Retracing a Winter's Journey , livre ebook

R ETRACING A W INTER’S J OURNEY
Schubert’s Winterreise
Susan Youens
Cornell University Press
Ithaca and London
In memory of my teacher and dearest friend,
Paul Amadeus Pisk
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
P ART I. T HE P OET AND THE C OMPOSER
1. Genesis and Sources
2. The Texts of Winterreise
3. The Music of Winterreise
P ART II. T HE S ONGS
1. Gute Nacht
2. Die Wetterfahne
3. Gefror’ne Tränen
4. Erstarrung
5. Der Lindenbaum
6. Wasserflut
7. Auf dem Fluße
8. Rückblick
9. [Das] Irrlicht
10. Rast
11. Frühlingstraum
12. Einsamkeit
13. Die Post
14. Der greise Kopf
15. Die Krähe
16. Letzte Hoffnung
17. Im Dorfe
18. Der stürmische Morgen
19. Täuschung
20. Der Wegweiser
21. Das Wirtshaus
22. Mut
23. Die Nebensonnen
24. Der Leiermann
Postlude
Appendix. Ludwig Uhland’s Wander-Lieder
Selected Bibliography
Illustrations
1. Wilhelm Müller, as sketched by Wilhelm Hensel in 1822
2. Wilhelm Müller, the “Gennan Byron,” engraving by Johann Schröter
3. The two original gatherings of Winterreise , Part I
4. The two gatherings with three wraparound bifolia
5. The final gathering of Part I
6. The gathering structure of Part I
7. Autograph manuscript of “Auf dem Fluße,” stanza 4
8. Koloman Moser’s Irrlicht as a femme fatafe , 1897
9. A hurdy-gurdy of the Napoleonic era
Preface
Franz Schubert’s Winterreise has been a magnet for musicians and writers on music since its creation in 1827. Recent years have seen the publication of a new edition of the song cycle by Walther Dürr for the Neue Schubert-Ausgabe, as well as the new facsimile edition from Dover Publications of the autograph manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library. Arnold Feil, in his monograph on the two cycles Schubert set from Wilhelm Müller’s poems ( Die schöne Müllerin had appeared four years earlier), has pointed out many previously unremarked features of the songs, and Cecilia Baumann and others have continued the efforts of earlier literary scholars to redress Müller’s battered reputation as a second-rate poet. Cultural historians such as Paul Robinson, the music theorist David Lewin, and musicologists such as Anthony Newcomb, Robert Winter, and Kurt von Fischer have examined aspects of the cycle ranging from single songs to questions of tonal-dramatic unity, paper and chronology, and the literary context of the work. Recordings and performances of Winterreise, one of the best known and most challenging of all song cycles, continue to proliferate. More than 150 years after its birth, Schubert’s eighty-ninth published opus still compels the fascination due a masterpiece.
No one questions the musical stature of Winterreise, but the poetry that inspired the music, describing the narrator’s soul-searching winter wanderings, has not often been so favorably judged. Wilhelm Müller has had a bad press in this century, although an occasional voice is raised to argue the contrary, and several new editions of selected poems, including Die Winterreise, have been published recently, further evidence of critical reevaluation of a poet acclaimed throughout the nineteenth century. It is surely time for musicians to rediscover what Schubert, who was customarily discriminating in his choice of poetry to set, found so powerful in this verse and why he again chose Müller’s work for a major song cycle. Müller, I believe, was more skillful at his craft and more original in his treatment of conventional themes than is commonly recognized today. The supposed naivete of his poetry, for which condescending critics condemn him, is deceptive. A close examination reveals a felicitous choice of simple words and skillfully deployed changes of poetic rhythm to underscore shifts of tone, address, or focus. When Müller obsessively repeats key words in “Letzte Hoffnung” to depict acute anxiety or when a change of meter marks the transition from external awareness to inner reflection, he proves that he is, after all, a true poet, one who chose words precisely to achieve the greatest allusive richness by the most economical means.
Müller’s avowals of creative spontaneity notwithstanding, his aesthetic of poetry was conscious and calculated. The resultant text of Die Winterreise is a deliberately paradoxical fusion of folklike forms and unfolklike content. In his articles on poetry and his reviews of other poets, Müller stated his dislike of complex poetic syntax and his preference for simplicity of expression in order best to convey the immediacy of emotional life. The inward experiences he portrays in this cycle, however, are not simple. His wanderer, after his beloved forsakes him, embarks on a solitary journey into the depths of his being and there conducts a lengthy process of self-questioning. His attempts to understand his alienation from humanity are periodically interrupted by surges of emotional current and by increasingly urgent longings for a death that is always denied him. Tone and technique throughout this cycle are consistent with the pretense that there are no listeners, no one present but the wanderer himself. In order to trace what the poet Novalis called “the path inward” (der Weg nach Innen), Müller does not invent a third-person narrator or any other speaker for this monodrama in twenty-four episodes. When the poet omits didactic explanations and answers to the wanderer’s questions, he admits us into a fictive consciousness and its mysteries. The result is a richer, more complex text than some have supposed.
It is my desire to demonstrate both that the poetry of this cycle has considerable merit and that Schubert paid it the homage of close reading when he converted the poems into songs. Every aspect of his setting, from considerations of the cycle as a whole to the compositional choices for each individual song, reflects his attention to Müller’s nuances of meaning. Even where Schubert on occasion alters the poet’s words for better melodic sound, he does so in evident awareness of the effect on the listener’s understanding of the text—he was an excellent editor. His wanderer is different from Müller’s because musical, an interpretation and a dramatic reading in music of Müller’s creation; but despite this inevitable difference, rather than overwhelming the poetry, riding roughshod over it, Schubert’s compositional choices underscore the protagonist’s psychological complexity. The “closeness” of words and music is not an ideal often perfectly attained in song settings, including Schubert’s lieder; music competes with text, and overwhelms and contradicts it more often than not. But even a cursory examination of any of the songs in this cycle makes apparent Schubert’s close reading of the poetry and his desire to enhance rather than obliterate it. Winterreise, D. 911, is not great music superimposed on mediocre words. Instead, the cycle arises from a cultural context of contemporary literary ideals given new expression in Müller’s verse and Schubert’s music, and that context should be brought to bear on matters of interpretation.
Accordingly, I have begun the first chapter, “Genesis and Sources,” with a brief biographical study of Wilhelm Müller, famous in his own day as something other than “the poet of the Schubert song cycles,” and with an account of the poetic sources for the cycle. Although the tale of Schubert’s setting is familiar to many, I have included it here because the complicated genesis of the work has a direct bearing on questions of order and structure. Throughout the book and especially in the first chapter, my interpretation relies heavily on cultural history and on public reception of the work. Reading the earliest reviews, for example, not only tells us how certain critics understood the work in its own day but should also help to impel a reexamination of later opinions, especially the supposed worthlessness of Müller’s poems. The second chapter, “The Texts of Winterreise ,” is an argument for an altered understanding of Müller’s protagonist and his fate, while Chapter 3, “The Music of Winterreise,” is an overview of Schubert’s cycle, including consideration of the song forms, tonalities, melodic style, the writing for piano, meters, tempi, and the like, aimed to demonstrate the particular nature of this cycle. “Liederkreis” or “song cycle” is a Protean term, one that different composers have defined variously. Schubert’s lengthy Müller cycles (longer by far than the average song cycle of the era) are constituted of self-sufficient lieder; before examining the individual songs, I have asked what the cycle as a whole is like.
To this point, the format of the book is conventional, but such treatment is not feasible for the second part, which examines the songs in order. Each small essay on the individual songs opens with Schubert’s piano introduction and a few textual phrases, his German text (I have modernized the spelling), and my prose translation. Then I generally begin by examining aspects of the poetry not included in the second chapter and end with aspects of Schubert’s setting not discussed in the third chapter, but I have not forced the entries into a rigid format. Rather, I have paid attention to a host of matters, from singularities of poetic and musical form to details of prosody and musical rhythm, and have permitted myself frequent digressions into reception, past history, literary antecedents and descendants, biography, folklore, even art history, when they are appropriate to the song at hand. For example, the magic of “Der Lindenbaum,” one of the climactic songs in the first half of the cycle, is heightened all the more when one understands the antiquity of the linden-tree image in German poetry and its symbolic associations with love and beneficent Nature.
Sometimes I also discuss aspects of the compositional process for particular songs as evident in the autograph manuscript and engraver’s fair copy. The use of sketches in analysis is a conten