Requiem for Mignon (Schumann)
richa...@gmail.com
it online? The complete Wilhelm Meister is on Bartleby.com, but I do
not know which parts were used by Schumann. Can anyone please help?
John
This work has been released on an EMI Gemini CD.
Click "series"
Click "Gemini"
Click "Catalogue"
Scroll down until you find the listing for the CD
09046 350900 2 4
Click "Text to download"
Perhaps it is there.
(I can't find a way to go the the link directly, sorry)
min...@bellsouth.net
Thanks, John, but for some strange reason, this lists the text for
everything on the CD EXCEPT the Mignon work!
Richard
Linn
If it is Op 98a that you're after go here:
http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/s/schumann_opcat.html
Scroll down about three-quarters of the page. It's "Kennst du das
Land?". Click on each song individually for the lyrics.
Linn
david...@aol.com
together as Op. 98, the Lieder, Op. 98a, and the mini-oratorio, the
Requiem for Mignon, Op. 98b. The Requiem is a setting from the
passage in which Wilhelm Meister discovers that Mignon has died. I
actually managed to find the text online embedded in this little
history of its composition by somebody named Bradford Robinson:
Robert Schumann
Requiem für Mignon op. 98b (1849)
nach Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre von J. W. von Goethe
für Soli (SSAAB), gemischten Chor und Orchester
On 3 May 1849, during a richly productive period that saw an
impressive outpouring of music in all genres, Schumann returned from
an excursion with his family to find Dresden in a state of
insurrection. Two days later he fled the city to avoid conscription
and settled in the nearby town of Kreischa, where he remained for a
month, continuing all the while to compose. One of the several pieces
he wrote during his temporary exile was a setting of the poem Kennst
du das Land from Goethe's semi-autobiographical novel, Wilhelm
Meister, as the final song in his Song-Album for the Young (op. 79,
no. 29). Even at the time he was aware that the Mignon setting pointed
beyond the otherwise simple songs in this volume: "At the end comes
Mignon, bending her baleful gaze upon a more complex emotional life."
Mignon, in Goethe's novel, is a wraith-like Italian orphan who
develops a hopeless romantic attachment to the hero and gradually
wastes away as the novel progresses. At her side is the Harper, a
strange, bard-like figure who, unbeknownst to both, is in fact her
father by an incestuous liaison. Both these characters are given lyric
moments of supreme beauty in which they sing of their tormented mental
states. The poems have fired the imaginations of German lied
composers, from Beethoven to Hugo Wolf, to produce some of their
greatest songs. Schumann was no exception.
On 12 June, the Dresden uprising having been bloodily suppressed,
Schumann and his family returned to the city. The Goethe project
loomed ever larger in his mind, and from 18 to 22 June he set the
remaining Mignon songs, at the same time adding the Harper's ballad
and Philine's lied Singet nicht in Trauertönen. The three remaining
Harper songs followed on 6 and 7 July. But before then, on 2 and 3
July, in a white heat of inspiration, he sketched Requiem for Mignon,
an exquisite small-scale oratorio for which there were no
compositional precedents.
The text for the Requiem is taken from Book 8, Chapter 8 of Goethe's
novel. Wilhelm, having long lost sight of the unhappy Mignon, chances
upon the funeral obloquies for the deceased girl in an abbey. The
depiction of the scene is almost theatrical, with stage directions,
notes on costuming, and the words, written in the dactyls of ancient
Greek tragedy, broken down into stichomythic dialogue. Four boys stand
at the sides of the girl's bier, surrounded by ostrich plumes, amidst
a group of adults who form the chorus. It is a children's song of
grief, to which the adults speak words of consolation:
CHOR: Wen bringt ihr uns zur stillen Gesellschaft?
KNABEN: Einen müden Gespielen bringen wir euch; laßt ihn unter euch
ruhen, bis das Jauchzen himmlischer Geschwister ihn dereinst wieder
aufweckt.
CHOR: Erstling der Jugend in unserm Kreise, sei willkommen! mit Trauer
willkommen! Dir folge kein Knabe, kein Mädchen nach! Nur das Alter
nahe sich willig und gelassen der stillen Halle, und in ernster
Gesellschaft ruhe das liebe, liebe Kind!
KNABEN: Ach! wie ungern brachten wir ihn her! Ach! und er soll hier
bleiben! laßt uns auch bleiben, laßt uns weinen, weinen an seinem
Sarge!
CHOR: Seht die mächtigen Flügel doch an! seht das leichte reine
Gewand! wie blinkt die goldene Binde vom Haupt! seht die schöne, die
würdige Ruh!
KNABEN: Ach! die Flügel heben sie nicht; im leichten Spiele flattert
das Gewand nicht mehr; als wir mit Rosen kränzten ihr Haupt, blickte
sie hold und freundlich nach uns.
CHOR: Schaut mit den Augen des Geistes hinan! in euch lebe die
bildende Kraft, die das Schönste, das Höchste hinauf, über die Sterne
das Leben trägt.
KNABEN: Aber ach! wir vermissen sie hier, in den Gärten wandelt sie
nicht, sammelt der Wiese Blumen nicht mehr. Laßt uns weinen, wir
lassen sie hier! laßt uns weinen und bei ihr bleiben!
CHOR: Kinder! kehret ins Leben zurück! Eure Tränen trockne die frische
Luft, die um das schlängelnde Wasser spielt. Entflieht der Nacht! Tag
und Lust und Dauer ist das Los der Lebendigen.
KNABEN: Auf, wir kehren ins Leben zurück. Gebe der Tag uns Arbeit und
Lust, bis der Abend uns Ruhe bringt und der nächtliche Schlaf uns
erquickt.
CHOR. Kinder! eilet ins Leben hinan! In der Schönheit reinem Gewande
begegn euch die Liebe mit himmlischen Blick und dem Kranz der
Unsterblichkeit!
CHORUS: Who are you bringing into our silent gathering?
BOYS: We bring you a weary playmate; let her rest amongst you until
such time as the joyous cries of her heavenly siblings should awaken
her.
CHORUS: First of youth to enter our midst, welcome! welcome with
sadness! Let no boy or girl follow upon you! Let old age alone
approach the silent hall, willingly and calmly, and let the dear, dear
child rest in our midst!
BOYS: Ah! how unhappily we have brought her here! Ah! and here she
should remain! Let us remain, too, let us cry, cry beside her coffin!
CHORUS: Look at the mighty wings! look at the robe, light and pure!
how the golden band shines from her brow! look at her lovely,
dignified peace!
BOYS: Ah! the wings do not lift her; her robe no longer flutters in
lighthearted play; when we wreathed her brow with roses she looked
upon us, sweet and friendly!
CHORUS: Look with the eyes of the spirit! let the formative strength
live within you that bears life, the most beautiful, the supreme,
upward and beyond the stars.
BOYS: But ah! we miss her here, no longer does she walk in the gardens
and gather the flowers of the meadow. Let us cry, we leave her here!
let us cry and remain with her!
CHORUS: Children! return to life! Let the fresh air that dallies about
the twirling water dry your tears. Flee the night! Day and joy and
duration is the lot of the living.
BOYS: Onwards, we return to life. Let the day give us labor and joy
until evening brings us peace and nocturnal sleep refreshes us.
CHORUS. Children! hurry on to life! Let Love, in the pure gown of
Beauty, greet you with celestial gaze and the wreath of immortality!
Once the children have left the scene, the Abbot launches into a
gloomy panegyric for the nearly anonymous girl, whose true origins,
and the full extent of her tragedy, are then disclosed in a
melodramatic coup de théâtre. But none of this entered Schumann's
oratorio, which ends with the four children "hurrying into life."
Schumann found Goethe's scene perfectly laid out for a musical
setting: the four boys were assigned to four female solo voices - two
sopranos and two altos - while the adults were personified by a mixed
chorus. As his only departure from the original, the lines from
"Children! return to life!" are intoned by a solo bass, who thereby
assumes the role the Abbé in Goethe's novel. The harp is prominently
featured in the orchestra, in reference partly to the Harper, partly
to Mignon's costume (she is clad as an angel, hence the "wings" in the
text), and partly to Mignon's assumption into the starry firmament.
The result is a delicate miniature oratorio of enchanting beauty that
gradually brightens from the C-minor funeral march of the opening to F-
major radiance at the final words: "Onwards, we return to life!"
Schumann was fully aware of the close relation between his Wilhelm
Meister songs and the Requiem. Mignon's final lied, So laßt mich
scheinen, already hints at the white winding sheet and the gnawing
sorrow that will lead to her early death, where she shall be "young
for all eternity," and thus forms a natural transition to the funeral
exequies of the Requiem. He therefore chose to publish the two works
in a single opus, with the nine lieder appearing as Part 1 (op. 98a)
and the Requiem as Part 2 (op. 98b). Whether they were likewise meant
to be performed as a cycle is a moot question: the lieder of op. 98,
perhaps because they call alternately for male and female voice, have
not established themselves among Schumann's song cycles. But there can
be no doubt that the continuity of mood, setting, and literary model
links all these disparate members into a unified whole.
The Requiem for Mignon received its first performance in Düsseldorf on
21 November 1850, during a subscription concert under Schumann's
direction. The following year, along with the Wilhelm Meister songs,
it was published in full score, parts, and piano reduction by
Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig. Brahms conducted the Vienna première of
the work during his first and only season as director the Vienna
Singakademie (1863-4), and in the 1880s there were two competing
translations circulating in the English speaking world: Requiem for
Mignon by Natalia Macfarren (1880) and Mignon's Requiem by the
redoubtable Reverend Troutbeck (1882). But since then Schumann's op.
98b has maintained only the most fragile of footholds in the
repertoire, partly because of its brevity, making it difficult to
program, and partly because it presupposes a close acquaintance with
Goethe's writings. As the German scholar Hermann Kretzschmar ruefully
noted as early as 1890, "This burial scene will be fully intelligible
only to those who keep the portrait of the wonderfully sweet and alien
being from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister lovingly in their hearts."
--Bradford Robinson, 2005
I copied all of this from this website:
-david gable