Ludwig van Beethoven, "Sehnsucht", Lied für Singstimme und Klavier in vier Vertonungen WoO 134 nach einem Gedicht von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Autograph

No time to be brief

Amongst Beethoven's many settings of Goethe, "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" from "Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre" WoO 134 is certainly not the most significant or most deep. Even so the autograph score tells us a great deal about the story of its genesis and Beethoven's working methods.

The manuscript is made up of two bifolia, which unusually are not one inside the other but attached one after the other. Pages 1-4 form the first, pages 5-8 the second leaf. The first page does not contain any musical text. Beethoven noted here, "Nb: Ich hatte nicht Zeit genug, um ein Gutes hervorzubringen, daher Mehrere Versuche Ludwig van Beethoven." (NB I did not have enough time to produce a good one, so here are several attempts Ludwig van Beethoven.) Sure enough, on the following pages there are four settings of the same text, each of a different length. Beethoven's note was not scrawled in the margin as an afterthought, but was meant for the person who had commissioned it, for whom the autograph score was intended. Already on a sketch leaf, which is also at the Beethoven-Haus (HCB Mh 76), and on the sketches for the second setting of WoO 134, Beethoven wrote, "There was a lack of time to only shorten this Lied once". The Lied was to appear in the literary journal "Prometheus", which had been founded in 1808 by Leo von Seckendorf and Joseph Ludwig Stoll. Seckendorf and Stoll had commissioned a setting of Goethe from Beethoven. This was to be printed next to a text by Goethe as a musical decoration. Beethoven was very interested in doing so, but at the same time was completely overworked. At the beginning of 1808 he was working on his Fifth Symphony and the Cello Sonata op. 69. Although he had enough leisure to find four settings of the text and to develop them (and even to write them out in, for him, a complete fair hand), he did not probably have the patience to condense them into one single composition.

Seckendorf and Stoll had only commissioned one Lied - they also only printed one of them, the first one. Did they even receive all four versions? On the reverse of the first bifolium, on leaf 4 (image 4), the censor wrote the usual term "Imprimatur" in the right margin, permitting the manuscript to be printed. This permission was usually given on one of the outer pages, that is on the first or last one, but never in the inside of the document. Had Stoll and Seckenberg only submitted the first bifolium with the first three Lieder to the censors? Or had they not received the second bifolium with Beethoven's fourth setting? The fourth Lied is the most extensive; maybe the two editors had not printed it because it had not been completed. We do not know. With a few years distance, Beethoven became more relaxed and less self-critical as far as the four settings were concerned. In 1810 he had all four printed in an edition by the Viennese Kunst- und Industrie-Comptoir under the title "Die Sehnsucht von Göthe mit vier Melodien nebst Clavierbegleitung". However, he had not rehabilitated them, as he neither calls them "Lied" nor "songs". But there is no longer talk of "no time to be brief".

(After "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt. Lied in vier Fassungen (WoO 134) nach einem Gedicht von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe von Ludwig van Beethoven". Facsimile of the autograph score with an essay by Helga Lühning, Bonn 1986) (J.R.)