I was brother to many brothers and sisters. Our father and mother were kind. I was devoted to all of them with deep love. Once our father took us to a feast. My brothers were very happy there. But I was sad. Then my father came to me and bade me enjoy the delicious food. But I could not, whereupon my father grew angry and banished me from his presence. I turned my steps and, with a heart full of infinite love for those who spurned that love, I wandered into faraway regions. For years I felt myself divided between the greatest pain and the greatest love. Then I heard of my mother’s death. I hastened to see her, and my father, softened by grief, did not prevent me from entering. There I saw her corpse. Tears flowed from my eyes. I saw her lying there as in the happy times of the past, in which, in the view of the deceased, we should live as once she had.
And we followed her body in mourning, and the bier sank into the ground. From that time on I stayed at home again. Then my father once more took me to his favorite garden. He asked me whether I liked it. But I found that garden repugnant and did not dare say anything. Then he asked me a second time, flushing, whether I liked the garden. I answered, trembling, that I did not. Then my father struck me and I fled. And for the second time I turned my steps, and with a heart full of infinite love for those who spurned that love, I wandered once more into distant regions. For long, long years I sang songs. If I wished to sing of love, it turned to pain for me. And if I wished to sing only of pain again, it turned to love for me.
Thus love and pain divided me.
And one day I heard of a pious maiden who had just died. And a circle formed around her gravestone, within which many youths and old men walked as if in everlasting bliss. They spoke softly so as not to wake the maiden.
Heavenly thoughts seemed perpetually to spray forth from the maiden’s tomb upon the youths like delicate sparks, producing a gentle sound. I greatly longed to walk there too. But only a miracle, they said, can lead into that circle. Yet I slowly approached the gravestone, filled with devotion and firm faith, my gaze lowered, and before I knew it, I was in the circle, which uttered a sound of miraculous beauty; and I felt as if eternal bliss were concentrated in a single instant. I saw my father too, reconciled and loving. He clasped me in his arms and wept. But I wept even more.
—Franz Schubert, July 3, 1822
One morning in 1822, Franz Schubert wrote down an enigmatic text in which all his ghosts seem to take shape: wandering, solitude, consolation, disappointed love. Inspired by this dreamlike narrative, conductor Raphaël Pichon devised a vast Romantic fresco, combining resurrection of unknown treasures with rediscovery of established masterpieces.
My Dream is the title given by Ferdinand Schubert to a text written by his brother in 1822. In this narrative, which does indeed resemble a transcription of a dream, the narrator, banished by his father, twice goes into exile: “I wandered once more into faraway regions. For long, long years I sang songs [lieder]. If I wished to sing of love, it turned to pain for me. And if I wished to sing only of pain again, it turned to love for me.” Thus the Wanderer, the eminently Schubertian archetype of the wayfarer, expresses himself through song; and that song, in its ambivalence, speaks of perpetual dissatisfaction and the absence of a true homeland in this world below.
Like Schubert’s dream, the pieces in this program contrast different spaces. At the beginning of the second act of Schubert’s unfinished oratorio Lazarus (1820), Simon the Sadducee finds death is the only way out of a “world of misery.” In the story of the “Cloud Maiden” told by Froila, father of the hero of Alfonso und Estrella (1821–1822), an enchanted castle serves as a refuge from the “gloomy folly of earthly torments.” Thus, whether legendary, metaphysical, or mythological, places outside the material world are depicted by means of song. Like the Lorelei in Heine’s famous poem, the mermaids, nixies, and undines so dear to the German Romantics use their songs to deceive mortals: It is with their voices that Schubert’s “Cloud Maiden” and Schumann’s Meerfey construct the illusory world where they lure huntsmen and sailors to their doom. In Schumann’s piece, the bewitching yet ephemeral character of the illusion is embodied in a texture that conceals its own contours: The five voices intersect and the phrases overlap as if to lead the listener astray. By delineating a distant space, then, song explores another time. Repetition is the primary element: The act of singing the same melody to different strophes is what characterises the Lied—song in German—in its simplest form. Examples include the funeral chorus in Lazarus (“Sanft und still”), Ellen’s Third Song (Ave Maria, 1825), the mermaids’ song (“O wie wogt”) in Weber’s Oberon (1826) or, in the first act of Alfonso und Estrella, the chorus “Zur Jagd, zur Jagd!” The last two of these are inserted into the plot of an opera without inflecting the action: Here it is a scenic backdrop that appears, that of sirens or the hunt, both characteristic topoi of Romantic opera. This external framework nevertheless resonates with the interiority of the opera’s characters: At the end of the chorus of huntresses, Schubert assigns the horn-call motif to the solo clarinet in preparation for Estrella’s entrance aria.
To remain with Alfonso und Estrella, the “Cloud Maiden” song is a more complex case. The music, which sets a narrative this time, is more akin to a succession of lieder—indeed, one of these, the section describing the huntsman’s ascent to the castle, was later to provide the musical material for a song in Winterreise (No. 19, “Täuschung” [“Delusion”]). The music of the first strophe reappears only when the petrified hero is transformed into a legendary figure. His concluding plunge to his death veers towards the operatic: Melody becomes declamation, and the harp that accompanied Froila disappears behind the orchestra. In fact, this shift from lied to drama is largely played out in the accompaniment: By taking the place of the piano, the orchestra draws the lied away from the intimate, private sphere of the drawing room.
It was at the request of baritone Julius Stockhausen that Brahms orchestrated several Schubert lieder in the early 1860s. A decade later, when he was composing his Triumphlied and Schicksalslied, he assigned the vocal line in his arrangement of Gruppe aus dem Tartarus (1817) to unison male chorus. The piano tremolos that open this striking scene suggested growling strings and cutting brass attacks to the orchestrator. These devices, employed here to render Schiller’s imagery—“the angry sea,” “groaning,” etc.—are frequent in opera; they recur in Lysiart’s revenge aria, which opens the second act of Weber’s “Grand Heroic–Romantic Opera” Euryanthe (1823). Liszt, who conducted the premiere of Alfonso und Estrella in 1854, also has recourse to them in his 1860 orchestration of Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger” (1828) to emphasise the dramatic progression of Heine’s poem. This time, the image that takes shape is the narrator’s own double, “aping the pain of his love.” In Schumann’s Szenen aus Goethes Faust, the use of vocal tessitura also dissolves the identity of the characters: The roles of Faust and Mephistopheles, both allotted to a baritone, seem to merge. In the third part of the work, devoted to the protagonist’s transfiguration (this section was also premiered by Liszt at Weimar, in 1849), it is in the guise of Doctor Marianus that the scholar glorifies the “Queen of Heaven.” Although they lean in the direction of opera, these “Scenes” for soloists, chorus, and orchestra effectively elude theatrical performance: Goethe’s drama, by dint of its outsize proportions and its multiple settings for the action, at once dismisses that possibility.
Mirroring this dispersal of stage settings, the absence of clear contours that characterize the dream or vision is also expressed by the fragmentary and the unfinished. For instance, the horn phrase that introduces the mermaids’ song in the second act of Weber’s Oberon is cut off after three bars by a silence (during which, in the original score, Puck informs Oberon in speech of the mermaids’ presence). Similarly, in the Allegro moderato of his “Unfinished” Symphony (1822), Schubert interrupts the string theme just before its conclusion. A musical gesture and a work left unresolved thus constitute different levels of incompleteness. Schubert’s unfinished compositions are numerous, from Lazarus to several of his operatic efforts; Alfonso und Estrella is the only wholly sung opera he completed. Pichon capitalizes on the notion of fragmentariness to map out transitions from one piece of music to another: The unresolved ending of the mermaids’ song from Oberon moves directly into the Andante movement of the “Unfinished” Symphony, while the introduction to the third act of Alfonso und Estrella acts as a prelude to Gruppe aus dem Tartarus. And so Schubert’s dream resonates: “If I wished to sing of love, it turned to pain for me. And if I wished to sing only of pain again, it turned to love for me.”
—Nicolas Boiffinn (courtesy of harmonia mundi)