Sehnsucht

I’ve been considering the mental states of nostalgia, saudade and Sehnsucht, all of which seem to be local versions of various aspects of melancholy. Sehnsucht is the title of a poem by Goethe, set to music by Schubert, which our choir was planning to perform next weekend, which planted the seed in my mind. The poem goes like this:

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt

Weiß, was ich leide!

Allein und abgetrennt

Von aller Freude,

Seh ich ans Firmament

Nach jener Seite.

Ach! der mich liebt und kennt,

Ist in der Weite.

Es schwindelt mir, es brennt

Mein Eingeweide.

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt

Weiß, was ich leide!

In English:

Only one who knows this longing

Understands what I suffer!

Alone and separated

From all joy,

I look to the vast horizon

On every side.

Oh! He who loves and knows me,

Is far away.

I feel dizzy, and it burns

my insides.

Only one who knows this longing

Understands what I suffer!

Goethe’s idea that nobody else could know what he’s going through is central to the idea of Sehnsucht. The feeling itself is not, unlike nostalgia, associated with yearning for anything in particular, unless it’s a time before the Sehnsucht came on. It’s an idiopathic condition, in that respect.

Germans even seem to be convinced that only Germans suffer from Sehnsucht, since they’re the only ones who have a word for it. That sounds to me like a version of the old canard about Eskimos and their snow vocabulary, and about as convincing. What’s wrong with the word “yearning”? That’s an emotion that doesn’t require an object, as any teenager knows.

Melancholy itself, in the sense in which we now use it, is also similar to that free-floating form of yearning. So, also, is the Portuguese saudade, which I’ll look at later.

There is also a setting of the Goethe poem by Tchaikovsky, and a piece for piano by Robert Schumann. Here’s a performance of the Schubert setting: