Welcome to Resounding Verse, a podcast about poetry and song.

It has been a long time since I did a podcast episode—over a year, in fact, I’m a little embarrassed to say. There’s no real reason for that, other than that life got in the way, as it tends to. But I’m really happy to be back with new episodes.

I should say briefly that one of the reasons I felt inspired to return now is that just this past week I heard a wonderful presentation by Majel Connery. Majel is a musicologist, a performer, a composer, and also a podcaster, and she visited the University of Oregon for a week, where she did many things, among them giving a great talk about podcasting.

If you don’t already know, Majel has been involved with two terrific podcasts, one called A Music of Their Own and the other called Reverberations. After hearing her presentation and being reminded of the joys of this particular form of communication, I decided: enough excuses, it’s time to get back at it. So here I am.

Because the poem that forms the basis for this episode is in German, we’ll first hear it read in the original language by my friend and fellow musicologist and song lover Maria Behrendt, and then I’ll read it in English translation.

“Das Blatt im Buche,” or “The Leaf in the Book,” by Anastasius Grün.

Das Blatt im Buche

Ich seh’ eine alte Dame,
 Die ein altes Büchlein hat,
 Es liegt in dem alten Buche
 Ein altes, dürres Blatt.

So dürr sind wohl auch die Hände,
 Die’s einst im Lenz ihr gepflückt.
 Was mag wohl die Alte haben,
 Sie weint, wenn sie’s erblickt?

The Leaf in the Book

I see an old woman
 Who has a small, old book,
 In the old book lies
 An old, dried leaf.

The hands that once picked it for her in springtime
 Are likely just as dry.
 Whatever could be amiss with the old woman,
 She weeps whenever she sees it?

This poem was written by an Austrian poet and politician named Anton Alexander, Count of Auersperg, who published under the pen name Anastasius Grün. The poem comes from an 1830 book of poems called Blätter der Liebe, which could be translated either as “Leaves of Love” or “Pages of Love.” The word Blätter, like its English equivalent leaves, can mean either leaves of a book or leaves of a tree.

I mention that because this particular poem uses the word Blatt, the singular form of Blätter—that is, “leaf”—to play on this double meaning. The poem describes an old woman who is sitting with a book in her hand, and in that book is a pressed leaf: a leaf in the leaves of the book, in other words.

One of the things that I find especially striking about this poem is that it’s not told from the perspective of the woman herself, but instead from the perspective of an outside observer. And for that reason, we are left wondering what she is thinking and feeling while holding the book and looking at the leaf, because she can’t tell us herself. We can only speculate, try to understand.

The poem thus becomes a powerful act of empathy, an effort to understand what someone else is experiencing, not because they tell us, but because we can glean it, however imperfectly, in their actions, their eyes, and, in this poem, their tears.

That is the crucial mystery of this poem. By the end, we know that the leaf inside the book triggers a powerful emotion for her. “She weeps whenever she sees it” is the last line. But we only discover this gradually.

The poem starts with nothing extraordinary and nothing particularly emotional. The first stanza is purely descriptive, almost clinical:

I see an old woman
 Who has a small, old book,
 In the old book lies
 An old, dried leaf.

The significance of these images, the depth of the emotion behind them, only becomes clear in the next stanza, when we learn that her hands are as dry as the leaf. The poem is like a camera that gradually zooms in on the details of the scene. We start with the woman, then narrow to the book, then the leaf in the book, then the woman’s hands that once picked the leaf off a tree, and then, of course, the tears that flow from her eyes.

When I read this poem, I can’t help but think of my grandmother, who passed away—gosh, eight years ago; it doesn’t seem that long—at the age of 100. We were very, very close, almost kindred spirits. We often played Scrabble together, and she would roundly beat me even in her last year. And sometimes, as we played, I would watch her hands, worn with age, a little shaky, as she put the tiles on the board.

Her body was weathered, but her mind was still sharp. And she told me it was often preoccupied with the past. This really struck me. She said that she lived much of the time in her memories because so much of her life lay behind her and so little lay ahead of her.

I never saw her with a book in her hand with a pressed leaf in it, but I did sometimes see her look through the modern-day equivalent of one of those books, a photo album, staring at its images, lost in thought, a little like the alte Dame of this poem.

I could, of course, ask my grandma what she was thinking when she was holding a book in her hands like this, but we don’t have that luxury here. We can’t ask this old woman why she weeps. And so the poem ends in a state of uncertainty.

In fact—and this is something that I hadn’t noticed initially—it actually ends with a question mark. Not “She cries whenever she sees it,” which is kind of the way I read it earlier, but “She cries whenever she sees it?” You can hear that slight uptick at the end of the sentence in my friend Maria’s reading of the final line.

The whole poem traces an emotional arc toward this final question as it zooms in, ending with a close-up of her tears, but we can’t quite get close enough to reveal what’s really in her heart. To my mind, that’s what makes the poem so heartbreaking. It gets so close to her true feelings, but never fully there.

That Anastasius Grün can take us on this emotional journey in only eight lines and with such simple language makes the poem all the more powerful. Notice, for example, how repetitive the poem is. The word “old,” or alte, appears in each of the first four lines:

Ich seh’ eine alte Dame,
 Die ein altes Büchlein hat,
 Es liegt in dem alten Buche
 Ein altes, dürres Blatt.

On first glance, you might think that this repetitiveness is a sign that the poet lacks imagination to come up with richer, more varied words. And here I might note that in one brief biographical sketch that I read of Anastasius Grün, this collection of poems, Blätter der Liebe, was described as showing little originality.

But we can just as well see that simplicity as a sign of originality, a deliberate creative strategy. The repetitiveness of the language makes the opening of this poem seem almost like an incantation, a prayer. Prayers often have repeated words that we meditate on, we reflect on their meaning, and I think that’s what’s happening here. We meditate on the very word that describes the essence of this poem: old age, old books, old leaves, old memories.

“Das Blatt im Buche,” or “The Leaf in the Book,” by Anastasius Grün.

Ich seh’ eine alte Dame,
 Die ein altes Büchlein hat,
 Es liegt in dem alten Buche
 Ein altes, dürres Blatt.

So dürr sind wohl auch die Hände,
 Die’s einst im Lenz ihr gepflückt.
 Was mag wohl die Alte haben,
 Sie weint, wenn sie’s erblickt?

I see an old woman
 Who has a small, old book,
 In the old book lies
 An old, dried leaf.

The hands that once picked it for her in springtime
 Are likely just as dry.
 Whatever could be amiss with the old woman,
 She weeps whenever she sees it?

And now here’s a musical setting of this poem by Pauline Decker. The performers are James Gilchrist, tenor, and Jocelyn Freeman, pianist.

[Music excerpt]

The song you just heard is the first song in a cycle of songs by a little-known but extraordinarily talented composer from the nineteenth century named Pauline Decker. But here’s the thing: Decker didn’t create the cycle. I did.

Before I explain what I mean, I first need to tell you what a song cycle is. A song cycle is, in essence, not just any group of songs, but a group that forms a larger, coherent whole. The whole could tell a story, or it could be bound together by recurring poetic ideas or even musical ideas.

Song cycles were immensely popular in the nineteenth century, especially in German-speaking lands. Landmarks of the genre include Ludwig van Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, or To the Distant Beloved, which many people regard as the first true song cycle. There’s also Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, or Winter Journey, and Die schöne Müllerin, or The Beautiful Miller-Maid, and Robert Schumann wrote many famous cycles, among them Dichterliebe, or A Poet’s Love.

And what do these composers have in common—Beethoven, Schubert, Robert Schumann—other than that they are German-speaking? They’re all men.

In the nineteenth century, the song cycle was a man’s game. Women wrote many, many songs during this time. In fact, in many ways, song became a natural form of expression for women during this time. Songs, with their small forces, could be written and performed in the drawing room or the salon, in spaces where women’s artistry was more accepted.

Yet song cycles remained largely out of reach for them. While individual songs could flourish in a private, domestic sphere, cycles demanded a more expansive and public frame of presentation that clashed with prevailing ideas about women’s artistic limits. As a result, the very composers who helped define the expressive possibilities of nineteenth-century song were rarely given the chance to shape the grandest form of the genre.

Pauline Decker was just such a composer. She was a celebrated German opera singer and also a close friend of Fanny Mendelssohn, who in her latter years published seventeen opuses of songs.

But almost all of these opuses contain only a single song. This song, for example, is her Opus 11. Opus 11 is just one song. The same is true of her Opuses 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, and 15. And the other opuses that she wrote contain at most two or three songs. She never wrote a song cycle and almost exclusively published her songs individually.

So what I decided to do is create a cycle for her out of eight separate, standalone songs. Partly I did this to provide a vehicle for performers who would otherwise have to dig through archives and online databases to find these songs.

In fact, this project was prompted in some ways by an email I got from a friend who’s a singer, and he said, “Steve, could you suggest some song cycles by women in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century?” And to be clear, there are some.

Fanny Mendelssohn, for example, wrote a single song cycle for her brother, but it wasn’t published in her lifetime. It wasn’t published until 2008. Clara Schumann wrote a song cycle, but she wrote it with Robert Schumann. Their names appear on the song cycle, but we have no way of knowing which songs are by her and which songs are by her husband.

So one of my goals, quite plainly, was practical. Could I put together a cycle of songs that tell a compelling story, that showcase the beauty and power of Decker’s songs, so that performers could feature them on recitals more easily and this music could get heard?

Yet an equally important goal wasn’t just to provide performers with access to this music, but to provide Pauline Decker access to a genre that was unavailable to her, as it was to so many other women composers of her time, using curation as a form of advocacy.

The cycle that I created is called Liebesblätter, which again means “Love Leaves,” or perhaps “Love Letters.” And here I’m riffing on the title of Anastasius Grün’s collection of poems, Blätter der Liebe.

In many ways, the cycle answers the question at the end of the first song: why does the woman weep when she looks at the leaf in the book?

The cycle, in short, is a dialogue between two lovers. It’s for two different voices and piano. But this is a dialogue less about confessions of love than about missed opportunities and unspoken feelings. It’s a story of two people who love each other but can’t bring themselves to express it and therefore end up apart, looking back on a future that might have been.

You could imagine the opening song as being sung either by a narrator or by the woman’s distant beloved, long separated from her and imagining what she might be doing today.

It’s hard to summarize the entire cycle briefly, and I would direct you to a lovely performance of this cycle by not just James Gilchrist and Jocelyn Freeman, the tenor and pianist whom you heard a moment ago, but also Katie Bray, a mezzo-soprano who sings the other role. She actually sings the role of the old woman and then the young woman. And I’ve provided a link to that recording in the show description.

So after this opening song, which takes place in the present, we move to the past and we hear songs about the youthful longings of these two lovers. Then comes a really lovely duet where they’re in this nocturnal scene, but not together, and a nightingale expresses their feelings, which they can’t express to one another.

After this, we ultimately lead to a song of parting, and then the final song is another duet, now a much more sorrowful duet, where we’ve returned to the present, where they’re both old and they’re looking back on this beautiful time in the past, and greeting each other not in actuality but in their imaginations.

The poem about the old woman with the book felt like a perfect place to start the cycle because it describes the main character and ends with this question—why is she weeping?—which the cycle could partly answer.

But the music to the song also seemed perfect. The slow tempo, the simple melody: this made it sound like someone was setting a stage for a more dramatic story to come. Think of the beginning of Romeo and Juliet: “Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene.” This is the kind of declamatory opening that I had in mind.

I tried to heighten that feeling of anticipation by engaging in some slight recomposition. I started the song with a short piano introduction instead of with the singer diving right in, which is what Decker’s original version does.

The introduction basically duplicates what the piano does when the voice enters. And here’s the introduction of the song, followed by the first phrase. Notice how similar they are.

[Music demonstration]

I also love that Decker’s piano part starts as if in the middle of a thought—not with a stable tonic chord, by which I mean the home chord of the key, so a C chord in C major, but instead with an unstable dominant chord, and a dominant chord that’s actually in inversion, so it’s in an unstable position. And furthermore, it leads to an unexpected chord.

So Decker could have started the piano part like this.

[Piano demonstration]

Instead, she chooses the least stable beginning, a beginning that sounds less like the start of something than like the continuation of something that precedes it—in this case, the past love that the old woman is remembering.

I was also really drawn to the texture of the piano part itself: spare and simple, but with a repeated motive that felt like the musical equivalent of the prayerful, meditative repeated word that I mentioned before. Old, old woman, old book, old dried leaf: alte Dame, altes Büchlein, altes, dürres Blatt.

Listen for these notes in the piano.

[Piano demonstration]

And notice how they sound a little like an incantation themselves. But the motive changes as the song goes.

As the scene becomes enriched with emotion, as we zoom in more closely on the intimate, personal images—her hands, her tears—and as she remembers this time of spring when love and life were green, the piano part becomes enriched too.

Listen for how the piano’s motive changes from this...

[Piano demonstration]

...to this.

[Music excerpt]

And what was that arpeggio at the end, falling down from the highest notes in the piano thus far? When I hear that gently cascading motion, I think of the gentle wind that blew through the trees so long ago when the old woman plucked this leaf. Or maybe the memory that rushes into her mind unexpectedly. Or even an exhalation of breath as she thinks of that bittersweet memory.

All of these things seem to be conveyed in a single gesture.

The motion in the piano here is all the more striking because it’s followed by stasis, just sustained chords, the kinds of chords that might accompany a recitative. And that’s what this text sounds like:

Was mag wohl die Alte haben,
 Sie weint, wenn sie’s erblickt?

Whatever could be amiss with the old woman,
 She weeps whenever she sees it?

The final sustained chord beneath the word erblickt, the final word of the poem—that word that’s followed by a question mark—is the musical equivalent of a question mark: another dominant chord.

But then comes a short piano postlude, and another rush of motion and emotion. Is this her tears? Is it the emotions that she can’t bring herself to express in words, so they’re expressed in the wordless sounds of the piano?

It’s all of these things.

[Music excerpt]

I was so struck by the resonance of the piano postlude that, in another act of recomposition, I changed the ending of the final song of the cycle so that instead of sounding like this—

[Music demonstration]

—it sounds like this.

[Music demonstration]

As a result, in my curated song cycle, the end of song eight, the final song, echoes the end of song one, which felt only fitting, since this final song, like the opening song, takes place in the present.

The lovers sing a tender duet to each other, greeting each other across time and space with these words:

Every morning I shall say,
 Oh my darling, when shall you come to me?

Every evening I shall speak,
 When my eyes close in death:
 Oh my love, think of me.

And here once more is the opening song of the cycle, “The Leaf in the Book.”

[Music excerpt]

I owe many thanks at the end of this episode. First, to James Gilchrist and Jocelyn Freeman for performing this song so beautifully, and also to Katie Bray, who is just as much a part of the recording of the entire cycle. And again, if you’re interested in listening to all eight songs, I’ve provided a link in the program description.

Thank you also to Maria Behrendt for her lovely reading of the poem, and to Sharon Krebs and Harald Krebs, two dear friends who first introduced me to Pauline Decker’s songs.

I hope this episode and this cycle will inspire you to dig even deeper into her wonderful music.

To listen and subscribe to the podcast, go to resoundingverse.com. And if you like what you’ve heard, I hope you’ll consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, or even sharing this episode with someone who you think will also enjoy this music.

Resounding Verse is produced by me, Steve Rodgers. Thank you for listening.