Three Poems by Marie Luise Kaschnitz. Musical Setting by John D. White

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Hal H. Rennert

Abstract

Each of the three poems was first published in Kein Zauberspruch (1972), one of five volumes of poetry by Marie Luise Kaschnitz during her life-time (1901–1974). The poem “Vögel” (Birds) was actually written in the early 1960s, shortly after her husband, the art historian Guido von Weinberg-Kaschnitz, had died in 1958. One literary critic refers to this poem perceptively as a secular requiem (“ein weltliches Requiem”). Although there is a strong biographical element in Kaschnitz’s writing, her range of themes is much deeper and wider. She shares with other German and other European writers the classical humanism of mid-twentieth century and straddles a complex and enlightened Weltanschauung as, for example, her friendships to Theodor Adorno, Paul Celan, Dolf Sternberger and Ingeborg Bachmann demonstrate. My fellow colleagues in the field of German Studies in North America are familiar with her famous short story, “Das dicke Kind” (The Fat Child), if for no other reason than it’s ubiquitous appearance in undergraduate textbooks. A selection of her poems from four collections appearing in German-speaking countries in Europe between 1957 and 1972 were included in The Selected Later Poems of Marie Luise Kaschnitz, translated by Lisel Mueller, Princeton University Press, 1980.

John White and I have collaborated on literary-musical projects for over thirty years. The Kaschnitz Lieder project grew out of a larger prospective monograph on the poetry and short prose of Kaschnitz and my research at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany, where her literary estate, that is, her manuscripts, letters and papers (Nachlass) is located. I took up John White’s challenge—with an eye and ear to possible successful musical settings—selecting ten of Kaschnitz’s best poems from an oeuvre of over one thousand published and several dozen unpublished poems for translation. The three poems in the current issue of Delos represent an additional refinement of this challenge.

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