Today is the birthday of one of Central Europe’s greatest sons, the immortal Austrian composer Franz Schubert, whose music has become such a big part of my life over the last couple of years. His music has been an important part of my journey to recovery from the evils of Marxist totalitarianism and Trotskyist cultism. He personifies a dreamy Romantic individualism utterly incompatible with the cold, unyielding rigidities of ‘scientific socialism’ and Leninist philistinism. His ravishing, mesmerising melodies and engrossing song cycles, with their lonely, wandering, heart-broken protagonists, are a wonderful riposte to the moronic philosophy that would like to reduce feeling human souls to ridiculous automatons and programmed puppets in the hands of a cruel god of political economy.
Like most people, my introduction to Schubert was the second movement of his Piano Trio in E Flat, made famous by Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon (1975). The melancholy tinkling of the piano, in mournful counterpoint with the wailing strings, is among the last gems that this musical pioneer gave to humanity before his untimely death. Since then, I have discovered so many other aspects of his magnificent oeuvre, such as his Unfinished Symphony and his Symphony No 9, but most importantly, his song cycles. It was on a winter morning commute into work that I discovered his Winterreise song cycle through German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff’s recording. The very first song, ‘Gute Nacht’, became a fast favourite. Haunting, moody, march-like, the lyrics gave poetic expression to all the disappointments of my adolescent life.
Fremd bin ich eingezogen,
Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus.
Der Mai war mir gewogen
Mit manchem Blumenstrauss.
I followed the bitter, jaded protagonist across the snowy wastes of rural Austria for the next twenty-three songs. On and on he sung of his spurned love, his mental suffering, his fruitless search for respite on his self-imposed, wandering exile. I had discovered Gustav Mahler and his sublime song cycles around the same time, and reflected deeply on the similarities and the differences. Mahler’s songs had their own grandeur, but I found (and still do) that Schubert’s songs were subtler and somewhat more abstract. Not for Schubert the melodramatic frenzy of the protagonist in Mahler’s ‘I have a gleaming knife in my breast’ from his Songs of a Wayfarer. Instead, there is the quiet despair of the miller in ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’ from Die schöne Müllerin as he waxes poetic about being rocked into eternal sleep by the river in which he plants to drown himself.
With the help of my singing teacher, a Schubert scholar, I have been able to uncover so much of what is magical about Winterreise, and it remains one of the great staples of my musical existence. More recently, however, I have fallen head over heels for his other great song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin. Over twenty songs, we follow the journey of a wide-eyed, wandering apprentice miller, full of youthful curiosity about the world as he prepares to take his apprenticeship under the master and his wife. He begins the cycle brimming with naivety and optimism, meets and falls in love with the master miller’s daughter (who for a time appears to return his feelings), is jilted by her when she falls in love with a dashing young hunter, and decides, in his despair, to drown himself in the very stream that he once believed was prophetically leading him to a great destiny full of love and happiness. The cruelty with which the universe crushes his hopes and grinds him into the dust, and the dizzying transition from the joy of the first half of the song cycle to the utter despair of the second half, makes this cycle for me easier to relate to than Winterreise, with its unbroken mood of sorrow. It also relates very strongly to events in my own life.
The follies and foibles of youth in the throes of first love are vivdly drawn out in these lyrical pieces. In ‘Am Feiarabend’, the young miller desperately seeks to impress the young maiden with his work ethic, and laments that he is not strong enough to surpass his fellows and woo his sweetheart. In ‘Ungeduld’, the lovesick young man sings of how he wishes to tell all of nature about his great passion, to ‘carve it on the bark of every tree’ and ‘inscribe it on every pebble’. In ‘Mein’, we see him celebrating a love returned, an emotion so overwhelming for him that it manifests itself in hiccuping, staccato quavers as he lets us know that ‘My beloved, the maid of the mill, is mine, is mine!’ The colour green becomes the emblem of their love, represented by the green ribbon he sends to her in ‘Mit dem grünen Lautenbande’. This emblem takes on a darker significance in ‘Die liebe Farbe’, when he is jilted, and begins fantasising about dying and being buried in green grass strewn with green plants of various kinds, his corpse also dressed in green as a symbol of his faithfulness to a faithless lover. The cycle terminates when the miller decides to escape his misery once and for all by throwing himself into the stream that once led him to the beautiful, faithless maid of the mill.
This heart-wrenching song cycle is a wonderful counterpart to another song cycle I have discovered, Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe. These musical gems remind me that I am and will always be more 19th-century German Romantic than Marxist revolutionary, and that is for the best. My Schubert journey is still in its infancy. Just today, I practiced singing one of his greatest pieces, Erlkönig, which sets the famous poem by Goethe to unforgettable music, and happens to be fiendishly difficult for pianists, more so than the singing. Here is one of my favourite classical singers, the great German lyric baritone Hermann Prey, singing it live, with James Levine conducting:
I am excited to discover more of Schubert’s oeuvre as the years go by. Whether my life be long or short, it shall always be blessed with the beautiful strains of ‘Ständchen’ from Schwanengesang, the plaintive melodies of Winterreise, the jolly triplets of ‘Das Wandern’ from Die schöne Müllerin. Thanks to him, I shall never be without a song in my heart to accompany me in both sorrow and sunshine. His music, in the words of ‘An die Musik’, ‘Hast mich in eine bessre Welt entrückt!’