Australian Poet Research Articles

An Austrian Poet's Literary Heritage

An Austrian Poet's Literary Heritage

Richard Strauss's “Four Last Songs”

The musical creation of Richard Strauss has been revealed over a space of about seventy years. His two periods of greatest activity, the first of which is dominated by the Symphonic Poems, the second by Opera, have as “Prologue” his youthful work (up to, say, op. 15) and as “Epilogue” everything which comes after the opera Capriccio (1940–41), to which he gave no opus numbers and which he designated as his “inheritance.” In each of the four periods one special type of work dominates, but through all of them runs the Song. Even in the boy's and young man's earliest essays in composition it plays its part, and then in the 'nineties and around the turn of the century—that is to say, during the first decade of Strauss's married life—it comes to full flower. Naturally it receded somewhat when Strauss was dedicating his creative powers to opera above all else, yet even in the years between Salome and Capriccio he published several collections of songs. From his final working years (that is, after 1941) there are only, apart from two as yet unpublished songs to words by the Austrian poet Josef Weinheber, these Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra. Not merely do they represent Strauss's last contribution to the Song, but they are, above all, the last compositions that he—in the year before his death—completed.

THE AUSTRALIAN POETS

THE AUSTRALIAN POETS

Australian Poets of This War

Australian Poets of This War

A Contemporary Australian Poet

A Contemporary Australian Poet

Three Australian Poets

Three Australian Poets

The History of Schnitzler's Reigen

Even a cursory examination of the two stout volumes of H. H. Houben's Verbotene Literatur von der klassischen Zeit bis zur Gegenwart vividly brings home to the reader the significant rôle that censorship has played in the history of German literature during the past one hundred and fifty years. Here we find represented not only the authors of Young Germany, Heine, Gutzkow, Laube, Wienbarg, Mundt, and modern writers, such as Dehmel, Hauptmann, Schönherr, Sudermann, but even relatively harmless poets like Bettina von Arnim, Grillparzer, Hebbel, Heyse. Despite the fact that Schnitzler is listed in the announcement at the end of the first volume as among those to be treated in the second volume, he is nevertheless conspicuously absent, while such lesser lights as Bahr, Dreyer, Fulda, Hartleben are included. Houben himself has recognized the Austrian poet's title to a place of honor in this literary rogues' gallery. In discussing Maria von Magdala by Heyse, who drew a sharp line between his poetic muse and the sensationalism and unbridled freedom of the modern dramatists, Houben points out that in one respect Heyse has far outdone the younger generation, “durch einen solennen Zensurskandal, der anderthalb Jahre die Öffentlichkeit in Atem hielt und in seiner kulturhistorischen Bedeutung höchstens durch den Kampf um Schnitzlers Reigen übertroffen wurde.”

II.—“The Devil and the Advocate”

Der Stricker, an Austrian poet who is perhaps best known for his Pfaffe Amîs (ca. 1230), is the first (so far as we know) to tell the story of a wicked advocate (or judge) who was more unscrupulous in robbing his neighbors than the Devil himself. This tale, though perhaps a folk-tale originally, and even in its written versions never very far from the spirit of the folk, is interesting chiefly for its literary adaptations, notably Chaucer's Friar's Tale. Its principal forms, which are maintained with remarkable consistency, no doubt because its propagation was rather through books than through oral tradition, seem to have been determined by its use as exemplum, jest, or simple story. The oldest form, as it occurs in the narratives of der Stricker and Caesarius of Heisterbach, is also the most frequent and important. A rather unhappy rearrangement of the same incidents, which have to do with the leveling of a curse at a man or beast, characterizes a second form, of which the earliest example is found in Johannes Pauli's Schimpf und Ernst (1522). A little later (1537) Hans Sachs altered the story by omitting one episode regularly found in the other two types. Into one of these three closely related groups, represented by der Stricker and Caesarius, Pauli, and Hans Sachs respectively, the great majority of the thirty known versions fall. The variations are comparatively insignificant, and the analogous tales which do not follow one of these standard outlines are strikingly few.