Die Lorelei: A Song History

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The song is named for the Lorelei, a slate rock that rises steeply from the east bank of the Rhine near Sankt Goarshausen and was long known for its echo.[1][2] Writers from around 1500 onward credited that echo to dwarves, forest spirits or nymphs rather than to any single figure.[2] The legend of a maiden who threw herself into the river over a faithless lover and became a siren luring fishermen to their doom was largely the invention of Clemens Brentano, in his ballad "Zu Bacharach am Rheine" from the novel Godwi (1800-02).[1]

Painting of a river valley at sunset, with trees on a slope in front and a castle on a distant hill

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, Sunset on the Rhine, oil on canvas, 1853. Shows the Rhine, though not the Lorelei rock.

In Heinrich Heine's short poem, an enchanting woman's singing distracts boatmen until they are wrecked on the rocks; sources differ on whether it dates from 1823 or 1824.[1][2] Composers set it many times, more than 25 by Britannica's count and over 40 according to the Rhineland-Palatinate regional history institute in Mainz.[1][2] Franz Liszt wrote a setting for voice and piano in 1841, published in Berlin in 1843 with a dedication to Countess Marie d'Agoult, and revised it in the mid-1850s.[3]

The melody most people know is Friedrich Silcher's, dated 1837 by the Mainz institute and 1838 by the Neue Deutsche Biographie.[2][4] Silcher, music director at the University of Tübingen from 1817, wrote songs in a folk manner that themselves became folk songs known far beyond Germany; no other setting of Heine's poem matched the popularity of his tune.[2][4] Shelley Stevens includes it in Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer, a book of 26 intermediate solo arrangements in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Die Lorelei"

Sources

  1. Britannica: "Lorelei".
  2. Institut für Geschichtliche Landeskunde Rheinland-Pfalz (regionalgeschichte.net): "The Legend of Loreley".
  3. IMSLP: "Die Loreley, S.273 (Liszt, Franz)".
  4. Deutsche Biographie: "Silcher, Friedrich".
  5. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer".
  6. Image: Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, Sunset on the Rhine, oil on canvas, 1853. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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