Nikolaus Lenau

Nikolaus Lenau was the pen name of Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau (13 August 1802 – 22 August 1850), a German-language Austrian poet.

Biography

He was born at Csatád (Schadat), Kingdom of Hungary, now Lenauheim, Banat, then part of the Habsburg monarchy, now in Romania. His father, a Habsburg government official, died in 1807 in Budapest, leaving his children in the care of their mother, who remarried in 1811. In 1819 Nikolaus went to the University of Vienna; he subsequently studied Hungarian law at Pozsony (Bratislava) and then spent the next four years qualifying himself in medicine. Unable to settle down to any profession, he began writing verse. The disposition to sentimental melancholy inherited from his mother, stimulated by disappointments in love and by the prevailing fashion of the romantic school of poetry, descended into gloom after his mother's death in 1829. He was placed in an asylum, under restraint, for the remainder of his life. He died in the asylum at Oberdöbling, possibly from neurosyphilis, near Vienna Lenau's fame rests mainly upon his shorter poems; even his epics are essentially lyric in quality. His excellent poem, "Herbst", expresses the sadness and melancholy he felt after his sojourn in the United States and his strenuous travels across the Atlantic to return to Europe. In it, he mourns the loss of youth, the passing of time and his own sense of futility. The poem is archetypal of Lenau's style and culminates with the speaker dreaming of death as a final escape from emptiness. He is the greatest modern lyric poet of Austria, and the typical representative in German literature of that pessimistic Weltschmerz which, beginning with Lord Byron, reached its culmination in the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi.

Legacy Composer Marie Schauff (fl. 1799–1844) set Lenau’s poems to music in her “Gedichte von Lenau” opus 3. Franz Liszt composed "Der traurige Mönch" (The Sad Monk) after the poem of the same name by Nikolaus Lenau. The piece is part of Liszt's exploration of Faustian themes and is considered a significant example of his late-period style.

Robert Schumann, whom Lenau met in 1829, set six of his poems in the Sechs Gedichte und Requiem, Op. 90. The cycle was composed in 1850; Lenau died on the day of its premiere at Dresden. “Die Nacht” and “Die Sennin,” songs by Sophie Seipt (1812–1889) are based on poems by Lenau. Lieder by composer Pauline Volkstein (1849–1925) use text by Lenau. Notturno, a 1933 song cycle by Othmar Schoeck includes settings of nine poems by Lenau. The composer Heinz Holliger has written a song cycle, Lunea (2013), using Lenau texts, and an opera, also called Lunea, based on the song cycle. Lenau's Don Juan served as the inspiration for German composer Richard Strauss's tone poem Don Juan, Op. 20.