Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  Schubert’s love of poetry is inseparable from the close-knit friendships that dominated his social life from 1814 until his death. Spaun, a fellow student at the Court Chapel, had drawn him into a group called the Bildung Circle, which consisted of young men from various artistic professions, dedicated to Bildung (the great German pastime of intellectual self-improvement), literary readings, aesthetic debate, and friendship. At first glance, these young men look like a band of poetry-reciting layabouts out of Lea Bohème, their own poetry innocuous and sentimental, but in fact they were serious and sometimes daring in their pursuits. Most poetry came Schubert’s way through books and manuscripts exchanged in the circle; he had no money to buy books of his own. In terms of literary accomplishment, the most impressive member of the circle was a poet named Johann Mayrhofer, who also became arguably the most significant influence on Schubert’s mind.

  Mayrhofer, about whom much is learned in Susan Youens’s book Schubert’s Poets and the Making of Lieder, was a man of terminal contradictions. He was steeped in the world of ancient Greece; his politics tended toward revolutionary liberalism; yet he worked as a censor for the Metternich regime. He was reclusive, morose, misogynistic, self-critical, and in all likelihood homosexual. He killed himself in 1836. His poems are full of disjointed, dreamlike images that look beyond Romanticism to the nightmare Symbolism of Georg Trakl. At the same time, however, he championed art as an impersonal, light-suffusing instrument of order, against the Romantic grain. Schubert was closest to this bizarre character from 1816 to 1820; they shared an apartment for eighteen months. During this time, Schubert’s songs concentrated heavily on mythological subjects, not only byway of Mayrhofer, own poetry but also byway of Schiller’s and Goethe’s. The forty-seven Mayrhofer settings themselves have a restless quality that mirrors the character of the poet.

  The song “Auf der Donau,” for example, is a weird scene on the Danube that begins with conventional Romantic images of waves, forests, and castles and ends with visions of doom (Untergang). Schubert’s music matches the poem’s trajectory from idyll to disaster: as Youens observes, the song ends in a jarringly different key from the one in which it began, and Untergang arrives in ice-cold tones at the bottom of the keyboard. Other Mayrhofer poems, however, contain suggestions that Schubert does not readily take up. “Uraniens Flucht” is an ode to the mythological figure of Urania—not the Muse of Astronomy but the goddess Aphrodite under another name. Graham Johnson argues that the poem’s cryptic scenario, in which a genderless “loving pair” praises the goddess, makes sense only as code for homoerotic love. (Johnson leaves out the clincher, though: the citation of Urania in Plato’s Symposium as a protectress of love between men.) More remains to be uncovered in Mayrhofer’s obscure erotic zone: the implications of his libretto for Schubert’s unfinished opera Adrast, which would have contained one of the few same-sex love arias in opera, and a peculiarly sentimentalized scene of self-castration in the poem “Atys” (based on Catullus).

  There was a break between Schubert and Mayrhofer in 1820. The composer moved to another apartment and ceased working from Mayrhofer’s manuscripts. In the next two years, Schubert’s life veered toward crisis. He was present at the scene of a disturbance involving Johann Senn, an activist in pro-democratic, anticlerical student politics; Metternich’s police placed Senn in lengthy confinement and briefly questioned Schubert. Schubert seems to have made a mute protest against Senn’s arrest by publishing songs on two Senn poems in 1823. In that same collection, he set “Die Liebe hat gelogen” (“Love has lied”) by the German poet August von Platen, who was also a political dissident and—incidentally or not—was as close to an outspoken homosexual as the era would permit. (Platen, like Mayrhofer, used the unhappy ancient Greek figure Adrastus as code: in his diaries, one of his amours goes by that name.) Meanwhile, Franz von Schober, the dashing bad boy of the circle, apparently led Schubert on adventures in low life. By the end of this “wild period,” in 1822, Schubert had contracted syphilis.

  All of this raises questions about Schubert’s own sexual identity. The issue came to the fore of Schubert scholarship in 1989, when Maynard Solomon, a keen biographer of Mozart and Beethoven, published a subversive essay titled “Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini,” suggesting that Schubert was homosexual and was part of a gay subculture. Solomon’s thesis was based not only on the Mayrhofer friendship but also on unexplained oddities in the documentary record, notably an entry in the diary of Eduard von Bauernfeld—the same friend who recorded Schubert’s foot-stamping tirade—saying that “Schubert [is] half-sick (he needs ‘young peacocks,’ like Benvenuto Cellini).” Peacocks, Solomon noticed, are in Cellini’s autobiography not so subtle code for young men he has seduced. Also significant in this respect were some euphemistic-sounding accounts of Schubert’s attitude toward women (phrases such as a “dominating aversion for the daughters of Eve” and “indifferent to the charms of the fair sex”).

  The musicological furor over Solomon’s article was unenlightening. It told more about anxieties over sexuality at both ends of the spectrum than anything in Schubert’s nature. Conservative elements shouted down the “homosexual Schubert” as a categorical impossibility. The Canadian musicologist Rita Steblin exposed some flaws in Solomon’s research, but her careful recounting of the archival record gave way to manifestations of bigotry; in a letter to the editors of The New York Review of Books, she likened gay-friendly musicology to Nazism, describing both of them as “fashionable political ideologies.” At the opposite extreme, Susan McClary listened to the Andante of the “Unfinished” and heard an “open, flexible sense of self,” a supposedly gay voice evident in specific musical procedures. This argument depended on stereotypes of Schubert’s “gentleness” that many episodes in his music deny; it also depended on stereotypes of homosexuality itself.

  Some fair-minded scholars have had trouble accepting Solomon’s conclusions. The argument is indeed speculative, although Solomon succeeds in showing that presumptions of a heterosexual Schubert are no less speculative, and that no reliable evidence for any romantic relationship exists—not even for Schubert’s often-mentioned attachment to the soprano Therese Grob. Those who have tried to rebut Solomon’s article—among them Elizabeth McKay, in a 1996 biography—have simply dreamed up new fantasies of heterosexual affairs in the conditional tense: “If Schubert fell in love with the ‘bewitching Sophie’ … it would not be surprising,” and so on. In between the protectively cheery anecdotes, his friends admitted the unresolved mysteries of his nature. “Schubert is much praised, but they say he conceals himself,” goes an entry in Beethoven’s conversation books for 1823. All signs suggest that Schubert hung back from commitment to anyone or anything, yet his syphilitic condition after 1822 indicates that he somewhere found a physical outlet for his sexuality. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, something’s going on here, but we don’t know what it is.

  We know at least that Schubert emerged a changed man. He devoted himself again to Classical forms: first to piano sonatas, then to chamber music and the symphony. In 1824 he wrote the A-Minor and “Death and the Maiden” Quartets in swift succession; and just before beginning work on “Death and the Maiden,” he had turned to Mayrhofer’s poetry for the last time. He chose poems that speak of self-purification, recognition of the inaccessibility of Love, and wakefulness in a sleeping world. The most remarkable of the group is “Aufl6sung” (“Dissolution”), in which Mayrhofer shouts in his most visionary voice, “Go under, world, and never more disturb / These sweet, ethereal choirs.” The images resonate with a murky poem that the composer himself had written during his previous illness-ridden year, titled “My Prayer”: this also speaks of Untergang, self-abnegation, self-transformation. “Kill it, kill me with it,” Schubert wrote of his life up to that time.

  It is difficult to describe the nearly Wagnerian music that Schubert brings to “Auflösung”: dark rolling chords on the piano, whiplash changes of key, incongruously grand phrases o
n the word “sweet,” a slide back down to banging low notes and stammerings of “Go under,” and a tenuous resolution at the end. (Brigitte Fassbaender delivers a hair-raising rendition of this song in the Hyperion series.) “Auflösung” is, I think, a great early feat of Romantic confession, but Schubert would not write more songs like it. He would not write a “history of my feelings,” to use the phrase that Count Platen applied to his amazingly frank diaries. Although Schubert was now verifiably doomed, caught in the supreme Romantic predicament, he would bury emotion more deeply in music. The “Death and the Maiden” Quartet is a pure Classical composition, written according to the old rules.

  The feelings, suddenly, are ours.

  We are back where traditional musicologists like to have us—with “the music itself.” History holds traces of a powerful personality, but it seems as if the life has been raided, robbed, emptied by a ruthless devotion to art. The music, again, has an uncommonly immediate presence. Schubert is somehow more with us than most of the bust-on-the-piano classics. Contemporary composers look to him as a colleague and search his scores for new paths. Various compositions of recent decades have taken off from Schubertian sources: Luciano Berio’s Rendering, John Harbison’s November 19, 1828 (the date, of course, of Schubert’s death), Edison Denisov’s Lazarus, and Georg Friedrich Haas’s Torso, to name a few. Meanwhile, Schubert himself seems to be still composing: different editors’ realizations of his numerous unfinished pieces arrive every few years.

  At the end of the line, at the limits of what music can express, are the masterpieces that appeared between 1823 and 1828: the last three quartets, the two piano trios, the String Quintet, the last eight or so piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, and the song cycles. In his final years, Schubert writes with greater detachment, greater economy of means, but also with an increasing command of the bigger forms. All his youthful innovations are mobilized as a means of controlling large structures. He uses his eccentric modulations and equivocal chords to create subtle changes of color across a sprawling vista. He opens up space by distributing figures through far-flung registers of the piano, or by spreading a filigreed texture of sound through the strings. In that space, one voice might cry out, like the amazing second cello line in the String Quintet, or instruments might repeat a rhythm relentlessly to give a sense of traveling motion.

  In some ways, the late works are highly conservative in form. In other ways, they enter uncharted regions. The G-Major Quartet of 1826 is perhaps the most “advanced” of all: the abrupt, wrenching gestures of its opening bars look past the nineteenth century to the twentieth. The venturesomeness of the harmony does not come by way of dissonance—the usual index of progressive musical thinking. Schubert is able to exploit tensions in the tonal system without resorting to the chromatic congestion that had begun in Beethoven and would end in Schoenberg. Instead, he follows circuitous new paths from one warmly familiar chord to another; in the quartet, as in other pieces, he touches on the whole-tone scale, which would become the foundation of Claude Debussy’s post-tonal language many decades later. At the same time, Schubert’s unearthly harmonies have a historical basis. Lurking in the opening section of the quartet is the lamento bass—the somber stepwise descent familiar from Dido’s Lament, the “Crucifixus” of the B-Minor Mass, and the overture of Don Giovanni.

  “It’s sigh, it’s nostalgia,” Gyorgy Ligeti said of the lamenting figure, at the outset of a virtuoso analysis of the G-Major Quartet at the New England Conservatory, in 1993. The old pattern is woven through the first bars of Schubert’s work like a slender thread. A soft G-major chord leads by way of a rapid crescendo to lashing G minor, which in turn subsides to reassuring D major, the companion chord of G. That chord then blackens to D minor before giving way to A major, with a diminished seventh and a dominant seventh on D ensuing. From these chords you can extract the chromatic fourth (G down to D, step by step). In the next section—a more subdued episode, with tremolos buzzing softly all around—the lamenting fall recurs, except that it now appears plainly in the cello, assuming its traditional bass function. But the harmonization is different: around the note F-natural there materializes not a D-minor triad but a trembling chord of F major, foreign to the home key. “A total shock,” Ligeti said of this moment. “You cannot understand [it] in the tonal context.” Musical language is almost torn apart by memories of its past as well as by premonitions of its future.

  The song cycles, too, blend convention and revolution. Their tales of unhappy love, set in archetypal, not quite real places like the Mill, the Village, and the Inn, shift from a Romantic here-and-now to an interior plane. Winterreise casts a very cool gaze on despair: it has something in common with Wallace Stevens’s “mind of winter,” contemplating “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” and even more with the skeletal lyricism of Samuel Beckett, who nursed a deep love for Schubert’s work and for Winterreise in particular. Indeed, the cycle unfolds like a Beckett play, in a landscape as vivid as it is vague. A young man who has been spurned by his beloved goes walking in and around the village where she lives, apparently fading into nonexistence in the process. Feet crunch in snow, ice cracks over a river, a post horn blows, a leaf flutters down from a tree, a crow circles in the air, dogs bark, clouds scurry across the sky, and, in the “Leiermann” epilogue, an ancient organ-grinder enters, playing a tune for no one. To an uncanny degree, you hear those sounds in Schubert’s piano writing, down to the rattling of the chains that hold the barking dogs. Yet there is something abstract about the aimless journey, which keeps circling back to the same places and the same motifs, the walking rhythm entering time and again. By the end, the young man seems to have merged with the figure of the hurdy-gurdy man, as if he has grown old in an hour.

  The six Heine songs of 1828 take up where Winterreise left off, in a world of self-alienation and derangement. Schubert’s powers of suggestion now extend to the musicalizing of literary abstractions. In “Der Doppelganger,” the narrator sees his “double” and feels he has become a ghost himself, watching his own ridiculous life. Setting the scene, Schubert writes an acutely unnerving progression in B minor in which each chord has been lobotomized by the surgical removal of one essential note. These chords draw a picture of a walking corpse.

  Listeners often have the idea that Schubert in his late period is looking into the face of death. The String Quintet and Sonata in B-flat, both of which were finished in September of 1828, do sound like a conscious farewell and summing up. The sequence of events of the Quintet’s Adagio—a halting, nearly unbearably wistful principal theme; a vehement central section; a return to the first theme, enfeebled but ever more lovely; the briefest flash again of anger; then a passage into silence—might show an awareness, a defiance, and then an acceptance of death. But this is the story Schubert told from the beginning: the going-forth of beautiful melody, a crack-up or collapse, a recovery of peace. The B-flat sonata, so vast and calm and mysterious, refines this story to an extreme of subtlety. Its principal theme bestows grace for seven measures. Then a trill rumbles ominously in the bass. Then the theme resumes, as if nothing has happened.

  It remains to mention the Great C-Major Symphony, which both the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra played in New York on the occasion of the young man’s two-hundredth birthday, on January 31, 1997. We call it the Ninth, but Schubert probably considered it his First—his first “grand symphony,” his first utterance worthy of Beethoven’s mantle. Sketched during an 1825 trip through the Austrian Alps, it seems to document the overcoming of morbidity, of all Romantic fascination with death. The force of the effort is both exhilarating and frightening. In the finale, the composer returns to a scene of innocence—a huge rustic dance, heralded by fanfares. By the end, the ceremony borders on violence: in a clear reminiscence of the hellish climax of Don Giovanni, the note C is repeatedly slammed down in the bass regions of the orchestra while a wild sequence of chords pivots around it. For all the world, it sounds like the st
amping of a man reaching for the stars.

  8

  EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPES

  BJÖRK’S SAGA

  I first met Björk in the lobby of the Hotel Borg, a funky Art Deco palace in the center of the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik. The Borg opened in 1930, the dream project of a noted wrestler who hosted swank parties for American military officers and the odd movie star. Eventually, the wrestler died and the hotel fell on hard times. In the early 1980s, it became the gathering spot for a group of aggressively bohemian teenagers, who theorized punk-rock anarchy at the hotel bar. One of the gang was Björk Guðomundsdóttir, the daughter of an electrician and a feminist activist. She sang in a band called Kukl, which means “black magic,” and she outraged older Icelanders with her antics. Parents shuddered when the singer bared her midriff on television while visibly pregnant. Even in her late thirties, she still looked as though she could fall in with a group of fashionable delinquents. She walked through the door of the Borg wearing a ladybug cap and white shoes with red pompoms on the toes.

  It was a pale, mild morning in January 2004. The day before, an ice storm had rendered the city impassable, but some shift in the Gulf Stream had warmed the air overnight. We took a taxi into the suburbs, where Björk was working on a new album. She held in her hands a program for the play The Master and Margarita, which she had seen the night before. She read Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, on which the play was based, when she was young, and it remains one of her favorite books. “The book is very popular with Icelanders,” she said. “It has a very Nordic feeling to it, even though it is Russian. It ridicules bureaucracy, it has black magic and Arctic magic realism. You could say it is Alice in Wonderland for the Arctic grown-up.” I nodded, and glanced at a snowcapped mountain ridge in the distance. “Of course,” she added, “you have to watch for the Nordic cliche. ‘Hello! I am a Viking! My name is Björk!’ A friend of mine says that when record-company executives come to Iceland they ask the bands if they believe in elves, and whoever says yes gets signed up.”