Lenore (ballad)
Encyclopedia
Lenore, sometimes translated as Leonora, Leonore or Ellenore, is a poem written by German
author Gottfried August Bürger
in 1773, and published in 1774 in the Göttinger Musenalmanach
. Lenore is generally characterised as being part of the 18th century Gothic
ballads, and although the character that returns from its grave in the poem is not considered to be a vampire
, the poem has been very influential on vampire literature. William Taylor, who published the first English translation of the ballad, would later claim that "no German poem has been so repeatedly translated into English as Ellenore".
and the Enlightenment
, Latin and French
dominated over the German language
, and German literature
had mostly been modelled after French
and Italian literature
. These factors lead few scholars to recognize the existence of a distinct German culture
or literature.
In order to gain acknowledgement for the German language and thus acquire a distinctively German literary tradition from which it would be possible to get a sense of nationality, philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder
believed that it was necessary to preserve German idioms, for they are the element that gives a language its idiosyncrasies and distinguishes it from other languages:
After reading Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
by Thomas Percy and James Macpherson
's Ossianic poems, Herder thought the means through which Germany could create a unique literature of its own would be to collect folk songs among the lower classes of Germany:
Bürger answered Herder's plea by publishing Lenore, which had been suggested to him by a Low German
Volkslied, similar to the Scottish
ballad of Sweet William's Ghost
collected in Percy's Reliques. William Taylor has also compared Lenore to "an obscure English ballad called The Suffolk Miracle
", in which a young man appears to his sweetheart, who has no knowledge that he had already passed away, and carries her on horseback for forty miles until the man complains he has a headache, which leads the maid to tie her handkerchief around his head. After they depart, the young maid returns home and is informed by her father that her lover had in fact died, whereupon he goes to the young man's grave and digs up the bones, finding that his daughter's handkerchief is tied around the skull.
yet. Ever since he had gone to battle in the army of King Frederick
, Lenore has been impatiently worrying about William every day and longing for his return, but she has not heard any news from him. When the other warriors return from the war without William, she begins to quarrel with God
, complaining about His unfairness and proclaiming that He has never done her any good, which prompts her mother to ask for her daughter's forgiveness because she knows that such a thought is blasphemous and will condemn her to Hell
. Lenore's mother also suggests that William probably found another woman in Hungary
, and that Lenore should forget him.
At midnight, a mysterious stranger who looks like William knocks on the door searching for Lenore and asks her to accompany him on horseback to their marriage bed. Lenore happily gets on the stranger's black steed and the two ride at a frenetic pace, under the moonlight, along a path filled with eerie landscapes. Terrorised, Lenore demands to know why they are riding so fast, to which he responds that they are doing so because "the dead travel fast" ("die Todten reiten schnell"). Lenore asks William to "leave the dead alone" ("Laß sie ruhn, die Todten").
At sunrise, their journey ends and they arrive at the cemetery's doors. As the horse goes through the tombstones, the knight begins to lose its human appearance, and is revealed as Death
, a skeleton with scythe and hourglass. The marriage bed is shown to be the grave where, together with his shattered armour, William's skeleton lies. The ground beneath Lenore's feet begins to crumble and the spirits, dancing in the moonlight
, surround dying Lenore, declaring that "no one quarrels with God in Heaven" ("mit Gott im Himmel hadre nicht").
and a strong influence on the English ballad-writing revival of the 1790s. According to German language
scholar John George Robertson,
In a similar tone, English literature
scholar Marti Lee claims that:
Lenore was an immediate sensation in Germany
and was widely translated into different languages, which brought it a great deal of popularity in many European countries and the United States, and also generated numerous "imitations, parodies, [and] adaptations". Its first English translation was published in March 1796, when William Taylor's rendering of the ballad, Ellenore, appeared in the Monthly Magazine. The translation, however, was completed in 1790, and it had already been "declaimed, applauded and much discussed in Norwich
literary circles".
After Walter Scott
heard how enthusiastically a crowd at Dugald Stewart
's house had reacted to a reading of Taylor's version done by Anna Laetitia Barbauld
, he attempted to acquire a manuscript of Bürger's original. In 1794, when he had finally received one, he was so impressed by it that he made his own rendering, William and Helen, in less than a day. Scott's version was passed from hand to hand, and was extremely well received. In 1796, three new English translations were published by William Robert Spencer
, Henry James Pye
and John Thomas Stanley. Translations by James Beresford
and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
were published in 1800 and 1844, respectively, and both have been hailed as the most faithful translations of Bürger's original work.
Other notable translators of Lenore into English include Frederic Shoberl
, Julia Margaret Cameron
and John Oxenford
. Sigmund Zois and France Prešeren
translated the ballad into Slovenian
, while Vasily Zhukovsky
and Pavel Katenin
published translations in Russian
. A version in Italian
was made by Giovanni Berchet
and both Leopoldo Augusto de Cueto and Juan Valera made their own translations to Spanish
. Gérard de Nerval
, who was obsessed with the text, published five translations in French
, two in prose
and three in verse
.
Between 1797 and 1800, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
wrote Christabel, which according to to some German critics was influenced by Bürger's Lenore. Percy Bysshe Shelley
was also impressed by Lenore and treasured a copy of the poem which he had handwritten himself. Shelley biographer Charles S. Middleton further suggests that "it is hinted, somewhat plausibly, that the Leonora of Bürgher first awakened his poetic faculty. A tale of such beauty and terror might well have kindled his lively imagination". Influences of Bürger's poem on "Monk" Lewis, John Keats
and William Wordsworth
have also been noted, and some of its verses have been used by other authors on their own works. The verse die Todten Reiten schnell ("The dead travel fast") is also particularly famous for being cited by Bram Stoker
in the early chapters of his novel Dracula
(1897). The verse Laß sie ruhn, die Todten ("Leave the dead in peace") and the poem would later inspire a story of the same title by Ernst Raupach.
's Symphony No.5, named Lenore, one of his best-regarded works and which he finished writing in 1872, has been described by pianist Donald Ellman as "a most important pivotal work between early and late-romantic styles". In 1874, Henri Duparc wrote his symphonic poem
Lénore, which was then arranged for two pianos by Camille Saint-Saëns
and for piano duet by César Franck
. Musicologist Julien Tiersot
called it "one of the best models of its kind". Between 1857 and 1858, Franz Liszt
wrote his first melodrama, Lenore, based on Bürger's ballad. Maria Theresia von Paradis also composed a ballad for voice
and piano in 1789 based on Lenore.
Lenore has also inspired several illustrations by a large number of notable artists, including Carl Oesterley
, Daniel Chodowiecki
, Ary Scheffer
, Horace Vernet
, Johann Christian Ruhl, Hermann Pluddemann
, Johann Heinrich Ramberg
, Louis Boulanger
, Otto Schubert, Eugen Napoleon Neureuther
, Karl Friedrich Lessing
, Frank Kirchbach, Georg Emanuel Opiz, William Blake
, Franz Stassen, Franz Kolbrand, Octave Penguilly L'Haridon, Wilhelm Emelé
, Alfred Elmore
and Frank Stone
. Lady Diana Beauclerk
's depictions of the ballad were published in William Robert Spencer's rendering, while Daniel Maclise
and Moritz Retzsch
illustrated Julia Margaret Cameron and Frederic Shoberl's translations, respectively.
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
author Gottfried August Bürger
Gottfried August Bürger
Gottfried August Bürger was a German poet. His ballads were very popular in Germany. His most noted ballad, Lenore, found an audience beyond readers of the German language in an English adaptation and a French translation.-Biography:He was born in Molmerswende , Principality of Halberstadt, where...
in 1773, and published in 1774 in the Göttinger Musenalmanach
Göttinger Musenalmanach
Göttinger Musenalmanach was the title of two different literary magazines published in Göttingen, Germany, one running from 1770 to 1807, the other 1896 to 1953...
. Lenore is generally characterised as being part of the 18th century Gothic
Gothic fiction
Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story"...
ballads, and although the character that returns from its grave in the poem is not considered to be a vampire
Vampire
Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person...
, the poem has been very influential on vampire literature. William Taylor, who published the first English translation of the ballad, would later claim that "no German poem has been so repeatedly translated into English as Ellenore".
Background
In the 18th century there were more than eighteen hundred different German-speaking political entities in Central Europe. During this period, due to influences from the RenaissanceRenaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
and the Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
, Latin and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
dominated over the German language
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, and German literature
German literature
German literature comprises those literary texts written in the German language. This includes literature written in Germany, Austria, the German part of Switzerland, and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora. German literature of the modern period is mostly in Standard German, but there...
had mostly been modelled after French
French literature
French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in French language, by citizens...
and Italian literature
Italian literature
Italian literature is literature written in the Italian language, particularly within Italy. It may also refer to literature written by Italians or in Italy in other languages spoken in Italy, often languages that are closely related to modern Italian....
. These factors lead few scholars to recognize the existence of a distinct German culture
Culture of Germany
German culture began long before the rise of Germany as a nation-state and spanned the entire German-speaking world. From its roots, culture in Germany has been shaped by major intellectual and popular currents in Europe, both religious and secular...
or literature.
In order to gain acknowledgement for the German language and thus acquire a distinctively German literary tradition from which it would be possible to get a sense of nationality, philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism.-Biography:...
believed that it was necessary to preserve German idioms, for they are the element that gives a language its idiosyncrasies and distinguishes it from other languages:
"The idioms are the elegances of which no neighbor can deprive us and they are sacred to the tutelary goddess of the language. They are the elegances woven into the spirit of the language, and this spirit is destroyed if they are taken out. [...] Take the idiomatic out of a language and you take its spirit and power. [...] The idioms of the time of the Meistersänger, of Opitz and Logau, of LutherMartin LutherMartin Luther was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517...
, etc. should be collected [...] And if they are good for nothing else they will at least open the way to the student of the language so he can understand the genius of the nationality, and explain one by the other. The idioms of every language are the impressions of its country, its nationality, its history."
After reading Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry is a collection of ballads and popular songs collected by Thomas Percy and published in 1765.-Sources:...
by Thomas Percy and James Macpherson
James Macpherson
James Macpherson was a Scottish writer, poet, literary collector and politician, known as the "translator" of the Ossian cycle of poems.-Early life:...
's Ossianic poems, Herder thought the means through which Germany could create a unique literature of its own would be to collect folk songs among the lower classes of Germany:
"It will remain eternally true that if we have no Volk, we shall have no public, no nationality, no literature of our own which shall live and work in us. Unless our literature if founded on our Volk, we shall write eternally for closet sages and disgusting critics out of whose mouths and stomachs we shall get back what we have given."
Bürger answered Herder's plea by publishing Lenore, which had been suggested to him by a Low German
Low German
Low German or Low Saxon is an Ingvaeonic West Germanic language spoken mainly in northern Germany and the eastern part of the Netherlands...
Volkslied, similar to the Scottish
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
ballad of Sweet William's Ghost
Sweet William's Ghost
Sweet William's Ghost is a folk song, collected by Francis James Child in 1868 as Child ballad number 77. It exists in many forms but all versions recount a similar story. It was printed in Allan Ramsay's The Tea-Table Miscellany in 1740, and again in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English...
collected in Percy's Reliques. William Taylor has also compared Lenore to "an obscure English ballad called The Suffolk Miracle
The Suffolk Miracle
-Synopsis:A young maiden of noble birth comes to love a young commoner, so her father sends her away. Whilst in exile, the maid wakes one night to find her lover at her window mounted upon a fine horse. They go out riding together until the man complains he has a headache; the maid tends to him and...
", in which a young man appears to his sweetheart, who has no knowledge that he had already passed away, and carries her on horseback for forty miles until the man complains he has a headache, which leads the maid to tie her handkerchief around his head. After they depart, the young maid returns home and is informed by her father that her lover had in fact died, whereupon he goes to the young man's grave and digs up the bones, finding that his daughter's handkerchief is tied around the skull.
Synopsis
Although the Battle of Prague is over, William, the fiancé of a young woman named Lenore, has not returned from the Seven Years' WarSeven Years' War
The Seven Years' War was a global military war between 1756 and 1763, involving most of the great powers of the time and affecting Europe, North America, Central America, the West African coast, India, and the Philippines...
yet. Ever since he had gone to battle in the army of King Frederick
Frederick II of Prussia
Frederick II was a King in Prussia and a King of Prussia from the Hohenzollern dynasty. In his role as a prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire, he was also Elector of Brandenburg. He was in personal union the sovereign prince of the Principality of Neuchâtel...
, Lenore has been impatiently worrying about William every day and longing for his return, but she has not heard any news from him. When the other warriors return from the war without William, she begins to quarrel with God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
, complaining about His unfairness and proclaiming that He has never done her any good, which prompts her mother to ask for her daughter's forgiveness because she knows that such a thought is blasphemous and will condemn her to Hell
Hell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
. Lenore's mother also suggests that William probably found another woman in Hungary
Kingdom of Hungary
The Kingdom of Hungary comprised present-day Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia , Transylvania , Carpatho Ruthenia , Vojvodina , Burgenland , and other smaller territories surrounding present-day Hungary's borders...
, and that Lenore should forget him.
At midnight, a mysterious stranger who looks like William knocks on the door searching for Lenore and asks her to accompany him on horseback to their marriage bed. Lenore happily gets on the stranger's black steed and the two ride at a frenetic pace, under the moonlight, along a path filled with eerie landscapes. Terrorised, Lenore demands to know why they are riding so fast, to which he responds that they are doing so because "the dead travel fast" ("die Todten reiten schnell"). Lenore asks William to "leave the dead alone" ("Laß sie ruhn, die Todten").
At sunrise, their journey ends and they arrive at the cemetery's doors. As the horse goes through the tombstones, the knight begins to lose its human appearance, and is revealed as Death
Death (personification)
The concept of death as a sentient entity has existed in many societies since the beginning of history. In English, Death is often given the name Grim Reaper and, from the 15th century onwards, came to be shown as a skeletal figure carrying a large scythe and clothed in a black cloak with a hood...
, a skeleton with scythe and hourglass. The marriage bed is shown to be the grave where, together with his shattered armour, William's skeleton lies. The ground beneath Lenore's feet begins to crumble and the spirits, dancing in the moonlight
Danse Macabre
Dance of Death, also variously called Danse Macabre , Danza de la Muerte , Dansa de la Mort , Danza Macabra , Dança da Morte , Totentanz , Dodendans , is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's...
, surround dying Lenore, declaring that "no one quarrels with God in Heaven" ("mit Gott im Himmel hadre nicht").
Reception and impact
Lenore had a profound effect on the development of Romantic literature throughout EuropeEurope
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
and a strong influence on the English ballad-writing revival of the 1790s. According to German language
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
scholar John George Robertson,
"[Lenore] exerted a more widespread influence than perhaps any other short poem in the literature of the world. [...] like wildfire, this remarkable ballad swept across Europe, from Scotland to PolandPolandPoland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
and RussiaRussiaRussia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
, from ScandinaviaScandinaviaScandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
to ItalyItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
. The eerie tramp of the ghostly horse which carries Lenore to her doom re-echoed in every literature, and to many a young sensitive soul was the revelation of a new world of poetry. No production of the German "Sturm und DrangSturm und DrangSturm und Drang is a proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s, in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism...
" - not even Goethe's WertherThe Sorrows of Young WertherThe Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774; a revised edition of the novel was published in 1787...
, which appeared a few months later - had such far-reaching effects on other literatures as Bürger's Lenore; it helped materially to call the Romantic movement in Europe to life."
In a similar tone, English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
scholar Marti Lee claims that:
"Lenore had tremendous influence on the literature of the late eighteenth- and early [n]ineteenth-centuries, and in fact, today's popular horror books and movies are still feeling the reverberations. [...] In short, Bürger’s achievement, while minor in itself, helped father an international movement that led directly to the massive popularity of Gothic works then and now. [...] As the Gothic novel borrowed many of its original conventions from the German ballads, as popularized by "Lenore," we can fairly say that Bürger is one of the most influential founding fathers of the Gothic and horror genres."
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and was widely translated into different languages, which brought it a great deal of popularity in many European countries and the United States, and also generated numerous "imitations, parodies, [and] adaptations". Its first English translation was published in March 1796, when William Taylor's rendering of the ballad, Ellenore, appeared in the Monthly Magazine. The translation, however, was completed in 1790, and it had already been "declaimed, applauded and much discussed in Norwich
Norwich
Norwich is a city in England. It is the regional administrative centre and county town of Norfolk. During the 11th century, Norwich was the largest city in England after London, and one of the most important places in the kingdom...
literary circles".
After Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
heard how enthusiastically a crowd at Dugald Stewart
Dugald Stewart
Dugald Stewart was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and mathematician. His father, Matthew Stewart , was professor of mathematics in the University of Edinburgh .-Life and works:...
's house had reacted to a reading of Taylor's version done by Anna Laetitia Barbauld
Anna Laetitia Barbauld
Anna Laetitia Barbauld was a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and children's author.A "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career at a time when female professional writers were rare...
, he attempted to acquire a manuscript of Bürger's original. In 1794, when he had finally received one, he was so impressed by it that he made his own rendering, William and Helen, in less than a day. Scott's version was passed from hand to hand, and was extremely well received. In 1796, three new English translations were published by William Robert Spencer
William Robert Spencer
William Robert Spencer , English poet and wit, was the younger son of Lord Charles Spencer and his wife Mary Beauclerk. He was the grandson of Charles Spencer, 3rd Duke of Marlborough on his father's side and Vere Beauclerk, 1st Baron Vere on his mother's...
, Henry James Pye
Henry James Pye
Henry James Pye was an English poet. Pye was Poet Laureate from 1790 until his death. He was the first poet laureate to receive a fixed salary of £27 instead of the historic tierce of Canary wine Henry James Pye (20 February 1745 – 11 August 1813) was an English poet. Pye was Poet Laureate...
and John Thomas Stanley. Translations by James Beresford
James Beresford
James Beresford was a writer and clergyman. He made translations and wrote religious books, but was chiefly known as the author of a satirical work, The Miseries of Human Life, considered to be a "minor classic in the genre".-Bibliography:This list of works is taken from Beresford's obituary,...
and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...
were published in 1800 and 1844, respectively, and both have been hailed as the most faithful translations of Bürger's original work.
Other notable translators of Lenore into English include Frederic Shoberl
Frederic Shoberl
Frederic Shoberl , also known as Frederick Schoberl, was an English journalist, editor, translator and writer. Schoberl edited Forget Me Not, the first literary annual, issued at Christmas "for 1823" and translated The Hunchback of Notre Dame.-Biography:Shoberl was born in London in 1775, and...
, Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary themes....
and John Oxenford
John Oxenford
John Oxenford , English dramatist, was born at Camberwell, London, England.-Life:He began his literary career by writing on finance...
. Sigmund Zois and France Prešeren
France Prešeren
France Prešeren was a Slovene Romantic poet. He is considered the Slovene national poet. Although he was not a particularly prolific author, he inspired virtually all Slovene literature thereafter....
translated the ballad into Slovenian
Slovenian language
Slovene or Slovenian is a South Slavic language spoken by approximately 2.5 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia. It is the first language of about 1.85 million people and is one of the 23 official and working languages of the European Union...
, while Vasily Zhukovsky
Vasily Zhukovsky
Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky was the foremost Russian poet of the 1810s and a leading figure in Russian literature in the first half of the 19th century...
and Pavel Katenin
Pavel Katenin
Pavel Aleksandrovich Katenin , , was a belated Russian classicist poet, dramatist, and literary critic who also contributed to the evolution of Russian Romanticism....
published translations in Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
. A version in Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
was made by Giovanni Berchet
Giovanni Berchet
Giovanni Berchet was an Italian poet and patriot. He wrote an influential manifesto on Italian Romanticism, Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo, which appeared in 1816, and contributed to Il Conciliatore, a reformist periodical....
and both Leopoldo Augusto de Cueto and Juan Valera made their own translations to Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
. Gérard de Nerval
Gérard de Nerval
Gérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets.- Biography :...
, who was obsessed with the text, published five translations in French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, two in prose
Prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
and three in verse
Verse (poetry)
A verse is formally a single line in a metrical composition, e.g. poetry. However, the word has come to represent any division or grouping of words in such a composition, which traditionally had been referred to as a stanza....
.
Between 1797 and 1800, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
wrote Christabel, which according to to some German critics was influenced by Bürger's Lenore. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
was also impressed by Lenore and treasured a copy of the poem which he had handwritten himself. Shelley biographer Charles S. Middleton further suggests that "it is hinted, somewhat plausibly, that the Leonora of Bürgher first awakened his poetic faculty. A tale of such beauty and terror might well have kindled his lively imagination". Influences of Bürger's poem on "Monk" Lewis, John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
and William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
have also been noted, and some of its verses have been used by other authors on their own works. The verse die Todten Reiten schnell ("The dead travel fast") is also particularly famous for being cited by Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker
Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula...
in the early chapters of his novel Dracula
Dracula
Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker.Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to relocate from Transylvania to England, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor...
(1897). The verse Laß sie ruhn, die Todten ("Leave the dead in peace") and the poem would later inspire a story of the same title by Ernst Raupach.
Adaptations
In 1828, Karl von Holtei wrote Lenore, a dramatization of Bürger's ballad which achieved great popularity. Several composers have written pieces based on, or inspired by, Lenore. Joachim RaffJoachim Raff
Joseph Joachim Raff was a German-Swiss composer, teacher and pianist.-Biography:Raff was born in Lachen in Switzerland. His father, a teacher, had fled there from Württemberg in 1810 to escape forced recruitment into the military of that southwestern German state that had to fight for Napoleon in...
's Symphony No.5, named Lenore, one of his best-regarded works and which he finished writing in 1872, has been described by pianist Donald Ellman as "a most important pivotal work between early and late-romantic styles". In 1874, Henri Duparc wrote his symphonic poem
Symphonic poem
A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music in a single continuous section in which the content of a poem, a story or novel, a painting, a landscape or another source is illustrated or evoked. The term was first applied by Hungarian composer Franz Liszt to his 13 works in this vein...
Lénore, which was then arranged for two pianos by Camille Saint-Saëns
Camille Saint-Saëns
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...
and for piano duet by César Franck
César Franck
César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life....
. Musicologist Julien Tiersot
Julien Tiersot
Julien Tiersot born in Bourg-en-Bresse on 5 July 1857 and died in Paris on 10 August 1936, was a French musicologist, composer and a pioneer in ethnomusicology.- Biography :...
called it "one of the best models of its kind". Between 1857 and 1858, Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...
wrote his first melodrama, Lenore, based on Bürger's ballad. Maria Theresia von Paradis also composed a ballad for voice
Vocal music
Vocal music is a genre of music performed by one or more singers, with or without instrumental accompaniment, in which singing provides the main focus of the piece. Music which employs singing but does not feature it prominently is generally considered instrumental music Vocal music is a genre of...
and piano in 1789 based on Lenore.
Lenore has also inspired several illustrations by a large number of notable artists, including Carl Oesterley
Carl Oesterley
Carl Wilhelm Friedrich Oesterley was a German painter and art historian who was a native of Göttingen. He is remembered largely for creating oil paintings with Biblical themes, and was the father of landscape painter Carl August Heinrich Ferdinand Oesterley .He studied archaeology, philosophy and...
, Daniel Chodowiecki
Daniel Chodowiecki
Daniel Niklaus Chodowiecki was a Polish - German painter and printmaker with Huguenot ancestry, who is most famous as an etcher...
, Ary Scheffer
Ary Scheffer
Ary Scheffer , French painter of Dutch and German extraction, was born in Dordrecht.-Life:After the early death of his father Johann Baptist, a poor painter, Ary's mother Cornelia, herself a painter and daughter of landscapist Arie Lamme, took him to Paris and placed him in the studio of...
, Horace Vernet
Horace Vernet
Émile Jean-Horace Vernet was a French painter of battles, portraits, and Orientalist Arab subjects.Vernet was born to Carle Vernet, another famous painter, who was himself a son of Claude Joseph Vernet. He was born in the Paris Louvre, while his parents were staying there during the French...
, Johann Christian Ruhl, Hermann Pluddemann
Hermann Pluddemann
Hermann Friedhold Pluddemann, German historical painter, was born at Colberg in 1809. His first master was Seig in Magdeburg, and in 1828 he entered the studio of Carl Joseph Begas in Berlin, and went in 1831 to Düsseldorf, to the atelier of Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow, with whom he remained six years...
, Johann Heinrich Ramberg
Johann Heinrich Ramberg
Johann Heinrich Ramberg was a German painter and printmaker.Ramberg was born at Hanover to a father who fostered his artistic talent. He first showed his talent by drawings of scenes in the Harz Mountains. These became known to George III, king of England, his sovereign, since he was also...
, Louis Boulanger
Louis Boulanger
Louis Boulanger was a French Romantic painter, lithographer and illustrator.-Life:He enrolled in 1821 at the École des beaux-arts where he attended the workshop of Guillaume Guillon Lethière and received a solid classical training. Next he made a présentation for the prix de Rome, in 1824, in...
, Otto Schubert, Eugen Napoleon Neureuther
Eugen Napoleon Neureuther
Eugen Napoleon Neureuther was a German painter, etcher, and illustrator.Born in Munich, Germany, he was the son and pupil of the painter Ludwig Neureuther . He also studied at the Munich Academy under Wilhelm von Kobell...
, Karl Friedrich Lessing
Karl Friedrich Lessing
Karl Friedrich Lessing was a German historical and landscape painter, grandnephew of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He was born near Breslau, and was a pupil of Heinrich Anton Dähling at the Berlin Academy. He first devoted himself to landscape and in 1826 obtained a prize with his Cemetery in Ruins...
, Frank Kirchbach, Georg Emanuel Opiz, William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
, Franz Stassen, Franz Kolbrand, Octave Penguilly L'Haridon, Wilhelm Emelé
Wilhelm Emelé
Wilhelm Emelé was a German painter of horses, military scenes and hunting scenes.-Biography:...
, Alfred Elmore
Alfred Elmore
Alfred Elmore was a Victorian history and genre painter. He was born in Cork, Ireland, the son of Dr. John Richard Elmore, a surgeon who retired from the British Army to Clonakilty....
and Frank Stone
Frank Stone
Frank Stone , was an English painter. He was born in Manchester, and was entirely self-taught.He was elected an associate of the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1833 and member in 1843; and an associate of the Royal Academy in 1851.The works he first exhibited at the Academy were portraits,...
. Lady Diana Beauclerk
Lady Diana Beauclerk
Not to be confused with the 20th-century Princess of Wales of the same maiden nameLady Diana Beauclerk was an English noblewoman and artist....
's depictions of the ballad were published in William Robert Spencer's rendering, while Daniel Maclise
Daniel Maclise
Daniel Maclise was an Irish history, literary and portrait painter, and illustrator, who worked for most of his life in London, England.-Early life:...
and Moritz Retzsch
Moritz Retzsch
Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch was a German painter, draughtsman, and etcher.Retzsch was born in the Saxon capital Dresden. He joined the Dresden Academy of Arts in 1798 under Cajetan Toscani and Józef Grassi, later working autodidactically, copying the famous pictures of the Gemäldegalerie,...
illustrated Julia Margaret Cameron and Frederic Shoberl's translations, respectively.
External links
- Kamila Vránková, Variations and Transformations of the 'Lenore' Motif in European Ballads
- Oliver Farrar Emerson, The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore: A Study in English and German Romanticism
- Peter Drews, G.A. Bürger's Lenore in the Slavic (pre-)Romantic era