Die Schöne Magelone - Program Notes

Die schöne Magelone Brahms’s neglected masterpiece probably started life as an old Provençal poem. The earliest extant version seems to be a fourteenth century French novel of chivalry, entitled La Belle Maguelonne, princesse de Naples, et le comte Pierre de Provence, and by the end of the fifteenth century it had been printed in five French editions and translated into numerous other languages. Lope de Vega fashioned from it his drama The Three Diamonds, and in Germany it became extremely popular as a prose narrative. Ludwig Tieck’s version of the story was published in 1796, and a second, slightly altered edition followed in 1812. He shortened the narrative, gave greater psychological depth to the characterization and couched the tale in a florid language that brimmed with poetic nature description. And he inserted into each of the eighteen chapters a verse romance, from which Brahms chose fifteen poems when he started to compose Die schöne Magelone in 1861.

That was not his first acquaintance with the legend. He had originally come across it at the age of fourteen during the summer holidays in Winsen on the Lüneberg heath at the house of Adolf Giesemann, a paper-mill owner, who turned out to be one of Brahms’s most understanding benefactors. (The composer was later to reward this kindness by clandestinely financing the singing lessons of Giesemann’s grand-daughter in the form of a scholarship at the Berlin Academy of Music.) The young Brahms read the Magelone story enthusiastically with Giesemann’s thirteen year-old daughter Lieschen, probably in G. O. Marbach’s prose narrative of 1828. They spent much time together; Brahms gave her piano lessons in part return for hospitality, and they undertook many expeditions into the surrounding countryside.

The visit was repeated the following year, after which their paths did not cross again till 1861, when Lieschen was already married.

The halcyon days, however, had not been forgotten, nor had their mutual reading of the Magelone narrative. In 1861, probably in Clara Schumann’s Düsseldorf home, Brahms read Tieck’s Die schöne Magelone and was clearly delighted, since he entered his favourite passages into the ‘Schatzkästlein’ (treasure-box), where he recorded everything he read that particularly took his fancy. It was also in 1861 that Brahms’s friendship with the singer Julius Stockhausen blossomed; together in Hamburg they gave several recitals, including Die schöne Müllerin, Dichterliebe and An die ferne Geliebte. Brahms’s ecstatic admiration is clear from the letter he wrote Clara Schumann, urging her to visit Hamburg and hear Stockhausen: ‘Stockhausen singt wunderschön, und ich bitte Dich, zu bedenken, daß er Sonnabend die Müllerlieder sämtlich und Dienstag die Dichterliebe vollständig und beides sehr schön singen wird.’ (‘Stockhausen sings wonderfully and I urge you to consider that he will be singing all the Müllerlieder on Saturday and the whole of Dichterliebe on Tuesday, and that he will sing both very beautifully.’) Their collaboration recalls the Vogl/Schubert partnership; and he was probably the first Lieder singer to sing Die schöne Müllerin and other cycles in their entirety. Brahms’s use of ‘sämtlich’ and ‘vollständig’ in his letter to Clara suggests that this was not the norm.

It was during this period of collaboration that Brahms resolved to compose the Magelone cycle. He penned the first four songs in July 1861; numbers five and six followed in May 1862, after Stockhausen had performed the first song from manuscript in April of that year at a Philharmonic Concert in Hamburg. The first six songs were published by J. RieterBiedermann, after Breitkopf & Härtel had rejected them on the grounds that the piano accompaniments were too demanding. Brahms’s brilliant reply was to state that the accompaniment to Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’ and Schumann’s ‘Frühlingsnacht’ had not prevented them from becoming extremely popular. In 1869 Rieter published the whole cycle, which was dedicated to Stockhausen.

Infuriatingly, we have no recordings of the great singer, for whom Brahms wrote many of his songs. Brahms’s treatment of the vocal line in Die schöne Magelone suggests that Stockhausen did not possess a large voice. It seems that he impressed above all by his powers of interpretation, his sensitivity to the text and by an immaculate technique. Eduard Hanslick, reviewing a Vienna recital by the singer in 1854, wrote: ‘Es ist schwer zu entscheiden, in welchem Liede der weiche, innige Vortrag des Konzertgebers am gewinnendsten war; den meisten Eindruck schien ‘Der Müller und der Bach’, dann das zarte ‘Ich frage keine Blume’ zu machen. Im Fach der Ballade gab Herr Stockhausen die wunderlich-grauenhafte Tragik des Schubertschen Zwerg mit maßvoller Empfindung, wie sie dieses hinreißend schöne Musikstück wohl verträgt.’ (‘It is difficult to decide in which the song the tender, ardent voice excelled most. Most impressive of all seemed to be ‘Der Müller und der Bach’, and then the tender ‘Ich frage keine Blume’. As for ballads, Herr Stockhausen performed the strange and eerie tragedy of Schubert’s Dwarf with a discretion that this thrillingly beautiful music is well able to bear.’)

In 1874 Brahms transposed the songs for a new edition, for which a connecting narrative by Bernhard Schlotke was planned. The proposal came to nothing, and Brahms himself was not always certain whether a synopsis of the story should be included. A narrative link, however, is essential to a full understanding of the work. It is not a cycle in the manner of Die schöne Müllerin or Winterreise; nor does it resemble the more episodic Dichterliebe or Frauenliebe und -leben. The story is not told exclusively from the viewpoint of the protagonist; ‘Wie schnell verschwindet’, for example, is for Magelone, and ‘Geliebter, wo zaudert’ for Sulima, the daughter of the Sultan who holds Peter captive. The Romances (Brahms’s term not Tieck’s) are lyrical crystallizations of a complex emotional web and require a connecting narrative to explain the details of the drama. One possibility is to print a detailed synopsis in the programme. Alternatively, as in the first of Fischer-Dieskau’s four recordings (1957 with Jörg Demus) the singer can recite a substantial part of Tieck’s Novelle between the songs. But perhaps the best way is to have a great actor, as in tonight’s performance, fill in the gaps between the songs – for only with the help of such a narrative can the listener fully appreciate the songs for what they are: musical illustrations of a colourful, fantastical adventure, a reflection of a Romantic world suffused with the poetry of Minnesang, the splendour of past chivalry and the miraculous simplicity of fairy-tale.

Richard Stokes © 2019