Ex. 5-5: An meine Zither

An meine Zither (To My Zither) is No. 4 of six songs with piano that Emilie Zumsteeg published around 1819, at 22, with a publisher in Mainz. Two of the six songs are on poems by Theodor Körner.

Theodor Körner (1791–1813) was born in Dresden. At 21 Körner was the house poet of the court theatre in Vienna and engaged to an actress. In the spring of 1813 he gave up both to fight against Napoleon. Five months later he was killed in battle, aged 21. His war poems made him famous all over Germany. This poem is not one of them. It was found among his papers and printed in 1815, in a book of his remaining poems that his father put together.

In the poem a young man stands at night under the window of the girl he loves. He asks his zither, "my heart's close friend," to sing softly, so that she will dream of him. Then he says that his heart is like the instrument: its strings are feelings, and love has tuned them. The zither here is not the flat Alpine zither of today. It is Körner's guitar. He played the guitar and wrote small songs for it. His father wrote that with "his Zither on his arm" he liked to imagine himself as a wandering singer of the Middle Ages.

Two years earlier, at 20, Zumsteeg had published her first songs, five songs with guitar, and one of them was already on a Körner poem. For this poem about a guitar she wrote a piano part instead.

IMSLP