The German Lied is an essentially secular genre, but there are enough of them that deal with sacred themes, broadly construed, that it is possible to include at least an example in this blog. And so we turn to Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn – her brother Felix was also a composer, and the song we are going to look at was first published under his name) and her setting of a text by Johann Ludwig Uhland entitled Die Nonne (The Nun).

The music, a gentle A-minor ripple in the piano supporting a vocal line relatively high in tessitura and hovering around the dominant of the key, is mournful, reflective, and somewhat other-worldly in effect, mirroring the text which relates mourning, comfort, and death in a cloistered moonlit scene.

Only the title identifies the young woman depicted as a nun specifically, but the text implies that she had fallen in love, presumably putting her profession in tension with her desire. She mourns her beloved, approaches a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and herself dies peacefully then and there.

It is the second verse which I find somewhat theologically problematic. The text reads:

O wohl mir, dass gestorben,
Der treue Buhle mein!
Ich darf ihn wieder lieben:
Er wird ein Engel sein,
Und Engel darf ich lieben.

Which we might translate as:

I am happy that my true beloved has died!
I am allowed to love him again:
He will become and angel,
And I may love angels.

Now, the thing here is that the idea that deceased humans become angels is widespread, and often pastorally comforting to the bereaved, but it is not really theologically sound – we await the resurrection of the body, which is glorified and changed somehow, but remains a human and not an angelic nature. Biblically, Mark 12 and its synoptic parallels (in Matt 22 and Luke 20) in the context of a question from Sadducees about levirate marriage and the resurrection describe our future glorified being as like (ὡς), or in Luke equal to (ἰσ-), angels, but these texts do not warrant a claim to become angels. Since they are, however, about conjugal life at the resurrection, we may find that the sense of them does allow the maiden in the song the comfort she seeks: she may love her Buhle in a correct way in the future life, uncomplicated by the less ordered way that a present love might desire an expression in contradiction to her duty.