The 20-minute Mahler/Schubert song cycle Einsamkeit, which I have concocted with the bass trombonist David Taylor, maps a dire trajectory. Each song begins with a disappointed lover. Each discloses an ever more extreme state of “Einsamkeit” – of an existential solitude grown strange and inscrutable.
The ineffability of late Schubert was brought home to me by an email from William Sharp, one of America’s premiere vocal recitalists, in response to my earlier Einsamkeit blog. Bill writes of “Der Leiermann,” the final song of Schubert’s cycle Winterreise (and also of Einsamkeit):
“I have never understood why anyone calls the protagonist of Winterreise a ‘madman’! Where does that impression come from? Winterreise is a traumatic 24-hour journey of loss and self-imposed isolation precipitated by the loss of a loved potential spouse through social/class strictures. It ends with the voluntary end of withdrawal into depression. The poet approaches the poor musician (artists are poor — that’s why they can’t be married) and suggests a healing artistic collaboration. The artist no longer wishes to die, and will save himself with his art. The Müller boy [in Die schone Mullerin] hasn’t got this life-saving thing in his life, and commits suicide.”
This compelling reading is not that of – for instance — Richard Capell, in his indispensable 1928 study of Schubert songs. Capell writes of this “last turning of the wintry road”: “A madman meets a beggar, links with him his fortune, and the two disappear into the snowy landscape . . . We may read anything or nothing much into the cleared scene.”
Johann Michael Vogl, the most eminent contemporary exponent of Schubert’s songs, wrote after Schubert died that his compositions were products “not of conscious action” but “of providence,” that they occupy “a state of clairvoyance or somnambulism.” The pianist Claudio Arrau applied to late Schubert the term “Todesnähe” – a proximity to death.
Einsamkeit begins with Mahler’s “Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht” – a jilted lover’s lament. Schubert’s “Die Stadt” and “Der Doppelganger,” coming next, are disturbed utterances – but the dank city, and harrowing “double” on the street below, are images we can glean. “Die Nebensonnen,” with its three suns in the cold sky, and “Der Leiermann,” with its strange hurdy-gurdy man, are images less readily interpretable. Different readers, different singers, will render them differently.
David Taylor and I first performed Einsamkeit with dancers, two months ago. Igal Perry unforgettably inhabited the Leiermann in a white suit (you can see a video here). A few weeks ago, David and I performed Einsamkeit sans dancers at the Brevard Music Festival (the video at the top of this column). David’s bass trombone, with its various mutes and techniques of utterance, is a marvel of instrumental virtuosity. Mainly, however, his rendering of the five songs is a tour de force of expressive musical speech.
What we have done to Mahler and Schubert (my accompaniments are far from literal) will be differently processed by different listeners. At Brevard, there were musicians in the audience who felt we had newly excavated (not distorted) what Mahler and Schubert were saying.
Further thoughts: working on “Die Stadt,” with its gray water and “dreary rhythm,” I suddenly realized its kinship to very late Liszt – to his Venetian piano cameos La lugubre gondola I and II. And also, by extension, to Busoni’s ghostly, rocking Berceuse. (All these works, Schubert’s included, visit the outskirts of tonality.) I had a look at Liszt’s influential piano versions of Schubert’s songs – and discovered that, in scoring the cycle Schwanangesang, he places “Die Stadt” first. And he transcribes it with a fiendish relish: a tremendous achievement, in its way. But Liszt’s pianistic flourishes diminish the strangeness Schubert’s inspiration. Late Schubert also turns uncanny in his Drei Klavierstucke, D. 946 – which will never rival in popularity the two sets of Impromptus. If “Die Stadt” forecasts late Liszt, here the intermingling of quotidian and sublime is virtually Mahlerian.
When you watch and listen to the Brevard Einsamkeit, be sure to use headphones – or many details (including David’s singing of “Die Nebensonnen”) will be inaudible. My thanks to Brevard’s Matt Queen for filming/editing. The Brevard performance included the supertitles below:
Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht (00:00)
When my sweetheart has her wedding day
It will be my day of sorrow
I’ll weep, weep for my darling.
Die Stadt (4:12)
On the distant horizon
The town appears as a misty shape.
A dank breeze ruffles
The grey water in dreary rhythm.
The boatman rows my boat.
The sun rears up and shows me
The place where I lost my love.
Der Doppelgänger (The Double) (7:47)
The night is still. The streets are quiet.
Here is the house where my sweetheart lived.
A man stands there, wringing his hands.
Horror grips me as I see his face
And the moon shows me my own self!
Die Nebensonnen (11:32)
I saw three suns in the bright cold sky
And watched them long with steadfast eye. . . .
Now the best two are gone.
And if the third would only go
That all were dark ‘twere better so.
Der Leiermann (14:40)
Beyond the village stands the organ-grinder
Playing as best he can with numb fingers.
He staggers barefoot in the snow.
No one stops to listen or to look.
Strange old man, shall I go with you?
Will you join in my songs?
Leave a Reply