romantic tendencies in his compositions, especially evident in their romantic subjectivity and po-etic impulses, Schumann continued to look to the past as a source for inspiration and even validation—a trope that pertinently summarizes his artistic credo. During those mentally and physically demanding years, amidst revolutionary activities that forced the entire family to fl ee Dresden and bouts of depression, Schumann almost single-handedly contributed to the creation of idiosyncratic dramatic works (among them Das Paradies und die Peri and Szenen aus Goethes Faust) that, in the composer’s words, aspired toward “a new genre for the concert hall.”31 Richard Pohl criticized Schumann’s innovative settings as arbitrary Zwichengat-tungen (“generic hybrids”).32 Our cursory look at the Requiem für Mignon reveals that Schumann’s “new genre” entails, among other original qualities, an uncompromising synthesis of epic and dramatic elements, shot through with moments of exceptional lyri-cism, that may serve as metaphors for wider cultural, political and religious aspirations

MonumentsMemorials are meant to preserve the

memory of those departed. In Goethe’s

novel, Mignon is memorialized via an “aestheticized funeral,”33 which also ac-complishes the work of mourning—that is, in Freud’s theory, the only successful ac-ceptance of a loss. Like the artist it wished

to memorialize, the Requiem für Mignon also serves as a monument—a monument that preserves Goethe’s memory not only through his art but in art. In a self-refl exive moment, Schumann seems to be espousing

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the romantic view that one also becomes immortalized in those who behold the art-work, be it Goethe’s or Schumann’s. In other words, in lieu of mourning, artistic products chosen to memorialize their creators tend to become monuments—and, as Alexander Rehding has recently shown, “[e]ach monu-ment casts a trajectory into the future, set-ting out guidelines for the mode in which the hero is to be remembered.”

On this 200th anniversary of Schumann’ s birth, this author would like to invite us to remember our hero by preserving the legacy of his choral-orchestral music. For institution-al, cultural, and other reasons, Requiem für Mignon and other such works have become, literally, disembodied—marginalized, very much as Mignon in Goethe’s novel. Out-wardly they represent perfect vehicles for the Romantics’ predilection for the lofty and monumental—discourses that often elude us in our complex, post-modern present. At the same time, however, they invite us to commemorate our hero in dazzlingly original forms and exquisitely innovative styles that Schumann’s “new paths” helped pioneer.

In memory of John Daverio, dear friend and mentor, who fi rst revealed to me the beauty of Schumann’s choral music.

NOTES

1 “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” (from Book 4, Chapter 11) is actually sung by both the Harper and Mignon. Some settings exist as duets, but most composers have included it among Mignon’s solo songs. All translations, unless otherwise noted, come from Eric A. Blackall’s English translation of J. W. von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, vol. 9 in Goethe’s Collected Works (New York: Suhrkamp, 1989).

2 In his encyclopedic (although not always error-free) catalog of Goethe’s works set to music, Willi Schuh credits Mignon’s “Kennst du das Land” with more than eighty-four settings. See Willi Schuh, Goethe- Vertonungen: ein Verzeichnis (Zürich: Artemis-Verlag, 1952).

3 Schumann responded to the early “canonization” of Goethe’s Faust with the Szenen aus Goethes Faust (1844–53), a large-scale dramatic composition in three parts. The setting of the Schlußszene of Faust II, which Schumann called Fausts Verklärung, premiered simultaneously on August 29, 1849, the centenary of Goethe’s birth, in Dresden (with Schumann conducting), Weimar (where Liszt had organized a lavish series of concerts), and Leipzig (with Julius Rietz).

4 The two Abteilungen share several motivic and thematic relations; see Ulrich Mahlert, Fortschritt und Kunstlied: späte Lieder Robert

Schumanns im Licht der liedästhetischen Diskussion ab 1848 (München: Musikverlag E. Katzbichler, 1983), 152– 56.

5 Friedrich Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister (1798),” in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 275.

6 Due to her “mesmerizing power and provocative complexity,” Edmunds believes that “she is the most significant character of the work.” See Kathryn R. Edmunds, “‘Ich Bin Gebildet Genug … Um Zu Lieben Und Zu Trauern’: Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in Mourning,” Germanic Review 71 (1996): 87.

7 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 320. 8 Ibid., 314 and 320. 9 Ibid., 321.10 She is also given a pair of “big golden wings, …

a lily in one hand and a little basket in the other.” Ibid., 315.

11 Ibid., 322. Note that Goethe retains the ambig-uity of Mignon’s androgynous persona in the funeral scene, with references to “him” instead of “her.” Most literary translations, for reasons of consistency, have chosen to alter Goethe’s male pronouns to female. Following several CD translations, I have modifi ed Blackwell’s translation in Table 1 to refl ect the male pronouns of Goethe’s original.

12 Ibid., 332.13 Ibid., 332–33.14 Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity:

Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 109.

15 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 352. The discourse on the singers’ disembodied voices in the manner described here has been fascinatingly discussed by Carolyn Abbate, especially in her In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). According to Abbate, “[s]uch voices are considered divine, or at least supernatural, free of ordinary encumbrances” (6).

16 In his CD recording of the work, John Eliot Gardiner chose to use boys’ voices instead of SATB chorus; the results are dubious at best. See ““Schumann-Gardiner: Das Paradies und die Peri, Requiem für Mignon, Nachtlied.” The Monteverdi Choir, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, John Eliot Gardiner, director. 2 CDs (Hamburg: Archiv, 289 457 660-2, 1999).

17 As in the case of the Requiem für Mignon (but on a much larger scale), Schumann set the narrative of the Faust Szenen as an oratorio, albeit of a hybrid form, since it

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encompasses diverse stylistic elements borrowed from a variety of genres. More specifical ly, Schumann’s Faust Szenenbetrays a mixture of genres and styles and transcends the boundaries between the sacred and the secular ; it also epitomizes the tendency toward infusing secular literature with a religious impulse, as evident in the Schlußszene from Faust II, a scene clothed musically in sounds that add to the text’s transcendental imagery. On the fusion of secular and religious elements in this work, see my “‘The Will to Musical Drama’: Schumann’s Szenen aus Goethes Faust,” in Faust in Music, edited by Lorna Fitzsimmons (publication forthcoming).

18 See Nowak’s essay in Goethe: Musical Poet, Mu-sical Catalyst, ed. Lorraine Byrne (Dublin,

Ireland: Car ysfor t Press, 2004), 283ff. The most famous work of this nature in Protestant Germany was Heinrich Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien (1636), composed on a variety of Biblical passages. It is commonly believed that this work served as a model for Brahms’s Protestant-inspired German Requiem.

19 Schiller’s Nänie probably dates from the year 1799, but was published in 1800. Brahms wrote the famous choral-orchestral setting of Nänie, Op. 82 in 1880–81, as a memorial piece for his friend, the painter Anselm Feuerbach. The musical restraint of Brahms’s setting bears numerous similarities with the dignifi ed lament Schumann writes for Mignon.

20 In John Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a “New Poetic Age” (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1997), 395. Elsewhere Daverio notes that all of Schumann’s “Requiem settings are affirmative in tone, underscoring as they do the poetic themes of redemption (Manfred, Faust), hope in the future (Requiem für Mignon), and comfor t (‘Ruh’ von schmerzensreichen Mühen’ and Requiem, Op. 148).” He goes on to assert that the Requiem für Mignon “best exemplifies his largely positive stance.” See Crossing Paths: Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 186.

21 Daverio, Crossing Paths, 186. 22 Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a “New Po-

etic Age,” 395.23 Originally in Liszt’s Gesammelte Schriften, vol.

4 (Leipzig, 1882). Translated as “Robert Schumann (1855),” in Schumann and His

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World, ed. R. Larry Todd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 349.

24 Ibid., 350. Undoubtedly, Schumann’s approach resonated with his own music aesthetics, which Liszt had already put in print on several occasions.

25 See Daverio’s account in this aptly titled chapter of Robert Schumann: Herald of a “New Poetic Age.”

26 John Daverio, “Einheit—Freiheit—Vaterland: Intimations of Utopia in Robert Schumann’s Late Choral Music,” in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 73.

27 Letter of December 28, 1853 to Carl Meinardus. Ibid., 73.

28 As cited and translated in Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History, revised by Leo Treitler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 1158.

29 Daniel Beller-McKenna, “Brahms, the Bible, and Robert Schumann,” American Brahms Society Newsletter 13/2 (1995): 3. See also his Brahms and the German Spirit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 37ff. From Brahms’s fi rst biography to recent scholarship, many writers have proposed connections between Schumann and the Deutsches Requiem; see Klaus Blum, Hundert Jahre ein deutsches Requiem von Johannes Brahms (Tutzing: Schneider, 1971), 101ff; Michael Musgrave, The Music of Brahms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 86; John Daverio, Crossing Paths, 184–88.

30 In 1848, during a period of great “political excitement” over the outbreak of revolutions in Europe, Schumann started, and within a couple of years completed, a large number of compositions for voices and orchestra. As he noted in a letter of June 17, 1849, to Franz Brendel, it had fallen to him “to

tell, in music, of the motivating sorrows and joys of the times”; John Daverio and Eric Sams, “Schumann, Robert,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://0-www.oxfordmusiconl ine .com.maur ice .bgsu.edu/subscriber/ar ticle/grove/music/40704 (accessed February 22, 2010).

31 Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a “New Poetic Age,” 272.

32 See Schumann’s letter of February 6, 1854 to Richard Pohl, in Schumann and His World, ed. R. Larry Todd, 261– 62.

33 Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller, 109.

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Whose Mourning?: Schumann’s Requiem für Mignon

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