Zeitkritik in William Blakes „Songs of Innocence and of Experience“ (German Edition)

Nicola Walker-Smith soprano , Michael Finnissy piano. As one might expect from a composer who was himself an exceptional pianist, the piano writing is demanding—using the whole range of the keyboard to create a variety of textures. The dramatic opening of the poem is well served; the piano creates an appropriate atmosphere in the opening bars: Composed during the summer of , Ah Thel appeared as a supplement in the Musical Times in July The music is reflective, sensual, and eminently singable, with the occasional spoken phrase cleverly integrated into the texture … In the final phrase the voices sing just two or three notes, independently of one another, as the music regains its equilibrium, the melodic semitones of the inner parts providing a poignant accompaniment to the more consonant outer parts.

Cornelius Cardew, Cornelius Cardew: John Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew Though, as Donald Fitch points out, few have actually realised any substantial part of that dream. Only the American composer William Bolcom has succeeded in setting all 46 poems as a single sustained composition. Many others have set substantial numbers of the poems, though not often as a connected set.

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A relatively unknown composer, John Sykes, came close. Sykes eschewed commercial dissemination of his work to the extent that he published none of his songs and gained no professional performances of them in his lifetime. It is unclear if Sykes himself was a Party member. John Austen Sykes was born in India in In he went up to Oxford as organ scholar at Balliol, where he was a contemporary of Auden, Spender, and Day Lewis.

One contemporary considered him to have been the most distinguished music undergraduate of his time. In he was appointed to the staff of Kingswood School, the Methodist boarding school in Bath, founded by John Wesley in , and there he stayed, except for war service in the Pioneer Corps he was a conscientious objector , until he died of cancer in the school Sanatorium in the summer term of Most of his music was written either for the school or for a small group of friends.

Over the years, he wrote something like twenty anthems for the chapel choir.

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A former pupil recalls. From the experience of my own lessons with him, where I learnt from him, rather than was taught by him, I have to say that Sykes was not all that brilliant a teacher: The puzzlement increases when it is realised not just that Thompson was a pupil at that school omission of such data is typically Thompsonian mauvaise foi but that his discovery of Blake must owe much to a charismatic, left-wing, Blake enthusiast on the staff—John Sykes.

Apparently an early work. A later setting is Songs of Experience , IV. Songs of Experience song cycle for voice and piano, ca Songs of Innocence song cycle for voice and piano, June —March An arrangement of Songs of Experience , X, with lower voice part added. Catalogs and bibliographies; 5 Berkeley: The latest [ November ] Tate Britain display in their Blake room is entitled: A group of newly-discovered prints, apparently once bound up as a book, like a Small Book of Designs now in the British Museum, is displayed alongside a print from the Tate collection which possibly formed part of the same set.

Instead they have just a brief inscription handwritten beneath the image, yielding a total of thirteen lines of text that have been unknown until now.

Tate Britain provides no fuller discussion of the new images. There is just a brief mention on the gallery website: I list the prints in the sequence in which they are displayed on the walls of Tate Britain, left to right. The First Book of Urizen , plate 2. Image only no text , surrounded by black ink framing lines.

Colour-printed from a relief-etched copper plate and finished with watercolours and pen and black ink on wove paper. The Book of Thel , plate 7. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , plate The First Book of Urizen , plate 7. The First Book of Urizen , plate Full-page image surrounded by black ink framing lines. The Small Book of Designs is a sequence of 23 quarto pages formerly bound into a book.

It is now in the British Museum disbound and the pages separately mounted. This is sometimes referred to as Copy B. The newly-discovered designs are on apparently untrimmed numbered quarto pages with stitch marks indicating they were once bound together. This confirmation of a set sequence of images with inscriptions further supports the idea that the pages were intended as an emblem book.

As the table below makes clear, there appear to be just two printings of each image.

The newly-discovered prints nicely fill the gaps in the sequence of known pages from Copy B. The two exceptions are pages which are not represented in Copy A. Could indeed the supposed Copy B prints from Urizen plates 9, 12, 13 once have formed part of the Copy A sequence? Further checking for stitch-holes, and measurement of the gaps between holes, might clarify what belongs in what sequence. The images in the Small Book of Designs , copy A, are colour-printed—that is printed from coloured inks painted on to the copper plates—with little additional work after printing.

My knowledge of the BM prints derives mostly from reproductions, but it seems to me that the new prints are not so heavily printed; the images have been substantially reworked and strengthened in watercolour and with pen and ink work. This suggests that the new set consists of second pulls from the same inking as the BM set.

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Zeitblom describes the Blake settings in some detail: Further Reading Donald Fitch, Blake set to music: Website The Britten-Pears Foundation: He comments on its ethos: He writes Both Blake and Cardew praised inexplicitness in art, and their own was criticised for it. Blake settings by Cornelius Cardew [1] Chorale: Tilbury notes The dramatic opening of the poem is well served; the piano creates an appropriate atmosphere in the opening bars: Published by Novello, Doubleday, , p. By now we all know that William Blake was not simply a madman—does the public know as well?

I fear we are deceiving ourselves, in fact, when we believe this discussion to be over just because we know. With a thousand Orcs throughout the cities of Hamburg and Frankfurt—the poster for the exhibition was based on America 10—the event prompted a massive demand for information on Blake.

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Thus, many a German journalist suddenly had to face the task of writing an article on an artist he possibly had never heard of before. The outcome you might already guess: Sir Geoffrey Keynes Paris and Munich: Prestel Verlag, , limited edn. The introduction by Keynes provides the reader with some basic information on the context and meaning of The Marriage and gives some useful but far from extensive bibliographical data.

Erdman and others that were published in the Keynes festschrift Oxford: Clarendon Press, , pp. The numerous enlargements of details from Marriage that appear in the English edition are also missing from the German. Tolley in Blake Newsletter 32 [Spring ], p. Wills in Blake Studies , 6 [], The quality of reproduction is very high. Each page of the small volume is characterized by the high quality that we have come to expect from Trianon Press.

The size of the leaves is the same as in the original, and the colors seem as true as one can achieve with color-offset printing however, I have not been able to compare the facsimile directly with the original at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and my memory might be cheating. A German edition of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience , copy Z the same reproduction as distributed by Oxford University Press , has been available for some years.

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Hofmann with a German trans. Wilhelm , Frankfurt am Main: As far as I know, copy T has never been reproduced before. Prentice Hall, , pp. On the other hand, this volume has to be judged much more cautiously in regards to the accuracy of its reproductions than the Marriage facsimile. Of the two framing lines on thirty-eight plates of the original, only one is to be seen. Ironically here the plates are reproduced on both the recto and verso of each leaf, while in the original most of them are printed on one side of the sheet only, and the size of the facsimile pages is different from the original.

In addition, the brilliant colors and the gold used by Blake for a number of plates in copy T are hardly to be imagined when looking at this reproduction. Read this and over 1 million books with Kindle Unlimited. Borrow for free from your Kindle device. Lucy Maud Montgomerys Kurzgeschichten Band 3: German Edition 9 Oct Lucy Maud Montgomerys Kurzgeschichten Band 2: German Edition 11 Sep Lucy Maud Montgomerys Kurzgeschichten Band 1: German Edition 27 Aug Provide feedback about this page.

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