Towards the end of 1810, Beethoven realized that he had promised his publisher three more songs than he had previously delivered. He corrected this deficiency with the “Three Songs of Goethe” published as Opus 83.
During Beethoven’s lifetime, Goethe was renowned as the greatest living German writer, and he was certainly one of Beethoven’s favorite. During his compositional career, Beethoven set over 20 Goethe poems to music — more than twice as many as any other poet.
The first of Beethoven’s Opus 83 Goethe songs, “Wonne der Wehmut” (“The Joy of Melancholy”) has attracted the most admiration. Barry Cooper cites the “particularly detailed word-setting, with the poetry mirrored by the music in every conceivable way.” (Beethoven, p. 214)
Goethe’s poem “Wonne der Wehmut” tells of eyes that are “never dry” with “tears of eternal love” and “tears of unhappy love.” Most crucially, tears of melancholy are essential for spiritual fulfillment: “To eyes that have even half-dried, How desolate, how dead the world appears”
#Beethoven250 Day 244
“Wonne der Wehmut” (Opus 83, No. 1), 1810
A live performance with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore and English subtitles is the perfect combination.
At the start of the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau video of “Wonne der Wehmut” we see the beginning of the score and a descending scale in the piano following the words “trocknet nicht” (“never dry”). Beethoven’s use of this scale in this context has been described as a “veil of tears”
In William Kinderman’s detailed four-page analysis of “Wonne der Wehmut” (Beethoven, pp. 163–7), he notes:
Beethoven’s sensitive development of the vocal appoggiatura into the descending motif in the piano is part of a larger process whereby the expressive affect derived from the poem is transformed into the musical structure. He does not simply depict particular words by means of musical motifs; the words enter into a dialogue with the music, which is not subordinated to the text but, on the contrary, creates a new formal context for it.