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Musical settings of Heinrich Heine's political poetry
A talk on musical settings of Heine's political poetry given at the Heinrich Heine Bicentennial Symposium "Heine's Political Significance for Germany Today" at the Goethe Institut in New York City, December 12, 1999
by Peter W. Shea
What is the political significance of Heinrich Heine in Germany today? And what can an American musician and librarian like myself have to say about that topic? I have never been to Germany, and I don’t follow German politics closely. What I have done for the past three years is collect, sing, analyze and write about a large number of musical settings of Heine’s poems, from the very earliest Lieder of the 1820’s to songs written very recently by contemporary composers, two of whom are with us today [Leonard Lehrman and Leslie Crabtree]. This activity has been as part of my ongoing development of a web-based performer’s guide to solo and duet settings of Heine, and if you are interested in that project I can answer questions about it later. Before I get into details, there are some general things I can say about how Heine, politics and music intersect.
Heine’s works have attracted composers ever since they were first published, indeed they seem to have attracted more composers than any other poet. But it must be said that what has attracted many of them is the surface beauty, the polished perfection and conventional imagery of many of his early lyrics, especially those in the Buch der Lieder. Many composers, especially those of the 19th century, have enthusiastically appropriated Heine’s beautiful word music as a convenient platform for conventional, banal, and sentimental effusions. Most of these songs were intended for the middle class parlor, hardly the place for Heine’s political and satirical verses. So it is not surprising that the relatively small number of more overtly satirical and iconoclastic lyrics which do appear in the Buch der Lieder and Neue Gedichte collections were seldom set to music in the 19th century, except by such eccentric completists as Johann Vesque von Püttlingen and Mario van Overeem who set to music the entire Heimkehr and Neuer Frühling cycles respectively.
There are, of course, deeper levels even in Heine’s early poetry. It has been a commonplace of recent Heine scholarship that his attempt at perfecting a folk-song like beauty and simplicity of utterance was a political statement in itself – "This is what we must aspire to; this is what we should value" – while at the same time mocking such aspirations by means of extreme metaphors and his characteristic Stimmungsbrechung – "We can’t possibly achieve this; what fools we are for trying." This type of ironic complexity in a poem is hard to express in music, but there have been composers who have sometimes succeeded at it, even in the 19th century, Robert Schumann being the foremost, in my opinion. Indeed, as the great Lieder-singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau has said about Schumann, "rarely do we encounter an artistic expression so similar to Heine’s, with its tortured, almost pathological qualities and its intensity." This is not to say that composers who ignore Heine’s irony necessarily write less worthy music. I know of many truly outstanding songs which seem to be based on superficial readings.
Then again there are a few who go against the grain completely. One of these is the British composer Lord Berners. He wasn’t a German, but like many British and American composers before World War I, he was drawn to German poetry, particularly Heine. Now the poem "Du bist wie eine Blume" has been set to music over 400 times, more than any other Heine text, usually under the assumption that it was addressed to a beautiful child. You’ll hear a couple of superb and lovely settings in that vein later on in today’s concert. Lord Berners, however, had read of Heine’s assertion that this poem was actually addressed to a white pig that was about to be slaughtered. So in 1913 he wrote a setting from that viewpoint, with the snorting of the pig as an integral musical element, and a performance instruction "Schnauzend."
Even in the 20th century, the earlier Heine collections have been by far the most popular with composers, and here politics comes into the picture in a different way. Because of his fairly brief association with Karl Marx, Heine was adopted by the Communists as something of a prophet. And it so happens that a significant number of this century’s Heine settings originated behing the Iron Curtain. But even so, the preponderance of those songs draw their texts from the early lyrics, possibly since irony and sarcasm does not translate very well, and their unthreatening conventional patina appealed to the essentially conservative artistic bureaucracy.
During the initial stages of my own project I have been concentrating on settings of poems from Heine’s earliest collection "Junge Leiden," so that, in order to find out what composers have set Heine’s later, more political poems, I have had to rely largely on Günter Metzner’s massive bibliography, "Heine in der Musik." First it may be interesting to hear some of what Metzner has to say in his introduction about recent developments in the more popular genres such as folk music and jazz.
"The German student movement of 1968 gave rise to a colorful flock of songsmiths, who early on discovered Heine for their purposes. Looking at pieces critical of times past or present, a few verses from ‘Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen’ became part of the scenery. Many listeners were introduced to an entirely new Heine at the legendary song festivals at Burg Waldeck. Accompanied by guitar, folk duos sang musically rather unassuming ‘Erinnerungen aus Kräwinkels Schreckentagen’ or songs of the ‘Wanderratten.’ ‘Die schlesischen Weber’ without tears in their desperate eyes have been part and parcel of political folklore ever since. It seems as if the new embracing of Heine in this genre follows other societal trends, from agitation to spirituality. Of all the many groups who did so, the Swiss group ‘Poesie und Musik’ (with members Rene Bardet, Andreas Vollenweider, Orlando Valentini) had the greatest success in 1974 with their recorded Heine program ‘Ich kann nicht mehr die Augen schliessen’. This music and poetry concept, however, was not a novel one; under the title ‘Lyrik und Jazz,’ the Attilla Zoller Quartet with speaker Gert Westphal had already introduced a jazzed-up Heine. Other record productions from the sixties are witness to the uncertainty of the producers as to whether Heine’s text would stand on its own or would even be understood. The musical tours de force only reiterate a basic mistrust of the power of the verses. In the last few years [meaning the late eighties] there have been mostly poetry recitals, where the musicians were asked to contribute only musical impressions.
On the subject of theatrical revues Metzner writes: "There is a simple recipe for mixing Heine-revues in a most effective manner: Take two dozen poems, and commission a modern composer to re-work Romantic productions or compose music parodies or persiflage, illustrate the text in large gestures and mimicry, perhaps even choreographic whims, break off a verse from the Heine opus and use it as a catchy title. The revues produced after this concept in the last fifteen years were mostly presented at smaller theaters and studio stages. Günther Büchs’ productions in the Düsseldorf Kammerspiele in 1972 and ’78 relied on the new compositions of Peter Janssens. ‘Trommle die Leut aus dem Schlaf’ was the title of a cabaret program which premiered in Zürich in 1975 with a score by Jerzy Husar. Heinrich Huber was the musical director of the 1981 Dortmund production of the Heine revue "Schlage die Trommel und fürchte dich nicht.’ Huber was also responsible for the music and noise background of the ‘Dichter unbekannt’ program, which was released as a recording." By the way, if anyone knows how I might get copies of any of these recordings I would be very interested.
Metzner does not mention the efforts of the politically active cabaret and musical theater artist Katja Ebstein, winner of the 1970 Eurovison song contest, who in 1974 recorded an album of Heine-Lieder by Christian Bruhn, and as recently as this May of this year [1999] premiered a one-woman show called "Trommler ohne Furcht: Brecht und Heinrich Heine, Lieder und Texte" at the Stadttheater in Augsburg. And a recent CD of Heine-Lieder by Burkhard Engel performed by the vocal group Cantaton provides more evidence that Heine continues to exert some fascination in the folk-pop realm. Here is part of a song called "An einen politischen Dichter" downloaded from their website. I apologize for the poor sound quality.
One can understand what Metzner means by the phrase "musically unassuming."
Due to time constraints, I have chosen to investigate just a few representative poems: the single poem "Die Schlesischen Weber," the sub-collection "Zeitgedichte" from the 1844 collection "Neue Gedichte," and the two mock-epics "Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum" and "Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen."
I know of only six [now 8] musical versions of "Die schlesischen Weber" and four of those are from the German folk, jazz, or cabaret recordings or productions I mentioned earlier, or from similar efforts. More in the serious classical tradition is a setting by the German-American Stefan Wolpe. It is an early effort from the early 1930’s, before he fled the Nazis, when he was in Berlin writing songs on revolutionary themes for theatrical groups espousing social causes, and even his setting is somewhat in the vein of the more experimental cabaret songs of the period. Most recently this poem appears as a movement from the extraordinary Liederspiel for narrator, soloists, chorus and orchestra "Aus der Matratzengruft" written in 1991 at the age of 84 by the Munich-based composer Günter Bialas. I would like to play part of that movement, and I highly recommend the 2-CD complete recording on the cpo label to everyone here. [Since this paper was presented I have discovered a setting for chorus and orchestra by the German conductor Otto Klemperer, and a version for reciter and guitar by Ermano Maggini.]
Of the 24 poems in Zeitgedichte only eleven [now twelve] have been set to music, in a total of 23 [now 26] settings for solo voice, and one choral version. The first poem "Schlage die Trommel und fürchte dich nicht" is the most popular, with five settings. Only two of the ten [now twelve] composers flourished in the 19th century. A totally obscure composer named Th. Hermes set to music "Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht" shortly after it was first published, and near the end of his life just after the turn of the century the Kleinmeister Theodor Kirchner set to music the poem "Heinrich,"certainly not the most inflammatory poem of the set. All of the remaining works were composed well into in the 20th-century, and all by composers with German names, except one, David Blake, a British composer, whose two settings from Zeitgedichte together with 10 other Heine settings form his 1981 song cycle "From the mattress grave" for high voice and eleven instruments. Three poems appear as spoken word with jazz accompaniment on the aformentioned album "Heinrich Heine – Lyrik und Jazz" and the 1970s musical revues of Heinrich Huber and Peter Janssens together include seven Zeitgedichte settings. Concert music on these texts by the remaining composers includes one of West German music educator Kaspar Roesling’s unpublished set of four Heine Chansons from around 1947, one of the "Drei Lieder für Edda Schaller" written in 1975 by the East German composer Paul Dessau, six songs from two different Heine song cycles written in 1973 and the late 1980’s by Reiner Bredemeyer, who was born in Colombia but spent much of his career in the DDR, and more recently another movement from Gunter Bialas’ "Aus der Matratzengruft" combines the texts of "Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht" from Zeitgedichte and "Im traurigen Monat November wars" from the mock-epic "Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen."
For the latter work and the other mock-epic "Atta Troll" the pattern of usage is similar to the examples I’ve already given. Verses from both appear on Poesie und Musik’s Heine disc and in Peter Janssens "Heinrich Heine Song Buch", both from the 1970s, and a few selections from just Deutschland are found such on such recordings as Attilla Zoller’s "Heinrich Heine – Lyrik und Jazz", and Wolf Biermann’s "Seelengeld" from 1986. Dieter Süverkrüp sang ‘Ein neues Lied, ein bess’res Lied’ on his LP ‘1848 – songs of a German revolution.’ Incidentally, in 1976 Süverkrüp received the Heinrich-Heine Prize of the DDR.
Moving over to works for the stage, verses from both poems figure in Wilfried Krätzschmar’s "Heine-Szenen," which was produced at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1983, while Atta Troll was adapted as a chamber opera in 1952 by the Belgian composer Raymond Chevreuille. Straddling the theatrical and concert genres, the film-composer Hans-Martin Majewski wrote music in 1961 for a lavish production of "Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen. Eine poetische Reportage" for several speakers, chorus and orchestra, which was released on EMI Records, and in 1984 there was a revue version of the poem performed in Berlin with music by Jürgen Knieper. [Found since presentation
Finally, in the realm of more traditional concert music, besides the Bialas piece we already heard, Tilo Medek’s song on a verse from „Deutschland" „Ein neues Lied, eine besseres Lied" was written in 1970, before he left East Germany for the West. The West German composer Wolfgang Hufschmidt has set the same text in his „Fünf Lieder nach Texten von Brecht und Heine" for voice and piano from 1980, which he reworked from part of his 1977 composition „Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen" for speaker and guitar. Hufschmidt based both of these works on the melody of "Brüder, zur Sonne, zur Freiheit." Last, but certainly not least, later today we will have the distinct pleasure of hearing a song cycle based on selected stanzas from "Deutschland," which was written in 1984 by none other than our own moderator, Leonard Lehrman, who has told me that what drew him to Heine was his "irony and incredible contemporaneity" while he was living and working in Vienna, Bremerhaven, and especially Berlin in 1981 through ’86.
One can see from the wide variety and respectable quantity of music based on just these few selections, that throughout this century, and since the 1960s especially, these verses of Heinrich Heine, radical as they were for the 19th century, ring true in the modern world, and that musicians and composers, in Germany especially, but in other nations too, continue to be influenced and inspired by them.
Last Edited: 5 February 2009
