Pfitzner, Hans

Hans Pfitzner -The brownies op. 14

(b. Moscow, 5 May 1869 – d. Salzburg, 22 May 1949)

for deep bass voice and grand orchestra

The poem Die Heinzelmännchen (The brownies) by August Kopisch (1799–1853) had already been very popular in the first half of the 19th century, long before Pfitzner’s setting. The poet took the tale of the Cologne brownies from the 18th century and put it into a rhymed poem form. The plot of the tale can be quickly summarized: the little fellows take over the work of the lazy craftsmen at night, so that in the morning they find the work done. The curious wife of the tailor, however, tries to find out their secret and sets a trap for the brownies, into which the little helpers fall and thereupon disappear forever. The story is told by a narrator and already lies in the past. Kopisch first published his eight- stanza work in a volume of poetry in 1836 in the chapter “All sorts of little ghosts”. Each stanza is composed of 14 verses that rhyme in couplets. Pfitzner, however, set only seven of the stanzas to music; he omitted the episode of the cooper. The poem can be divided into four sections: an introduction to the fairytale (stanza 1); a list of the individual episodes in which the brownies take away the work of the craftsmen (stanzas 2–6); the trap by the tailor’s wife and the escape of the brownies (stanza 7); and finally a concluding, melancholic return to the present (stanza 8). The irregular verse length of the stanzas is notable: the labors of the mythical creatures are described primarily by a list of verbs. This list is characterized by a dactylic verse measure, while the other verses of each stanza are iambic. The irregular construction of the verses produces the effect in the poetry as well as in the music that the work seems to be done quickly, which also corresponds to the content of the tale.

Hans Pfitzner approached Kopisch’s popular poem after being encouraged by the singer Paul Knüpfer to compose a new orchestral song. At the time, Knüpfer was first bass at the Berlin Court Opera and was looking for a new vocal piece for the concert hall. The composition, which takes about ten minutes to perform, was the second original orchestral song after Herr Oluf op. 12 by the 34-year-old Hans Pfitzner, who was also working in Berlin at the time as first Kapellmeister at the Theater des Westens (“Theater of the West”). The piece was premiered on 9 April 1904, at a concert of the “Musikalische Gesellschaft” (“Musical society”) in Essen. The soloist, however, was not, as one would suspect, the song’s initiator and dedicatee, Paul Knüpfer, but the Berlin Court Opera singer Emil Stammer. In addition to Pfitzner, Richard Strauss also responded to Knüpfer’s request and composed Das Tal op. 51 No. 1, an orchestral song for bass based on a poem by Ludwig Uhland. The brownies was first published in 1903 by Julius Feuchtinger in Stuttgart; Pfitzner arranged the piano score himself. …

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