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MAIBLUMEN BLÜHTEN ÜBERALL
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| It was probably at this time, encouraged by the success of «Verklarte Nacht», that Zemlinsky himself began work on two programmatic pieces for string sextet. Of the first, a slow movement in Eb minor entitled «Ein Stuck aus dem Leben eines Menschen» ('A piece of a person's life') and subtitled 'Schicksal' (fate), only fragments survive; of the other, a setting of Dehmel's «Die Magd» with sextet accompaniment, a score of 210 bars has been preserved. [The first two sections, which constitute a thematically integrated unit, were published in I997 as «Maiblumen blühten überall» ('Maybuds blossomed all around']. |
| Like Früblingsbegräbnis», the opening verses of «Die Magd» tell of a young man struck down by the summer sun. But where Heyse's poem inhabits a world of playful makebelieve, Dehmel presents a gruesome human tragedy. On a clear spring night a farm labourer and his lass embrace beneath the alder tree; in the heat of the summer cornfields the boy dies of exhaustion; as autumn approaches, the girl - now pregnant - is ordered to leave the farm; under Christmas lights, shining from inhospitable houses, she kills her new-born child and sinks delirious into the snow. Why Zemlinsky abandoned the project is not clear. In the surviving fragment of verse 3, inspiration slackens: perhaps he realized the impossibility of finding music for the suicide of the outcast mother more tragically serene than that for the death of the young man. But perhaps he instinctively sensed that the story, for him, was over. Had he himself not been struck down by Alma, his summer sun? |
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[pp.122-123, senza note. © Antony Beaumont]
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TORNA ALL'INDICE
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