Monday, December 28, 2015

December 5, 2009: Schubert the serious

I would not want to accuse Franz Schubert of lacking a sense of humor;  but in both his songs and his instrumental music he shows a strong inclination towards over-dramatization, often making it a point of getting as close to going off the deep end as possible without actually doing so.  Thus, for example, one can make a case for interpreting the Opus 15 piano fantasy ("Wanderer") as a descent into insanity (at least to the extent that insanity was understood in Schubert's time).  When it comes to setting texts, however, Schubert often seems to reject any authorial intention of irony in favor of depicting yet another protagonist wearing his heart on his sleeve.

I have a former colleague from the Music Department at the University of Pennsylvania to thank for first pointing out that Schubert missed this boat of irony in what may be his most memorable song, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poem, "Der Erlkönig."  This was originally conceived as a simple ballad to open his 1782 Singspiel Die Fischerin (the fisherwoman).  The melody for this ballad, as it was first performed, was composed by the actress playing the lead, Corona Elisabeth Wilhelmine Schröter.  In his Grove Music Online entry for Schröter, Ronald R. Kidd describes her setting as "simple, folklike and strophic;"  and anyone who has read Goethe's original German text independent of any musical setting will realize she was basically following the straightforward three-beat meter of the words.  Had Schubert not immortalized it, we would be quick to dismiss it as doggerel;  and Goethe probably would not have challenged the judgment.  In her performance Schröter apparently sang it at a spinning wheel, cranking away in time to that three-beat meter.  Upon reaching the end, her first spoken text is something like, "That's the umpteenth time I've sung that damned thing tonight!"

Nevertheless, in 1815 Schubert turned "that damned thing" into high drama.  The first thing he did was to cast the song in a four-beat meter, depicting a raging storm with triplets on each beat that does not let up until a concluding recitative phrase describing the death of the child.  In the midst of the storm, the musical setting of the text scans more like prose than poetry.  It is almost like a dramatic reading (declaimed in that exaggerated style that John Barrymore could do so well), rather than a poem, let alone a piece of doggerel.

My guess is that Schubert went against Goethe's grain for two reasons.  The more important is that he did not think an audience in the early nineteenth century would buy into that self-mocking humor that Goethe dished out in the late eighteenth century.  With this as context, I would suggest that the other reason was that he just couldn't honor the original spirit.  When we consider how much music he did compose, it is not hard to imagine that he simply could not bring himself to set a text with the same tediously repetitive doggerel in which it was authored.  He would no sooner write music that way than he would jump off a cliff (even if such a suicidal act held promise of being immortalized in a canvas by Caspar David Friedrich).

It may be valuable to bear in mind this hypothetical view of Schubert's character next month when San Francisco Performances presents the recital debut of Nathan Gunn at 8 PM in Herbst Theatre on January 12.  For this recital Gunn has chosen to perform the song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin, accompanied by his wife Julie.  The cycle depicts a narrative of unrequited love where things just keep getting worse and worse for the protagonist, rather as they do for the imagined protagonist of the "Wanderer" fantasy.  In the early nineteenth century making up poems for this narrative had become a bit of a parlor game;  and Wilhelm Müller got so good at it that he published his results, a cycle of 23 poems.  Schubert, however, dispensed with any ludic context and any pursuit of irony as part of the game, discarded three of the poems, and set the remaining twenty to his first extended song cycle.

Once again, his reason for extracting high drama from ironic trivia may be that he could not do it any other way.  In the grand scheme of music history, we are probably all better off that Schubert made this decision.  The result is a challenge to both musical and narrative skill, and any hint of triviality is transcended once we get beyond the strophic structure of the first song.  Since Gunn is no stranger to intense drama, having made the lead in Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd one of his signature roles, we have every reason to expect that the full intensity of Schubert's dead seriousness will win out over any frivolity that may have laced Müller's original conception.

The tickets for Gunn's recital are available for $49 and $32.  Further information may be obtained by calling San Francisco Performances at 415-392-2545.  Further information, including a link for purchasing tickets, may be found in the January area of the Calendar Web page for San Francisco Performances.

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