Schubert's songwriting reached its apogee in the two great cycles, Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, the Hamlet and King Lear of the repertoire, and in the collection of songs known as Schwanengesang, the very last that he composed.
I first got to know these pieces in my late teens and early twenties, and listened to them obsessively in much the same way that my elder brother listened to Syd Barrett or Robert Wyatt. Certain tracks got worn out with repeated playing: the heart-breaking lullaby sung by the stream to the young lad who has drowned himself at the end of Die Schöne Müllerin, the beautiful folksong of Der Lindenbaum, the mad droning of Der Leiermann that closes Winterreise, and the terrifying Doppelgänger with its gut-wrenching howls of anguish.
I set about trying to sing them, but gave up in frustration because I didn't have the voice or the imagination to do them justice. I continued to listen to them, of course, and to buy recordings: after my initiation with Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore came Wunderlich, Hotter, Schreier and Schiff, Pears and Britten, Fischer-Dieskau and Brendel, Fischer-Dieskau and Barenboim, until I had more than 50 versions.
But it wasn't until shortly before my 40th birthday that I summoned up the courage to perform Die Schöne Müllerin for the first time, at a lunchtime concert in Ealing Hospital. Since then I have spent hour after hour rehearsing, performing and thinking about these works of genius, and yet in many ways they still remain elusive and unknowable.
How is it that a collection of 20 songs about a young apprentice miller who falls in love with the first girl he meets, only to be rejected in favour of a more virile huntsman, can reduce grown men to tears? When I hear the jaunty, carefree opening of Das Wandern, the first song of Die Schöne Müllerin, it is impossible to imagine that this yodelling music will develop into songs that tell me what it is like to fall in love so naïvely, so open-heartedly, that rejection can lead to despair and suicide. The music, far from becoming mawkish or sentimental, achieves a transcendence that seems to make sense of the sufferings of love and comforts us with a feeling that Schubert understands our most hidden selves. He does this with music that is at once remarkably simple and highly crafted.
The optimism and enthusiasm of the first half of the cycle leads us, almost literally, along the garden path: of the first 13 songs only one, Am Feierabend, is essentially in a minor key. The upward interval of a major 6th, the most positive in western music, is everywhere, giving us hope that all will be well. From song 14, however, when the hunter arrives, the music is suddenly much darker and mostly in minor keys. Yet the most heart-breaking moments occur when, in the last two songs, we hear that upward major 6th again. It is as if, in the depths of despair, some piercing shaft of hope and happiness is remembered.
Winterreise starts almost where Die Schöne Müllerin leaves off - the title of the first song is Gute Nacht, echoing words of the earlier cycle's last verse. Musically, too, Schubert picks up themes from the latter part of the cycle; the piano's repeated F-sharps in Die Liebe Farbe become a motif of repeated notes that runs right the way through Winterreise and reaches its ultimate expression in Der Wegweiser, where the voice itself loses the ability to change pitch. The major/minor alternation that appeared so strikingly in several songs in Die Schöne Müllerin becomes all-pervasive, creating a sense of disorientation and uncertainty. And the open 5th, the bleakest of musical intervals, that was heard at the start of Der Müller und der Bach, chillingly reappears in Einsamkeit (Loneliness) and, most tellingly, in the very last song, The Hurdy-Gurdy Man. Schubert was terminally ill with syphilis when he wrote this music full of black humour, irony and a life-affirming fierceness; no wonder Beckett loved it.
Schwanengesang is an anomaly, often performed as a cycle but perhaps only made into one by an opportunist publisher after Schubert's death. The settings of three different poets, Rellstab, Heine and Seidl do, in fact, make a diverse but coherent whole, the over-riding subject being Sehnsucht - longing. The word makes its final appearance in the very last song, Taubenpost, almost as the answer to a riddle.
The variety is astonishing: strophic songs such as Frühlingssehnsucht and Abschied, in which every verse brings out a different aspect of the music; a brooding ballad, Kriegers Ahnung, with its distant rumble of war; the delightful Ständchen, a serenade that outdoes even Mozart; and then the extraordinary Heine songs. And after all this, and the hundreds of songs that have gone before, comes Die Taubenpost, the pigeon post. To be touched and moved by this song is, I think, to get to the essence of Schubert. It is music of the most incredible generosity, totally lacking in self-pity, written by a man who knew he was dying but that is completely free from irony and bitterness. There are tears of course, but also a kind, compassionate smile. No matter how many times I sing it, I feel blessed and immeasurably grateful to the most loved and most lovable of composers.
· Mark Padmore sings Schubert's Die Schöne Müllerin on May 19, Winterreise on May 21, and Schwanengesang on May 24 at the Wigmore Hall, London. Box office: 020-7935 2141. He also performs Winterreise at the Lichfield festival (01543 412121) on July 7, the Buxton festival (01298 70395) on July 14 and the Cheltenham festival (01242 227 979) on July 19. A recording of the work, with Mark Lewis, will be released on Harmonia Mundi in 2009.
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