Romberg, Andreas [German]

Andreas Jakob Romberg
(b. Vechta, 27 April 1767 – d. Gotha, 10 November 1821)

Das Lied von der Glocke

Preface
A celebrated composer and violinist in his own day, Andreas Jakob Romberg toured Europe throughout his youth, often performing with his cousin, Bernhard Heinrich Romberg. In 1790, Romberg joined the electoral orchestra in Bonn while Beethoven was playing in the viola section. After relocating to Hamburg and joining the opera orchestra at the Ackermannsches Komödienhaus in 1800, Romberg increasingly turned his attention to composition. In addition to numerous choral works, Romberg composed nine symphonies, 20 violin concertos, 25 string quartets, eight operas, and several double concertos and other chamber works. His most famous composition was his 1808 setting of Friedrich Schiller’s 430-line poem, Das Lied von der Glocke.

First published in 1799, Das Lied von der Glocke (“The Song of the Bell”) presents the casting of a bell as an allegory for human life. At 430 lines, it is one of Schiller’s longest poems, as well as one of his most celebrated. Nine technical stanzas describe the casting process – from the preparation of the alloy and the inspection of the melt to the filling of the form and final destruction of the casing. They are interspersed throughout the poem in a quick trochaic meter. Conversely, idealized images of village life are written in a slower iambic meter, accompanied by corresponding moral meditations. In these, Schiller depicts pedestrian activities, from birth to death, in times of war and peace: a baptism; first love; a wedding; the harvest; images of hearth and home. While elevating simple life into something beautiful, the poem contemplates the risks and rewards of human existence. Above all, Schiller’s poem praises domestic virtues and the bourgeois social order. For example, Schiller writes that at night, the people have nothing to fear, thanks to the law: “Schwarz bedeckt/ Sich die Erde/ Doch den sichern Bürger schreket/ Nicht die Nacht,/ Die den Bösen grässlich wicket/ Denn das Auge des Gesetzes wacht.” [“Black shrouds/ the earth itself/ But the safe burgher fears/ not the night/ which ghastly awakes the wicked/ for the eye of the law keeps watch.”] And the poem envisions an idealized, if now outdated, division of labor between man and woman: “Der Mann muß hinaus / In’s feindliche Leben […] Und drinnen waltet / Die züchtige Hausfrau” [“the man must go out/ in mean hostile life […] and inside governs/ the modest housewife”]. In such soaring rhetoric, Das Lied von der Glocke thus expresses the moral idealism of simple domestic sentiment.

The first reactions to Schiller’s poem were overwhelmingly positive. Among others, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Goethe praised the work. The early Romantics, however, were more critical. Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, for instance, recalls nearly falling off her chair with laughter upon reading Schiller’s work. And Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel penned several satirical poems in response. But a vast majority of the reading public embraced Das Lied von der Glocke and it quickly became a staple of German culture. Indeed, the poem remained the most popular of all of Schiller’s poems for more than a century, memorized by generations of German school children through the 1950s…

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