Fall Magic

In this work, Edward Ford translates into English many of the poems and one tale by the nineteenth-century German writer Josef Freiherr von Eichendorff. His achievement is to have brought to readers' attention the beauties of important poetry not widely known in the United States at the present time. Many of these poems have been set to music by composers as distinguished as Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Richard Strauss. The musical setting of Eichendorff's poem, "In einem kühlen Grunde," by an obscure Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Glück, has become so familiar to present-day Germans that it is often mistakenly listed as a "folk song" in catalogues. Eichendorff's poems are culturally so central to the German lyric tradition that they deserve to be better known in English.