Hagar's lament
(Poet's title: Hagars Klage)
Set by Schubert:
D 5
Schubert did not set the words in italics[March 30, 1811]
Hier am Hügel heißen Sandes
In der menschenlosen Wüste,
Sitz ich, und mir gegenüber
Liegt mein sterbend Kind,
Lechzt nach einem Tropfen Wasser,
Lechzt und ringt schon mit dem Tode,
Weint, und blikt mit stieren Augen
Mich bedrängte Mutter an.
Du musst sterben, armes Würmchen,
Ach, nicht eine eine Träne
Hab ich in den trocknen Augen,
Wo ich dich mit stillen kann.
Ha! säh ich eine Löwenmutter,
Ich wollte mit ihr kämpfen,
Um das Eiter kämpfen
Dass ich löschte deinem Durst.
Könnt’ ich aus dem dürren Sande
Nur ein Tröpfchen Wasser saugen!
Aber ach! so musst du sterben,
Und ich muss dich sterben sehn!
Kaum ein schwacher Strahl des Lebens
Dämmert auf der bleichen Wange,
Dämmert in den matten Augen,
Deine Brust erhebt sich kaum.
Hier am Busen komm und welke!
Kömmt ein Mensch dann durch die Wüste,
So wird er in den Sand uns scharren,
Sagen: das ist Weib und Kind.
Nein ich will mich von dir wenden,
Dass ich dich nicht sterben seh
Und im Taumel der Verzweiflung
Murre wider Gott!
Ferne von dir will ich gehen,
Und ein rührend Klaglied singen,
Dass du noch im Todeskampfe
Tröstung einer Stimme hörst.
Noch zum letztem Klaggebete
Öfn’ ich meine dürren Lippen,
Und dann schließ ich sie auf immer,
Und dann komme bald, o Tod.
Jehova! blick’ auf uns herab!
Erbarme dich des Knaben!
Send aus einem Taugewölke
Labung uns herab.
Ist er nicht von Abrams Samen?
Ach er weinte Freudentränen,
Als ich ihm dies Kind geboren,
Und nun wird er ihm zum Fluch!
Rette deines Lieblings Samen,
Selbst sein Vater bat um Segen,
Und du sprachst: Es komme Segen
Über dieses Kindes Haupt!
Hab ich wider dich gesündigt,
Ha! so treffe mich die Rache!
Aber, ach! was tat der Knabe,
Dass er mit mir leiden muss?
Wär ich doch in Sir gestorben,
Als ich in der Wüste irrte,
Und das Kind noch ungeboren
Unter meinem Herzen lag;
Nein, da kam ein holder Fremdling,
Hieß mich rück zu Abram gehen,
Und des Mannes Haus betreten,
Der uns grausam itzt verstiess.
War der Fremdling nicht ein Engel?
Denn er sprach mit holder Miene:
Ismael wird groß auf Erden,
Und sein Samen zahlreich sein.
Nur liegen wir und welken,
Unsre Leichen werden modern
Wie die Leichen der Verfluchten,
Die der Erde Schoß nicht birgt.
Schrei zum Himmel, armer Knabe,
Öffne deine welken Lippen!
Gott, sein Herr, verschmäh das Flehen
Des unschuld’gen Knaben nicht.
Here on a hill of hot sand
In the deserted wilderness
I sit, and opposite me
there lies my dying child
thirsting for a drop of water.
Thirsty and already wrestling with death
He is crying and looking with vacant eyes
at me, his tormented mother.
You have to die poor little mite.
Not a single single tear
do I have in my dry eyes
with which I can relieve you.
Oh, if I were to see a mother lioness
I would want to battle with her
and fight to get to the udder
in order to quench your thirst.
If only I could, out of this parched sand,
suck a small drop of water!
But oh, you have to die
and I have to watch you die.
There is barely a dim ray of life
dawning on the pale cheek
or dawning in the dull eyes.
Your chest is hardly moving.
Come to my breast and wither!
If a man were to come through this desert
he would put us in a shallow grave
and say, ‘That is a woman and child’.
No I shall turn away from you
So that I don’t see you die
and in a frenzy of despair
grumble against God.
I shall go a long way from you
and sing a stirring song of lament
so that even in your death struggle
you will hear the comfort of a voice.
It is only for the final prayers of lament
That I open my parched lips
And then I shall close them forever,
And then come quickly, death.
Jehovah! Look down on us
Have mercy on the lad.
Out of a cloud of dew send
refreshment down to us.
Is he not of the seed of Abram?
Oh, he wept tears of joy
When I bore him this child
And now he treats him as accursed!
Save the seed of your beloved
Even his father begged a blessing
And you said, “May blessings come
On this child’s head.”
If I have sinned against you
You can strike me with your vengeance.
But oh, what did the lad do
That means he has to suffer with me?
If only I had died in Syria
When I was wandering in the desert
And the child, as yet unborn,
Was lying under my heart.
No. A nice stranger came and
Called me back to Abram and told me
To enter the house of the man
Who has now cruelly expelled us.
Was the stranger not an angel?
For he said with a fine expression,
“Ishmael will be great on the earth
And his seed will be numerous.”
We are just lying down and fading;
Our corpses will rot
Like the corpses of the accursed
Who are not hidden in the earth’s womb.
Cry to heaven, poor child!
Open your withered lips.
God, his Lord, do not spurn the entreaties
Of the innocent lad.
All translations into English that appear on this website, unless otherwise stated, are by Malcolm Wren. You are free to use them on condition that you acknowledge Malcolm Wren as the translator and schubertsong.uk as the source. Unless otherwise stated, the comments and essays that appear after the texts and translations are by Malcolm Wren and are © Copyright.
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Themes and images in this text:
Angels Cheeks Chest / breast Clouds Deserts Eyes Fighting and wrestling Frenzy and lack of control Graves and burials Hearts Heaven, the sky Houses Lack of water – thirst and drought Laments, elegies and mourning Lap, womb (Schoß) Lions Lips Mother and child Rays of light Syria Tears and crying Walking and wandering Worms
Abraham rose early in the morning, took some food and a waterskin full of water and gave it to Hagar; he set the child on her shoulder and sent her away, and she went and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba. When the water in the skin was finished, she thrust the child under a bush, and went and sat down some way off, about two bowshots away, for she said, ‘How can I watch the child die?’ So she sat some way off, weeping bitterly.
Genesis 21: 14-16 (New English Bible)
The account in Genesis limits the wording of Hagar’s lament to the simple question, “How can I watch the child die?” Schücking’s text, first published in the Göttingen Musenalmanach in 1781, expands the question and imagines the various stages of the mother’s distress. There is no narrative coherence and no resolution. Hagar at times wants to cling to Ishmael and be found dead (united with him as a madonna and child) and at other times wants to leave him so that she does not have to watch him die (lest she blame God in the resulting frenzy). She is sometimes addressing her dying son, at other times his father Abraham and often speaking directly to God. There is shifting focus from the present horror (with vivid details of parched ground and pale cheeks), to the prospect of a future either as a rotting, unburied corpse or quickly buried in a shallow grave by a passing stranger in the desert, with flashbacks to Ishmael’s birth and the associated promises (now apparently broken) of greatness to come.
The tension between wanting to embrace the dying son and the desire to leave him so that she does not have see him die is surely related to the inherent tension of motherhood. The moment of birth and bonding is also a moment of cutting off and letting go. The role of the parent is to prepare the child for a life without parents. There is agony and there are tears as children are born and as they die. Hagar explicitly refers to graves as wombs.
Much of Hagar’s agony relates to her inability to suckle. She, like the desert around, is dry. She would fight to get milk from a lion if there were such a beast nearby. She longs to be able to suck up a single drop of dew, but there is no prospect of that here. Her eyes, too, are dry beyond tears. She cannot offer even a tear drop to quench her child’s thirst (the verb ‘stillen’ has connotations of both quenching thirst and offering comfort).
How old was ‘the lad’? A simple reading[1] of the text of Genesis suggests that he was 14 or 15 (depending on how old Isaac was when he was weaned)[2]. Throughout the lament Hagar refers to him as a lad (Knabe), but of course he is still her baby. She remembers the earlier time when she had been expelled from Abraham’s household while she was pregnant with Ishmael, but she (or the poet) confuses the prophesies made by God’s messenger on that occasion (that the child about to be born will live at odds with his kinsmen) with the promise that is made at the resolution of the story (not actually related in Schücking’s text), that Ishmael will be the father of a great nation.
It is surely no coincidence that the text held some appeal for a fourteen year old lad who was never to have an easy relationship with his father. Did Schubert perhaps identify with a boy who had been promised a great deal, but who had contradictory feelings about his father (who seemed to have both blessed and cursed him)? The fact that Schubert chose this mother’s lament as perhaps the first text he ever set to music seems to offer an invitation to explore the Oedipal elements at play. The mother wants her son at her breast and she envisages lying with him in the womb of the earth, yet simultaneously she wants to leave him and she rails against the Father (both Abraham and Jehovah) who has decreed that he must die.
Freudian or Lacanian readings of the text (and of Schubert’s setting of it) might or might not be worth pursuing, but there can be little doubt that the most significant feature of the imagery in terms of Schubert’s own interest in the text is related to water. Schubert was to create so much ‘water music’, returning regularly to poems that feature waves, rivers,lakes, boats, sailing, diving, fishing and drowning that it seems truly astonishing that his first ballad is set in a desert and is about drought. We do know that he later associated flowing water with creativity (cf. D 491 Geheimnis, by Mayrhofer). It is surely significant that he begins his career as a song composer in a parched landscape with a fountain that has run dry (the mother’s breast). Was this his sense that he could not be allowed to die at this early point (like Ishmael, he was 14 at this point), with so much untapped potential.The spring is about to be tapped. Ishmael does not die.
[1] It may be that the two narratives of Hagar’s expulsion at the instigation of Sarai / Sarah are two versions of the same original oral narrative. The Abraham narratives have a number of these parallel versions (e.g. two versions of Sarai being passed off as Abraham’s sister rather than his wife, two versions of God announcing his promise to make Abraham the father of a nation etc).
[2] Gen. 12: 5 Abram set off for Canaan when he was 75
Gen. 16: 3 Abram took Hagar as his wife / concubine after he had been in Canaan for 10 years
Gen. 16: 16 Abram was 86 when Ishmael was born
Gen.17:24-25 Abraham was 99 and Ishmael was 13 when they were circumcised
Gen. 21: 5 Abraham was 100 when Isaac was born
Gen. 21: 8 Hagar and Ishmael are sent away after the feast celebrating Isaac’s weaning
Brussels, Musée des Beaux-Arts
Hagar and Ishmael in Genesis Gen. 16: 1 – 5 Abram's wife Sarai can not have children. She suggests Abram have a child with her Egyptian slave Hagar. Gen. 16: 6 – 16 Sarai resents Hagar's pregnancy and mistreats her. Abram allows her to send Hagar away. Hagar wanders in the wilderness but meets an angel, who tells her to return and suffer the ill-treatment. He prophesies that the child about to be born will live at odds with his kinsmen. Hagar returns, gives birth to a boy and Abram calls him Ishmael. Gen. 17 God establishes a covenant with the 99 year old Abraham and says Sarai (now to be called Sarah) will have a son. Abraham has to mark the covenant by circumcision. Gen. 21: 1 - 7 Sarah gives birth to Isaac when Abraham is 100 Gen. 21: 8 – 13 A feast is held when Isaac is weaned. Sarah complains that Hagar is laughing and wants her sent away. Gen. 21: 14 – 21 Hagar and Ishmael are saved from dying in the desert. God shows them a well and promises that Ishmael will be the father of a great nation. Ishmael lives in the wilderness of Paran and becomes an archer. Hagar finds him a wife from Egypt.
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Original Spelling and note on the text Schubert's source for this text seems to have been Zumsteeg's musical setting of it. There are a number of differences in the wording between Schubert's version and that published by Schücking in the 1781 Musen-Almanach (shown in bold below): Hagars Klage Hier am Hügel heissen Sandes, In der menschenlosen Wüste, Siz' ich, und mir gegenüber Liegt mein sterbend Kind! Lechzt nach einem Tropfen Wasser, Lechzt, und ringt schon mit dem Tode, Weint, und blikt mit stieren Augen Mich bedrängte Mutter an! Du mußt sterben, armes Würmchen, Ach, nicht eine eine Thräne Hab' ich in den trocknen Augen, Wo ich dich mit stillen kann! Säh' ich eine Mutterlöwin, Ha! ich wolte mit ihr kämpfen, Kämpfen mit ihr um die Eiter Dass ich löschte deinem Durst. Könnt' ich aus dem dürren Sande Nur ein Tröpfchen Wasser saugen! Aber ach! so mußt du sterben, Und ich muß dich sterben sehn! Kaum ein schwacher Stral des Lebens Dämmert auf der bleichen Wange Dämmert in den matten Augen, Deine Brust erhebt sich kaum. Hier am Busen komm und welke! Kömmt ein Mensch dann durch die Wüste, Wird er in den Sand uns scharren, Sagen: das ist Weib und Kind. Nein ich will mich von dir wenden, Daß ich dich nicht sterben seh', Und im Taumel der Verzweiflung Murre wider Gott! Ferne von dir will ich gehen, Und ein rührend Klaglied singen, Daß du noch im Todeskampfe Tröstung einer Stimme hörst. Noch zum letztem Klaggebete Öfn' ich meine dürren Lippen, Und dann schließ' ich sie auf immer, Und dann komme bald der Tod. Jehova! blick' auf uns herab! Erbarme dich des Knaben! Send' aus einem Thaugewölke Labung uns herab. Ist er nicht von Abrams Saamen? Ach er weinte Freudentränen, Als ich ihm dies Kind geboren. Und nun wird er ihm zum Fluch! Rette deines Lieblings Saamen, Selbst sein Vater bat um Seegen, Und du sprachst: Es komme Seegen Über dieses Knaben Haupt! Hab' ich wider dich gesündigt, Ha, so treffe mich die Rache, Aber, ach, was that der Knabe, Daß er mit mir leiden muß? Wär ich doch in Sir gestorben, Als ich in der Wüste irrte, Und das Kind noch ungeboren Unter meinem Herzen lag! Nein; da kam ein holder Fremdling, Hieß mich rück zu Abram gehen, Und des Mannes Haus betreten, Der uns grausam izt verstieß. War der Fremdling nicht dein Engel? Denn er sprach mit hoher Miene: Ismael wird groß auf Erden, Und sein Samen zahlreich sein. Ha! wir liegen nun und welken, Unsre Leichen werden modern Wie die Leichen der Verfluchten, Die der Erde Schoos nicht birgt. Schrei zum Himmel, armer Knabe! Öfne deine welken Lippen! Gott, sein Herr! Verschmäh das Flehen Des unschuld'gen Knaben nicht.
Confirmed by Peter Rastl with Musen Almanach A. MDCCLXXXI Göttingen bey J.C.Dieterich (Göttinger Musenalmanach 1781), pages 123-127.
To see an early edition of the text, go to page 123, [163] – 123, here: https://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN890210349&PHYSID=PHYS_0163&DMDID=DMDLOG_0001