Struwwelpeter
Matthew Fuerst
About this work:
Program Note for Struwwelpeter
Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter, or Cheerful Stories and Funny Pictures For Good Little Folks was first completed as a set of ten poems and illustrations for his three-year old son Carl as a Christmas present in the year 1844. Hoffmann had been looking for a present for his son, but found many of the stories he came across too banal. The work he wrote for his son contain stories that fall in the tradition of some of the more gruesome Grimms Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales. Hoffmann’s poems contain children who are punished for some misdeed, and the punishment usually fits the crime. For example, one finds stories where a child gets his thumbs cut off for sucking on them too much, a child who starves to death when he does not eat his soup, and a child who is killed by the very same animals he tortures earlier in the poem. As gruesome as these stories might be, they are meant to give instruction to a child on how to live his or her life (albeit, rather grotesque at times).
I was first introduced to these poems a few years ago and was astonished by them. Almost immediately I wished to create a song cycle out of these poems. I chose and arranged the poems for this cycle so that there is a general progression that becomes more gruesome, climaxing with Cruel Paul, and then writing a lullaby-esque setting for Slovenly Peter, and bookending the work with the introduction found at the beginning of the book. The introduction I set in Binary Form to reflect the text. The first section I imagined in a toy factory with a number of machines working simultaneously while the soprano sings an imagined Nursery Song above all the commotion. The second half of the song offers the warning to bad boy and girls, set on just a single note in the soprano, and a chord in the piano which functions as a sort of “warning-motive” throughout the cycle. The Story of Little Suck-A-Thumb is set in a modified five-part rondo form (ABABA). The A section is a sort of old fashioned folk song, while the B section is a more violent, aggressive setting. The Story of Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup is a chaconne (a repeated chord progression), but as each day passes, the texture thins out, the number of chords decreases, and tempo slows down. The vocal line is gradually reduced from a wide range for the soprano to merely two notes and finally a whisper when Augustus dies. Cruel Paul is the most dissonant and violent of the set, reflecting Paul’s fate at the hands of the animals he tortured. This is the only poem in the set in which the main character’s death is violent. Slovenly Peter I imagined as almost a song sung by a mother to a child, reassuring the child after the violence in Cruel Paul. It is the one song that is like an aria, and the only poem in which the main character has no real punishment except for being slovenly.
The set was written for Kristi Matson and Brad Blackham, and dedicated to their daughter, Audrey, as a Christmas present to all three of them. It was a little token of gratitude for all their support during my move and as I settled into my new life in Hillsdale.
-Mathew Fuerst
Year composed: 2008
Duration: 00:16:00
Ensemble type: Voice, Solo or With Chamber or Jazz Ensemble:Solo Voice with Keyboard
Instrumentation: 1 Piano, 1 Soprano