Envisioning the Night

Schubert's songs of the night are poised between gothic and Romantic tropes. The gothic looms large in the graveyard settings discussed in chapter 1, notably ‘Leichenfantasie’, where darkness spotlights spectral presences in the moon's faint rays: ‘with dim light the moon shines over the death-still groves; / sighing, the night spirit skims through the air – / mist-clouds lament, pale stars shine down mournfully / like lamps in a vault.’ The idea of night revealing things beyond the realm of the living, implied in ‘Leichenfantasie’ through the ‘Nachtgeist’, is rendered explicit in the opening stanza of Schubert's ‘Die Nacht’, D 534, the last of his Ossian settings: ‘Night is dull and dark. / The clouds rest on the hills. / No star with green trembling beam; / no moon looks from the sky. / I hear the blast in the wood; but I hear it distant far. / The stream of the valley murmurs; but its murmur is sullen and sad.’ Such features – distant tremors and sudden blasts of sound – extend to a view of the night as not only revealing but also concealing supernatural beings, as in ‘Erlkönig’, D 328, where the son experiences the Erlking as all too real, the father dismissing his presence as a ‘streak of mist’. Night as a mix of the supernatural and the corporeal is pronounced in the opening stanza of ‘Schwestergruss’, with traces of the moon's rays but no sound: ‘In the moonlight / I wander up and down / Seeing dead bones / And a silent grave.’ These songs – distant in chronology, close in spirit – all point to the night as a backdrop to strange happenings brought about by darkness: ghostly presences, funeral processions, and eeriness as sound and silence combined. Death lingers in the shadows – ‘It is a ghost! It fades, it flies’, to quote from Ossian's ‘Die Nacht’.

A dreamer sits in darkness, head bowed, hands resting in front of him. All is hushed, no words, little movement. A male voice hums the last seven bars of Schubert's ‘Nacht und Träume’, D 827 – ‘sweet dreams, come back!’ (‘Holde Träume, kehret wieder!’). Haunting in its fragmentation, the music is repeated, this time with words, the man's head sinking deeper into his hands. At the words ‘Holde Träume’, the light reveals the man's own reflection, his dreamt self, gazing down on him from a podium suspended in mid-air: a mirror image of his waking self.

This scene from Samuel Beckett's last television play, ‘Nacht und Träume’, broadcast on 19 May 1983, provides a springboard for thinking about the prominence of death (whether real or imagined) in Schubert's music. Central to the discussion is the relationship between biography and art – or, more specifically, the relationship between depictions of death and Schubert's confrontation with his own mortality, as intimated in his oft-quoted letter to Leopold Kupelwieser:

The ‘strange procedures’ of Schubert's creativity that the publisher detected in 1826, or the critic's mention of ‘bizarre, grotesque things’ in his early songs, quoted in the Introduction and chapter 1, re-emerge through this book as part of the lexicon of gothic necropoetics that captivated the imagination of the time. Strangeness, whether through sonic signifiers or poetic subject matter, weaves its way in and out of the case studies. Pieces that reflect the dreamworlds of ‘Nacht und Träume’, such as the Adagio of the String Quintet, give way to extreme disjuncture characteristic of the grotesque. Funereal music undergoes doubling and distortion, as in the Andante of the Piano Trio in E flat and the C minor Impromptu, discussed in chapter 2. And music that is eerie one moment turns sublime in another, as suggested in relation to the dialectics of pain and pleasure in ‘Bertas Lied in der Nacht’ and ‘Der Unglückliche’, in chapter 3. The recurrence of tropes (musical and poetic) highlights the fluidity of a vocabulary that is doubled, warped, defamiliarized, and left unreconciled across generic and chronological boundaries.

Prominent amid this continuity of gothic tropes are the ways in which their associations, and the contexts in which they appear, change over time. One such example is the octave doubling present in much of the music discussed here, from the opening stanzas of ‘Leichenfantasie’, the first case study of chapter 1, to the return of split lefthand octaves in the opening of the Andantino of the A major Piano Sonata, D 959, the final case study of chapter 4. Their recurrence suggests implicit dialogues across the case studies, with blurred boundaries among the contrasting iterations: the latter example, while devoid of the supernatural associations of the former, carries traces of death through its distant echoes of the earlier songs, and is now tinged with the weight of what has come before. Musical material undergoes change, returning in altered contexts, as highlighted by the fusions of funereal and French overture style, or the ways in which themes are distorted in the C minor Impromptu and the Adagio of the E flat Trio. Funereal imagery, as in the wider range of case studies in chapter 2, is devoid of its connotations in Schubert's graveyard settings, while containing echoes of their soundworlds.

I first encountered Franz Schubert when I was five. An easy, bare-bones piano solo transcription of the song ‘Ständchen’ rested against the music desk of our old Köhler upright piano in the living room. My mother, intent on teaching it to me by rote, played it slowly and only a few notes at a time. I stopped her after many bars of this process and asked why the music was so sad. She paused and answered cryptically: ‘Schubert died of a broken heart.’ Whether she knew the truth of Schubert's tragic end or not, her words hung in the air merged with the sounds that issued forth from that old, out-of-tune upright, and unknowingly she cemented a notion that the music's sadness was connected to something beyond the notes.

My mother's response, even if only poetically true, aligns well with hermeneutic readings that link Schubert's awareness of his own mortality to depictions of death in his music. Not surprisingly, I gravitated towards these narratives as a performer and as a teacher, finding in them satisfying entry points for engaging with Schubert's music.

Joe Davies's seminal book, The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert, turns away from biographical considerations to a cross-disciplinary, multisensory exploration of death and the gothic at the intersection of music, literature, and the visual arts. Davies's breadth of erudition and depth of insight is striking for its balance of analytical/critical commentary that is grounded in musical engagement while still being accessible to a wide audience. In a book for scholars, performers, and readers outside the discipline of music, Davies guides us on a revelatory journey through a lesser-known village in Schubert country and opens new vistas for Schubert analysis, interpretation, and performance.

Public fascination with the gothic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sets the stage for Schubert's preoccupation with death, the macabre, and the strange. Davies observes that these gothic tropes, appearing as early as Schubert's 1810 Schauerballaden, extend throughout his oeuvre to the later instrumental and piano works of his final years. Through case studies, Davies identifies a non-linear ‘constellation of ideas’ that intermingle, fragment, loop, and metamorphose in sonic estuaries of gothic Romanticism, the sublime, and the grotesque.

The grave is at once silent and sonorous in Schubert's songs. Early manifestations extend back to the dance of the spirits in his settings of Friedrich von Matthisson's ‘Der Geistertanz’, discussed in the Introduction: ‘Quickly we airy spirits / Strike up a whirling dance / Around graves / And rotting bones’ (‘Rasch tanzen um Gräber / Und morsches Gebein / Wir luftigen Schweber / Den sausenden Reih’n’). Here, the grave gives rise to supernatural presences, not yet fully formed, whirling around in the spirit of danse macabre (a theme taken up in chapter 4). Death, seemingly unburdened by morbid thoughts, is tinged with a cheerful ‘farewell’: ‘You have buried our grief / Deep in the gloomy Chamber; / Happy we, who whisper you / A cheerful farewell!’ (‘Tief bargst du im düstern / Gemach unser Weh; / Wir Glücklichen flüstern / Dir fröhlich Ade!’). The ghostliness of the night spirit is juxtaposed with critical distancing from the grave as a site of the supernatural through imagery all too real (rotten bones, whimpering dogs). Such tensions play out in varied ways across Schubert's graveyard settings – sometimes affirming supernatural presences, while other times questioning or shifting away from such phenomena entirely.

Later songs revolving around graveyard diggers, such as his setting of his friend Franz von Schober's ‘Schatzgräbers Begehr’, D 761 (1822), weigh down the airiness of the night spirits with the weariness of lived experience: ‘So leave me in peace with my endeavour. / Surely a grave is gladly given to every man; / Will you then not grant me one, friends?’ (‘Drum lasset Ruhe mir in meinem Streben! / Ein Grab mag man wohl jedem gerne geben, / Wollt ihr es denn nicht mir, ihr Lieben, gönnen?’). Here the grave offers a desirable escape from life, as apostrophized in the penultimate stanza: ‘If I am digging my own grave with this hope, / Yet I will gladly climb down, / for then my longing will be stilled’ (‘Sollt’ ich mein Grab mit dieser Hoffnung graben: / Ich steige gern hinab, / gestillt ist dann mein Sehnen’).

The Adagio of Schubert's ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy in C major, D 760 (1822), forms a bridge between the previous chapter and the sound(s) of the grotesque traced in what follows. Its thematic material takes the disjuncture embodied in his setting of ‘Der Wanderer’, D 489 (1816), on which the movement is based, to extremes. The music shown in Example 4.1 throws into stark relief the fusion of the silent and joyless (stanza 1) with the vision of dead ones rising (stanza 4). Ghostly whispers in the final stanza, quoted in the epigraph above, serve as a threshold between the passagework that skims the texture in bars 227–30 and the distortions that follow in its pathway. Traces of dreamt-of joy in the song source are shattered by the profusion of harsh sonorities, chromatic warping, and textural density unleashed in bars 231–35. The lack of articulation here between the diaphanous and the distorted, the one flowing seamlessly from the other, renders this process of distortion all the more disturbing. The extremity of such writing tilts the pendulum from the fusion of pain and pleasure at the heart of the sublime discussed in the previous chapter, to the prising open of boundaries that defines the grotesque. Tropes explored throughout the book – nocturnal imagery, doubles, and distortions – coincide with the disjuncture studied in this chapter. Stylistic references are destabilized, their soundworlds subject to rupture or conflation vis-a-vis the permeable nature of the gothic imagination.

Definitions of the grotesque from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries foreground themes that are central to gothic necropoetics. Pertinent here is the art historian Johann Fiorillo's attention to its ‘horror-inducing’ aspects, epitomized in his view by the fusion of incongruous elements in Henry Fuseli's ‘The Nightmare’ (Figure 4.1).

Threatening Clouds on the Horizon

As Beethoven may have feared several days earlier, Duport, the resident manager of the Kärntnertor Theater, must have assumed that Beethoven would give his Akademie there1 and seems to have threatened reprisals if soprano Henriette Sontag and mezzo soprano Caroline Unger sang with Beethoven if he held it at the Theater an der Wien. Probably during the afternoon of Maundy Thursday, April 15, 1824, Schindler came to Beethoven's apartment at the corner of Ungargasse and Bockgasse (today's Beatrixgasse) and reported briefly, “Unger is quite indignant about Duport. Both girls [Unger and Sontag] are going together to see him today. She doesn't doubt a successful outcome.”3 Nephew Karl commented that in public, Duport always spoke highly of Beethoven and that he was curious to learn what he would say to the girls.

But Beethoven had never felt comfortable with Count Palffy, the current owner of the Theater an der Wien. Possibly encouraged by the publishers Steiner and Haslinger, whose shop in the Paternoster Gässchen he visited frequently, the composer started exploring the feasibility of holding his Akademie on Sunday, April 25, at the relatively small Landständischer Saal, where he could employ a composite orchestra drawn from the Kärntnertor Theater, the Burgtheater, and the Theater an der Wien, all under Ignaz Schuppanzigh as concertmaster, the way he had in the Aula of the University of Vienna and the Grosser Redoutensaal in 1813–1814. Again, nephew Karl chuckled, “Count [Moritz] Lichnowsky is really an old lady. He chanced to learn from your brother your decision to give the Akademie in the Landständischer Saal. He lamented terribly about the enmity that Palffy is developing toward you.”

That evening, Count Lichnowsky arrived with a carriage and invited Beethoven, with Schindler in tow, to spend the evening at his apartment in the Bauernmarkt, basically to reason with the composer about the venue for his concert. Before leaving, through Karl, he informed Beethoven that Sontag and Preisinger could sing at the concert if it was on April 25, but that Unger could not.