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Swan Songs: Schubert's ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2011
Extract
The following inquiry began as an echo of my preoccupation long ago and far away with settings of late nineteenth-century French poetry. Mallarmé's ‘le cygne/signe’ arrives too late (involuntarily, I recall the immortal line ‘What time's the next swan?’) to be a player in the creation of Schubert's songs, but the great French poet had recourse to some of the same signifying swans at work in this composer's chosen poem by Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg-Stolberg. Struck by an analogy in the words for D. 774 (published in March 1827 as op. 72), I dug a little deeper and discovered multiple specimens of these emblematic creatures from Greek and Roman literature, medieval lore, Reformation iconography and Romantic art.
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References
1 Spenser, Edmund, Complaints, ed. Renwick, W.L. (London: Scholartis, 1928): 22–3.Google Scholar ‘For deeds doe die, how ever noblie donne,/And thoughts of men do as themselves decay,/But wise wordes taught in numbers for to runne,/Recorded by the Muses, live for ay’, Spenser writes in lines 400–403 of the same poem.
2 These lines come from Asia's song at the end of act 2, scene 5 (lines 72–4) of Prometheus Unbound, later set to music by Maude Valérie White (1855–1937). See Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Reiman, Donald H. and Fraistat, Neil (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002): 254Google Scholar.
3 The phrase comes from Walter Slezak's tales of his father, the great Wagnerian tenor Leo Slezak, whose swan-boat was famously dilatory on one occasion. See Slezak, Walter, What Time's the Next Swan? (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962)Google Scholar.
4 One thinks of Mallarmé's ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui’, with its ‘cygne d'autrefois’ who remembers ‘que c'est lui/Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre/Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pour n'avoir pas chanté la région où se vivre/Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui’. See Mallarmé, Stéphane, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945): 67–8Google Scholar.
5 One possibility for the source of the 1815–16 Stolberg songs (‘Morgenlied’, D. 266; ‘Abendlied’, D. 176; ‘An die Natur’, D. 372; ‘Romanze’, D. 144; ‘Daphne am Bach’, D. 411; ‘Stimme der Liebe’, D. 412; and ‘Lied in der Abwesenheit’, D. 416) is the Gedichte der Brüder Christian und Friedrich Leopold Grafen zu Stolberg (Carlsruhe: Christian Gottlieb Schmieder, 1794). Schmieder also published the edition in 1783 that lacks ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’. Schubert, when he set ‘Auf dem Wasser’ and ‘Die Mutter Erde’ may have had recourse to the two-volume edition of the Gedichte published in Vienna by Wallishausser in 1821 (this seems the most likely source), the Gedichte published in 1822 in Heilbronn by Strasser or the Leipzig edition of the Gedichte by Weygand in 1821, to list only three of the options.
6 This ‘Musik-Beylage’ for the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode 156 (30 Dec. 1823): 1,288, is reproduced as Document 232 in Waidelich, Till Gerrit, Hilmar-Voit, Renate and Mayer, Andreas, eds, Franz Schubert: Dokumente 1817–1830 vol. 1, Texte (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1993): 181–2Google Scholar.
7 We do not know the circumstances in which Schubert contracted syphilis; both before and after his death, his friends said little about the matter. McKay, Elizabeth Norman, in Franz Schubert: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996): 133–63, discusses Schubert's ‘double nature’, including the darker sensual side.Google ScholarGibbs, Christopher H., in The Life of Schubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),Google Scholar does not entirely agree with McKay's conclusions about debauchery.
8 John Reed writes, ‘The poem may not be great literature, but it gives Schubert all he needs: a strong dactylic rhythm, and a simple stanza form which falls easily into a symmetrical four-bar structure.’ The stanza form is not as simple as Reed claims. See Reed, John, The Schubert Song Companion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985): 54.Google Scholar Richard Capell, while he does not condemn this poem as he does the words of another Stolberg song from 1823, ‘Die Mutter Erde’, D. 788 (‘a muddled poem’), does not understand it, calling it ‘carefree and warmhearted’, an ‘idealization of Viennese river pleasures’. It is much more than that. See Capell, Richard, Schubert's Songs (London: Pan Books, 1973): 185.Google Scholar
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10 See Ahl, Frederick M., ‘Amber, Avallon, and Apollo's Singing Swan’, American Journal of Philology 103 (1982): 373–411.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Plato, , Phaedo, trans. David Gallop (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
12 Skulsky, Harold, in Metamorphosis: The Mind in Exile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981),CrossRefGoogle Scholar discusses different types of metamorphosis myths. In his view, they are always confrontations with the mind–body problem.
13 Ovid, , The Metamorphoses, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York and London: Harvest Books, 1993): 50–51.Google Scholar
14 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), The Aeneid, trans. Fitzgerald, Robert (New York: First Vintage Books, 1984): 300.Google Scholar In his ninth eclogue, Virgil also invokes poetry that singing swans shall bear aloft to the stars (‘cantantes sublime ferent ad sidera cycni’). See Virgil, , Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid I–VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, repr. of 1916 edn): 66–7Google Scholar.
15 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Odes II: Vatis amici, trans. David West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): 142–5Google Scholar.
16 See Jakob, Michael, Schwanengefahr: Das lyrische Ich im Zeichen des Schwans (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2000)Google Scholar for more on this subject.
17 Hölderlin, Friedrich, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1980): 234.Google Scholar Some of the most beautiful swans in all of poetry reside in the first stanza of ‘Hälfte des Lebens’: ‘Mit gelben Birnen hänget/Und voll mit wilden Rosen/Das Land in den See,/Ihr holden Schwäne,/Und trunken von Küssen/Tunkt ihr das Haupt/Ins heilignüchterne Wasser’ (370).
18 Yeats, William Butler, The Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1956): 196.Google Scholar
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20 Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold Graf zu, ‘Die Schafpelze’ in Iamben (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1784): 40.Google Scholar Stolberg quotes portions of lines 19–20 and lines 55–6 from Canto 27 of the Paradiso (‘se io mi trascoloro,/Non ti maravigliar …/In vesta di pastor’ lupi rapaci/Se veggion per tutti i paschi’) as the entrée to his own poem, beginning, ‘O könnt’ ich wie zu einem Feierschmaus/Die ganze Klerisei der Christenheit/Einladen! von dem Eisgestade her/Den dummen Papen, von des Tago Strand/Den schlauen Inquisitor der das Blut/Der Unschuld mit der weissen Kutte deckt,/So Abt als Bischof, Pabst und Kardinal,/Den Domherrn welcher mit dreifachem Kinn/In weicher Sänfte angetragen käm’, etc.
21 For a bibliography of anonymous pamphlets, articles and brochures, see Goedeke, Karl, Grundrisz zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung aus den Quellen, vol. 4, part 1 (Dresden: L. Ehlermann, 1910–1960): 1,026–8. See alsoCrossRefGoogle ScholarKastner, Karl, ed., Der innere Aufschwung des Katholizismus in Deutschland am Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1926)Google Scholar and Ludwig Stockinger, ‘Friedrich Leopold Stolbergs Konversion als “Zeitzeugnis”’, in Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg (1750–1819). Beiträge zum Eutiner Symposium im September 1997, ed. Baudach, Frank, Jürgen Behrens and Ute Pott (Eutin: Struve, 2002): 199–246Google Scholar.
22 This passage comes from a letter Brentano wrote to Achim von Arnim on 18 March 1806. See Brentano, Clemens, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 31: Briefe, III , ed. Behrens, Jürgen, Feilchenfeldt, Konrad, Frühwald, Wolfgang, Perels, Christoph and Schultz, Hartwig (Stuttgart and Berlin: W. Kohlhammer, 1991): 510–11Google Scholar.
23 Voß's ‘Wie ward Fritz Stolberg ein Unfreier?’ was originally printed in Sophronizon oder unpartheyisch-freymüthige Beyträge zur neueren Geschichte, Gesetzgebung und Statistik der Staaten und Kirchen, ed. Paulus, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Gebrüder Wilmans, 1819): 1–113Google Scholar ; a facsimile appears in Behrens, Jürgen, ed., Streitschriften über Stolbergs Konversion (Bern and Frankfurt am Main: Herbert Lang, 1973).Google Scholar See also Friedrich Leopold Grafen zu Stolberg kurze Abfertigung der langen Schmähschrift des Herrn Hofraths Voß wider ihn. Nach dem Tode des Verfassers vollendet von dem Bruder herausgegeben (Hamburg: Perthes & Besser, 1820).
24 See Schumann, Detlev W., ‘Aufnahme und Wirkung von Friedrich Leopold Stolbergs Übertritt zur Katholischen Kirche’, Euphorion 50/3 (1956): 271–306Google Scholar ; the same author, ‘Goethe and the Stolbergs: A Friendship of the Storm and Stress’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 48 (1949): 483–504Google Scholar ; and the same author, ‘Goethe and the Stolbergs after 1775: The History of a Problematic Relationship’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 50 (1951): 22–59Google Scholar.
25 Voß, Johann Heinrich, Bestätigung der Stolbergischen Umtriebe nebst einem Anhang über persönliche Verhältnisse (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler 1820).Google Scholar
26 See Hellinghaus, Otto, Friedrich Leopolds Grafen zu Stolberg erste Gattin Agnes geb. von Witzleben. Ein Lebensbild aus der Zeit der Empfindsamkeit (Cologne: J.P. Bachem, 1919): 20.Google Scholar
27 Friedrich wrote an ‘Ode. An Agnes’ in 1783 in which he invokes images of reflections in the water, of a beech grove rustling in the west wind, of the seasons passing and of death, but he ends with thoughts of the new life already in her womb. See Friedrich, and Stolberg, Christian, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, 354Google Scholar.
28 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, ‘Voß und Stolberg’, in Goethes Werke, vol. 36 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1893): 286.Google Scholar Goethe ascribes Stolberg's conversion to his search for emotional support in the wake of her death.
29 Voß, , Bestätigung der Stolbergischen Umtriebe, p. 156.Google Scholar
30 Cited in Hellinghaus, Friedrich Leopolds Grafen zu Stolberg erste Gattin Agnes geb. von Witzleben, 61.
31 See Janssen, Johannes, Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg. Sein Entwicklungsgang und sein Wirken im Geiste der Kirche (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1882): 34.Google Scholar
32 François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, Demonstration de l’existence de Dieu, tirée de la connoissance de la nature, et proportionnée à la foible intelligence des plus simples (Paris: Jacques Estienne, 1713). Fénelon proposes that the self should be utterly submerged in submission to God, a proposition that shocked a Roman Catholic hierarchy insistent upon a more muscular exercise of free will.
33 See Goethe, , Propyläen-Ausgabe von Goethes Sämtlichen Werke, vol. 6: 1788–90 (Munich: Georg Müller, 1910): 232,Google Scholar for the brief letter of 5 December 1788 in which Goethe hopes that Stolberg's children will console him, and p. 236 for the letter of 2 February 1789.
34 Goethes Werke, vol. 5, part 1 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1893): 186.Google Scholar
35 See Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold, ‘Gedanken über Herrn Schillers Gedicht: Die Götter Griechenlandes’, in Ein Jahrhundert deutscher Literaturkritik (1750–1850), vol. 2: Schiller und sein Kreis, ed. Fambach, Oskar (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1957): 44–9Google Scholar ; and Dahnke, Hans-Dietrich, ‘Die Debatte um “Die Götter Griechenlandes”’, in Debatten und Kontroversen. Literarische Auseinandersetzungen in Deutschland am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Dahnke, Hans-Dietrich and Leistner, Bernd, vol. 1 (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1989): 193–269.Google Scholar See also Norbert Oellers, ‘Stolberg, das Christentum und die Antike’, in Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg (1750–1819). Beiträge zum Eutiner Symposium im September 1997: 109–26.
36 It was the lines immediately following the lament Schubert set to music that offended Stolberg: ‘Alle jene Blüten sind gefallen/Von des Nordes schauerlichem Wehn,/Einen zu bereichern unter allen,/Mußte diese Götterwelt vergehn’ (‘All those blossoms have perished in the north wind's fearful blast; to crown One above all, this divine world had to vanish’). Schubert's setting is titled ‘Strophe an Schiller’, D. 677, composed in November 1819.
37 In Senn's, JohannGedichte (Innsbruck: Wagner, 1838),Google Scholar one finds the ‘Schwanenlied’ on p. 15 with the footnote ‘In Musik gesetzt von Fr. Schubert’.
38 Franz Bruchmann and Johann Senn, both members of the Schubert circle c. 1820, were particularly close friends who shared similar philhellenic and patriotic beliefs. In the second or third week of March 1820, the two of them and Schubert were among those surprised by the police at Senn's lodgings after a farewell party for a fellow Tyrolean friend of Senn's. Senn, already on a police blacklist for his political opinions, was jailed for 14 months and then sent into internal exile; Schubert, who garnered a black eye in the scuffle, was not named in the report to the notorious chief of police, Count Josef Sedlnitzky, but he was probably warned to watch his step. Thereafter, Senn was something of a martyr in his friends’ eyes. See Kohlhäufl, Michael, Poetisches Vaterland. Dichtung und politisches Denken im Freundeskreis Franz Schuberts (Kassel and Basel: Bärenreiter, 1999): 280–87Google Scholar.
39 See Osthoff, Wolfgang, ‘Zum Vorstellungsgehalt des Allegretto in Beethovens 7. Symphonie,’ Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 34/3 (1977): 159–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
40 Graham Johnson, ‘Death and the Composer’, The Hyperion Schubert Edition 11, with Brigitte Fassbaender, mezzo-soprano, and Graham Johnson, piano (Hyperion CDJ33011): 12.
41 I am grateful to Professor Sobaskie for this insight in an email communiqué.
42 Burney, Charles, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (London: T. Becket and Co. Strand, 1773): 144.Google Scholar
43 To cite just a few examples, Julius Drake, accompanying Ian Bostridge on EMI Classics CDC 7243 5 56347, keeps the dynamics almost uniformly pianissimo, except for the downbeat of bar 6, and ignores the small accents on F and E in bar 7. The same is true of Lambert Orkis, accompanying Arleen Auger on fortepiano (Virgin Classics VC 7 91195-2), except that he more closely observes the accents in bars 6 and 7 and plays the indicated crescendo–decrescendo arc in bars 30 and 32 of the postlude. Rudolf Jansen, accompanying Elly Ameling on Philips 416 294-2, likewise ignores the hairpin markings, while Melvyn Tan, accompanying Nancy Argenta on EMI Classics CDC 7 54175 2, executes a slight decrescendo through each bar in bars 1–5, but clearly marks the F and E accents in bar 7. The one pianist I have found who is faithful to Schubert's indications in every way, and who rightly groups this song with a selection of Schubert's songs of death is Graham Johnson, accompanying Brigitte Fassbaender on The Hyperion Schubert Edition 11, already cited. His performance of the postludes is particularly beautiful.
44 The same crescendo–decrescendo pairing also applies to bars 30 and 32 in the postlude, bars in which we sway in place to different constituents of a dominant ninth harmony.
45 Reed, The Schubert Song Companion, 54. However, on p. 492 in an appendix on ‘Schubert's Tonalities’, Reed lists both ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ and ‘Schwanengesang’ as being in A major/minor. Graham Johnson, in ‘Death and the Composer’, p. 13, also invokes the original key of A minor, but he does so in order to point out that this song shares parallel modes and descending semiquavers with the Impromptu, Op. 90, no. 4 (D. 899). Well before me, this noted Schubertian pointed out that the emergence into the sunlight of major mode has a metaphysical power ‘not often enough pondered by audiences’, that it is a ‘musical metaphor for the liberation of the soul from its shackles’ (p. 14).
46 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the possible connections between these works.
47 See the author's ‘Mozart, Mörike's, Schubert, Wolf's: “Denk’ es, o Seele!”’, Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, Neue Folge 24 (2004): 83–114.Google Scholar
48 When I hear Schubert's version of Stolberg's wings in the final stanza, I always think of Keat's lines, ‘Fair world, adieu!/Thy dales, and hills, are fading from my view!/Swiftly I mount, upon wide spreading pinions,/Far from the narrow bounds of thy dominions./ Full joy I feel, while thus I cleave the air,/That my soft verse will charm thy daughters fair,/And warm thy sons!’, and of a snippet from Andrew Marvell's ‘The Garden’: ‘Casting the body's vest aside,/My soul into the boughs does glide;/There, like a bird, it sits and sings/Then whets and combs its silver wings/And till prepared for longer flight/Waves in its plumes the various light’. See John Keats, ‘To my Brother George (Full many a dreary hour have I passed)’, The Complete Poems, ed. Barnard, John (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979): 67.Google Scholar See also Marvell, Andrew, The Complete Poems, ed. Donno, Elizabeth Story (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996): 101Google Scholar.
49 In his 1817 (?) setting of Franz von Bruchmann's ‘Am See’, D. 746, Schubert fills a song emblematic of longing for transcendence with mirrored motivic, harmonic and formal reflections.
50 In Friedrich, and Stolberg, Christian, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, p. 352, one finds a poem supposedly written by Agnes to her husband, ‘An ihren Stolberg. Von Agnes’, in which she calls for ‘Melodie! schöne Vertraute der liebenden Seele,/Mit der sie tauchet in's Meer der Empfindung,/Mit der sie schwebet über die Sonnen,/Bis über der Sterne harmonischen Tanz!/Melodie, komm herab!’ She got her wish, even if she never knew it.Google Scholar