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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