3 - Songs of the Night
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 May 2024
Summary
Darkness has more Divinity for me;
it strikes Thought inward,
it drives back the Soul
To settle on Herself, our Point supreme!
Life makes the soul dependent on the dust; Death gives her wings to mount about the spheres.
—Edward Young, Night ThoughtsLeben ist der Anfang des Todes. Das Leben ist um des Todes willen.
Life is the beginning of death. Life is there for the sake of death.
—Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (Novalis), BlütenstaubEnvisioning the Night
Schubert's songs of the night are poised between gothic and Romantic tropes. The gothic looms large in the graveyard settings discussed in chapter 1, notably ‘Leichenfantasie’, where darkness spotlights spectral presences in the moon's faint rays: ‘with dim light the moon shines over the death-still groves; / sighing, the night spirit skims through the air – / mist-clouds lament, pale stars shine down mournfully / like lamps in a vault.’ The idea of night revealing things beyond the realm of the living, implied in ‘Leichenfantasie’ through the ‘Nachtgeist’, is rendered explicit in the opening stanza of Schubert's ‘Die Nacht’, D 534, the last of his Ossian settings: ‘Night is dull and dark. / The clouds rest on the hills. / No star with green trembling beam; / no moon looks from the sky. / I hear the blast in the wood; but I hear it distant far. / The stream of the valley murmurs; but its murmur is sullen and sad.’ Such features – distant tremors and sudden blasts of sound – extend to a view of the night as not only revealing but also concealing supernatural beings, as in ‘Erlkönig’, D 328, where the son experiences the Erlking as all too real, the father dismissing his presence as a ‘streak of mist’. Night as a mix of the supernatural and the corporeal is pronounced in the opening stanza of ‘Schwestergruss’, with traces of the moon's rays but no sound: ‘In the moonlight / I wander up and down / Seeing dead bones / And a silent grave.’ These songs – distant in chronology, close in spirit – all point to the night as a backdrop to strange happenings brought about by darkness: ghostly presences, funeral processions, and eeriness as sound and silence combined. Death lingers in the shadows – ‘It is a ghost! It fades, it flies’, to quote from Ossian's ‘Die Nacht’.
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- The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert , pp. 89 - 118Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2024