5 Lieder

Willkommen und Abschied D767 (1822)

Versunken D715 (1821)

An Schwager Kronos D369 (?1816)

Meeres Stille D216 (1815)

Prometheus D674 (1819)

One of the ironies of musical history is that the greatest of German poets failed to recognise the genius of the greatest composer of German song. Obviously, Goethe cannot have known about Schubert in 1814, when he wrote Gretchen am Spinnrade, his first masterpiece in Lied form and the first of his more than 70 Goethe settings. But the poet should have become aware of him two years later when the composer’s friends sent him a collection of perhaps as many as 20 of his Goethe settings in the hope of gaining his approval before a proposed publication. On the advice of Goethe’s friend and musical advisor, Carl Friedrich Zelter, the volume was returned. It was not even acknowledged. In 1825 Schubert himself sent Goethe the three songs about to be published as Op.19 – An Schwager Kronos, Mignon, and Ganymed – asking him to accept their dedication. Goethe noted the arrival of the songs in his diary but made no reply.

The problem was that Goethe and Schubert had diametrically opposed views on the relationship between music and poetry. For Goethe, whose ideal was the strophic settings of Zelter, a song should be little more than a melodically heightened version of the poem with minimal accompaniment. For Schubert, of course, a song was music, at the service of the poetry but free, in the interest of poetic expression, to develop in its own dimension. He wrote many simple stophic settings but only, for the most part, where the different stanzas of the poem do not require different treatment. How could he – or Zelter, come to that – have made a strophic setting of Willkommen und Abschied with its irregularly recurring implied pauses and changes of tempo? It could even be argued that Schubert’s relatively free setting of that poem (and the same comments apply to both versions) is too constrained by its galloping rhythmic ostinato to do justice to every emotional aspect of the youthful Goethe’s impetuous but multi-faceted verse.

Like Willkommen und Abschied, Versunken is driven by an ostinato in the piano part, in this case a thrilling and untiring succession of semiquaver arpeggios in the right hand over a sometimes syncopated, sometimes even rhythm in the left. Though urged on in this recklessly impulsive way, it is a comprehensive reflection of the sentiment of a poem which – taken from Goethe’s West-Östlicher Divan, later to become a favourite source of inspiration for Schumann and Wolf – is an uncommonly vivid expression of erotic arousal. The extraordinary quality of Schubert’s piano parts is demonstrated, if in a negative kind of way, by comparing them with orchestral arrangements by other composers. Brahms’s (1862) orchestral version of An Schwager Kronos is tame in comparison with the original, which uses the percussive quality of the piano so vividly in the first five stanzas, which finds an uncanny match between the staccato right-hand arpeggios and the “sea of fire” in the sixth, and which imitates brass fanfares to so much better effect than the real thing in the last.

The piano part of Meeres Stille, which consists of no more than 32 quietly arpeggiated chords in unchanging succession of semibreves, is modest enough to have pleased even Goethe and at the same time so daring as to take the breath away. Prometheus represents everything the poet didn’t like about Schubert but had he been able to hear it – the song was first published 18 years after his death – he might have made an exception.­ He would surely have understood that this unrhymed dramatic monologue could not be set strophically. Each of the seven stanzas, varying between five and eleven lines in length, requires its own treatment. That is what Schubert provides in an astonishing setting which tests the limits of the resources of the piano and the structural strength of a harmonic strategy

devised for immediate expressive effect rather than long-term unity.