Friedrich Rückert’s Kindertotenlieder

Abstract

A brief half-page article in the Economist of July 1997 makes a useful introduction for the modern reader to the author of Kindertotenlieder¹ and the texts of some of Schubert’s best-known Lieder. The anonymous writer, writing in a pastiche of Samuel Johnson, under the heading ‘In praise of mediocrity’, claims for the ‘deepest human emotions’ a central place in all literature, major and minor. ‘Parental love’ he goes on ‘is seldom honoured in poetry yet is an honourable subject’. Abandoning the Johnsonian persona he continues:

Buckets of dire verse — and still more of dire non-verse — have been poured out by good poets in this century; and oceans thereof by well-known poets. Often a paucity of substance, spirit or both is wrapped in portentous complexity. The poet who — not always only temporarily — has nothing to say has been able since around 1900 to hide his lack in obscurity even more easily than earlier poets hid theirs in smoothness of metre and rhyme.