On 20 April 1840, in one of her first letters to Gottfried, Johanna promised not to ‘intervene in your (certainly bright mood) with a diminished seventh chord’. A letter from 17 June 1840 reveals more concrete musical links between the Kinkels, when Johanna tells Gottfried that she and some choir members sang ‘[his] Lieder, of which [she] has also composed a new one again’. These two excerpts demonstrate that music played a crucial part in the Kinkels’ relationship, an aspect which confirms Maynard Solomon’s concept of interconnected aspects of life and art. Drawing on constructiveness as a commonality between historiography and biography, Unseld warns that autobiographical documents may be particularly prone to (mis)readings as historical sources, because their authenticity and objectivity are questionable. Nevertheless, such documents can be valuable in tracing links between music and life. For Kinkel, music served as a means of self-expression, a way of socialising and relaxation, and an inspirational mediator between herself and her second husband. It should be borne in mind, however, that ‘there is no such thing as a biographical truth’ and that, according to Unseld, (auto) biographical works bear a dialogical balance of the inventory self (‘inventarisches Ich’) and inventive self (‘inventorisches Ich’), an observation which will also surface in relation to Johanna Kinkel.

Berlin: Kinkel’s attempt to process her first marriage

Considering Kinkel’s own biography and her motivation in moving to Berlin, it is not surprising that all of Kinkel’s love songs published during her Berlin time allude to a desperate search for true love. In Kinkel’s Lied ‘Verlornes Glück’ (Lost Happiness, op. 6, no. 5), the words of which originate from Kinkel herself, the lyrical I returns to their favourite place and bemoans their love being over. Although this Lied was not published until 1839, the opus number points to one of Kinkel’s earlier compositions (the first published opus was op. 7).

This Lied’s timing and structure are interesting – perhaps one of the reasons why the reviewer of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung thought it was one of the most beautiful Lieder within this collection. The two-quaver upbeat in the vocal line is preceded by a cadence-like crotchet progression in the piano accompaniment.