Friedrich Rückert and Robert Schumann, “Widmung“
For my wife, Buff Lindau
Widmung
Friedrich RückertDu meine Seele, du mein Herz,
Du meine Wonn’, o du mein Schmerz,
Du meine Welt, in der ich lebe,
Mein Himmel du, darein ich schwebe,
O du mein Grab, in das hinab
Ich ewig meinen Kummer gab!
Du bist die Ruh, du bist der Frieden,
Du bist vom Himmel mir beschieden.
Dass du mich liebst, macht mich mir wert,
Dein Blick hat mich vor mir verklärt,
Du hebst mich liebend über mich,
Mein guter Geist, mein bess’res Ich!
Dedication
You my soul, you my heart,
You my rapture, O you my pain,
You my world in which I live,
My heaven you, to which I aspire,
O you my grave, into which
My grief forever I’ve consigned!
You are repose, you are peace,
You are bestowed on me from heaven.
Your love for me gives me my worth,
Your eyes transfigure me in mine,
You raise me lovingly above myself,
My guardian angel, my better self!Translation by Richard Stokes, author of The Book of Lieder (Faber, 2005)
Dedication
When I was in college, I had several jobs which helped me afford the cost of tuition. I worked as a short-order cook, at a grill making burgers and other fried foods. It was for much of my life one of the most exciting and fulfilling jobs I ever had. I was also the only ‘librarian’ of a small record library, the space no larger than a sizeable closet, from which students could take out recordings of classical music. Not an exciting job. Hardly anyone ever came, and I, sitting in that record-encrusted room, either studied or listened to music. It was there I discovered “An die Ferne Geliebte,” “To the Distant Beloved,” a song cycle by Ludwig von Beethoven. It would not be until three decades later that I learned that it was the first song cycle, the first series of songs interlinked by theme. It is, to my mind, the greatest of all song cycles. The greatest.
(I know, I know. Franz Schubert was the master, uncontested, of the art song – “Lied” plural “Lieder” – and his two great song cycles, “Die Schöne Müllerin” and “Die Winterreise” are undeniable masterpieces. I have listened to both, often, and heard them both performed live.
And Schubert was, to my mind, better at writing songs than his celebrated successor, Robert Schumann. Schumann does not move me as Schubert does, or as Beethoven does.)
Then, recently, I went to a performance of Schumann’s music which included songs of Robert Schumann and his wife, Clara Schumann. Good stuff. The final song of the performance, “Widmung,” was one I had heard before. This time, it blew me away. The music is, well, as good music gets. The poem it was based on seemed to me so powerful, so wise, that I thought I must write about it.
The poem is by the German poet Friedrich Rückert. He was not one of the very greatest German poets – Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke, Celan – but he was a powerful lyric poet. Known best in his lifetime as a professor of, and translator of, literature in other languages – reputedly, he knew thirty languages! – he wrote lyric poems that seem remarkably adaptable to music. Mahler famously adopted a poem sequence of his into “Kindertotenlieder,” and later wrote settings for five songs in “Rückert-Lieder;” Schubert and Brahms set his poems to music, as did Bela Bartok and George Hindemith and Hugo Wolf. Perhaps it was Rückert’s lyricism, his rhythms and evocative language; perhaps it is the Romantic tendency to suffuse a poem with emotion. For whatever reason or reasons, Rückert’s poems lend themselves to music, to Lieder.
Ah, but I have dithered about enough. It is time to consider the poem. Here it is, with music, exactly as I heard it. The soprano is Jennifer Johnson Cano, the pianist is Gloria Chien, and the recording is courtesy of Alan Bise, the recording engineer.
Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival
Recorded live, August 29th, 2021
Jennifer Johnson Cano, soprano
Gloria Chien, piano
Being a listener and not a performer or musicologist, I am not competent to discuss Schumann’s remarkable musical setting, although I can tell you about its context. Robert’s love for Clara is one of the history’s great love stories. He was an accomplished concert pianist, music commentator (perhaps the most accomplished in all history), and composer. Early on, as he was starting out, his piano teacher was a man called Friedrich Wieck. Wieck had a nine year old daughter, Clara, who was also a virtuoso pianist. Schumann and Clara were attracted to one another. Then, always music-oriented, Schumann studied law, he got engaged – and eventually returned to Leipzig and re-encountered Clara Wieck, who was now sixteen. They fell in love. Schumann requested her hand in marriage, but Friedrich refused. Three years later, against her father’s wishes, they married. Their love for each other was intense, one of the great love stories of all the ages. But it was to end sadly. Schumann had an extended nervous breakdown; he ended up in a sanatorium, where after a bit over two years in residence, he died at 46.
As a wedding gift for Clara, he composed a song cycle for her, “Myrthen.” Unlike most song cycles, which are based on the work of a single poet, this cycle was based on poems by a number of poets: A sort of celebratory bouquet of poems. This description, from notes to an album by the well-known soprano Hyunah Yu, gives the composition’s context succinctly:
Myrthen ("Myrtles") is dedicated to Robert Schumann's wife, Clara, and was presented to her on the day of their wedding. Myrtles are evergreen shrubs native to Europe and north Africa. The white or rosy flowers found on them are often used to make bridal wreaths. The first songs of Myrthen were begun in the early part of 1840 and the set of 26 songs was complete by April, well in advance of the wedding date on September 12th of that year. The songs were bound with a red velvet inscription that simply said, "To my beloved bride." Schumann was, then, offering his own unique wreath of myrtles to Clara.
The opening song of the cycle is “Widmung,” which translated into English is “Dedication.”
Often, when people think of poems, they think of ‘love poems.’ Poetry addresses many things – objects, despair, nature, philosophy – but in our day, unlike in previous times like the Renaissance, love is not chief among them.
So there is something worthwhile, I think, in taking on a love poem as the subject of one of these letters. Twelve lines, two short of a sonnet; the lines are in rhymed couplets, all end-stopped except lines six and seven, when an enjambement (a leaping of the gap between lines) hastens to explain why death appears in this love poem.
For it is a love poem. The German reader might recognize this right away, for German has two forms of ‘you,’ the second person which indicates someone is being addressed. “Sie” is for those whom we know or meet; ‘du’ is for those with whom we are intimately familiar, such as our children, our family, our closest friends – and our loves.
On a first encounter, it may be that the “du’ of the first line indicates the poet is speaking to himself, to his inner-est parts, his soul and heart. But as the poem proceeds it becomes clear that this ‘du’ is another, a person who is his heart and soul.
I think that this first line, with its ‘du,’ is deeply ambiguous, for we do not know on first reading or hearing – before we read the rest of the poem – that the poet is not addressing his own soul and heart.
You my soul, you my heart,
You my rapture, O you my pain,
You my world in which I live,
My heaven you, to which I aspire,
We proceed, with rapture and pain, to the world the poet/lover lives in, to heaven, to aspiration. As we move through the lines, we recognize he is addressing a lover. But in that first line, no. It could be his own soul and heart, it could be a lover. Ambiguous: The ambiguity is resolved as we read the poem.
Clara, to whom the book of poems/songs was given, to whom it is ‘dedicated,’ would have known how to read the words from the outset. But for us, readers/listeners, there will always be that first ambiguity.
In line two, we can understand “rapture,” for what is love at its most intense but rapture? But “pain?” The pangs of love, so strong and severe, can seem painful. But are they? Ah, it is a difficult truth of life that there is no love without pain, for deep attachment leads to deep entanglement, which in turn can lead to profound anxiety that the love can be dissolved by death or accident or even the reality of the ‘other’ who is beloved. More, to be alive is to encounter pain, and as ennobling as love is or can be, it is not immune from what we know as the ‘human sphere,’ that congeries of situations and emotions that humans encounter and inhabit.
In line three, “you my world in which I live,” Rückert points to the enabling and all-encompassing power of loving. It, loving, creates a world for us, a world we inhabit with pleasure and joy. The pleasure is indicated in the following line, in which love is a “heaven.” This is, to my view, the most sentimental line in the poem, the one that we would be most likely to encounter in, well, a popular magazine: Love is heaven. Ugh. But the phrase is redeemed, somewhat, by the poet’s recognition that love is not heaven, but the heaven toward which he aspires. Here we encounter the difficulties of translation: In German, “schwebe” means ‘float,’ or ‘balance toward.’ In either case, heaven is not so much fixed as a state of being which, enmeshed in love, one is either aspiring towards or in some transitory sense, floating in.
Then comes the second quatrain, the concluding line of which suggests that love is not heaven itself, but of a heavenly quality. Note that the nouns of the opening quatrain give way in lines seven and eight to verbs, intransitive verbs (“you are”) but verbs nonetheless.
O you my grave, into which
My grief forever I’ve consigned!
You are repose, you are peace,
You are bestowed on me from heaven.
I have already noted that lines five and six are, unlike all the other couplets, enjambed: if there is “death in paradise” (the line is from Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning;” “Is there no change of death in paradise?”), this death is that of the griefs carried by the self who has entered into the lovers’ relationship. In love, we find surcease from what troubles us. This new “world in which I live” may have pain in the present, but it does not have the grief one carries from the wounds and losses of life, which are buried in the love of one’s lover.
Is this true? I don’t know, but it is lovely to think so. For Rückert, the surrendering of grief to the wholeness of love leads to repose, rest, peace.
Your love for me gives me my worth,
Your eyes transfigure me in mine,
You raise me lovingly above myself,
My guardian angel, my better self!
As it moves towards its conclusion, the poem soars. For love is more than is claimed for it in the opening eight lines, where serenity and bliss (and, yes, pain) are the territory which ‘being in love’ entitles one to enter. What happens in these final lines is the reshaping, the re-forming, of identity. The lover becomes a new and different person, in his own eyes. Reflected in the love of another, “your love for me gives me my worth,” so that the lover is ‘transfigured’ and becomes another self. A better self, as the concluding phrase has it. This is, I think, true: Through love one has the capacity to see oneself anew, to cast aside the myriad doubts and insecurities which we carry about as if they were a heavy load on our backs, and see oneself as one’s lover sees us: A good and worthy personage.
One rises, “über mich,” above myself. In Hegel, this would be called an “Aufhebung,” a rising above into a new sense of consciousness. But here the rising above comes into being not through consciousness, nor through the powers of opposition (as in Hegel); but through love itself, which transforms in the loving gaze of the Other the Self that is beheld, a Self which is reflected back to itself in the loving eyes of the Other. [Pardon those capitalized abstractions, Self and Other….] The German has it better than the translation, indicating clearly that the eyes of the other transform the self in the self’s eyes: “Dein Blick hat mich vor mir verklärt,” which quite literally means, “Your look has transfigured me before myself.”
No wonder that for Schumann, writing to and for Clara, as for Rückert, the lover is a “guardian angel” or – closer to the German – “my better spirit.” But the poem does not end there. It began in ambiguity, and it also closes in ambiguity. The lover herself is for him his “better self,” but the self he recalls has been transformed, transfigured, and lives as a better person because of his love. So in the final phrase, the lover is Schumann’s better half, but at the same time he is better for having loved her, and having her love. “My better me.”
The Lied that Schumann wrote does not end there. He repeats the first four lines of the poem and then concludes with its last line, quite likely (always in performance!) emphasized.
One needs, I think, to ponder on whether poems are ‘true’ or just collocations of words which sound lovely when put together. Part of what makes this poem by Rückert, and the music of Schumann, so deeply moving to me is that I believe that last line, and the ambiguity of the ‘better self,” are true.
I have been married to my wife, Buff, for forty-nine years; we have lived together for fifty-two. Marriage is always a relation which limits, for all relations do. We are constrained by the needs and foibles of the other, which we honor in trying to honor and keep steadfast the relationship. [Always at my back I hear Shelley’s lines – that Shelley who abhorred the idea of marriage, whose final words in this passage gave E. M. Forster the title of his first novel—on marriage, “and so/ With one sad friend, and many a jealous foe,/ The dreariest and the longest journey go.”] But marriage also enlarges, allows one to enter into and inhabit one’s “better self,” “mein bess’res Ich!” The closeness of marriage, and a long-lasting bond between humans, means that one becomes the Other. Well, not becomes exactly, but that one is transformed into something better, into what that Other whom we have chosen to love and respect and revere, has admired in us.
Pablo Neruda, in one of his One Hundred Love Sonnets, wrote of the closeness of lovers in this concluding sextet:
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
“So close that your hand upon my chest is mine,/So close that your eyes close with my dreams.” That better I, that I myself am, is because love is part of my life, because I have allowed love to let me transform myself into a better self. Is my wife my better self? I think so. Am I a better self because she has stood by my side, and I by hers, for fifty years? I think so, also.
A better self. Who would not wish for this? I am better for the love I have shared with Buff, as Robert Schumann shared his love with Clara. I also believe, deeply, that she is the better self that I could be, that in Buff my best impulses and tendencies reign. Yes, she like me, has limitations. But although not perfect – who is? – she is my better self.
I was deeply moved by that final phrase when it was repeated in Schumann’s musical setting. It seemed so true. Truth value is part of what I look for in poems. Not just that poems say things well, compose and arrange words so that beauty makes a deep appeal to us, but that in those beautifully, artfully composed words there is a recognition of something that is true about, or in, the world. That love ennobles and improves us, that it gives us a sense of what we can and must become: Yes. But that what we love has a nobility of its own, apart from us? This is a truth we acknowledge easily enough on a superficial level (I adore you!), but that is not always before us on the deepest levels.
So let me dwell a little longer on that final phrase, “mein bess’res Ich!” which in English is “my better self.” Rückert and Schumann mean something more I believe than that I, myself, become a better self because I have love and my lover’s regard. We are, none of us, the center of the universe. That better self is not merely me as reflected in my lover’s eyes. What Rückert and Schumann intend to convey, I think, is that there is another who is better than I myself am. That we love those who embody what is ‘better’ about being human than we ourselves embody – that those we love are truly, in this union-through-love, our better half. This is the piercing recognition which ends this poem, and which provides the conclusion, repeated as it is, of Schumann’s song. There are persons better than we are, and those we love are such persons. A radical thought.
So, while it may be trite to say one’s partner in marriage is one’s ‘better half,’ it takes Rückert and Schumann to tell us that even trite sayings have root in deep truth. Those we love are better than we are, and we are richer for our relation to them.