How To Step Off Into a Black Hole (Or NOT): Strauss's "Der Einsame," with Extra Warning Light Provided By My Favorite Musician

Art by fellow music-loving and fractal-art making Hiver @justclickindiva, used by permission

The advantage of great grief in life is the opportunity to ask one of life's most necessary questions: how as a human being do you keep taking the blows of life and not fall into the abyss of despair?

I have had to ponder the question deeply in this past three weeks. As a devout Christian I know that there are always two paths before me. As it is said in the Book of Proverbs, “the way of the wise goes upward, that he [or she, in my case] may depart from hell beneath.” So, the abyss and I have no business with each other … but if I decided to do business with it, what would that even look like?

This is the question that Richard Strauss addressed in “Der Einsame,” the second of a pair of songs for low voice and orchestra. The first of that pair, “Das Tal,” is so bright and beautiful that it is hard to remember a bad mood anywhere around it – the character there takes so much joy in life, and in his favorite valley, that even the idea of growing old and weak and dying is transformed. In the standard German way, dying amidst nature is a very good end, so the man says to his favorite valley, “Take me in, and then bloom right on” … in a sense, he gives himself back to the nourishment of that which had nourished him. Think of “Das Tal” as “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King, just for 1902!

Yet “Der Einsame,” in any century of human existence, would represent a depth deeper than any valley of earth for a solitary man (the meaning of der Einsame is “the solitary man,” since the masculine form is given by the German) to come to. The song is as extraordinarily beautiful a song as “Das Tal” when sung well, but finding a good recording is not easy. Yet I'm not throwing any singer under the YouTube struggle bus by name because the breath control it takes to sustain those long, low notes in all those long legato lines and project all that over a whole orchestra is just not something most people on earth can do, to say nothing of doing well. The song does the job it is supposed to do by virtue of what it is: if you can sing it well, there is a good chance that you are “solitary” among male singers.

Sounds like a job for my favorite musician, doesn't it? Fortunately for me and us, Kurt Möll's interpretation of “Der Einsame” is the first YouTube served up to me!

Of course we have talked about this song before in passing … I had to get over the idea that I ever knew standard German beyond operating well in a college or casual setting and go study again to even get past the first four words in Kurt Möll's soft German dialect. Doing that also is what tipped me off to understanding I was missing the whole point of my favorite Verdi opera aria for bass in both Italian and German – and getting that point tipped me off to the depth of the trouble around me that I had to deal with, personally and professionally!

In the aftermath of those battles and accepting great losses, then Brahms's lullaby for mature adults who understand the blessing of eternity came into my life, in the great yet gentle might of the voice of bass Josef von Manowarda singing “Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht.” At last I could understand: “Death is the cool night; life is the sweltering day,” and why there are so many who have prepared for the next life and have no fear of death … life has been long and hard, and the cool of the evening is welcome before passing through to a new, eternal day, in which love reigns eternal.

But I am 42. Barring some unforeseen event, I do not intend to meet the cool night any time soon … there is but one path by which I could choose to go there now, and it is despair. Many have chosen that at far younger ages than me. Slowly by neglect of necessary things, a little faster by adding destructive habits, quickly in a single desperate act … the first way catches many more than the latter two, and when you have done all you can and still find yourself again alone, so much work lost, it is the first way that is so very dangerous ... one might stumble in easily without maintaining vigilance.

Interestingly, there is a “solitary” – a singularity, technically – in the physical universe that epitomizes this: a black hole, made from the collapse of a very large star. So concentrated is the gravity of a black hole that even light cannot escape it. Come too close, and, slow or fast, the end of any orbit path is the bottom of that black hole. But the thing is, you can't see a black hole. You can only see it by the light wrapping around it on its event horizon. Remember @justclickindiva's art up above? That light wrap is the one and only warning anyone would get to change course!

“Der Einsame” is Strauss gorgeously lighting up the event horizon of the black hole of despair, and fittingly, Herr Möll is the right man -- with that voice as black as midnight but spangled with a billion stars – to report what happens if we blow through the event horizon into the void.

What would we hear if we could hear the voice of one being crushed inside a black hole? Google Translate and beginning German combined finally let me transliterate what Herr Möll sings to us about the man in that unfortunate situation: “Where I am, around me rings darkest darkness, so dull and dense.” This is not just a dark room, or a dark place … this darkness has mass and great weight, and since it is surrounding this man, we might even say it has a grip … and it is pressing downward … slowly, inexorably … the vocal line keeps getting longer and lower and the low strings wander even lower, threatening to break the chords at the end of the opening two lines.

Just how much gravitational danger are we dealing with in “Der Einsame”? So much that Herr Möll, two lines in, is putting in a striking amount of work at the bottom of average bass range. He starts on a low G sharp, soon hits a striking low G, and then ends on a low F, F2 to be exact. In terms of male voices humans hear every day, that kind of descent is rare, since bass averages out on the F2 and basses are a minority in human voices anyhow!

But for Herr Möll, a true basso profundo, F2 is still in the middle of his low range. That is to say, Herr Möll's voice holding with such ease through a long F2 indicates that even though we are starting at the human average limit for low voice, we are nowhere near the bottom for this song, because as low as F2 already is, in Herr Moll's voice it just doesn't sound low enough to be the bottom. And indeed, the wandering of the low strings still lower while Herr Möll holds the chord together with that F2 tells the human ear: the man we are hearing about is in unusual danger, because even with the situation he is already in, he can fall further … much, much further.

But then, light breaks just long enough to show us what the problem is: lost love. “[I've been here] since the time I stopped being the light of your eyes, my beloved.” Then, back to C sharp minor and around the cycle of fifths to B flat minor and at last a brief break of light again in B flat to let it be known: “To me is lost the sweetness of the Love-star, in all its golden splendor!” There was but one light in this man's whole life – one star, and it has now gone out. The night of “Der Einsame” is not the “cool night” of Brahms. This is the heat death of the universe in a man's life.

Herr Möll is so, so good, after the setup of an otherwise calm approach, at then letting us know a character has internally gone to pieces … he hints at his voice breaking in a sob in the middle of the word erloschen, the second of two words – “mir erloschen” – which roughly transliterates to “[to] me [is] lost.” But, drop out the extra words to make it make sense in English, and you get “me lost” … “me lost,” with even the memory of what he has lost being more torment … from a sob to an anguished heart cry on the song's highest note on “Liebessterne, at the memory of those love-stars … but then to fall right back down through the lost glorious light is even more devastating! The first word of the following line is Abgrund, and Herr Möll announces that with calm force. “Abyss” – that is the very next word! What has broken the fall is the very edge of the abyss, so there is still further down – infinitely further down – that this man can still go!

Now it is about here, after being so disappointed by King Philipp in Verdi and all his gorgeously self-centered carrying on about his wife never loving him, that I realized I needed to stop and think. Of course my heart goes out to the character in “Der Einsame”… he resonated with me greatly in my own time of grief, and that resonance stayed put even as other basses I listened to struggled more through the song. I checked to make sure, because the voice of Herr Möll by itself is profoundly moving to me … but no, that wasn't it. Even less well sung, “Der Einsame” has its own deep gravity ... and a deep, deep lesson.

If you Google the heat death of the universe, you will find that it is not something we really have to worry about … although the idea that every source of heat and light in the universe will someday self-destruct, cool, and go out is existentially scary, it is too far out in time to even be considered among the many dangers that confront us in this life.

But for the man in “Der Einsame,” the very last star has gone out … how did he get there, in the short space of a mere human life? Richard Strauss highlights it in the first bright section of the song, and Kurt Möll's glorious tones hang half the stars of the Milky Way around it for warning lights: the man in “Der Einsame” says that the light went out when he stopped being the light in his beloved's eyes. In other words, this poor man was living only for the approval of another human being.

This – this co-dependency on an individual and mass scale – is the thing that makes people's feet run downhill to the abyss. This is the thing that social media in general has put on overdrive in these modern times: the constant search for and addiction to attention from other people, the constant need to perform to try to capture the eyes of others, the assigning of value to one's self based on the aggregate perceived from others' opinions. There is no core in such people, no light shining from within, no light meeting with light – everything has to come from the outside, and when attention moves on to the next thing or person of the moment, such people are lost in the darkness.

In romantic relationships, people like this are utterly exhausting because they are so needy, and so the partner who has more to offer always decides to move on. It is not said in “Der Einsame” that this is the case, and, granted, it is a very short song, but again, just as it is in King Philipp's case in Verdi's aria, all we hear about is the man's loss. King Philipp turned murderous, faced with the same situation. The character in Strauss's song is a gentler soul, weeping, but since this man puts it all on the woman and sees no path to agency for himself and thus finding healing and growth, despair is inevitable. That abyss yawning at his feet provides a temptation...

“[The] abyss opens at my feet – take me in, eternal night!”

… to which he yields. Richard Strauss wrote it and Kurt Möll puts the sound to it: the pit having been opened, and the last hope lost, that last F2 on the word for German word for night – nacht is held out for so long we hear the man's fall all the way down until the note is lost in the wandering of the low strings … gone into the swirling darkness, forever.

As it is in “Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht,” death occurs so smoothly in “Der Einsame” that we might miss it – we also might miss that this is by no means a natural death. ” It is not just that the character was drawn into the orbit of a black hole – we know where he went wrong, locking the whole value of his existence into the viewpoint of another human being, so we understand where his spiral downward begins. Yet the issue is that he chooses not to make any kind of course correction. Instead, he chooses to step into the black hole while we watch but can't do a thing about it … except, of course, take warning.

Easter has just passed. For the loss of what mere mortal would I step off into the abyss, when Christ conquered death and returned from the grave to keep me out of said abyss? I needed that reminder this past Sunday, and also in the previous week … for when grief hits hard enough, one cannot see clearly … again, most people are not consciously choosing to start their path to despair by choosing to assign too much value to the opinions and feelings of other people about them.

We are only human. We miss a lot of clues and hints and red flags, and on top of that, many of us have not been taught to think deeply about our choices and responsibilities in life. Many of us did not learn in formative years how to define ourselves as separate from our peer groups' viewpoints, with callings and purposes of our own.

Yet those who do not accept the challenge of seeking this learning in adulthood remain lost, accumulating losses and heading toward despair, degradation, and destruction … and because this is so common, it is also common for people to say, while choosing the abyss, “What other choice did I have? I never saw one!”

I live on, grieving and all, because I am one of the ones here in this realm to show people that there is another choice ... from heaven to earth, there is no reason to despair … there is always the possibility of looking up … there is light, there is hope for whoever wants it … but “Der Einsame” shows that there are people who will focus on the darkness, and how they got there, and who is responsible for it beside them, and what they have lost, and all this to the point that they pass the point of no return.

The pit of despair is always there. Richard Strauss's music illumines its border and even its staggering interior dimensions in an unforgettable way ... those wandering low strings literally leave no conceivable bottom for us to find! Kurt Möll follows through as only he can in revealing the tragic disorder and destruction of those who descend into that pit's inexorable grip … but kindly, as ever. The stunning beauty of his voice shields those who are not ready for so deep a lesson, while his careful choices of how to use that voice leaves indicators of what is really going on for those of a mind to learn. Master teachers are always teaching, even through their legacy.

I listen, and I learn, and I am reminded by “Der Einsame” to avoid even the marginal orbit of the pit of despair, for no human may toy safely with that gravity by assigning her value to where she stands in the fickle affections of other people. It is a mercy of God on me that through YouTube, “Der Einsame” came to me through the one male voice that, to me, could be a safe guide through so dark and deep a lesson left in art … and what I learned, I have now faithfully passed on!