The far side of the moon

Elsbeth Dangel-Pelloquin shows why old songs and fairy tales exert a special appeal in times of social upheaval. Between Romanticism and Modernism, folk songs and fairy tales become counter-models to a rationalised world – as poetic spaces of the uncanny, the contradictory and the unattainable. In Mahler's work, too, they become a resonance chamber for existential experiences, far removed from any idyll.

‘I don't know what it means that I am so sad; a fairy tale from ancient times that I cannot get out of my mind.’ So laments the Rhine boatman in Heine's song of the Loreley. The boatman is badly affected by the lure of the fairy tale from ancient times: he is swallowed up by the waves.

In our childhood memories, fairy tales are certainly enticingly eerie, but at the same time they are lucky charms, set in a world where anything is possible, where the miraculous reveals itself right before our eyes as a matter of course: talking and acting animals, animated objects, transformations of all kinds, ghostly beings, and almost always the victory of good over evil. In fairy tales, space can be overcome and time suspended. Above all, however, fairy tales completely reverse the order of the world: the weak turn out to be the strong, the stupid the clever, and the rejected and oppressed the chosen and free. And so we ourselves were strong and had a pleasantly thrilling interaction with all kinds of riff-raff. Fairy tales gave us wings that carried us ‘over our northern cliffs and northern capes into warm gardens,’ as Jean Paul put it. Heine's verses and Jean Paul's texts belong to the Romantic era.

As old as the fairy tales and old sages may be, their romantic fans were youthful: they were a crowd of exuberant young people, full of contempt for the dry, rational late Enlightenment and the old traditions, which they literally discarded. Their spirited spirit of optimism was directed against established forms of education and  lifestyles. They had grand ideas for a new universal romantic art form and collected everything they could find in the so-called folk tradition of old songs and stories. For in these orally and anonymously transmitted testimonies, they saw an original and unspoilt poetry that ‘comes purely from the heart into words’ (Jakob Grimm).

This is how the song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn) by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano came into being. The two young students were inspired to write it during a trip together on the Rhine, passing the mythical Loreley rock, which Brentano and later Heine sang about. There they discovered the German landscape and the natural poetry slumbering within it, the poetic folk spirit, which they called ‘innocence’. And these songs are indeed “innocent”, carefree in their disregard for morality, logic, order and law. They deal in a very elementary way with everything that belongs to life, and in doing so they unhesitatingly relate the most heterogeneous things to each other: the everyday and the mythical, love and abandonment, life and death.

Between 1805 and 1808, the two “song brothers” edited three volumes of Des Knaben Wunderhorn – Alte deutsche Lieder (Old German Songs), which they themselves worked on extensively to strengthen the romantic spirit, much to the displeasure of the collaborating Grimm brothers, who were just twenty years old at the time. From 1812 onwards, they published their own collection, the famous Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales). Politically, these were dark years in Germany, with Napoleon's troops sweeping across Europe like a storm. And so the collections also had a patriotic purpose: as resistance against the conquerors.

Almost exactly 100 years later, as long as Sleeping Beauty's enchanted slumber, a new generation of artists, sometimes called neo-Romantics, took a liking to old songs and fairy tales and attempted to detach them from the now conventional tradition of male choirs and nurseries. Why this revival? Once again, these were turbulent years, with enormous acceleration in technological development, which at the same time meant alienation from industrially exploited nature, and with the threat of war on the horizon. And once again, the artistic awakening that rebelled against this was, as so often, a return to old ways and forms. Artistic fairy tales were en vogue, for example those by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in which, however – unlike most traditional folk tales – nothing friendly and wonderful happens, but instead a disturbing stranger bursts in with a fantastic twist.

In Vienna, that laboratory of modernity, art and science turned to the provinces of the uncanny, the unconscious and the inaccessible, which were not governed by reason. The Art Nouveau movement and the cult of life sought to transform all aspects of life, moving away from restrictive social orders towards a free life in harmony with nature, conceived as a return to origins. And in keeping with the Romantics, the later Viennese opera director Gustav Mahler professed his fascination with the songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn: the songs were not ‘literary poetry’ but ‘more nature and life – the sources of all poetry’. His selection confirms that it was precisely the lively and untamed diversity, the quirky and oblique references and the witty, illogical leaps that inspired his compositions: ‘It's like suddenly looking at the side of the moon that's turned away from us.’

Maurice Ravel also followed the trend of reviving old fairy tale traditions in his fairy tale composition Ma mère l’Oye from 1908 as piano music and in 1911 as a ballet, performed by the Ballets Russes under Sergei Djagilev. Ravel, however, draws on older French traditions from the 17th century. And these have nothing to do with German sincerity and cosiness. Rather, it is the courtly code of Versailles that has found its way into the old fairy tales, mainly through Charles Perrault's adaptation, and determines the rules of etiquette with its “bon sens” and “bon goût”; for example, when the prince in La Belle au bois dormant finds Sleeping Beauty's hundred-year-old dress similar to his grandmother's, but does not say so out of politeness. Such charming social realism would be unthinkable in the Brothers Grimm's version. But this brings a breath of fresh air to the magical world, which can be heard in Ravel's music.

In 1911, the year of the premiere of Ravel's ballet and the year of Mahler's death, Hofmannsthal noted: ‘Dance makes you blissfully free. Revealed freedom, identity.’ Ballet, this wordless form of theatre made only for the pleasure of the eyes and music, should also enable the audience to experience the enchantment that connects us to the depths of our selves. Hofmannsthal's Josephslegende with music by Richard Strauss was also premiered by the Ballets Russes in Paris in May 1914. A month later, the shots in Sarajevo brought such European encounters to an abrupt end. The destructive events that followed left the old fairy tales and songs unscathed. For, as Jean Paul, who was highly esteemed by Mahler, put it, they are ‘not a flat mirror of the present, but the magic mirror of a time that is no longer.’

Author: Elsbeth Dangel-Pelloquin