Franz Schubert and His World
Page 26
In the third act the insurgents are victorious in battle in a region not far from the mountainous region where Froila dwells. The General encounters the fleeing Estrella and is just about to drag her away when, at her cry for help, Alfonso rushes to her side, frees her and takes the guilty General prisoner. When he learns that his heart’s desire is the daughter of the defeated King, he calls his comrades to arms and rushes to assemble under his command the faithful soldiers who had been scattered by the defeat. The young Princess has for some time found asylum in this lonely valley, where fate has also guided Mauregato, pursued by the insurgents. Mauregato, suddenly catching sight of Froila, takes him now to be the vengeful spirit of the legitimate King and, seized with terror, begs for mercy and lays the stolen chain at his feet. Estrella arrives, followed by Alfonso, victorious over the rebellious troops. The two kings, after reaching an agreement, renounce their rights to the throne of Léon, and entrust it to the pair of lovers, thus uniting the parties and fulfilling the dictum.
The role of Froila was written for the Viennese singer Vogel [sic] and includes some of the most beautiful parts of the opera, in which virtually everything, from beginning to end, is nobly sustained. Much is graceful and charming and reveals the distinguished composer at every turn. Only one thing is lacking: the element of drama.
The opera must be considered in the fullest sense a Singspiel. It consists of a series of light and pretty vocal numbers sustained in a broadly melodic manner. Everything carries the stamp of Schubert’s lyricism and much must be included with the best of his song collections. Often one comes across his favorite intervals, cadences, and turns of phrase. But the lack of theatrical experience and dramatic understanding is noticeable at every turn, and the symphonic virtues, for example, do not compensate for the work’s defects, since the musical effect is nowhere strong enough. The instrumentation plays a very subordinate role; it is really only piano accompaniment arranged for orchestra. The frequently employed violin arpeggios, the so-called batteries, are especially tiresome, so too is the monotony with which chords, figures, and passages are doubled by different instruments without the others introducing the slightest episodic contrast or variety. Schubert allows the orchestral accompaniment to sink far below the significance that Gluck and Mozart, not to mention Beethoven, gave to it. In his songs, on the other hand, he allows the piano to play so important a role as to effectively unify the whole; his accompaniments create a kind of instrumental miniature, a scenic background and decoration for the vocal line. Duets and trios appear in this work like a sequence of romances which the characters sing, one after the other, until they join voices at the conclusion in a small ensemble. So naive and simple, yet so far from adequate.
Schubert, so masterful within smaller frameworks, suffers the loss of much of his natural genius in broader expanses. He fulfilled the important mission of raising the level of lyric composition, of endowing it with an unimagined artistic significance, of placing it on an equal footing alongside the most important artistic genres. But though he broadened the dimensions of the lyric, those of the stage exceeded his powers and might have actually crushed them. The rich, powerful flow of his melodies, diverted into too broad a channel, lacked depth. One has to say that the rays of his genius possessed more intensity than range, and reached the stage from too far a distance for the objects they encountered to cast enough of a shadow to emerge. And so I could compare his opera with Peter Schlemihl, which was also robbed of this property so necessary to give reality to his actual person. So too, as with Peter Schlemihl, do we find here melodic character in truth and reality, yet we are tempted to doubt its very existence since it does not cast the indispensable shadow.
If indeed the libretto promised little in the way of scenic development, then we must ask how much better Schubert would have fared if he had had a better subject. He poured out the whole of his gift for lyric song into this opera, but dramatic contour and declamatory expression are missing everywhere. Whoever wishes to do so can find evidence of how much the balance between the lyric and the dramatic fluctuates for composers, and how silly the generally held view is that anyone who possesses all of the special musical-technical skills also simutaneously possesses the necessary qualities to compose an opera. We have before us not only a significant musician, but an exceptionally gifted, brilliant tone poet who utterly misjudged the requirements of stagecraft, which entitles us to doubt whether he would ever have completely fulfilled these requirements, since his theatrical attempts—among which Alfonso und Estrella, if not the last, is certainly the most important—support such a view.
Certainly the last thing we want to do is deny richly endowed organizations the capability to present very different emotions and feelings in the most varied artistic genres, or even in different art forms. We have always argued on principle against the usual manner of ordering artists into particular categories and then treating prejudicially those works that belong to a different genre than those that were once successfully cultivated by them. One does not need to adduce the example of a Mozart or Michelangelo or anyone else in order to repudiate the notion of classifying artists like shops or cities that become well known because of certain foodstuffs or a choice morsel, some because of their wine, others by virtue of their cheese, some on account of their patés, others because of sweets. Still, it would be a mistake not to realize that a genius does not always have the ability to manage all the genres of an art form. Like the forms of nature and all forms adopted by our emotions, individual art forms have a legitimate essence of their own, and each will be brilliantly and fully developed through the powerful outpouring of a specially endowed genius. We admired in Chopin the example of an extraordinary ability to limit itself to that framework most congenial to it. Schubert warrants something similar. In his extraordinarily creative life, his attempts at dramatic and symphonic works can only be considered secondary. The theater in particular possessed too broad a scale for someone of his outlook. Moreover, the dramatic texture demanded by the stage was too complicated for his impulsive and direct inspiration.
How different it is to express emotions in limited or sharply distinctive contours, in pleasing yet brief formulations, in energetic yet concise expressions that one would like to call aphorisms of the heart—how different from giving life to the feelings of fictitious characters, allowing these characters to preserve a firmly logical character when actions conflict with one another, to confer on them forceful yet natural language in complicated situations, providing them with the true accent by which their emotions may come to light as they struggle. Schubert had the gift of dramatizing lyrical inspiration to the highest degree. He understood how to develop out of poems small in range the entire quintessence of feeling and the compelling power of the emotions, by bestowing on the often more apparent than actual pains, joys, and sentiments of a few verses a power of expression, dazzling brilliance, penetrating intensity, wonderful delicacy, and a glaze of color, so that we see them flare up before our eyes, take possession of our souls, and enjoy the delightful or bittersweet aftertaste of impressions he pours into our hearts like drops of magic elixir. In the short duration of a Lied he transforms us into observers of brusque but deadly conflicts, allows us to behold and perceive the broken sighs and overflowing tears of agony, or feel the fluttering pulsation of blessed love; he leads us through all the misery and sorrow of hopeless pain or lifts us into the regions of the ideal and eternal. Might he have reached the same goal within an expanded frame by intensifying the reach of his characters?
Moral constitutions, like physical ones, are diverse; intellectual qualities and preferences are just as manifold as corporeal ones. One moment the eye is sharper and more acute, another, less so, the ear more or less accurate and true; in some, the muscles are better developed, in others, the nerves. In one temperament, melancholy, dreaminess, and feeling prevail; in another, reflection, conjecture, calculation. In one case, liveliness and the momentary, in another, reserved and lasting ardor.
Some are full of simplicity, like single-stringed instruments, others create a fully harmonious sonority. The latter are the rarest and only to these is it granted to encompass what appears to be mutually exclusive, to combine the most heterogeneous qualities, to be at the same time spontaneous and reflective, enthusiastic and erudite, forceful and gentle, vivacious and profound. And whoever wishes to choose the stage as his realm must belong to the ranks of the latter, for though the lyric is for the most part subjective by nature, dramatic works require the objectivity of character and action. Thus it is more likely that a dramatic poet will distinguish himself as a lyric poet than that a lyrical nature will fasten upon dramatic elements with lasting success. Or that one will encounter as rarely among us musicians as one will among writers talents who are endowed with the necessary profusion of intellectual virtues—especially since the musician who wishes to master the stage must demonstrate all the qualities of the tragic poet. Before one embarks on dramatic works, therefore, a serious testing of powers is of increasing and pressing necessity.
Schubert was destined to render an extraordinary service, albeit indirectly, to the dramatic Muse. He has exercised on operatic style perhaps a greater influence than has until now been recognized. By employing and bringing into relief harmonic declamation in a more highly intensified manner than Gluck, he has raised it to a power and energy not yet considered possible in the Lied, exalting poetic masterworks with its expression. In this way he disseminated and popularized declamation, facilitated its acceptance and understanding. By teaching us to value the joining together of noble poetry and profound music, he imbued the latter with the affecting accents of the pathos inherent in poetry; he made natural, as it were, poetic thought in the realm of music, uniting them like body and soul, and thereby instilling disgust and aversion toward the kind of vocal music that clings annoyingly to bad verse, verse without heart or soul.
It was Schubert’s nature to sing out in the purest way, full of vitality and life; he was ablaze with divine fire and anointed with the chrism of the Holy Spirit, but his heavenly Muse, her glance lost in the clouds, liked above all to let the folds of her azure mantel stream over elysian fields, forests, and mountains, in which she wandered about in capricious strides, at first contemplatively, then jumping about, ignorant of the artificially winding path upon which the dramatic Muse carefully strolls between the wings and rows of lights, his winged strophe experiencing an uncanny fear of the clattering of gears and stage machinery. Schubert is to be compared more to a mountain stream that breaks free from the bosom of a snow-covered mountain peak, and in steep, frothy waterfalls inundates the rocky descent with a thousand colorfully sparkling drops, than to the majestic river that waters the plains and reflects the images of cathedrals on its mirror-like surface. In art he is and remains great because in art—as in nature—greatness, nobility, and grandeur are not measured in terms of material dimensions, because its creations are not measured in terms of the size and weight of commercial products, but according to those incorporeal laws whose secret the human spirit possesses yet is unable to reveal.
NOTES
1. A thirteenth essay, on Wagner’s Das Rheingold, is now generally grouped with the others, though it has a somewhat different genesis because it was not associated with any performance. At the end of September Liszt received the completed score of the opera from Wagner, and, as he told the composer, permitted himself a slight indiscretion in bringing to the attention of the public without his consent the vast tetralogy Wagner intended: “I hope you will not be angry with me. I meant well by it, and it cannot do any harm to have made the public a bit more aware of the whole thing.” (Unless otherwise specified, translations are those of the author of the present article.) The essay appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik at the beginning of the New Year 1855. For a careful chronological study of the publication history of all of the essays, see Franz Liszt, Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 5: Dramaturgische Blätter, ed. Dorothea Redepenning and Britta Schilling (Wiesbaden, 1989), 154–59.
2. For an important study of the relationship of Schober and Liszt, see Maria Eckardt, “Schubert’s and Liszt’s Friend and Poet: Franz von Schober,” in Liszt Saeculum I, no. 56 (Budapest, 1996), 13–19.
3. On the Pest affair, see Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, the Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847 (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 319–42. For a valuable corrective to Walker’s uncritical defense of Liszt, see Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge, 2004), 117–56.
4. For more on these biographical sketches, see Allan Keiler, “Ludwig Rellstab’s Biographical Sketch of Liszt,” in Franz Liszt and His World, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley (Princeton, 2006).
5. Eckardt, “Schubert’s and Liszt’s Friend,” 13–19, discusses these works in some detail.
6. Ferdinand Schubert to Breitkopf und Härtel, Vienna, 2 March 1848, in Schubert: Die Erinnerungen seiner Freude, ed. Otto Erich Deutsch (Leipzig, 1957), 482.
7. Franz Liszt, 28 February 1848, in Franz Liszts Briefe, ed. La Mara (Marie Lipsius) (Leipzig, 1899), 4: 24.
8. Franz von Schober to Ferdinand Schubert, Weimar, 18 March 1848, in Deutsch, Schubert: Die Erinnerungen, 485.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid, 486.
11. Eduard Genast, Aus Weimars klassischer und nachklassischer Zeit (Stuttgart, 1904), 316.
12. Liszt to Breitkopf und Härtel, 24 February 1850, in Deutsch, Schubert: Die Erinnerungen, 372.
13. Liszt to Raff, 30 December 1850, in Helene Raff-München, “Franz Liszt und Joachim Raff: Im Spiegel ihrer Briefe,” Die Musik 1/10 (1902): 863.
14. Liszt to Raff, 19 March 1851, in Helene Raff-München, “Franz Liszt und Joachim Raff: Im Spiegel ihrer Briefe,” Die Musik 1/13 (1902): 1162. August Friedrich Wilhelm Reissmann (1825–1903) was a music critic and composer. He resided for a few years, in the early 1850s, in Weimar.
15. Liszt to Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, 13 May 1851, in La Mara, Franz Liszts Briefe, 4:119.
16. Liszt to Raff, Eilsen, 8 June 1851, in Helene Raff-München, “Franz Liszt und Joachim Raff “: 1167.
17. Liszt to Louis Köhler, Weimar, 2 March 1854, in La Mara, Franz Liszts Briefe, 1:151.
18. Liszt to Breitkopf und Härtel, Weimar, 27 May 1854, in Deutsch, Schubert: Die Erinnerungen, 493.
19. Walker, Franz Liszt: The Weimar Years 1848–1861 (Ithaca, NY, 1989), 92.
20. A fairly detailed summary of Liszt’s revisions can be found in Till Gerrit Waidelich, Franz Schubert: “Alfonso und Estrella” (Tutzing, 1991), 41–46. Also see discussion of revisions in Keiler, “Liszt and the Weimar Hoftheater,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 28 (1986), 431–50.
21. Franz von Schober to Heinrich Schubert, 2 November 1876, in Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, ed. Otto Erich Deutsch, trans. Rosamond Ley and John Nowell (London, 1958), 208.
Schubert’s Freedom of Song, if Not Speech
KRISTINA MUXFELDT
For Richard Kramer
In these pages I wish to probe the freedom imagery in a surprising number of Franz Schubert’s songs, some written in the heady atmosphere of the so-called Befreiungskriege, the “wars of liberation” of 1813 to 1815, others composed only over the following decade, in the reactionary police state that Austria had become. Because the political dimension is more transparent in poetry from the earlier time I will first turn our attention to Schubert’s settings of several poems by Theodor Körner (1791–1813), the poet of German patriotism who took up arms in the wars against Napoleon and died a martyr for that cause in August 1813 at the age of twenty-one. Then we will take a closer look at Schubert’s continued preoccupation with similar imagery in songs set after the war to poems by Johann Mayrhofer and Johann Gabriel Seidl—this in the face of Austria’s by-then firm stand against a constitutional Vaterland for its people.
Schubert produced his Körner settings toward the close of an era when dozens of other composers, most prominently Beethoven in Vienna, openly addressed current affairs of state in celebratory son
gs and occasional music—a striking contrast with opera, which frequently took a longer, and more critical, historical view.1 Patriotic lyrics flooded the marketplace during those years, helping to drum up support for the war effort. This is not to say that opinion was uniform, though, since all publications were closely monitored—for civility of discourse as well as for political conformity. One surprisingly personal invective against the self-crowned emperor of the French with whom Austria earlier had tried to forge an alliance by political marriage (in 1810) was an ironic “Ode to Napoleon” attributed to the German poet, librettist, playwright—and diplomat—August von Kotzebue (1761–1819). It appeared anonymously in Moscow (not even the publisher was identified). As the “Genius of Freedom” weeps in slavery’s chains, he laments elegiacally before building to a mocking tirade: “Let thousands go to ruin, suffocated by hunger, plague, and sword; Just so that Your flags wave victorious, and nothing disturbs Your plan. Inhuman tiger [entmenschter Tyger] all the world calls you! Defiling swindler of trust and belief! No matter, You alone are victor! That goal is worth any means.”2