Mojca Erdmann & Malcolm Martineau

Images of Love, Death, and NatureLieder by Franz Schubert

Paul Thomason

Beginning and ending with the words of a woman expressing her deepest concerns for those she loves, tonight’s concert explores a wide range of themes dear to the hearts of the Romantics.

Hagars Klage is the earliest of Schubert’s songs to have survived. The copy used for the first edition is inscribed, “Schubert’s first song composition, written in the Konvikt at age fourteen, 30 March 1811.” There is little doubt that he wrote at least a few others songs before this one, since his brother Ferdinand said that by the age of ten Schubert was already composing “songs, string quartets, and piano music,” although none of them seems to have come down to us. The words of Hagars Klage are by Clemens August Schücking, but rather than on the original poem Schubert based his work on the 1797 setting by Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg. A good friend of Friedrich von Schiller, Zumsteeg composed the first instrumental music for his drama Die Räuber in 1782, as well as more than 300 songs. His dramatic ballads were extremely popular. “Zumsteeg’s ballads, with their rambling alternations of recitative and arioso, show him blithely unaware of the inescapable fact that music cannot serve words unless it also serves itself… there must be a degree of interesting musical incident to engage the ear,” says Brian Newbould, adding, “[Schubert] had no difficulty in outshining his mentors in musical interest from an early age.”

Schubert discovered Zumsteeg’s songs while a student and they opened a world of possibilities to the boy. His friend Josef von Spaun recalled visiting him at school in March 1811. “He had several of Zumsteeg’s songs in front of him and told me these songs moved him profoundly… He said he could revel in these songs for days on end. And to this youthful predilection of his we probably owe the direction Schubert took, and yet how little of an imitator he was and how independent the path he followed. He had already, at that time, attempted a few songs, for example, Hagars Klage. He wanted to modernize Zumsteeg’s song form, which appealed very much to him.”

Schubert follows the older composer’s example of setting the long poem—a mother’s lament for the death of her son, inspired by a biblical tale—in smaller sections of contrasting tempo, mood, and harmonic key, which brings the work closer to an extended operatic scena. Even this early composition shows Schubert’s propensity for using vivid harmonic changes to convey the shifting emotions of the words. What he lacks—hardly surprising at this stage—is a sense of how writing for the human voice is different from writing for, say, a violin, resulting in demands that are virtually impossible to meet for a singer in terms of range, awkward leaps between notes, and singing certain syllables on extreme notes. But, as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau commented, “The sense of improvisation and uninhibited dramatization raises Hagars Klage well above the model of the more experienced, older composer. It is astonishing how Schubert, still a child himself, was able to share the agony of Hagar… and how he was able to end the song in a mood of consolation. All the immaturity and clumsiness are as nothing beside such clarity and such exciting creative power.”

This work of the teenaged composer is followed tonight by two songs written in 1826, two years before Schubert’s death. Both are settings of texts by Johann Gabriel Seidl from his publication Lieder der Nacht (“Night Songs”). Schubert met the young Viennese poet and dramatist at a party given by Franz von Schober in January 1826 and went on to set a total of 11 of his poems to music, including Die Taubenpost, the final song from Schwanengesang. Im Freien beautifully captures the rather nostalgic mood of revisiting a place from one’s past at night and remembering the emotions experienced there. At first the song seems almost like a piano piece with an added vocal line, but in fact the soloist and the constantly rippling accompaniment often move in parallel motion, two people very much of the same mind. In Das Zügenglöcklein the piano also sets the scene and keeps the listener firmly in the world of the song by the repeated ringing of the titular bell in the right hand—described in the poem as a custom in Austrian parishes when a member of the community was dying. Schubert’s evocative music for each of the five verses is slightly different, depending on the nature of the person facing death.

Night also permeates Matthias Claudius’s Abendlied, which Schubert set in 1816. Here the night is idyllic and Schubert’s music seems deceptively simple. Pianist and Schubert scholar Graham Johnson points out that Claudius was an extremely happy family man and that in his poems “we can hear the security of the hearth and an untroubled belief in the goodness of the world. There was much that was domestic and optimistically trusting about Schubert, too, which is perhaps one of the reasons … we feel that this poetry fits our composer’s personality like a glove.”

Love—the overwhelming joy it brings, as well as the pain caused by its absence—is a common theme not only of Romantic poets, and one Schubert thoroughly explored in all its variations. Fülle der Liebe dates from a particularly happy time in Schubert’s life, the summer of 1825, when he and his good friend, the famous baritone Johann Michael Vogl, were on holiday in Upper Austria. Amid the spectacular Alpine scenery he also worked on his Great C-major Symphony and other songs. Friedrich von Schlegel’s poem describes a man whose youthful spirit has been led by love through many trials and emerged transformed, so that he can consider his sorrow to be a blessing. Vogl was known for his rather grand, even heroic manner as a performer (not all of Schubert’s friends were admirers) and this song certainly suited his particular style. Spaun listed it among a few other songs when he said, “Anyone who has heard Vogel sing [these songs] has something to take with him throughout his whole life and will never hear anything more beautiful.”

Frühlingsglaube is the only poem by Ludwig Uhland that Schubert set to music, but the resulting composition from 1820 has become a favorite of audiences. Uhland was an important and influential Swabian poet who inspired composers like Schumann, Brahms, and Richard Strauss, so it is perhaps odd that Schubert did not set more of his works. This immediately accessible piece celebrates spring and the renewal of hope it brings, although the overall feeling is rather sad or bittersweet—as if the singer cannot yet quite let go of the torment mentioned at the end of the poem.

The next two songs date from 1815, Schubert’s most productive songwriting year (with an astonishing 142 works). Quite possibly this burst of creativity was spurred by his falling in love with Therese Grob, who had sung the soprano solo in his Mass in F major the previous autumn. Apparently she returned his affections: “For three years, she hoped that I would marry her,” Schubert later told a friend, “but I could not find a post that could support us both. So she married another man at the wish of her parents—and I was deeply hurt. I still love her, and since then I have never met anyone who meant so much or more to me. She just wasn’t meant for me, I suppose.”

The short Lied (“Es ist so angenehm, so süss”) is a graceful, and utterly charming account of the delights of being in love. (Though commonly attributed to Friedrich von Schiller, there is some thought the poem might have been written by Caroline von Wolzogen, an early patroness of Schubert’s.) Amalia presents a quite different look at love. The text is from Act III of Schiller’s play Die Räuber, in which the solitary heroine is thinking of her banished lover who has been cheated of his inheritance and become the leader of a band of robbers. Schubert’s setting is really a gripping mini-operatic scene, beginning with an arioso as the girl describes her lover, turning into a passionate recitative as she remembers the way he kissed her, and finally becoming an aria as she relives their souls melting into each other; the piece ends with another arioso lamenting his absence.

Longing suffuses Sehnsucht, one of Mignon’s songs from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Schubert was one of many composers who have been drawn to the aching beauty of this poem, but for him it became virtually a life-long obsession. Between 1815 and 1826, he set the words no fewer than six times (including for male-voice quintet). D 359 is the third version, the first of the two composed in 1816. Goethe describes this as a duet between the waif Mignon and the Harper, but most of the musical settings give the text to Mignon alone. “The famous lyric expresses not only Goethe’s own longing for Italy, but that vague and indefinable search for a world better and nobler than the real one which gave the Romantic movement its characteristic mode of expression,” writes John Reed. One suspects that for Schubert the quality of longing was much deeper and more personal.

Nature in all its glory was another frequent theme of the Romantics. Johann Mayrhofer’s Erlafsee expresses appreciation for the beauties of the lake of the title, coupled with feelings both happy and sad—though the reason for the dual emotions is never specified in the text. This is the first of Schubert’s songs to ever be published, in an almanac in February 1818. For a while Mayrhofer and Schubert were close friends, even sharing lodgings for a year and a half (“two somewhat impractical gentlemen,” according to their landlady), before Schubert left at the end of 1820. Just how intimate their relationship was has long been debated, but there is no doubt Mayrhofer was thrown into a deep depression by Schubert’s withdrawal. He committed suicide several years after the composer’s death. Schubert set 47 of Mayrhofer’s poems, more than of any other poet with the exception of Goethe. In Erlafsee, he only used two stanzas and 14 lines of the much longer poem, although Susan Youens has suggested that Mayrhofer may have later added the additional lines, which are quite different, dealing with the mysterious appearance of a ghostly female figure. Schubert’s song superbly depicts the quiet scene and its effect on the viewer.

Appreciation of nature approaches pantheism in Johann Peter Uz’s Gott im Frühlinge, a song from June 1816 that mirrors a sentiment Schubert noted in his diary the same year. He had gone walking with his brother in the countryside just outside Vienna and wrote, “I felt so contented there with my brother Carl in the mysterious twilight. ‘How beautiful it all is!’ I cried and stood still, quite delighted.” Graham Johnson comments that the constant 16th-note pattern in the accompaniment, above which the vocal line sails, might represent “the ceaseless workings of nature… It is typical of Schubert to make a single accompanying figure seem appropriately descriptive on many levels at once.”

The program ends with four songs based on the work of Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish poet, novelist, playwright, and historian—to mention only his literary activities. His works were enormously popular in Germany and influenced German literature, while his translations of German ballads (many of them Goethe’s) did much to introduce German literature to Great Britain. Numerous operas including Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Rossini’s La donna del lago were drawn from Scott’s works. Schubert’s songs date from 1825, more than likely from that spring.

Lied der Anne Lyle appears in Scott’s novel The Legend of Montrose, where it is sung by Annot Lyle, the heroine of the story. (Graham Johnson calls her “a veritable Mignon of the North.”) The words—actually taken from Andrew MacDonald’s comedy Love and Loyalty—are undeniably sad and another composer might have made a rather tragic song out of them, but Schubert’s setting is gentle and wistful, and so tugs at the heartstrings all the more strongly. Ellen’s three Gesänge are taken from Scott’s narrative poem The Lady of the Lake. Rossini’s operatic version was given in German almost two dozen times in Vienna in 1821 and 1822, and there were several performances in Italian the following year, so it is more than likely Schubert saw at least one of them. Reading Scott’s poem was a revelation to him. “He was awakened to a whole new world of romantic drama and emotion,” writes Elizabeth Norman McKay, “in which tenderness and sensitivity coexisted with a larger, grander world of wide landscapes, nobility of mind, fateful action, and often tragic outcomes.” The results were among the best known and most performed of Schubert’s songs during his lifetime. His seven settings based on Scott’s poem—five for solo voice and two for chorus—were published in 1826 in Vienna as his Opus 52.

In the story of The Lady of the Lake, Ellen Douglas and her father are living in exile with a Highland clan. Her first two songs are intended to soothe the disguised King James V whom Ellen does not recognize. Raste Krieger! Krieg ist aus is an extended lullaby to the weary man written in rondo form, though Schubert’s enthusiastic setting of words like “armour’s clang, or war-steed champing” and later the “war-steed’s neigh” and “shouting clans,” while enormously enjoyable, are hardly conducive to sleep. The atmospheric second song Jäger, ruhe von der Jagd! is supposed to be a lullaby as well, but here the jaunty hunting horn motif perhaps negates some of the intended restfulness. The third and bestknown piece, Ave Maria, is in fact one of the most popular classical melodies of all time. Ellen sings it after joining her father in his hideaway, fearing for the safety of herself and those she loves in an upcoming battle between the Highlanders and the King of Scotland. Though it has often been performed in churches as part of a religious service, the song’s long vocal lines call for the breath control of a well-trained singer to make the most of this extraordinary composition. It is Schubert at his very best—simple, direct, and heartfelt.