I wish I could have thought to post this back when cherry trees were blooming. Still, perhaps somewhere a lone cherry tree still blooms like the one at the end of my mind.
Mack Harrell said once in my presence that great poetry doesn’t make for good songs. It seems a truism. Great poetry is complete in itself. A musical setting could add nothing to a great poem.
But I think it may be a rule that admits of exceptions. I certainly make some. I am still haunted by Hugo Wolf’s setting of Goethe’s little meditation on Anakreons Grab, so haunted indeed that I once sought to remedy what I thought to be the fault of the little poem’s common English translations which seemed to me to falsify its utter simplicity. Here’s my translation.
The Happy Poet
The damask rose blooms here
laurel and scuppernong knot
cricket climbs as ringdove croons
wherever gods themselves have planted
Anacreon rests.
The happy poet laughed his way
through springtime, summer and autumn before
winter finally laid him under the hill.
And here it is in a 1952 performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore.
Wolf understood this poem, I like to think, and took his inspiration from its last couplet, which is as follows (Goethe’s Hügel likely refers to a little grave mound).
Frühling, Sommer und Herbst genoss der glückliche Dichter;
Vor dem Winter hat ihn endlich der Hügel geschützt.
And just now in the kitchen as I was loading the dishwasher and congratulating myself on my last in a current round of virtual doctor visits, I began to sing to myself John Duke’s wonderful setting of Houseman’s “Loveliest of Trees.” And I realized that I can now never recall that poem without John Duke’s music. Here it is in a performance by American Tenor, James Taylor. The pianist is Donald Sulzen.
I love the way the primary vocal melody returns at the end of the song (cf. Duke’s treatment of “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now . . .” with his treatment of “About the woodland I will go . . . .” The speaker has seen his own end and found it a trifling matter, whether his present springtime adventure is a one-off or one of many. And I am thinking that such poetry, that is poetry that lends itself to song, may be characterized by a voice without apparent self awareness or consciousness of a rift between itself and its milieu. Schiller called such poetry naive and distinguished it from sentimental poetry which he averred must perforce create that nature it strives to limn across the boundary of the poet’s self awareness.
You could read Schiller’s once famous Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung. Better yet, you could read Isaiah Berlin’s 1979 essay entitled “The ‘Naiveté’ of Verdi,” whom Berlin calls “the last of the great naive masters of Western music,” though he recognizes that Verdi is “not without ideology.” Interestingly Berlin dedicated this essay to W. H. Auden, whose “Hymn to St. Cecilia” contains a few lines that attempt a description of the naive:
I cannot grow;
I have no shadow
To run away from,
I only play . . .
but which is finally a sentimental poem, wearing “its tribulation like a rose.” Or perhaps Auden had Shiller’s distinction in mind and perhaps that is a part of what the “Hymn to St. Cecilia” is about. I first encountered Auden’s poem in Benjamin Britten’s famous setting, and that setting comes to mind when I think of the Hymn or reread it, but music does not come essentially to mind as it does with John Duke’s “Loveliest of Trees.”
So, whether there were cherries blooming anywhere around the world today, I had my woodland ride with Houseman and Goethe, with Wolf and Duke and Anacreon, whom Goethe calls
—The Happy Poet.