[Ralph P. Locke]

The distinguished periodical “Musical Quarterly” has just published an article by my longtime Eastman School colleague Jürgen Thym and myself:https://academic.oup.com/mq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/musqtl/gdad001/7136728?utm_source=authortollfreelink&utm_campaign=mq&utm_medium=email&guestAccessKey=2cd0a2ec-59ef-4dae-8c80-0311781815a9

–MQ, founded 108 years ago (1915), is now edited by Leon Botstein and published by Oxford University Press.–Our article is mammoth: 67 pages long. But we had a great co-author, in a sense: the pianist-composer-conductor Ferdinand Hiller (1811-85). The photo, taken by Fritz Luckhardt (Vienna) in or after 1870, was kindly provided by Gunther Braam.

–The article is our translation of an imaginative 40-page tale that Hiller published at the end of his life and entitled “Visits in the Beyond” (“Besuche im Jenseits”).

–It’s never been translated before, nor provided with commentary, and we enjoyed the challenge.

–In his long but quick-moving tale, Hiller imagines being allowed to make 12 trips to Heaven to meet and converse with 38 distinguished musicians, writers, and visual artists whom he knew when they were walking on earth.

–These include Beethoven and Goethe (he met both of them when he was a teenager), Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Rossini, Meyerbeer, the tenor Adolphe Nourrit, the poets Heine and Lenau, and the great Shakespearean actor Bogumil Dawison, among others.

–Heine serves as Hiller’s main guide through Heaven, much the way (as he points out) that Virgil showed Dante around the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise in “The Divine Comedy.”

–Hiller (the writer) has each of the 38 speak in a characteristic manner and address topics that were important to that person when alive.

–Topics that are touched upon include German nationalism, prejudice against Jews, and how music differs from other art forms.

–The whole story is told with a fine sense of timing: Hiller does not know the ground rules for visiting the honored dead but gets clued in bit by bit, notably by Heine and Chopin.

–We provide endnotes to identify individuals and historical events that the 39 speakers (including Hiller himself) allude to, and a detailed introduction to explain the significance of the document and our principles of translation. We raise an important question: why does Hiller not meet any women in Heaven? Indeed, he mentions this himself, with surprise…

–The article is available on its own, online, at the link shown above.

–It will eventually be assigned to a volume and issue and thus get its correct pagination. (It currently starts with page 1.) I will send out another post when the journal issue is available and the pagination is thus definitive.

Ralph Locke

Emeritus Professor of Musicology / Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester)

RLocke@esm.rochester.edu

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