Essays

1. The Shakuntala Experience

The “relationship” between “music and poetry” in “Germany”, “explained to the Indians”, twice 5000 characters, “then and now”. By God, dear Goethe-Institut: what a task between these ten quotation marks Where does the own lie here, where is the foreign there, how is the relationship between them? Where would such a definition attempt be placed? In which place, what time? And what distinguishes the so-called "music" from the so-called "poetry"? In what kind of relationship is the additive "and" set? Perhaps one answer already lies in my way of asking these questions ¹, typically German-dialectical, bipolar. So let's start, dialectical-German, bipolar with us in others and others in us. "Off to the fields of the Ganges ..." it echoes in my thoughts: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?v=TMtsU4EJyRI

This song from Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Six songs, op. 34, is based on a text by Heinrich Heine from the "Book of Songs" (1822). It transports the listener to an India that you can only find in the German romantic song: a garden full of lotus flowers, violets, roses, gazelles, and palms.



On wings of song

I am now beginning to wonder, as to how it must tickle the Indian ears. It never is and most certainly never was so idyllic on the Ganges - not the way it is in this song. The Dutch writer, Multatuli had already, in 1860, amused himself by this non-place and the "concoction of Heine" in his novel, Max Havelaar: "First of all you have never seen the Ganges and therefore know not whether the life there is good or not. Shall I tell you how things really are? They’re all lies that you talk about because you are enslaved to the verse of meter and rhyme. Had the first line ended on lies or deceit, you would have asked Marie if she would go along to Broek and so on."

The Ganges is here just, first and foremost, a German rhyme-river: A rhyme to "Gesanges" (Song in German). And there we have it, the music of the language itself!
Ganges, Gesanges, Tata! And India is already that fabulous, much dreamt of place where music and poetry do not seem to be strangers for long. ² The melody carries the text - on her wings, which consist of nothing but broken arpeggios in a piano –this time really to the much sought after Ganges. Mendelssohn's musical version transforms India into a place of a phantasm: a much dreamt of unity of music and poetry, existing only in dreams; into a place where the poem can only get through the song. This place does not exist; we call it musical heterotopias, a romantic India phantasm, invented by two German artists of Jewish origin.

However, despite the Ganges-Gesanges (song)-Rhyme, Multatuli’s criticism of the poem does not suffice. For, Heine himself is master of a hidden ironic tone. ³ And Mendelssohn's musical version emphasizes just the unattainable, the absence, the construction of props, jamborees - and not really its presence. ⁴ Because, this song, itself is, already, a response to the "Shakuntala experience of the Germans". ⁵

In 1791, Georg Forster's translation of Kalidasa’s Abhijňānaśakuntalam led to an enthusiasm for India in German poetry. Indian Gods names, myths, and landscape elements became widespread exotic trends. One learnt Sanskrit, founded a Chair of Indian Studies; in 1816, the philologist, Franz Bopp, in whose lectures Heine participated, impressed upon the concept of Indo-European and the idea of an Indian origin of the German language. Goethe, Herder, the Schlegel brothers, and Novalis were devoted to the Shakuntala texts. The Indian maiden becomes the male fantasy, an allegory for a pristine, heavenly Indo-German protolanguage whose innocent being serves to authenticate the undivided unity of music and poetry. Brentano wrote to a "maiden", whom he gives a copy of "Sakuntala": "When in the lost paradise / You went from the Creator's hands. / You too as clear and pure as this / Sakontala receives the Spirit." Even the unfinished Shakuntala opera by Franz Schubert (1820) bears witness to it, despite its musical refinements and beauty:



Heine’s song turns against these metaphysical excesses of a German maiden as an Indian Shakuntala, this reception of the stranger by the self. It makes the India-phantasm of Germans visible by taking this imagery literally, exposing its construction and transmitting the Indo-German estrangement on to the estrangement between music and poetry. The lyrical subject occurs as a "seductive impostor", "who promises the flight in a beautiful world which he is very well acquainted with." ⁶ Is it not the German language, which Heine refers to here as a sweetheart that needs to be carried off to India, in order to love it? No, the poet does not believe in such a protolanguage that needs to regress to its Indo-European origins, so that it can be loved. ⁷ Love can even happen immediately, impromptu. No wonder, this poem is about a neat fraud. A dream only believed by the one who believes. And one who wants to be a blissful listener believes it more. Because the relationship between text and music "can be, even after it is realized, not dissolved in a way that it would cease to be fantastic or wonderful, depending on how one chooses to approach it." ⁸

2. Foreign Labour

"I am restless, thirsty for distant things" - so begins Alexander von Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony from the year 1922, a song cycle for soprano, baritone, and orchestra, based on poems by Rabindranath Tagore:



The fervent music paints the longing for a forever lost, translucent distance –also for the post-romantic harmonic- in the full symphonic form one last time.

When Tagore won the Nobel Prize in 1913, it was suddenly back: the German India-phantasm of romantics. Composers of the Second Viennese School dedicated themselves to Indian legends, they studied the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, combined yoga and modern dance, Marie-Luise Gothein translated Tagore's poems and described in her history of garden design, the beauty of Indian gardens. Whence this renewed yearning?

The answer to that was a "Dance Macabre of the principles". In the estate of the Viennese composer, Arnold Schoenberg, one finds the unfinished plan of a homonymous symphonic piece from 1914, which should also include texts by Tagore and Indian sound material. According to Schoenberg, the romantic notion of the historically progressive, advancing musical thinking belongs to the principles that did the death dance the entire twentieth century long. The teleological time of Judaism and Christianity is confronted with the circular time of Indian thought.

This idea had enormous consequences in contemporary music of the 20th century: Stockhausen's Mantra, Stefan Wolpe’s Tagore- musical settings, Morton Feldman’s meditations and works by John Cage influenced by Indian philosophy - all revolve around a repeal of linear temporality.

But what does this mean for the relationship between "Music" and "Poetry"? Did the Romantics believe that both were once, in the distant past, one entity and did they longingly celebrate this old entity as a utopia, then the German composer in Schoenberg-succession understood the music itself as the language, the language itself as music.

This insight has opened problems that would probably have been very strange to a poet like Tagore. Like many Indian poets, he wrote, set to music and sang his lyrics himself in the unbroken, cyclic continuation of a centuries-old tradition. And don’t the Indian poets do this to this day?

In Germany, however, historical scepticism and a consequent respectful separation of poetry and music belongs to a firm cultural tradition. Even Poetry Slam, Hip Hop, Rap, Singer song writing, and performance art adaptations or occasional collaborations change nothing in this respect. We charter concepts which have a long tradition in other countries and through them attempt to get rid of the depths of our own history.

Of course, there are poets and composers who convincingly continue to work together on dialectical romantic phantasm of song that carries the text to the Ganges. Here are two good examples:

Händl Klaus und Georg Friedrich Haas (Bloodhouse, 2010 )



Michael Wertmüller und Dea Loher ("Do not cry, sing, 2015," )

Such reanimation still seems to aim on the whole at a romantic unity of fantasy out of music and text - they are distant, often in discourses broken echoes of the romantic song, of the operas of Wagner and the community work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss. Besides, there is the more sceptical attempt to continue to work at a critical historical and material concept of music and text, however, under the new conditions of the algorithm and its economy. In this tradition, I see the poet, Mara Genschel, Hannes Bajohr and composer, Martin Schüttler and Johannes Kreidler. The latter had entirely outsourced the musical work to India In his play "Foreign Labour" in 2009 and delivered only "the poem", namely a performative approach poem:

"The composer of new music, Johannes Kreidler has named his Art-campaign as Foreign labour and has hired a composer from China and an audio programmer from India to facilitate cheap production of characteristic examples of his own music."



Many of his works are based on such concept poems. Purely phenomenological, as a musical event, without the leading concept-poetry, the pieces would be pointless. Yes, one may wonder how far its execution is necessary. As a linguistic event, the concept already implements, indeed, what it says. For political action but is only the executed composition: by reproducing, in real terms, in the aesthetic space the industrial processes of outsourcing to low-wage countries, and thus makes himself aware of the political dimension of the aesthetical production mechanisms. Kreidler pays the Indian and Chinese "foreign workers" for their work, which he then sells as his own.

With such an action, the composer parodies both a new German stereotype of India, which has taken the place of the Indo-European language-origin-phantasm for some years. The land of Shakuntala has become the land of computer scientists, audio programmers, and plagiarists for the Germans. Heine’s rhyming of Gesanges (song) to Ganges was replaced in a hideous German campaign slogan from 2000 through the crude rhyme "Children instead of Indians". The CDU politician, Jürgen Rüttgers wanted to ask the Germans to reproduce themselves instead of being reproduced by Indian computer scientists. In such a manner, he believed the problem of the scarcity of German computer specialists could be eliminated. Fortunately, the Germans have not acted on his prompt up till now. But unfortunately – was the rhyme to be blamed? - only a few Indians came to Germany. And, even a good edition of Kalidasa's Shakuntala can currently only be procured through an antiquarian. It's time to go back to the Indo-German wing of song. Perhaps, with the project, "Poets translating Poets"?

References

1. Questions, one is only comfortable asking if one has received a dialectical blow on the head by Father Hegel and believes in the continued, by its very nature progressive, history of art. And - since about the year 1800 - most poets and thinkers have been struck with it here in Germany. Although, currently, they might just be deeply unsettled by the real presence and godlike timelessness of the Internet, and are beginning to do away with it...
2. The poet Friedrich Schiller impressed a lasting idea in his essay on naive and sentimental Poetry that the original, enshrined in ancient Greek, unity of poetry and music was lost for the subject of modernity.
3. Referred to here is the so-called "romantic irony".
4. Misinterpreting the matter with the presence shall create a grotesque Kitsch-misunderstanding as this
5. Walter Leifer: The Shakuntala experience of the Germans. In: Walther Leifer, India and the Germans, 500-year encounter and partnership, Tübingen, 1969, S.97-114
6. Ignace Feuerlicht: Heine’s "On Wings of Song", in: Joseph A. Kruse: Heine Yearbook 1982 Volume 21, Hamburg 1982, p 33
7. A late echo of this is Vico Torriani’s amusing hit in Germany: "Calcutta is on the Ganges"
8. Hans-Jost Frey, Four Alterations on the Rhythm. Basel 2000, S.2003