Unv. 23 – Sketches for a song by Goethe: Heidenröslein.
I) The surviving fragments
II) H. E. Huss’s reconstruction
III) Graziano Denini’s reconstruction
Hess 150 – (Unv. 23) Sketches for a song by Goethe: Heidenröslein. The sketches (Beethoven MS 79) are held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This leaf belonged to Alexander Wheelock Thayer (1817–1897), Beethoven’s eminent biographer, until his death, when it was auctioned together with other Beethoven manuscripts (for further details see the book by our Luigi Bellofatto, Alexander Wheelock Thayer, the Greatest Biographer of Ludwig van Beethoven: A Study in Nineteenth-Century American Music Criticism, 2011). The paper is of the type that Douglas Johnson identified as having been used by Beethoven between 1793 and 1796.
Additional sketches can be found in: autograph 45, folio 31v, from 1818 (in Nottebohm II, p. 137); autograph 63, pp. 2–4, from 1820 (Nottebohm II, p. 576); and in the large Artaria 201 autograph, pages 77 and 115, from 1821–1823 (cited in Nottebohm II, pp. 471 and 474). Autographs 45 and 63 are held by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, while the Artaria manuscript is in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.
Henry Holden Huss produced a reconstruction of the Lied, which Henry Edward Krehbiel—who, after Thayer’s death, had the opportunity to examine all his papers and manuscripts—commented on in an article published in the illustrated supplement of the New York Tribune on 6 March 1898, accompanied by a facsimile of the sketches. Beethoven worked on this Lied between 1796 and 1823, without ever completing it.
Heidenröslein
Sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein steh’n,
Röslein auf der Heiden,
War so jung und morgenschön,
Lief er schnell, es nah’ zu seh’n.
Sah’s mit vielen Freuden
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein roth,
Röslein auf der Heiden.
Knabe sprach: “Ich breche dich,
Röslein auf der Heiden!”
Röslein sprach: “ich steche dich,
Dass du ewig denkst an mich,
Und ich will’s nicht leiden.”
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein roth,
Röslein auf der Heiden.
Und der wilde Knabe brach’s
Röslein auf der Heiden.
Röslein wehrte sich und stach,
Half ihr doch kein Weh und Ach,
Muss’t es eben leiden.
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein roth,
Röslein auf der Heiden
Unv. 23 – Hess 150 Sketches for a song by Goethe: Heidenröslein
I) Artaria 201 page 77 – II) Artaria 201 page 115 – III) Gallica MS-79 page 4
Artaria 201, complete page 77
Artaria 201, complete page 115
Gallica MS-79, complete page 4
Artaria 201, page 77: (written above the sketch: “Göthe”)
Nottebohm – Zweite Beethoveniana (page 471): “a beginning of a song, probably to Goethe’s Heidenröslein.”
Artaria 201, page 115: the inscription “kommt mitten vor” and, in the sketch, “Rö–slei roth”.
Nottebohm – Zweite Beethoveniana (page 474): “a beginning of a passage from Goethe’s Heidenröslein.”
Gallica MS-79, page 4: continuous sketches for the Lied. Inscription “Ritornell”.
Henry Holden Huss (21 June 1862, Newark, New Jersey – 17 September 1953, New York) was an American composer, pianist, and music teacher. Huss grew up in New York, the son of German parents who had emigrated to America. After studying piano and organ with a teacher trained at the Leipzig Conservatory, Huss travelled to Munich to study at the Königliche Konservatorium Schule with Josef Rheinberger. Among his fellow students were Arthur Whiting and H. W. Parker. After graduating, he returned to the United States and embarked on a career as a travelling piano virtuoso. He came to be regarded by critics of his generation as one of its finest composers.
Among his works is a piano trio in D minor, Op. 23 (1886), subtitled “The Munich” and dedicated to Rheinberger. It enjoyed immediate success and quickly entered the repertoire. However, after its initial acclaim, the work soon fell into obscurity and remained unpublished until 2008, when Edition Silvertrust issued it in a world premiere. Revised by Skyler Silvertrust, it was performed by the Rawlins Piano Trio, who recorded it in a world premiere in 2004. The String Quartet Op. 31, dedicated to Mrs Frederick Coolidge, was published in 1921 by G. Schirmer Inc., New York, for the Society for the Publication of American Music (S.P.A.M.). Huss also founded the American Guild of Organists.
The British label Hyperion released a recording of the Piano Concerto in B major, Op. 10, as part of their successful Romantic Piano Concertos series.
For further information on the life and music of Henry Holden Huss, see Henry Holden Huss: An American Composer’s Life by Gary A. Greene (1995, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen NJ and London), ISBN 0-8108-2842-1.
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Henry Edward Krehbiel (Ann Arbor, 10 March 1854 – New York, 20 March 1923) was an American writer, music critic, and musicologist. The son of a German clergyman of the Methodist Episcopal Church, from whom he received his earliest education, he began studying law in 1872 in Cincinnati, Ohio. From 1874 to 1880 he worked as a music critic for the Cincinnati Gazette, in addition to directing the Musical Revue of New York and taking up the post of music critic at the New York Tribune, a position he held until his death.
He became an influential music critic, writing numerous articles for the Tribune, for the illustrated magazine Scribner’s Monthly, and for other journals. He wrote many books on various aspects of music, including one of the earliest studies on African American music.
Krehbiel also translated several opera librettos, among them those of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. A passionate advocate of the music of Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvořák, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky—then still not widely known in America—he devoted himself to promoting the works of these masters.
For more information on Krehbiel and Beethoven, see the article by our co-author Luigi Bellofatto, published by the Beethoven-Haus:
Henry Krehbiel and his edition of Alexander W. Thayer’s “Life of Beethoven” / Luigi Bellofatto. – 2009. – Portr., Faks. (Brief), Ill. In: Bonner Beethoven-Studien. – 8 (2009), pp. 7–34.
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Below is the article published in the illustrated supplement of the New York Tribune on 6 March 1898, with an accompanying facsimile of the sketches.
Commentary by Henry Edward Krehbiel, reconstruction of the sketches by Henry Holden Huss.
Henry Edward Krehbiel (Ann Harbor, 10 marzo 1854 – New York, 20 marzo 1923)
Unv. 13 (Hess 150) is part of the “Research Becomes Art” project
A New Life for the Unknown Works of Ludwig van Beethoven: An Artistic Exploration by pianista and tenore Jacopo Merlini
“The Little Rose of the Meadow” (in German, Heidenröslein) is a short German folk-derived poem transcribed by the celebrated writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1771; the poet was only 22 at the time. The Lied consists of three stanzas and tells of a boy who finds a rose and wishes to pick it, despite the flower warning him that he will be pricked; he persists, and indeed he is pricked. This “sweet pain” is one of the key characteristics of Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”), of which Goethe was a renowned representative.
Sturm und Drang was one of the most important German cultural movements and is conventionally dated between 1765 and 1785. It takes its name from the drama Wirrwarr, published in 1776 by Maximilian Klinger. This literary movement contributed, together with Neoclassicism, to the birth of German Romanticism, whose leading figures included Goethe himself, Friedrich Schiller, and also Gottfried August Bürger—one of whose poems (Opus 52, no. 5, Mollys Abschied) was honoured by being set to music by Beethoven.
This Lied could not fail to attract the attention of other great musicians of the period, thanks to its simple poetic power. Franz Schubert (D 257 – Op. 3 No. 3) achieved remarkable results when, at only eighteen years of age (1815), he set the poem to music, creating a simple and immediate melody with a folk-like character. The piano part is limited to a bare accompaniment of chords, as is the very brief coda at the end of each stanza.
Heinrich Werner, a German composer who died prematurely at only 33, wrote his moving version of the Lied in 1829, while Robert Schumann published his own in 1849, including it in the collection Romanzen und Balladen, Op. 67 (No. 3).
