Making bold, the singer begins—“Ja, spanne nur den Bogen mich zu tödten”—and once again the harmony bends to F minor and an arresting E♮ “promissory note”36 against the C♮ root of that key’s dominant, “Du himmlisch Weib” (see Example 1). On repetition, those words are inflected by the wondrous glow of F-flat major, I–V (the earlier leading tone now a root, and the melodic contour twisted to put C♭ into the outer voices). At play in the architecture of the song is basically a tension between the tonic-major and parallel minor modes: simply put, the relative minor, F minor, is a minor-mode adjunct to A-flat major (because its dominant sits a major third above A♭); F-flat major is a poignant major mode adjunct to A-flat minor (its dominant sits a minor third above A♭.). Much else intervenes, it needs hardly be said, but the reach of these combined harmonic and dynamic inflections extends all the way to the end of the song. For his portrayal of the cherished vision still trembling before the Sterbender’s eyes Schubert summons the strongest dynamic contrast yet, reinforced by the indications stark and leise in the vocal part, and colors the final closure in the tonic-major with a dab of F♭ as if the singer had not the strength to reach a semitone higher.
That Schubert’s song is addressed to Liberty, freedom personified—a multivalent image carrying political, sexual, even anarchic associations, and fast vanishing from open public discourse due to censorship—may be suggested in the exquisite harmonies enveloping “du himmlisch Weib” and in the threefold repetition of “im zürnenden Erröthen” that lays stress on the rosy hew in this aural canvas. Next repeated is “Ich werd’ es nie bereuen,” made even more emphatic when Schubert later repeats the declaration in this rewording: “Nie werd’ ich es bereuen, dass ich dich sah.” The place where Diana is first seen by Actaeon is indicated in a whisper, a pianissimo stream of rising and falling eighth notes: “am blühenden Gestade die Nymphen überragen in dem Bade” (on the flowering bank overtowering the nymphs in the bath). These are practically the only words in the song not to be emphasized by local repetition and further bracketed by crescendi carrying the thought through to its radiant goal. Consider that if the pianissimo words were cut away altogether, the sentence would remain perfectly coherent: “Nie werd’ ich es bereuen, dass ich dich sah, der Schönheit Funken in die Wildniß streuen” (Never shall I regret that I saw you, scattering Beauty’s rays into the wilderness). Schubert lets us hear the latter clause twice in soaring cadential phrases (four times if we count the weaker cadences to C-flat major in measures 46 and 50), bringing the first half of the song to a close in B major (Example 2). A temporal caesura is made by transforming this last root into a leading tone: from an isolated B♮ a downward arpeggio through a G-major dominant-seventh takes us to faraway C major where the action is paused and a narrating voice in sympathy with the wounded man avows that he breathes more freely now that he has been illuminated by Diana’s unveiled radiance. “Wem du gestrahlet ohne Schleyer” is heard four times, giving us ample chance to feel the scrim evaporate before our eyes. Twice the fatal arrow strikes its mark and the repetition in its wake creates something like a tableau vivant, an almost cinematic simulation of real-time dying: the narrating, now “autobiographical” voice clings to the radiant vision as his senses slowly leave him. The entire closing scene recalls Körner’s vision of a Lützower Jäger’s death on the battlefield: “Whether I called it Freedom, or whether Love: as luminous seraph I see it standing before me now; and as my senses slowly leave me a breath carries me to rosy-morning heights.” It takes little effort to hear this song as an elegy for a fallen comrade.
Example 1. Der zürnenden Diana, D707, mm. 14–30.
Paired in one Liederheft (a gathering of songs) with Der zürnenden Diana is another song on a Mayrhofer text, Nachtstück (D672), which Schubert dedicated to the singer Katharina von Lacsny, née Buchwieser. In the February 1825 publication announcement in the Wiener Zeitung the publisher Cappi took credit for the selection of the two songs in Opus 36: prospective buyers were assured that both had been well received in Johann Michael Vogl’s performances for the most select private circles.37 Surely Schubert approved the dedication and selection. The musicologist Clemens Höslinger has speculated that the song about Diana’s nakedness must have called up not only the beautiful “Catinka” Buchwieser’s many love affairs but also a scandalous naked orgy said to have been planned in November 1812 at Count Pálffy’s palace in Hernals. The police got wind of it and punished all the associates of the “Adamiten und Maurerloge.” (Since Vienna’s Masonic chapters were shut down two decades earlier, mention of an active lodge surprises almost as much as the pairing of Adamites with Freemasons.) The noblemen paid hefty fines; the women, including Buchwieser, were given a flogging, and then the poor singer had to appear onstage the next day as the Princess Navarra in François Adrien Boieldieu’s opera Jean de Paris.38 Quite possibly the dedication did invite such associations “in the most select circles”—or, worse, prompted performances meant to embarrass the singer, who was respectably married by the time Schubert composed the song.
Example 2. Der zürnenden Diana, D707, mm. 50–73.
Höslinger wonders further whether the 1869 picture of Diana in the Schwind Foyer at the Vienna Court Opera might be an homage to the former singer. The trompe l’oeil statue of Diana in the fresco by the Viennese painter and Schubert friend Moritz von Schwind (Figure 3) has just released her arrow, and her right arm is still pulled back, her bow arm outstretched, rather like Titian’s. A symbol of Luna, the crescent moon, often associated with Diana (as in Titian’s earlier Diana and Actaeon, another picture in the Orléans collection), adorns her head, and a thin shawl is snaked around her naked body. Since Schwind was introduced to Frau Lacsny by Schubert in 1825, the same year Schubert published and dedicated his Der zürnenden Diana to her, it seems reasonable to imagine that she was on his mind when he designed the tryptych portraying Diana along with other themes from Schubert’s works (also visible in Figure 3 is Goethe’s “Der Fischer”).
These suggestions are by no means mutually exclusive: to take the allusion to the former Catinka Buchwieser and the 1812 sex scandal at face value (not as a Schleyer for another political meaning) is only to acknowledge that sexual freedom, freedom from social convention, was an element in Schubert’s political credo. How entwined Restoration political agendas were with the regulation of private behavior is revealed by a later event. The right to privacy would not gain legal recognition for decades. But in March 1848, the year censorship restrictions were briefly lifted, the Wiener Zeitung announced that not only was censorship gone but the police would cease spying. Henceforth, invasive police intrusion into the private lives of the city’s residents was strictly forbidden.39 Whatever else we may imagine, the dedication to Lacsny extends to both songs in Opus 36, the Actaeon tale, Op. 36, No. 1, and the haunting Nachtstück, No. 2, composed in 1819. Both were published a half step lower than originally conceived, perhaps to accommodate a favorite singer. The subject matter of Nachtstück? When the fog descends and Luna does battle with dark clouds, “Der Alte,” the old rhapsode, takes his lyre and sings this apocalyptic prophecy into the forest: “Du heil’ge Nacht: bald ist’s vollbracht.”40 What shall be soon completed? “Soon I shall sleep the long slumber, and be released from all suffering.” The old man seems already to have lived for far too long, like old Tithonus, lover of Eos (the dawn), who grew aged but could not die. Luna’s name is the only overt hint, as in many Mayrhofer poems, of a mythological basis. The meaning of the song (and of the entire opus) changes depending on which Alter we imagine sings the prophecy “Holy Night: soon it shall be accomplished.” Is he Endymion, destined eternally to slumber in youthful beauty so that Luna may penetrate him on nightly visits, siring their many daughters? Or is he Tithonus, likewise granted longevity by his beloved Eos, in his case, however, in the form of old age? Tithonus is traditionally represented as a bard carrying a lyre or harp. The troubled, Baroque, C-sharp-minor counterpoint with which Schubert’s eerie tone-
painting begins yields to blurred arpeggios created “with raised dampers” as the prophetic words are sung in a muted voice (gedämpft). Twice, novel deceptive cadences accentuate the words “old man,” then on the last page otherworldly harmonies sink mysteriously (the old man listens for Death), transforming the atmosphere for the C-sharp-major close. Moments before, the narrating voice relates that many a dear bird (mancher liebe Vogel) calls out, “Oh let the old man rest in his grassy tomb.” The fictional scene is punctured. No matter which old man came to contemporary listeners’ minds, this exhortation must have sounded like a very personal message when sung by Johann Michael Vogl.
Figure 3. Moritz von Schwind, Diana, Vienna Staatsoper.
1826: Oppositional Politics in Sehnsucht
For another case of concealed political content, let us consider a song from 1826, a year when censorship restrictions came to be tested and enforced in particularly infuriating ways. That spring, the great comic playwright and actor (also former opera singer and performer of Schubert part-songs) Johann Nestroy was jailed in Brno for the improvised lines he introduced in performance, following which the police canceled his contract and he relocated to Graz. It mattered not whether his extemporary jokes criticized heads of state or offended sexual mores or moral and religious norms: to depart from an approved script—to bring down the house without prior permission—was against the law.41 That year, too, the Parisian satirical weekly Le Figaro was founded: on its masthead appeared the words “Without the freedom to criticize, praise is empty” from Figaro’s soliloquy in Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro, the speech that had smashed through the barricades of Parisian censorship in 1784. The year 1826 also saw the formation of a secret society in Linz involving several of Schubert’s acquaintances. They called themselves Eos (Dawn) or the Frühaufstehgesellschaft—The Early-to-Rise Society—perhaps after the morning societies that formed in the early days of the French Revolution. The members were known as “Memnonites.” According to legend, a colossus associated with Memnon—son of Eos and Tithonus, he fell in battle defending Troy—gave out a lamenting cry at the hour of sunrise and then was mute for the rest of each day.42 The Memnonites had written an elaborate constitution and statutes and held assemblies in which democratic protocol could be practiced on mundane, seemingly apolitical subjects, preparing them for a post-uprising world. A branch organization was started in Vienna after two of its members, the brothers Franz and Fritz Hartmann, both students of law, moved there; they also attended Schubertiades at Spaun’s. The society’s statutes, membership, and its journal Morgenstern (later Lampe) have attracted renewed attention of late from scholars doubting that all this was simply harmless Biedermeier entertainment.43
Nearly a decade after the Congress of Vienna, outrage over censored speech filled the air in that city. Now writers and artists could unite against this assault on their profession without needing to probe one another’s political persuasions because the most basic prerequisite for any form of representative government was open discussion. In 1826 there was no “foreign” tyrant to oppose; democratic-nationalist opposition was directed against Metternich’s Restoration government. This was the climate within which Schubert set the poem “Sehnsucht” by Johann Gabriel Seidl (1804–1875), a local Viennese poet who a dozen years later would himself take a position as a part-time censor. Schubert’s delightfully catchy song invites scrutiny because it is difficult to get the words of the poem to mean quite what the music’s character—its demeanor—and the rhetoric of its repetitions and phrase structure would imply; indeed, music plays an even greater role in shaping meaning here than in Der zürnenden Diana. Doubly alluring is that the poem also strikes an autobiographical pose; the fourth stanza depicts a poet struggling to overcome his writer’s block to compose this very song, Sehnsucht (D879):
Die Scheibe friert, der Wind ist rauh,
The pane frosts over, the wind is raw,
Der nächt’ge Himmel rein und blau:
the nighttime sky so clear and blue.
Ich sitz’ in meinem Kämmerlein,
I sit in my little room
Und schau’ ins reine Blau hinein!
and gaze into pure blue!
Mir fehlt etwas, das fühl’ ich gut,
Something is lacking, this I well feel;
Mir fehlt mein Lieb, das treue Blut:
I miss my love, my true life’s blood,
Und will ich in die Sterne seh’n,
and when I gaze into the stars
Muß stets das Aug’ mir übergeh’n!
my eye must brim over with tears!
Mein Lieb, wo weilst du nur so fern,
My love, where do you tarry so far away,
Mein schöner Stern, mein Augenstern?!
my beautiful star, star of mine eye?!
Du weißt, dich lieb’ und brauch’ ich ja,—
You know ‘tis you I love and need,—
Die Träne tritt mir wieder nah.
Again my tears well up.
Da quält’ ich mich so manchen Tag,
I’ve tormented myself many a day,
Weil mir kein Lied gelingen mag,—
because no song will come together,—
Weil’s nimmer sich erzwingen läßt
for song never will be forced
Und frei hinsäuselt wie der West!
and murmurs forth freely like the west wind!
Wie mild mich’s wieder g’rad’ durchglüht! —
How the mild glow suffuses me again just now!—
Sieh nur—das ist ja schon ein Lied!
Ah, look—it is a song already!
Wenn mich mein Loos vom Liebchen warf,
If my lot has cast me from my love,
Dann fühl’ ich, daß ich singen darf.
then I feel that I may sing.
Seidl’s poem is in five stanzas. The scene is a small chamber late at night. From here the poet gazes out into the nighttime sky; a rough wind frosts the windowpane. The first three stanzas concern a beloved absent star, addressed as “mein Lieb” in stanza three: “My love, where do you tarry so far away, My beautiful star, star of mine eye?!” (mein Augenstern). Stanza four shifts to unexpectedly inward expression, revealing a poet suffering from writer’s block: he has tormented himself for many a day but no song will come together because song will not be coerced but murmurs forth freely like the west wind: “Weil’s nimmer sich erzwingen läßt und frei hinsäuselt wie der West.” (To the west of Austria, we might reflect, lies France.) Suddenly the star’s rays create a warm glow—passing right through the frozen window—and look, already here is a song!
As soon as the poet’s muse appears his song comes together in a blink. Very charming. The next lines are puzzling, though. The final couplet is cast as a pithy summation whose “if-then” clause is meant to explain how the meditation on writer’s block follows from the yearning for the absent beloved. But something is amiss—why does no meaning spring into place? “If my lot has cast me from my love, then I feel that I may sing.” What does this intend? Why should the poet feel he can sing when his beloved is far away? We may be reminded of those famous lines from Pause in Die schöne Müllerin—“Ich kann nicht mehr singen, mein Herz ist zu voll” (I can sing no more, my heart is too full)—but that will not help us here because Seidl’s poem has nothing to do with unrequited love. What then? We step closer to understanding when we note that the words in the final verse are not “daß ich singen kann” (that I can sing) or “singen muss” (must sing) but “daß ich singen darf” (may sing). It is not that I am obliged to sing; rather, I am not barred from doing so. Moreover, “daß ich singen darf” makes a conceptual rhyme with the previous stanza’s “Weil’s nimmer sich erzwingen läßt / Und frei hinsaüselt wie der West!” The verbs “dürfen” and “erzwingen” ever so gently suggest a commanding presence, someone or something able to grant or force things. “Darf” and “warf” are not run-of-the-mill Lieder rhymes; “darf” plainly was chosen to sustain the murmur of pro
test in the previous lines.
Hearing the song in performance our attention may snag (mine does) on a disjunction between the meaning, on its face, of those words “Wenn mich mein Loos vom Liebchen warf, dann fühl’ ich, daß ich singen darf” (downcast at first, then cheery) and Schubert’s crystal-clear rhetoric, which turns to the major mode at the start of the strophe and builds to emphatic, almost triumphant, cadencing for the repeated pronouncement “daß ich singen darf, daß ich singen darf.” Nothing signals any ambivalence. Indeed, nothing suggests that these lines mean anything other than exactly what they say. By some mechanism, we must be able to hear what they say in a way that aligns with D-major song and dance, followed by the piano’s wistful commentary on it. Schubert’s setting makes us intuit a coherent meaning even if the words of the poem do not want to comply.
The song begins with a piano introduction in D minor with agitated triplets in the right hand against a bass descent through the chromatic tetrachord, D to A (see Example 3). In the triplets the alto voice descends in tenths against the bass, sandwiched between oscillating octave A♮s that seem locked in place. A memorable jolt in measure 3 disturbs the flow as the alto, having failed to move when the bass fell to C♮, sinks to D♯ against the bass B♮; it takes six beats before the chromatic descent can resume and move to a D-minor cadence. With the singer’s entry the bass descent begins anew, passing over the C♮ that had threatened to inflect B♮ as a dominant in measure 3. When the pattern starts up again for strophe two (“Mir fehlt etwas”), the bass stalls almost immediately on C♯ for two bars while the vocal melody is jerked up a fifth before pushing a half step higher to F♮ on the word “Lieb” just as the bass and alto sink to octave C♮s and E♭ respectively. The resulting unstable dominant seventh echoes the disturbance in the piano introduction and “Lieb” is held out for five full beats before tension is released in two quick cadences to B♭ in the middle of the verse (B♮ is bypassed this time). This places an abrupt, utterly unexpected emphasis on the word. From this point forward the D-minor “lamento” pattern loses its grip on the remaining strophes—but note that it is a bass C♮ in measure 45 (not shown in the example) that turns the harmony to a sad A minor for the cadence-ending strophe three at “Die Thräne tritt mir wieder nah.” Tears—a lament—step nearer again.
Franz Schubert and His World Page 29
