Four years after Beethoven drafted a letter to the woman he addressed as his Immortal Beloved (Day 254), he was apparently still mourning the impossibility of that relationship. On 8 May 1816 he wrote to his friend Ferdinand Ries:
My best greetings to your wife. Unfortunately I have no wife. I have found only one whom no doubt I shall never possess. (Beethoven Letters, No. 632)
In February 1816, Beethoven placed his nephew Karl under the care of a schoolmaster, Cajetan Giannatasio del Rio, and he befriended the man’s wife and two daughters, Fanny and Anna. Fanny seems to have developed a crush on Beethoven and wrote about him in her diary:
My father thought that B. could rescue himself from his unfortunate domestic conditions only by marriage, did he know anybody, etc. Now our long foreboding was confirmed: he was unhappy in love! Five years ago he had made the acquaintance of a person, a union with whom he would have considered the greatest happiness of his life. It was not to be thought of, almost an impossibility, a chimera — “nonetheless it is now as on the first day.” This harmony, he added, he had not yet discovered! It had never reached a confession, but he could not get it out of his mind! (Thayer-Forbes, pp. 646–7)
Given Beethoven’s continued heartbreak over the woman he once addressed as his “Immortal Beloved,” it’s not difficult to believe that she was on his mind in April 1816 when composing the music of his great song cycle “An die ferne Geliebte” (To the distant beloved).
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“An die ferne Geliebte” (Opus 98), 1816
This is a real treasure: A live performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with English subtitles.
Composers before Beethoven had grouped related songs; Beethoven himself had done that with the Gellert Lieder (Day 150). But “An die ferne Geliebte” has earned a special place in music history by being the first major song cycle (or Liederkreis as Beethoven labeled it) whose songs are intended to be performed in a set sequence. Unlike later song cycles by Schubert, Schumann, and Mahler, the six songs of “An die ferne Geliebte” are additionally linked with piano transitions, and must be performed without any breaks.
The texts of the six “An die ferne Geliebte” songs are by Alois Jeitteles, about whom little is known. He was born to a Jewish family in Brno, and was a 21-year-old medical student in Vienna at the time he wrote the poems. It could be that Beethoven suggested the subject matter.
Concerning the connection between the “Immortal Beloved” letter and “An die ferne Geliebte,” Joseph Kerman writes:
By bringing his feelings into the open, Beethoven was renouncing or abandoning them. Projecting himself into Jeitteles’s poems, he was saying that love was removed from him in time as much as in space, distant from him, and also well behind him. …
Possibly it served as a literal love offering; more probably it served as a nostalgic hymn to past love in general. On the other hand, I believe that in another respect a literal reading can be more illuminating that a general one. Beethoven, through Jeitteles’s lover, seems to be saying that only through art could he achieve loving communication; the beloved is unreachable except through songs. There is therefore some justification for regarding the cycle as an act of renewed dedication to music, to the artist’s mission in general.” (Beethoven Studies, Norton, 1973, pp. 131–2)
#Beethoven250 Day 294
“An die ferne Geliebte” (Opus 98), 1816
Young tenor Makudu Senaoana performing in a Voices of South Africa Opera Singing Competition.
The vocal lines of the six songs that comprise “An die ferne Geliebte” have a folksong-like simplicity and directness — “without the trappings of art” as the last song states. It is instead tempo changes and the underlying piano accompaniment that indicate mode swings.
Beethoven is the first composer to represent the complex process of memory — not merely the sense of loss and regret that accompanies visions of the past, but the physical experience of calling up the past within the present. The first song of An die ferne Geliebte … is about the pain of distance. Each one of the six songs of the cycle except the last is a landscape, and the opening landscape is the one that separates. (Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, p. 166)
In the first song of “An die ferne Geliebte,” the poet is peering from a distance — literally spatial but perhaps metaphorically temporal — and vows to sing songs of lament that express his anguish. Through these songs, time and space will compress until hearts shall touch.
The first song of “An die ferne Geliebte” is in modified strophic form, but the second song sets the vocal line of the middle of three stanzas to an insistently repeated G as the poet projects himself from his vantage point into the valley of his beloved.
The third song of “An die ferne Geliebte” instructs the stream, clouds, birds, and winds to convey to his beloved the depths of his love. After the first two modified-strophic stanzas, the remainder have a key change to minor, melodic variations, and frequent tempo changes.
The third and fourth songs of “An die ferne Geliebte” are united not only by keys but with an unceasing vocal line, and now the poet wishes to travel with the clouds, the winds, and the stream to be closer to his beloved. The sudden tempo change at the end is startling.
The fifth song of “An die ferne Geliebte” is the most strophic of the set, varying only with the piano interludes between the stanzas. When May returns, the poet watches a swallow construct a nest that becomes a bridal chamber, a bridal bed, and a home for its family.
The final “An die ferne Geliebte” song dedicates the songs to the distant beloved. He sings to her what she must sing back to him. The final stanza then recalls the melody and words of the first song’s last stanza. Through music, the two hearts meet, and the cycle closes.
An die ferne Geliebte is his most openly Romantic work. Even the last phrase (which is the first phrase rewritten) is both decisive and, by Classical standards, inconclusive. The end of the cycle with the return of the first phrase needs to suggest the incomplete: it is only the anguish of separation that returns. The last song is not a memory of the distant beloved but a memory of grief and of absence. Even if, as the words claim, the distance in time and space is vanquished by a song, the effect of transcendence depends on our understanding that the absence persists. (Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, p. 174)
#Beethoven250 Day 294
“An die ferne Geliebte” (Opus 98), 1816
The use of a guitar accompaniment is not historically inappropriate, although usually guitars would be found in Viennese homes rather than the stage.
Despite the seeming simplicity and directness of the vocal part in “An die ferne Geliebte,” the overall work has a structural sophistication and complexity. The connections between the songs are much deeper than are immediately evident. Musicologist Christopher Reynolds has shown that all the songs are based on motific material presented in the first ten measures of the first song. (“The Representational Impulse in Late Beethoven. I: An die ferne Geliebte”)
In a fascinating article, “The Antecedents of Beethoven’s Liederkreis” Luise Eitel Peake discusses how the Liederkreis (“song cycle”) originated as a parlor amusement in which various related songs would be sung individually and collectively by a group of friends. Sometimes these songs would be related in a way that would form a riddle with clues, and the story they tell would sometimes even form a simple picture. For “An die ferne Geliebte,” this picture (supported by textual mentions) is a teardrop. She concludes:
Though we too might find the “shape” of Beethoven’s mature masterpiece slightly embarrassing, its alternative, the simple explanation that Beethoven decided to write An die ferne Geliebte because he was in love, or because these marvelously suitable poems just happened to fall into his hand, no longer seems convincing. We should begin to take the domestic games of the early nineteenth-century ladies’ clubs more seriously… ([jstor.org/stable/736549])
#Beethoven250 Day 294
“An die ferne Geliebte” (Opus 98), 1816
A must view! What begins as a socially-distance performance by American mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke progressively becomes more challenging and then sillier. With English subtitles.