Conference Booklet - Music - National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Session 3.1 Plenary Session LATE STYLE AND POPULAR RECEPTION
Leon Plantinga (Yale University)
Schubert, Popular Music, and Melancholy
What was life like in post-Congress Vienna? Something of a composite portrait has come down
to us. There was alt-Wien, a place of celebration and easy gaiety, of comfortable, orderly
middle-class life, and sensible domestic architecture that has acquired the name Biederm eier.
But there was also Metternich‘s Vienna, a place obsessed with memories of the French
Revolution, where iron-fisted social control and a draconian penal code were employed to
suppress any lingering liberal and egalitarian views.
If we have inherited unlike competing visions of the city, the same seems to be true of
her native son Schubert. There is the Schu bert of biography and operetta from around the turn
of the twentieth century: the guileless composer of lilting songs and ingenuous instrumental
music whose rhythms and textures echoed the sounds of Old Vienna. Occasional patches of
melancholy in this music seemingly reflected the disappointment of an early love unrequited.
More recently that other Schubert has emerged: a man who suffered from a venereal disease –
he may have been a practicing homosexual – and once wore a wig to conceal his lack of hair,
one given to profound despondency who in 1824 declared himself ‗the most unhappy and
wretched creature in the world.‘ The texts this Schubert chose to set were sometimes the stuff of
nightmares: a son wrenched from the arms of his father by a demon only he could see, the
wounded romantic wanderer who moves inexorably toward destruction, or the rejected lover
tormented by harrowing visions from his former life. In a remarkable way this Schubert was
able to capture something of the essence of tragedy in his mu sic with text and without.
The actual Schubert clearly embodied something of each of these visions. His music
constantly echoes the sounds heard in Vienna‘s taverns and ballrooms: the close-harmony of the
Maennerchor and the infectious rhythms of Deutsche, Laendler, Ecossaises. Then too,
particularly in his later works – one thinks of the Heine songs, the Eb Trio and the String
Quintet in C – Schubert plumbed new depths of tragedy and despair in musical expression.
In some of Schubert‘s most impressive late music these two themes are mingled. In particular,
dances take on the aura of tragedy – as if outward, carefree life in Vienna goes on in the face of
inner despair. Examples from Schubert‘s last year are the first movement of the Fantasie in F
minor, a lugubrious contradanse for piano duet; and the slow movements of the final two Piano
Sonatas, D. 959 and 960, both of the Deutscher/ Laendler type.
The locus classicus for this novel sort of amalgamation is the Andantino of the Sonata in
A major, D. 959. This movement is a stylized Laendler, which, whether danced or not, was
typically played in sociable settings by strings, including a string bass – whose pizzicati we hear
in the incessant left-hand accompaniment in the outer sections (an effect mainly neutralized by
most pianists who pedal through Schubert‘s slurs and dots). This melancholy dance in minor
gives way repeatedly to a dream -like major version that seems, in Schubert‘s usual fashion, to
project a more sanguine, but insubstantial vision of things.
In the middle section both melody and dance rhythm give way to som ething like
hysteria: careening scales and arpeggios, followed by declamatory chordal shouts, vividly
portray near-total loss of control. Finally things calm down and get back to something like
normal. The original music returns in new guises, now colored by memories of emotional
chaos: whatever the inner turmoil of this sonata‘s persona, the dance – like life in Vienna – goes
on.