Dear Friends,
In a Foreign Land is the first song in Schumann’s Liederkreis on texts of Eichendorff.
I’m so happy to offer you my new recording:
In a Foreign Land
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (1788 — 1857)
Behind the lightning, heavy clouds
Come from the homeland,
But Father and Mother long are dead,
No one knows me there.
How soon, how soon comes that quiet time
When I too rest, above me
The rustling of the lonely woods,
And no one knows me here.
(translation by IW)
In der Fremde
Aus der Heimat hinter den Blitzen rot
Da kommen die Wolken her,
Aber Vater und Mutter sind lange tot,
Es kennt mich dort keiner mehr.
Wie bald, wie bald kommt die stille Zeit,
Da ruhe ich auch, und über mir
Rauschet die schöne Waldeinsamkeit
Und keiner mehr kennt mich auch hier.
That place where I belong sends a cloud upon my life… it is an old story.
As A. E. Housman writes,
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
In the eighth song of the cycle, the poet speaks of “the castle which stands in the valley, which is so far from here”, and of the beloved, “so long dead”. The nightingales sing “as though they wished to say something of the beautiful days of old”. In the ninth, their “song of longing” issues “from the crypt of its prison.”
What has been lost is still speaking: in the sixth, branches rustle and tremble “as though, around the half-sunken walls, the old gods were making their circuit”.
In the “secret glory of twilight”, “the distances drunkenly discourse, as though of a coming great good fortune”, and in the last, moon, stars, migratory birds, the rustling of the meadows, and, again, the nightingales unite in proclaiming, “She is yours!”
But for now, in this first song, the only way to rejoin those the poet loves seems to be death.
The mood is as in Novalis (Hymns to the Night, 6):
O lonely stands, and deeply saddened,
He who with warm piety loves the past.
Thank you so much.
With every good wish,
Ishmael
The remainder of the Liederkreis is on its way!
I offer lessons online in music theory; for a taste of the insights to which it may lead, please see my website:
Castle Lubowitz, where Eichendorff was born; lost to creditors at his mother’s death
Reminds me of Homeland by Mikhail Lermontov, a prominent 19th century Russian romantic poet.
I love my land, but with a queer passion,
My mind isn't able to absorb it, yet!
Nor glory, purchased by the bloody actions,
Nor peace, in proud confidence inlaid,
Nor sacred sagas of the days of yore
Will stir my pleasant fancies any more.
But I do love — and I don't know why —
Her endless plains' indifference and silence,
Her endless forests' ever swaying wildness,
Her rivers' floods which, like the sea, are wide.
I love to gallop in a cart on roads,
And peering slowly through darkness of the nights,
And idly dreaming of the night abodes,
To meet the solemn hamlets' twinkling lights.
I love the smell of the burnt-out stubble,
The wagons, sleeping in the steppe,
And gleaming of the birches' marble,
Midst cornfields on the hillocks' steps.
And with a joy, that's little known,
I see a full and stout barn,
A cottage covered with straw,
And shutters that are fairly done.
And in the holly dewy evening,
I'm glad to watch until midnight,
The dances, filled with stamps and whistling,
To murmur of the peasants, tight.