Josephine Lang

Dear friends of piano music,

I have noticed that I write about my grandma quite a lot. She was a very clever and brave woman, wise to live and with an educated heart. Otherwise she was completely uneducated, because I come from Prussian farmers, and all that counted was practical skills, bravery and punctuality. Anyone who, like my grandmother, wore glasses - my ancestors were blind as a mole, like me - was forbidden to read books in order not to endanger their poor eyesight. That is why I mostly remember very short, concise and very true sentences from my grandmother, such as: After the war there weren't that many men - on the subject of choosing a partner. At that time, however, the following sentence was almost even more shocking: You used to marry a farm. Where's the love in that, I thought. This pure pragmatism struck me as cruel. But of course it made sense - in my family too. After losing his farm in what is now Poland, my grandpa married my grandma, the court heiress in Brandenburg. They still loved each other - by the luck of fate - but often these property-preserving reason marriages are certainly also very unfortunate arrangements, which, however, guarantee material security and a livelihood for the family.

In the life of Josephine Lang, the romantic Lied composer, we find a very interesting example of the exact opposite, which is so touching, so romantic, so incredibly complicated and at the same time so sad that I would like to try to reproduce it here. It is not about the love story of Josephine and her husband, the law professor and poet Reinhold Köstlin, but of Josephine and Wilhelm von Eichthal. They met in Munich when Josephine was 15 years old and had been working as a piano teacher for three years after her mother's death. At first she doesn't like Wilhelm, because an ironic remark on his part has offended her tender disposition. Wilhelm, who is ten years older than her, is magically attracted by her outstanding talent and has extensive correspondence with Felix Mendelssohn about it. Wilhelm worries that bad influences and a lack of musical training could impair Josephine's development and tries to send her to the Mendelssohns in Berlin, but does not get permission from Josephine's father. Meanwhile, Josephine's initial aversion and shyness towards him seems to have turned into affection, and both are apparently trying to understand their feelings for each other. One ponders, one hesitates, and in order to gain clarity, Wilhelm goes to Greece, then to Turkey, and later to New York. They write love letters to each other, full of longing, full of regret, Josephine composes her autobiographical songs - an unhappy love is often much more fruitful for art than a happy one. Finally Josephine married Reinhold Köstlin in 1842, von Eichthal died in New York in 1847 at the age of 42. Isn't that shocking? But it teaches, I find, so much about the mind of the romantics. Feelings, very strong feelings that are reflected and especially communicated in letters. Years of reflection in order to be clear about the type of feeling for one another, longing, procrastination. Josephine suffers greatly from the spatial separation and she mourns Wilhelm, even if she has been married to Reinhold for five years. A romantic, unfulfilled and futile love. But you can also look at it pragmatically - during her years as a wife Josephine did not compose anything, before that she was very productive and after Reinhold's death in 1856 she began her artistic work again. It is still difficult to combine work and family today; in the 19th century it was not even wanted. So if Josephine had married Wilhelm von Eichthal as a young girl - who knows whether she would have ever composed anything.

Kerstin

Picture: Von Autor unbekannt - Scan eines Privatfotos im genealogischen Archiv Hans-Thorald Michaelis sowie in: "Musik und Gender im Internet": http://mugi.hfmt-hamburg.de/grundseite/grundseite.php?id=lang1815, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5119914