Search - Bamberger Symphoniker :: Joseph Joachim Raff: Symphony No.5 ''Lenore'' / Orchestral Suite No.1, Op.101

A Gentle Interpretation of Burger's Poem

John D. Pilkey | Santa Clarita, CA USA | 12/18/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As a complement to this program symphony, I have just copied from an internet source an English translation of Burger's Lenore (1774), basis of Raff's program. I notice that Rubenstein's opera The Demon premiered in 1875 three years after Raff composed the symphony in 1872. So romantic spookery was still in the air in the 1870s. Instead of going for gothic effect, however, Raff's music aims at a dreamy romantic mood of the harmless sort exhibited by another German romance Undine in 1811 and Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" around 1820. The ghost's wild ride is given an appropriate but hardly overpowering string impression of galloping with matching gothic trills in the woodwinds in the finale. But even here the dominant melody is an edifying hymn exhibiting the same respect for the Church that shows up in Undine.



The poem Lenore was composed at a time when the German Empire still existed on paper and Germans maintained some degree of continuity with their medieval past. It opens with a reference to Frederick the Great of Prussia, a monarch who still thought and acted like a king despite his intellectual devotion to the Enlightenment. In evoking the pre-Napoleonic stage of German culture, Raff's symphony avoids the frantic gothicism that seemed an innovation in literature in Burger's 1774. Raff overlooks the opening impression of Lenore as a young woman "wildly tearing her raven hair." In Burger we eventually find that "The dead ride quick at night!" Despite some dark, minor key gestures, Raff's finale shifts attention from gothic horror to the dreamlike sense of whirring rapidity in the closing stanzas: "What doleful tones sigh through the gloom!/ The ravens croak and hurry . . . From hill and dale proceeding,/ As faster, faster, lope, lope, lope/ Away they ride o'er plain and slope,/ The comet's speed outvying/ with sparks and pepples flying." Raff never attempts the all-out gothicism of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain (1867) even though the program is comparable."