Franz Schubert and His World
Page 28
Schöner Tag! Du bist erwacht.
Glorious day! You have awakened.
Mit geheimnisvollen Worten,
In melodischen Accorden
Grüß’ ich deine Rosenpracht!
With mysterious words,
in melodious strains
I greet your roseate splendor!
Ach! Der Liebe sanftes Wehen
Ah, love’s gentle breezes
Schwellt mir das bewegte Herz,
make my moved heart swell
Sanft wie ein geliebter Schmerz.
as softly as a beloved pain.
Dürft ich nur auf gold’nen Höhen
If only upon golden heights I might
Mich in Morgenduft ergehen!
bask in morning fragrance!
Sehnsucht zieht mich himmelwärts.
Yearning draws me heavenward.
In this excerpt, from a lengthy patriotic poem in Leyer und Schwert not set by Schubert, “Was uns bleibt” (All that remains for us), a star’s identification with political freedom is made explicit:
Wenn auch jetzt in den bezwung’nen Hallen
Even though now in vanquished halls
Tyrannei der Freiheit Tempel bricht; —
tyranny breaks Freedom’s temple; —
Deutsches Volk, du konntest fallen,
German people, you could fall,
Aber sinken kannst du nicht!
but sink under you cannot!
Und noch lebt der Hoffnung Himmelsfunken.
The heavenly spark of hope lives on.
Muthig vorwärts durch das falsche Glück!
Courageously onward through false fortune!
‘S war ein Stern! Jetzt ist er zwar versunken,
Doch der Morgen bringt ihn uns zurück.
‘S war ein Stern! —Die Sterne bleiben.
‘S war der Freiheit gold’ner Stern. 26
‘Twas a star! Though he has now faded
the morning shall return him to us.
‘Twas a star! —The stars remain.
‘Twas Freedom’s golden star.
Körner’s poems about death in battle revel in wedding imagery, notably so in “Schwertlied,” which draws out what today seems a ludicrous metaphor into a sixteen-stanza conversation between a soldier and his sword (its stanzas are in quotation marks). The dialogue promises young men an experience in battle as intense as the wedding night. The soldier’s sword is his beloved bride and the performers in Schubert’s setting for a unison chorus and solo voice are instructed to clink swords on those sixteen “hurrahs,” just as Körner indicated in a footnote, making a communal racket as noisy as the traditional breaking of porcelain at a Polterabend, the festivities on the eve of a wedding. Did Schubert find this absurd or did he take it seriously?
Schwertlied (D170, stanzas 3, 4, and 12):
Ja, gutes Schwert, frey bin ich,
Und liebe dich herzinnig,
Als wärst du mir getraut,
Als eine liebe Braut—urrah!
Yes, my good sword, I am free,
and love you dearly
as if you were my betrothed,
as if my sweet bride—Hurrah!
Zur Brautnachts Morgenröthe
Ruft festlich die Trompete;
Wenn die Kanonen schreyn,
Hol’ ich das Liebchen ein.—Hurrah!
The festive trumpet heralds
the bridal-night’s rosy morn;
when the cannons shriek,
I shall catch up to my dearest.—Hurrah!
………………….
…………………..
“Ach herrlich ist’s im Freyen,
Im rüst’gen Hochzeitsreihen
Wie glänzt im Sonnenstrahl
So bräutlich hell der Stahl!”—Hurrah!
“How glorious to be in open air,
in a wedding round so hale,
where the sunlit steel
gleams like bridal white!”—Hurrah!
Even an apostrophe to the beloved so innocently pious as “Liebesrausch” (Love-Intoxicated) invites political reading when it is found amid these martial poems. The use of the diminutive Mädchen at first masks that this rapturous poem might sing of the ideal—for Susan Youens it is a love poem that “does not rise much above the level of platitude”27—but what eventually strikes our ears are the endings of each stanza and the narrowing of focus in the last verse: at the close of the first stanza, “your noble image shines for me”; at the end of the second, “and all my loveliest songs name only you”; and the third, with Körner’s emphases, “Only one longing lives in me, only one thought here in my heart: the eternal quest for you.” As with several Körner poems, Schubert attempted two settings (D164 and D179, in March and April 1815).
Here is the entire poem, “Liebesrausch”:
Dir, Mädchen, schlägt mit leisem Beben
Mein Herz voll Treu’ und Liebe zu.
In dir, in dir versinkt mein Streben,
Mein schönstes Ziel bist du!
Dein Name nur in heil’gen Tönen
Hat meine kühne Brust gefüllt;
Im Glanz des Guten und des Schönen
Strahlt mir dein hohes Bild.
For you, maiden, my heart pounds, a quiet trembling of devoted love.
In you, in you my striving ceases;
you are my life’s fairest goal.
Your name alone, a sacred tone, fills my bold breast.
In the radiance of all that’s good and beautiful
your noble image shines for me.
Die Liebe sproßt aus zarten Keimen,
Und ihre Blüthen welken nie!
Du, Mädchen, lebst in meinen Träumen
Mit süßer Harmonie.
Begeist’rung rauscht auf mich hernieder,
Kühn greif ich in die Saiten ein,
Und alle meine schönsten Lieder,
Sie nennen dich allein.
Love [the Beloved] sprouts from tender seeds,
and its [her] blossoms never wither!
You, maiden, live in my dreams
in sweet harmony.
Rapturous inspiration comes over me,
boldly I pluck the strings,
and all my loveliest songs,
they name only you.
Mein Himmel glüht in deinen Blicken
My heaven glows in your glances;
An deiner Brust mein Paradies.
my paradise upon your breast.
Ach! Alle Reize, die dich schmücken,
Ah! All the charms adorning you,
Sie sind so hold, so süß.
they are so noble, so sweet.
Es wogt die Brust in Freud und Schmerzen,
My breast undulates in joy and pain;
Nur eine Sehnsucht lebt in mir,
only one desire dwells in me,
Nur ein Gedanke hier im Herzen:
only one thought here in my heart:
Der ew’ge Drang nach dir.
eternal passion for you!
Finally, Körner himself spelled out the ambiguity, conflating Liberty and Venus, in a poem titled “Abschied vom Leben” (Departure from Life) written on the eve of a near-brush with death three months before he finally succumbed in battle. By the poem’s end freedom and love can no longer be meaningfully distinguished:
Und was ich hier als Heiligthum erkannte,
And that which I knew to be sacred here,
Wofür ich rasch und jugendlich entbrannte,
for which quickly and youthfully I became enflamed,
Ob ich’s nun Freiheit, ob ich’s Liebe nannte:
whether I called it Freedom, or whether Love:
Als lichten Seraph seh’ ich’s vor mir stehen—
As luminous Seraph I see it standing before me now—
Und wie die Sinne langsam mir vergehen,
and as my senses slowly leave me,
Trägt mich ein Hauch zu morgenrothen Höhen.
a breath carries me to rosymorning heights.
>
I do not wish to linger over Schubert’s Körner settings here, I merely wish to observe that a vocabulary of images found in his (and not only his) poetry from this time resounds through many other poems that Schubert chose to set in later years. This was one way around the ever stricter censorship restrictions that came in the wake of the Congress of Vienna. Heard in isolation, faint echoes of revolutionary freedom imagery might be easily dismissed by readers, or, for that matter, could be deliberately masked by poets.
The Death of Actaeon
Especially complex examples of such concealment of freedom imagery are found in poems of Johann Mayrhofer, the conflicted censor who maintained his oppositional, at times markedly Germanic liberalism while dutifully serving the state for twenty years. Schubert’s friend Josef von Spaun would later characterize him as “extraordinarily liberal, indeed democratic, in his views … passionate about freedom of the press.”28 Mayrhofer, in his own 1829 recollection of Schubert, hinted intriguingly at a deepening rift between the two intimate friends whose personalities had often clashed even while they lived together: “The cross-currents of circumstances and society, of illness and changed views of life kept us apart later, but what had once been was no more to be denied its rights.”29 Mayrhofer’s poetic oeuvre is steeped in classical literature and Greek mythology, often presenting familiar episodes with surprising twists or omissions. We can see this in the following poem about Diana, the goddess who roams the forests freely with her handmaidens. (Her father Zeus promised he would never force her to marry against her will.) Just when Mayrhofer wrote the poem “Der zürnenden Diana” is not known; Schubert’s song dates from December 1820, the final month of his stay with Mayrhofer (by which time their mutual friend Senn had already languished in prison for nearly a year and his fate was still uncertain).
Ja, spanne nur den Bogen, mich zu tödten,
Du himmlisch Weib! im zürnenden Erröthen
Noch reizender. Ich werd’ es nie bereuen,
Dass ich dich sah am blühenden Gestade
Die Nymphen überragen in dem ade,
Der Schönheit Funken in die Wildniß streuen.
Yes, draw your bow to slay me,
you heavenly woman! in the flush of anger
more enchanting still. I shall never regret
that I saw you on the flowering bank,
towering over the nymphs in the bath,
spreading rays of beauty into the wilderness.
Den Sterbenden wird noch dein Bild erfreuen.
Er athmet reiner, er athmet freyer,
Wem du gestrahlet ohne Schleyer.
Dein Pfeil, er traf, doch linde rinnen
Die warmen Wellen aus der Wunde;
Noch zittert vor den matten Sinnen
Des Schauens süße letzte Stunde.
Your image will yet gladden the dying one.
He who has beheld your unveiled radiance
breathes more purely, more freely.
Your arrow—it struck, yet warm waves
spill gently from the wound.
Still trembling before failing senses
is the last sweet hour of sight.
Der zürnenden Diana (Of Diana Enraged; D707) tells the familiar story from book three of Ovid’s Metamorphoses of the hunter Actaeon accidently stumbling upon the goddess bathing in a pool. Her virgin nymphs use their own bodies to shield her from Actaeon’s gaze, “but the goddess stood head and shoulders over all the rest,” as Ovid tells it “and red as the clouds which flush beneath the sun’s slant rays, red as the rosy dawn, were the cheeks of Diana as she stood there in view without her robes.” Diana, infuriated, gazes back at Actaeon, splashes him with water and robs him of his speech: “Now you are free to tell that you have seen me all unrobed—if you can tell,” she taunts him (how could a censor-poet not have noted this challenge?) and she makes horns sprout from his forehead so that his hounds will mistake him for a stag, the very prey they have chased all day. Unable to command the dogs as before, Actaeon will be torn to shreds by them.30
Figure 1. Titian, The Death of Actaeon.
In Ovid’s telling Diana is unarmed when Actaeon happens upon her, her quiver and her unstrung bow resting with one of her handmaidens. Not so in Mayrhofer’s poem, where Actaeon is struck by Diana’s arrow—as he is in Titian’s memorable portrayal of The Death of Actaeon (1559–75), which fixes forever the instant when an athletic, rosy-cheeked Diana, clad in a rose-colored tunic, has just let fly her arrow (see Figure 1). With her right arm still drawn back and her bow-arm outstretched one breast is exposed to the viewer, who inadvertently becomes a voyeur. We do not notice immediately that on the right, blended into the brownish thickets in the distance, a partly transformed Actaeon is being mauled by bloodthirsty hounds. The picture’s time scale is complex, more like a photographic double exposure than a single moment in snapshot. (Titian’s Diana, we might note, bears a striking resemblance to the equally unforgettable figure who strides across the battlefield in Eugene Delacroix’s 1830 canvas Liberty Leading the People. As Liberty holds high the tricolor flag, her flushed cheek and exposed breasts are illuminated by the blazing heavens; only gradually do we notice the dying Revolutionary at her feet hoisting himself up to catch a last glimpse of her. Buried in plain view in both canvases is the doomed beholder of an awe-inspiring female figure.) I do not know if Mayrhofer knew Titian’s work, either by reputation or in copy, but it is not unlikely. Until the early 1790s the Duke of Orléans owned Titian’s painting. In an effort to ride out the storm of upheaval in the late 1780s he had engraved copies produced of all his paintings before he offered his magnificent collection for sale. This series was printed between 1786 and 1808, interrupted for a time by the chaos of the revolution. The Duke, or Philippe Égalité as he was known, did not live to see his Titians and other masterpieces on display in London during the early years of the nineteenth century, where they were enthusiastically viewed by many. As a member of the royal family, in line for the throne, he was guillotined. The Congress of Vienna held extensive deliberations about the fate of artworks that had changed hands during the French Revolution and the First Empire. With the rise of public museums across Europe came questions not only about stolen artworks but about the status of royal art collections as personal or national property.31 Curiously, in the Mort d’Acteon found among the Orléans engravings Titian’s graceful Diana is made to appear remarkably masculine (see Figure 2).
In Mayrhofer’s “Der zürnenden Diana” all mention of the stag’s antlers and the hounds is left out, except, perhaps, for his choice of the verb zittert (trembles) in the penultimate line—“noch zittert vor den matten Sinnen”—evoking the convulsive shivers of the wounded animal as it expires. Other features in the poem leap out: the words “du himmlisch Weib,” because high esteem for any woman is a striking anomaly in this poet’s output. More significantly, Mayrhofer tells the story from the perspective of a defiant Actaeon (though not once named in the poem) who welcomes the fatal arrow, refuses remorse, and insists that the forbidden vision was worth dying for even as warm blood gushes from his wounds and his senses leave him. This stands in stark contrast to those Renaissance accounts of Ovid’s tale that present the wayward hunter as a hapless victim punished for his error by a tyrannical goddess who knows no mercy, at least not forgiveness. Man’s fortune can spiral out of control in an instant: this was one lesson for early modern observers of Parmigianino’s Actaeon frescos, for example, and the warning is still there in Titian.32
Figure 2. Jacques Couché, engraving based on Titian’s Death of Actaeon in the Gallery of the Palais Royal with historical commentary by the abbé de Fontenai.
Mayrhofer declares his radical remove from such traditional ecclesial and courtly interpretation in strophe 2, when the mythical hunter’s singular experience is generalized: he who has glimpsed the towering beauty’s rays scattered into the wilderness, who has seen her without her veils—he will breathe more purely, will breathe more freely. Rather than warning the v
iewer who gazes at a painted image of Diana’s nakedness not to repeat Actaeon’s error, the defiant hunter in this poetic fable invites emulation. “Er athmet reiner, er athmet freyer / Wem du gestrahlet ohne Schleyer”: the second er appears to have been added by Schubert to intensify the meaning; it does not appear in the text Mayrhofer published in 1824.33 About this stanza we might also speculate that the word Schleyer (veil), a rhyme for the adverb freyer (freely), could evoke a symbol—a Sinnbild—borrowed from a late eighteenth-century Masonic imaginary: the veils of Isis. The Egyptian nature goddess’s veils concealed mysteries that only her initiates could fathom.34
Mayrhofer’s stripped-down telling of Actaeon’s story makes possible rosy-cheeked Diana’s transferal from the realm of myth into the domain of Sinnbild (the German term, literally a “sense picture,” a pictograph), allowing her image to lend concrete shape to an abstraction. Yet it is Schubert’s absorbing music that actually lulls us into forgetting the mythic veil. Commentators on the song have remarked on the needless repetition of phrases in Schubert’s setting: words conveyed clearly the first time through are repeated over and over again. When we pay heed to the rhetoric of those repetitions to see what is emphasized thereby, what is downplayed, and how local harmonies, modulations, and dynamics color our perception of the words, we can appreciate how much greater the freedom of song is for releasing those symbolic associations that the compact poem cloaks in myth.
In Schubert’s ten-bar piano introduction to the poet’s words in Der zürnenden Diana there is already a hint of a poetic image, as yet inchoate, in the repeating figuration used to make a crescendo from piano to forte then pulled back to pianissimo just before the singer’s entry. From sharp fp attacks on the downbeats the quivering chordal triplets in the treble build to a climax in the accented middle of each bar. At the crescendo’s high point in measure 5 a diminished seventh thwarts a move to the relative minor, making the Feurig tremors shake yet more forcefully before the harmony veers around to a tonic cadence in A-flat major by way of a passing German augmented sixth on F♭. The coordination of tonal surge and dynamic swell draws our attention to an emerging form.35