March 28, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY

Page 7

MUSIC: Vivian Freyre Zoakos

Understanding Poetry Through Music

Part II (This concludes Kathy Burdman's report on a class given by Ortrun Hoefinghoff on Beethoven's songs during Lyndon LaRouche's New Hampshire presidential primary campaign. She contrasted the poetry of the great Friedrich Schiller to the much more superficial Goethe, whose poems Beethoven nonetheless raised to the level of creative reason in some 15 settings. One of these, the Mailied or "May Song," was Beethoven's first use of the theme that eventually was perfected in his setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy in the Ninth Symphony.) The meter of Goethe's youthful "May Song,'' Ortrun Hoefinghoff explained, has a lawful accent on the second syllable with a secondary stress on the seventh of each line. Thus it reads: "Wie herrlich leuchtet mir die Natur!, /Wie glnzt die Sonne! Wie lacht die Flur!" (Or, "How splendid bright around me is Nature! How the sun shines! How the fields laugh!") The first verse continues, exalting the "joy and rapture"' expressed by nature, ending (in rough translation). "Oh Earth! oh sun! oh gladness! Oh delight!") The reader will have to listen to the song on one of the popular Beethoven lieder recordings to appreciate it fully, but Beethoven intervenes into the "law" of Goethe's gay if innocuous first verse to shift the meter of the poem itself through his use of note lengths and pitches. What comes out is this: "Wie herrlich leuchtet mir die Natur. /Wie glnzt die Sonne, wie lacht die Flur!" Thus, in the first line, the full word herrlich (splendid) is coherently accented, not just the line's second syllable herr-; and instead of continuing on fixedly to accent the seventh syllable, the entire meter is shifted asymmetrically so as to accent Natur (nature), which falls on a strikingly syncopated offbeatand is, after all, the subject! Everything has been interrupted: the fixed metrical jig is up. In Goethe's original, words of little or no conceptual significance, such as "the," are stressed because they fall on the second or seventh syllable. Beethoven shifts the emphasis in each line to the subjectsun, field, blossoms, twig.

In the second part of the verse, this is done with runs up to strikingly higher notes, especially for Wonne (rapture) and Sonne (sun). Another Voice Beethoven's injection of this higher content into Goethe does not stop with the vocal line, but extends emphatically to the piano accompaniment, which is not what you'd expect from a ditty about flowers in spring. While the melody is a rapid "allegretto," beneath it the piano plays a series of sustained, stately notes at almost exactly half the speed of the voice. Played alone, it is a J.S. Bach-like church chorale. "There is a higher moral principle at work in creativity, even your own, Goethe, than flowers and childish joy," Beethoven hints. And throughout the song, he continues to redefine lawfulness itself. First, he has synthesized Goethe's poem of nine short stanzas into three longer verses which reflect the three levels of human consciousness. The first described what LaRouche has called "n"the order of the physical universe and the mind-set of the human being who thinks merely on the level of a peasant bound by nature's dictates. In the second verse, he introduces the consciousness of love of another human being: it starts (omitting the German): "Oh love, oh love, so goldenly beautiful /Like morning clouds on those far heights." This is a rough equivalent to LaRouche's "n + 1," the biological universe, or, the mind-set of a person at the level of understanding who realizes that society of human beings differentiates man from beasts, yet tends to see other people as objects to possess like flowers or trees: "Oh maiden, oh maiden, how I love thee! /How your eyes shine! How you love me!" it ends. Accordingly, Beethoven sets this verse with the same melody and piano accompaniment as the first. Goethe unfortunately never went much beyond this stage and his last lines continue about larks and how much joy the beloved brings. This is where Beethoven's genius really takes over. In the last two lines, "Sei ewig glcklich, wie du mien liebst!" (Be happy forever, as in thy love for me), the ghost of an idea LaRouche calls "n + 2" lurks in Goethe's subconscious the level of Reason, in which one self-conscious mind intervenes to change, to create new ideas in another. "Be thou happy forever"I am considering you, your future joy now, perhaps with or without my own

selfish joy"as in thy love for me"which joy has been created inside you by my love, and your love returning it. At exactly this point Beethoven totally shifts the melody line, creating a further development of the original theme by repeating it three times as a "theme with variations," and simultaneously repeating the last line of the poem three times. Elsewhere he has treated the text as almost unimportant. Now, the piano line itself bursts into full-flowered rising and falling accompaniment. Even the tonal development of the song is completed right at this juncture. We have omitted discussion of the keys through which the "May Song" moves, really the most important aspect of it, because of the difficulty of describing this in print, but one thing can be said. The third repetition of "Sei ewig glcklich, wie du mich liebst" ends by the repetition of the seventh and eighth tones of the scale (ti-do, ti-do, ti-do) on the words "Sei ewig," the first time in the entire song that the keyA-flathas been strictly defined. It is clinched by the emphasis on the "leading tone," which in any scales begs to be followed and completed by the "do." Thus, the most joyous moment of fulfillment comes in the song on the words "Sei ewig." The immortality of human love, says Beethoven, can bring even Goethe to Schiller's level of Reason.