A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Schubert

Back in the mists of time, somewhere in the early 1980s, I found myself in Vienna, spending a couple of weeks studying with the great Hans Hotter. I was lucky enough to be selected to work with one of the greatest singers of the 20th Century in the city that is synonymous with music, a singer famous above all else for his interpretations of the great roles of Richard Wagner’s operas, in particular Wotan in the Ring Cycle. During this period of study, Hans made a profound statement which has remained with me ever since. “Despite all my success in Wagner, I found my true self singing the songs of Franz Schubert. That was where I was most at one with the world and the cosmos.”

I still find this a most extraordinary comment, all these years later; that a man with perhaps the most heroic bass-baritone voice of all time should have admitted that the art songs of Schubert, with their  small scale and intimate subtlety, affected him most during his long career. I have spent the last 40 years or so probing this same music, and still find myself amazed at the variety of Schubert’s invention. That so much can be revealed between just a singer and a pianist of what makes us human is quite marvellous. From serenity in songs like ‘Im Abendrot’ and ‘An die Musik’ to enormous outpourings of rage or grief like ‘Der Doppelgänger’ or ‘Aufenthalt’ to joy and contentment like ‘Die Taubenpost’ or ‘Rastlose Liebe’, Schubert describes the human condition in all its complexity and profundity.

Franz Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797 and was taught violin by his father and piano by ‘his brother. He studied composition with Salieri (he of ‘Amadeus’ fame) and, in 1821, was admitted to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, as a performing member. He composed prolifically from a young age and has left us with an extraordinary oeuvre including symphonies, operas, chamber music and sacred music, and above all more than 600 songs (Lieder). He gave a public concert of his own compositions only once, in 1828, and a few months later he died at the age of only 31.  His life was maddeningly short, and his greatness only became apparent after his death, but what a legacy he left us!

I could wax lyrical about his piano music, his string quartets and his symphonies, but this series is about a singer’s take on the great composers, so I propose to look at his songs from that angle. The first thing to say about the songs is that, unlike many song writers, Schubert wrote in such a way that any voice can sing most of his compositions. With only a few exceptions, his Lieder can be transposed to suit the timbre and range of all voice types. This means that sopranos and basses, and everyone in between, can find inspiration from the same poems and musical settings.

Several great composers wrote vocal music for particular singers. In the 20th Century, Benjamin Britten wrote marvellous music for his partner Peter Pears and Francis Poulenc composed many songs for his close friend Pierre Bernac. In 1813, Schubert heard Johann Michael Vogl singing Orestes in Gluck’s ‘Iphigénie en Tauride’ and the following year, Don Pizarro in the first performance of Beethoven’s revised ‘Fidelio’. The singing of this Austrian baritone impressed the young Schubert immensely, and the two finally met in 1817, when the composer was 20 years old and Vogl nearly 50. Their collaboration resulted in some of the ‘greatest songs ever written, from ‘Erlkőnig’ onwards, and the cycles ‘Die Schőne Műllerin’ and ‘Winterreise’ were both composed for Vogl’s voice. Having said earlier that I feel Schubert’s songs are able to be transposed for a variety of voices, it must be said that the two great cycles are slightly different. The youthful love story gone wrong, about the poet’s infatuation with the miller’s daughter, and her fickle nature in preferring the huntsman, seems to suit a higher voice, while the Winter Journey from despair to madness which is ‘Winterreise’ feels better suited to a darker voice. I only ever sang ‘Die Schőne Műllerin’ once and was not really happy with the result, whereas I have sung ‘Winterreise’ on and off for many years. Indeed, had it not been for Covid-19, I would have performed several concerts of ‘Winter Journey’ in 2020 to mark 40 years since my first attempt. Hopefully, I shall be able to try again in 2021. In the 20th Century, the great German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with his remarkable range and flexibility, was the perfect interpreter of these two cycles but I must say I prefer a tenor like Pears or Wunderlich for the first set of songs. ‘Winterreise’ strikes me as a better fit for basses and bass-baritones like Hotter (and myself!), although both Pears and Wunderlich have recorded magisterial performances of the later work too. I’ll write at more length later about the cycles, including the posthumously created ‘Schwanengesang’.

The first thing to say about the performance of Schubert songs is that any notion of showing off or vocal extravagance must be avoided, at all costs. You need to have a good technique to sing Schubert, and you need to know your voice inside out, but the voice must be at the total service of the words and the music. To this end, the singer should have a good grasp of the German language and must understand all the nuances of that language. There are no shortcuts or tricks. You should know exactly what you are saying, word for word and phrase for phrase. Schubert set some of the greatest poetry ever written, not only the German greats like Goethe, Schiller and Heine, but also German translations of Shakespeare and Walter Scott.

There is an argument for translating the German words into the language of the singer and his/her audience, since the nature of a recital prohibits excessive gesturing and acting, and one is communicating largely by vocal means. Many people have tried to produce decent singing translations over the years, and my friend Jeremy Sams has done fantastic work in providing new versions which combine clarity with attention to detail, and respect for word setting in English from the German. However, personally, I prefer to sing these songs in the original German, as I feel the sound of the language is part of the overall sound of the music as imagined by the composer. Some would say that, by transposing the music from the original keys, one has already compromised the original sound, and there is a good argument to be made for this view, but, simply from a personal feeling, I like to sing them in German. I always insist that the audience has access to a direct translation and that there is enough light in the auditorium to read the programme.

To perform the songs of Schubert well, it is imperative that singer and accompanist are as one. Indeed, I would say that the whole concept of the singer, and his accompanying servant, is a disastrous mistake. Fortunately, this is a concept largely consigned to the dustbin of history, and, often these days, the pianist can be as starry as the singer. I remember, back in the 1970s at the Edinburgh Festival, a performance of ‘Winterreise’ given by Fischer-Dieskau with the young Daniel Barenboim and recall to this day the wonderful playing of the rookie maestro. Fischer-Dieskau recorded with such pianistic greats as Sviatoslav Richter and Alfred Brendel and Pears and Britten together offered insights into the songs that were unique.

Some of Schubert’s accompaniments are incredibly difficult to play. Famously, Gerald Moore spoke of his tricks to avoid Repetitive Wrist Strain playing ‘Erlkőnig’, and many of his strophic (multi-verse) songs test the pianist’s stamina even more than the singer’s! It is important that the pianist also understands the words as well as the singer because the nuances of Schubert’s invention entail close communication between the two performers.

The maturing of Schubert’s Lieder writing is worth a closer look. Many of the early songs, written in his teens, reveal a fascination with the long dramatic narrative. A few years ago, I was asked to sing some of his early settings of the poetry of Ossian in a concert in the south of France. Ossian, the supposed Gaelic bard “discovered” and translated into English by James Macpherson in the 18th century, became an instant success story across Europe, with, reputedly, Napoleon always taking a copy of his works on campaign. Schubert was caught up in the excitement of this “discovery” of an unknown Celtic genius and set several of the poems from Macpherson’s 1765 collected edition of Ossian. It is interesting that the Romantic movement in literature was a few decades ahead of the same movement in music, and Schubert was one of the first composers to recognise the promise of these extraordinary poets as texts for his music. Indeed, his music is a bridge between the Classical period of Mozart and Haydn and the later Romantics, and his rather long-winded settings of Ossian mark the beginnings of a new style. I remember singing ‘Lodas Gespenst’ (Loda’s Ghost), an eerie tale of shades and ancient warriors in pre-Christian Scotland in which Fingal destroys the army of the dead. It mixes recitative style with more metric sections but is ultimately unsatisfactory as a work. However, from these beginnings, Schubert quickly evolved into the composer of such brilliant narrative songs as ‘Erlkőnig’ and ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, setting Goethe’s immortal words with genius.

Towards the end of his short life, Schubert wrote the wonderful song cycles that define him now: ‘The Pretty Miller’s Daughter’ and ‘Winter Journey’ are both settings of Wilhelm Műller, a poet, soldier and teacher from Dessau. Műller’s poetry was seen as quite good but rather naive, and yet, somehow, Schubert found in these verses something which touched him profoundly and allowed him to produce works which altogether transformed the poems into masterworks. The journey of the jilted lover in ‘Winterreise’ becomes a parable of loss and madness, as the poet wanders further into the bleak wintry landscape of Germany, only finding, at the end, some rapport with an old, crazy organ-grinder. The last song, ‘Der Leiermann’ (the Hurdy Gurdy Man) is magnificent in its bleak despair and suggests that Schubert was aware of the fatal nature of the illness that carried him off only a few weeks after the composition.

The posthumous cycle ‘Schwanengesang’ (Swan Song), which Schubert composed as a series of songs by two poets, Heine and Rellstab, later edited into a cycle but never intended as such, continued this bleak mood, but interspersed with the gloom are some of his most tender songs he wrote. The last song is ‘Die Taubenpost’ (the Pigeon Post), which could not be jollier or more optimistic, and stops us from reading too much into the idea of life imitating art.

Nonetheless, the deaths of Beethoven and Műller in the same year 1827, as well as Weber the year before, and Schubert in 1828 must give us pause to regret the terrible fate of music in the late 1820s. It is almost unimaginable to think of the loss to the world of these great men, all around the same time. The fact that Schubert was virtually unknown outside Vienna when he died, could have been even worse, if his works had not been discovered later. Thankfully, they did survive, and we are all the better for having his wonderful music available to us, both to perform and to listen to.