Tuesday Tones

The weekly music feature returns! As does the theme we were exploring before December took over: music inspired by water, or written with a watery “theme”. And today we have two works, by two titans of classical music, neither one of which I had ever heard of before last week when I listened to them for the first time. I feature these two works because they share identical inspiration: a pair of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The poems are called “Calm Sea” and “Prosperous Journey”, hence the two works Calm Sea and Prosperous Journey. The first is a cantata by Ludwig van Beethoven; the second is a concert overture by Felix Mendelssohn. The works date, respectively, to 1815 and 1828.

First, the poems:

“Calm Sea”

Deep stillness rules the water
Without motion lies the sea,
And worried the sailor observes
Smooth surfaces all around.
No air from any side!
Deathly, terrible stillness!
In the immense distances
not a single wave stirs.

“Prosperous Voyage”

The fog is torn,
The sky is bright,
And Aeolus releases
The fearful bindings.
The winds whisper,
The sailor begins to move.
Swiftly! Swiftly!
The waves divide,
The distance nears;
Already I see land!

Reading the first poem, one might wonder why the speaker seems so vexed by calm seas. Wouldn’t you want a calm sea? Well…no, you wouldn’t, because this was in the days of sailing vessels, and a calm sea means no wind…and therefore, no voyage. Calm seas were viewed with dread by sailors. Read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner again for a good illustration of this: a calm sea means a ship floating along powerlessly. No, for a sailor, the wind is the key to a prosperous voyage.

Here are Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, first by Beethoven (op. 112) and then by Mendelssohn (op. 27).