Mozart's Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems Read online

  MOZART’S JOURNEY TO PRAGUE AND A SELECTION OF POEMS

  EDUARD MÖRIKE (1804–75) was the seventh child of a large family in Ludwigsburg (Württemberg). His father was a doctor who died when Mörike was thirteen. He studied theology in Tübingen and became a Protestant pastor in 1834, a profession in which he was seldom happy and from which he retired after nine years. His novel Maler Noten was published in 1832 and a first volume of poetry in 1838. Between 1851 and 1866 he taught literature at a seminary in Stuttgart, and continued to write, including his masterpiece Mozart’s Journey to Prague (1855). Mörike never travelled beyond his native Württemberg and led a quiet and increasingly reclusive life with his Catholic wife and two daughters. He spent the last decade of his life in virtual solitude, anxious to avoid the fame his writing had brought him.

  DAVID LUKE is an Emeritus Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford. Among the German authors he has written about and translated are Goethe, Kleist, the brothers Grimm and Thomas Mann. His translation of Goethe’s Faust won the European Poetry Translation Prize. His previous work for Penguin includes Goethe’s Selected Verse and Selected Tales of the brothers Grimm.

  EDUARD MÖRIKE

  Mozart’s Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems

  Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by

  DAVID LUKE

  Scots translations by GILBERT MCKAY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Libris 1997

  Revised edition published by Penguin Books 2003

  1

  Translation, Introduction and Notes copyright © David Luke and Gilbert McKay, 1997, 2003

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the translators has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

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  EISBN : 978–0–141–90773–4

  Contents

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  Note on the Text

  Mozart’s Journey to Prague

  (1855)

  Selected Poems

  1824–1838

  On a Winter Morning before Sunrise/An einem Wintermorgen, vor Sonnenaufgang

  Peregrina I–V

  Two Voices in the Night/Gesang zu Zweien in der Nacht

  At Midnight/Um Mitternacht

  In the Early Morning/In der Frühe

  A Journey on Foot/Fußreise

  Intimation of Spring/Frühlingsgefühl

  In the Spring/Im Frühling

  Urach Revisited/Besuch in Urach

  Love Insatiable/Nimmersatte Liebe

  The Forsaken Girl/The Forsaken Lassie/Das verlassene Mägdlein

  To My Beloved/An die Geliebte

  The Song of Weyla/Gesang Weylas

  Seclusion/Verborgenheit

  To an Aeolian Harp/An eine Äolsharfe

  News from the Storks/Storchenbotschaft

  A Huntsman’s Song/Jägerlied

  Sweet-Rohtraut/Schön-Rohtraut

  Good Riddance/Abschied

  1837–1863

  A Prayer/Gebet

  Johann Kepler

  To Sleep/An den Schlaf

  At Daybreak/Bei Tagesanbruch

  The Tale of the Safe and Sound Man/Märchen vom sichern Mann

  The Woodland Pest/Waldplage

  To the Nightingale/An Philomele

  To a Christmas Rose/Auf eine Christblume

  The Beautiful Beech-Tree/Die schöne Buche

  Divine Remembrance/Göttliche Reminiszenz

  A Walk in the Country/Auf einer Wanderung

  The Falls of the Rhine/Am Rheinfall

  An Edifying Meditation/Erbauliche Betrachtung

  Inscription on a Clock with the Three Hour-Goddesses/Inschrift auf eine Uhr mit den drei Horen

  On a Lamp/Auf eine Lampe

  The Auld Steeplecock/Der alte Turmhahn

  Oh soul, remember!/Denk es, o Seele!

  A Domestic Scene/Häusliche Szene

  A Visit to the Carthusians/Besuch in der Kartause

  Erinna to Sappho/Erinna an Sappho

  Postscript: Mörike and Hugo Wolf

  Notes

  Title Index of Poems

  Introduction

  As the half-forgotten author of poems which are among the most remarkable in the German language but became famous chiefly as the texts of songs, and of a minor masterpiece of imaginative musical biography, an inspired narrative prose poem about Mozart which lives chiefly in the borrowed glory of the greater masterpiece it celebrates, Eduard Mörike suffers the paradox of owing his exalted but inconspicuous place in German literary history largely to the genius of others. How many readers, even in Germany, listening to the most exquisite of Hugo Wolf’s Mörike settings, remember who wrote the words, and how many will understand the modest and mysterious title of Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (literally Mozart en route to Prague) if they do not already know the story as a Mozartian fantasy, a brilliant literary footnote to Don Giovanni? And yet it seriously distorts Mörike’s achievement to overlook either the story itself or the poetry to which it is closely related. Both are Mörike’s essential legacy: Mozart’s Journey to Prague, a work created at the height of his maturity but charmed into existence by memories that went back thirty years to the beginning of his adult life, and the lyrical development to which it essentially belongs.

  Mörike lived all his life hidden away in south-west Germany, in the cultural region of Swabia, corresponding approximately to the political territory of Württemberg, in which he was born in 1804 and whose borders he almost never crossed. 1804, as it happened, was the year in which Napoleon became Emperor of the French and began rearranging Germany. The old medieval Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation still nominally existed during the first two years of Mörike’s life, and Württemberg, also the native land of Schiller and Hölderlin, was a medium-sized state within it, half Catholic and half Protestant. Napoleon, to reward the reigning Duke who had earned his favour, made the duchy a kingdom in 1805, before abolishing the Empire in 1806; and Württemberg was still a medium-sized kingdom when another German Empire, this time courtesy of Bismarck, came into being four years before Mörike’s death in 1875. The poet had been virtually untouched by these events or by any of the intervening political perturbations of the nineteenth century. He remained an introverted and neglected provincial dreamer, though in his later life he did gain some recognition in Germany, even outside the Swabian heartlands. Even in Germany, af
ter his death, he was again forgotten for about another thirty years, but from the turn of the century until now German literary scholars have taken an increasing interest in him, and a historical-critical complete edition of his works and letters, begun in 1967, is still being slowly put together. In England and elsewhere outside his linguistic sphere he remains almost entirely unknown.

  Mörike’s native Ludwigsburg had been built near Stuttgart at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the formal Italianate style, as a garrison town and the summer residence of the Württemberg court. His mother was a Protestant clergyman’s daughter and his father at first considered adopting the same career, but became a doctor instead and died from a stroke in 1817. There were thirteen children, of whom seven survived infancy; Eduard’s brothers Karl and August and his sisters Luise and Klara were especially close to him. His education seems to have been based from the outset on the assumption that he would become a pastor like his grandfather, though personal suitability or conviction commonly played a lesser part in such decisions than the fact that the Church offered long years of elaborate vocational training at public expense, leading eventually to modest but secure life-long employment. When Eduard was thirteen, the traumatic loss of his father threatened to interrupt this programme; fortunately, his rich and cultivated uncle Friedrich Eberhard von Georgii, a high legal official, offered him hospitality for a year to enable him to complete the first stage of his schooling. Living in his uncle’s large rococo mansion in Stuttgart, the boy encountered the ancien régime elegance he was later to celebrate in Mozart’s Journey to Prague, as well as being encouraged to further study of the Latin and Greek classics to which his poetry is substantially indebted.

  Mörike failed his all-important Landexamen at the age of fourteen, but his uncle’s influence nevertheless secured his admission to the Lower Theological Seminary in Urach, an enchanting small fortified town surrounded by wooded hills, one of the medieval Swabian duchies. His commitment to theological studies was less than total, but he was later to remember his years in Urach with great nostalgia. It was here, and later at the Theological Seminary in Tübingen, that he formed close youthful friendships, some of them lifelong, as with Wilhelm Hartlaub, who, like Mörike himself, ended up as a simple village pastor, and Johannes Mährlen, who became a Professor of Economics at the Stuttgart Polytechnic. With Ludwig Bauer, a fellow poet whom he met at Tübingen and who was to remain one of his chief intimates, Mörike found, Tolkien-like, that he could construct elaborate private mythologies: the imaginary remote island kingdom of Orplid, with its tutelary goddess Weyla, its lineage of kings and disappearing civilization, was their joint invention, and was to play a significant part in Mörike’s rambling, never-finished novel Maler Nolten (Nolten the Painter) as well as in some of his poems. Other friends included the future critic and scholar Friedrich Theodor Vischer and the future philosopher David Friedrich Strauss, both of whom he had known since their early schooldays together. Vischer and Strauss had little patience with Mörike’s interest in Märchen and myth, but were to retain a stimulating influence on him. Strauss later made himself notorious by suggesting in his Das Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus, 1835–6), a book which cost him his university career, that the Gospel narratives were themselves mythical.

  On record from Mörike’s years as a theological student, more especially after his move to Tübingen in 1822, are some emotional experiences that found their way into his verse: his childhood association with his cousin Klara Neuffer, for instance, had developed into an adolescent romance, but in 1823 she gave him up in favour of another candidate for the ministry. Much more traumatic and of lasting effect, as it seems, was his infatuation with the mysterious Maria Meyer (1802–65), a beautiful and unstable girl of questionable reputation. Her unmarried mother Helena Meyer had been the weak sister in a large and otherwise respectable Swiss family, and had ended in the local workhouse, the paternity of her several children remaining obscure. The adolescent Maria, who probably suffered from epilepsy as well as religious hysteria, had for a time been a protégée of Juliane von Krüdener, a mad Baltic baroness who travelled around Switzerland in 1817 as the leader of a peripatetic evangelical sect, before retiring to her Livonian estates and never again emerging. Maria was now also, like her mother, locked up in Schaffhausen and put to work knitting and spinning, but released in 1819. Her movements during the next four years are uncertain, but in 1823 she was found by a Ludwigsburg innkeeper lying unconscious beside the road from Stuttgart, and entered his employ as a ‘bartender’. One of her many male visitors at the inn was the painter Rudolf Lohbauer, an intimate friend of Mörike’s, and it was thus that the latter, visiting Ludwigsburg during the Easter vacation of 1823, met ‘Peregrina’, as he was to call her in his poems. Maria, apart from her remarkable beauty, was not without some degree of cultivation, and her personality fascinated a number of those who met her. She liked to make a mystery of herself and would tell fanciful stories about her origins and her family. Whether or not Mörike, like Lohbauer in all probability, became her lover for a time (and everything that might be evidence of this has been carefully destroyed) there is no doubt that she stirred his emotions more deeply than any other woman in his life. After returning to Tübingen he and Lohbauer kept up a correspondence with her, until suddenly and without explanation she vanished from Ludwigsburg and resumed her wandering lifestyle. The following year she reappeared in Tübingen and sought out Mörike, who refused to see her. Torn by conflicting feelings, he characteristically took refuge at home in Stuttgart with his mother and his sister Luise, in whom he had confided. In 1826 Maria again tried to visit him in Tübingen, but again he would not see her; evidently this was in self-defence, a shrinking retreat from a passion that had disturbed him too painfully. Maria returned to Switzerland, where she eventually married a carpenter’s apprentice in her native Schaffhausen and tried to make an honest living with him; Mörike never learnt of this change of heart, having long ago lost touch with her. The five poems he eventually published as a cycle under the title ‘Peregrina’ are partly more direct, partly more stylized and fictionalized treatments of the Maria Meyer experience. The first and fourth in particular, set to music by Wolf with incomparable pathos, momentarily reveal the tragic depths of feeling of which the poet was capable. His novel Maler Nolten incorporates four of them, and develops ‘Peregrina’ as one of the central figures of the story: the wandering, mentally deranged gipsy Elisabeth, who evidently symbolizes the darker side of the hero’s nature. The mysterious power she exercises over him frustrates all his attempts to integrate himself by marriage into normal society, and in the end destroys him as well as Elisabeth herself, though their fatal bond seems to continue on a mystic plane after their death.

  In 1824, the year of Mörike’s renunciation of Maria, two other significant events occurred in his life within a few days of each other. One was his visit to the Hoftheater in Stuttgart with his favourite brother August, his sister Luise and two friends, to see a performance of Don Giovanni. This was his first, never-to-be-forgotten introduction to Mozart’s greatest and most disturbing opera. Five days after they had seen it together the seventeen-year-old August died suddenly in mysterious circumstances. The family had on financial grounds dissuaded him from his chosen career of medicine, and as a compromise he had taken a job as an apothecary’s assistant in Ludwigsburg. On the morning in question he was found dead in the cellar at his place of work, having apparently poisoned himself. The town’s medical officer, to spare the family of his deceased colleague, officially certified a ‘nervous stroke’ as the cause of death. The shock to Eduard, as one of the few who probably knew the truth, was profound, and left its trace in a poem not written, or at least not published, until thirteen years later, the ode ‘To an Aeolian Harp’ (‘An eine Äolsharfe’, 1837), in which the motif of lamentation for the death of a beloved boy is muted in the text of the poem itself, but reinforced in the Latin epigraph. Mörike appears to have felt that the two events of 1824, so
close to each other in time – the encounter with Don Giovanni and the death of August – were a significant coincidence, and it seems likely that this was the early emotional and imaginative root of Mozart’s Journey to Prague, which is in fact not only a celebration of the composer’s genius but also a meditation on his tragically early death and on mortality in general. The story ends with a poem, ‘Denk es, o Seele’ (‘O soul, remember’), a lyrical memento mori now relatively well known as an anthology piece, which Mörike actually wrote in 1851 and which may at first not have specifically referred to Mozart. In 1855, passing it off as a Bohemian folk-song, he incorporated it into Mozart’s Journey as the story’s concluding comment.

  After four years as a seminarist at Urach and four at Tübingen, Mörike passed his final examination in 1826, though without great distinction. He was now required to practise for some years as a curate or supply-preacher (Vikar) before being given a parish of his own. This interim period was in his case unusually prolonged and peripatetic; he was plagued by scruples about his suitability for the ministry (he had, for instance, considerable sympathy for the views of his friend David Strauss) and kept applying for release from his duties on the grounds or pretext of ill health. He considered seriously whether he might be able to earn his living as a freelance writer, and even resigned his curacy for more than a year to try this out, but soon realized that despite the burdens of his vocation, the stability and security it could offer made it, if he was to be a poet, the least unacceptable option. Fortunately the Church authorities treated him with considerable tolerance. Mörike’s Vikariat lasted eight years and involved ten transfers from parish to parish. One of them was the parish of Plattenhardt, to which he was assigned in May 1829, shortly after his year of absence. Here the incumbent had recently died, and his widow and daughter, the twenty-two-year-old Luise Rau, were still living in the parish house; Mörike fell in love with Luise and they quickly became engaged. Over the next four years he wrote passionate and exalted letters to her, overwhelmed her with poems, urged her to read Goethe and Lichtenberg. What the unsophisticated Luise understandably wanted, however, was above all a husband who would be settled in his own parish, as her late father had been, and she and her mother became less and less confident that the eccentric and frequently ailing Mörike would ever be fit for this role. The engagement was broken off in 1833. Less than a year later, however, in May 1834, the consistory did at last appoint the wayward Vikar to a living of his own, in the tiny village of Cleversulzbach near Heilbronn. Mörike took his mother and sister to live with him there instead of a wife.