During his
prolific albeit short career, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
was known to carry a book in which he noted the German poems he
particularly like or that aroused his musical interest. After setting
music to them, he would then send these compositions as small presents
to his friends showing an apparent disregard for the resurgent German
song style that dominated Austria's contemporary musical environment.
His personal musical preferences notwithstanding, Mozart's legacy in the
song genre are 33 works under the title of Lieder, mostly resembling the
French and Italian aria styles he favored.
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Almost all of Mozart's chosen poems have
long since been forgotten as they belonged to minor, fashionable poets,
with the exception of Das Veilchen ("The Violet"),
set to the famous and homonymous poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832). In the opinion of Alfred Einstein, the music
historian and critic, "The Violet" represents the only
instance in which Mozart encountered a real poem." Despite much
debate as to whether "The Violet" is really a song or a
miniature operatic aria, there is no doubt that the song and the poem
were born out of personal experience. Appearing in "Erwin und
Elmire", Goethe's first group of ballads, "The
Violet" reflects "in the light of the springtime of poetry
the stormy and painful relation between two lovers...and where a young,
pert and exuberant girl teases a fine and serious youth, plays with his
affections, even as she loves him, "The Violet' is the soul of that
fine and serious youth," claim Einstein, adding that "in
Mozart, Goethe found a kindred spirit...for in this lyric scene, the
lyric element, the stream of musical feeling, receives equal emphasis
with the dramatic element as it starts amiably, with the carefree
approach of the shepherdess, her song flowing through the fields while
the violet's meditation is modest and heartfelt and the inevitable
catastrophe is sad...the song bursts open, not out of respect to the
poet and the song form, but out of Mozart's inner necessity...for it
was
rooted in the depths of his personality and experience. Mozart was
physically small and unprepossessing, and an incurable disease had long
since marked him. Undoubtedly, he had suffered deeply despite a keen
awareness of his greatness as an artist, because of his unimpressive
appearance." Mozart's connection with the violet continued
throughout his musical career. A favorite symbol of unrequited love in
the 18th century, the violet was also regarded as a presage of death or
as the flower most likely to be found growing by grave sites. The latter
is poignantly evidenced by the composer in his choice of Joachim
Heinrich Campe's (1746-1818) poem, "Abendempfindung an
Laura" ("Thoughts at Eventide") in which the sad,
evocative text comes through in harmonic progressions reaching a climax
in the passage "pflücke mir ein Veilchen auf mein Grab"
(pluck a violet for my grave.)
In 1791, the last year of his life, Mozart
returns once again to the violet in Sehnsucht nach dem Fruhlinge
("Longing for Spring"), set to a poem by Christian
Christoph Sturm (1740-1786). Using the musical theme from the Rondo
movement of his Piano Concerto in B-flat (K.595), he expresses a mood of
resignation to his fate in a song that speaks of children playing
joyfully in a field. Devoid of sharp emotions and in a dreamlike
fashions, they long for Spring and its beacon, the violet, while the
music conveys the resigned cheerfulness that comes from the knowledge
that this is the last Spring. Mr. Einstein states that "this fact
makes all he more uncanny the depths of sadness that are touched in the
shadings and modulations of the harmony." Two hundred years later, "Longing
for Spring" is still a favorite among German-speaking children.
The charming naivete and easy flow of its melody transcends Mozart's
melancholy and it allows his childlike, hopeful nature to come forward
time and again to conjure up the violets that will bring on the magic of
Spring:
