Claudine von Villa Bella and the Publication of “Nähe des Geliebten”

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Literary production is conventionally imagined as a process leading from a more or less private moment of literary composition to the public presentation of the text to an audience or readership, but each of these moments can be a drawn-out process involving several stages toward the text’s publication—in the broader sense of being made public. In the case of Goethe’s poem “Nähe des Geliebten” (Nearness of the Beloved) the moment of composition is well documented and belongs to the compendium of anecdotes surrounding Goethe’s legendary creativity, but the process by which the poem was then made available to the public is complicated, more complicated than editions of Goethe’s works suggest.

At some date between March 12 and May 2, 1795,¹ Goethe was invited to the Hufeland household, where for the first time he heard a number of songs by Carl Friedrich Zelter, presented by Zelter’s friend Johann Friedrich La Trobe. In particular he heard a song that set a text by Friederike Brun beginning with the words, “Ich denke dein, wenn sich im Blütenregen / Der Frühling malt” (I think of you when spring paints itself in showers of blossoms).² Goethe was so struck by this song that he then constructed his own text to fit Zelter’s music, taking over a number of phrases and metrical devices from Brun’s original version. Goethe’s text, which begins “Ich denke dein, wenn mir der Sonne Schimmer / Vom Meere strahlt” (I think of you when I see the shimmer of the sun gleaming from the sea), is therefore a kind of contrafact of Brun’s and stands in a complex relationship to it: Goethe’s version pays homage to it, parodies it, and uses it as a stepping-stone to something higher.³ Above all, though, it seems to have been Zelter’s melody that affected Goethe. He wrote to Friederike Helene Unger over a year later, on June 13, 1796, relating his first encounter with Zelter’s work:

Die trefflichen Kompositionen des Herrn Zelter haben mich in einer Gesellschaft angetroffen, die mich zuerst mit seinen Arbeiten bekannt machte. Seine Melodie des Liedes: Ich denke dein hatte einen unglaublichen Reiz für mich, und ich konnte nicht unterlassen selbst das Lied dazu zu dichten.

(MA 4.1:1121)

[I encountered Mr. Zelter’s excellent compositions in a social grouping that was the first to make me acquainted with his work. I found his melody to the song Ich denke dein unbelievably attractive and could not resist writing the poem to fit it.]

On June 27, 1795, Goethe sent the poem to Schiller, who included it in his Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1796 (Muses’ Almanac for the Year 1796), after which it appeared in successive editions of Goethe’s poems with no amendments other than the alteration of “nur” to “mir” in the penultimate line.⁴ But was its publication in the Musen-Almanach its first appearance in public?

Several modern editions and studies of Goethe’s works discuss the genesis of the poem purely in terms of these two stages: its initial composition and the print publication in the Musen-Almanach.⁵ There has, however, long been a suspicion, sometimes presented as an assertion, that there was an intervening stage in which it was used for a performance of Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s setting of Claudine von Villa Bella in the later Singspiel version, which took place in Weimar on May 30, 1795—but the evidence has not been conclusive. Inge Wild provides the most precise summary of the current state of knowledge: “Die in der Forschung mehrfach geäußerte Meinung, G. habe das Gedicht zuallererst in das Arienbuch zur Oper Claudine von Villa Bella für Aufführungen des Singspieles in Berlin und Weimar 1795 aufgenommen, ist nicht verifizierbar, da beide Textbücher verschollen sind” (“‘Nähe des Geliebten,’” 272; Scholars have frequently expressed the opinion that Goethe first published the poem in the songbook for the opera Claudine von Villa Bella for performances of the Singspiel in...