Recycling Schubert: On reading Richard Kramer's Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song

Nineteenth Century Music

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 77-92

  Litterick, Louise ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61049442419     PISSN: 01482076     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ncm.1996.20.1.02a00050     Document Type: Review

References (9)

1. Walter Frisch, "Schubert's Nähe des Geliebten," in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln, Neb. , 1986), pp. 188-89.
2. Frisch, "Schubert's Nähe des Geliebten," p. 190.
3. Some years before Harry Goldschmidt's article appeared, Maurice J. E. Brown suggested in print that the order of the songs might not reflect "Schubert's wish" and that "the altered [sic] order in Schwanengesang destroys this coherence [of the sequence in Heine] and gives us an unconnected group of songs. " He lists the songs according to the relative order of the poems in Die Heimkehr "to show how, arranged thus, they do form a miniature song-cycle" (see his Schubert's Songs [London, 1967; Seattle, 1969], pp. 59, 61;
4. and Goldschmidt, "Welches war die ursprüngliche Reihenfolge in Schuberts Heine-Liedern," Deutsches Jahrbuch der Musikwissenschaft für 1972 [1974], 52-62). It is virtually certain in Brown's case and likely in Goldschmidt's that neither would have had the opportunity to examine the autograph manuscript, which was in the private collection of Mary Flagler Cary until 1968, when it was deposited in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.
5. Brown, Schubert's Songs, p. 59.
6. See, from the Rellstab portion of Schwanengesang, for example, the third strophe of Liebesbotschaft, "Tröste die Süsse mit freundlichem Blick, / Denn der Geliebt kehrt bald zurück," and the mixed mood of the last strophe of In der Ferne as it shifts between B major and B minor, songs to which Kramer points in discussing the Cmusic flat sign major in the last strophe of Abschied. His discussion of the meaning of key in the early nineteenth century is a useful contribution. He sometimes fails, however, to distinguish major from minor in his references. Although Schubert tends to move between the two modes of a single key, a discussion of the meaning for him of any key should either distinguish major from minor or discuss wherein Schubert's topos eradicates the distinction in mood and meaning between the two. To cite one example from Kramer: "Cmusic flat sign major is prolonged, tonicized, and made more substantial than seems justifiable in the song [Abschied] itself, where Cmusic flat sign has otherwise no role to play. It evokes a nostalgia for those past musics in B major [italics mine], no matter that Rellstab's lines here might bear only the faintest poetic relevance to the passages in Liebesbotschaft, Ständchen, and In der Ferne awakened in this music" (p. 113). There is no B major in Ständchen, however, only B minor.
7. See also the critical-analytical discussion of these Cs in Lawrence Kramer, "The Schubert Lied: Romantic Form and Romantic Consciousness," in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, pp. 221-22.
8. Susan Youens, Retracing a Winter's Journey: Schubert's Winterreise (Ithaca, N. Y. , 1991), pp. 34ff. , esp. p. 37.
9. Kramer provides a diplomatic facsimile of this earlier version as ex. 6. 10 (p. 141). He says of this passage the following. "The revision captures a breathtaking leap. . . . The new phrase has become almost an emblem of Der Doppelgänger itself, the phrase that invariably springs to mind when we picture the song. It is difficult to imagine the song without it, but that is just what the autograph proposes" (p. 141).