Conference Booklet - Music - National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Laura Tunbridge (University of Manchester)
Against Late Style: Schubert’s ‘Ständchen’, D957 no.4
‗For all the infinite sentimental abuse to which ‗Ständchen‘ has been treated, the heart of the
piece – its hope even in the face of the hopeless – remains pure and strong.‘ Critic James Rovi‘s
attempt to salvage the reputation of the fourth song from Schubert‘s Schwanengesang indicates
the extent to which, these days, late style is equated with enhanced aesthetic worth. ‗Hope in
the face of the hopeless‘, purity, strength, are qualities we now associate with the best of
Schubert‘s last works.
But what of the ‗infinite sentimental abuse‘ to which Rovi refers? His main objection is to
Lilac Time (1934), a popular biopic of Schubert, which takes ‗Ständchen‘ as its theme tune and
features what seems to be a particularly hammy performance of the song by Richard Tauber
impersonating Schubert at the piano. We might add to Rovi‘s list of ‗sentimentalizers‘ Germanlanguage
biopic Leise flehen meine Lieder (1933), where ‗Ständchen‘ becomes the love theme for a
youthful Schubert and a Countess. We can object that both these films play fast and loose with
history. We might also ask whether we are doing something similar by filtering our
understanding of Schubert through the lens of a late style determined primarily by twenty -firstcentury
values. Even before Lilac Time and Leise flehen meine Lieder were released ‗Ständchen‘
was among the most performed of Schubert‘s Lieder. There was no acknowledgment that it was
a late work, simply that it was a singable one. Mainly through the example of the performance
history of ‗Ständchen‘, but also with reference to works by other composers (Beethoven,
Schumann), this paper investigates whether popularity and late style are mutually exclusive. It
also considers whether, by arguing for late style, musicologists help audiences engage with
Schubert‘s music.
John Sienicki (Michigan, USA)
The Posthuman Schubert: Reading Winterreise as Far Ahead of Its Time
It has long been well known that Schubert often reused or reworked his own works in new
contexts. But in the last months of his life, there was a notable increase in Schubert‘s use of the
practice of ―sampling‖ of excerpts from other composers: in the E-flat Trio (a Swedish song),
‗Auf dem Strom‘ (Beethoven), the C minor piano sonata (Beethoven, Vorisek), ‗Der Hirt auf
dem Felsen‘ (Wenzel Müller). This sampling phase seems to have begun with Winterreise, in
which Schubert marks a striking similarity between one point in Wilhelm Müller‘s story and the
crisis point in Ferdinand Raimund‘s very important play ‗Der Bauer als Millionär‘ (1826) by
using transformed but recognizable musical snippets from the play‘s most memorable songs
(‗Aschenlied‘, ‗Brüderlein fein‘) in ‗Der greise Kopf‘ and ‗Die Krähe‘.
Schubert left very little in the way of letters or statements from which to deduce his
extra-musical thoughts, so perhaps the best way to approach the question of interpreting his
late use of sampling is to locate musical genres in which sampling figures prominently as a
compositional technique, and that share other relevant characteristics with Winterreise.
We could take that moment in ‗Der greise Kopf‘, when the protagonist thinks his hair has
turned gray overnight, as one defining feature, and search for stories in which the natural
progression from youth to age is distorted into something unnatural, or more broadly, stories
based on unusual age or intergenerational relationships. This leads to films from India, where
doctrines of reincarnation provide opportunities for inventive plots exploring unu sual
interpersonal structures. The most striking Bollyw ood examples of this phenomenon – such as
‗Karz‘ (‗Debt‘, 1980), and its further development into ‗Om Shanti Om‘ (2007) – tend to use
quotation from other films to an extent well beyond even the Bollywood norm, reincarnating
those previous works in a way that parallels the plot structure.