Home > MMP > Iss. 5 (2024)
Document Type
Article
Abstract
In a chapter from German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century (1996), Jürgen Thym describes the historiography of the German Lied as “a hike through the high-peak area of a mountain landscape where the trail along the ridge leads from one glorious peak to the next.” Beneath the high peaks of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf, he notes, are smaller peaks not reachable by trail. Thym clears paths through this unexplored landscape by surveying the Lieder of Carl Loewe, Fanny Hensel, Franz Liszt, Robert Franz, Clara Schumann, and Peter Cornelius. My essay extends one of these paths, exploring the songs of Marie Hinrichs (1828–1891), who published only one song collection in 1846 (op. 1, Neun Gesänge). The songs of Hinrichs’s op. 1 are of extraordinary quality—as unassuming as they are affecting—and their quality was recognized by nineteenth-century critics. Studying them raises crucial questions about the obstacles to female creativity, and also about the premium that music analysts have placed on complexity and ingenuity, over and above the simplicity and restraint that define so many overlooked Lieder from this era. I focus on the first song of Hinrichs’s collection, “Du welker Dornenstrauch,” which is simple but nuanced—with four-bar phrases but a conflict between the notated and heard meter, and an easy block-chord accompaniment but a texture that places the song’s main motif in different configurations so that it sounds like a memory that returns in different forms. Hinrichs’s op. 1 vividly demonstrates that simplicity and sophistication are not mutually exclusive, and that amidst the mountaintops of the nineteenth-century Lied lie hidden clearings waiting to be discovered.
Recommended Citation
Rodgers, Stephen. “In Praise of Simplicity: Marie Hinrichs’s op. 1, Neun Gesänge.” Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal. Issue 5, article 2 (March 2024): 1–8.