George Hunka

Tales of two cities: Vienna / Philadelphia

Author: George Hunka

  • Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

    Gustav Mahler.

    In a passage that I quoted yesterday from his book Germania, Simon Winder mentions Gustav Mahler’s song “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (1901-1902), based on the poem by Friedrich Rückert. He called it “the greatest” of 19th century German songs, “a work of such richness that it can only be listened to under highly controlled circumstances.” He is off by a year or two, but let’s be open-minded. It won’t hurt.

    It would be chary of me not to post it here today, so control (highly) your circumstances and enjoy this 1989 performance of the song by Jessye Norman, accompanied by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic. The original poem and a translation follows the video.

    Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen
    Friedrich Rückert

    Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,
    Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben,
    Sie hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen,
    Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben!
    Es ist mir auch gar nichts daran gelegen,
    Ob sie mich für gestorben hält,
    Ich kann auch gar nichts sagen dagegen,
    Denn wirklich bin ich gestorben der Welt.
    Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel,
    Und ruh’ in einem stillen Gebiet!
    Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel,
    In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!

    I am lost to the world
    English translation by Richard Stokes

    I am lost to the world
    With which I used to waste much time;
    It has for so long known nothing of me,
    It may well believe that I am dead.
    Nor am I at all concerned
    If it should think that I am dead.
    Nor can I deny it,
    For truly I am dead to the world.
    I am dead to the world’s tumult
    And rest in a quiet realm!
    I live alone in my heaven,
    In my love, in my song!

    Translation © Richard Stokes, author of The Book of Lieder (Faber, 2005)

  • Solitary tourism, in Vienna and elsewhere

    From Simon Winder’s delightful 2010 book Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History:

    Quite possibly the pleasure of this way of life would be much reduced in some other countries, particularly more insistently gregarious places such as Italy. German culture puts a high value on temporary solitude of a stagey kind. Perhaps this is its great gift. In some moods I think there is no need to do anything other than read German writers from the first half of the nineteenth century — a sort of inexhaustible storehouse of attitudes flattering to those who just like sometimes to be left alone. …

    The poetry on this subject stretches out to the most hazy, distant horizon and fed a century of German songs, culminating perhaps in the greatest of them all: Mahler’s setting of a Rückert poem, “I have lost track of the world with which I used to waste much time,” a work of such richness that it can only be listened to under highly controlled circumstances. The idea, whether in Goethe, Mörike, Rückert or Heine, is to be alone, in a wood, on a mountain, in some overpoweringly verdant garden, or just inside one’s head, almost always as a moment’s pause before plunging back into a world of love and normal human decisions. This tic is of course a bit unpolitical and some writers have seen it as passive in a way that implies a German malleability and failure to engage with disastrous implications for the future. But equally it is an anti-political, fiercely private stance, with a built-in resistance to fanaticism or mass manipulation. It seems hard on Schubert’s songs for them to be viewed as early danger signs of a failure to stand up to Nazism.

  • Women and the Russo-Ukrainian War

    A week ago, just a few days before the third anniversary of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, St. Martin’s Press published Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary, a collection of writings by the late Victoria Amelina. The book recounts Amelina’s attempts to document the war in Ukraine, attempts which were tragically cut short when she died, the victim of a Russian cruise missile, in a Donetsk restaurant in 2023. In a recent essay for the Guardian, her friend Charlotte Higgins called it “a precious, powerful work of literature: a steady beam of light born amid darkness and violence,” and in her introduction to the book Margaret Atwood describes the text as “intensely modern. It reminds us of — for instance — the Pessoa of The Book of Disquiet and the Beckett of Krapp’s Last Tape. Incompleteness draws us in: we long to supply what is missing.”

    A few days after Amelina was killed in 2023, I memorialized her on July 5 of that year with a post to this blog; that post appears below.

    When the time comes for the histories of the Russo-Ukrainian War to be written, historians will find a great many of the first-person accounts of the war to have been composed by women. The prose generated by these writers reveals a tough-as-nails approach to the violence of the war; perhaps the first drafts of these accounts can be found today on Twitter, on feeds by the likes of Olesya Khromeychuk and Dr. Olha Poliukhovych. Both of these women are academics, but both provide meditations on the war that reach deep into personal experience — both their own and ours, if we read deeply enough. (I also note that the best reporting to come out of Kyiv during the early days of the war was from the BBC’s Lyse Doucet.)

    The courage of these women is beyond dispute. Over the weekend Victoria Amelina, a writer who abandoned her interest in fiction at the start of the war to document war crimes and the lives of children in the war, was killed by the Russians in a Kramatorsk  missile attack on a restaurant, dying in Dnipro. She is far from the only artist to be killed in the conflict. It is only fitting that you take ten minutes to read her essay “Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened,” an undated meditation published by Arrowsmith Press. She writes:

    We still need to talk about the past. A lot. We can help each other mourn our dead, as Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht helped me and millions of others around the world, regardless of nationality.

    How can I return the favor? As a citizen of Lviv, I want to accept responsibility for the city’s past — with all its stories, beautiful and ugly, with all its guilt. As a writer what I can do is to listen to the silences rising from the city’s ground, and do my best to translate them into a tongue the living understand.

    To honor her memory and return the favor Amelina bestowed on us, we should listen to those silences too.

  • Three years

    Today marks the third anniversary of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Russia has inflicted over 12,456 Ukrainian civilian deaths and 28,382 injuries since then, while four million Ukrainians  are internally displaced and 6.8 million Ukrainians have fled the country.

    Any sovereign nation is entirely within its rights to determine whether or not to join economic or military alliances, such as the European Union or the North American Treaty Organization; this is a matter of international law. Realpolitik will always play its part in these decisions, but the government and citizens of that nation still retain the exclusive right to decide what institutions they decide to ally themselves with.

    It could be argued that Joe Biden wavered fatally in his support of Ukraine, but Donald J. Trump is idiot par excellence, willing to cozy up to bloodthirsty autocrats like Putin and sell Ukraine out to the highest bidder. So United States foreign policy, which at one time at least paid lip service to ideals of democracy and national sovereignty, has become greedily transactional, rewarding gross violations not only of international law but simple human decency. And this, it seems, is all right by most of the American electorate, as are attacks on such things as the right of individuals — also sovereign — to determine their own gender identity and assume that the government has their back, or diversity and equity initiatives that still reward meritorious individuals, or the moral obligation to provide assistance to the poor and unfortunate around the world, even if that assistance adds up to only 1% of the US budget. Trump and his minions may happily wallow in and take advantage of the creation of destruction and chaos, but it’s no way to run a country.

    I went to church yesterday, where the gospel reading was Luke 6:27-38 — most appropriate, this, and proof itself that these days even going to an Episcopal Church is something of a political protest. It’s Trump, and all those who voted for him (and those who sat the election out, passively granting their consent to his victory), who’s to blame.

    I’m sure I know many people who voted for Trump, whether they care to admit it or not. This vaguely nauseates me. I was born — back in the Pleistocene era — at Pennsylvania Hospital, 8th and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia, just three blocks from Independence Hall, and through my life I’ve admired what this country has stood for, not least Emma Lazarus’s sentiments engraved at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty in 1903. My grandparents when they arrived here saw that plaque, I think (my grandmother worked at Ellis Island as a nurse), though because their English was poor I’m not sure they could read it. In the past few years I’ve enjoyed reading about 18th-century American history, about the founders, and I’ve never had a problem with the idea that progress can be low: two steps forward one step back, and sometimes worse than that. I’m no revolutionary. And of course there was our founding sin (and the sin of those founders), slavery.

    But at least then, I could believe that this was still my country. It’s really not my country any more. The beacon of the free world, proud and courageous, is no longer Washington, DC, it seems; it’s Kyiv.

    Slava Ukraini. I wrote about my own Ukrainian roots here.

  • Dufourt / Nonken

    Hitting the streets tomorrow, Hugues Dufourt: L’Origine du monde, a new album of piano and percussion works by the French composer, is already garnering rave reviews. In the March issue of Gramophone, Arnold Whittall calls the performance of the title work, inspired by Gustave Courbet’s controversial 1866 painting now at the Musée d’Orsay, “an exceptionally assured and spellbinding demonstration of Dufourt’s uncompromising creative ambitions. … While Marilyn Nonken is the tirelessly resourceful pianist throughout, there are also vital contributions from the New York University Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Jonathan Haas.” Andy Hamilton in the British music magazine The Wire called it “a superb release. … In the works assembled here, physicality of performance is inseparable from musical sensuousness.”

    Divine Art’s release completes Marilyn’s informal, indeed unintended, trilogy of spectral music for piano, following her 2005 double-CD Tristan Murail: The Complete Piano Music and her 2012 Voix Voilées (this latter also includes her extraordinary performance of Dufourt’s Erlkönig), all of which garnered top-flight reviews. After all, she did write the book on the subject. The CD booklet contains an excellent essay by Will Mason on this music to get you up to speed, and the album will be available tomorrow on CD from Amazon, as well as streaming on a variety of outlets, including Apple Classical. Bon appétit!