Vom Leid zum Lied

Three stories about artists' fates – one tragic, one almost tragic with a conciliatory ending, and one unintentionally comical with a happy ending. The latter precedes the other two by decades: in 1886, the year of the death of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and dedicated to his memory, Karl May wrote his 2,616-page pulp novel about a dairymaid who becomes a singer after an adventurous series of detours. In Friedrich Huch's novel Enzio, on the other hand, the hero, although blessed with talent and beauty, is not viable because, following the model of Oscar Wilde, he wastes his talent on art and his genius on life. The musician Daniel Nothafft is treated similarly cruelly in Jakob Wassermann's Nuremberg novel Das Gänsemännchen (The Goose Boy). "Art is a Moloch; it devours souls," says the author in view of the suffering of his Parsifal of sound.

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