Song of the Bell (1799) F. Shiller I call the living • I mourn the dead • I break the lightning

The Song of the Bell by Friedrick Shiller published in 1799 as interpreted by Marianna Wertz who was vice-president of the Schiller Institute. Later used by Beethoven in his 9th Symphony                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        A Fugue in Four Voices The poem is a fugue in four principal parts, which interact and jointly develop, much as voices do in a fugal composition by Bach or Mozart. The first voice is the technological process of forging a great bell. The second voice, for which the bell is also a metaphor, deals with the development and life of the individual. The third voice concerns questions of statecraft and the French Revolution, in which the subjects of the first and second voices are placed in the larger, universal context. The fourth voice, which enters for the first time in the person of the poet, introduces Schiller’s method to ensure the success of republican revolutions.

The opening Latin invocation betrays Schiller’s thinking: “I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break the lightning.” The leading symbol of the American Revolution in Schiller’s time was the great Liberty Bell of Philadelphia, which pealed in 1776 to proclaim the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And Benjamin Franklin, known throughout Europe as the man who “broke the lightning”—the American Prometheus—was the living symbol of that Revolution for all European republicans. Franklin was the single most important link between the American Revolution and those French republicans, like Lafayette, Turgot, Carnot, and Lavoisier, who attempted to bring into being a constitutional monarchy in France, as the mediation for a constitutional republic. Turgot wrote of Franklin, in words which echo Schiller’s, “Eripiut coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis” (“He has snatched the lightning from the heavens, and the scepter from tyrants”). But the Bell is more than a metaphor for the American Revolution. The reader is struck from the outset of the poem with Schiller’s meticulous description of the actual 37 Schiller’s metaphorical use of lightning—as both creative power and destructive natural force—drew on familiarity with the republican scientist Benjamin Franklin. Above: Benjamin West, “Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky,” 1816. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Wharton Sinkler technology of bell-founding. Was his purpose to educate his readers about how to forge a bell? Hardly! His purpose was to forge a republican citizenry. Schiller points to the underlying purpose of the bell founding metaphor in the second stanza: This it is, what all mankind graced, And to this end to understand That he in inner heart so traced, What he created with his hand. For Schiller, man is the creator of his own destiny, “though the blessing comes from higher.” The forging of a bell, like the forging of a republic, will succeed only when man uses his “understanding” to be like the Creator. The bell itself, therefore, is not just a poetic metaphor for the American Revolution. Much more fundamentally, Schiller uses the bell as a metaphor to demonstrate that a republican revolution is only possible through the application of the same noetic processes that go into the creation of new technologies.