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BEN BRYNMOR FOWLER
Currently living in Ebisu, Tokyo. A lover of city living & city walking, cinema, music, fiction, currently writing a PhD on contemporary theatre in Britain and Germany, and developing an intense relationship with apple gadgets.

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Living in the land of Märchen, this is the perfect music to read Struwwelpeter alongside. And great analysis too. The best kind of tumblr content. 

msodradek:

—Robert Schumann, Märchenerzählungen, op. 132, II. Lebhaft und sehr markiert. Eric Le Sage (piano), Antoine Tamestit (viola) & Paul Meyer (clarinet).

Schumann’s Fairy Tales: Music, Literature and Painting

This is the second of four pieces in a cycle composed in 1853. It is, in the words of Peter Ostwald, “almost futuristic music” made of “dark melodies, nervous rhythms, and subtly contrapuntal texture”. At the same time it also has, paradoxically, an ancient quality that could recall an intoxicated Carnival parade or a medieval Death Dance:

—Alfred Rethel, Dance of Death: Death the Strangler (1850?). (The hypothesis of a connection between Schumann’s Märchen pieces and the works of his friend the painter Alfred Rethel has been proposed, writes Nicholas Marston, by Leon Botstein.)

Fantastic tales, both newly created and versions of traditional stories, were one of the fixtures of German romanticism, and since the very beginning, writers spoke of them in relation to music:

One striking instance of the evocation in music of a fairy-tale ambience can be found in the late chamber music miniatures of Robert Schumann, in particular Märchenbilder, op. 113, for piano and viola, and Märchenerzählungen, op. 132, for piano, clarinet, and viola. (…) The music ranges from rhapsodic to epic, melancholy to nostalgic, with the listener left free to establish the nature of the relationship between such music and the fairy tale. It is perhaps in this stimulation of the imagination, coupled with the mercurial quality of the music, that we can locate Schumann’s own attraction to the tales.

(…) The question of whether fairy tales could be said to be like music was raised briefly toward the end of the eighteenth century, in the early years of German Romanticism. Responding to the Kantian notion that, left free to roam, the imagination produces only nonsense, authors such as Novalis and Ludwig Tieck explored the idea of a mode of imaginative writing unconstrained by the demand to make sense. The fairy tale seemed fit for the purpose because of its lack of conventional characterization, disregard for motivation, and uncannily repetitive plots. It was in the perceived dreamy incoherence of the fairy tale that a link could be established with music (…)

—Stephen Benson, “Music”, in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Haase, Greenwood Press, 2008, pp. 649-650. Bold mine.

Schumann lived during a time when the Märchen (fairy tale) developed and flourished in Germany, both the simple, folklike tales of Andersen and the more elaborate ones of Tieck, Novalis, Hoffmann, and Arnim. He read them for his own enjoyment and to his children, and, inspired by them, created several musical counterparts. (…)

Writers of Märchen were quick to note its musical association. Märchen, wrote Ludwig Tieck, need to possess “a quietly progressive tone, a certain innocence of representation … which hypnotizes the soul like quiet musical improvisations without noise and clamor.” Novalis described the Märchen as resembling “a vision in a dream—incoherent— an ensemble of wonderful things and events, for example, a musical fantasy—the harmonic sequences of an Aoelian harp—nature itself.”

—Eric Frederick Jensen, Schumann, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 341-342. Bold mine.

And if you haven’t already done so, I strongly recommend you let yourself get bitten by the Schumann bug by reading noxrpm’s fantastic posts.

music fairytales fiction Schumann German Romanticism Märchen
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