The most extraordinary and elaborately encapsulated of the Encounter or Object poems is ‘Divine Remembrance’, in which the poet again adopts the persona of a ‘wanderer’ (this could be a convention borrowed from the young Goethe). He is making his way through a wild, rocky landscape, when he suddenly recalls a painting seen years ago in his much-visited Carthusian monastery: a painting of the Child Jesus as a beautiful five-year-old boy sitting on a rock in wild countryside, where his companion, an old shepherd, has picked up a curiously shaped petrifact and shown it to him. The Object captured by the painter, then perceived and now recalled by the poet, could hardly be more momentous and sacred: it not only goes back through the centuries to the earthly life of Jesus, but seems to return to the beginning of time. An almost imperceptible nuance of wonderment appears on the Child’s face as he stares at it, and in a flash of ‘divine remembrance’ recalls for a fleeting moment the creation of the world by his own act. The piece of stone, found by chance and appearing both in the painting and in the poet’s description of the painting, a memory within a memory, thus becomes a symbol of the world itself.
It is not clear whether this poem is to be construed as an expression of religious belief on the narrator’s part, of assent to the traditional Christian doctrine of the incarnate Logos ‘by whom all things were made’, as the Johannine epigraph states. Mörike has made this a rather more complex point than it seems. For instance, there is also the prior question of whether the painter (whoever he was, and if indeed the painting ever existed) himself held the traditional belief. It might be thought prima facie that this must have been so, because if it were not, half the point of the painting would disappear. It would have lost the profundity, the paradox that this five-year-old child is simultaneously the Creator, who in undergoing human incarnation has (as the classic formulation puts it) ‘emptied himself’ of divine knowledge and therefore of any consciousness of his divine actions, unless by some exceptional momentary anamnesis. In the absence of this theological dimension it would still be a religious painting, but in a quite commonplace sense: an attractive scene, marginal to the biblical story, of the Christ Child playing with a piece of rock. On the other hand, this may indeed be what the real or imaginary painting was: the christological hint may be no more than an interpretative contribution by the poet, whose thoughts about the Child and his plaything are more complicated than the artist’s were. This is perhaps the more likely reading both of the painting and of Mörike’s reception of it. But even on this view the poet can be said to be at one or two removes from an expression of faith: he may be merely touched by the faith of the unidentified painter, or he may have invented the painting altogether, perhaps thus implying that the divine Child as such may also never have existed. In any case the poem is not telling us of the poet’s encounter with the painting itself, or his thoughts about it when (as he claims) he first saw it, but of his memory of it which he suddenly now recovers in rocky archaic surroundings; and this memory of the painted scene is now enriched, becomes more moving, by his added reflections (with or without doctrinal assent) on the identity of the divine Child. Moreover, an exact parallel is here suggested between this psychological process of recollection (which may have prompted the writing of the poem) and the mysterious return, at the sight of the archaic stone, of the Child’s lost memory of his act of creation. The stone (a petrified growth ‘from the sea’s depths’), the Child, the painting and the mountain landscape, all take on their significance from the nexus of their encounters and associations. Both the natural Object and the art-Object are transformed and exalted, the two psychological events combine to disclose a pattern: the link between creativity and buried but recovered memories. Somehow we are again taken back here to the story of the child-giant Suckelborst: he has ancient knowledge of the beginning of things, he lived before the Flood, he himself is like something in a creation-myth, in his naive uncouthness he represents the creative force. Similarly, it is a returning childhood memory that prompts Mozart’s creativity when he first sits down by the orange-tree.
In Mozart’s Journey to Prague, the idyllic and tragic elements coexist, and each heightens the effect of the other. The half-historical, half-fictional tale is both a celebration of supreme art and a valedictory acknowledgement of the creative artist’s tragic destiny. Its central significant event is Mozart’s idyllic-fictional, unintended, serendipitous visit to the Schinzberg household on his way to Prague to produce the première of Don Giovanni, and the centre of this centre is the significant Object, the orange-tree. His encounter with it, and consequently with the Count and his family, involves more than one quite fortuitous but highly meaningful coincidence. He happens to arrive on the day of the betrothal festivities for the Count’s young niece Eugenie, happens to wander into the Count’s garden, and happens to sit down beside the particular tree that has acquired and will now further acquire such especial importance. It is now standing near a fountain, flourishing and fertile, bearing fruit as if to greet Mozart’s arrival. It is at this point that the ‘idyll’ begins, only to be rudely threatened almost at once. Mörike’s astonishing account of the onset of the mysterious creative process in the composer’s mind is the poetic high point of the Novelle, becoming dramatic as Mozart’s musical trance is interrupted. As in ‘Divine Remembrance’, creativity is triggered by a memory – in this case, as he looks at the oranges and listens to the fountain, a childhood memory of the golden balls thrown by dancing jugglers in Naples, and of the melody, or one like it, of Zerlina’s wedding dance. He becomes oblivious of his surroundings and is unconscious of the strange, instinctive, geometrical gesture with which he cuts the fruit into two hemispheres, parting and rejoining them as his musical idea develops. This is an internal idyll of creative harmony. The ensuing comic confrontation with the indignant head gardener marks the moment of maximum distance between genius and society; he is seen as ‘some kind of tramp wandering about’, who is ‘not right in the head’ and ‘says his name is Moser’. The satisfying anagnorisis that follows is the turning-point, the dénouement by which Mozart is reintegrated into the social idyll. The family joyfully invite him and his wife to break their journey to Prague for at least one night, to stay with them and join in the festivities. In the course of these he plays them one of his piano concertos, Eugenie sings an aria from Figaro, and she and Mozart together perform the new duet for Don Giovanni which he has written by the orange-tree and now dedicates to her. In the morning they continue their journey in a new carriage, which the Count has given them as a present. The artist’s relationship with society is shown to be as it should be.
Mozart’s Journey to Prague is somehow both prose and poetry, both an eloquent conversation-piece and a subtly constructed Novelle complete with flashbacks, criss-crossing narrations and a central symbolic Object. It is both an ornamental fountain of words and music, and at the same time the detailed record of a unique and idyllic social event, by a writer who has left behind him the youthful rhetoric of romantic isolation and adopted the voice of a narrator communicating with a real public, with a like-minded readership of cultivated friends: a narrator who has something to tell them, a story about something he has seen or found or experienced, a place he has visited (‘I know a place…’, ‘long ago I saw a picture…’). His narrative poems are sometimes (reviving here another ancient convention) ‘epistles’ to real or fictitious recipients, and their stories are as often as not told quite casually, in a low-key, understated, conversational style (Plauderton). This applies preeminently to Mozart’s Journey to Prague, in which Mörike’s predilection for narrative is very evident. His authorial story is interspersed with secondary, internal stories, by Mozart himself and by his wife Constanze. One of these is Mozart’s eloquent account of the Neapolitan water-pageant he saw seventeen years ago and of which he has been reminded by the orange-tree’s golden fruit; another is his account of the circumstances in which he was moved to write the sinister music of Don Giovanni’s meeting with the Statue. La
ter we hear Constanze’s reminiscences, her confession of her anxieties about her husband’s poor health and human weaknesses, and her eager hopes that the expected success of Don Giovanni in Prague may give a new turn to his fortunes. She describes at length the future she imagines for him, his happy and prosperous life in Berlin under the King of Prussia’s patronage. But Mörike’s authorial comments make it clear that none of this will ever happen, they refer to Mozart’s inability to thrive in this world, the self-consumption of his burning genius, his presentiments of death and terrible fits of paralysing depression. The narratives interweave, and the theme of his death interweaves with them. Through the high-spirited chatter of the story, it appears and disappears, hinted at, half mentioned, left unmentioned, finally confronted at the end in the memento mori of ‘O soul, remember’.
‘A Visit to the Carthusians’, written six years after Mozart’s Journey to Prague, resembles it in several ways: firstly in being a sophisticated complex of low-key, conversational narratives, secondly in combining a social idyll of ‘lichtsome sweet contentment’ with presages of death, thirdly in making elaborate use of a symbolic Object (the clock). In both the story and the poem, the primary or external narrative (Mozart travelling to Prague to produce Don Giovanni; the poet revisiting the abandoned monastery) contains a subtext, the underlying inner theme (the transitoriness and fragility of great cultures and of the creative artist himself; the certainty of death for every man). In both cases there is a historical dimension, and the Object relates the present to the past. In Mozart’s Journey we are given two stories about the orange-tree, two episodes of its history: one reaching back about a century to the great age of Louis XIV, when Madame de Sévigné gave the cutting to Count Schinzberg’s grandmother, and the other in which the tree (having now been carefully preserved as a symbolic heirloom of the family and thus a symbol of the ancien régime at its best) is intended as a betrothal gift for Eugenie – only to have its value for her and for everyone else unexpectedly and miraculously enhanced when Mozart himself sits down by it and picks one of its oranges as he composes part of Don Giovanni. From this moment, the fruit becomes something scarcely less consequential than the apple in the garden of Eden (‘your paradise’, as Mozart himself calls it in his letter to the Countess). Similarly, in ‘A Visit to the Carthusians’, the clock plays its role twice: in the past, fourteen years ago, when the poet-narrator first visited the monastery and found it prosperous and hospitable, and now again on his return visit when the doctor tells him the story of the clock and how the Steward hid it, while the clock itself still stands there with its menacing admonition. Both the clock and the doctor connect the past with the present, and bring with them the poem’s essential theme: the theme of death, of readiness or unreadiness for death, of the fear of ‘the last hour’.
In the story about Mozart, the idylls are also threatened: the idyll of perfect order represented by his art, and the social idyll represented by his fictional, transient visit to a place invented for him by Mörike as the artist’s ideal social setting. Here all is festivity and conviviality, badinage and Lebenslust, memories of an earlier golden age of culture. But hidden beneath everything are Mozart’s melancholy, his forebodings, his vulnerability to ‘daemonic’ forces. They rise darkly to the surface as he sits at the piano and plays extracts from his new opera which the world has not yet heard, ending with the Cemetery scene and the erotic hero’s terrifying descent into hell. Two years later, European culture will be shaken by the French Revolution, and four years from now Mozart himself will be dead. Eight years after finishing Mozart’s Journey to Prague, Mörike wrote another ‘letter’ poem, a last work before the twelve years of his final silence. In ‘Erinna to Sappho’, the young poetess Erinna writes to her beloved mentor of her happiness with ‘all our friends, and the graceful art of the Muses’ – and of how, that morning, she had suddenly found herself alone, confronted by strange omens of her imminent death and descent into ‘night’s dreadful abyss’: the sinister Doppelgängerin in the mirror, the rush of Apollo’s black-feathered arrow grazing her temple. Death isolates: and Mozart too, even in his present privileged company, seems isolated by the darker side of his own music. His hearers were delighted by Figaro and by Zerlina’s ‘Giovinette che fate all’amore’, but the music of the Stone Guest is the voice of the unspeakable. Noone can find an adequate comment. Mörike seems to suggest that there are two kinds of art: on the one hand the ‘graceful art of the Muses’ which adorns and enhances social intercourse, and on the other the art of isolation, of the abyss, of compulsive self-destroying genius. Only Eugenie, the most gifted and sensitive of the Schinzberg circle, perceives something of the latter in her admired master: she too cannot put it into words, but then she finds the words in the ‘Bohemian folk-song’ with which Mörike ends the story, and weeps as she re-reads it. She nevertheless seems to accept the truth of its message, and her tears are tears of sadness rather than of despair. She is thus the essential link between Mozart and her friends, between the divine-daemonic genius and the civilized society to which he gives delight. The at least partial bridging of this gap corresponds to Mörike’s known intention that in his story about Mozart the idyllic feeling, though inseparable from elegiac sadness, should nevertheless predominate.
Further Reading
Among biographical and critical sources here used I should mention above all the massive and authoritative systematic study of Mörike’s poetry by Renate von Heydebrand (Eduard Mörikes Gedichtwerk, Metzler-Verlag, Stuttgart, 1972). Others to which I am indebted to a lesser extent include Romano Guardini’s lectures on five poems (Gegenwart und Geheimnis, Werkbund-Verlag, Würzburg, 1957), Benno von Wiese’s analysis of Mozart’s Journey to Prague in his book Die deutsche Novelle von Goethe bis Kafka (Bagel-Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1959), Siegbert Prawer’s fascinating documentation of the reception of the poetry (Mörike und seine Leser, Ernst Klett, Stuttgart, 1960), Gerhard Storz’s Eduard Mörike (Klett, 1967), Hans Egon Holthusen’s short illustrated biography (Rowohlt, Reinbek, 1971), Peter Lahnstein’s mainly biographical Eduard Mörike (List-Verlag, Munich, 1986), and Birgit Mayer’s indispensable factual résumé in the Metzler Realien series (Eduard Mörike, Stuttgart, 1987). Material on Mörike in English is unfortunately scanty, but readers not fluent in German may wish to consult Margaret Mare’s biography (Eduard Mörike: the Man and the Poet, Methuen, London, 1957), Lionel Thomas’s selection of the poems (with introduction and notes, Blackwell’s German Texts, Oxford, 1960), R. B. Farrell’s article ‘Mörike’s Classical Verse’ (Publications of the English Goethe Society, London, 1955/6) and his short monograph on Mozart’s Journey to Prague (Studies in German Literature no. 3, London, 1960), the article by W. D. Williams ‘Day and Night Symbolism in Some Poems of Mörike’ (in The Era of Goethe: Essays Presented to James Boyd, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1959), J. P. Stern’s essay on Mörike (‘Recollection and Inwardness’) in his collection Idylls and Realities (Methuen, 1971), and the studies by B. A. Rowley, ‘A Long Day’s Night. Ambivalent Imagery in Mörike’s Lyric Poetry’ (German Life and Letters, 1975/6), ‘The Nature of Mörike’s Poetic Evolution’ (in the collection of commemorative essays for Lionel Thomas, Hull University Press, Hull, 1980), and ‘Brimstone, Beech and Lamp Bowl: Eduard Mörike’s Things’ (Publications of the English Goethe Society, 1993/4). See also J. Rolleston, ‘The Legacy of Idealism: Schiller, Mörike and Biedermeier Culture’ (Modern Language Quarterly, December 1990), and J. Adams (ed.), Mörike’s Muses: Critical Essays on Eduard Mörike (Camden House, Columbia, SC, 1990).
Note on the Text
Twelve years after Mozart’s Journey to Prague, Mörike published the fourth and last edition (Ausgabe letzter Hand,1867) of his collected poems, that is to say his final selection of those he thought worth publishing. The two best modern editions currently available, that by H. G. Göpfert (1954, revised 1981) and that by Helga Unger (1967–70), are both based on this text, while taking account of earlier printings and manuscripts in whi
ch interesting variants are occasionally to be found. The Reclam selection by Bernhard Zeller (1987) is based on Göpfert, and thus indirectly on the 1867 edition. For purposes of the present anthology I have used the Reclam texts simply because of their modernized punctuation; a few poems not in Reclam are taken from Unger. The question of the order in which the poems should be arranged is slightly more problematic. It is thought (though there has been some controversy on this point) that Mörike himself was responsible for the traditional sequence, which remained essentially the same in all four of his own editions, and which most subsequent editors have in practice adopted. It is not, however, chronological or dictated by any other discernible principle; for instance Mörike did not group the poems under subheadings according to form or theme, as Goethe in his own collected editions had tried to do. Suitably enough, he placed the great early meditation on the winter sunrise, ‘On a Winter Morning before Sunrise’ (‘An einem Wintermorgen, vor Sonnenaufgang’, 1825), at the beginning of the collection, and ended it with a still relatively early piece, the comical ‘Good Riddance’ (‘Abschied’, 1837), in which the poet very satisfyingly kicks his critic downstairs. In the bilingual selection here offered, the actual choice of poems is inevitably influenced by personal preferences and considerations of translatability, but I have also tried to illustrate the already discussed broad dissimilarity between Mörike’s earlier and later work, and have therefore abandoned his own order for one that is almost consistently chronological. This is then divided into two slightly overlapping sections (the first, as a concession to tradition, beginning with ‘On a Winter Morning’ and ending with ‘Good Riddance’). The greater length of the second section reflects an obvious bias in favour of poems in the later and ‘classical’ style, but this may serve as a corrective to the opposite bias of most previous Mörike anthologies. In the most important and influential anthology of all, Hugo Wolf’s volume (published in 1889) of musical settings of fifty-three of the poems, the emphasis also falls on the ‘romantic’ or ‘lyrical’ poems of the earlier period, though this of course is not a case of bias but a necessary requirement of the Lied form. Wolf’s Mörike-Lieder are discussed in a separate excursus (pp. 195–204). About half the poems chosen in the present edition are among those composed by Wolf, but I have made no attempt to relate the translations to the music or devise singable versions, if only because this would have required excessively close imitation of Mörike’s metrical patterns, with consequent excessive semantic distortion.
Mozart's Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems Page 4