Review

Author(s): Eva Badura-Skoda

Review by: Eva Badura-Skoda
Source: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Sep., 1993), pp. 142-143
Published by: Music Library Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/898718
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142
NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
Retracing a Winter's Journey: Schu-
bert's Winterreise. By Susan Youens.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
[xvi, 331 p. ISBN 0-8014-2599-9.
$43.50.]
Franz Schubert's Winterreise has been in-
deed a magnet for many musicians, mu-
sicologists, critics, and writers on music.
Frequently specialists of German Romantic
literature have also shown an interest in the
poet whose terrifying texts Schubert set to
some of his most inspired and moving mu-
sic. Wilhelm Muller was truly a Romantic
poet whose reputation in Schubert's day
was far greater than in the twentieth cen-
tury, when the general understanding for
this kind of German poetry has suffered
altogether a decline owing in large measure
to our age's positivistic and materialistic
philosophy of life. Most modern literary
critics have lacked a genuine sympathy for
Romantic ideas and became rather critical
in their evaluation of the poet, a tendency
imitated too often by modern musicolo-
gists. In contrast to this attitude, in his time
Muller's lyricism was highly admired. Hein-
rich Heine, for instance, praised him in his
essay "Romantische Schule" and compared
him favorably with Johann Ludwig Uh-
land, Joseph von Eichendorff, and Fried-
rich Rtickert; and Uhland himself also reg-
istered praise of Muller.
Susan Youens's book on this famous cy-
cle turns out to be, first and foremost, a
convincing reappraisal of the song texts.
Her analysis facilitates a better understand-
ing of the impact the poems had on Schu-
bert, who we know was deeply affected by
them. This alone makes the reading worth-
while, interesting, and often fascinating.
Youens does not deny that it was Schubert's
music that transformed these poems into
an absolutely unique masterwork of the
highest quality. She admits also that with-
out Schubert's music the poems probably
would be little known today, perhaps only
to a small circle of specialists. But this fate
Muller's poems would share today with
those of other Romantic poets, such as Uh-
land, Rtickert, Justinus Kerner, perhaps
even Eichendorff and Eduard Morike.
Youens's book is dedicated to the mem-
ory of her teacher, the late Paul Amadeus
Pisk. In the preface she acknowledges that
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NOTES, September 1993
she was guided by him to her better un-
derstanding of the songs. One can readily
believe this: Pisk was one of the finest Vi-
ennese musicians among those who fled the
Nazis to become immigrants to the United
States. A good composer himself, he was a
true Schubert lover and connoisseur. It is
not surprising that under his initial guid-
ance Youens achieved such a deep and con-
vincing insight into the meanings of text
and music.
The outline of Retracing a Winter's Journey
is simple and divided in two parts. While
in part 2 every single song of the cycle is
discussed, Youens brings in part 1 a wel-
come account of Miiller's life and a report
of the many poems and novels he wrote in
his short lifetime (he died 1827 at the age
of 33). She acquaints us with "a prolific
writer whose works reflect the interests of
many German intellectuals and poets in the
second and third decades of the century:
medieval German literature, folk poetry,
Italian travel lore, Homeric studies, opera
and drama criticism, contemporary English
and German poetry, and philhellenism"
(p. 9). Only three years older than Schu-
bert, Miiller belonged to the generation of
young artists who criticized governmental
oppression in Berlin as well as in Vienna,
which brought him frequently in conflict
with the powerful censorship bureaucracy.
Other chapters in this first part address the
genesis and sources of both text and music,
with the specific wording of the poems and
Schubert's few alterations, and with general
remarks on structure and form, tonal
schemes, dynamics, and tempi.
Schubert was so fond of Mtiller's poems
that, among the chosen poets whose texts
he set to music, next to Goethe, Schiller,
and Mayrhofer he set more poems of
Muiller than of any other poet. He appar-
ently liked the "naturalness"-the freedom
from artificiality-of his often song-like
poems. Already the "Miiller-Lieder" had
followed the then very fashionable Roman-
tic idea of artists as wanderers, full of
yearning for indefinite remoteness, often
homeless on this earth, an idea that had
been cultivated in a thousand ways in Ger-
many. Unique in Die Winterreise, however,
is the melancholy and despair shown in
Muller's second cycle of poems. "Miiller's
originality is first evident in an element of
Book Reviews
Die Winterreise often criticized: its lack of a
clearly defined plot, such as one finds in Die
schone Miillerin. The earlier work began as
a kind of Liederspiel, or song play.... It has
a cast of characters and vignettes in which
people speak to the miller lad and to one
another, come and go like the dramatis per-
sonae in a play.... The Winterreise, how-
ever, is a monodrama, a predecessor of the
Expressionist interior monologues" (p. 51).
Youens then discusses "The WinterJour-
ney as an Inward Voyage" and shows af-
terwards how Mtiller's wanderer "con-
demns illusions but is unable to resist them.
Muiller twice uses the metaphor of will-o'-
the-wisp or illusory light that leads his ques-
tioning voyager astray, into an abyss of the
spirit in Irrlicht and to near madness in
Tduschung. .... Since reality and illusions
are both unbearable conditions, it is no
wonder that he vacillates between them for
much of the journey" (pp. 59-60). Accord-
ing to Youens it is crucial that the wanderer
is a musician; he sees the hurdy-gurdy
player in "Der Leiermann" as his Doppel-
gdnger and anticipates his future as a beg-
gar. "Those people, including Schubert's
friends, who suggested that Schubert saw
in the cycle parallels to his own wintry con-
dition, may have spoken fairly up to the
point; the composer who knew that his own
hopes of love and life had been blasted by
syphilis could perhaps (all in the realm of
speculation) have seen some of his own
fears projected in Muiller's words, rather as
the wanderer sees his wretched state re-
flected in the hurdy-gurdy player" (p. 72).
In discussing Schubert's music, Youens
points out that the cycle is bound together
not by apparent formal structures or
clearly recognizable, repeated motives, but
rather by the subterranean recurrence of
certain figures for similar metaphors and
images found in the different songs-for
instance, groupings of nonlegato repeated
pitches and chords to reflect footsteps
found in "Gute Nacht" as well as in "Der
Wegweiser." Again and again Schubert de-
vised in his accompaniment a music that
derives either from the inner meaning of
the poem or from the external detail of the
poet's scenes, and achieves thereby a pow-
erful synthesis. Youens sees Muiller's and
Schubert's wanderer not as passive prey to
waves of emotion, though he is capable of
strong emotions. "He is analytically minded
and a realist, prone to philosophical re-
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143
flection" (p. 58). She claims that even his
dreams in "Friihlingstraum" are remark-
ably realistic, with nothing surrealistic, dis-
junct, or bizarre, and no supernatural el-
ements or fairytale-like objects are found in
the poems. When the wanderer speaks to
the river, the crow, the barking dogs, no
one expects them to reply; and in "Der
Lindenbaum" he knows that the voices who
beckon "Come here to me, companion" are
from within his own mind, and says himself
that the rustling leaves seem to be calling
to him ("als riefen sie mir zu"). This im-
pression of reality is the main reason for
the impact of intense terror that the cycle
of poems has on readers or listeners; and
that impact becomes strongly compounded
in the cycle of Schubert's Die Winterreise.
In spite of the existence of other mono-
graph studies on Die Winterreise (e.g., those
by Richard Capell [Schubert's Songs, 3rd ed.
(London: Duckworth, 1973)] and by Ar-
nold Feil [Franz Schubert (Stuttgart: Reclam,
1975; English trans. Portland, Ore.: Ama-
deus, 1988)]) or elaborate discussions in bi-
ographies of Schubert (see especially those
by Maurice Brown [Schubert: A Critical Bi-
ography (London: Macmillan, 1966)] and
Peter Gulke [Franz Schubert und seine Zeit
(Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1991)]), Youens's
book deserves a wide readership, for its
emphasis on the meaning of the poems in
concert with Schubert's obvious affinity
with the poet proves as successful as it is
well elaborated.
EVA BADURA-SKODA
Vienna
Brahms als Liedkomponist: Studien
zum Verhaltnis von Text und Verto-
nung. Edited by Peter Jost. Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner, 1992. [235 p. ISBN
3-515-05766-8. DM68.00.]
Brahms als Liedkomponist, inspired by the
scholarly neglect of Johannes Brahms's
songs relative to the attention paid his in-
strumental music, contains essays by nine
German and two American authors (the
articles originally in English, by William
Horne and Ira Braus, were translated into
German by the editor with Anne Schnei-
der). The majority share the approach laid
out by Peter Jost in his introductory essay,