An die ferne Geliebte

Beethoven's only song cycle was the precursor of a series of followers, including those of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Carl Loewe.

The title page of the original edition (S. A. Steiner, Vienna) bore a dedication with permission to Fürst Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, Duke of Raudnitz, a leading Austrian musical patron, in whose palace the Eroica Symphony was first performed in 1804; Beethoven also dedicated the six string quartets, Op.

Jeitteles had published several short verses, economic in style, in Viennese magazines or almanacks, particularly Selam and Aglaja, and was making his name as a poet.

He was an active, selfless young man who later distinguished himself by working tirelessly for his patients during a dreadful cholera epidemic and mortality in Brno.

[2] Beethoven had already explored inward feelings of longing in his setting of Matthisson's poem "Adelaide", but in these poems the distance from the beloved is greater, the longing is more intense and stormier, and is no longer satisfied with merely the sound of her name, but is preoccupied with the clawing pain of separation which colours the whole surrounding landscape.

[3] Max Friedlaender regarded the entire composition as autobiographical in meaning, and the subject of the composer's longing to be none other than the unsterbliche Geliebte, the Immortal Beloved of his letters of July 1812.

More recently Birgit Lodes has argued that both text and the title page of the first edition refer to a lover far away in "heaven".

With their underlying thematic linkage, each of the songs is carried without break into the next: a short bridge passage connects 2 and 3, and the last note of 3 is held through the first three bars of the accompaniment to 4 and proceeds into Diese Wolken almost without a breath.

Beethoven himself called it Liederkreis an die ferne Geliebte, i.e. a circle or ring of song, and it is so written that the theme of the first song reappears as the conclusion of the last, forming a 'circle' (Kreis) – a ring in the figurative sense of a finger-ring as a love-token – rather than a 'cycle' (Zyklus) in the sense of a programme or drama.

Wird sie an den Büschen stehen Die nun herbstlich falb und kahl.

Stille Weste, bringt im Wehen Hin zu meiner Herzenswahl Meine Seufzer, die vergehen Wie der Sonne letzter Strahl.

Diese Wolken in den Höhen, Dieser Vöglein muntrer Zug, Werden dich, o Huldin, sehen.

Diese Weste werden spielen Scherzend dir um Wang' und Brust, In den seidnen Locken wühlen.

Wenn das Dämmrungsrot dann zieht Nach dem stillen blauen See, Und sein letzter Strahl verglühet Hinter jener Bergeshöh;