Franz Schubert

The song-cycle Winterreise [Winter Journey] by Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is considered one of the composer's supreme masterpieces. The songs, settings of a 24-poem cycle by Wilhelm Mnller, were among the last works of Schubert's short life and they represent one of the peaks in his development of the lied form. The Winterreise was also the second of Schubert's song-cycles--a form he was developing and which could have reached even greater heights if he had lived. Though the impact of the work is greater when it is considered as a whole--a whole which is truly greater than the sum of its parts--the individual songs demonstrate the great height to which Schubert had brought the art of setting texts to music. At the core of this art is the depth of feeling generated by the combination of words and music. A brief examination of two of the pieces will demonstrate how Schubert crafted songs that could evoke such a response.

Even when the listener understands little German the content of the content of the poems is realized in the sounds that the voice is directed to produce by Schubert's music. The two songs discussed here are the first of the cycle, Gute Nacht [Good Night] and the last, Der Leiermann [The Organ Grinder]. In these songs the musical settings evoke the meanings of the poems with an intensity that is not just true to them, but enhances them as well.

Schubert's first full song-cycle, Die sch�ne Mnllerin [The Fair Maid of the Mill] (1823), was also based on

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irst and last stanzas the opening syllables are stressed and this conflicts with the weak upbeat demanded by the iambic meter. Schubert solved the problem "by putting the first upbeat on a higher note, thus neutralising the inappropriate regular accentuation of the bar" (Gal 94). This meant that each time the melodic phrase was repeated a subtle shift in emphasis could be achieved just by employing either the high note or the strong beat. Fischer-Dieskau points out how this stress on "the recurring up-beat in the treble at the beginning of each verse" has the effect of re-emphasizing the downward spiral of the singer's fortunes in love--an essential reminder in the opening song of this cycle about isolation and despair (261). Once this prosodic problem had been solved the strophic setting of the entire poem became feasible. But Schubert did not settle for this. The expressive demands of the poem would not have been met--at least not in terms of a musical setting--by this limited approach. This points up the similarity at the heart of the art of setting poems to music. In reading the poem words take precedence over the meter--even though the latter enhances them. Similarly, in a musical setting the melody must transcend t

Category: Arts - F