Lecture 5.

Schubert
Introduction to Classical Music History
Reading
Taruskin Volume III, Chapters 34 & 35

Since these are both quite long and sprawling chapters, exercise your
data management skills in skimming, and in pin-pointing pages which
you think are most relevant! (There is no use in dutifully reading every
single page)

Remember: access Taruskin via Reading Lists on Canvas.

What is Romanticism?
Caspar David Friedrich

Wanderer above a Sea of Mist (1818)

Caspar David Friedrich

Wanderer above a Sea of Mist (1818)

Mystery

Irrational

Infinite

Ambiguity

Emotion

Darkness
Thomas Bewick (1753-1828)
English inventor of book engravings

Dog and the Moon

Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829)

Philosopher of Romantic Irony

Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829)

Philosopher of Romantic Irony

Romantic Fragments: Aphorisms
Schlegel liked to express his philosophy not through a
grand system, but through aphorisms, a kind of joke.

‘An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world

like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog’
 “The historian is a prophet looking
backwards.”

Some “Poetry should forever be becoming and

never perfected.”
Schlegel
Aphorisms
“Mysteries are feminine; they like
to veil themselves but still want to be
seen and divined.”
If sonata form epitomises Enlightenment principles of order and reason, then ...

What is a quintessential ROMANTIC form?

What is an analogy for a ROMANTIC FRAGMENT

The Romantic Generation, circa 1810

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Character Pieces for Piano
Piano Miniatures:

Studies
Preludes
Mazurkas
Waltzes
Nocturnes
Impromptus
Songs Without Words
Schumann, Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), 1838
Romantic Song: Lieder
Franz Schubert
(1797-1828)
Wanderer’s Nightsong, D. 768
Over all the peaks
there is silence, GOETHE: The most perfect poem
In all the treetops in the German language?
You feel
Barely a breeze;
The birds are silent in the forest
Just wait, soon
You also will rest.
Der Doppelgänger (The Lookalike)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15UPmZeTTlU
The night is silent, the streets lie still
My dear lived in this house
She has already left the town
But the house still exists in the same place.

A human stands there as well and looks up

Wrings his hands out of pain
I'm filled with horror when I see him
The moon shows me my own shape.

You lookalike, you pale guy!

Why do you imitate my love's suffering
That torments me in this place
So many nights in the past time?
INTERMISSION
Franz Schubert (1797-
1828)
• Born: Vienna, 1797; died: Vienna, 1828.
• 1814 : Aged 17, having read Goethe’s Faust
composes ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’
• 1815: Becomes a schoolteacher and continues
composing songs: writing almost 150 in that year
alone including Erlkönig (The Erlking)
• Compositions
• Lieder: c600
• Song cycles: Die Schöne Müllerin (1823);
Winterreise (1827); Schwanengesang (1828)
• Other works include symphonies, chamber music,
piano music, opera and choral works.
The German Lied
Simplicity, inspired by folksong

Syllabic text setting

Avoidance of ornamentation.
Two Extremes
Strophic:
Each verse repeated to same melody

Ballad: Through-composed narrative

 Heidenröslein (A Wild Rose)

A boy saw a wild rose

growing in the heather;
it was so young, and as lovely as the morning.
He ran swiftly to look more closely,
looked on it with great joy.
Wild rose, wild rose, wild rose red,
wild rose in the heather.

Said the boy: I shall pluck you,

wild rose in the heather!
Said the rose: I shall prick you
so that you will always remember me.
And I will not suffer it.
Wild rose, wild rose, wild rose red,
wild rose in the heather.
Summary
• Schubert’s melodies and accompaniments are more than pictorial and
the role of the piano, not simply an accompaniment but takes on a
dramatic life of its own.
• The quality of the poetry (settings of Goethe, Müller, Heine, etc.)
lends itself to exquisite settings. The poetry/narrative can also
determine the form: i.e. not always strophic.
• When listening to and writing about Schubert’s Lieder consider all
aspects of the work such as form, harmonic language, melody and
rhythm and how they work with the text to create the song/song cycle.
Erlkönig (1816)
• Text by Goethe and based on the Legend
of the King of the Elves whose touch is
lethal to humans.
• The legend of the Erlking – captured the
imagination of poets, artists and
musicians throughout the nineteenth
century and inspired a dramatic setting
from Schubert.
 • The song is through-composed: appropriate for
a narrative based on a ballad.

Erlkönig: • Schubert captures the three characters

(narrator, father and son) within a single vocal
line of varying registers to represent each.

listening
• Unrelenting octave triplets in the piano part not
only represent the galloping horse but also the
anxiety of the child and father. Also provides a
unifying figure throughout.

points • Note at bar 57, the move to the relative major

to accompany the sinister invitation of the
Erlking to the child
Strophic Variation
Compromise between repetition and narrative
Auf dem Flusse (By the Stream)
Plodding accompaniment matches the lonely trek through the winter
landscape of the rejected lover. Vocal line and piano part are relatively
sparse representing the harsh landscape.
 Auf dem Flusse (By the Stream)

VERSE 1 VERSE 3
E minor E major
You who rippled so merrily, On your surface I carve
clear, boisterous river, Present with a sharp stone memory
how still you have become; the name of my beloved,
you give no parting greeting. D# minor/ E = crust the hour and the day.

VERSE 2 VERSE 4

With a hard, rigid crust The day of our first greeting,

you have covered yourself; the date I departed.
you lie cold and motionless, Around name and figures
stretched out in the sand. a broken ring is entwined.

VERSE 5 E minor
My heart, do you now recognise Identification
Pay attention to harmonic and textural
your image in this brook? with nature
symbolism
Is there not beneath its crust
likewise a seething torrent?
Heart mirrored in the
Water

Strophic Variation here

Contrasts from the first

G# minor
(climactic
resolution of
D#)
Problem: Is Romantic music just fragmentary, then?

If not, how do you join up the fragments?

Solution 1: The Song Cycle
Connect songs into a narrative
Winterreise (1827)
• Set of twenty-four poems by Wilhelm Müller.
• Schubert’s second song cycle
• The narrative is concerned with a nostalgic lover returning, in the winter, to the location
of a failed summer romance.
• The imagery is full of romantic themes: nature, lost love and introspection.
• Schubert’s setting for both vocal and piano parts captures both the external and internal
world.
No. 5, Der Lindenbaum (The Lime Tree)

Sounds like a folksong, but not.

An archetype of blissful memory.

Ideal of nature: The tree whispers to him.

No. 24, Der Leiermann (The Hurdy-Gurdy Man)

Journey’s end

Nihilism, nothingness

Texture and harmony stripped bare.

Naked repetition of the hurdy-gurdy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhbxq6pUU7E
Solution 2
Integrate songs into large-scale instrumental music
String Quartet in D minor, ‘Death and the Maiden’

Slow movement: variations on the song

Symphony no. 8 in B minor, ‘Unfinished’

Second subject is lyrical, like a song.

Axial modulation
via pivot notes

No real transition
Keys juxtaposed

Seems juxtaposed
and modulated
but not
Auf dem fluss
Plodding accompaniment matches the lonely trek through the winter
landscape of the rejected lover. Vocal line and piano part are relatively
sparse representing the harsh landscape.