“Isch Grolle Nischt” by Heinrich Heine in Musically and Comparative Discourse of an Eminent Text

Abstract

Eminentness is a term of the German hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, which he used to denote a text which contains an interpretation of its complementary meaning. First of all, he considered this to be a song with the word (poetry) and the music as its constituent parts. The combination of “literature and music”, i.e., vocal music, is one of the examples of the comparative (intermedial) theories of Stephen Paul Scheer. There are also two examples, including “literature in music” and “music in literature”, represented by programme music and musical prose as other forms of this integration, which can also be seen as eminent artistic texts. In this musical and comparative discourse, consider the poem “Isch grolle nischt” by Heinrich Heine, which has returned to literature after its integration into music, which showcases the works of prominent and nationally representative artists – except the German poet, the German and Ukrainian composers (Robert Schumann and Mykola Lysenko), the Ukrainian poet, writer and literary critic Lesya Ukrainka, and the unknown under a pseudonym V. Tarchansky. These artefacts draw attention if looking back at cross-cultural Ukrainian-German interactions. Particular aspects of the topic have already been covered by musicologists and literary scholars. The problem of the musicalisation of H. Heine's poetry has been addressed by many Ukrainian and foreign scholars. Ukrainian literary critics have focused on the “musical prose” associated with Heine's works. However, this subject has not yet been studied in the sum of the above comparative examples, and the discourse of eminentness, hence the relevance of this article.