Welcome to Resounding Verse, a podcast about poetry and song.
This episode deals with a setting of a German poem, so we'll hear it first read in the original German by my friend Harald Krebs, and then I'll read it in English translation.
Die gute Nacht, die ich dir sage
Die gute Nacht, die ich dir sage,
Freund, hörest du;
Ein Engel, der die Botschaft trage
Geht ab und zu.
Er bringt sie dir, und hat mir wieder
Den Gruß gebracht:
Dir sagen auch des Freundes Lieder
Jetzt gute Nacht.
Friend, you hear
The good night that I say to you.
An angel, bearing the message,
Goes to and fro.
He brings my message to you and has returned
The greeting to me:
The friend’s songs
Now say good night to you, too.
This poem is by Friedrich Rückert, a German poet whose work was set to music by hundreds of composers. The poem is very short, just two four-line stanzas. Two people are apart at night. An angel carries the speaker's goodnight greeting to the beloved, then returns with an answering message conveyed through the beloved's songs.
That back-and-forth motion gives the poem its simple two-part shape, and it's captured most directly by a phrase in the poem: ab und zu, or "to and fro." The angel moves between the two separated figures, carrying their greetings in both directions.
But this is not only a poem about sending a message. It's also about listening, about hearing a message. The speaker sends the words out into the darkness but has no way of knowing whether they have reached their destination. For a moment, the message seems to hang in the air, waiting to be heard.
This is something very familiar, something I think we all have experienced: saying something to someone who isn't there, either because they're physically not present or maybe because they've passed on, and you wish that they could hear it. Or maybe you're saying something to someone who's right in front of you, and they actually hear your words, but they don't understand them; they don't really hear them.
This poem turns that ordinary desire, that familiar desire, into something magical. The angel solves the problem, though not in an ordinary way. The speaker and the beloved never occupy the same space, and they never hear one another's voices directly. Instead, their words are carried by an unseen intermediary. The angel moves across the distance between them, taking the speaker's good night to the beloved and then returning with the beloved's greeting.
Notice, however, that when it comes back, it's not a spoken message but a song. The final lines refer to des Freundes Lieder, or "the friend's songs." The speaker's goodnight leaves as speech, but the response comes back as music.
One of the mysterious things about this poem is that it's not clear how long it takes for that message to be sent out and then return. Obviously, we can read the poem in a pretty short amount of time; it's only eight lines. But we don't know how far apart these two people are or how long this message's journey takes.
The word jetzt, or "now," at the end—jetzt gute Nacht, or "now good night"—makes this answering good night feel present and immediate. But we know it's traveled some distance and must have taken some time to do that.
And that's one of the wonders of this poem. In this imagined nighttime world that it creates, distance and time can expand and contract. Time seems somehow to stand still while these two figures listen to one another across an unimaginable space.
Die gute Nacht, die ich dir sage
Die gute Nacht, die ich dir sage,
Freund, hörest du;
Ein Engel, der die Botschaft trage
Geht ab und zu.
Er bringt sie dir, und hat mir wieder
Den Gruß gebracht:
Dir sagen auch des Freundes Lieder
Jetzt gute Nacht.
Friend, you hear
The good night that I say to you.
An angel, bearing the message,
Goes to and fro.
He brings my message to you and has returned
The greeting to me:
The friend’s songs
Now say good night to you, too.
And now here's a musical setting of this poem by Clara Schumann.
[Musical excerpt]
The song that you just heard was written by Clara Schumann in 1841, but it wasn't published in her lifetime. It didn't appear in print until more than 150 years later, in an edition published in 1992.
The particular version of the song that you just heard is a special arrangement for two singers and piano, and those singers were Sophie Karthäuser, soprano, and Stephan Loges, bass-baritone, with pianist Eugene Asti.
Clara Schumann herself wrote the song for just one solo voice and piano. So the alternation between singers here, and their joining together at the end, as you heard, belongs to this particular performance rather than to the original score.
That choice changes the way we hear Rückert's poem. And that's one of the reasons I picked it. I think it adds new layers of meaning to the poem and to the song.
The woman who begins the song might seem like the speaker who is sending her good night out into the distance. But when the man enters, he does not sing the absent friend's reply. Instead, he continues the speaker's account of what's happening, describing the angel who bears the message.
The change of voice, therefore, doesn't assign each singer a single, stable role. It's not quite as simple as that. It makes the song itself seem to travel from one person to another.
Schumann's song begins remarkably simply, with just two F-major chords. Then the piano waits for the singer to enter. And here's the very beginning of the song.
[Musical excerpt]
As simple as the opening is, it's surprisingly difficult to orient ourselves within it. It isn't immediately clear where the beat falls, or really what the meter is. Only gradually does the meter come into focus.
Earlier, I mentioned the poem's unusual, mysterious sense of time. The angel seems to cross the distance between the two figures almost instantaneously, and the word jetzt, or "now," brings the response into the present.
Clara Schumann reinforces that sense of suspended time: both jetzt, "now," and also somehow unimaginably long. The song begins without a strongly marked point of departure, as though we have entered a space that was already there before the song even began.
And once the song does begin, when the opening phrase starts, she allows it to take an unusually long time. The word Nacht, or "night," is extended. The piano inserts space between the parts of the line, and the harmony pauses before moving on.
A phrase that might have been compact and regular instead stretches outward. Here's the opening as it might have been written. And what I've done here is just remove the extra measures that give it an expansive quality, so that it's much more compressed and much more normative.
[Musical excerpt]
This is what Clara Schumann actually does. Just notice how much space she creates.
[Musical excerpt]
In the poem, the speaker says, "Friend, do you hear the good night that I bid you?" But we don't actually know if the friend hears it until the last two lines of the poem, when Rückert writes, "The friend's songs now say good night to you too."
In Schumann's song, however, it's as though we hear the answer already in those moments when the piano echoes the voice. Schumann adds a new layer of meaning to the text, hinting at the response that will only come later.
And then the male singer enters, singing the words, "An angel bearing the message goes to and fro."
[Musical excerpt]
The timing of the introduction of this new voice is especially suggestive. He enters just after the woman has asked whether her absent friend can hear her. For an instant, the appearance of another voice might seem to answer that question. We might think that this is the person who hears her, responding to her.
But what he sings is not a reply from the friend. He sings about the angel bearing the message back and forth. The new voice, therefore, remains difficult to identify. It seems momentarily to evoke the distant friend, but it also seems to embody the angel, or even simply to take up and carry forward the woman's words.
The arrangement turns the poem's intermediary into a feature of the performance itself. The song passes from one singer to another, and we're not always clear about the identity of those singers—which characters, which voices, they're representing in the text.
At the end of this stanza, Clara Schumann writes a piano interlude, which is built initially from gently cascading parallel thirds.
[Musical excerpt]
The way I hear this is that the piano gives the angel a musical presence of its own. These descending figures are light and fluid, and they carry the music away from the song's home key of F major into the distant key of D-flat major.
Rückert, in other words, tells us in his poem that the angel travels. Clara Schumann allows us to hear the journey of the angel.
That modulation from F to D-flat also enlarges the space of the poem. The other person no longer seems merely to be nearby—you know, in a closely related key, so to speak. The music instead moves to a distantly related key, suggesting the distance that this message has to cross.
And in this particular performance, that distance seems even greater because it's framed by a change of voice. The woman's voice returns, saying, "He brings my message to you and has returned the greeting to me."
[Musical excerpt]
You can hear the angel personified there again, in those parallel thirds, similar to the passage that we heard previously. Those thirds bring us back to the home key of F major.
And in this way, Schumann reinforces the poem's basic pattern of departure and return, translating ab und zu into a large-scale tonal motion: F to D-flat and back to F.
Once we're back in F major, the female singer continues with the text. She sings, Dir sagen auch des Freundes Lieder, or "The friend's songs now also bid you," and then we have to wait for the continuation of that line.
And when it comes, something remarkable happens. Both voices join together, singing the crucial words jetzt gute Nacht, or "now good night."
[Musical excerpt]
But that's of course not the end of the song. The piano continues for a full ten measures after the singers stop, playing on its own. It begins with those parallel thirds again—the angel's music—and then eventually settles on a dominant chord that finally resolves to the tonic.
The length of this postlude is important. If the song had ended just with the voices, maybe with a couple measures of piano wrap-up, their shared good night might have seemed to overcome the distance between them completely.
But instead, the distance returns. The postlude sounds like a resonance of their brief meeting, the answering music continuing but dissipating after both voices have gone.
That sense of dissipation, of dissolving, is even stronger because of the way the final cadence is handled. Clara Schumann does indeed resolve from a V7 chord, a C7 chord, to a I chord, an F-major chord. Yet she doesn't write this:
[Musical excerpt]
Instead, this:
[Musical excerpt]
There are dissonances in the right hand of the piano that delay the resolution to the tonic chord, so that the resolution suggests not stability or surety, but a reluctance to let go, even though you know you have to.
And here once more is Clara Schumann's Die gute Nacht, die ich dir sage.
[Musical excerpt]
Special thanks to the performers for giving me permission to use their recording of the song and for envisioning this beautiful reinterpretation of Clara Schumann's song in the first place.
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, Stephen Rodgers. Thank you so much for listening.
