Schubert’s Dream of Eden
by Professor Wilfrid Mellers (1973)
It is the prerogative of genius to know the right time and place to be born; and the quintessential character of Schubert’s music comes from the fact that he was nurtured in one of the most musically creative societies in history, but was ‘late’ enough to equivocate between the real and the ideal. Sonata music in Vienna, that 18th century melting pot of Europe, was in itself revolutionary, for it depended on a tension between the private and the public life. Between the two Mozart achieved a classical equilibrium, a passionate poise incarnate technically in his balance between lyrically vocal operatic melody and the instrumental drama of sonata style. Beethoven, comparatively, emphasised the subversive and re-creative aspects of the then new music, while still believing – at least until the last years of his life – that his private rebirth was an agent working for public (that is, social, even political) good. By Schubert’s time, however, corruption within Viennese society could be disguised neither by the tawdry triviality of a degenerating aristocracy, nor by the industry, piety and cosy sentimentality of the rising middle class, to which Schubert’s parents belonged. As a man Schubert was, like Beethoven, conscious of oppression in Austria; unlike Beethoven he did not think it was possible or perhaps even desirable to do anything about it. As a musician, he revered Beethoven with self-obliterating fanaticism; yet he deplored what he called Beethoven’s ‘eccentricity, which drives a man to distraction instead of resolving him in love’. So his own music seems to be created simultaneously out of conflict with the world as it was (the Beethovenian dynamic aspect of his work) and out of a yearning for Viennese civilization as he imagined it had once been (the early Mozartian, lyrically vocal aspect of his work). From one point of view, like Beethoven, he heroically protests; from another point of view he seeks in his music to resolve frustration in love, creating an art – not on behalf of Church or State, but for a communion of friends and lovers – wherein ideas are not corrupted by human malice or rapacity. Beethoven’s music, in his third period, becomes a discovery of paradise within the psyche; Schubert’s music, in his doom-haunted last years, becomes a search for a vanished Eden.
One can, of course, also express this in technical terms. Schubert’s ‘problem’, the history books used to tell us, was how to reconcile the romantic, self-contained lyricism of his song-like themes with the dramatic exigencies of the Becoming which is sonata: his dreams cannot be easily accommodated to the pressures of psychological reality. There’s some truth in this with reference to the earlier creations of his brief life: but his stature among the supreme masters is attested by the fact that his problem was solved, even though he had to live through a number of ‘unfinished’ works – notably the C major piano sonata, the B minor symphony and the C minor Quartettsatz – to do so. In the Quartettsatz the melodies are characteristically Schubertian, yet no longer Italianate; their yearning lyricism marks the emergence of the solitary Schubert of the last years. The fluttering ostinato accompaniment suggests a demonic night-ride such as he depicts in the piano parts of some of his songs: and the contrast between this nightmarish C minor and the sweetly Edenic, passively flat submediant in which the second subject appears is impetus to the music’s structure. At that time (1820) Schubert had solved his fundamental problem of technique and imagination, intensifying song into drama, resolving drama into song; yet he apparently did not see how the experience could be consummated in a complete four movement work. That he was to learn in the eight years left him, his supreme achievements being the three posthumous piano sonatas, the A minor, D minor and G major quartets, and the C major string quintet which, composed in 1828, the last year of his life, is the single work that most comprehensively embraces every facet of his genius.
The first movement is cast on a large scale, perhaps influenced by Schubert’s experience in working on the ‘Great’ C major symphony [1825 – but until recently thought to be 1828, Ed]. The second ‘cello he calls for helps him to achieve an almost orchestral resonance; and the initial theme sublimely fuses a lyrically song-like gesture (incorporating a quasi-vocal turn) into a euphoniously spaced, richly harmonised texture that generates energy (bounding arpeggiated figures) and mystery (repeated note figures and instable modulations occurring even within the exposition). The second subject is related to the first, to which it forms a nostalgic complement, drooping instead of aspiring upwards; characteristically, it begins not in an assertive dominant, but in the mediant. Both subjects are ‘developed’ within the exposition in that their figurations, interacting, change their emotional implications; as indeed had been anticipated in the dissonant cadential harmony of the opening phrase. A further twist is given in the exposition’s codetta theme, which alchemizes the stepwise movement of the second subject into a martial dotted rhythm, minatory, potentially sinister, prophetic of the military motives that, in the music of Schubert’s successor Mahler, were to become synonymous with Europe’s twilight.
Such multifarious material necessitates spacious development: which does not seek Beethovenian trenchancy, but rather Schubertian ambiguity, whereby in continuously fluctuating modulation themes that had been songful become savage, or those that had been heroic become a sigh of regret. The recapitulation likewise has to be expansive, for after all that has happened we hear the themes with new ears: in particular the second subject, now in Schubert’s sensuously passive flat sub-mediant, sings of ineffable mutability – Schoene Welt, wo bist du? The coda introduces a dark chromatic descent beneath the original yearning phrase. Though the music then stabilises over a tonic pedal, the end is inconclusive; one might almost say that the final tonic triads – the first fiercely dynamic in multiple stopping, the second warmly enveloping in middle register – epitomize the music’s conflict between reality and dream.
The slow movement transports us abruptly to the upward mediant, E major, a heavenly key according to the baroque tradition and one associated by Schubert with Eden – as we know from the texts of many of his songs. The lyrical tune, warmly harmonized in diatonic triads, moves very slowly over a broken pizzicato bass, with a counterpoint on first violin that sounds like a remote echo of the military motive of the first movement. This emphasises the dream-like quality of the sustained song: so it is a surprise, yet not entirely unexpected, when the dream-song is sundered by a middle section that jumps from the blissful E major to the ‘Neapolitan’ flat supertonic, F minor, traditional key of ‘Chants lugubres’. In panting, frenetic rhythms, accompanied by a grinding of triplet figures, a more operatic theme ranges through enharmonic modulations that disintegrate tonality hardly less radically than the mature work of Wagner. When the song then returns da capo these triplets are transformed into delicate demisemiquavers, no longer ferocious, yet mysterious in that they tend to submerge the song’s serene homophony. At the end the threat of F minor again intrudes, but this time leads not to the fever of Experiences, but to a simple cadence to the tonic. The effect is psychologically odd; the childlike coda suggests the security of Home, whilst at the same time hinting that terror lurks just beneath the surface.
The Scherzo seems brusquely to return us to the Earth and to our corporeal being for it is all upward thrusting energy over a tonic pedal, with Beethovenian cross-accents. The startling modulations, however, modify this self-confidence; though the tune lurches upwards it seems uncertain of its direction. On the whole we feel, in this movement, almost happy in our liberation; the rapidly shifting mediants are a relief, so we can return to the stability of that tonic pedal. But just as the middle section of the slow movement opposes frenzied Experience to Edenic Innocence, so the trio of this Scherzo opposes to apparent physical wellbeing a ‘recognition of other modes of experience that are possible’. It has the same key relationship of flat supertonic (D flat) to tonic (C) and begins in a tentative unison, distantly echoing the stepwise movement and dotted rhythm of the first movement’s codetta theme. The enharmonic modulations – involving flat supertonics to flat supertonics! – are weird; again there’s a hint of Mahlerian phantasmagoria, which is not finally banished by the da capo of the Scherzo.
Certainly this nightmarish quality survives into the rondo finale, which seems to forget the tempests of Schubert’s joys and sorrows in evoking the hedonistic present of Viennese café music. The movement begins oddly in C minor, and goes through several keys before establishing the major; the more jaunty the figurations grow, the more enigmatic are the adventures of harmony and tonality. Languorous beer-garden lyricism becomes inextricably entwined with the trumpery and trumpetings of militarism, as the dotted rhythms and triplet figurations of the previous movements gather an obsessional intensity: until the strangest things happen when Schubert adopts the device – familiar in Rossini’s operatic finales which, addressing an audience, play their own applause – of concluding a movement by whipping up the tempo. As the music becomes ostensibly more frivolous, so it grows more hectic; the final section of the coda takes us back to the first movement and scherzo. The last sound we hear is the cryptic Neapolitan relationship of D flat to C, emphasised by a growling trill on the two ‘cellos.
Whilst Schubert is closer to Mozart than to any other composer, the lyrical and dramatic bases of his art are more widely separated; from the struggle to reconcile them sprang the mingling of passion and nostalgia which is his music. With Mozart, the dancing interplay of melodic parts seem the essence of mutability itself; Schubert’s singing melodies and ambiguous harmonies are his own consciousness of mutability, romantic in spirit, so that, despite his respect for the past, his late music is inexhaustibly prophetic – especially of the individualism of Wagner, whose Tristan Schubert would have lived to hear, had he been allotted his three score years and ten! Yet if we therefore feel with Schubert, as with Mozart we do not, a tragic sense of potentialities unfulfilled, it’s also true that the spine-chilling beauty of his last works is inseparable from the sense of doom that hung over the composer and his world. The essential Schubertian experience is sensuous; and this may be why it appeals so strongly to us who are also mostly without inherited faith or clear social conviction. Knowing from his music (not from the books or programme notes we have read) that Schubert had so little time in which to experience the beauty incarnate in his melodic and harmonic senses, we become aware that for us, too, beauty is as transient as a dream. The music is still almost before we have heard it; the dream is past that was more real than the waking life.
Wilfrid Mellers (1914-2008)
Published with permission of his widow Robin
