I spend a lot of my time singing about unrequited love—an occupational hazard for a Lieder singer. Nineteenth-century German song and the lyric poetry on which it is based are much concerned with the distant or unreachable beloved and, in particular, with the concept of Sehnsucht. The word comes from “sehnen,” to long for (the noun “Sehne” means tendon—conveying the sense of tension) and “Sucht,” addiction or obsession. Die Sehnsucht is sometimes translated as nostalgia, but this confuses its relationship with time. Nostalgia is generally understood as a wistful longing for the past (something that is currently causing untold damage in Great Britain), whereas Sehnsucht is usually yearning for something that may or may not happen in the future.
This longing has inspired some of the most beautiful songs ever written. Mignon’s lament from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt weiss was ich leide” (Only one who understands longing knows what I suffer), was set by all the most famous German composers, from Beethoven to Hugo Wolf. In Beethoven’s hugely influential song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, the poet sends out songs of love, hoping that they will be heard and understood by the “distant beloved”—songs not fashioned by artfulness but motivated solely by die Sehnsucht. And Franz Schubert, the greatest Lieder composer of them all, was dying at the age of thirty-one when he chose to set a poem by his friend Johann Seidl that would prove to be his last song, “Die Taubenpost” (The Pigeon Post). This moving envoi is almost like Schubert’s will and testament: it tells of the ever-faithful carrier pigeon who conveys messages of love without asking for reward or praise. The name of this messenger, we learn in the last lines, is die Sehnsucht—“Do you know her?” the singer asks. “The messenger of all true souls.”
The pleasure and sorrow contained in these songs are inextricably bound up with the absence of the object of desire. They explore and celebrate the state of not having, of non-possession. What is important is the attempt to reach, the yearning for, the longing to communicate with—the endless or perhaps even hopeless desire. The poets and composers created songs of suspended satisfaction akin to the negative capability that Keats described: capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.
Our age, by contrast, seems intent on reducing the distance between desire and satisfaction to a minimum. Longing has got shorter. No sooner do we identify a desire than we set about finding the quickest way to get rid of it. This can usually be achieved without moving anything more than a couple of fingers. Music, books, food, sex can all be delivered to the home almost instantaneously. In many ways we are losing control of our desires: the big internet companies know so much about us that they can curate what we want and provide it for us without our being particularly conscious of desire or bothering to question it. We are all being trained to fail or simply reject the Stanford Marshmallow Test, and to regard delayed gratification as something for losers. Desire is no longer supposed to last.
Unfortunately, unless we can break this addiction to instant satisfaction, to the quick fix, we and the planet on which we live are well and truly fucked. We urgently need to change our relationship to gratification. As time runs out for us to do anything to mitigate the devastating effects of climate change, we will need more than ever to slow down and take our time—to live with desire, to hold it and give it duration.
Surely this is what we seek in great music, great art, great literature. I turn to Beethoven and Beckett, Rembrandt and Rilke to look for something that cannot be possessed or fully understood, but something rather that I long for and which will repay my attention. This art doesn’t so much aim to satisfy the appetite as to stimulate it. Die Sehnsucht is another word for this attentiveness—a desire for desire, an accommodation with it. We can—and surely must—take delight in not being satisfied.
Mark Padmore will play Gustav von Aschenbach in Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in the fall.
