Gurrelieder ~ Backstory

This is a very brief outline sketching the backstory of the Danish legend of Valdemar and Tove ~ the basis for Jens Peter Jacobsen's poem, Gurre-Lieder, which Schoenberg used as his text in the German translation by Robert Franz Arnold.  A more detailed background can be found as part of the liner notes for Vox recording VBX 206.

• It is the 12th or 13th century.
• Valdemar is the king of Denmark.  The queen is Helvig.
• One day Valdemar travels to the island of Rügen in the Baltic to see his brother.
• On Rügen Valdemar discovers "Little Tove" in a castle all alone.  They fall in love.
• Valdemar returns to Zealand, bringing Tove and her brother Hening with him.  There Valdemar builds the castle Gurre for Tove.  Gurre "is to be the retreat, the isle of continuing."
• The queen, Helvig, is not happy with this arrangement but waits for an opportunity for revenge.
• When Valdemar is finally gone off on a journey, Helvig induces her own lover, Folkvard, to bolt the door to the bath chamber, trapping  Tove inside.  They force scalding hot steam into the chamber and Tove dies an agonizing death.
• Valdemar returns and takes his revenge on Folkvard by sealing him in a barrel with nails pounded in the sides and rolling it around until he dies his own agonizing death.
• Valdemar, driven inward by his grief, now goes on a "spiritual" search for Tove that takes him to the other side of the grave ~ an eternal hunt, striking fear across the countryside as he rides his steed wildly through woods and over plains.

"Legends like that of Valdemar Atterdag’s wild ride are extremely widespread in Europe, the
protagonist varying from one country to the next."  And some of these folk tales may have made their way to the New World resulting in stories such as "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

The Vox liner notes provide a much more detailed account of the tangle of myths and legends that ultimately resulted in Jacobsen's poem, many of them with gruesome details such as Folkvard's slaying (which is not taken up in the Jacobsen poem) and Tove's murder ("Helvig's falcon [Folkvard] it was, who cruelly tore apart Gurre's dove [Tove]").

And once there did stand a Gurre castle in Zealand in Denmark whose ruins can be seen to this day (click for a tour).  Fact and legend co-mingle in Jacobsen's verse to create the wonderful haunting text for Schoenberg's Wagnerian cantata ~ his own musical vision of the ruins of Gurre.








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