166 The Romantic Generation remember the living Nature from which they came. The birch becomes a symbol of the melancholy of Sénancour’s adolescence and of his isolation. The splendor of the final paragraph lies in its change of style: after the rich flow of detail in the description of Fontainebleau with the long sentences encom- passing several seasons and three years of experience, we find a portrait-land- scape of a limited space during a few days in March—a landscape which comes to us in discontinuous fragments. The phrases are short and broken, the details isolated from each other: this is not a memory that arises spontaneously, physically, but one that is called up with an effort of will. The memories of Fontainebleau return unasked, but Sénancour is forcing himself to remember Lucerne, It is, paradoxically, even more moving, more poetic in its willfulness, in its inability to achieve organic movement. This letter is a profound example of a technique invented at the time and which effectively challenged composers to find a musical equivalent: to charge two images with all the power of memory and then to overlay one with the other, multiplying associations. Music and memory Beethoven is the first composer to represent the complex process of memory— not merely the sense of loss and regret that accompanies visions of the past, but the physical experience of calling up the past within the present. The first song of An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved) of 1816 is about the pain of distance. Each one of the six songs of the cycle except the last is a landscape, and the opening landscape is one that separates: Upon the hill I sit Gazing into the blue land of mist Looking towards the far pastures ‘Where I found thee, beloved. Far from thee am J] removed Cutting off lie mountain and valley Between us and our peace Our happiness and our suffering. Auf dem Hiigel sitz ich spihend In das blaue Nebelland Nach den fernen Triften sehend Wo ich dich, Geliebte, fand. Weit bin ich von dir geschieden Trennend liegen Berg und Thal Zwischen uns und unsre Frieden Unserm Gliick und uns’rer Qual.MOUNTAINS AND SONG CYCLES 167 Zivwlich langgam und mit Ansdrack Singstimme, ‘Aut dem Hic. gel wits’ ich xph-Rend in dav blau.e Ne- bel . PLANOFORTE. ? to, . a. jen Trif_ten we-hend,woich dich, Ge lleb te, fand. jusdrucksvoll ca" we T Spa This is the traditional melancholy of separation, familiar to song and aria; and Beethoven sets the stanzas to a simple strophic melody sung five times. It is only with the second song that the process of remembering begins, and with it the familiar horn calls as well and the musical echoes: Rin wenig geschninder Poco_allegretto. Wo die Ber ge 60 baw wih. gen Gran sca — PP, liblwo dle Wal. ke wan cea —168 The Romantic Generation ‘Where the mountains so blue From the misty gray Look out towards here, Where the sun glows The clouds drive Would I be. This opening stanza of the second song only moves towards memory, as if the horn calls awakened it. It is with the second stanza that memory begins to flow, that the past becomes half present, musically as well as poetically: 7 ru. higen Thalsebweiges Schmerzen and Qual, Wo im Ge.stelo still dle ~ se der Wind, much-te leh sein! There in the peaceful valley Grief and suffering are silenced: Where in the mass of rocks The primrose dreams quietly there The wind blows so lightly Would I be. The setting of this stanza is unique in Beethoven’s cycle: the first five songs all have a short strophic melody simply repeated by the singer for each stanza. The accompaniments, indeed, are elaborately rewritten, but the only changes in the vocal parts are alterations of mode from major to minor, an occasional echoing repeat of the end of a phrase, and (at the conclusion of the third song) an additional few notes as a transition to the next song. Otherwise the strophic form reigns absolute until the last song, and the vocal melody is identical from stanza to stanza. The only exception is this second stanza of the second song: here the melody is not exactly altered but simply displaced from voice to piano.MOUNTAINS AND SONG CYCLES 169 The singer now repeats a single note, a kind of inner pedal point below the melody—in front of the melody, indeed, would be the more accurate way of describing the effect. The melody comes from a distance, and the singer is reduced to meditating on a single note, as if lost in the act of recollection. As far as I know, this is the first attempt to exploit the fact—psychological as well as acoustic—that singer and pianist are in different spaces. The feeling of distance in time is translated, as we have seen before, as distance in space, but here a doubly literal separation in space, as the beloved is distant from the lover, and melody is distant from the singer. Beethoven imposes this feeling of distance by dynamics, sonority, and tonal- ity. There are seven indications of pianissimo in this stanza, where the first stanza marks only two, and both of those are echo effects (the opening chord of the first stanza is also pianissimo, but the rest of the stanza must rise to piano if the echoes are to make sense). In the second stanza everything is hushed. Two of the indications of pianissimo are within bars 27 and 28, where the new sonority of a drone bass softly and delicately reinforces the repeated G of the voice, like the soft wind that blows. The voice remains on the tonic G, but the melody is no longer in the fundamental key: it is now transposed to the subdominant C major, and this too is the only example of a transposition in the entire cycle. The use of a change of key with a mysterious hushed sonority to represent a movement away from reality was to be imitated later, most notably by Schumann. Here it serves to portray the separation of present reality and past memory. The genius of Beethoven is revealed best of all by the restriction of the voice to a single note: it seems as if the lover, now completely passive, is submitting almost involuntarily to the incursion of memory. One other change should be noted in this second stanza. The third line echoes the last half of the second one. In the first stanza, this echo was followed by another in the piano alone: since the third line is shorter than each of the first two, the result was a four-bar phrase with two echoes of one bar. All this play of sonority is removed in the second stanza, which runs everything together in a continuous pianissimo, the six-bar phrase is reduced to five (four and a single echo), and the new rhythm corresponds very subtly to the prosody. In this second stanza, too, the short third line runs into what follows. The new unity increases the wonderful effect of stillness: everything that happens seems far distant, motionless. The last stanza of the first song of the cycle begins: Before the sound of song All space and alll time retreat Denn vor Liedesklang entweichet Jeder Raum and jede Zeit170 The Romantic Generation and the final song wonderfully illustrates this victory of song over space and time as the first song returns (the words have now become “Before these songs yield / what kept us so far apart” (Dann vor diesen Liedern weichet / was geschieden uns so weit). However, the first song returns only gradually: what actually comes back as the last song opens is a distorted memory of the past, a new melody so much like the initial song that when the opening of the cycle almost literally returns, it seems to arise directly out of the last song. It might reasonably be claimed that Beethoven is illustrating the words of the final poem, which opens: die ich dir, Ge - liek. te, sank. — | ci t Take them, then, these songs, Which I sang to you, beloved. The thematic kinship of the first and last songs is perceptible, but not obvious at first hearing, and it is a very different thematic relationship from those found elsewhere in Beethoven. In general, in his music two themes are related byMOUNTAINS AND SONG CYCLES 171 coming from the same motivic nucleus, as if they had sprung from the same seed: this was the aspect of Beethoven’s technique that was already most striking to his contemporaries, and E. T. A. Hoffmann remarked on it in his famous articles of 1811. Individual themes and, indeed, whole movements in Beethoven were perceived as being created from the development of a short motif. A single process seems to generate a multiplicity of related themes: sometimes, too, a new theme is only a variation of one previously heard. But the first and last songs of An die ferne Geliebte are not related that wa’ not the same short motif that generates them, nor is one strictly a variation of the other—at least not a variation in Beethoven’s sense, in which essential parts of the motivic structure of the original are preserved. What the two songs have in common is not motivic development, or even any significant rhythmic detail, but general contour. They have similar shapes: the last song is not derived from the first but recalls it—indeed, at the end, literally calls it back. The last song is, therefore, not a variant of the first but a new melody that suggests the first, brings it to mind. The opening of this final song is only a secret return; it makes its effect because the first song is hidden behind the new melody as a memory which in fact later reappears clearly. This hidden presence makes the relationship seem, at first hearing, to be an occult one, a secret revealed only little by little. With the direction Molto adagio and the words “Und du singst, und du singst, was ich gesungen” (“And you sing, and you sing what I sang”), the motif of the new melody approaches more closely to the first song: PY, and sein lets. ter ver. gli — bet sta el = eG vr Mottn adugin. Tempo. and di singst, und dv singst, wae172 The Romantic Generation Ich gesnan.gen, wax mir aus der vor Irn Brust oh. ne Kunst . gr.pring’ rr. klun.gea, ‘nur derSebanacht sich be. wnat, fur der Sehasuchtsich be sussts ‘iewlich Iougsane und wit Ausdruck dann vor die. sen Lie.dern wel - \ c EERE * : = 7 This molto adagio is the emotional climax, the moment of most intense expression—the precise instant when past becomes indistinguisable from pres- ent. (It also prepares the return of the melody of the first song in its original form that follows shortly.) It is not simply the presence of the beloved but the songs of regret and longing which are remembered and become present, and these songs are themselves already the expression of memories. The past twice removed, the memory of memories, seems briefly tangible, and the sense of loss is all the more moving. In its psychological complexity and its ambition, Beethoven's cycle is a rival to the great landscapes of his contemporaries: like the works of Constable, Friedrich, Wordsworth, Hélderlin, and Sénancour, it aspires to the sublime, and it does so with the landscapes of everyday life. The awesome and terrible precipices of the Alps have been replaced by the ordinary scenes of Nature. The magnificent picturesque grandeur of Nature did not, of course, entirely disappear: Turner continued to practice heroic landscape; Constable drew Stonehenge; Wordsworth crossed the Alps; Hélderlin celebrated the course of the Rhine. Nevertheless, the new style of landscape was more at ease with theMOUNTAINS AND SONG CYCLES 173 familiar. Sénancour in fact made the transformation of the familiar the touch- stone of Romantic description, and established the essential distinction between the Romantic and the picturesque (or romantique and romanesque, two words whose meanings tended to blur before 1800, although they had begun to move apart). For Sénancour, writing in his preface to Oberman, the “Romantic” was an elitist concept, destined to be understood only by “a few scattered people in Europe” (“quelque personnes éparses dans l'Europe”). These happy few turned away from the spectacular landscapes that pleased the vulgar, and the scenes they loved defined a language that the crowd could not understand: When the October sun appears in the mist over the yellowing woods; when a small brook flows and falls in a field closed by trees, as the moon sets; when under the summer sky, on a cloudless day, a woman’s voice sings, a little distant, at four o’clock in the midst of the walls and roofs of a large city. Quand le soleil d’octobre parait dans les brouillards sur les bois jaunis; quand un filet d’eau coule et tombe dans un pré fermé d’arbres, au coucher de la lune; quand sous le ciel d’été, dans un jour sans nuages, une voix de femme chante a quatre heures, un peu au loin, au milieu des murs et des toits d’une grande ville.' Sénancour never disavowed his taste for magnificent mountain scenery, and for the sensation of finding at his feet “the void of heaven and the immensity of the world.” But the scenes here are so modest and antipicturesque as to include a simple cityscape. Like Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” they modestly hide a very grand ambition. Sénancour’s images are almost bare: the few details are chosen with precision to characterize, significantly, those instants of the present which betray a sense of the movement of time. If the immediate moment seems almost frozen, it is only to allow us a glimpse of a much larger scale of movement. Constable made the preoccupation with the familiar even more imperative. In a letter to his friend, Archdeacon Fisher, he wrote on 29 August 1824: Last Tuesday the finest day that ever was we went to the Dyke—which is in fact a Roman remains of an embankment, overlooking—perhaps the most grand affecting natural landscape in the world—and consequently a scene most unfit for a picture. It is the business of a painter not to contend with nature & put this scene (a valley filled with imagery 50 miles long) on a canvas of a few inches, but to make something out of nothing, in attempting which he must almost of necessity become poetical." 15. Etienne Pivert de Sénancour, Oberman: Lettres (Paris, 1965), xvi, 3. 16. John Constable's Correspondence, vol. 6, ed. R. B. Beckett (Ipswich, 1968), p. 172.174 The Romantic Generation The sublime here comes not from the content of the picture, or from Nature, but from art: the traditional harmony between content and style—the sublime subject treated in a sublime manner—is destroyed, and along with it is de- stroyed the decorum of the system of genres. In its place we have the Romantic art as defined by Novalis: “Making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.” The individual songs of An die ferne Geliebte are not only simple but relentlessly, willfully simple. The melodies are in many ways very like the tunes that Beethoven’s contemporary J. F. Reichardt wrote for children. Only the last song reveals a musical and psychological complexity suggested by the half- hearted structural complexity of the text. The rich accompaniment plays a role throughout in developing these emphatically naive melodies, but it is above all the changes of tonality and the extraordinary final song which endows the cycle with a monumental grandeur. The cycle is, indeed, comparable as an achievement to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, in which the simple doggerel style of didactic poems for children is similarly ennobled. We can see how essential for Beethoven's project was the familiar style of the individual melodies: it is the structure of the whole cycle that transfigures the details. Most of Beethoven's forms retain, even while they expand, Classical principles, but An die ferne Geliebte is his most openly Romantic work. Even the last phrase (which is the first phrase rewritten) Se epg eee a L 34 |e <> ra " oe is both decisive and, by Classical standards, inconclusive. The end of the cycle with the return of the first phrase needs to suggest the incomplete: it is only the anguish of separation that returns. The last song is not a memory of the distant beloved but a memory of grief and of absence. Even if, as the words claim, the distance in time and space is vanquished by song, the effect of transcendence depends on our understanding that the absence persists. Landscape and death: Schubert ‘The most signal triumphs of the Romantic portrayal of memory are not those which recall past happiness, but remembrances of those moments when future happiness still seemed possible, when hopes were not yet frustrated. There is no greater pain than to remember past happiness in a time of grief—but that