The beauty of small things

Richard Stokes
THE BOOK OF LIEDER
The original texts of over 1,000 songs with a Foreword by Ian Bostridge
713pp. Faber and Faber. £30.
0 571 22439 3

What is to be done with works of art that are small in scale, short in duration, or excessively modest in the claims they make on our attention? We could, of course, assemble a proud roster of little works to set against the prevailing bigness and loudness of so much artistic production in the West. In which case, sonnets, Cycladic figurines and Egyptian amulets would come into their own, together with La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes and the two-and-a-half minutes of Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 10. The dozen pages of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Brief des Lord Chandos would issue a mild-mannered reproach to the loquacious fictions of Proust, Joyce, Broch and Musil, and in the gaps between such acclaimed verbal monuments the beauty of small things would begin to shine forth again. But even if we did this, and came in the process to a new understanding of the microarchitecture of art, there would still be a problem. Works that occupy very little time or space imprint themselves only lightly on the human sensorium, and their meanings decay rapidly; they often seem no more than harmless litter scattered across the cultural landscape. Even as they summon us to brief moments of rapture, their momentum drains away.

The history of the Lied from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth is one of unease and rivalry in the household of secular vocal music, and questions of size are at the centre of the dispute. As opera becomes more ambitious, and greedier in the demands it makes on singers, directors and designers, the great song composers of Austria and Germany rediscover lyric poetry as their main creative spur, and find in the middle-class drawing room or the aristocratic salon their ideally circumscribed performance space. For them, songwriting is an exquisite craft, born within limits and content to remain there. Just occasionally, a miracle happens, and an extended work emerges from the musician’s encounter with short poems. Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, Schubert’s Winterreise and Schumann’s Dichterliebe all inhabit the dimension of time as if time were a newly discovered workable stuff for song composers: in song cycles at this level of accomplishment, verbal, motivic and harmonic cross-referencing allow the listener the pleasures of long-range anticipation and recall. But for every time-dwelling monodrama of this sort, there are dozens of brief lyrical effusions with little or no staying power.

When it comes to the tension between large and small musical forms as experienced by individual composers, no case is more instructive or more painful than that of Hugo Wolf, who brought the art of the Lied to a new summit of dramatic complexity in the late nineteenth century. At the beginning of his last major collection, the Italienisches Liederbuch of 1890–96, Wolf placed a wry tribute to the songmaker’s art:

Auch kleine Dinge können uns entzücken,
Auch kleine Dinge können teuer sein.
(Even small things can delight us,
Even small things can be precious.)

The original Italian poem, as translated by Paul Heyse, goes on to mention pearls, olives and roses, but could as easily have included, in its list of precious small things, popular ditties of the kind that Wolf was to favour throughout his sequence. Littleness is one of his themes, and needs no explanation or apology. When a young girl grumbles playfully, in the fifteenth song, that her diminutive sweetheart has been terrified by a snail and knocked head over heels by a fly, she seems to be upholding, on Wolf’s behalf, a small-is-beautiful artistic creed.

Even as Wolf was completing this extraordinary work, however, things were far from happy in his musical workshop, and the scale of his chosen art form was bringing him to the brink of despair. “I’m beginning to think I have reached the end of my life”, he wrote to his friend Oskar Grohe in 1891. “I can’t go on writing songs for another thirty years.” A few months later, the same correspondent received de profundis an even more alarming message:

“I really and truly shudder at the thought of my songs. The flattering recognition as “song-writer” disturbs me down to the very depths of my soul. What does it signify but the reproach that songs are all I ever write, that I am master of what is only a small-scale genre?”

Here was a Wagnerian disciple who had brilliantly miniaturized the master’s expansive art of declamation, and concentrated his lengthy chromatic adventures into a few brief measures, but who now craved the glamour of the operatic stage and the orchestral palette as Wagner had redefined them. Wolf in his songs had found a perfect way of emancipating himself from his mighty predecessor, but now sought to emulate Wagner on Wagner’s own terms, to be swallowed again by the leviathan of German vocal music.

In a sense, the crisis so cruelly visited on Wolf is with us to this day. The Lied still has to do battle to establish its aesthetic credentials, and indeed to be heard at all. There are some positive signs: within living memory, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore were able to fill the Festival Hall with eager Lieder listeners; the Wigmore Hall and comparable medium-sized venues across Europe and North America are still devoted to solo singers and their art; in recent years, Graham Johnson has not only turned the programming of song recitals into an ingenious artistic exercise in its own right, but has masterminded the recording of the entire 600-strong corpus of Schubert songs. And yet there is something about nineteenth-century culture that conspires against lyric utterance and its quiet confiding tone. This was an age of Imperial expansion, universal exhibitions, colossal urban-planning projects, multi-volume novel cycles, hour-long symphonies and ever-so-grand operas, and the spectacle of all this mental and muscular exertion has proved spellbinding for later generations. It is easy to forget that across Europe this was also a golden age for poetry in short formats, and that, in the German-speaking lands in particular, Goethe, Mörike, Heine, Trakl and Rilke, among many other poets of distinction, had brought a new art of compacted verbal brevity before the public.
In the footsteps of S. S. Prawer in his pioneering work, The Penguin Book of Lieder, first published in 1964, Richard Stokes now offers an imposing compendium of German verse, with facing English translations, and in so doing redirects our attention to the place where all great art songs start – not in a drift of airborne melodies, but down among the words on the poet’s page. Stokes’s approach throughout is adventurous and inclusive, and ushers many neglected writers and musicians into the company of the immortals. He takes full account of facts that other song collectors have found uncomfortable: that musical masterpieces were often inspired by such lesser figures of the Biedermeier period as Wilhelm Müller and Adelbert von Chamisso; that certain major song composers, including Brahms, positively preferred the lesser poetic talents; and that hard editorial work in libraries and archives is still required by anyone seeking to provide an accurate, comprehensive survey of this entangled textual corpus. As with A French Song Companion (2000) by Graham Johnson, for which Stokes supplied idiomatic translations from the French, The Book of Lieder is also a bracing invitation au voyage addressed to singers, recital-planners and ordinary listeners. As presented in these volumes, the parallel traditions of the Lied and the mélodie are not only mutually illuminating, but each of them packed with new discoveries.

“A special feature of this volume”, Stokes points out in his introduction, “is the attempt to print the sung version, while retaining the punctuation and layout of the original poem.” What he also does, however, over the 700 closely packed bilingual pages, is to take us back to the pristine moment before Schubert discovers Mignon’s songs in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, before Schumann begins to browse in Heine’s Buch der Lieder, and before Wolf steps forward as an active reader of Mörike. Stokes takes us back to poems as poems, that is to say, and sets before us the unadorned verbal textures that were to prompt these sovereign musicians into interpretative action. Even for listeners who know the core Lieder repertory well, and are able to hear these poems ready-tuned and harmonized by the composers concerned, there will be something strangely moving about the return journey to the plain text.

Stepping back from, say, Schubert’s second “Wandrers Nachtlied” (Wanderer’s Nightsong) and approaching the eight short lines of the poem that Goethe, referring to his own earlier work of that name, had simply called “Ein Gleiches” (The Same), the listener is able to defer for a moment the arrival of Schubert’s unanswerable setting – to say nothing of the ten versions by other hands that Stokes helpfully lists – in order to discover or rediscover one of the wonders of Western literature:

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh’,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vöglein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
(Over every mountain-top
Lies peace,
In every tree-top
You scarcely feel
A breath of wind;
The little birds are hushed in the wood.
Wait, soon you too
Will be at peace.)

We are now well placed to listen with new ears to Schubert’s tiny song. The young composer, while clearly venerating the master-poet of the age, proves to be headstrong and ready to intervene: an extra syllable is added to “Wipfeln”, “schweigen” is repeated, the last two lines are turned into a refrain, and the piano part introduces a cross-current of urgency into Goethe’s soothing final imperative. A new work of art is being born, and the reader of texts is being relocated to an uncertain threshold between different kinds of artistic expression. He or she is now in the interference zone between the verbal and the musical, and the sensations this produces are not always straightforwardly pleasurable.

By reminding the reader so insistently of the already complete works of art that precede the emergence of song, Stokes is highlighting a real difficulty that lies in the path of singers, accompanists and all who are concerned with the ancient quarrel between la musica and le parole. What happens to a poem when a song composer begins to bend it to his will? How do we inhabit the border territories between different modes of artistic meaning? What are we to make of the continuous push and pull between music and text, or between instrumental and vocal composition, in the forward motion of an accompanied song?

In his penetrating foreword to The Book of Lieder, Ian Bostridge invokes Freud, and in so doing brings us close to an answer to these questions. At first sight, Freud might seem ill-qualified to move discussion forward, for he was not musically inclined and had scant sympathy for those who were. He was, however, far from being a dunce in musical matters. He was enough of a Mozartian, for example, to dwell on Figaro’s “Se vuol ballare” in explaining his own “Revolutionary” dream in The Interpretation of Dreams, and, later in the same work, to describe precisely the effect of Figaro’s “Non più andrai” as sung by Leporello and his master during the closing scene of Don Giovanni. Perhaps a premonition of the psychoanalytic style of thinking was to be had from this momentary embedding of an earlier inside a later opera. Mozart’s self-quotation certainly brings us close to the Freudian dream-work, with its ceaseless transfer of meanings from one frame of reference to another.

Freud’s “style” has, however, a much more general relevance to the study of accompanied vocal music. His entire career as a modeller of the “psychical apparatus” was devoted to the strange syncopations that were produced when different fields, logics, systems, or agencies came into conflict in the human mind. His early talk of the split between consciousness and the unconscious, and his later account of id, ego and superego in perpetual strife, offered him a special sort of intellectual excitement. The mind was not just a place where divisions and schisms occasionally reached crisis point: it was where incommensurable systems chafed against each other endlessly, and where topological distortion was the order of the day. Freud described this troublesome realm between systems in a variety of ways, but never as economically as Rilke, for whom, in his fourth Duino Elegy, it was simply a Zwischenraum, an “in-between-space”. Freud’s account of betweenness, of the continuous competition between signifying systems each of which seems to want to tell the whole story, is an admirable training ground for anyone seeking to study the Lied critically, or to establish a coherent musico-poetic framework for analysis.

But the task is exceptionally difficult, even for those who have schooled themselves in this way. In large part, the problem is that a great song houses too many “systems”, even before the performers actualize it as sound. It is not just a matter of words and music pulling in different directions, for neither “words” nor “music” is a single thing. How does one create an intelligible third dimension, somewhere between the text of a poem and the soundscape in which the composer has enveloped it, when each of these already has complexity of its own? The text may be laden with verbal ambiguities, and the musical argument with interlaced melodic and harmonic pathways; melodies may have their own patterns of dissonance and concordance, and harmonies their teasing moments of irresolution; voice and accompaniment may diverge drastically; and piano or orchestra, far from merely accompanying the voice – or supplying babbling brooks, trudging footsteps and other illustrative effects to order – may suddenly lay claim to a primary expressive role. And all this is in place in the score, before the singer brings to bear, in performance, his or her personal system of vocal gestures.

Richard Stokes’s volume will be immensely helpful to all English-speaking song enthusiasts, including those who have a sound knowledge of German. It reminds us at every turn not just that song-texts matter but that a whole zone of artistic meaning will fall away if we fail to register them fully. If the power of the art song lies in its elaborate interweaving of distinct sense-fields and disparate rhetorical conventions, the listener who starves himself of the poet’s words will be gravely disadvantaged. He will certainly not pass into the superabundant signifying world that Freud, well ahead of music analysis, allows us to glimpse.

In the third song of Dichterliebe, for example, the full force of Heine’s wordplay will be lost:

Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne,
Die liebt’ ich einst alle in Liebeswonne.
Ich lieb’ sie nicht mehr, ich liebe alleine
Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine;
Sie selber, aller Liebe Wonne,
Ist Rose und Lilie und Taube und Sonne.
(Rose, lily, dove, sun,
I loved them all once in the bliss of love.
I love them no more, I only love
She who is small, fine, pure, rare;
She, most blissful of all loves,
Is rose and lily and dove and sun.)

In Schumann’s headlong setting of these lines, rhyme – at the line-endings, and in the fivefold echo of the poet’s own name that carries the reader from one line to the next in the middle of the poem – is pounded out relentlessly. But other kinds of verbal play are also to be heard in the song by anyone who has read the poem closely. This is a tale of two lists: four objects from the natural world, all of them derived from the Song of Songs, are set against four attributes of the beloved. As the narrative voice moves from material entities to intelligible qualities entirely lacking in sensory content, the poet’s love-object seems to become weightless and shapeless. Having been etherealized in this way, however, that object is then reconstituted in the remainder of the poem: in her own person she becomes rose, lily, dove and sun, anchoring herself in the real world and reasserting its variety against the monotonous chiming of the -eine list. As so often in the Buch der Lieder, Heine’s lines are sensuously alive and, at the same time, shot through with grammatical and philological jesting. And Schumann’s genius was such that, even as his musical imagination took wing, he left room for the characteristic textures of Heine’s verse to be read and savoured by his eventual drawing-room audiences. But then Schumann, in his songs and keyboard works, inhabited the musico-poetic manifold more inventively, and with less inhibition, than any other composer of his time.

In one way, The Book of Lieder simply confirms a widely held view of the domestic arts in nineteenth-century Germany and Austria: most song is indeed small in scope; much of it is suffused with gentility, and a standardized shyness in the expression of feeling; and many of the composers concerned are unduly loyal to the idiom of their predecessors in the tradition. On a bad day, even the enthusiast may feel that the Lied was a device for extending the lifespan of Biedermeier sensibility well into the age of cinema, the motor car and the telephone.

Yet, looked at in another way, Stokes’s mountainous accumulation of song-texts tells a very different story. Poem after poem, garnered from a wide variety of sources, speaks of the human subject caught in a single predicament – that of the impassioned, introspective social outcast. This sorry figure travels alone, skirting the abyss, and is constantly threatened by hallucination and nightmare; his isolation is occasionally relieved by the presence or the promise of a female partner in whom moral virtue and physical charm are wondrously combined, but who can easily prove to be unkind and faithless, when she is not a mere delusional projection of the male subject’s desire; with or without a feminine counterpart, he is exemplary both in his yearning and in the suffering to which he is arbitrarily exposed. However, the truly astonishing thing about “Lieder-man”, this unsocialized creature with the extruded nervous system, is that over his 100-year lifespan he survived so many changes of artistic taste and compositional method. He already speaks in Mozart’s “Abendempfindung”  (Evening feeling) of 1787, is cherished by Schubert and Schumann a generation later, and is still astir in the atonal works of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.
It is perhaps a pity that more space was not available for the darker moods of the Second Viennese School, and that Stokes has excluded such arresting works as Berg’s Altenberg Lieder and Webern’s settings of Trakl. Those songs would have provided another bridge back to the early decades of the nineteenth century – to the terrifying final moments of Winterreise, for example – and would have suspended the main narrative of the book on the eve of the First World War. Even without long echoes of this kind, however, Stokes’s picture of nineteenth-century German song is compelling.

The Lied, during its protracted heyday, is remarkable for two complementary reasons. First, it allows us to contemplate an elaborate dance of meaning as it unfolds between artistic media, and in places still largely inaccessible to formal music criticism; it enriches the dialogue between music and poetry, and celebrates the complexity of their encounter; and it isolates, in the masterpieces of the age, qualities not just of melody and harmony but of thinking tout court that were peculiar to the German tradition. Yet, secondly, The Book of Lieder sets out a bold claim about song composition and its public at this time. It shows the extent to which Hugo Wolf’s rather wretched “small-scale genre” was in fact the result of a long-sustained collaborative experiment to which all but a handful of the leading composers contributed. The Lied was a highly successful mechanism for turning private emotion into a new form of collective experience, and Richard Stokes’s “1,000 songs” bring this extraordinary cultural episode into memorable new relief.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Malcolm Bowie's books include Proust among the Stars, 1998, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as fiction, 1987, and Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, 1978.