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Highlands (1997) part 1: Wild rose in the heather
by Jochen Markhorst
A boy saw a wild rose growing in the heather; it was so young, and as lovely as the morning. He ran swiftly to look more closely, looked on it with great joy. Wild rose, wild rose, wild rose red, wild rose in the heather.
(“Heidenröslein, Wild Rose”, poem by Goethe, set to music Schubert, transl. Richard Wigmore)
In the liner notes to the various records of Schubert songs, it is often and gladly repeated. Schubert, who was a great fan of Goethe’s lyricism, sent him his set of Lieder in 1816 and again in 1825 three songs that he had dedicated to Goethe. On one occasion, Goethe sent back the consignment, which contained such small masterpieces as “Gretchen am Spinnrade”, “Erlkönig” and “Heidenröslein” without comment; on the other, he did not reply at all.
The undertone in these liner notes when quoting this anecdote is usually: how is it possible that the Dichterfürst, the poet laureate, did not recognise Schubert’s genius, and how strange is it that the civilised, broad-minded Goethe bluntly ignored Schubert’s outstretched hand? And for two hundred years now, musicologists and literary scholars have been thinking they have an answer to this. “Schubert’s music was too strong a competitor for the musicality of his lyricism,” for instance, and “Schubert’s songs did in fact not set Goethe’s poems to music – at best, he was inspired by them.”
Marlene Dietrich – Heidenröslein:
It is a somewhat romantic notion, which assumes that Goethe actually studied Schubert’s arrangements of his lyricism and felt threatened by them. Which is rather speculative. Indeed, it is rather unlikely. Goethe himself, a meticulous chronicler of his own life, makes no mention of Schubert and his dispatches either in his diaries, letters or autobiography. Yes, a small marginal note in one of his diaries, 16 June 1825, a day summed up in 95 words. The last 33 of these are:
„Sendung des Grafen Sternberg. Nachricht von seiner vorhabenden Reise. Sendung von Felix von Berlin, Quartette. Sendung von Schubert aus Wien, von meinen Liedern Compositionen. In Dodwell und Stanhope Morea und die griechischen Angelegenheiten.
Dispatch of Count Sternberg. News of his intended journey. Consignment of Felix from Berlin, quartets. Consignment of Schubert from Vienna, compositions of my songs. In Dodwell and Stanhope Morea and the Greek affairs.”
… and that throws some light on Goethe’s alleged disinterest. An identical picture emerges from the other, thousands of diary entries: Goethe’s house at Frauenplan in Weimar is inundated week in week out, for years on end, with letters, parcels and shipments from all over Europe. Goethe made the conscious decision to be very selective fairly early on in his life. “If I could not tell someone something special and appropriate, as the particular issue demanded, I preferred not to write at all,” he tells his secretary Eckermann in the last years of his life (Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, “Conversations with Goethe”, 1836). And:
“Thus it came to be that I could not answer many an honest man whom I would have liked to have written. You can see for yourself what is going on at my place and what kind of shipments arrive every day from every corner of the world. And you must admit that it would need more than one human lifetime if one wanted to respond to everything just briefly.”
It is much more likely, in short, that Schubert’s correspondence simply went down in the tsunami of mail. Well, it did not, thank God, discourage Schubert.
The custom of setting literary poems to music took off in the nineteenth century. Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Richard Strauss – in fact, all the great composers – loved to be inspired by the works of Schiller, Goethe, Eichendorff, Heine and all the others. And some poets owe their eternal fame to the musical setting of their actually mediocre poetry. Wilhelm Müller’s work, for example, we know mainly because Schubert composed his immortal Winterreise on it.
In the twentieth century, when poets place less and less value on the musicality of their poems, and thus make it more difficult for musicians to write music to their non-rhyming, arrhythmic and unstructured poems, the nineteenth-century duality of poets and song composers fades. The most successful examples generally fall back on solid, classical poetry. The Waterboys set poems by Yeats to music (An Appointment With Mr. Yeats, 2011), Leonard Cohen adapts Federico García Lorca’s poem “Pequeño vals vienés” (“Take This Waltz”, 1988), Edgar Allan Poe is picked up by Alan Parsons and Lou Reed, among others, and William Blake does reasonably well too (in The Verve’s “History” from 1995, for instance).
The Verve – History:
Dylan, then, has his own approach. He does not set other people’s poems to music, but he likes to borrow a line here and a word combination there. Even to this day, as is well known; “I Contain Multitudes” from 2020 is a line from Walt Whitman, for instance. William Blake echoes have been in Dylan’s oeuvre for half a century. In “Roll On, John” and in “Every Grain Of Sand”, to name just two, and here on Time Out Of Mind in “Cold Irons Bound” and in the outtake “Marchin’ To The City”. We hear T.S. Eliot in “Visions Of Johanna”, and dozens of verses and word combinations from – especially – Civil War era poems that can be found in the songs on Dylan’s aptly titled album “Love And Theft” (2001) and in the monumental song “’Cross The Green Mountain”.
“Highlands” is another variation on this practice. The core of Robert Burns’ chorus is set to music, and then largely, as in the “normal” folk tradition, reworked;
Robert Burns (1789) My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here, My heart's in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer; Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe, My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go. Bob Dylan (1997) Well my heart’s in the Highlands gentle and fair Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow Well my heart’s in the Highland I’m gonna go there when I feel good enough to go
Dylan sings five variants of this refrain in his song, all of which in substance boil down to the same thing as Burns’ refrain; nature’s idyll and longing. And routinely picks the botanical additions thereto from songs that are somewhere at the front of the canon; “Wildwood Flower”, “Honeysuckle Rose”, “The Twelfth Of Never” (I’ll love you till the bluebells forget to bloom), and in the chorus variants comparable bluegrass clichés like “over the hills and far away”, and comparable rural scenery like “horses and hounds” in the fourth chorus and “buckeyed trees” in the second chorus.
Wildwood Flower – Johnny Cash:
The local botanist would object, by the way; it is buckeye trees. A detail, but it does grate a bit nevertheless, because apparently a spelling correction already has been made. The misspelling bluebelles on the official site and in Lyrics 1962-2001 has been corrected to bluebells in Lyrics 1961-2012, and buckeyed has also been considered: it has been changed to buck-eyed – with a hyphen, but is still wrong.
It would not have happened to Goethe. The uomo universalis from Weimar was not only a statesman, poet, scientist and philosopher, but also a naturalist; his botanical work, such as Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums (1817), is considered to be a precursor for Darwin, also according to Darwin himself. In the historical introduction that Charles Darwin includes in the third edition of On the Origin of Species, he acknowledges Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as “an extreme partisan” of the transmutation view. Goethe was, in short, botanically as well as linguistically versed enough to know how to spell buckeye and bluebells.
But he could not write beautiful songs.
To be continued. Next up Highlands part 2: You can hear the air around it
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Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
- Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2nd Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971
- Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door