‘In song you have one of the most amazing diaries of any generation’s culture at a given time’

~ Thomas Hampson ~

The sunrise of modern pianism. Chopin, Schumann, Henselt, Thalberg … Liszt. Liszt, emigré Habsburg teacher turned klavier ‘lion’ turned mesopheric transcendentalist. The pale aspirant who at 20 generated ‘all the passions at the keyboard – terror, fright, horror, despair, love brought to delirium’, whose lessons were ‘a course in musical declamation’, who preferred revolution and strife to law and order (Madame Auguste Boissier, Paris 1831–32). The conquerer of the flowing mane, long fingers and straight posture who at 30 overwhelmed Russia, ‘a brilliant, passionate, demonic temperament, at one moment rushing like a whirlwind, at another pouring forth cascades of tender beauty and grace’ (Vladimir Stasov, St Petersburg, 8 April 1842). Liszt, North Star of empires and horizons.

‘He roamed the streets and the fields, and we know in what moods’, Richard Capell claimed famously of Schubert the song-writer in the centenary year of his passing, 1928. ‘He wondered at the stars, he blushed when he caught a girl’s glance, he sank into rich melancholy at the sound of the bell that told the death of an hour, and at the sight of the sunset that marked off a lost day from the tale of days which, with the best will in the world, he, being young, could not but believe to be unending’ (1928). Born in Catholic Vienna, citizen of an empire ruled for over 40 years by Franz, last of the Holy Roman Emperors, first Kaiser von Österreich, living in the shadow of Beethoven’s celebrity, he departed the world early. ‘Schubert is dead, and with him all that we had of the brightest and fairest’, his friend the painter Moritz von Schwind mourned. Liszt’s ‘cherished Hero of the Heaven of Youth’.

Given a master hand, transcription is re-cycling enobled. A personalised cosmos of ‘free’ or ‘strict’ arrangement. Modification, translation, reduction, expansion, re-focussing. Impression, distillation, evocation, ornament. ‘Closed’ or ‘open-ended’ variation. It’s how an era perceives, ‘films’, or interprets the music of itself or another. Nothing across the arts, muses Alan Walker, is comparable. ‘In an arrangement, music talks about music; music communes with music; and in the very greatest examples the language turns in on itself and produces a critical commentary on the original, a closed world par excellence’ (The New York Times, 16 March 2003). ‘The art of re-working a composition in a performing medium different from the original […] a composition in its own right’, argued Ronald Stevenson. ‘A special kind of creative interpretation’ expressing ‘the style of the composition as much as possible’, believed Samuil Feinberg. A ‘comment, criticism, dissertation, discussion, and display of imaginative faculties’, maintained Godowsky.

Elegant, virtuosic visiting cards, Liszt’s Schubert homages from the 1830s onwards show off a player’s powers of cantabile and accompaniment, the capacity to fashion illusion (Thalberg’s L’art du chant appliqué au piano obsession). Creatively they suggest changing verses and nuances of expression through varying/contrasted registers, subtle colourations, and emphases of texture, figuration and tempo intricately managed. Walker, reminding us of generations previous without piano roll, phonograph or radio, notes that they served a triple purpose. ‘They promoted the name of Schubert, little known outside Vienna; they advanced the field of piano technique, posing special problems of spacing and timbre which had never before been solved; and they widened Liszt’s own repertory’ (The Musical Quarterly, January 1981). Together with his other transcriptions and partitions (Beethoven’s symphonies notably), they address the concert platform more than the domestic salons of 19th-century portraiture, the ambience of a gentleman’s study aromatised in cognac and Turkish tobacco never far away.

‘Franz Schubert transformed a world of poetry into music. He brought the art song to a level previously unknown and showed what all art is: intensification, concentration, cast into its purest form’

~ Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau ~

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Schwanengesang S559

Schwanengesang, S559 (1838–39; Haslinger, Vienna 1838–40). 

No 4. Ständchen/La sérénade (1828; words Ludwig Rellstab), first version S559a (c 1837). D minor, Tempo rubato. ‘Listen, you have only to listen […] every sound to-night quivers with desire. You cannot but listen, you cannot but come – come, and give me love’ (Richard Capell). Liszt’s text (alternative ossias included) corresponds broadly with the first of his 12 Mélodies de François Schubert dedicated to the Countess of Aragon (Richault, Paris 1840).

Lieder S558

12 Lieder, S558/R243 (1837–38; Diabelli, Vienna 1838).

No 6. Die junge Nonne (‘The Young Nun’), D828 (1825; Jacob Nicolaus Craigher de Jachelutta). F minor/major, Moderato. ‘How the storm roars through the treetops. The rafters creak, the house shudders, the thunder rolls, the lightning flashes! And the night is as dark as the tomb! […] Come, heavenly groom, claim your bride. Free the spirit from its earthly bonds.’

No 10. Rastlose Liebe (‘Restless Love’), D138 (1815, first setting, dedicated to Salieri; Goethe). E major, Presto molto appassionato. ‘In the snow, the rain, against the wind, through steamy ravines, through mists, ever onwards!’

Lieder S558bis

12 Lieder, S558bis (revised ?1876; Cranz, Hamburg 1879).

No 3. Du bist die Ruh (‘You are the calm’), D776 (1823; Friedrich Rückert), edited Goran Filipec. E flat major, Lento sostenuto. ‘You are the calm, the gentle peace, you are longing and what stills it.’ In the 1879 edition ‘the second part of the song, containing the two climaxes, is recast, with less hand-crossing and a little less grandeur’ (Leslie Howard).

No 4. Erlkönig (‘Erl King’), D328 (1815, dedicated to Count Moritz Dietrichstein; Goethe), edited Goran Filipec. G minor, Presto agitato. ‘Look, father, the Erl King is close by our side […] the Erl King, with crown and with train.’ ‘My son, ‘tis the mist rising over the plain […] My father, my father, he seizes me fast, full sorely the Erl King has hurt me at last.’ ‘The father now gallops, with terror half wild, he grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child; he reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread – the child in his arms he finds motionless, dead’ (Edgar Alfred Bowring, adapted). The 1879 revision ‘makes many minor tidyings-up of technical details, offers some new ossia passages, and reworks the coda completely’ (Howard). In March 1840 Liszt and Wilhelmina Schröder-Devrient, Goethe’s second cousin, programmed Erlkönig in Dresden, the venue, Schumann reported, ‘brilliant with an assemblage of our aristocratic society’.

No 7. Frühlingsglaube (‘Spring Belief’), D686 (1822, second setting; Ludwig Uhland). A flat major, Assai lento. ‘Awake are breezes soft and light, they whisper and move by day and night, where’er they are gently stealing. New scents and sounds in spring we know, now, weary hearts, forget your woe. Fresh life is all things filling’ (John Troutbeck). The 1879 edition ‘extends the cadences at the end of each verse by one bar, and adds a few notes to the [penultimate] cadenza’ (Howard).

No 8. Gretchen am Spinnrade (‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel’), D118 (1814, dedicated to Count Moritz von Fries; Goethe Faust, Part I, sc xv). D minor, Non troppo allegro. The first of Schubert’s many Goethe settings (he was 17), announced by Cappi & Diabelli in the Wiener Zeitung, 30 April 1821: ‘Already this song has invariably been received with the most decisive approbation at the most excellent local private concerts. It may moreover justly be said of it that it deserves to be regarded as one of the most interesting of songs. Its possession will thus be greatly welcomed by all lovers of art, and especially by ladies who like singing.’ ‘My heart is heavy, my peace is gone […] When he [Faust] is not here life is like the grave; the whole world is embittered […] My heart yearns for him. Oh, if my arms could enfold him, and hold him. And kiss him as I desire, I should drown in his kisses. My heart is heavy, my peace is gone’ (John Reed). ‘Do not try to infuse any brilliancy … play in a coy, demure manner – and sit quietly’ (Liszt masterclass, Weimar 22 April 1882, Carl Lachmund’s diary). The 1879 rethink ‘adds a short introduction, abstracted from the middle of the work’ (Howard).

No 9. Ständchen von Shakespeare, D889 (1826; Shakespeare Cymbeline, Act II, sc iii No 9, ‘Song’), edited Leslie Howard. B flat major, Allegretto. ‘Hark, hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings,/And Phoebus ‘gins arise,/His steeds to water at those springs/On chaliced flowers that lies;/And winking Mary-buds begin/To ope their golden eyes:/With every thing that pretty is,/My lady sweet, arise: Arise, arise.’ In the 1879 revision ‘the first statement is altered in a myriad of tiny details, and the general effect is more fragile and restrained […] Something has gone awry with the printing after the first four bars of the second verse: the next five bars are retained from the first version, but the replacement of the last four of these comes hot on their heels and is obviously the preferred new text. The extra five bars must go, but one bar must be added (adapted from the earlier text) to conform sequentially with the revised version of the passage which follows’ (Howard).

No 11. Der Wanderer (‘The Wanderer’), D493 (1816 rev 1821; Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck). C sharp minor/E major, Lento assai. ‘From the mountains I come, the valley mists rise, the ocean roars. I wander, silent and joyless, my sighs eternally asking: where?’ The 1879 alterations ‘are largely confined to the end of the opening paragraph, where the left-hand figuration is entirely rewritten; to a new version of the end of the second verse, with dark tremolos in the bass, but on the whole a simpler texture than before; and to the last verse, where all figuration is jettisoned and everything is reduced to the musical bare bones’ (Howard). Inspiration – in melody, rhythm and key choices – of the Adagio from the cyclic 1822 Wanderer Fantasia for piano.

Melodien von Franz Schubert S563

6 Melodien von Franz Schubert, S563/R248 (1844; Richault, Paris 1844).

No 1. Lebe wohl! (‘Adieu, Farewell!’) D App 1/31 (1823; Karl Friedrich Gottlob Wetzel). E flat major, Adagio. This song, long attributed to Schubert, was written by August Heinrich von Weyrauch (1788–1865), a once popular member of the so-called Baltic-German song school (he was born in Rīga) who published it privately in 1824, in Dorpat/Tartu, under the title Nach Osten! (‘Eastwards’) – the first of twelve Deutsche Lieder. In a later Berlin printing he clarified his authorship, referring to the vogue for publishers to exchange ‘a name waiting for recognition with one that already had a reputation’. Richault’s Paris edition, credited to ‘François’ Schubert, appeared c. 1835–41¹ with substituted French lyrics by Antoine Bélanger (1803/04–1878), homme de lettres.² ‘Behold the supreme moment, the moment of our farewell’. Liszt is unlikely to have known Wetzel’s German original. ‘To the east goes, to the east, Earth’s silent flight’.

No 2. Des Mädchens Klage (‘The Maiden’s Lament’), D191 (1815, second setting; Schiller Die Piccolomini). C minor, Andante doloroso. ‘The cloud doth gather, the greenwood roar, the damsel paces along the shore’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge).

No 3. Das Sterbeglöcklein/Das Zügenglöcklein³ (‘The Death Bell’), D871 (1826; Johann Gabriel Seidl). A flat major, Andante con sentimento. ‘Ring through the night, ring, bring sweet rest to the one for whom thou tolls.’

No 6. Die Forelle (‘The Trout’), D550 (1817, fourth setting 1820; Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart). D flat major, Allegretto scherzando con capriccio. ‘In a clear stream in happy haste an impulsive trout passed by like an arrow. I stood on the bank and in sweet repose looked upon its bath.’ A strophic Lied where high-art meets folk-patois, catalyst of the variation fourth movement of the 1819 Piano Quintet. Schubart – poet, writer, organist, harpsichordist, composer, theologian, blasphemer, libertine – is best remembered today for his Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst published posthumously in Vienna in 1806, in the final chapter of which he discussed the colour, character and affekt of keys. To ‘smile but not laugh – it may have a few tears in its eyes and grimace, but it will never howl’ was how he imagined D flat, pianistically Schubert’s clé noire tonality.

No 6. Die Forelle, ossia version otherwise embellished. Distinct from Liszt’s second adaptation, S564 (Diabelli, Vienna 1846).

‘The most furious detractors of Liszt, the most severe critics of all his future works, are agreed that if he accomplished nothing else his transcriptions of Schubert’s songs are masterpieces in their delicacy and appositeness’

~ Sacheverell Sitwell ~

© 2023

¹ Richault’s address is given as Boulevard Poissonniere 26, effective 1841–62. Schubert was increasingly fashionable with the French. In December 1836 Liszt accompanied the tenor Adolphe Nourrit in various songs in Chopin’s Paris rooms, Chaussée d’Antin 38.

² According to the Bibliotheque nationale de France. The updated 1978 edition of Deutsch’s catalogue queries Edouard Bélanger, without clarification.

³ ‘A bell rung in Austrian churches as a call to prayer when a parishioner is dying’ (Emily Ezust).