Example 5. Joseph Drechsler, Aschenlied, mm. 1–8.
Example 6. Franz Schubert, Der greise Kopf, mm. 30–33.
Example 7. Joseph Drechsler, Brüderlein fein, mm. 1–5.
The musical connection between the other two songs is principally in their opening motives. The plaintive melody that opens Brüderlein fein—which occurs twice in a row and is sung repeatedly by both Jugend and Wurzel—served as a symbol for the whole song and its significance (Example 7). Die Krähe opens with the same three-note neighbor motive, but then drops a fourth instead of a third (Example 8). This could be a chance similarity—but the prominence of Raimund’s play and its particularly famous songs at the precise time when Schubert was composing Winterreise, along with the other connection to Der greise Kopf, bolster the argument for seeing it as more than that.
Another network of connections between Winterreise and the songs of Der Bauer als Millionär deserves brief mention. Just as the first four notes of Brüderlein fein became that song’s signature, so the last notes of the Aschenlied came to represent that song as well. On the words “Ein Aschen” or “Kein Aschen,” the singer first drops a sixth, then moves up a half step: C–E–F. Though this musical gesture is not uncommon, its recognizability as the melody for the Aschenlied’s refrain marked it as significant. Schubert uses this same set of intervals, on the same exact pitches, at the ends of several phrases in Das Wirtshaus, the twenty-first song of the cycle. And this recalls yet another song in Der Bauer als Millionär, Die Menschheit sitzt um bill’gen Preis (Mankind Sits for a Low Price), in which Wurzel compares the stages of a human life to a meal at a Wirtshaus—and the phrase “so endigt sich der Lebensschmaus” (so ends the feast of life) ends with this same motive of a falling sixth followed by a half step.
Example 8. Franz Schubert, Die Krähe, mm. 6–9.
Der Hirt auf dem Felsen and Fantasy’s Aria
The final case to be presented concerns another Raimund play, Die gefesselte Phantasie (Fantasy Bound), whose premiere took place at the Leopoldstadt Theater on 8 January 1828.38 In this play, Raimund—who, according to Bauernfeld, was always convinced that he was meant to be a tragedian—reflects somewhat satirically on the relation between high and low art. Queen Hermione is in love with Amphio, a shepherd who is also a good poet, so she proposes to marry whoever wins a poetry contest. Some evil spirits, determined to thwart the queen’s desires, tie up Fantasy, the muse, so that none of the poets are able to create anything at all. She is finally released only when she desperately begins to sing a quodlibet, which persuades Jupiter to smash her chains with a thunderbolt. Reunited with Fantasy, Amphio is able to write a winning poem and all ends happily. Ironically, it turns out he is actually a prince in disguise, but in the meantime Raimund has made various points about the relative merits of high and low art.
Act 1, scene 12 of Die gefesselte Phantasie features Amphio alone. The opening stage direction reads “Amphio sits on a stone and plays a soft song on his flute.” This scenario recalls Schubert’s scena or extended song, Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock, D965), which was composed in October of that same year. The shepherd in that work, also sitting on a rock, thinks longingly of his beloved while looking into the valley below, and he too is accompanied by a woodwind instrument (though it is a clarinet rather than a flute). These connections suggest the possibility that music from Die gefesselte Phantasie may be associated with Schubert’s piece.39 Another, more subtle relationship arises when we realize that although the shepherd in Der Hirt auf dem Felsen is a male character, the work was composed for soprano Anna Milder-Hauptmann. Similarly, Therese Krones, who sang the soprano role of Fantasy, was best known for playing the male character Jugend in Der Bauer als Millionär.
As with two of the Volkstheater works discussed earlier, the music for this play was written by Wenzel Müller, close to the end of his long career. When Fantasy first appears she introduces herself with a delicate song, suitable to the words that describe Fantasy’s whimsicality and her many guises. The opening stanza begins as follows:
Ich bin ein Wesen leichter Art,
I am a being of a light kind,
Ein Kind mit tausend Launen,
A child with a thousand whims,
Das Nied’res mit dem Höchsten paart,
Who pairs the low with the highest,
‘S ist wirklich zum Erstaunen.
‘Tis truly astonishing.
Müller writes a substantial introduction before Fantasy begins to sing (the beginning is shown in Example 9). The opening motive tellingly pairs low and high, beginning with an elaboration of the note F in bass clef and ending much higher, with parallel sixths descending a third in the soprano range. The first mini-phrase (mm. 1–2) outlines an interval of a sixth (F–D), and its altered repetition in mm. 5–6 extends the span to a seventh (F–E♭ The opening vocal melody (Example 10) composes out the two versions of the introductory motive by filling in that seventh.
Like this piece, Der Hirt auf dem Felsen opens in ¾ time and in the key of B-flat major. The opening gesture, though, seems to hover on D minor, hinting at a G minor that does not arrive here but will later be heard as the key of the middle section. Where Müller’s opening elaborates on the pitch F and leaps up a sixth to D before dropping a third, Schubert begins on D, elaborates on this pitch, and then drops a fourth (see Example 11). The third and fourth bars of Schubert’s version are reminiscent, in an indirect way, of Müller’s first two bars. At the same time, this melancholy, yearning opening meets Schubert’s own expressive needs.
Example 9. Wenzel Müller, Fantasy’s aria, mm. 1–8.
Example 10. Wenzel Müller, Fantasy’s aria, vocal line, mm. 17–20.
Müller’s opening gesture finds another echo much later in the Schubert piece, at the start of the final section. As noted above, Fantasy’s aria expands from a leap of a sixth to that of a seventh, and the seventh is then filled in as a scale in the vocal melody. (The presence of a grace-note F in the vocal line does two things. On the one hand, it fills out the whole octave; on the other, by putting a little interruption between scale degrees 6 and 7, it reinforces both the sixth and the seventh that existed as leaps in the introduction.)
Schubert completes the process in his final section, in which the melody ascends a sixth, leaps back down, and then ascends a seventh—thus far imitating Müller’s opening. Schubert’s vocal line then rises through the full octave, taking a different path from that point on.
Example 11. Franz Schubert, Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, mm. 1–4.
Example 12. Franz Schubert, Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, clarinet part, mm. 1–3 of Allegretto.
Final Reflections
Taken together, these four case studies link pieces by Schubert to famous Volkstheater works of his day—or, in the first example, to a piece from an earlier generation that had endured in the collective Viennese memory. They vary in the degree of musical and textual similarity, and perhaps also in the purpose and meaning of any intended correspondence. The first two cases present stronger musical resemblances than the later pair. Yet the striking plot relationships between the Schubert works and the two Raimund plays—in which we encounter a person whose hair turns white overnight, and there really is a shepherd on a rock thinking of his beloved—give meaning to the musical ties, though they are fleeting and subtle.
There is no way to prove that these references are deliberate. If Schubert was aware of what he was doing, he was not trying to draw attention to the connections, for had he wanted to, he could have quoted much more directly. If these were conscious references, I believe they were intended for his own understanding and that of anyone else who would both recognize the links and take them in the proper spirit. As Bauernfeld remembered, Schubert responded angrily when his friends appeared to criticize connections of this kind.
While some composers, such as Alban Berg, devised hidden musical references that concealed information about their personal lives,40 Schubert’s associations
of his music with Volkstheater works do not veil secrets of that kind. Rather, they first signal his interest in those works and then draw connections between them and his own music. By associating his music with the popular tradition, Schubert was allying himself with the comprehensive Viennese approach to the arts that Alfred Orel acknowledges when he attributes the strengths of the Viennese Classical tradition in part to its roots in folk music. Schubert was repudiating the purist approach exemplified by some of his friends when they argued that he should not use such common sources as folk tunes and marches in elevated genres such as the Lied. He was accepting the exuberant, irreverent side of Viennese culture that delighted in quodlibets, juxtapositions of “high” and “low” art, clever intertextual references, and surreptitious critiques of the authoritarian government. He was absorbing, developing, and commenting on the thoughts and perspectives of Volkstheater writers—Bäuerle’s satiric praise of the Imperial capital, Raimund’s poignant tribute to honesty and goodness in a world of corruption and deception—while also paying tribute to the music of his Viennese theatrical colleagues, Wenzel Müller and Joseph Drechsler. He was avoiding the simple categories that divided music in his time (as in our own), and embracing the full complexity and diversity of his native city.
Recent writing on Schubert has revealed many aspects of his music that were unrecognized or unformulated in the past, broadening our understanding of his numerous complicated strategies as a composer. Some scholars have focused on musical elements, discovering new and elaborate musical structures and approaches to harmony.41 Others have emphasized his approaches to poetry that include dramatic, psychological, and intellectual elements in various cases, depending on the text.42 These connections between Volkstheater works and Schubert’s compositions reveal another aspect of Schubert the interpreter: one who drew upon the vibrant popular tradition of his home city for his own expressive purposes.
NOTES
Although I am the author of this essay, all the work described here was done jointly with John Sienicki, who has explored the Volkstheater repertoire in depth. He was the first to notice and investigate some of the musical relationships discussed. I am grateful to Raymond Erickson and Walter Frisch, who offered very helpful feedback on an earlier version of this essay.
1. The Volkstheater tradition has not received much scholarly attention. The essential and magisterial history of the subject is Otto Rommel, Die Alt-Wiener Volkskomödie: Ihre Geschichte vom barocken Welt-Theater bis zum Tode Nestroys (Vienna, 1952). Rommel also published several important plays in reprint editions. More recent works include Jürgen Hein, Das Wiener Volkstheater (Darmstadt, 1997); and Beatrix Müller-Kampel, Hanswurst, Bernardon, Kasperl: Spaßtheater im 18. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 2003). Hein has also published a set of reprints, Parodien des Wiener Volkstheaters (Stuttgart, 1986). All these writers are literary scholars, and they do not discuss the music beyond acknowledging that it was usually present. For an overview in English of the Vienna theaters during Schubert’s lifetime, see Simon Williams, “The Viennese Theater” in Schubert’s Vienna, ed. Raymond Erickson (New Haven, 1997), 214–45. Alfred Orel’s introduction to the music volume of Raimund’s complete works includes a brief but impressive discussion of Volkstheater music, with attention to general characteristics, various genres, and differences between composers. Peter Branscombe also wrote about Volkstheater music; see “Music in the Viennese Popular Theater of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 98 (1971–72): 101–12.
2. Alfred Orel, Ferdinand Raimund: Die Gesänge der Märchendramen in den ursprünglichen Vertonungen, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6 (Vienna: Schroll, 1924), ix.
3. See Rommel, Alt-Wiener Volkskomödie, 364.
4. See Otto Erich Deutsch, The Schubert Reader (New York, 1947), 184–85.
5. See Rita Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft: Franz Schubert, Leopold Kupelwieser und ihr Freundeskreis (Vienna, 1998), 26–31, 196. The Theater an der Wien (1801) was first established as the Freihaus Theater in 1787.
6. See Neue Dokumente zum Schubert-Kreis, vol. 2: Dokumente zum Leben der Anna von Revertera, ed. Walburga Litschauer (Vienna, 1993), 34 and 56. The “Burg” or Burgtheater was another designation for the Kärntnerthor, or the court theater. Two years earlier, in October 1823, Anna’s future husband had also visited Vienna, and he wrote to his fiancée about his visits to three theaters: the Josefstadt, Kärntnerthor, and Leopoldstadt. In 1826, Franz von Hartmann’s diary refers to Schwind and Schober’s attending Karl Meisl’s play Die beiden Spadifankerl and the Spauns attending Ferdinand Raimund’s play Der Bauer als Millionär. See Deutsch, Schubert Reader, 578, 580.
7. Peter Branscombe assembled a list of the twenty-two occasions when Schubert is reported to have attended various theatrical performances; see “Schubert and the Melodrama,” in Schubert Studies: Problems of Style and Chronology, ed. Eva Badura-Skoda and Peter Branscombe (Cambridge, 1982), 110–11. The two Volkstheater plays on that list are Adolf Bäuerle’s Aline, on 19 October 1822, and J. A. Gleich’s Herr Josef und Frau Baberl—mentioned by Schubert, but with “Josef” misnamed as “Jacob” in a letter to Eduard von Bauernfeld—in May 1826. For both plays, the music was by Wenzel Müller. See also Deutsch, Schubert Reader, 236 and 528.
8. See Bauernfeld, Bilder und Persönlichkeiten aus Alt-Wien: Erinnerungen an Moritz von Schwind, Franz Schubert, Franz Grillparzer, Ferdinand Raimund, Johann Nestroy, Anastasius Grün und Nikolaus Lenau, ed. Wilhelm Zentner (Altötting, 1948), 50–55.
9. For details on Schubert’s links to Nestroy and Raimund, see Schubert-Enzyklopädie, ed. Ernst Hilmar and Margret Jestremski (Tutzing, 2004), 2:513–14 and 581–82.
10. Schubert’s own theatrical works do not seem to refer to the Volkstheater in similarly specific ways, though of course it is possible that connections will be identified in the future. My best guess as to why we do not find Volkstheater references in Schubert’s operas is that he was less practiced in that genre and perhaps always anxious to follow stylistic models in order to achieve success.
11. Kristina Muxfeldt discusses Viennese censorship and hidden messages in theatrical works in Vanishing Sensibilities: Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann (New York, 2012), 12–17. She also considers possible expressions of rebellion in Schubert’s opera on a text by Franz von Schober, Alfonso und Estrella (22–26). Her idea that the tyrant Mauregato may represent Metternich, as their names both begin with “M,” suggests how cautious artists were in that milieu. An 1823 play by the important Volkstheater playwright J. A. Gleich, Der Leopard und der Hund, was much more direct and bold in referring to Metternich—but after the royal family attended a performance, the play disappeared from Vienna. See Theaterzeitung, 4 December 1823, supplement no. 145, between pp. 581 and 582, and 23 December 1823, 619. Another Volkstheater example that demonstrates how it was possible to challenge the authorities is the piece known as Das beliebte Quodlibet from Gleich’s 1826 play Der Eheteufel auf Reisen. In this piece, the texts of selected musical snippets continually emphasize the need for silence because of the constant danger of police intervention. This work is reprinted with commentary in Lisa Feurzeig and John Sienicki, Quodlibets of the Viennese Popular Theater (Middleton, WI, 2008), xx–xxi and 275–84.
12. Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: Die Erinnerungen seiner Freunde (Leipzig, 1957), 199; my translation. Bauernfeld’s article “Einiges über Franz Schubert” is supposed to be from 17 and 21 April 1869, but I was unable to find it in an online version of Die Neue Freie Presse, so those dates may be incorrect.
13. This was the first adaptation that Perinet and Müller made together during the 1790s of the plays of Philipp Hafner (1735–1764); it is a reworking of Hafner’s play Der Furchtsame. They eventually turned all eight of Hafner’s complex morality plays into musical comedies.
14. More specifically, it is frequently categorized as a student song, which implies that it found a willing public among university students. For example, it is found on a German recordin
g of student songs performed by student groups, Studentenlieder, Sonia, 77198 (1993).
15. Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft, 263. Steblin presents evidence that Schubert was involved with the Nonsense Society at precisely the time when the 4 December 1817 issue of their journal, Archiv des menschlichen Unsinns, appeared (22–24).
16. See Feurzeig and Sienicki, Quodlibets.
17. The other two central playwrights of the day were Josef Alois Gleich and Carl Meisl.
18. Franz Schubert in seinen Klaviersonaten (Leipzig, 1927), 24–25. Költzsch uses the connection to Aline to argue against the then-accepted view that Schubert had written the fantasy in 1820. Interestingly, he also refers to this as “one of the few definitely demonstrable cases in which Schubert took melodies directly from the then inexhaustible Viennese ground of the people” (25). This comment suggests that Költzsch found it reasonable to believe that there were many other such cases that were less easily proven.
19. Maurice Brown argued against this link, pointing out that Schubert never labeled the fantasy with a name. Though he acknowledged the presence of a musical reference to Der Wanderer in the slow movement, he was uncomfortable with interpretations that then expanded this idea by associating the whole work with the sentiments in those poetic lines. See Brown, Schubert: A Critical Biography (London, 1958), 124–25. Nevertheless, others have continued to make this association, and Susan Wollenberg recently argued that this piece “shows Schubert creating a profound reflection on the song of that name in the variations at the work’s centre” and even more broadly that “like the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy, the chamber works featuring a variations movement based on a pre-existent Lied treat this not simply as an added element inserted into the movement cycle, but as a generative force for the whole work.” See Schubert’s Fingerprints: Studies in the Instrumental Works (Aldershot, 2011), 213–14.
Franz Schubert and His World Page 23