25. Goethe’s poem about a furtive passionate liaison first appeared in the early 1770s. It was revised and republished in 1789 and reissued again in 1810 under the now familiar title “Willkommen und Abschied”—perhaps its imagery sounded differently in later political climates.
26. Theodor Körner, Leyer und Schwert, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1815), 74ff.
27. Youens, Schubert’s Poets and the Making of Lieder, 130.
28. Ibid., 154, citing Carl Glossy, “Aus den Lebenserinnerungen des Freiherrn von Spaun,” in Jahrbuch der Grillparzer-Gesellschaft, 8 (Vienna, 1898), 275–303, quote at 295.
29. Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, trans. Rosamond Ley and John Nowell (London, 1958), 14.
30. Ovid, Metamorphoses, books 1–8, trans. Frank Justus Miller, revised by G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 135–39.
31. For more on discussions at the Congress of Vienna on the repatriation of artworks, see Bette W. Oliver, From Royal to National: The Louvre Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale (Plymouth, UK, 2007), 65ff. The dispersal of the Orléans collection is discussed in Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven, 2000), 22–29; and Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings, vol. 2: Venice, 1540–1600, National Gallery Catalogues (New Haven and London, 2008), 461–70.
32. Michael Thimann comes to this conclusion in his study of Parmigianino’s Actaeon frescos in Fontanellato where Latin didactic inscriptions frame the pictures on the ceiling of the Rocca Sanvitale. Michael Thimann, Lügenhafte Bilder: Ovids “favole” und das Historienbild in der italienischen Renaissance (Göttingen, 2002), 145, passim. I give thanks to Katelijne Schiltz for directing me to this stimulating study. The masculine Diana in the Orléans Mort d’Acteon is an intriguing obverse of Parmigianino’s remarkably feminine Actaeon.
33. Gedichte von Johann Mayrhofer (Vienna, 1824). Schubert’s text diverges from Mayrhofer’s publication in minor details: Mayrhofer’s published poem has “im zornigen Erröthen” and “am buschigen Gestade” whereas Schubert’s song text reads “im zürnenden Erröthen” and” “am blühenden Gestade.” Neither change is important for the present discussion. In addition, the first edition of the song is titled Die zürnende Diana, as it was in Schubert’s composition manuscript, in which it was later corrected to Der zürnenden Diana.
34. The image remained in wide circulation. Beethoven, for one, “kept under glass on his writing desk during his later years” three sayings, two of them inscriptions said to be from a statue of Isis and a temple at Sais, apparently copied out from Schiller’s 1790 essay “Die Sendung Moses”: “Ich bin, was da ist” (I am that which is) and “Ich bin alles, was ist, was war, und was seyn wird, kein sterblicher Mensch hat meinen Schleier aufgehoben” (I am everything that is, that was, and that shall be. No mortal man has lifted my veil). Maynard Solomon, “Beethoven, Freemasonry, and the Tagebuch of 1812–18,” Beethoven Forum 8 (2000): 117. Or see Solomon’s Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination (Berkeley, 2003), 147.
35. Entschlossen was the marking in the first version of the song, notated a half step higher, also from December 1820. In the early version the dynamic scale of the introduction’s crescendo was not yet so extreme, beginning mezzo forte not piano; dynamic intensity underwent revision at other points as well. Two autographs (and several copies) survive for the song. The early version, in A major, in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, A 230, was once owned by Johannes Brahms. A Reinschrift in A-flat that belonged to the singer Karl Schönstein is housed in the Wienbibliothek, MH 96c: it is marked Feurig (Op. 36: Risoluto). Further details of the sources may be found in the critical report accompanying the new Schubert edition. The Wienbibliothek manuscript can be viewed digitally at: http://www.schubert-online.at/. A digital facsimile of the first edition of Opus 36 is accessible at Harvard University’s library site, http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/12640640.
36. I refer to Edward T. Cone’s “Schubert’s Promissory Note: An Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics,” in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln, NB, 1986), 11–30. His provocative essay on Schubert’s Moment Musical in A-Flat, Op. 94, No. 6 was first published in 19th-Century Music 5 (1982): 233–41. A probing critique of Cone’s method by Leo Treitler is “Hermeneutics, Exegetics, or What?,” in Reflections on Musical Meaning and Its Representations, Musical Meaning and Interpretation, Robert S. Hatten, series editor (Bloomington, IN, 2011), 234–52.
37. In the original, “mehreren der gewähltesten Privat-Zirkel.” Schubert: Die Dokumente seines Lebens, ed. with commentary by Otto Erich Deutsch, series 8, supplement volume 5 of Franz Schubert: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke (Kassel, 1964), 274–75.
38. Clemens Höslinger, “Schubert, Schwind und die Göttin Diana: Eine Erinnerung an die Sängerin Catinka Buchwieser,” Schubert: Perspektiven 10/1 (2010): 45–69. Schwind got to know Lacsny in 1825 after she had retired from the stage. Schubert had already known her for some time but we do not know how or when they became acquainted. Theodor Körner, when he was in Vienna (around the time of the 1812 incident), wrote home enthusiastically about her performances.
39. The 29 March 1848 report in the Wiener Zeitung is quoted in Nestroy, Stücke 26.1, 119.
40. Just four years earlier, in 1815, Jesus’s words from the cross had sounded in Beethoven’s song for bass and chorus, Es ist vollbracht, the last number in Friedrich Treitschke’s Die Ehrenpforten, written to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat. Nicholas Mathew opens Political Beethoven (Cambridge, 2013) with some reflections on this piece and the political atmosphere within which it arose (1–16).
41. Nestroy was famous for the subversive meanings he conveyed by puns and comic understatement in performance and by the use of what Berthold Brecht called “slave language,” coded messages that evaded the censors but were “fully grasped by the Viennese lower and middle classes who attended Nestroy’s plays.” Joel Schechter and Jack Zipes, “Slave Language Comes to Krähwinkel: Notes on Nestroy’s Political Satire,” Theater 12/2 (1981): 72–75.
42. For more on the place of the Memnon legend in nineteenth-century culture, see Marjorie W. Hirsch’s Romantic Lieder and the Search for Lost Paradise (Cambridge, 2007), 41–53. Mayrhofer’s Memnon longs to be united with the Morgens Göttin (goddess of the morning) so that he may shine down as a pale star from spheres of noble freedom, pure love (“Aus Sphären edler Freyheit, reiner Liebe, / Ein bleicher stiller Stern herab zu scheinen”).
43. See the insightful study by Susanne Eckstein, “Die ‘Aufstehgesellschaft oder Eos’ und ihre Constitution: Gesetzgebung und Geselligkeit,” Schubert: Perspektiven 9/2 (2009): 183–214. See also Kohlhäufl, Poetisches Vaterland, 251–67; and Ilija Dürhammer, Schuberts literarische Heimat: Dichtung und Literatur-Rezeption der Schubert-Freunde (Vienna, 1999), 68–77.
44. Sehnsucht can be found together with three other songs in an autograph manuscript split between the Library of Congress and the Wienbibliothek. The first song in the gathering, Am Fenster, D878, is dated March 1826. Both libraries have made digital facsimiles available online. The poem appeared among the “Lieder der Nacht” in Johann Gabriel Seidl’s Dichtungen, part 2 (Vienna, 1826), 51. I have chosen to retain old spellings. A “Loos” may have meant something specific, perhaps a military lotto ticket.
45. Ludwig van Beethovens Konversationshefte, edited for the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek Berlin by Gritta Herre with Günther Brosche, vol. 9 (Leipzig, 1988), 219. For more on the Ludlamshöhle, see Horst Belke, “Ludlamshöhle,” in Handbuch literarisch-kultureller Vereine, Gruppen und Bünde 1825–1933, ed. Wulf Wülfling, Karin Bruns, and Rolf Parr (Stuttgart, 1998), 311–20.
46. Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, 241.
Schubert’s Tombeau de Beethoven: Decrypting the Piano Trio in E-Flat Major, Op. 100
CHRISTOPHER H. GIBBS
For nearly two centuries now listeners have perceived, however dimly, a ghost haunting Schubert
’s Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 100. Most of the attention has focused on the second movement, the principal cello melody of which in turn haunts the trio’s finale through a threefold cyclic return. Indeed, the Andante con moto is often characterized as a funeral march—although it is not so marked. For Robert Schumann the publication of the trio in late 1828 “went across the ordinary musical life of the day like an angry thunderstorm” and he characterized the Andante as “a sigh intensified to the point of an anguished cry of the heart.”1
Within weeks of Schubert’s death on 19 November 1828, Schumann heard the piece played at a musical soirée given by Friedrich Wieck in Leipzig and wrote in his diary: “Enraptured by [Schubert’s] Trio.” After hearing it again four days later he noted: “Home at 3AM—excited night with Schubert’s immortal Trio ringing in my ears—frightful dreams.”2 Attending those evenings as well was the editor of the august Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Gottfried Wilhelm Fink, who wrote the first extended review of the piece, which John Daverio has likened to “eavesdropping on the discussions prompted by readings of the work for the inner circle of Leipzig’s musical elite.”3
Of the second movement, Fink states that it “is equal to the first in beauty and harmony. The ever sad sensibility, as if torn from within, comes forth even more palpably in tones of melancholy. The heart of the listener, full of gentle pity, at times almost becomes uneasy, intimately attracted by the deep truth of the sentiment.”4 And in the third movement he finds “not only the profound, but rather more a ghost [Geist] restlessly fluttering from one path to the next that wants to catch the joy in flight again that he lost in rest, or rather, that he had driven away.” About the return of the cello theme in the finale Fink comments:
In a wondrously moving way, the lamenting Romance [klagende Romanze] of the second movement often enters into the wild bustle of pain and pleasure, and now and then we perceive the various voices of remembrance, whose echo is quickly drowned out by the restlessness of the present which, with its veiling mist, spreads over the otherwise amiable morning of the future. One sees that this work presents us with a very remarkable picture of the soul.
Such sentiments continued to be expressed. More than a century after Fink, J. E. Westrup observed that in the second movement “the curiously accented rhythm on the piano, like a march of ghosts, and the cello’s nostalgic theme (said to be a Swedish air), combine to produce an atmosphere for which the word ‘haunting’ is, for once, appropriate.”5 More recently, Lawrence Kramer noted that the accompaniment of the second movement “has the air of a funeral march” and likened the cello theme to a “specter,” a “ghost,” stating that the finale is “haunted by a song.” Echoing Fink’s observation about the last movement’s restlessness, Kramer considers all the more effective that into this “vacuous busyness” the lyrical cello theme brings “expressivity—rich, nostalgic, evocative—of a lost melody, an absent voice.”6 Leo Treitler uses the E-flat Trio as the principal musical example in his essay “Language and the Interpretation of Music.” Like Kramer and other critics he too has little kind to say of the finale’s opening themes, which makes the cyclicism all the more remarkable: “As if out of the depths of the unconscious, the cello steps forward to play the morose theme of the second movement sotto voce. It is as though the persistent memory of this is what all that patter had been meant to suppress…. The meaningfulness of this music is immensely enriched through this conspiracy of incompatible realms, producing as powerful a metaphoric effect as any that I can think of in language.”7
In earlier writings I proposed a possible reason for the trio’s haunted reception: that the piece, written in the aftermath of Beethoven’s death on 26 March 1827 and premiered exactly one year later on the first anniversary of that death, is Schubert’s “tombeau de Beethoven.” It served as the centerpiece of the lone concert Schubert devoted entirely to his own music, given just eight months before he died at age thirty-one. One of the first reviews of the published trio invoked Beethoven’s name, saying that in it Schubert “follows Beethoven’s path.” Many critics ever since have also perceived Beethoven’s presence.8
In this essay I will explore the idea that Beethoven is in fact the ghost haunting Schubert’s E-flat Piano Trio, and consider the implications of this for our understanding of Schubert. I will provide biographical and musical evidence to support my claim that the trio is Schubert’s deliberate and significant homage to Beethoven, and try to account for various elements people have heard in the work and the stories they have told about it. As a tombeau de Beethoven, Schubert’s trio joins a rich lineage of pieces composers have written over the centuries honoring earlier masters. This tradition includes déplorations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (such as Ockeghem’s for Binchois, Josquin’s for Ockeghem, Gombert’s for Josquin) through Baroque tombeaux, to Romantic tributes (Liszt’s for Wagner and Tchaikovsky’s for Nikolai Rubinstein).9 Such pieces often allude in some way to the honored composer’s music and though most homages, especially pre-Romantic ones, offer public testimony, some tributes have been private, the honor undeclared even if still sometimes perceived.10
In Schubert’s case, he did not announce a memorial concert for 26 March 1828 nor did he dedicate any memorial piece to Beethoven. Nonetheless, I suspect that many at the time received his message—which I hope to recover here, at least in part. I will further suggest that the literal implications of a compositional tombeau—a musical tomb—resonate more richly than usual in Schubert’s trio because its composition was intimately connected to Beethoven’s death, burial, and gravestone dedication. The trio in uncanny ways connects the deaths of the two composers, not only in Schubert’s initial reaction to Beethoven’s passing, but also in contemporaneous perceptions of them as reflected in the famous funeral oration Franz Grillparzer wrote for Beethoven and the notorious gravestone epitaph he crafted not long afterward for Schubert.
“Who shall stand beside him?”: Schubert at Beethoven’s Grave
One month after the death of Beethoven on 26 March 1827 the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported: “At 5:50 Beethoven passed into eternal rest, painless, after an hour of sustained agony. At that moment Schuppanzigh was playing the incomparable Adagio from his Piano Trio in G.” The concert at which violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh performed was part of his pathbreaking chamber music series held at Vienna’s Musikverein. The program had opened with string quartets by Haydn and Mozart before Carl Czerny joined Schuppanzigh and cellist Josef Linke for Beethoven’s Piano Trio, Op. 1, No. 2.11
We do not know whether Schubert attended Schuppanzigh’s concert that stormy afternoon, as he usually did, but three days later he participated as a torchbearer in Beethoven’s funeral.12 Vienna had a reputation for lavish obsequies—it was something that Emperor Joseph II tried to reform during the 1780s—and Beethoven’s on 29 March was formidable. Reports vary as to how many attended, with estimates ranging from ten to thirty thousand.13 An account published two weeks later in the Vienna periodical Der Sammler lists some of the eminent cultural figures who participated:
The splendidly ornate coffin was carried by the aforementioned singers and escorted by Kapellmeisters Eybler, Hummel, Seyfried and Kreutzer on the right, Weigl, Gyrowetz, Gänsbacher and Würfel on the left, all bearing white cockades. A row of torchbearers on both sides, among whom could be found Anschütz, Bernard, Blahetka, Jos. Böhm, Castelli, Carl Czerny, Signore David, Grillparzer, Konrad Graff, Grünbaum, Haslinger, Hildebrandt, Holz, Katter, Krall, Signore Lablache, Baron Lannoy, Linke, Mayseder, Mr. Meric (spouse of Mad. Lalande), Merk, Mechetti, Meier, Signore Paccini, Piringer, Radicchi, Raimund, Riotte, Schoberlechner, Schubert, Schickh, Schmiedl, Streicher, Schuppanzigh, Steiner, Weidmann, Weiss, Wolfmayer and many other friends of art and devoted friends of the departed. Everyone was dressed in black, with gloves of the same color and fluttering crepes on the left arm, except for the torchbearers, who had draped their torches with white sprays of lilies.14
The coffin was placed
in a hearse drawn by four horses for transport to the parish church in Währing, where two priests blessed it and there was further singing of the Miserere, motets, and Libera. Schubert’s older brother Ferdinand was allegedly the organist on this occasion.15 As only priests were permitted to speak at the consecrated ground of the grave site, Vienna’s foremost actor, Heinrich Anschütz, stood at the gates of the cemetery to deliver the funeral oration by Franz Grillparzer, Austria’s leading literary figure.16 For Grillparzer, Beethoven’s death marked the conclusion of a magnificent musical age: “The last master of resounding songs, the gracious mouthpiece of music, the heir and enhancer of the immortal fame of Handel and Bach, of Haydn and Mozart, is now no more, and we stand weeping over the broken strings of an instrument now still.” After welcoming Beethoven to this pantheon of great German composers, he posed a question: “He was an artist, and who shall stand beside him? … he traversed all, he comprehended everything. He who follows him cannot continue; he must begin anew, for his predecessor ended only where art ends.”17
Franz Schubert and His World Page 31
