Andersen, Hans Christian (EN)

Andersen Hans Christian, *2 April 1805 Odense, †4 July 1875 Copenhagen, Danish poet and fairy tale writer, a classic of the world’s children’s literature. He presented his difficult path of life from poverty and humiliation (the son of a washerwoman and a drunk shoemaker) to fame and loneliness in his diaries (Mit livs eventyr 1855); they are also a source of information about his keen attitude to music, learnt mainly during his travels around Europe. A special role was played by encounters with Wagner’s operas, Liszt’s works and Jenny Lind’s singing (“She opened the door to the sacred rooms of art for me”). He started by writing novels, fantasy short stories and dramatic works; he published a few volumes of poetry (Digte 1829, 1832, 1850), but from the moment when his first collection of fairy tales and spontaneously accepted (Eventyr, fortalte for børn 1835), he focused his entire life on this genre. In notebooks Eventyr og historier, he until 1872 he published a total of approximately 160 “fairy tales and stories;” at least a dozen of them (including The Little Match Girl, The Nightingale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Ugly Duckling) have entered the world culture permanently.

Andersen’s miniatures written in prose (next to E.T.A. Hoffmann and E.A. Poe) introduced a new element to Romantic literature (and indirectly to music) – a shade of extraordinary and deeply humanistic fantasy; the moment of wonder and magic is combined in a natural, folksy way with living faith, and the free, dreamlike crossing of the border between the real and the surreal world always has a motivation and moral of an emotional, sometimes sentimental nature (Stravinsky talks about Andersen’s “sweetness”). The thematic material of very diverse provenance (fairy tales and legends of the Scandinavian circle known to Andersen directly, the tradition of Mediterranean fairy tales, his fantasies and autobiographic moments) is combined by Andersen into a stylistically uniform narrative flow, in which the place of music is distinguished; sometimes even ostentatiously. Typical for fairy tales (raised to its peak by Andersen) personification (and panpsychism) of ubiquitous nature and objects surrounding man results in presenting the “imaginary world” through the element of movement and contrasting deadness. Exceptionally numerous and expressive sound motives (singing of the nightingale, screaming and singing of swans, ringing of bells, playing of the organ, singing of birds, singing and crying of mother, sounds of mermaids, howling of the wind, etc.) play constructive functions in Andersen’s strands (choruses, climaxes) – attesting to their often magical origins – and more often the atmospheric and symbolic functions. This distinction also extends to the negative aspect of sound: actively used silence, speechlessness, and silence (of mermaids, swans, and people), bringing to mind elements of forgotten rhetorical expression. The specific musicality of Andersen’s miniatures results from their thematic monotony, usually expressed in two modes (as if following the theory of affects), through a constant alteration of sadness and joy, minor and major; in this aspect, one could even speak of a tendency to Picardy endings (eventually optimistic). Anderson, in his cosmogony, gives the music a unique role – representing surreal reality: “There is no death, life reigns; it transforms into tones that sound like a church organ, like voices from the elven hill, like the songs of Ossian, like the thunderous beat of the Valkyrie’s wings”; the highest value in this system is “the bird’s singing of a folk song, a bird that never dies” (Folkesangens fugi 1864).

The texts and strands of Andersen’s fairy tales became popular among dozens of composers of the 19^th and 20th centuries, including S. Prokofiev, I. Stravinsky, W. Maliszewski, J. Françaix, W. Egk, H.W. Henze and, above all, Danish composers; referring to Andersen for topics became the custom of subsequent generations, starting with J.P.E. Hartmann. The plots of fairy tales, especially the highly developed ones, were most often the starting point for the librettos of stage works (operas, ballets, pantomimes, mixed genres), representing two trends: the children’s scene (especially fantasy and sentimental plots) and the ordinary scene (especially allegorical plots, such as The Nightingale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, often shown in the style of an ironic buffo); only rarely did Andersen’s threads inspire a symphonic poem, a programmatic overture, or an illustrative suite (J.P.E. Hartmann Novelletter 1855, A. Enna Andersen-Festovoerture 1905, F. Delius Eventyr 1917, S. Bortkiewicz Aus Andersens Märchen 1925, B. Rogers Characters 1944). The original text of the fairy tale was used sporadically in melodrama and ballad works, often in puppet theatre, with the so-called musical illustration.

Numerous songs were written to the text of Andersen’s early poems; the most significant were composed by R. Schumann (4 songs from Op. 40, 1840, dedicated to the poet) and E. Grieg (12 songs from 1863–70, including Jeg elsker dig – I love you), as well as F. Delius and C.A. Nielsen. N. Gade, in addition to songs to Andersen’s words, wrote the cantata Korsfarerne (1866).

Andersen is the author of several opera librettos based on his themes (J.P.E. Hartmann Liden Kirsten 1846) and others, e.g. W. Scott’s (I. Bredal Bruden fra Lammermoor 1832), Gozzi’s Gozziego (J.P.E. Hartmann Raunen eller Broderprøven 1865), Manzoni’s (F. Glaser Bryllupet ved Comosøen 1849).

Literature: G. Hetsch Andersen a muzyka, „Muzyka” 1930 no. 11/12; L. Erhardt Balety Igora Strawińskiego, Kraków 1962.