Perhaps it is time for us to hear
German in a different way.
Here is the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's fantastic 9th Symphony -- This is the
choral ode in the fourth movement. As for translations, you just cannot
translate Alle Menschen werden Brüder, / Wo dein sanfter Flügel
weilt effectively into English.
The lyrics are from a
Romantic poem by Friedrich Schiller which Beethoven adapted for this symphony: You can use this poem for your Romantic
poetry paper. Beethoven is
often seen as a musician who spans the breach from Classical (Enlightenment) to
Romantic, but the 9th Symphony is by far in the latter camp.
The Romantic Era hearkens back to medieval and mythological times. Many works of music and art feature Arthurian tales, such as Richard Wagner's Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde. Since Beowulf features characters from Germanic-Norse mythology, here is one of the songs from Die
Walkurie, the second opera in Richard Wagner's massive four-opera
tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). J.R.R. Tolkien will use some of this myth in
his own "Ring Cycle" written about 70 years after Wagner.
Wagner's "Ring
Cycle" is a massive, epic Romantic work that follows Northern German
mythology -- Siegmund, makes an appearance in Beowulf
(page 59) in one of the songs sung in Hrothgar's castle.
Moving on in the 19th
century, Mahler, at the end of the Romantic Era, writes these tragic but
beautiful songs, Kindertotenlieder. As a child, Mahler lost six of his siblings,
and the death of a younger brother affected him deeply. The title
translates as Songs for Dead Children, and clearly, the German here is much
more poetic. Mahler would also lose a beloved daughter not long after these
songs were published, and his wife Alma blamed her death on him, for writing
these songs in the first place.
Moving into the 20th
Century, here is Richard Strauss. Remember the opening from 2001: A
Space Odyssey? That music is Also
sprach Zarathustra, a tone poem by Strauss. But since we are looking at words, not
sounds, here is the fantastic soprano Jessye Norman singing Strauss' Four Last Songs, composed at the end of
his life. As an old man, Strauss was left alone by the Nazis during WWII,
and there is this fantastic story about how an American oboist came upon him at the end of the war, and
got him to write an oboe concerto.
