In two weeks, I’ll be sitting down at the piano for three consecutive nights to play Schubert’s three magnificent song cycles—die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise, and Schwanengesang. On the first evening, I’ll share the stage with James Judd, a beautiful, light, youthful tenor who tells the miller’s story of love and ruin with elegance and stunning nuance. On the following night, I’ll visit Winterreise with my long-time partner, tenor Joe Dan Harper, whose care for the dark cragginess of these poems is what drew me to his artistry so many years ago. Finally, the three of us will explore the songs of Schwanengesang together on the final concert. The contrasting colors of these two voices will, I think, perfectly capture the duality that we find so often in Schubert’s music—a sunny, bright, joyful sound that can so quickly turn to the dark and melancholy.
Practicing these three cycles at the same time has allowed me to discover new things in the music, and I feel I’m getting to know Schubert a little more deeply. I find myself noticing the ways certain keys are imbued with meaning in each cycle. E major, for example, is the key of the final song in Müllerin—the brook’s lullaby to the drowned miller. We hear this key for the first time in the same cycle in the tenth song, “Tränenregen” (“Rain of Tears”)—just a glimpse of E major, a foreshadowing of what is to come, as the miller sits looking at the reflection in the brook and contemplates, innocently, being pulled under. Then towards the end of this cycle in “Trockne Blumen” (“Dry Flowers”), E major emerges fully from a funeral march in E minor as the miller imagines flowers blooming upon his grave at winter’s end and spring’s beginning. These texts speak of consolation and an end to grief and suffering. This key is also Schubert’s choice for one of Winterreise’s only happy moments, “der Lindenbaum” (“the Linden Tree”), where the traveler remembers a happy scene of love that once unfolded in the shade of the linden tree. Seeing E major through the lens of the songs from Müllerin, it becomes a less joyful key, one tinged with a sense of loss. This is reinforced in the following song, “Auf dem Flusse” (“On the River”) when E minor turns suddenly to E major, as the traveler recounts etching the name of his beloved and the details of their doomed romance in the ice with a sharp stone. This grim graffiti links what was once a happy memory with the pain of its ending; a moment of summer frozen forever in winter.
A Major, a key clearly associated with love, springtime, and the beloved miller-maid throughout Die schöne Müllerin, reappears in Winterreise in some interesting places: the dream music at the beginning of “Frühlingstraum” (“Spring Dream”) where the traveler dreams of love and happiness, the nostalgic dance that lures him in “Täuschung” (“Deception”) and finally, in the resignation and acceptance of loss in the heartbreaking penultimate song, “die Nebensonnen” (“Sun Dogs”). A major is springtime and love, pure and uncomplicated. But that final appearance of the key in “Nebensonnen” is peculiar. The piano hovers in a low register, slowly intoning what seems to be a dance rhythm, but too slow for dancing, with a final melodic motive that seems to say “Lebewohl” (“farewell,” as in Beethoven’s sonata by the same nickname). A final farewell to happiness and companionship; a benediction before heading off into the dark with the old street musician (“Der Leiermann”).
Speaking of Beethoven. C minor is also an important key in Schubert’s song cycles. We hear it most prominently in the songs of Schwanengesang—it is the funeral march of “Kriegers Ahnung” (“Soldier’s Premonition”)—the key, of course, of Beethoven’s famous funeral march in the Eroica symphony. It is the struggle of the mythological Atlas to carry the world on his shoulders in “Der Atlas” (music that also alludes to Beethoven, this time his final piano sonata, Op. 111), and it is the terrifying vision of the city of lost love that emerges from the fog in “Die Stadt” (“The City”). It is not surprising that we would find allusions to Beethoven in Schwanengesang, given that the first seven poems were given to Schubert by Beethoven’s publisher after the elder composer’s death. But the sense of herculean struggle that pervades all of the poems set in this key also, in a sense, remind us of Beethoven as he was viewed by Schubert’s generation.
C minor also makes several noteworthy appearances in Winterreise. First in “Erstarrung”(“Freezing”), where in a moment of desperation, the traveler becomes aware of his great loss. He clings to his sense of agony in an attempt to hang on to his memory of the beloved, however painful that may be. Many songs later, we encounter C minor again in “Rast” (“Rest”) and then soon after in two adjacent songs “Der greise Kopf” (“the Grey Head”) and “Die Krähe” (“The Crow”). All three of these poems dwell on inescapable, agonizing fate, much like the fate of Atlas with the world on his shoulders. In the first song, the traveler seeks rest, weary from his journey, but the quiet only allows him to feel more acutely the sharp fangs of the “serpent” within. In the second, he considers the arc of his life and longs for his journey to be over (“Wie weit noch bis zum Bahre?/how long now until the grave?” is the song’s most stirring moment). In “Die Krähe,” the crow hovers over the traveler like an omen of death, showing a macabre faithfulness that the traveler could not find in a human companion. In Die schöne Müllerin, we hear the key of C minor just once, in the song “Der Jäger” (“The Hunter”). In this song, with a fit of jealous rage, the course of the entire narrative is changed from hopeful love to bitter disappointment.
There is no doubt that the colors of these tonalities were connected in Schubert’s imagination to specific emotions and ideas. It is worth noting that A, E, and C (both major and minor) are keys that appear with great frequency in the piano sonatas, and probing these tonal connections between the songs and sonatas would bear some worthwhile fruit. In my practicing, I’m finding myself fixated on these tonal colors, which would no doubt have been even more distinct and vivid on the piano from Schubert’s day. I’m tucking that idea away for another day—the Schubert cycles on a Graf!
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