¹ Agnes (or Agnese) Schebest followed an engagement of several years at the opera in Pest with a succession of tours through the principal opera houses of Germany and eastern Europe. She was noted for her interpretation of heroic and intensely passionate, frequently also masculine, roles: Bellini's Romeo and Norma, Cherubini's Medea, Sextus in Mozart's Titus; at Pest she once sang the part of Elvira in Don Giovanni. Her memoirs, Aus dem Leben einer Kiinstlerin (Stuttgart, 1857), reveal an equally consecrated devotion to the arts of dramatic and musical portrayal. See also the article “Agnese Schebest” in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.

² After an earlier meeting with Strauß and Kauffmann, Mörike had reported: “Strauß schien mir ubrigens nicht so ganz unbefangen, frei und keck wie sonst. Ganz unter uns gesagt: ich mufite lebhaft unseres Gesprächs von seiner neuen Lage als Ehmann den-ken; gewiß fühlt er sich unbequem darin, wenn sie ihm nicht gar wirklich Sorge macht. Was mir die Andern vom Verhältnis sagten, wiewohl sie nicht von Weitem etwas Bedenk-liches dabei aufkommen lassen wollen …, bestätigt unsre Meinung. Kauffmann ist völlig bezaubert von ihr: sie habe eine damonische Anmut, zugleich etwas Gewaltiges, das jeden hinreiße.” Eduard Morike, Brieve, ed. Friedrich Seebaß (Tubingen, 1939), p. 559. Throughout this article, spaced type will be that of my sources, and italics, my own.

³ They are part of a detailed account of the entire excursion in Morike's letter of 20 March 1843, ibid., pp. 565–581.

⁴ Ibid., pp. 88 (May 1827) and 678 (Nov. 1850); Eduard Mörikes Briefe, ed. K. Fischer and R. Krauß (Berlin, 1903), i, 69 (Sept. 1827).

⁵ The independent findings of this investigator in answer to the first of these questions were anticipated by some brief paragraphs in two excellent recent studies: Herbert Meyer, Eduard Mörike (Stuttgart, [1950]), pp. 89, 113 f., and Rudolf Ibel, Weltschau deutscher Dichter (Hamburg, 1948), pp. 191, 198 f. However, considerable additional material relevant to this question will be presented here. Although some psychological assumptions are inevitable in an inquiry of this nature, the methods will be essentially those of literary research, applied to literary and biographical evidence. The special techniques of modern psychology might well shed further light upon the material of this paper, if they could be used with the necessary circumspection. Some related psychological aspects of Morike's artistic creation are ably discussed in the article by Liselotte Dieckmann, “Morike's Presentation of the Creative Process,” JEGP, Lm (1954), 291–305, and conversations with her have also rendered invaluable assistance in the preparation of the present article.

⁶ Mörikes Werke, ed. Harry Maync (Leipzig and Vienna, 1914), i, 99. Except where otherwise noted, the term Werke will hereafter refer to this edition.

⁷ Hildegard Emmel (Morikes Peregrinadichtung [Weimar, 1952], pp. 69 ff., 124 ff.) has argued that all the Peregrina poems were originally composed between 1828 and 1831. Adolf Beck discusses her study in his “Forschungsbericht: Peregrina,” Euphorion, xlvii (1953), 194–217, and he establishes beyond doubt the authenticity of the date 6 July 1824 on the Weimar manuscript of “Peregrina: in.” None of the other poems can be certainly dated. Beck believes that the second poem of the cycle also originated in that month but that the other three were composed early in 1828. According to Beck's hypothesis, the invitation to love in “Peregrina: i” was inspired by a later attachment of 1828, but the horror it aroused in Mörike was owing to his recollection of the love for Maria Meyer, and the dream of vital forces in the dark shafts of the earth is a symbolic reminiscence of her. Beck's hypothesis is compatible with the views expressed in this paper, provided that the dream in the second strophe is not taken merely as a symbol but as a poetic synthesis of actual dream-images associated with Maria Meyer.

⁸ See Karl Fischer, Eduard Morikes Leben und Werke (Berlin, 1901), pp. 54 ff.; Harry Maync, Eduard Morike, 5th ed. (Stuttgart, 1944), pp. 79–110 (hereafter to be cited as “Maync”); cf. also the letter of Jan. 1824 to Luise Mörike, Briefe, ed. Seebafi, pp. 23 ff.

⁹ Fischer, pp. 56 ff.; Maync, p. 126; Briefe, ed. Seebaß, pp. 32 f., 53 f.

¹⁰ See the oracular and telepathic dreams in Mörike's article “Aus dem Gebiete der Seelenkunde,” Werke, ii, 480 f.; also Hermann Hieber, Eduard Morikes Gedankenwelt (Stuttgart, 1923), pp. 44–62.

¹¹ It would be rash to say that Morike accepted, or even entertained, intellectually the proposition that his guilty love for Maria Meyer brought down upon the family the calamity of his brother's death. But perhaps some vague causal association of this nature existed for him in what he called the “nocturnal or dream side of the psyche” (Werke, ii, 483) and expressed itself creatively in the deaths of Nolten's fiancée and friend under the influence of Elisabeth. There are also indications that Morike may have connected the death of his sister Luise three years later with his love for Maria Meyer and the performance of Don Giovanni in 1824. Early in her illness, in March 1826, he recalls the costume which Luise wore at this performance. In a letter written to her a month before her death, he alludes to Maria Meyer, and he does so again—for the last time prior to the “noli me langere” passage of 1843—in reporting Luise's death to a friend. Briefe, ed. SeebaC, pp. 53 f., 73, 77.

¹² Werke, i, 467, and ii, 377.

¹³ Werke, ii, 17 f.

¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 422–430; the quotation is from p. 427.

¹⁵ These two interpretations have been stressed respectively by H. Pongs, “Ein Beitrag zum Dämonischen im Biedermeier,” Dichtung uni Volkstum, xxxvi (1935), 254 f., and Franz H. Mautner, “Morikes Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag,” PMLA, lx (1945), 210 f. and fn.

¹⁶ Werke, ii, 377; the version quoted here is that of the Maler Nollen of 1832; for the slightly different final version see Werke, i, 97. In “An die Geliebte” (Werke, I, 123), the image “Von Tiefe dann zu Tiefen stiirzt mein Sinn” is associated with an ecstatically passionate love enjoying divine sanction and free from forebodings of death. This is not so much an exception as a reminder that Mörike's symbols are flexible and their connotations in each case may vary within a certain range. “An die Geliebte” also shares another image with the passage in Mozart, the stars. Like many other poets, Morike probably uses these instinctively as a symbol of ultimate, divinely ordained destiny.

¹⁷ Konstanze also sees threatening, green-eyed specters closing in upon her, reminding us of the Legion von Schrecken in our passage from Mozart. Ibid., p. 89.

¹⁸ Briefe, ed. Seebaß, pp. 317 ff. (Feb. 1832).

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 76. Cf. Maync, p. 134.

²² Sämtliche Werke, iv, 21.

²³ Ibid., v, 153 ff.

²⁴ Cf. Herbert Meyer, Eduard Mörike, pp. 96 f.

²⁵ Briefe, ed. Seebaß, p. 730; Unveröjfenilichle Briefe, ed. Seebaß (Stuttgart, 1945), p. 281; Briefe, ed. Fischer-Krauß, ii, 249.

²⁶ See especially the stylistic analysis of Franz H. Mautner cited above, PMLA, ix (1945), 199–220.

²⁷ Werke, iii, 256 ff. That the author may nevertheless have attached some significance to the humiliation Mozart suffered at the hands of his coquettish Roman protegee is suggested by the ensuing warmly human episode of the ropemaker's shop, through which the composer regains his balance.

²⁸ Mörike reports this as common knowledge in a letter of 1851 (Briefe, ed. Seebaß, p. 692), and the tenor of his references to Agnes Schebest immediately before and after the visit of 1843 suggests that he may already have heard rumors of this sort.

²⁹ At this point he mentions the portrait given him by Agnes. This remarkable engraving, the frontispiece to Agnes Schebest's memoirs (see n. 1, above), enables one to appreciate the impact of her personality upon Mörike and Kauffmann.

³⁰ Briefe, ed. Seebaß, pp. 570 f.

³¹ Ibid., pp. 576 f.

³² Ibid., pp. 578 f. Mörike reports here that Kauffmann attributed to Agnes “eine unmäßige Eifersucht.”

³³ See ibid., pp. 616, 639, 691 f., 726.

³⁴ Ibid., pp. 570 f.

³⁵ Werke, m, 235.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 234.

³⁷ Ibid., p. 267.

³⁸ Ibid., pp. 235 f.

³⁹ Briefe, ed. Seebafl, pp. 567 f.

⁴⁰ Two letters, the first of which refers to the “silbernen Posaunen,” reveal that he was writing his novella on Mozart that year. Briefe, ed. Fischer-Krauß, ii, 230, and Unveröffentlichte Briefe, pp. 264 f.

⁴¹ Quoted in Maync, p. 446.

⁴² Werke, m, 223 ff.; cf. editors' footnote in Briefe, ed. Fischer-Kraufi, ii, 81.

⁴³ Maria Meyer was older than Mörike. In the first version of Maler Nolten, the gypsy Elisabeth is described as “eine Person von ansprechendem und trotz ihres gesetzten Alters noch immer von jungfräulichem Aussehen” (Werke, n, 56). She also resembles Agnes Schebest in that her appearance and demeanor have “ein auffallendes Gepräge von Schön-heit und Kraft” (ibid., p. 198; cf. the description of Agnes Schebest above, p. 403).

⁴⁴ Even in Mörike's subjective, personal experience there seems to have been something of a permanent victory after the creation of Mozart. Maria Meyer and the “Posaunen” of death lived on, as we have seen, in the world of his dreams, but in his old age he was able to exploit such a dream deliberately and immediately for literary purposes. And when he mentions the memories associated with Don Giovanni to a friend of his declining years, Bernhard Gugler, they take on warmer and brighter colors: “Vielen Dank fiir Deinen D Juan, der mich … sehr angenehm beschäftigt und mir an hundert Stellen die halbver gessene Musik, oft ganze Strecken lang, wieder lebendig vor die Ohren gebracht hat, nicht ohne eine starke Sehnsucht nach diesem Element und einen Schwall von glucklichen Erinnerungen (an L. Bauer, Kauffmann, Hardegg, Lohbauers etc.) bei mir zuriickzulassen ” Letter of Feb. 1869, in Otto Guntter, “Eduard Mörike und Bernhard Gugler,” Schwä-bischer Schillerverein: Sechzehnter Reckenschaftsbericht (Marbach, 1912), p. 62.