As a songwriter, Beethoven may seem to sit in the shadow of Schubert, R. Schumann, and the other great Romantic masters of lieder, as well as his own reputation as a titan of instrumental music. As he said, “Whenever I hear music in my inner ear, it is always the full orchestra that I hear. When writing vocal music, I invariably have to ask myself: Can it be sung?” But his attachment to the poetry of his era—especially that of Goethe and Schiller—was deep, and his contributions to the genre significant. As with every musical form he tackled, he pushed songwriting far beyond the limits of what his contemporaries were doing, and with his vocal masterpiece An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved) created the first fully integrated song cycle.
Beethoven was a prolific songwriter: Over the course of his career, he composed about 250 songs, mostly to German texts. Still more of his songs exist only in sketches, including attempts at poems Schubert later made famous, such as “Erlkönig” and “Rastlose Liebe.” Renowned accompanist Graham Johnson comments that, unlike Schubert, who smoothly merged his musical imagination into whatever poem he set, Beethoven—in keeping with his forceful personality—tended to bend poetry to his will, often choosing poems that reflected the crises he was personally experiencing.
Such is the case in the first three songs on today’s program. They came from one of the most difficult times in the composer’s life, the period of 1814 to 1820, when he became absorbed in the battle for custody over his nephew Karl and then confronted the struggles of parenting. These situations so overwhelmed Beethoven that his composing energies were somewhat stifled, and he produced fewer major works than before. His depression during those years is deeply imprinted on the second setting of “An die Hoffnung” of 1813–1815, and still more in “Resignation” of 1817.
In 1804–1805, Beethoven made his first setting of “An die Hoffnung” to a poem from Christoph August Tiedge’s Urania as a gift to one of the young women he courted, Josephine von Brunsvik. However, the poem continued to reverberate in his memory, and a decade later, he created the setting we hear this evening, which is much darker and more sophisticated in its musical treatment. It opens with a strophe Beethoven had omitted in the earlier version, in which the poet poses the question, “Is there a God?” The composer sets these desperate words in a recitative that is harmonically wayward and uncertain, but at the end makes a grimly affirmative declaration that “Man should hope!” The rest of the song uses flexibility of tempo and an almost speech-like approach to word-setting to capture every nuance of the poem. Strophes that begin in doubt strive to complete themselves in hope—especially the last one, which in a rising line ascends to a vision of the glowing sun glimpsed through the clouds. The second strophe returns to complete the song.
“Resignation” appears to directly address Beethoven’s composing crisis of this era. He captures the terse poem’s mood of exhaustion and depletion with spare, broken phrases, and gives the singer detailed instructions about how it should be performed: “With feeling, yet resolutely, well accented, and sung as though spoken.” The most important phrase is “Du mußt nun los dich binden” (“You must now break free”)—perhaps Beethoven commanding himself to find a new way out of his composing block. Susan Youens writes, “The grim musical pun by which Beethoven ‘finds not’ the cadence he has prepared or sought (‘sucht’) at the words ‘findet nicht’ is another marvelous detail of a haunting song.”
Composed in 1820 and generally considered to be Beethoven’s last true lied, “Abendlied unterm gestrirnten Himmel” (“Evening Song Beneath the Starry Sky”) shows the composer in a calmer, more serene state as he looks forward to a peaceful end to his life. Beethoven scholar Barry Cooper tells us that it may have been inspired by quotation from Kant that strongly moved the composer: “There are two things that raise a man above himself and lead to eternal, ever-increasing admiration: the moral law within us, and the starry sky above us.” Beethoven always found solace in nature, and here he looks upward to the stars for consolation. This beautiful song is in strophic style, but with each strophe slightly altered to convey the evolving perspective. It closes with soft, wide-stretched chords in the piano—a musical view out to infinity.
Created in April 1816, An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved) is the masterpiece of Beethoven’s lieder. The poetry for its six songs was written, perhaps at the composer’s request, by Alois Jeitteles, a young medical student and poet involved in Vienna’s theatrical scene. It’s quite possible that Beethoven intended the work as an expression of his undying love for his own “Immortal Beloved,” believed to be the married Antonie Brentano from whom he had separated himself several years earlier to avoid temptation.
This cycle again draws on Beethoven’s deep love for nature’s beauty. Here, the poet wishes to reestablish communication with the beloved through the medium of the natural world that separates them. The six songs are linked together by brief harmonic and tempo transitions in the piano. Bringing the cycle to a full-circle conclusion, the final song uses the melody of the first song for its final stanza, and then develops it into a faster, more ardent coda.
Cooper finds in these lovely songs the combination of the artless (the simple, folk-like melodies) and the sophisticated (the harmonic structures and the subtle expressive details) characteristic of Beethoven’s late-period music. Especially remarkable is the cycle’s mood of serenity and the singer’s acceptance that he must remain separated from his beloved for both their sakes.
While Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise are true song cycles conceived as poetic and musical wholes, Schwanengesang (Swan Song) is a group of 14 of his last songs put together posthumously in 1829 by Tobias Haslinger (publisher of Winterreise), who gave the set its catchy marketing title. The collection contains two distinctly different sets of songs: seven to picturesque verse by Ludwig Rellstab (1799–1860), and six by one of Schubert’s favorite poets, the terse and ironic Heinrich Heine (1797–1856). Schubert’s very last song, “Die Taubenpost”—written weeks before he died—was included, too, as a final farewell. As Schubert scholar John Reed writes, “It is the mark of Schubert’s genius that he developed a different style for every poet he set, and the Rellstab and Heine songs can be clearly differentiated, though they touch the same deep pessimism.” Apparently, Schubert wished to create two separate cycles for these poets, but death thwarted that goal.
Though Rellstab, Schubert’s exact contemporary, never met the composer, he did know Beethoven and had sent him a collection of poems. The poet told the possibly true story that Beethoven, before his death, sent them on to Schubert with instructions that he may want to set them.
The most conventional of the group is the opening “Liebesbotschaft” (“Love’s Messenger”), in which the poet eagerly sends his love along the waves of a babbling brook. Brooks are featured in many of Schubert’s songs, notably in Die schöne Müllerin. Here, he captures its sparkling flow in a continuous pattern in the piano’s right hand that creates the song’s atmosphere.
Very different is the next song, “Kriegers Ahnung” (“Warrior’s Foreboding”), in which the protagonist is a soldier unable to fall asleep among his comrades. In the old ballad style, Schubert uses different keys, meters, tempos, and piano patterns to reflect the soldier’s changing thoughts as he confronts his fears of the coming battle. The song begins in C minor with a sharply accented rhythmic motive that sounds like muffled drums and suggests the threat of death. For the following two strophes, the music flows happily as he comforts himself with reminiscences of life at home in the arms of his beloved. The last strophe seems a fruitless effort to calm his fears, and the song ends ominously with the drumbeat motive.
“Frühlingssehnsucht” (“Spring Longing”) surges breathlessly forward as the poet responds to the season’s burgeoning beauty with a restless longing for fulfillment in love. Each strophe only pauses briefly as he asks the closing questions: “Wohin?,” “Warum?,” “Und du?”
With its limpid, flowing melody of irresistible loveliness, “Ständchen” (“Serenade”) is one of Schubert’s best-loved songs. Accompanied by a guitar-like pattering in the piano, the singer invites his lover to join him in a nocturnal tryst; the ornaments adorning his phrases intensify the seductive effect.
In the minor mode, “Aufenthalt” (“Resting Place”) is one of the many songs Schubert wrote about wanderers driven from their homes by unbearable loss. Ironically, there is no true resting place here, for the poet has chosen the most inhospitable, storm-riven places, which, however, match his emotional state perfectly. The piano’s right hand maintains a continuous drumming of triplets, while the left hand provides commentary on the grimness of his situation. However, as Reed points out, the wanderer is not overwhelmed by his circumstances: “The protagonist is still a fugitive from life and society, but he is better able to see his own situation with detachment. The headlong flight has become an orderly retreat, stiffened with stoic resolve.”
“In der Ferne” (“Far Away”) continues the theme of the wanderer far from home amid minor-mode darkness. Reed comments that here “the sense of loneliness, of alienation … possesses him rather than the idea of flight.” The piano’s prelude, with its sforzando chords and rumbling upward figures, establishes the tragedy of his situation and returns between the poem’s strophes. Rellstab has chosen a confining rhyming pattern, which determines the drooping phrase endings that pervade the song. Wild harmonic changes periodically tear into the singer’s otherwise stolid lines.
“Abschied” (“Farewell”) is about another wanderer, but this time he is an undamaged personality out for an adventure he has freely chosen. Schubert comes up with an intoxicating rhythmic theme for the piano that mimics the horse’s spirited trot and the lure of distant places. As the poet passes each landmark in his hometown, he acknowledges it with a hearty “Ade,” although there is a flicker of regret as he passes the little lighted window, behind which perhaps someone special to him lived.
With his spare, acerbic verse, Heinrich Heine was one of the greatest and most timeless of the 19th-century poets. Schubert responded to these qualities with a unique “Heine” style that is leaner, alert to the poet’s ironic double meanings, and musically more modern. Some of the songs anticipate techniques later adopted by the Impressionists and Hugo Wolf. Part of a poetic collection called Die Heimkehr (The Homecoming), the six songs Schubert chose trace a story of the pain of love lost and the withdrawal of the protagonist from his daily life—especially when the songs are given Heine’s original order, beginning with “Das Fischermädchen” and closing with “Der Atlas.”
In “Der Atlas,” the powerful hammering motive in the piano bass illustrates the tragic myth of Atlas, who (punished by the gods) must bear the weight of the world on his shoulders; the poet’s sorrow possesses that same crushing weight. With extreme concentration and simplicity, “Ihr Bild” (“Her Likeness”) expresses the poet’s loveless state through bare, bleak octaves; in contrast, fuller, sweeter harmonies are used for his memories of his beloved.
The only untroubled song in the set, “Das Fischermädchen” (“The Fishermaiden”) is a rocking barcarolle. Schubert scholar Brian Newbould calls “Die Stadt” (“The Town”) “an impressionistic tone-poem before its time.” Swirling-mist arpeggios on an eerie diminished-seventh harmony create an air of unreality as the poet watches the town where his love affair ended from the vantage point of a boat at night.
“Am Meer” (“By the Sea”) is divided between music of detached loveliness in the major mode and tremulous music in the minor that reveals the poet’s inner anguish. The shattering “Der Doppelgänger” (“The Wraith”) is built on the four dark chords with which it opens; they continue through the song like a passacaglia pattern. Above them, the poet sings in the barest, bleakest recitative, twice rising to cries of unbearable pain.
Schubert’s publisher perhaps wisely chose to attach one unrelated song—the composer’s last, written just weeks before he died—to finish Schwanengesang on a brighter note. Another of Schubert’s most beloved lieder, “Der Taubenpost” (“Carrier Pigeon”) is powered by an infectious, highly rhythmic accompaniment figure. This charming song shows the goodness and optimism that lay at the heart of Schubert’s personality, and that remained with him despite the ravages of a progressive illness that would kill him at age 31.
—Janet E. Bedell
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