Four musical settings of the poem “In Danzig” by Joseph Eichendorff — music and the expression of the word

The poem In Danzig by Joseph Eichendorff, which appeared in the second edition of his works collected in 1848, is one of the most famous and important poems of the 19th century about Gdańsk. Its author, an important German poet of the Romantic era, has visited Gdańsk three times. From 1821 to 1824 he lived and worked here for the first time as a Prussian civil servant. In 1838, he spent several weeks in Gdańsk with his eldest daughter. The last time he spent in the city was in the years 1843–47 and lived with his family on Chlebnicka Street. At that time a poem was probably written in 1843 with the original title Nachts, later changed to Nachts in Danzig, finally entitled In Danzig.

This outstanding example of German romantic poetry proved to be an important source of inspiration for the work of composers of different formats. The most well-known example of the song based on the poem comes from the work of Hans Pfitzner, the German composer of the turn of XIX/XX. I also noticed two other works on the Eichendorff text by lesser-known composers during the inquiry in the Gdańsk Library: Max Stange and Alfred Balfanz. The latter was Gdańsks citizen. The immediate impetus for dealing with this problem was the work of the young composer Kamil Cieślik with the eponymous title, which was premiered by the Gdańsk Vocal Ensemble Art’n’Voices.

The object of the proposed reflection is therefore an attempt to compare the characteristics of the musical layer of the four works with regard to the expression of the poetic layer of Eichendorff’s poem. The thesis, which emerges in the initial stage of observation, follows intuition: the clarifications of the poem acquire a universal form to a certain extent. This means that the expression of the word in the works depicted is of utmost importance for the music.