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A Surfeit of Musics: What Goethe's Lyrics Concede When Set to Schubert's Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2011

Robert S. Hatten
Robert S. Hatten
Affiliation:
Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, Bloomington
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Extract

Of the many possible relationships between music and poetry, which are but a small subset of the possible relationships between music and text, I have chosen a still narrower focus for inquiry. I will investigate two independent, lyric poems whose musically poetic language and form was fully conceived without any expectation that a composer might use their texts as structural scaffolding and expressive inspiration for related, and emergent, musical and artistic ends. Two lyric poems by Goethe, each set by Schubert, will serve to illustrate the conflict between poetic and instrumental/vocal musics, in which the lyric poems inevitably concede something of their music to an appropriation by, and not merely a translation into, another artistic medium. Even when Schubert succeeds in exemplifying, or expanding upon, the symbolic richness of meaning embodied in the poem, we should consider the fate of overwritten meaning embodied in the musical language and form of the poem by itself.

Type
Articles
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , November 2008 , pp. 7 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Schoenberg, Arnold, ‘Das Verhältnis zum Text’, in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Kandinsky, Wassily and Marc, Franz (Munich: R. Piper and Co., 1912)Google Scholar; trans. Newlin, Dika as ‘The Relationship to the Text’, in Style and Idea, 1950; reprinted in Style and Idea, ed. Stein, Leonard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975): 144Google Scholar.

2 Frost, Robert, Letter to John T. Bartlett, 4 July 1913, in Collected Poems, Prose and Plays, ed. Poirier, Richard (New York: Library of America, 1995): 664–9.Google Scholar Cited in Pinsky, Robert, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998): 4, note 1Google Scholar.

3 Winn, James, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 250.

5 The complete cantata from which Winn draws is found in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, vol. 3, ed. Williams, Harold (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937; 2nd edn 1958): 956–61,Google Scholar which Winn ‘reprinted from Faulkner’s edition of 1746’ (Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence, note 59).

6 Winn, , Unsuspected Eloquence, 282.Google Scholar

7 Schoenberg, , ‘The Relationship to the Text’, 145.Google Scholar

8 Georgiades, Thrasybulos, ‘Lyric as Musical Structure: Schubert's Wandrers Nachtlied (“Uber allen Gipfeln,” D. 768)’, in Schubert: Musik und Lyrik (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967): 17–31Google Scholar ; trans. Gollner, Marie Louise in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Frisch, Walter (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986): 84–103.Google ScholarCompare the analysis in Stein, Deborah and Spillman, Robert, Poetry into Song: Performance and Analysis of Lieder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996): 45–51Google Scholar.

9 One of the anonymous reviewers of this article hears in the cadence an analogously ‘laconic expressiveness’ – quoting my words in describing Schubert’s closing gesture – which for this reader captures, in its simplicity, something of the brevity ‘embedded’ in the poetic structure – and even a ‘deeper echo of the image inherent in “spürest du kaum einen Hauch”’. I concur with this kind of interpretation, which goes a long way toward justifying Schubert’s personal sensitivity, despite the repetitive conventions that his inherited musical rhetoric apparently demanded. But these conventions, I would still claim, run roughshod over a delicate poetic cadence such as Goethe’s. Perhaps only a modern composer would have the stylistic means available in order to capture the kind of ending Goethe achieves, but this possibility need not undermine our admiration for Schubert’s text-setting abilities in general; rather, by my critique I am simply acknowledging what is missing.

10 Newbould, Brian, Schubert: The Music and the Man (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997): 183.Google Scholar

11 Deutsch, Otto Erich, Schubert: A Documentary Biography, trans. Eric Blom (London, J.M. Dent, 1946): 270.Google Scholar Cited in Newbould, , Schubert, 183.Google Scholar

12 Muxfeldt, Kristina, ‘Schubert's Songs: The Transformation of a Genre’, in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Gibbs, Christopher H. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 132.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 134.Google Scholar

14 For Brian Newbould, ‘the loss is symbolized by F minor, the happiness by A flat major’ (Schubert, 52). Even if one considers the opening progression to be an auxiliary one in A major, the opposition between F minor and A major will prove to be thematically and expressively significant. The term ‘arrival 6/4’, which addresses the rhetorical force of a move to a tonic-flavoured ‘cadential 6/4’ whether or not it is resolved immediately to V, is introduced in Hatten, Robert S., Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994): 15, 22Google Scholar.

15 Newbould, , Schubert, 52.Google Scholar

16 For this strategy of thematic closure in poetry, see Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, Poetic Closure: Or Why Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

17 For ‘pavane rhythm’, see Georgiades, ‘Lyric as Musical Structure’, 89. The long– short–short motto is characteristic of some (but not all) openings of pavanes and early allemandes (see examples, respectively, in Apel, Willi, The History of Keyboard Music to 1700, trans. and rev. Hans Tischler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972): 240Google Scholar (Fig. 235, 2) and 259 (Fig. 257). The motto rhythm on a single pitch is a formulaic opening for the chanson and its instrumental transcription or intabulation, the canzona (see Ness, Arthur J., ‘Canzona’ entry in The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Randel, Don Michael [Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986]: 136–8).Google Scholar

18 Interestingly, Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s first ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ (1776) was composed on the same day as his setting of ‘Erster Verlust’: 5 July 1815.

19 ‘Erster Verlust’, however, would continue to attract later composers, notably Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Hugo Wolf.