Let Your Being Be

Duino Elegies 

and The Sonnets to Orpheus 

by Rainer Maria Rilke

“Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

My introduction to Rilke was through his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, where he introduces many of the themes that permeate the Elegies and Sonnets. Here we find references to alienation, fear, poverty, loneliness, art, disease, and death. Yet even with death there is great beauty and soaring poetry even in translation (especially fine by Stephen Mitchell).

Rilke creates powerful yet elegant poetic odes to the majesty of the human experience and its relationship to the external world in this comprehensive translation of two major works. A realm in which the human being exists in a state of perplexity and struggle. I was fascinated by the ideas of death as an other, the "terrible rival" from the notebooks, and a meditation on the fear of death as well as death overcome. The great joy of learning to be yourself and enjoy your being; what I call a will to relax and "let your being be". The many aspects of love that appear both as desire and as a rival for the work of the artist.

Through it all we find the poet "learning to see" with a new will and a new being. There were moments I was reminded of Nietzsche's Zarathrustra, and of course Orpheus and and other myths from Ovid along with the Bible and other literary resonances. Above all I came to accept Rilke's admonishment for us to go ahead and become "beginners". To begin is to begin to create and will your being and ultimately your life, even in the face of death.

Poem for Meditation

Sonnet #116




How oft, when thou, my music, music play'st,
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway'st
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,
Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap,
At the wood's boldness by thee blushing stand!
To be so tickled, they would change their state
And situation with those dancing chips,
O'er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more blest than living lips.
Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.


The use of music and the delight in the dance make this one of my favorite sonnets.  But Shakespeare adds to the fun with his envy of the nimble "jacks" and his wish that it would be his lips and not the lute that would be tickled by her kiss.   It is reminiscent of the part in Taming of the Shrew where Kate calls her music tutor “rascal fiddler and twangling jack.”  She was not an enthusiastic musician.

Poem for Meditation

Sonnet #116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Every morning I receive a Sonnet from Shakespeare by email.  I usually peruse the sonnet briefly and then move on, but on some days the Sonnet, usually in the very first line, grabs my attention and holds my mind -- I must reread and think some more about this one.  Love is not an uncommon topic of Shakespeare's sonnets.  Some of the best, Sonnets 29 or 16 come to mind, and some of the rest touch on this topic.  In Sonnet 116 we have a declaration of love that defines the boundaries of the human mind. 

 What is this love? 

It is a marriage of minds; 

it is unaltering, we find,

and an  unbending kind 

of beaming star.

It is fixed in its goal --

Not shaken by rift nor shoal.

Time's love's neither reaping nor reeling,

And as clocks tick we survive the feeling

of loss.

These thoughts are said so much better by Shakespeare and as stated deserve the strength of his concluding lines:  "If this be error . . . I never writ, nor no man ever loved."

Sonnet for Monday Morning

It is a beautiful sunny day, finally, in Chicago.  This Sonnet from Shakespeare seems appropriate for our Chicago weather is nothing if not changeable.  So in that spirit here is Shakespeare forthwith:

XXXIV.

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
'Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss:
The offender's sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offence's cross.
Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.

Sonnets from Petrarch

*

Three Sonnets of Petrarch

Pace non trovo

Benedetto sia'l giorno

I' vidi in terra angelici costumi

Composed between 1838-42; the sonnets from Petrarch by Franz Liszt were first published in Vienna by Haslinger in 1846.  Liszt actually transcribed a solo piano version and published it before the vocal one.  A revised piano transcription was published in 1858 as a part of Années II
He based his compositions on the sonnets 47, 104 and 123 of Petrarch (1304-1374)… (see below for translations).  Liszt is traditionally seen as a representative of the German, and perhaps New German, school of composition.  He can be seen as a Romantic and in his later years a precursor to the "Impressionism" of Debussy and others.  In fact, when Liszt's songs are discussed, scholars focus mostly on Liszt's lieder.  His best-known biographer, Alan Walker, finds in Liszt the "missing link" between Schumann and Mahler (Walker, Reflections on Liszt, p 150).  Liszt might have been influenced by the Italian style of composition many times throughout his life: with his father during his first world tour, watching opera in Paris, in addition to obviously traveling with Marie d'Agoult.  Over the course of his life Liszt constantly wrote bel canto works however most were not vocal pieces.  
The texts of the sonnets describe Petrarch's love for a woman named Laura; This Laura might have been a real person (Laura de Noves), or might possibly be a fictional character.  According to Petrarch Laura was a married woman; the poetry reflects this unattainable aspect of his love.   Commentators have noted that Petrarch's poetry, unlike the sylized poems of courtly love, is an original stylistic synthesis of intense, personal, and oftentimes conflicting emotions.
In general the text of the poetry inspires the music.  These works represent an entirely different, bel canto, aspect to Liszt's compositional style.  This is in contrast to works like the Mephisto Waltz.  Bel canto is usually described as "Music that requires 1) a display of virtuosity; 2) a large vocal range, and particularly for higher voices; 3) a lyric, legato, melodically-based line (rather than a more declamatory, text-driven, Germanic style); 4) regular phrase structure with a climax occurring in the third unit of a larger group of phrases; 5) written in the style of Italian opera composers from the late 18th and early 19th centuries Liszt writes 2 appropriate cadenzas.  Both the repetition of words (a feature not found in the poetry) and placing important words on very high notes heighten the dramatic sense and emphasize the "beauty of sound" and "brilliance of performance".  Melodic lines feature numerous nonharmonic tones, while occasional coloristic, almost word-painting effects.  
Liszt wrote program music throughout his life irrespective of whether he was specifically ‘portraying’ a chosen subject in his music. This applies to his whole life’s work, which cannot be divided up and categorized artificially with respect to programmatic composition. It applies as much to his sacred as to his secular music, to his instrumental as to his vocal settings, to the numerous genres in which he composed, and to the various phases of his stylistic development.  


Sonnet 47

Blest be the day, and blest the month, the year,
The spring, the hour, the very moment blest,
The lovely scene, the spot, where first oppress'd
I sunk, of two bright eyes the prisoner:
And blest the first soft pang, to me most dear,
Which thrill'd my heart, when Love became its guest;
And blest the bow, the shafts which pierced my breast,
And even the wounds, which bosom'd thence I bear.
Blest too the strains which, pour'd through glade and grove,
Have made the woodlands echo with her name;
The sighs, the tears, the languishment, the love:
And blest those sonnets, sources of my fame;
And blest that thought—Oh! never to remove!
Which turns to her alone, from her alone which came.

Wrangham

Sonnet 104

I fynde no peace and all my warre is done,
I feare and hope, I bourne and freese lyke yse;
I flye above the wynde, yet cannot ryse;
And nought I have, yet all the worlde I season,
That looseth, nor lacketh, holdes me in pryson,
And holdes me not, yet can I escape no wyse.
Nor lets me leeve, nor die at my devyce,
And yet of death it giveth none occasion.
Without eye I see, and without tongue I playne;
I desyre to perishe, yet aske I health;
I love another, and yet I hate my self;
I feede in sorrow and laughe in all my payne,
Lykewyse pleaseth me both death and lyf,
And my delight is cawser of my greif.

Wyatt

Sonnet 123

On earth reveal'd the beauties of the skies,
Angelic features, it was mine to hail;
Features, which wake my mingled joy and wail,
While all besides like dreams or shadows flies.
And fill'd with tears I saw those two bright eyes,
Which oft have turn'd the sun with envy pale;
And from those lips I heard—oh! such a tale,
As might awake brute Nature's sympathies!
Wit, pity, excellence, and grief, and love
With blended plaint so sweet a concert made,
As ne'er was given to mortal ear to prove:
And heaven itself such mute attention paid,
That not a breath disturb'd the listening grove—
Even æther's wildest gales the tuneful charm obey'd.

Wrangham

(The Sonnets, courtesy of Project Gutenberg)

* Petrarch and Laura