An Die Musik Poem by gershon hepner

Bin ich allein,
Hauch ich di meine Empfindungen ein.
When I’m alone,
I breathe to you discoveries I own.
Sing, Klavier,
So worries that I own may disappear.
Playing double,
Accompany my trials, transcending trouble.

Inspired by an article by Rachel Cohen in the Fall 2009 issue of The Threepenny Review, discussing the synchrony of hands required when playing the piano, while waiting to obtain free tickets for a performance of Lucy Letts’s play “August: Osage County, ” at the Ahmanson Theater in LA. The poem alludes to Schubert, Rachel Cohen’s article and Letts’s extraordinary play. by Rachel Cohen writes:

The unusual capacity for paired patterns––rhythm, in time, and counterpoint, in relational space––are part of what makes piano music, in the lovely expression of Richard Capell––“veer between a genuine sensuous communication and an idea of music, an abstraction. The voice, the violin, the clarinet, ” he continues, “have no capacity of representing an imaginary music; while pianoforte music is more often than not something else in short score.”…

In Schubert’s song “An Mein Klavier” (“To My Piano”) written in 1816, as in the more famous “An Die Musik” (“To Music” of a year later. The voice has a melody in continuous lines, and the piano has two patters: one imitates the quick music of the voice, and the other holds to rhythmic chords. The pensive sonority of chords, as Capell points out, was one of the new pleasures that the piano afforded and with which it had, over the course of the eighteenth century, utterly vanquished the rival harpsichords and clavichords.

“Bin ich allein/ Hauch’ ich dir meine Empfindungen ein” (Whe I am alone, I breathe my sensations to you”) is the sentiment which opens the song’s second stanza, and the relation is presumed to be reciprocal, for at the song’s end the singer exclaims, “When in life worries surround me, sing to me, beloved clavier.” Schubert has arranged for the piano to respond very simply, by having, after each four-lined strophe of accompanied singing, a line in which the piano plays alone. In this fifth line, the piano doesn’t limit itself to either rhythm or melody: it joins the patterns, singing and accompanying, and in this way becomes a companion to thoughts. Schubert creates this effect with the simplest little pair of patterns, and I do not think the feeling would come through if this little pair did not carry, buried far below the surface, the almost impossible stretch of technique by which the capacity to play double as first acquired.


9/10/09