Seufzer eines Ungeliebten â Gegenliebe (Sigh of an unloved one â Love requited), WoO 118, is a song (lied) for voice and piano by Ludwig van Beethoven, composed at the end of 1794 or in 1795. The text comes from two related poems from the collection Lyrische Gedichte (1789) by Gottfried August Bürger. Both poems are written from the point of view of a young man experiencing unrequited love: "Seufzer eines Ungeliebten" expresses the conceit that while all the creatures of the woodlands and fields have a partner to love them, the young man has none; "Gegenliebe" expresses a blissful fantasy on the young man's part that his love is returned.
The composer was about 24 when he wrote the song; he had arrived in Vienna in 1792 to study and build his career. Beethoven's primary teacher in Vienna was Joseph Haydn, who had himself already set the "Gegenliebe" poem to music (1784, Hob. XVIIa: 16). Beethoven also studied with Antonio Salieri, who helped him in his goal of becoming an opera composer. Beethoven's sketches for Seufzer/Gegenliebe are mixed with that of another song about unrequited love, "Adelaide", which unlike Seufzer/Gegenliebe was published at the time and was quite successful. It is unknown whether Beethoven attempted to publish Seufzer/Gegenliebe at the time of its composition. Much later in his lifetime, Beethoven offered the song to the publisher Peters of Leipzig, in a letter from 5 June 1822, but in the end it was published only posthumously (1837) by Anton Diabelli. The work appears today in standard editions of Beethoven's songs and is occasionally performed and recorded.
As his friend Franz Gerhard Wegeler later remembered, Beethoven's composition of love songs coincided with a time that he himself was frequently in love:
<blockquote>In Vienna, at least for as long as I lived there, Beethoven was still engaged in romantic relationships, and at that time he had made conquests which would have been very difficult, if not impossible, for more than one Adonis. â Can a man, without having known love in its most intimate mysteries, have composed "Adelaide", Fidelio and so many other works? ... I will note again that, as far as I know, all the objects of his passions were of a high rank.</blockquote>
However, the fact that "all the objects of his passions were of a high rank" was problematic, as biographers such as Jan Swafford have pointed out: it was quite inappropriate for a commoner like Beethoven to form a love match with an aristocratic woman, and indeed Beethoven never succeeded in his life in creating a permanent romantic attachment; he died unwed. Hence it is possible that the sorrows and wishful thinking given in Bürger's poems resonated with Beethoven's own feelings.
Beethoven encountered Bürger's poems in their published form in the Göttingen Musen-Almanach. Originally, it appears that Bürger wrote the poems separately, then realized their connectedness and had them printed in subsequent editions adjacently, in the order Beethoven encountered.
As can be seen in the text below, Beethoven altered Bürger's words in minor ways.
Seufzer eines Ungeliebten is composed in iambic tetrameter, with the first line of each couplet including an extra final unstressed syllable, so the lines alternate between 9 and 8 syllables. This is a widely used pattern, seen for instance in Goethe's poem "Wilkommen und Abschied". "Gegenliebe" is in a version of trochaic tetrameter in which half of the lines are catalectic; i.e. they omit the final eighth syllable. In both poems, the lines are grouped into quatrains with rhyme scheme AâÂÂBâÂÂAâÂÂB.
The song reaches the A above middle C and thus is suited to be sung by a tenor (or, in principle, a soprano) voice. Other singers have sung the work transposed; for instance, the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau recorded the work in A minor, a minor third lower than notated.
Pilcher calls the song "formally adventurous", and it is indeed unusual for a composer to incorporate two poems into the same song. Beethoven sets the first stanza of Seufzer eines Ungeliebten" with recitative, of the kind widely used in opera. Following the recitative comes the main portion of "Seufzer eines Ungeliebten", in a leisurely 3/4 rhythm, marked andantino. This main portion ends not with a tonic cadence, but a loud dominant chord with fermata, making it clear that more is to come. Without pause there follows Beethoven's setting of "Gegenliebe", in 2/4 time with a faster tempo (allegretto).
Cooper (1996) has put forth a distinction among Beethoven's songs: some are "folk-like", with each stanza given a fairly simple setting; others involve a "dramatic, even operatic approach"; Seufzer/Gegenliebe falls in the latter category. Orrey, pursuing the same idea, notes that in Italian opera a soloist often would sing a recitative followed by a bipartite aria consisting of a slow passage, the cavatina, followed by a final faster section, the cabaletta; the three portions of Seufzer/Gegenliebecorrespond to these three standard sections.
Cooper later offered a slight different analogy: the work is a "double song" set in the form of a "miniature Italian cantata". Historically, cantata and oratorio arias tended to follow operatic models. The use of term "cantata" for a solo vocal work with piano would have been familiar in Beethoven's time; his contemporaneous song "Adelaide", likewise operatic in style, was first published as a "cantata".
The key structure of Seufzer/Gegenliebe is centered on the tonality of C. The recitative is in C minor, the rest of "Seufzer" mostly in E-flat major (the relative major of C minor), coming to a close on C minor again, and "Gegenliebe" is in C major. The shift from stormy C minor to exultant C major was a tonal pattern Beethoven would adopt again later on, in the Fifth Symphony (1808) and the last piano sonata (1822).
The operatic style of Seufzer/Gegenliebe, and the fact that Beethoven never published it, suggests regarding it as a sort of preparation for more prominent works he created later on. Thus, Orrey sees Seufzer/Gegenliebe as an early preparation for Beethoven's concert aria "Ah! perfido" (1796), a more extended work written for soprano solo and orchestra. "Ah! perfido" shares the recitative-cavatina-cabaletta structure of Seufzer/Gegenliebe, and its cavatina section is likewise in E-flat and set in 3/4 time. As with Seufzer/Gegenliebe, the text deals with "thwarted love". Further on, Pilcher notes that Beethoven deployed the recitative-cavatina-cabaletta structure of Seufzer/Gegenliebe in his only opera Fidelio (1805âÂÂ1814); it is used for the major solo scenes of his protagonists, Leonore and Florestan.
The melody of "Gegenliebe", given below, continued to evolve in Beethoven's mind as his career progressed.
Only slightly altered (with masculine rather than feminine endings), the theme appears in Beethoven's Choral Fantasy opus 80 for piano, chorus and orchestra, from 1808. The Choral Fantasy version is in turn widely viewed as a foreshadowing of the "Ode to Joy" melody employed in the final movement of the Ninth Symphony (1824).
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