Every Note Directed At You!
Stories of Musical Dedications
Ursula Schneewind
Original title: "Jede Note an Dich gerichtet!"
Blessing Verlag, November 2004
‘Every note directed at you!’ wrote Gustav Mahler to his wife Alma during rehearsals for the first performance of his Eighth Symphony – thus touching on a theme that Ursula Schneewind cleverly varies in this charming, vividly written book in which she tells the stories of eight great composers dedicating their works to other people. Even if the works discussed here were meant to be heard by the ears of the whole world, they were at the time initially intended, entrusted to one particular person. And it becomes clear that the motives for this are just as many and varied as are the actual musical creations.
‘Farewell! You darling soul of my soul! Wherever I may be, I will now always be yours. Farewell!’ Words from a parting letter, the end of an affair that raised hackles around 150 years ago. A married man fell for a married woman – an everyday story that would barely raise an eyebrow nowadays, were it not for the fact that we owe the existence of a world famous opera to it.
The writer of the letter: Richard Wagner, a small, passionate man with blazing eyes, a powerful brow and energetic features – a man with a kind of charisma irresistible to men and woman alike. The former music director of the Dresden court was living in exile in Zurich with no income, supported by his friends. In Germany, he was a wanted man – as a revolutionary and inciter of revolts.
The recipient: one Mathilde Wesendonck, a respected businessman’s daughter from Eberfeld, wife of an undertaker, and amateur poet – pretty, mad about music, and inclined to go into raptures.
The other people involved: Minna Wagner, one-time actress whose beauty had withered too early and who was inclined to jealousy. Spirited, matter-of-fact and somewhat dull; suffered from heart complaints. And, finally, Otto Wesendonck, wealthy silk manufacturer, respectable and sensitive with a sense of elevated culture and ways of life.
Wagner had spent years working on his great project Der Ring des Nibelungen [The Ring of the Nibelungs]; he hadn’t made really good progress, but getting to know Mathilde sent him into a kind of creative frenzy. All the same, he decided quite suddenly to stop work on it. The borders between fantasy and reality merged: the plot of the opera and reality, musical fiction and his own mental state became as one. Was it Richard or Tristan who was in love with her? Was she his Mathilde, or his Isolde? These are pointless questions, for one thing and one thing alone counted for Wagner: his art and his yearning for love – a love that was unfulfillable in life and hence immortal. ‘I have been destined to carry out my poetry in prose (in real life)’, he claimed when looking back on his life. And this certainly applied to those weeks in autumn 1857.
It is only possible to give a small sample here of the enormous wealth of meticulously researched yet wonderfully vividly narrated ‘dedication stories’ that Ursula Schneewind presents to the reader. And this applies to the historical and psychological details just as much as to her assessment of the music itself. If the portrayal of Richard Wagner and the precarious constellation of people around him during this particular ‘dedication phase’ is vivid, then the portrayals of the other seven composers and their milieu at that time are no less so. In the process, the dedications take on something beyond their historical significance: they gain a highly dramaturgical appeal. They are directed at the composers’ lives like a beam of light being shone onto a particular phase, a crucial topic, a special relationship. Ursula Schneewind’s portraits of these eight musical Titans, all of them so very different, are filled with enormous intensity and force.
A note on the content, arranged according to:
composer, name of dedicated work, recipient of the dedication, theme
Johann Sebastian Bach – Das musikalische Opfer [Musical Offering] – Frederick the Great.
Bach as the representative of the ‘old’ style in conflict with the Kaiser’s market-oriented, superficial taste in music.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Aria ‘Non so d’onde viene’ (I don’t know where these tender feelings come from) – Aloysia Weber, the sister of the woman he later married.
Mozart’s struggle to earn his living; breaking away from his dominant father.
Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony No. 3 Eroica – Napoleon, later Prince Lobkowitz.
Beethoven’s ambivalent stance towards politics and Napoleon.
Franz Schubert – Liederheft [Book of Songs] – Goethe.
A dedication that fell on deaf ears, as the King of Poetry didn’t appreciate the young composer’s sensational new music and simply ignored him.
Richard Wagner – Tristan und Isolde – Mathilde Wesendonck.
The fluid boundaries between fantasy and reality, art and everyday life.
Gustav Mahler – Symphony No. 8 – his wife Alma.
A marriage in great difficulties; fear of loss; music as a proof of love and an attempt at conciliation.
Alban Berg – Violin Concerto – Manon Gropius, Alma Mahler’s daughter.
The tragic death of a young girl; Berg’s emotional entanglements; his situation during the Third Reich.
Arnold Schönberg – Cantata “Ein Überlebender aus Warschau” [“A Survivor from Warsaw”] – in remembrance of the Jewish victims of National Socialism.
Schönberg’s difficult role as an avant garde composer; his fate and his self-perception as a Jew.
Ursula Schneewind studied musicology, German and philosophy at Cologne and Vienna, and wrote her doctorate on Richard Strauss. She has worked as music editor for various broadcasting corporations, and has written countless TV and radio scripts, newspaper articles and lectures.
© by Gabriele Lengersdorff (crédito da foto da autora)