Tracklist: German Folksongs

1. Ännchen von Tharau
   
2. Guter Mond
3. Auf, auf zum fröhlichen Jagen
   
4. Aber Heidschi Bumbeidschi
   
5. Kein Feuer, keine Kohle
   
6. Weißt du, wieviel Sternlein stehen
   
7. Es klappert die Mühle
   
8. Es waren zwei Königskinder
   
9. Es dunkelt schon in der Heide
   
10. Steigerlied
11. Wer hat die schönsten Schäfchen
    
12. Die Gedanken sind frei
    
13. Wenn alle Brünnlein fließen
    
14. Zwischen Berg und tiefem Tal
    
15. Bald gras ich am Neckar
    
16. Im Krug zum grünen Kranze
    
17. Ade nun zur guten Nacht
18. Es, es, es, und es
19. Freiheit, die ich meine
20. Geh aus, mein Herz
    
21. Der Mai ist gekommen
    
22. Muss i denn, muss i denn zum Städtele hinaus
    
23. Das Lieben bringt große Freud
    
24. Im Märzen der Bauer
    
25. An der Saale hellem Strande
    
26. In einem kühlen Grunde
    
27. Der Mond ist aufgegangen
    
28. Schlafe, mein Prinzchen
    
29. Guter Mond (Fassung für Klavier zu vier Händen)
    
30. Kein schöner Land

MARTIN STADTFELD, piano
Bela Plicht (age 12), piano (track 29)

Martin Stadtfeld on his arrangements

I wrote these arrangements of German folksongs during the second lockdown. The first lockdown had something darkly romantic about it, with nature rambles and a tendency to think more deeply about life, whereas the second was depressing by comparison. I think that many people shared this experience.

For me, the folksong was something to cling on to. These melodies stirred feelings inside me, just as I believe that their inspired simplicity touches every soul. Even those songs that I did not previously know seemed familiar. The emotions that are described in folksongs are as old as the hills but also eternally new.

I grew up with lullabies such as "Guter Mond", which I have recorded here in a version for piano four hands with a talented pianist of the younger generation. And I first got to know the "Steigerlied" after I had chosen to make my home in the Ruhr Valley. Two songs that I did not know before starting work on this project are "Im Krug zum grünen Kranze" and "An der Saale hellem Strande" but they are now among my favourites.

Which do I like the best? "Es waren zwei Königskinder" and "Ade nun zur guten Nacht "is a heart-rending song of farewell.

I prepared these arrangements within the space of a week, during which I felt intoxicatingly happy. Some of them use the old passacaglia form, whereas in a number of them, including Freiheit, die ich meine, I express my own personal feelings on the song’s theme in preludes and postludes of my own composition. There are also a

few variations, albeit in reverse: first the altered, “alienated” form, then the theme at the end. Listeners can puzzle this out for themselves.

Folksongs seem to reflect a kind of archetypal sound within the human soul. Even the ones that have been “composed” tend to be a way of summarizing, focusing and shaping the hum of the world. In some of these songs, there is no mistaking how close they come to the music of the great composers. In two of them I have introduced melodies by Mozart and Beethoven, for example. All of these songs gave me courage at a time

when human emotions often had to be suppressed. These songs will survive because they examine the themes of love, loneliness, the longing for freedom, harmony with the seasons and the joy of shared emotions.

KALEIDOSCOPE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE – 

COMING CLOSER TO THE GERMAN FOLKSONG

Folksongs are “truly that which the true artist must heed – much as the mariner heeds the polestar – when he starts to suspect that his art may be leading him astray, for it is here that he will find all that profits him the most”.1 This nugget of advice was offered to aspiring young artists in 1782 by the composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt, who is still remembered today for the melodies that he wrote for the songs Bunt sind schon die Wälder and Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär. Reichardt’s essay set out to highlight the special importance of the folksong as a point of orientation for the next generation of composers. “You will often find more true understanding of art in a genuine folk­song that has survived for centuries than in many a grand opera that is worshipped by several thousand, but only for a month. […] The melodies of songs that everyone can sing as long as they have ears and a larynx must be able to exist on their own without any accompaniment and must capture the character of the song with the simplest sequence of notes, with the most specific motion and in the closest accord with the individual sections so that once we know the tune we can no longer imagine it without the words or the words without the tune since the melody means everything to the words and nothing on its own. Such a melody will always be truly monodic in character and require no accompanying harmonies or even permit such harmonies. This is what all songs were like at a time when our German folk still led lives enriched by song, when accompanying harmonies had not yet been introduced and for a long time afterwards were still restricted to the church as their place of origin.”2 

At the time that Reichardt’s article first appeared in print, research into German folk­songs was still in its infancy. It was only a few years earlier that Johann Gottfried Herder had published the two collections of folksongs that were later to become famous and in which he had first attempted to probe more deeply into the essence of the German folksong. It was clear to Herder that he was blazing a trail here: “For Germany the river of history was troubled and murky. Here and there it was possible to salvage a single voice of the people, a song, a proverb or a rhyme; but mostly they were covered in mud, and the waves immediately snatched them away again and returned them to the river’s depths.”3 Herder realized that these songs contained “the archive of the folk, the repos­itory of their knowledge and of their religion, their theogony and the cosmogonies of the deeds of their fathers and the events that make up their history, the reflection of their heart and the picture of their domestic lives in all their joy and sorrow, whether by the bridal bed or by the grave.”4 Herder was already aware of the importance of the melody that supports the words, an importance of fundamental significance for the folksong, allowing him to postulate that “The essence of the song is singing not paint­ing; its perfection lies in the melodic course taken by the passion or emotion, a course that could be described using the old but apt expression Weise [melody]. If this melody is missing from a song, it is toneless, it contains no poetic modulation, no sustained course or direction; it may have images aplenty, it may be perfectly assembled from the most exquisite colours, but it is no longer a song. […] If, on the other hand, the song has a melody to it, a lyrical melody both pleasing to the ear and well-sustained, then even if the content itself is of no significance, the song will survive and will be sung. […] A song must be heard and not seen; it must be heard with the ear of the soul, which does not count or measure or weigh up individual syllables alone but listens to the way in which they continue to echo and resonate within the listener’s inner ear.”5

One of Herder’s immediate successors was Anselm Karl Elwert, whose Ungedruckte Reste alten Gesangs nebst Stücken neurer Dichtkunst (Unpublished Fragments of Ancient Songs together with Examples of More Recent Verse) appeared in 1784. Its author was manifestly fascinated by the archetypal power of the folksongs that have survived and surmised that “there must be something in these simple songs that gives them their strength to resist time’s depredations, a phenomenon that affects even our most beautiful operatic arias all too soon. Unless we ourselves are in the situation in which these ancient poets sang their songs, we shall never be able to equal them. We can imitate them only if we can sing what is in our souls, nothing more nor less.”6

Elwert’s acknowledgement of the importance of the musical aspect of these folksongs was shared by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, whose three-volume anthology, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn), is arguably the most famous collection of early German folksongs. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to read the essay “On Folksongs” that appears at the end of the first volume of 1806 and find its author hailing the aforementioned Johann Friedrich Reichardt, “who did more for the old German folksong than any living musician by bringing it to the attention of the reading classes and ensuring that its merits are adequately assessed, even putting it on the stage”.7 The author of this afterword, Achim von Arnim, regarded himself and his comrades-in-arms as pioneers who were keen to make their fellow Germans aware of their long-neglected cultural heritage and to create the basis for a shared cultural identity at a time when the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was being dissolved. Arnim explained that he and his fellow researchers in the field of the German folksong were seeking “something higher, the Golden Fleece that belongs to each and everyone and that constitutes the wealth of our entire folk in the form of our inner living art, the weft and warp of a lengthy history and of powerful forces, the faith and knowledge of the folk, all that accompanies them through joy and death, songs, legends, lore, sayings, stories, prophecies and melodies – we want to restore to everyone all that has retained its diamantine strength throughout the passing centuries, not dulled but only rendered shinier in its interplay of colours, seamlessly joined with the universal monument of the greatest of more recent nations, the Germans, the tombstone of prehistory, the joyful present and a token of the future that exists over the course of our lives: we want at least to lay the foundations of something that points beyond our own abilities, firmly convinced as we are that those people will not fail who continue this process and bring it to its ultimate completion, placing the coping-stone on every undertaking. All that lives and unfolds here and everything to which life cleaves is not of today nor of yesterday, it was and is and will be. It exists and so it can never be lost, but it can slip from our grasp for lengthy periods, often just when we need it the most and think about it and brood upon it the most.”8

Although the earliest editors of German folksongs repeatedly stressed the importance of the melodies, concrete musical examples are notably absent from almost all their publications, most of which focus on the poems.

One exception was the Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder mit einem Anhange Flammländischer und Französischer, nebst Melodien (Collection of German Folksongs with an Appendix of Flemish and French Folksongs, together with their Melodies) that Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching and Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen published in Berlin in 1807. Their volume contains a lengthy appendix running to no fewer than eighty pages and including melodies that are still familiar to us today. Among them are Hänschen klein, with its original title, “Fahret hin”, Auf, auf zum fröhlichen Jagen and Kein Feuer, keine Kohle kann brennen so heiß. With their choice of songs, the two editors were especially eager to demonstrate that folksongs contain a veritable panopticon of human existence: “And so we have reached the point where by ‘folksong’ we should understand not just a song by and for the common folk but every poetic utterance that issues from a certain generalized national spirit and returns to that spirit. In songs such as these the common folk naturally has a much greater voice than the gentry. In other words, everything that is expressed directly and in an unstudied way, everything that might be likened to the breath of life, the expression of manifold characters, of social states and of conditions, situations and age, especially the universal emotions of friendship, love and life in all its inner connections, with all its joys and sorrows, its contradictions and its mysteries; and not excluding the rankest wantonness, the merriest and boldest ribaldry, the most baroque and maddest wit and mockery and, finally, a delightful degree of nonsense with the most entertaining follies in its wake, all of which add spice to our lives. And just as everything in our lives is chaotically confused and forever changing, so the same is true of this colourful posy of songs, each of them often containing the most contradictory elements nestling cheek by jowl. […] In short, our folksongs encompass everything that comes from our hearts in song, with the result that it also goes straight to the heart in turn, appealing to us in the most general terms and resonating there,in particular offering delightful, almost wistful entertainment to our present artificial age, which has repeatedly threatened to destroy these songs. This undying root within the human heart has ensured that so many others like it have been preserved and continue to be propagated in every conceivable transmutation, deriving from a much older period than the one to which we may in certain random cases be able to trace its origins, at the same time guaranteeing that it will survive in the future and constantly be renewed. Both of these factors constitute the most convincing testimony to their genuine and imperishable value.”9 The melodies published by Büsching and von der Hagen do indeed constitute a colourful and kaleidoscopic anthology of folksongs still capable of instilling a sense of enthusiasm in its readers by dint of its sheer variety.

Of particular importance as a collection of folk tunes is the Deutsche Volkslieder mit ihren Original-Weisen (German Folksongs with their Original Melodies) by Andreas Kretzschmer that first appeared in 1838, with a second volume superintended by his co-editor, Anton Wilhelm von Zuccalmaglio, following two years later and specifically describing itself as a “continuation of Andreas Kretzschmer’s work”. This, it will be remembered, was a time when German national Romanticism was on the rise. One notable entry is the now famous song Kein schöner Land in dieser Zeit (literally, “there is no fairer land at this time”), the words of which appear to have been written by the editor himself, while its melody has been cobbled together from a number of other folksongs. Numerous composers drew on this collection, convinced as they were that it was a repository of historical folksongs: few can have been aware that many of the folk tunes printed here were in fact the work of Zuccalmaglio. Brahms warmly welcomed this anthology and by the end of his life had reworked more than twenty of its songs, adding a piano accompaniment that was in keeping with his age. In his introduction to the first of the two volumes, Kretzschmer takes up Reichardt’s aforementioned ideas on the essence of a folksong’s melody, arguing that it remains “perpetually fresh as a pure, independent tune that needs no additional harmonies and even after the passage of several centuries it continues to affect the human mind in the way that it did at the time of its composition. […] The creator of such an independent folk tune sings the tune to himself in the simplest possible way, just as he feels it, and it is this feeling that tells him whether the melody can deviate or, at best, modulate to the upper or lower dominant, but not to both of them within the same song, still less to other keys; and in this respect he is right since no genuine folksong does this. […] If his song is to appeal to his comrades and if it is to move people who, like him, know nothing of the rules of harmony, it must consist of an independent melody that requires no such harmonies to be the thing that it is; indeed, it scorns all such harmonies and is more moving without them than it would be with them.”10 Brahms bore all of this in mind when he set to work on his own arrangements, proceeding with care and evincing great respect for the original melody, in this way helping many a folk tune to take on a new lease of life.

Perceptions of German folksongs were lastingly influenced both at home and abroad by adaptations such as Muss i denn zum Städtele hinaus and by independent, folklike songs such as Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten and Ännchen von Tharau from the pen of Friedrich Silcher. Hailed as the man who reawakened the German folksong, Silcher published twelve sets of these songs between 1825 and 1860, featuring a total of 144 songs for male-voice quartet: “These folksongs are as widespread as German song: they may be heard on the banks of the Susquehanna and of the Ohio as well as in our German fatherland, and when the Cologne Male-Voice Choir performed in London in 1853 and 1854 and helped the German song to enjoy some of its greatest triumphs, it was folksongs that led the way, the Swabian song Jetzt gang i ans Brünnele leaving the greatest impression. What is the reason for such successes? Is it simply the fact that in selecting the songs for his collections, Silcher had first pick and was particularly fortunate in his choice? No, his merits are greater than this, for what was needed here was not just a scholarly and hard-working collector, it also required the sort of peculiarly thoughtful poetical gifts that can be observed in Silcher himself, enabling him to restore these priceless products to us in their unadulterated form. Silcher’s merits lie in multiple directions. As a collector he has discovered the genuine source of these songs, not in yellowing manuscripts but in the living wellspring of the people; he has heard these melodies on the lips of those innocent classes of the folk. We could report on more than one of the most delightful Swabian folksongs that were sung by the pretty girls in the villages close to the university town of Tübingen and that caught the composer’s attention and passed into his collection from the mouths of these very maidens. The melodies are faithfully reproduced, the four-part writing is clear, uncomplicated and without any laboured harmonies.”11

The fascination that is exerted by these engagingly simple folksongs and that has been described again and again persuaded composers from an early date not only to rework traditional folksongs, as Beethoven, for example, did with a whole range of songs from various nations, but also to turn their hand to new works written in the style of folksongs. In his preface to the second edition of his Lieder im Volkston, Johann Abraham Peter Schulz – still remembered as the composer of the melodies to Der Mond ist aufgegangen and Ihr Kinderlein kommet – expressed his thoughts on the challenge involved in writing tunes that were easy to grasp and suited to the world of folk poetry. These tunes, he argued, should “be sung in a way more appropriate to the folk than to the world of art, namely, in a way such that even unpractised lovers of singing – always assuming that they are not wholly lacking in a voice – can easily repeat them from memory and retain them. To that end I have selected only those texts by our finest poets, texts that seemed to me to be tailor-made for this kind of folk singing, and in the case of their melodies I have deliberately tried to cultivate the greatest simplicity and intelligibility and, above all, to introduce a semblance of familiarity because I know from experience how much this familiarity not only helps a folksong to find the most rapid acceptance but is, indeed, a necessary part of that process. It is in this semblance of familiarity that the whole mystery of the folk tone lies. […] Only through a striking similarity between the musical and the poetic tone of a song; only through a melody that never departs from the course that is followed by the text, neither rising above it nor sinking beneath it but adapting its contours to suit the declamation and the metre of the words, much like a tight-fitting garment, while also containing readily singable intervals, remaining within a compass appropriate to all the voices and flowing along through the simplest of modulations; and, finally, through sheer perfection in the proportions of all of its parts, which is what gives the melody that roundness that is indispensable to every work of art in the field of miniature genres – it is through all of these factors, I say, that the song acquires the semblance of that which I am speaking here, the semblance of the unmannered, the artless, the familiar, in a word, the folk tone that allows it to impress itself on the ear so quickly and to return there again and again.”12

Other composers likewise wrote new songs, while attempting to keep within the parameters defined by Schulz. In some cases, however, it was only after their words had been rewritten that their melodies acquired the popularity of folksongs. This happened, for example, in the case of Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s song Wer hat die schönsten Schäfchen, which uses a melody that Reichardt had composed in 1790 for a setting of a poem by Karoline Rudolphi. A similar instance is the song An der Saale hellem Strande, which is based on Soldatenabschied, the first of Friedrich Ernst Fesca’s op. 27 set of songs for voice and piano. Geh aus, mein Herz, und suche Freud was originally a hymn written by the German theologian Paul Gerhardt in 1653, but in 1836 its words were used to accompany the memorable tune from a song by August Harder that was in turn a setting of a poem by Ludwig Christoph Heinrich Hölty. It is in this last-named guise that the song finally became familiar all over the world.

There have also been occasions when folk tunes have found their way into operatic scores. Mozart’s pupil Franz Xaver Süßmayr, for example, used the tune of Im Märzen der Bauer in his opera Der Spiegel von Arkadien, where it is set to new words by Emanuel Schikaneder, “Die Milch ist gesünder, ist lauter, ist rein”. Engelbert Humperdinck similarly used a number of traditional folksongs in his fairytale opera Hänsel und Gretel. These include Suse, liebe Suse and Ein Männlein steht im Walde. But he also adopted a folklike tone in a number of songs of his own composition such as Brüderchen, komm tanz’ mit mir. These were later extracted from the opera and acquired the popularity of folksongs, leading a life of their own. The high degree of recognizability of folk tunes and their simple structure, which is sustained merely by a harmonic framework in which the melody retains its sovereign importance, offered many composers additional opportunities to rework them for more complex resources in the form of chamber works and symphonies. Folksong quotations that may be seen as a secular counterpart to the chorales that are quoted on substantially more occasions are found in the works of Brahms, Mahler and Schoenberg. With his own folksong arrangements Martin Stadtfeld once again comes close to the heart of the German folksong. These arrangements invariably leave ample scope for the original melody, while at the same time commenting on it and opening up new perspectives and unsuspected points of reference. And anyone hearing them will inevitably be reminded of the texts that traditionally go with them. Our folksongs are so firmly anchored in our consciousness that it is impossible “to imagine the tune without the words or the words without the tune."

Dr. Timo Jouko Herrmann (2022)

1 Johann Friedrich Reichardt, "To Young Artists" Musikalisches Kunstmagazin 1 (1782): 4.

2 Ibid.: 3.

3 Johann Gottfried Herder, folk songs. Along with other pieces mixed in, vol. 2 (Weygandsche Buchhandlung:

Leipzig, 1778–79): 11f.

4 Johann Gottfried Herder, “On the similarity of mediaeval English and German poetry, next to

Miscellaneous that follows”, Deutsches Museum 2/11 (1777): 432.

5 Herder, folk songs. Along with other pieces mixed in, vol. 2: 33f.

6 Anselm Karl Elwert, unprinted remains of old songs together with pieces of new poetry (Krüger: Gießen and

Marburg, 1784): 138.

7 Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Old German Songs, Vol. 3 (Mohr and

Rooms: Heidelberg, 1806-8): 425.

8 Ibid.: 463f.

9 Johann Gustav Büsching and Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Collection of German folk songs with an appendix of Flemish and French songs, along with melodies (Friedrich Braunes: Berlin, 1807): II–V.

10 Andreas Kretzschmer, German folk songs with their original tunes (Vereins-Buchhandlung: Berlin, 1838): IX–X.

11 Otto Elben, The popular German male song, second edition (H. Laupp'sche Buchhandlung: Tübingen, 1887): 425f.

12 Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, Songs in the folk style to be sung at the keyboard, second edition (George Jakob Decker: Berlin, 1785): non pag.

CD release date: October 7, 2022