Zeitkritik in William Blakes „Songs of Innocence and of Experience“ (German Edition)

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Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus: Translated by Helen Lowe-Porter: Knopf, , and more recently by John E. Roman eines Romans Amsterdam: Translated by Richard and Clara Winston: The Genesis of a Novel London: The Boydell Press, The source of my final paragraphs.

William Blake in art, music, film, and literature

My source for details of the collected Blake that Auden gave to Mann. William Blake was a poet of crucial importance to Britten. Other poets, notably W. Auden, were set more often, but as the enthusiasm of, at the most, a decade. Some individual Blake settings followed in the s, including a first version of A Poison Tree. Can Chandler really be referring to the Songs and Proverbs? Britten was not a parochial composer. Francis Poulenc once said that words and music should form a love-match, not a marriage of convenience. The languages set include French, Russian, German, and Italian poets.

The list of recordings is based on my own collection and is necessarily incomplete. Part of the text appears in The English Auden , pp.

Faber Music, ; revised edition Part I, Angels before the Creation: Athelstan Riley , 5, War in Heaven Revelation. Britten later set the same text but omitting the third stanza for solo voice in A Charm of Lullabies. It may be that the reason for the reticence of the original dedication was that Edward Sackville-West, who had helped with the selection of the texts, was an active music critic. Britten conducts Britten, Decca The Serenade , with its two virtuoso soloists, one vocal, one instrumental, is subtle, beautiful, and haunting, a magical exercise in nocturnal imagery and matching sonorities executed with a challenging technical sophistication.

Britten seems to have started work on the concept and content of the Serenade by taking his copy of the Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of English Verse , awarded him as a school prize in , and listing on the rear fly-leaf those poems in the anthology that caught his attention, no fewer than sixteen in all, of which four would be used in the completed work. Not included in this first selection were the Cotton and Blake poems; neither is to be found in the Quiller-Couch anthology.

The work was almost immediately recognized as the masterpiece it is. The subject is Night and its prestigia: The whole sequence forms an Elegy or Nocturnal as Donne would have called it , resuming the thoughts and images suitable to evening. The mood could be a lament for lost innocence. The first song in the cycle is the second setting of a text previously used by Britten for a duet.

This version omits the third stanza. All five verses are included in the duet setting of Britten found the texts for the cycle in an anthology edited by F. Budd, A Book of Lullabies Planning of The Little Sweep began in August , when, as Eric Crozier explained, the idea of an opera for children and audience to perform seemed highly original. This preliminary play served its purpose well at the time, but it does not wear so well as the opera.

Philip Brett notes that this constituted genuine release and fulfilment for Britten whatever its psychological impulse. Revised versions of the play were prepared in and , and an alternative sequence of music and readings, The Climbing Boy , was compiled by Paul Johnson in London, to thee I do present Beaumont, Fletcher. The final movement quotes the leading melody and text of the thirteenth-century round Sumer is icumen in. The Spring Symphony belongs to a symphonic tradition created largely by Mahler, by whom Britten was much influenced, which incorporates vocal forms.

Faber and Faber, ; new edition Choreographed by Norman Walker to the Songs and Proverbs , op. The choice of composer probably originated with Geoffrey Keynes who had already been instrumental in commissioning Vaughan Williams to compose Job: This commission had unexpected consequences.

Summer 1977

Benjamin Britten could reasonably have expected the commission— his was the reputation for setting English verse, and Blake one of his poets. In his memoirs Fischer-Dieskau says that the cycle was written for him after the death during childbirth of his first wife, the cellist Irmgard Poppen, in December , and this too may have affected its mood.

This astonishing song cycle contains some of the bleakest music Britten ever wrote for voice, a work full of sorrow and irony, each proverb a stern admonishment, and each song a brilliantly characterised miniature. Peter Pears, who made the selection of the poems and proverbs, had the brilliant idea of using some of the latter as a prelude to each song.

Sarah Jost

These proverbs reflect on the poems that follow. The cycle contains six of the Songs of Experience , seven of the Proverbs which, though not stated in the vocal score, are to be found in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , and the beginning and closing verses of Auguries of Innocence. The cycle is sung as a continuous piece, interleaving a ritornello-like setting of the seven proverbs with the seven songs. Pears planned the sequence to move from wrath, in the first four songs, to tenderness and compassion, and finally to innocence once more.

The all-too-knowing subject is revealed in full frailty—a portrait all the more remarkable for its unblinking honesty and bleak integrity.

There are not more than a dozen forte markings throughout the score and the harsh undercurrent of dissonance is all the more compelling for so constantly being muted. The texture of the music is spare and strong with much two-part writing for the piano.

The stark proverbs are clearly distinguished from the more expansive settings of the songs they punctuate by their disconcerting lack of metrical synchronization between voice and piano. Faber Music, ; new edition Initially the composer had thought of using Latin texts only, but in conversation with E. Unfortunately a stroke prevented Forster from collaborating further. Prestel Verlag, , limited edn. The introduction by Keynes provides the reader with some basic information on the context and meaning of The Marriage and gives some useful but far from extensive bibliographical data.

Erdman and others that were published in the Keynes festschrift Oxford: Clarendon Press, , pp.

The numerous enlargements of details from Marriage that appear in the English edition are also missing from the German. Tolley in Blake Newsletter 32 [Spring ], p. Wills in Blake Studies , 6 [], The quality of reproduction is very high.

Each page of the small volume is characterized by the high quality that we have come to expect from Trianon Press. The size of the leaves is the same as in the original, and the colors seem as true as one can achieve with color-offset printing however, I have not been able to compare the facsimile directly with the original at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and my memory might be cheating. A German edition of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience , copy Z the same reproduction as distributed by Oxford University Press , has been available for some years.

Hofmann with a German trans. Wilhelm , Frankfurt am Main: As far as I know, copy T has never been reproduced before. Prentice Hall, , pp.

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On the other hand, this volume has to be judged much more cautiously in regards to the accuracy of its reproductions than the Marriage facsimile. Of the two framing lines on thirty-eight plates of the original, only one is to be seen. Ironically here the plates are reproduced on both the recto and verso of each leaf, while in the original most of them are printed on one side of the sheet only, and the size of the facsimile pages is different from the original.

In addition, the brilliant colors and the gold used by Blake for a number of plates in copy T are hardly to be imagined when looking at this reproduction. It is this that we must aim at: Oxford University Press, , p. The difficulties of putting this abstraction into life and action are well known; perhaps the Newsletter might provide the right forum for discussing again the problems connected with teaching and exhibiting William Blake.

It should be understood that the following bibliography of Blake references in Germany —especially entry nos. Nonetheless, one might find some wheat among the chaff, even among the shorter essays see particularly nos. Nevertheless, I hope that most of the longer and more important articles actually are included here, and that the second part is almost complete. Not mentioned are the many two- or three-line referenes which merely gave the dates of the exhibition, opening-hours etc.

Lucy Maud Montgomerys Kurzgeschichten Band 6: German Edition 9 Jul Lucy Maud Montgomerys Kurzgeschichten Band 5: German Edition 6 Mar Lucy Maud Montgomerys Kurzgeschichten Band 4: German Edition 20 Nov Read this and over 1 million books with Kindle Unlimited. Borrow for free from your Kindle device.

Lucy Maud Montgomerys Kurzgeschichten Band 3: German Edition 9 Oct

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