Songs on Texts by Mayrhofer

1823 must have been a very difficult year in Schubert’s life. In terms of the illness, syphilis, which eventually brought him to an early grave, 1823 marked the onset and a turning point in his own awareness of mortality. By February he was already showing signs of the disease that was highly contagious and socially embarrassing. Confinement away from society was necessary but painful. Schubert’s greatest consolation may have been the additional time for composing without having to pay endless social calls. This remained a very productive time for Schubert, including the completion of several significant piano compositions, songs, and worked for the last time on several opera projects (a genre he never was able to establish himself in). Late in the year he completed his first song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin.
Before that, in June 1823, Schubert published his opus 21, three water-themed songs by poet Johann Mayrhofer. (Tonight’s selections include the first and third songs from op. 21.) Schubert’s friendship with Mayrhofer dates back to December 1814, and, indeed, these three songs were actually composed in the spring of 1817. Why publish them now, seven years later? At the end of 1820 Schubert and Mayrhofer’s friendship cooled considerably. Hence it is entirely plausible—though not provable—that the composer promoted these works for publication in 1823 as a kind of peace offering to Mayrhofer.
The set begins with “Auf der Donau,” a bleak rhapsody that ruminates on man’s inability to achieve anything of permanence. Mayrhofer sets out nostalgic visions of a glorious past as a chimera; the images appear literally as “castles in the air” as one floats down the Danube. Despite the inviting start, all is doom and gloom within two lines. Schubert captures the chimerical tone through evaded cadences and a minimal establishment of the opening key, E-flat major, which yields quickly to C-flat major. Remarkably, at least for 1817, Schubert never gets back to the home key once he leaves it: the third stanza is set to a varied reprise of the opening but in F-sharp minor, bringing the song to an utterly pessimistic and barren conclusion.
“Wie Ulfru fischt,” the third song in op. 21, is also set in a minor key, though Schubert manages to sound less despairing. The song operates from the simplest of all possible formal structures: a strophic design (meaning that all stanzas are set to the same music) with an identical piano prologue and epilogue. Mayrhofer touches on a Viennese interest in folk charm—the charm of rustic living—merged with the “urban” philosophical musings over mortality and life’s paradoxes. Schubert obviously felt the personal connection to such bittersweet thoughts during that summer of 1823, when he was facing an uncertain future, alone, and thumbing through past songs to put together for publication. Mayrhofer had written, “The earth is surpassingly beautiful, but safe it is not.” The heavy hand of Fate is always just a step behind you. Schubert’s letters, and in particular a poem he wrote early in 1823, show just how despondently he looked to the future. But he had not given up; like Ulfru, Schubert is a survivor and he would go on to write works that forever altered the course of music history.
When Schubert set Schiller’s poem “Gruppe aus dem Tartarus” in 1817, it was the second time he worked with that text. The earlier setting bears no comparison to the second, far more mature and dramatic version. That year—as we can see by virtue of the preceding songs heard this evening—was an extremely productive one, particularly in song composition. And “Gruppe aus dem Tartarus” shows Schubert taking definitive steps beyond the lieder he had written to date. He pushes aside the strophic expectation for the poem’s three stanzas, writing instead an evolution from one stanza to the next. The opening tremolos in the piano establish the somber mood and create demonic outbursts that often overwhelm the declamatory vocal line. Lingering on a set pitch level, the voice drones menacingly, moving just enough to keep pace with the rising tonal scheme. Somewhat crudely but effectively, Schubert elects to build the entire song on a series of key changes ratcheting up by half step (as the tortured souls creep slowly from the depths). The change to the major mode at “Ewigkeit” (eternity) brings a moment of welcome relief from the turbulent minor; a glimmer of hope, perhaps, but the end of Schiller’s poetic hell is never in doubt.
The musical structure of “Ganymed” is close to “Auf der Donau” without the general despairing tone. Goethe wrote the poem in 1774 to celebrate the amorous, all-consuming, and quasi-erotic love relationship between man and Nature: a striving for oneness, the urge toward unity with all living things that became so critical to 19th-century aesthetics. In myth Ganymede was the most beautiful youth alive. He was chosen by Zeus, king of gods and men, to be a royal cupbearer, though the implications of Zeus’ fondness for the boy hardly stop there. Homosexual feelings inherent in the myth and its subsequent use among classical authors may but need not be transplanted to help explain the motivations of either Goethe (in writing the poem) or Schubert (in setting it to music). Such correlations are debatable and not always instructive for understanding the piece of work facing us. What cannot be argued, however, is how successfully Schubert embodies the poem’s theme of continual striving with a through-composed tonal narrative. Starting in A-flat major, he sets off on a journey through at least eight different keys (!), crisscrossing the universe of tonal centers to end, finally, in F major. Schubert decides to portray Ganymede as a spirited youth: the mincing accompaniment undercuts Goethe’s overt sexuality. And although the pictorial rising melodic lines (at the text’s “Upwards! Strive upwards!”) could have been expected, the way in which Schubert avoids a final cadence in F major for so long offers a beguiling and affecting “delayed gratification.”

(c) Jason Stell