Whose Voice? Speaking, Singing, and Listening in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Cervantes’s Don Quijote

ABSTRACT

Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre appeared in 1795–96, two decades after the publication of Bertuch’s translation of Cervantes’ Don Quijote and three years before Tieck’s seminal translation of the same. Both novels famously feature errant protagonists with complex lives and problematic love interests. This comparative paper offers a detailed exploration of the potential links. The initial focus is contextual, with a discussion of Goethe’s reception of Cervantes’s work and the critical responses of Goetheforschung to this meeting of great minds. The paper then explores parallels between the texts, building on the work of Barry Ife on Quijote in relation to the use of voice (especially song) and dissembling (ventriloquy) in the Lehrjahre.

KEYWORDS:

• Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
• Don Quijote
• Cervantes
• song
• ventriloquy

August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Athenaeumsfragment 380 seems like a good starting point for an exploration of voice in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Considering the value of ‘declaiming’ or reading aloud, he ends his ruminations with the comment: ‘wer denn doch zum Beispiel den WILHELM MEISTER nie laut gelesen oder lesen gehört hat, der hat diese Musik nur in den Noten studiert.’¹ The inextricable link between what we read and what we hear, between prose, voice, and music, sits at the heart of this aphorism and at the heart of this paper. The choice of Cervantes’s Don Quijote as a point of comparison follows a long tradition of considering these two works in parallel which goes back to the Romantic era itself. Reflecting on the value of the novel as a genre, Friedrich Schelling noted the following:

Dem Roman […] bleibt nichts als die Prosa in ihrer größten Vollkommenheit, wo sie von einem leisen Rhythmus und einen geordneten Periodenbau begleitet ist, der dem Ohr zwar nicht so gebietet wie das rhythmische Silbenmaß, aber doch von der anderen Seite auch keine Spur von Gezwungenheit hat, und deswegen die sorgfältigste Ausbildung erfordert. Wer diesen Rhythmus der Prosa im Don Quichotte und Wilhelm Meister nicht empfindet, der kann ihn freilich nicht gelehrt werden.²

There is no suggestion here that Schelling sees these two texts as sharing more than their inherent literary quality as successful novels, but his comments about the rhythm of the prose are worth a brief exploration. Below, there follow two excerpts, both describing the effect of song. First, Goethe:

Der Alte sah Wilhelmen an, als dann in die Höhe, tat einige Griffe auf der Harfe und began sein Lied. Es enthielt ein Lob auf den Gesang, pries das Glück der Sänger und ermahnte die Menschen, sie zu ehren. Er trug das Lied mit so viel Leben und Wahrheit vor, daß es schien, als hätte er es in diesem Augenblicke und bei diesem Anlasse gedichtet. Wilhelm enthielt sich kaum, ihm um den Hals zu fallen; nur die Furcht, ein lautes Gelächter zu erregen, zog ihn auf seinen Stuhl zurück. (MA, v,126)

Now Cervantes:

Estando, pues, los dos allí, sosegados y a la sombra, llegó a sus oídos una voz que, sin acompañarla son de algún otro instrumento, dulce y regaladamente sonaba, de que no poco se admiraron, por parecerlos que aquél no era lugar donde pudiese haber quien tan bien cantase. Porque aunque suele decirse por las selvas y campos se hallan pastores de voces estremadas, más son encarecimientos de poetas que verdades; y más cuando advirtieron que lo oían cantar eran versos, no de rústicos ganaderos, sino de discretos cortesanos.³

These two passages, it seems to me, encapsulate what Schelling means by ‘von einem leisen Rhythmus und einen geordneten Periodenbau’. Carefully subdivided sentence structure, balance within clauses, and rhetorical sophistication lend this prose a musicality — prose that effectively sings, the prose of singing novels.

Schelling’s understanding of the novel as a form which exists in productive dialogue with other genres is echoed in Barry Ife’s discussion of voice and song in Cervantes’s work where he argues that ‘Cervantes was an ambitious if ultimately frustrated dramatist’ and that Don Quijote is a novel in which he gives form to his aspirations for the stage:

His view of what the theatre could and should achieve far outstripped the capacity of the contemporary playhouse, the taste of its audience and the willingness of producers to take a risk. It could be argued that he sublimated this frustration in prose.⁴

While Goethe was certainly not a ‘frustrated dramatist’, he was, like Cervantes, a poet, a playwright, and an author of prose fiction. The fact that both writers shared this literary range is perhaps significant, equipping them with potential solutions to a narrative conundrum: how to bring the voices in their prose texts to life? Their aim, as Ife notes, is ‘to make the voices heard as loudly and clearly as if we were hearing them, live, in the theatre’.⁵ Those voices need to be heard in whichever medium they are delivered, be it speech, inner dialogue, or song. This means both authors need to be able to draw their readers into the narrative on multiple textual and sensory levels by deploying both their poetic skills to enrich the narrative and their stage craft to enliven the interaction between reader and text. The words need to be read, imagined, and, importantly, heard.

In order to understand better how Goethe responds to this challenge, I aim to explore further the use of voice, and in particular, the singing voice in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, drawing on the comparison with Cervantes’s seminal text. What emerges is a reading of Goethe’s work not only as a novel that ‘sings’ but also one filled with a cacophony of voices carried and often compromised by displacement, ventriloquy, and dissembling. This exploration of the use of voice in Goethe’s narrative is an attempt to read between and, indeed, across the sensory lines. The value of such analysis is hinted at in the Gespräche mit Eckermann:

Den anscheinenden Geringfügigkeiten des Wilhelm Meisters liegt immer etwas Höheres zum Grunde, und es kommt bloß darauf an, daß man Augen, Weltkenntnis und Übersicht genug besitze, um im Kleinen das Größere wahrzunehmen.⁶

Here, the focus will be less on ‘Augen, Weltkenntnis und Übersicht’ and more on ears, imagination, and auditory awareness: hearing while reading. This can happen on multiple levels. Being read to is perhaps the most obvious. The comments by August Wilhelm Schlegel which opened this paper point to the fact that many contemporary consumers of Goethe’s text would have been a listening audience, read to in salons and parlours as part of an evening’s entertainment. The auditory world we are used to today — radio, podcasts, audiobooks — finds a precursor in the listening-based entertainments of the growing leisured classes of the late-eighteenth century. However, listening is only one aspect of our reading. Angela Leighton, following Jonathan Culler and others, argues that we also ‘hear’ when we are reading to ourselves, claiming that:

the ear hovers somewhere between a literal and a metaphorical faculty in the work of reading, between a sense perception, alert to real noises, and a figure for hearing which might pay attention to sounds on the page that are self-evidently inaudible.⁷

We are, she claims, effectively ‘reading with our ears’ — ‘hearing’ inside our heads the sounds we see being described, with voices drifting in and out of our perception like ‘ghost effects’, voices we imagine or remember and then forget, that we hear and unhear: ‘a slippage between the ear as passive perceiver of audible noise, and the ear as recaller, surmiser, or re-imaginer of noise’. The role of literature is, Leighton claims, ‘somehow to turn up the volume of that listening when we hear “nothing” to make it speak or sing’.⁸

Exploring this notion further, it becomes clear that there are multiple layers of complexity in relation to the ownership and agency of voice in a text as it is being ‘read with [the] ears’ — whether silently or aloud. Whose voice and whose words are we ‘hearing’? This question can arise in relation to the narrative itself. For example, the words of individual characters are often filtered, or ventriloquized, even sequestered through the voice of another via some form of reported speech. Thus, we do not always ‘hear’ the original speaker. Equally, when a text is read aloud, another layer is added as an actual identifiable, perhaps even familiar or famous voice delivers the words of a fictional character — think of a parent reading to a child or an audiobook read by celebrity. Whose voice are we hearing then? Even when we are not listening to the words read aloud, each of us will give the inner voice we imagine speaking or singing those words a different character, sound, or intonation. Thus, the absence of literal voice in the context of the written word is replaced by a fluid myriad of potential voices perceived by our reading ears.

Before we delve into the auditory world of both texts, however, it may be useful to spend some time exploring their potential connections. The first tantalizing question when exploring these two novels in comparative terms is whether Goethe was directly inspired by Cervantes’s text when working on the Lehrjahre. Is it possible? The answer is: perhaps. He certainly owned a copy of the Spanish original, given to him in 1783 by Carl August for his birthday that year. Bertuch’s translation of 1775 was already an established source, and interest in Spain had been on the rise, epitomized by works such as Wieland’s Quixotic Don Sylvio von Rosalva (1764), Schiller’s Don Carlos (1787), and Goethe’s own plays, Clavigo (1774) and Egmont (1788). Perhaps most importantly, Goethe was writing just as the Quijote had begun to attract the attention of the first generation of Romantic writers. Indeed, it was Schiller who drew the attention of Ludwig Tieck to Cervantes’s text, resulting in the latter’s seminal translation Leben und Thaten des scharfsinnigen Junckers Don Quijote de la Mancha which appeared in four volumes from 1799 to 1801. Goethe owned a copy of the first volume at least and, indeed, had to badger August Wilhelm Schlegel for its return in 1800. Cervantes and his eponymous hero were, then, very much in the air.

Goethe’s interest in Spain would ebb and flow throughout his life. His own library contained works by Alonso de Ercilla, Baltasar Gracián, Calderón, and Lope de Vega, as well as Cervantes.⁹ The record of his borrowing from the library at Weimar gives a flavour of his reading in this general area over the years.¹⁰ Prompted most likely by Tieck’s Quijote translation, there is a flurry of interest around 1801–02, including Johann Jacob Volkmann’s Neueste Reisen durch Spanien, the anonymous Liebschaften der Königen von Spanien, and Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares in French translation. In 1812 Goethe borrows A. Norwich’s Teatro español and Richard Twiss’s Reisen durch Portugal und Spanien; in 1819–20 Alexandre de Laborde’s Voyage pittoresque et historique d’Espagne; and in 1823–24 J. F. Sandvos’s Spanische Sprachlehre, B. Ramírez’s Grammaire espagnole, Juan Alvarez de Colmenar’s Les Délices de l’Espagne, Narcisse Achille de Salvandy’s Don Alonzo; ou, L’Espagne, Edward H. Locker’s Views in Spain, and all four volumes of Tieck’s translation of Don Quijote. This reflects the fact that Spain and Spanish culture were very much in vogue at the time. The interest was twofold. Politically, the country was a source of fascination: from the part the Iberian Peninsula played in the Napoleonic Wars to the power struggle between monarchists and republicans in the post-war period, Spain was never far from the headlines. Culturally, the gradual unpicking of the so-called Black Legend of inquisitorial medieval and early modern Spain, lead primarily by the thinkers of the Romantic generation, meant that Spain was beginning to be seen in a new light. It was no longer regarded as dark, intolerant, and backward, but rather as a place where the nefarious extremes of French cultural dominance had failed to take root. Spain was seen as a nation which, as August Wilhelm Schlegel noted, pithily but also positively, had ‘das achtzehnte Jahrhundert verschlafen’.¹¹ It had maintained its cultural authenticity and was thus paradigmatic, no longer dogmatic. Goethe was able to observe this shift in perspective unfold from start to finish and its traces are to be found in his work both explicitly and implicitly. We have already mentioned Clavigo and Egmont, both of which tend more towards the Black Legend version of Spain which suited well the extremes of the Sturm und Drang. As time goes by, however, we see a shift to a more positive reception, driven in part by the work of the Romantics, especially August Wilhelm Schlegel’s translation of Calderón and, importantly, the growing interest in Cervantes.

Parallels have, of course, been drawn before between the work of these two literary giants. With regard to the figure of Don Quijote specifically, the relationship to Goethe’s other great eponymous hero, Faust, has long been acknowledged, notably in Joseph Bickermann’s thorough and dogged comparison of 1929 in which he expresses surprise that he is the first to explore the connections in detail:

Don Quijote und Faust, die Werke und die Helden, haben so viel Gemeinsames, daß es zunächst befremdend erscheint, warum das in ihnen einander entsprechende von den Forschern bisher nicht bemerkt und nicht vermerkt worden ist.¹²

Can the same be said of Don Quijote and Wilhelm Meister? Goethe’s contemporaries were certainly quick to identify links between the two texts. As well as Schlegel and Schelling, Adam Müller in his Vorlesungen über deutsche Wissenschaft und Litteratur (1806)¹³ and Rahel von Varnhagen in her Buch des Andenkens in an entry dated 1822 make the connection.¹⁴ It is picked up further in the scholarship of the early twentieth century with, for example, J-J. A Bertrand (1914) and Arturo Farinelli (1924) both homing in on Goethe’s Spanish interests and their traces in his work, in particular the Lehrjahre.¹⁵ The prolific German Hispanist, Werner Brüggemann, also points to the affinities in his 1958 study Cervantes und die Figur des Don Quijote in Kunstanschauung und Dichtung der deutschen Romantik,¹⁶ while Michael Nerlich, writing more recently in 2001, notes that the Lehrjahre were ‘concebido en el espíritu irónico de Cervantes’ [conceived in the ironic spirit of Cervantes] but stops short of making a direct comparison with Don Quijote.¹⁷ Most recently, in his new biography of Goethe, Jeremy Adler places the two in their historically synchronous context, noting that ‘[m]it Cervantes’ Don Quixote begann die Neuzeit; mit Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre fing die Moderne an’.¹⁸ None of these, however, take a particularly detailed look at the textual interconnections, focussing instead on often rather indefinable symmetries, what Farinelli refers to as ‘la ressamblance indéfinissable’ of the two texts.¹⁹

There are certainly some clear thematic and character parallels. The notion of a life spent on the road, in perpetuum mobile, the accompanying sidekicks, the forlorn hopes of love — but these alone do not serve to prove much. There are countless novels of the period which feature these. Yet, there is undoubtedly something about Wilhelm Meister himself which is Quixotic. We find him reading aloud from ‘deutsche Ritterstücke’, much to the delight of his companions (MA, v, 122), while later, he refers to his own ‘ritterliche Abenteuer’ (MA, v, 265). But it goes much further than that. Just as Don Quijote is drawn away from reality by his obsession with chivalric novels, so Wilhelm’s absorption into the world of the theatre and Shakespeare removes him from reality into a created world. Both protagonists are acting parts, creating identities, dissembling. For the mature Don Quijote, this is the retreat into a better, higher reality. Whether this is simple delusion, or a conscious choice is hard to tell. For the youthful Wilhelm it is something more formative, a chivalric quest of a different type. Alexander Gelley, discussing the Lehrjahre in the context of the Wanderjahre, sees the shifting landscape of identities in the earlier text as Wilhelm’s quest for self-knowledge against a backdrop of ‘instability of identity’:

Wilhelm’s effort to know himself leads him not to some recess of inwardness but toward those roles that a new and alluring social context makes available to him. The themes of ceremony, masquerade, and dissimulation, so prominent in this novel, as in much of eighteenth-century fiction, are shown to be integral to the determination of character as moral essence and to the formation of fictive character or personnage.²⁰

Gelley’s reference to the performative aspect present in the ‘ceremony, masquerade, and dissimulation’ rests on actions but also on the use of voice to create roles. That voice is central to both ‘moral essence’ and the ‘formation of fictive character’. This argument pre-echoes but also counters aspects of Ife’s view that ‘[i]n Cervantes’s mind the essence of the self lies in the voice’ and that ‘[t]he voice is the key to the character and the mark of a character’s integrity’.²¹ Where for Cervantes, the voice embodies inherent integrity, for Goethe it is a means to the creation of identity itself. In both cases, it is intrinsic, not extrinsic. The voice is, effectively, the self, but that self is fragile.

Reading the Lehrjahre with attention focussed on voice, it soon becomes clear that very often characters are not in fact in possession of their own voices. From the very outset, the text revolves around intrigue and acting, with a mix of voices telling their own stories and those of others. Individual characters often have their words written for them, quoted for them, or even spoken or sung for them. So, the voices we hear in the Lehrjahre are not always the voices who are actually speaking. This is perhaps inevitable in a narrative which revolves around a theatre company in which displacement and dissembling stretch further than the confines of the stage. The reader is forced to navigate a multiplication of voices and levels of voice: the real, the imagined, and the sequestered. This complexity has been noted elsewhere. Liisa Steinby highlights the plurality of voices of which the Lehrjahre is an extreme example,²² while Mucignat highlights Wilhelm’s confusion at the end of novel,²³ which, I would argue, is caused by the myriad voices leading to an incomplete picture of his identity as he understands it.

This complex use of voice has a clear impact on the stability of the narrative throughout, for the reader (on an extradiegetic level) and for the various characters (on a diegetic level). How do we know, given such extensive use of dissembling through sequestered, borrowed, or displaced voices, whose voice we are actually hearing, and who is being listened to? In Don Quijote, dissembling is generally the product of the hero’s mind or the desire of those he meets to play along — either out of loyalty or concern, as is the case with Sancho, or, more frequently, ridicule—, but in Goethe’s text, the characters dissemble deliberately, often with the express intention of deceit. The efforts to manipulate the Graf are a good example in terms of highlighting the use and abuse of voice in the text as we are given intertwined versions and interpretations of one presumably straightforward conversation, namely the Graf’s instructions in relation to the staging of a play in honour of the visiting prince. Wilhelm, who has received his instructions second-hand from Melina, assumes he has the right to exercise his own authorial voice, to effectively override that of the Graf:

‘Es ist mir nicht wahrscheinlich’, versetzte Wilhelm, ‘daß es die Absicht des Herrn Grafen gewesen sei, gerade das Stück, so wie er es Melinan angegeben, fertigen zu lassen: wenn ich nicht irre, so wollte er uns bloß durch einen Fingerzeig auf den rechten Weg weisen. Der Liebhaber und Kenner zeigt dem Künstler an, was er wünscht, und überläßt ihm als dann die Sorge, das Werk hervorzubringen.’

The Baron, however, has heard it quite differently and been party to a separate conversation, bringing in another set of voices:

‘Mitnichten’, versetzte der Baron; ‘der Herr Graf verläßt sich darauf, daß das Stück so und nicht anders, wie er es angegeben, aufgeführt werde. Das Ihrige hat freilich eine entfernte Ähnlichkeit mit seiner Idee, und wenn wir es durchsetzen und ihn von seinen ersten Gedanken abbringen wollen, so müssen wir es durch die Damen bewirken. Vorzüglich weiß die Baronesse dergleichen Operationen meisterhaft anzulegen.’ (MA, v, 166)

The Baron’s proposal to resolve the situation in Wilhelm’s favour sees voice as a means to persuasion, an attribute which is very clearly allied to the female voice. This is another example of the linkage between voice and identity, this time pertaining to gendered assumptions of social intercourse which see the art of persuasion as an intrinsic element of the feminine identity, a necessary tool in the passive world of women. This dialogue marks the beginning of the rather comedic deception of the Graf which resurfaces periodically throughout the narrative and culminates in the latter finding Wilhelm in his chamber dressed in his own night attire, leading him to assume he is seeing an apparition, a vision of himself. The result is a loss of confidence — he becomes withdrawn and silent — a loss of voice, partially at least, and a loss of agency. The unreliability of voice, both for the speaker and the listener, is clear — pity then the poor reader who sits outside the narrative looking, and indeed, listening in. We as readers are in no better position than the characters themselves.

Key to this dilemma is the fact that both texts are controlled by narrators who openly censor the material made available to their readers. In the very opening line of Cervantes’s text, the narrator famously refuses to recall the name of the place in La Mancha where events take place. He is in control of the flow of information and consequently the voices his readers are allowed to ‘hear’. This strategy is also adopted by the narrator in Goethe’s text with periodic interventions directed at the reader, for example the narrator’s express decision not to divulge the full content of Wilhelm’s conversation with the old harpist at the end of the fourteenth chapter of book five ‘um unsere Leser nicht mit unzusammenhängenden Ideen und bänglichen Empfindungen zu quälen’ (MA, v, 336). Such overt evaluation and manipulation of voice is not limited to the narrators. Wilhelm’s reworking of Hamlet and his reading of the text via Wieland’s translation show Shakespeare’s voice being compromised and sequestered, reworked and re-rendered. The vulnerability of drama in this regard is perhaps inevitable given these are texts explicitly written to be read aloud and interpreted by actors and directors, but the use of translation and further interpretation is evidence of a particular susceptibility to such manipulation.

While the explicit use of narratorial intervention shows how voice can be consciously controlled, voice, as a means of self-expression and a conduit for communication, is often seen to be out of control. By this I mean that individuals are not in control of the words they find themselves speaking or writing. For example, Wilhelm has limited control over his own voice when writing to Werner. The narrator informs us that ‘[er] war mit der Erzählung seiner Abenteuer, wobei er, ohne es selbst zu bemerken, sich mehrmal von der Wahrheit entfernt hatte, ziemlich weit gekommen’ (MA, v, 109). The narrator not only points out Wilhelm’s unintentional dissembling but also decides what the truth actually is, while Wilhelm has no right of reply. A more extreme example can be found in the ‘Prólogo’ of Don Quijote which is an object lesson in the manipulation of identity and voice. The eight sonnets and two other poems presented by the narrator dissemble intentionally to present a collection of sequestered voices from Spanish chivalric literature or Cervantes’s text itself. Amadís de Gaula, Belianís de Grecia, Orlando Furioso, and others find themselves in poetic, ventriloquized correspondence with Don Quijote, Sancho Panza, and Dulcinea. In Goethe’s text, characters are also often unable to tell their own story and rely on or are forced to put up with others doing it for them. For example, in book seven, Marianne’s last words in a letter are read aloud by Mignon, and her story is told by Barbara. In book eight, Wilhelm’s life is recounted from his apprenticeship records while Mignon’s account of the night a woman visited Wilhelm’s room is told by the doctor, Therese’s response to Wilhelm’s proposal is conveyed by Natalie, and the Marchese’s story comes via the Abbé. No one, it seems, gets much of a chance to speak for themselves.

This instability of voice has an impact on how we as readers ‘hear’ the words vocalized in the text. This is exemplified in the frequent use in the Lehrjahre of the reading of private letters. These are words never intended for the eyes (or ears) of others, for instance, in book seven, where there is the confusion over the letters between Norbert and Marianne. These letters are an excellent example of ‘reading with ears’: how does the reader imagine these voices being delivered? What tone of voice do they give to the characters? The imagined voice is shaped to fit the imagined self of the character, as envisioned by the reader. We hear the voice we think suits the person speaking. This is, for instance, the case when Wilhelm, unsure who is playing the part of Hamlet’s ghost, hears the voice of his own dead father — a literal example of Leighton’s notion of ‘ghost effects’. Wilhelm imagines he hears it, we imagine him hearing it, but we also imagine hearing it for ourselves.

The imagining of voice — hearing what we are reading — takes on a further dimension when that voice is deployed in song. Ife highlights the role of song and music in Don Quijote as follows:

Cervantes […] seems consciously to have sought solutions to the difficulty of conveying the sound of music through the written word. This is why songs come to be so prominent in his work. Song is the one musical form in which the two dimensions of music and text intersect through the medium of voice. Through song, abstract relationships between real-world sounds are grounded in language; song has the capacity to stimulate the auditory imagination; and song enables characters to express their authenticity and to ‘find their voice’.²⁴

There is much here which chimes with Goethe’s use of song in the Lehrjahre. He is careful to position song in its emotional and physical context by telling us what the singer does before singing (tuning, breathing in, preparing), how the song sounds (sad, joyful), and how the listeners respond (applauding, comforting, sympathizing). Armed with this information, we as readers may not hear a tune but we can imagine one that would fit. Thus, the characters find and hear their own and each other’s voices while we add the music.

Characters do not only find their own voice through song, but, as a marker of identity, song enables others to find them. For example, song is revelatory in a situation where dissembling masks identity such as the band of mountain peasants who sing and play using disguise in book two of the Lehrjahre:

Es währte nicht lange, so trat ein Bauer aus der Menge und gab jenem drohend zu verstehen, daß er sich von hier hinwegbegeben solle. Die Gesellschaft war darüber verwundert und erkannte erst den in einen Bauer verkleideten Bergmann, als er den Mund auftat und in einer Art von Rezitativ den anderen schalt, daß er wage, auf seinem Acker zu hantieren. (MA, v, 93)

As soon as the individual in disguise opens his mouth to sing, he is recognized. Self and singing voice are as one. There is, of course, a more famous example of this in the Lehrjahre. Mignon is perhaps the best known of Goethe’s female characters and — with the exception of Faust’s Gretchen — undoubtedly his most famous singer. Yet, for Mignon, it is more than just about singing. She only really communicates through song as her grasp of German is still poor and, like the disguised shepherd, her singing voice conveys her identity: ‘Sie sprach noch immer sehr gebrochen Deutsch, und nur wenn sie den Mund zum singen auftat, wenn sie die Zither rührte, schien sie sich des einzigen Organs zu bedienen, wodurch sie ihr Innerstes aufschließen und mitteilen konnte’ (MA, v, 261).

Essentially, her identity as an outsider defines her ability to make her voice heard. It is impossible to explore Mignon’s singing voice without reference to her most famous song. Readers of the novel have already been introduced to Mignon as a complex, pathetic but also resilient character before the opening of book three which begins abruptly with the ‘Mignonslied’, a move which Terence Cave describes as enabling Goethe ‘to present a graphic (one might also say audible) image of Mignon and her story’.²⁵ In a typical example of the novel’s theatricality, Wilhelm hears the singing voice ‘off stage’ and realizes it is Mignon’s voice. This is the narrative of his response:

Melodie und Ausdruck gefielen unserem Freunde besonders, ob er gleich die Worte nicht alle verstehen konnte. Er ließ sich die Strophen wiederholen und erklären, schrieb sie auf und übersetzte sie ins Deutsche. Aber die Originalität der Wendungen konnte er nur ferne nachahmen. Die kindliche Unschuld des Ausdrucks verschwand, indem die gebrochene Sprache übereinstimmend und das Unzusammenhängende verbunden ward. Auch konnte der Reiz der Melodie mit nichts verglichen werden. (MA, v, 145)

Cave responds to this, noting that ‘[w]hen the narrator adds a description of the performance, emphasizing its expressive modulations, we are made ever more tantalizingly aware that we can never hear Mignon herself, only imagine her’.²⁶ That imagining takes the form of ‘reading with the ears’ as Wilhelm’s enraptured response also helps us as readers to ‘hear’ the song. As seen on the page, it is a confident, evocative text. Described as sung by Mignon, it takes on a different timbre: — ‘die kindliche Unschuld’, ‘die gebrochene Sprache’ — these conjure up a particular delivery. The reader is able to ‘hear’ Mignon’s linguistic uncertainty and imagine the effect of the song. Yet, for all the sense of authenticity conveyed through the act of singing, the song and the voice that sings are soon subject to assault. The singer must repeat the song; it must be explained; it is written down; it is translated. Only then does the reader realize they have been duped. The song we ‘hear’ is in fact Wilhelm’s German translation, not Mignon’s original. The song is, then, sung but also sequestered, Wilhelm essentially taking over control as he transcribes and translates, just as he seeks to do with the Count’s play and Hamlet. Mignon’s identity as expressed through her singing voice is undermined as her language of choice is overwritten. This is no act of careless hubris, however. Wilhelm is deeply affected by what he hears, — Mignon’s ‘unwiderstehliche Sehnsucht’, — but what he hears is ultimately beyond him. He tries to interpret — ‘Es muß wohl Italien gemeint sein?’; ‘Bist Du schon dort gewesen, liebe Kleine?’ (MA, v, 145) — but the effect of his questioning is devastating. Mignon’s response is silence. Her voice, for now, is spent. As readers, we have ‘heard’ the voice in song and are now arrested by its sudden cessation. The song is left hanging in the air, outside of its original context and stripped of the voice by which it was sung.

Yet, song can survive in detached form, split away from the narrative and the character in a way other novelistic elements cannot. Ife gives the example of the muleteer’s song where Cervantes ‘peels the text from the song, sets the song free, letting it become pure voice, recorded wholly in terms of its effect on those listening, the audience’.²⁷ It can be heard on its own terms, beyond the narrative, and still have meaning. In the Lehrjahre, Wilhelm takes this a stage further:

Das Instrument sollte nur die Stimme begleiten; denn Melodien, Gänge und Läufe ohne Worte und Sinn scheinen mir Schmetterlingen oder schönen bunten Vögeln ähnlich zu sein, die in der Luft vor unsern Augen herumschweben, die wir allenfalls haschen und uns zueignen möchten; da sich der Gesang dagegen wie ein Genius gen Himmel hebt und das bessere Ich in uns ihn zu begleiten anreizt. (MA, v, 126)

As presented here, without voice, all other musical elements are without value, echoes of the unattainable. Voice and melody must exist as one, in symbiosis, in order to have effect. Song is, then, the purest form of vocal communication. Furthermore, it is often not only a means to communication, sometimes it is the only means of communication.

This is exemplified in the words and actions of the old harpist, another of the singing characters in the Lehrjahre. This quasi-Ossianic figure embodies music in its simplicity and its wisdom. He does so both through song itself and in his interactions with others. In chapter thirteen of book two, Wilhelm seeks out the old man and follows directions to a run-down area of the town. As with the ‘Mignonslied’, he hears the song before he sees the singer: ‘Es waren herzrührende klagende Töne, von einem traurigen, ängstlichen Gesange begleitet. Wilhelm schlich an die Türe, und da der gute Alte eine Art von Phantasie vortrug und wenige Strophen teils singend, teils rezitierend immer wiederholte, konnte der Horcher nach einer kurzen Aufmerksamkeit ungefähr folgendes verstehen’ (MA, v, 134). As readers, we are already prepared for what we are about to hear: something ‘herzrührend’, ‘klagend’, traurig’, ‘ängstlich’. Furthermore, we are in fact drawn into Wilhelm’s company to listen — ‘der Horcher’, not Wilhelm himself is paying attention. We, also ‘Horcher’ reading with our ears, pay attention:

Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß,

Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte

Auf seinem Bette weinend saß,

Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.

Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,

Ihr laßt den Armen schuldig werden,

Dann überlaßt ihr ihn den Pein;

Denn alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erden. (MA, v, 134)

This sorrowful evocation of the inherent hopelessness of life is bound to have an effect, and indeed it does — ‘die wehmütige, herzliche Klang drang tief in die Seele des Hörers’ (MA, v, 134). There it is again: the use of a more abstract term. ‘Der Hörer’ has the potential to signify both reader and protagonist. We have to hear the old man sing because we know how he will sound and we are there listening with Wilhelm.

As Wilhelm and the old man continue their conversation, the symbiotic relationship of text and music in song is described by the narrator in terms which underline not only their potential communicative value but also how they are heard, noting:

wie der Liturg seinen Worten den Vers eines Gesanges anzupassen weiß, der die Seele dahin erhebt, wohin der Redner wünscht, daß sie ihren Flug nehmen möge, wie bald darauf ein anderer aus der Gemeinde in einer anderen Melodie den Vers eines anderen Liedes hinzufügt und an diesen ein dritter einen dritten anknüpft, wodurch die verwandten Ideen der Lieder, aus denen sie entlehnt sind, zwar erregt werden, jede Stelle aber durch die neue Verbindung neu und individuell wird, als wenn sie in dem Augenblicke erfunden worden wäre; wodurch den aus einem bekannten Kreise von Ideen, aus bekannten Liedern und Sprüchen für diese besondere Gesellschaft, für diesen Augenblick ein eigenes Ganzes entsteht, durch dessen Genuß sie belebt, gestärkt und erquickt wird. (MA, v, 136)

Here, the narrator delivers what is effectively a manifesto of song and its value to reader, singer, and listener. It also encapsulates the various aspects of voice examined here. Songs, the singing voices which carry them, and the individual identities they express intertwine with the audiences who hear them. These listeners then in turn take on the role of singing voice to bring the songs to a new group of listeners and so it goes on. Each time, the song is altered slightly — ventriloquized, sequestered, translated. Here, the process is taken to be positive. In this regard, voice, and in particular the singing voice, is brought to life ad infinitum — perhaps the ultimate measure of success for our two great writers in their quest to let their characters’ voices be heard.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Professor Jeremy Adler who drew my attention to Sir Barry Ife’s work on the Quijote as performance, particularly in relation to song and music, and proposed an approach to the Lehrjahre on similar lines, to explore Goethe’s second major prose work as a ‘singing novel’, and to Professor Ife himself for his time in discussing the paper with me. Thanks also go to Professor Helen Abbott for her expertise on song.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carol Tully

Carol Tully is Professor of German at Bangor University. Her research centres on the intellectual networks and cultural mediators of the nineteenth century. She recently led on the AHRC-funded project ‘European Travellers to Wales 1750-2010’ and co-authored with Kathryn N. Jones and Heather Williams the study Hidden Texts, Hidden Nation: (Re)Discoveries of Wales in French and German Travel Writing (1790-2018) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020).

Notes

1 Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. by Ernst Behler and others, 35 vols (Paderborn: Schönigh, 1958–), I, ii: Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801), ed. by Hans Eichner (1967), p. 236

2 Friedrich Schelling, Werke: Auswahl in drei Bänden, ed. by Otto Weiß, 3 vols (Leipzig: Eckart, 1907).

3 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Edición del IV Centenario (Madrid: Real Academia Española/Asociación de Academias de la lengua Española, 2004), p. 260. Translation: ‘As they rested in the shade, they heard a voice that, unaccompanied by any other instrument, was sweet and melodious; and they were astonished, this not seeming to be a place to come across someone singing so well — because although it’s often said that shepherds with fine singing voices are to be found in the woods and fields, this is more exaggeration than sober truth. And they were even more amazed when they realized that what they could hear being sung were verses not of rustic herdsmen but of intelligent courtiers’; Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. by John Rutherford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 230.

4 Barry Ife, ‘From Stage to Page: Don Quijote as Performance’, in The Art of Cervantes in Don Quijote: Critical Essays, ed. by Stephen Boyd, Trudi Darby and Terence O’Reilly, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, 27 (Oxford: Legenda, 2019), pp. 93–118 (p. 93).

5 Ife, p. 95.

6 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. by Christoph Michel and Hans Grüters, DKV im Taschenbuch, 50 (Berlin: DKV, 2011), p. 165.

7 Angela Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge, MS: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 2.

8 Leighton, p. 5.

9 See Goethes Bibliothek: Katalog, ed. by Hans Ruppert (Weimar: Arion-Verlag, 1958).

10 See Goethe als Benutzer der Weimarer Bibliothek: Ein Verzeichnis der von ihm entliehenen Werke, ed. by Elise von Keudell and Werner Deitzen (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1931).

11 A. W. Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Briefe, ed. by E. Lohner, 7 vols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1962–74), vi: Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literature — Zweiter Teil (1967), p. 267.

12 Joseph Bickermann, Don Quijote und Faust: Die Helden und die Werke (Berlin: Collignon, 1929), p. 193.

13 Adam Müller, Vorlesungen über deutsche Wissenschaft und Litteratur (Dresden: Arnold, 1806), p. 51.

14 Rahel von Varnhagen, Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde, 3 vols (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1834), iii, 59

15 J.-J. A Bertrand, Cervantes et le Romantisme Allemand (Paris: Alcan, 1914), pp. 77–79; Arturo Farinelli, Guillaume de Humboldt et l’Espagne: Avec une esquisse sur Goethe et l’Espagne (Turin: Bocca, 1924), pp. 317–62.

16 Werner Brüggemann, Cervantes und die Figur des Don Quijote in Kunstanschauung und Dichtung der deutschen Romantik, Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft, 2/7 (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1958), pp. 56–57.

17 Michael Nerlich, ‘Don Quichotte ou le combat autor d’un mythe’, in Le Regard d’Orphée : Les Mythes littéraires de l’Occident, ed. by Bernadette Bricout (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 111–35 (p. 122)

18 Jeremy Adler, Goethe: Die Erfindung der Moderne. Eine Biographie (Munich: Beck, 2022), p. 200.

19 Farinelli, p. 355.

20 Alexander Gelley, Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 73.

21 Ife, p. 95.

22 Liisa Steinby, ‘Temporality, Subjectivity and the Representation of Characters in the Eighteenth-Century Novel from Defoe’s Moll Flanders to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’, in Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. by L. Steinby and Aino Mäkikalli (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), pp. 135–60 (p. 136).

23 Rosa Mucignat, ‘Theatrical Revolutions and Domestic Reforms: Space and Ideology in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Austen’s Mansfield Park’, Comparative Critical Studies, 7 (2010), 21–40 (p. 34).

24 Ife, p. 97.

25 Terence Cave, Mignon’s Afterlives: Crossing Cultures from Goethe to the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 17

26 Cave, p. 17.

27 Ife, p. 101.