Introduced and translated by David Luke

Morike’s Mozart’s journey to Prague – one of German literature’s most famous and best loved stories, first published in 1855 – is a distillation of Mozart’s life in the form of an imaginary recreation of the journey he made with his wife Constanze from Vienna to Prague in the autumn of 1787 to conduct the triumphant first performance of Don Giovanni. It is generally considered to be the most sustained and successful evocation of Mozart’s inner world and creative processes, set in the socially fragile, rococo ambience of the Bohemian nobility. The playful narration of the story – and of the stories within the story – appears to remain on the surface but at crucial moments reveals poignant depths. The whole atmosphere captures, like no other literary work, the spirit and the presence of Mozart’s music.

Morike is often thought of as one of Germany’s greatest lyric poets after Goethe, yet this description remains insufficient. When the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller, with appropriate good humour, called him a talent ‘fathered by Horace on a delicate Swabian muse’, he was trying to do justice to Mörike’s distinctive blend of classicism and romanticism with a uniquely appealing local and domestic flavour. The second half of this volume is devoted to the most extensive selection of Mörike’s poetry ever translated into English verse. It contains the poems for which he is most admired – including the comic idyll, ‘The auld weathercock’, which Turgenev once recited to an astonished Mörike when he visited him in Stuttgart – and represents the wide range of his work, from folk ballad to Wordsworth-like nature poems, from mock epic to lyrical contemplations of particular objects, including the celebrated ‘On a lamp’, a miniature counterpart to Keats’s ode ‘On a Grecian urn’.

Published by Libris in 1997