An die ferne Geliebte

Beethoven's Liederkreis

Beethoven's only song cycle was the precursor of a series of followers, including those of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Carl Loewe. The setting is for a man's voice (usually tenor) with piano. The title page of the original edition (S. A. Steiner, Vienna) bore a dedication with permission to Fürst Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, Duke of Raudnitz, a leading Austrian musical patron, in whose palace the Eroica Symphony was first performed in 1804; Beethoven also dedicated the six string quartets, Op. 18, the Eroica Symphony, Op. 55, the Triple Concerto, Op. 56, the C minor Symphony, Op. 67, the Pastoral Symphony, Op. 68, and the String Quartet, Op. 74 to him.

The text was written by a physician named Alois Isidor Jeitteles, probably at Beethoven's request. Then aged 22, Jeitteles published several short poems, economic in style, in Viennese magazines or almanacks, particularly 'Selam' and 'Aglaja', and was making his name by it. He was an active, selfless young man who later distinguished himself by working tirelessly for his patients during a dreadful cholera epidemic and mortality in Brno.

Beethoven had already explored inward feelings of longing in his setting of Matthisson's Adelaïde, but in these poems the distance from the beloved is greater, the longing is more intense and stormier, and is no longer satisfied with merely the sound of her name, but is preoccupied with the clawing pain of separation which colours the whole surrounding landscape. Max Friedlaender regarded the entire composition as autobiographical in meaning, and the subject of the composer's longing to be none other than the unsterbliche Geliebte, the Immortal Beloved of his letters of July 1812.

The whole sequence is through-composed, so that none of the songs stands alone. The different moods of the six episodes are expressed in different key and time signatures, working from E-flat major in the first song through G major (and briefly C major) in the second to A-flat major in the third and fourth, and thence back through C to E flat. With their underlying thematic linkage, each of the songs is carried without break into the next: a short bridge passage connects 2 and 3, and the last note of 3 is held through the first three bars of the accompaniment to 4 and proceeds into Diese Wolken almost without a breath. The final strophes of 4 have an accelerando leading directly into the vivace of 5.

Synopsis

Unlike the Schubert–Müller song-cycles, the six songs or episodes of An die ferne Geliebte do not form a chronological narrative leading towards a conclusion. Beethoven himself called it Liederkreis an die ferne Geliebte, i.e. a circle or ring of song, and it is so written that the theme of the first song reappears as the conclusion of the last, forming a 'circle' (Liederkreis) – a ring in the figurative sense of a finger-ring as a love-token – rather than a 'cycle' (Liederzyklus) in the sense of a programme or drama. This thematic revolution is also expressed in the emotion and conceit of the words.

1. He is sitting on a hillside looking at the distant spot where they first met, and, feeling the pain of separation, he decides that he will sing songs to convey the feelings from one loving heart to the other.
2. He identifies himself and his feelings with the landscape and the misty hilltops, sending his suffering into the valley where the soft winds can calm it, and the inward pain of his love into the forest depths: in these he can always be with her, even though he cannot go to her.
3. With this thought he bids the clouds and the brook to greet her, and the little birds to sing to her of his complaint, and the west wind to carry her his sighs like the last rays of the sun, and the brook will carry his tears of love to her.
4. He is enraptured, thinking how the clouds and the birds will see her – let him be borne with them! These breezes will play upon her breast and in her hair – let him share in that delight! And she shall see herself in the brook, and the picture will flow back to him.
5. In lovely May when nature is at the full, and the swallows are building their nests for love to dwell within at their bridal beds, and everything that winter has separated is again united with its mate, it is only their own love which has no springtime, and all they have are tears.
6. So he will send her the songs he has written, and she will sing them to the lute when the red of sunset falls across the blue sea and behind the distant mountain: she will sing what he has sung, artlessly, from the fullness of his heart, out of his longing, and these songs will vanquish what keeps them so far apart, and will join one loving heart to the other.