Conference Booklet - Music - National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Session 10.3 LIEDER: RECEPTION AND REMINISCENCE
Jürgen Thym (Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester)
Schubert Remembers
Facing one's death, or simply approaching the end of one's life, seems to force artists to channel
their creative energies into works of art that are meditative, reflective, enigmatic, intro- and
retrospective, even oblivious to pleasing audiences (Said, Delbanco) – resulting, as far as music
is concerned, in compositions that later critics describe as representative of bearing the
earmarks of a Spätstil or late style (e.g., Adorno on Beethoven‘s last works). The soliloquies of
Beethoven's last piano sonatas, the sparse textures and tonal experiments of Liszt's last musings,
and the otherworldly qualities of some of the movements in Mahlers Lied von der Erde are cases
in point.
Even though we may bristle at the notion of a late style for a composer who died at the
age of 31, his approach to memory expressed in music, is that of a composer who reached
maturity at an uncomfortably early age, perhaps speeded up by the nature of his health crisis in
1822. Schubert's song cycles (and some of the Heine settings of Schwanengesang could be
included here as well) indeed confront images of death at many junctures in the narrative
(Adorno in his Schubert essay of 1928) and thus provide multiple access points to the world of
an artist in the last stage of his creativity. It is a retrospective world, in which the artist no
longer seeks the utopia in the future, but discovers memories of the past and describes them in
colors both radiant and glowing as well as, by dint of juxtaposition, jarring and tainted, and in a
musical language that is both conventional and anticipating modernity.
Brief glimpses at the late songs of Beethoven, Liszt, and Mahler will provide additiona l
underpinnings to my approach.
Loretta Terrigno (City University of New York)
Herder’s Edward Ballad: Schubert, Loewe, Brahms
Schubert‘s visit to the Pachlers in Graz in September 1827, as Winterreise awaited completion,
yielded an oft-neglected strophic setting of Herder‘s Edward (D923). This paper addresses
questions of chronology that are not fully resolved by the Neue Schubert Ausgabe through an
examination of Schubert‘s musical emendations in the autograph of the song a t the Pierpont
Morgan Library. These emendations suggest the possibility that a copy in the Wittezcek-Spaun
collection (GdM), regarded as the second of three extant versions, may have actually been the
first. Schubert‘s fair copy in Budapest provides a definitive third version.
The Morgan emendations include Schubert‘s revisions as he prepared the song for
publication; they further suggest his possible awareness of Carl Loewe‘s setting of the Edward
ballad (composed 1817-18). Loewe‘s textual variants from Herder inspired M.J.E. Brown to
suggest a hitherto unknown text source for both composers, and lead to questions involving
anxiety of influence. While Loewe sets Edward as a through-composed dramatic ballad,
Schubert‘s use of the strophic Lied displays his engagement with the form as the remna nt of a
past aesthetic and invokes a different facet of Edward T. Cone‘s concept of the ‗composer‘s
voice‘: Loewe emphasizes the anxious interrogation between a distraught mother and
pathological son, while Schubert distances them from the action, evoking the mythic
timelessness of the poem.
Finally, Schubert‘s Edward was published posthumously in 1862 as Op. 165 by C. A.
Spina in Vienna, a publisher in close contact with Brahms, whose own setting of Edward (Op. 75
no.1) displays Schubertian musical traits. A Schenkerian analysis of all three works elucidates
the composers‘ similar response to Herder and their potential musical influence on each other.