Who Owns the Song in Hesse’s Gertrude?
This essay discusses Gertrude in full, including its ending.
Kuhn writes the song. Heinrich Muoth sings it. In the interval between those two acts, the music gains something its composer could neither supply alone nor comfortably refuse.
This occurs early in Hermann Hesse’s Gertrude, a novel narrated by a composer looking back over his life. A sledding accident has left Kuhn with a lasting physical impairment; musical work has given his loneliness purpose. Muoth, an opera singer with a disconcerting mixture of generosity and brutality, enters that solitude carrying the voice Kuhn’s music needs.
The relationship begins with a disagreement about value. A teacher has found the compositions technically unsuccessful and their passion unexpected. Muoth cannot offer a professional judgment of their construction, yet he wants to sing one. His interest grants the work an existence beyond the composer’s hopes and the teacher’s reservations.
I had to sit down and accompany him, and so I heard my song properly sung for the first time. It was sad and moved me against my will, for he sang it without a performer’s manner, softly, as though to himself. — Early section beginning “Während meines letzten Semesters am Konservatorium”; translated for this essay from the cited German edition.
“Against my will” gives the scene its peculiar intimacy. Kuhn has written the music, but another person can return it to him as an experience he has not mastered. Hesse makes collaboration disturb the artist’s possession of his own inner life.
The voice inside another man’s work
Muoth explains that the song feels like his own. Kuhn points out that he did not write its words either. For the singer, this complicates nothing: the composer must have lived the feeling in order to set it.
Ownership passes through three people—the poet, composer, and performer—without becoming identical in any two of them. Hesse supplies the lyric, although he gives us no score with which to assess Kuhn’s music. The novel instead makes us hear through the relations a performance creates: Muoth’s private manner, Kuhn’s reluctant emotion, their momentary silence afterward.
The economy is skillful. An extravagant description of an imaginary masterpiece would ask the reader to accept the narrator’s musical taste on trust. Here, the altered behavior proves the performance’s force. A man who has been isolated finds himself accompanying someone who has entered the emotional territory of his work.
Accompaniment is also a precise allocation of activity. Kuhn must play while Muoth sings. The composer’s authority does not disappear, but for these minutes it takes a supporting form. The person who supplied the piece listens to what another person does with it.
Their friendship retains this imbalance. Muoth helps Kuhn obtain work and brings his songs before listeners, even while his conduct toward women repels him. Hesse makes professional generosity coexist with emotional destructiveness in the same person. Accepting the help creates obligations that moral disapproval alone cannot conveniently dissolve.
A later reconciliation gives the mechanism a small, wonderfully physical expression. After an uncomfortable conversation, Kuhn begins another song. At a significant turn from minor back to major, Muoth nudges him approvingly with his elbow. Musical judgment travels through a gesture too quick and companionable to resemble a declaration of friendship. For a moment they can agree with exactness.
The months Kuhn cannot narrate
The novel’s distribution of time follows a related principle. Long stretches of composition contract into a list: a song, a violin fantasy, a quartet, further sketches. Kuhn can remember their richness while insisting that almost nothing about the period can be told.
What a person is and experiences for himself, how he becomes and grows and falls ill and dies, all that is beyond telling. The lives of working people are boring; interesting are the courses and fortunes of the good-for-nothings. — Section beginning “Nun, das sind Erinnerungen”; translated for this essay from the cited German edition.
This is a musician explaining why his own essential activity resists his chosen medium. Hesse lets the confession qualify the book we are reading. Kuhn’s daily labor produces works he can name; his relationships produce scenes he can narrate. Consequently, Muoth’s unstable social life occupies space that months of disciplined creation cannot fill.
The assertion is deliberately vulnerable. Kuhn already made us interested in his music through meetings, letters, auditions, and performances. The supposedly incommunicable inner life becomes legible when somebody else enters it. His claim of narrative impossibility therefore describes his habitual solitude more accurately than it describes the limits of prose.
Hesse’s writing is strongest where it uses those interruptions to give musical labor social consequences. A conductor’s first response to Kuhn’s impairment threatens his employment; Muoth redirects the encounter toward whether he can play. Teiser, an orchestral colleague, offers another kind of musical companionship, founded on knowledge of the craft and pleasure in instrumental detail. Talent acquires a livelihood through these uneven, embodied exchanges.
Gertrude has already learned the songs
Gertrude Imthor changes the terms of Kuhn’s musical intimacy with an act he did not arrange. She has copied and learned two of his songs for herself, before he even knows that she sings. She offers to perform them if he will accompany her.
Kuhn’s surprise exposes how much her activity has escaped his attention. She has selected the music, worked on it privately, and brought an interpretation into being before inviting him to participate. Hesse gives her a modest but consequential independence through that preparation.
When Gertrude and Muoth later sing together, Kuhn initially sees no reason for jealousy. Their unequal temperaments seem to him unlikely foundations for love. Their voices mingle, however, and the shared performance possesses a fluency his reasoning lacks. The professional relation helps bring together the people whose marriage will exclude him.
Hesse refuses to reward the composer for having loved more cautiously. Kuhn’s music can assist a bond he would never have chosen, and his musical affinity with Gertrude cannot determine her desire. The novel places the artist within the consequences of his work, among other people who can use it for lives of their own.
Yet Gertrude is also constrained by Kuhn’s reverent gaze. He repeatedly presents her nobility and beauty through natural and musical comparisons, while her inward reasoning remains less available. The title promises a woman whom the narrator often renders as an ideal presence within his own emotional history. That discrepancy gives the book some of its poignancy and some of its weakness.
The Hermann Hesse Page’s 2016 commentary, credited to Gottschalk, presses hard on her self-sacrifice, describing an altruism that works against her well-being. It is persuasive wherever loyalty appears to dignify endurance. Gertrude’s earlier work on the songs also preserves a capacity that the sacrificial reading can obscure: she chooses, practices, interprets. But Gertrude’s musical life deserves attention beyond its usefulness to either man.
A dedication without a claim
After Muoth’s death, Kuhn can repeatedly revive him in thought and speak to him with a patience he seldom achieved while his friend was alive. The novel’s reconciliation consequently depends on a troubling advantage: memory permits a conversation whose other participant can no longer interrupt.
Hesse lets that retrospective tenderness stand beside the irreparable damage. Music has made intimacies possible; it has not made the musicians sufficiently wise to protect one another. Kuhn’s eventual composure cannot be transferred backward to rescue the people who suffered through his younger years.
Gertrude resumes singing. She and Kuhn remain close, although his renewed thoughts of a romantic future have to subside. The last description of their relationship returns to the circulation of work:
She is my friend, and when, after restless, solitary periods, I emerge from my seclusion with a song or a sonata, it belongs first to the two of us. — Final section; translated for this essay from the cited German edition.
The sentence carries a different claim of possession from the first performance. Muoth had made a song seem his own; now a new piece belongs first to an exchange between friends. Kuhn has not won Gertrude through the sublimity of his suffering. He has kept someone with whom the labor of solitude can become audible.
That final relation is as exact a defense of music as Hesse needs. A composition offers these people an activity they can share after desire and injury have exhausted the futures they imagined. Gertrude remains its first listener and an interpreter in her own right, with a voice the composer must accompany.
Sources
Hermann Hesse, Gertrud, 11th edition, Albert Langen, Munich, 1910. German text, Project Gutenberg no. 61266. The transcription has unnumbered narrative divisions; quoted passages are located by their German section openings or their position in the final section. English block quotations were translated for this essay from this German edition.
Gottschalk, Gertrude (1910): Introduction and background, Hermann Hesse Page, 2016, especially pp. 3–4 on Gertrude’s self-sacrifice. This essay accepts that criticism in part while emphasizing the musical agency shown in Hesse’s text.
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