An die Musik

In preparing the next Evensong bulletin, I happened upon this resource, and have added it to my sidebar listing of favorite sites on the Net:

http://www.marlboromusic.org/downloads/Naegele_Book_2008.pdf
German Vocal Texts in Translation: An Anthology
Philipp O. Naegele (translations)

Dr. Naegele prepared these translations for printed programs of the Marlboro Music Festival over a period of nearly fifty years, 1953-2004. There are more than 400 pages of texts, a reference for listening to lieder or choral music, or simply for reading some of the finest poetry in the German language.

Dr. Naegele escaped Nazi Germany as an eleven-year-old child in 1939, becoming in the U.S. a noted violinist and violist in the world of chamber music. In his preface, he writes:

One critical concern was to respect the literary sensibilities of readers with little or no acquaintance with German, while retaining an essentially line-by-line procedure. At the same time there was a keen awareness of the sensibilities of all those bilingual artists and listeners, at Marlboro and beyond, for whom many of these classics of German poetry constitute a treasured spiritual link to a ‘Heimat’ from which they may have been evicted or painfully estranged by forces that threatened to compromise the language itself. Those spiritual links vault back to a pre-industrial, pre-ideological, even pre-Freudian world of uncontaminated and candid German speech. During the first fifty years of the Marlboro Festival such a constituency was much in evidence. Speaking as one of their number, this translator valued the labor on these tropes on love and death, hope and despair, the stars and the watery deep. It was a poignant and integrative adventure to align on the page and in the mind an earlier and more recent ‘Heimat’ of language, assuaging thereby some of the never quite healing wounds of uprootedness and reaffirming modes of perception, of yearning, and of desire.

It is not only the texts that hearken back to that better time: it is the music: from the chorales of Martin Luther through Schütz, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bruckner. Naegele refers the reader to a song on p. 160 that says it better than he (or I) ever could:

An die Musik
Franz Schubert, D. 547 (1817)
Text: Franz von Schober (1798-1882)

Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,
Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,
Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden,
Hast mich in eine beßre Welt entrückt!

Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf entflossen,
Ein süßer, heiliger Akkord von dir
Den Himmel beßrer Zeiten mir erschlossen,
Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafür!

Thou gracious art, in many a gray hour,
When life's wild swirl held me ensnared,
Hast thou enflamed my heart to ardent love,
Hast borne me off to a better world!

Oft has a sigh, outflowing from thine harp,
One dulcet, sacred consonance from thee,
Unlocked for me the heav'n of better times,
Thou gracious art, I give thee thanks for this!

(Copyright © Philipp Naegele, Marlboro School of Music, Inc.)