Ed's Place

Friday, May 28, 2021

Franz Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin, Gretchen am Spinnrade, and Ständchen (with English translations)

English translations ©2012-2013 by Edward Lein; all rights reserved.
Please notify and credit when reprinting: edward_lein@hotmail.com
ORIGINAL MUSIC & WRITINGS: LEINmachine | Art Song Translations

Die schöne Müllerin (The Lovely Mill-maiden) on poems by Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827)

Although Beethoven's lovely An die ferne Geliebte ("To the Distant Beloved," 1816) is generally cited as being the first "song cycle," Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin ("The Miller's Lovely Daughter," 1823-24) is the first song cycle of its own type. Beethoven's cycle is one continuous movement with several contrasting sections, along the lines of a sung fantasia, in which music from the beginning returns at the end so as to form a kind of musical circle. In contrast, Schubert composed a set of related songs intended to be performed as a group in a specified order, but each of the 20 songs is nonetheless self-contained, and so may also stand alone as a separate piece. Thus, Schubert's concept of the song cycle is more in keeping with a Baroque-era solo cantata, with piano accompaniment. And it is Schubert's model more than Beethoven's which has provided inspiration for song cycles by later composers, from Schumann and Mahler to Britten and Barber, and beyond.

In truth, Schubert's groundbreaking work, first published in 1824, was really the concept of German poet Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827). In 1820, when Müller published his cycle of 25 poems about a young miller’s apprentice who finds but then loses love, he intended them as song lyrics, and later wrote a friend that he hoped "... a kindred spirit may some day be found, whose ear will catch the melodies from my words, and who will give me back my own" (Schubert Songs, by Maurice J.E. Brown). Although Schubert chose a number of Müller's poems as texts for other songs as well, including those of another great cycle, Winterreise ("Winter Journey," 1828), there is no evidence that Müller ever knew that his "kindred spirit" indeed had been found, and that Schubert used his words to create unsurpassed musical masterpieces.

Gretchen am Spinnrade & Ständchen

Gretchen am Spinnrade ("Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel," Op.2, D. 118, 1814) was the first work that brought Schubert, not yet 17 years old, to the attention of Viennese music-lovers, and it is still regarded as among the finest of all German Lieder. The text, drawn from Goethe's Faust (Part 1), relays the obsessive confusion, bordering on despair, of the still innocent Gretchen after she has become infatuated with Faust, but then is seemingly deserted by him (oh, that she had been!). The motion of Schubert's piano part reflects not only the whirring of the spinning wheel, but also Gretchen's increasingly agitated emotional state.

Gretchen am Spinnrade ("Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel")

Ständchen (Serenade)
Following Schubert's Ave Maria, D. 839, his Ständchen (Serenade), D.957, no.4, must come in as a close second among his most-beloved songs, and, as with Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze, Schubert's popular "Swan Song" has been arranged for practically every performance ensemble imaginable. "Leise flehen meine Lieder," is the first line of the text by German poet Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860) that served as Schubert's inspiration.

Ravel: Shéhérazade (with English translations of Tristan Klingsor's poems)

Notes and English version ©2009, by Edward Lein; all rights reserved.
Please notify & credit when reprinting: edward_lein@hotmail.com

ORIGINAL COMPOSITIONS & WRITINGS: LEINmachine | Art Song Translations

Ravel / Klingsor: Shéhérazade
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) composed his magically evocative song cycle, Shéhérazade, in 1903 (the same year as his String Quartet and the first movement of his Sonatine for piano solo), setting for high voice and piano three poems by his friend, Tristan Klingsor (pseudonym of Léon Leclère, 1874-1966). The orchestral version soon followed, and it seems likely that the orchestrations were as much a part of Ravel's original conception as the vocal part and harmonies. The cycle was written for either soprano or tenor, and although it is seldom performed by a man, in 2004 baritone Konrad Jarnot released a recording with pianist Helmut Deutsch.

In 1903, Klingsor published a collection of 100 poems inspired by reading the Middle Eastern folktales known collectively as One Thousand and One Nights (or, Arabian Nights) which lately had been published in a French translation. He titled his poetry collection Schéhérazade, chosen in homage to Rimsky-Korsakov's similarly inspired symphonic suite, of which both he and Ravel were fans--it is perhaps significant that at the mention of "Sinbad" toward the end of the first song the solo violin, featured so prominently in Rimsky Korsakov's suite, can be heard in Ravel's orchestral setting (albeit doubled an octave below by Ravel). Ravel and Klingsor were likewise big fans of Debussy's revolutionary opera Pelléas et Mélisande, and they reportedly attended all 14 performances of the opera's premiere run in 1902.[1] When Ravel decided to set three of Klingsor's poems he made the poet re-read the lines aloud repeatedly, hoping to capture the rhythms of French speech patterns as perfectly as had Debussy.

Often warm and glittering but suffused with a melancholy longing, Ravel's music transforms our understanding of the poetry, particularly in the first and final songs. When first performed in 1904, Asie was sung as the last rather than first song. But when it came time to publish the score the composer changed the order of the songs, instead concluding with L'indifférent, in which Ravel "once suggested that the key to his own personality lay hidden ..." [2]

On the surface, Asie appears to be little more than a catalog of exotic enticements available to travelers--but the music suggests that the narrator is someone who feels trapped in a mundane existence, with the only likely escape found in reading the adventures of others.

La flûte enchantée is a straightforward depiction of romantic yearning as it relates how lovers, separated by constraints of servitude, discover that they can still form an immediate connection through music.

At first reading, L'indifférent comes across merely as a libertine eyeing a would-be conquest; but through the music one is left instead with the impression of a traveler isolated in a foreign land hoping to make any sort of human contact to overcome deep loneliness, but who seems somehow emotionally powerless to interact. It becomes almost as though Klingsor, when heard through the amplification of Ravel's music, has captured in a few lines what Thomas Mann related in his 1912 novella, Death in Venice.

FOOTNOTES
1. Ravel and Klingsor, among other young Parisian musicians, painters and writers, formed a society called Les Apaches whose purpose was to promote ground-breaking artistic achievements, and mutually supporting Debussy's controversial opera was chief among their efforts.
2. Quoting EMI producer Ronald Kinloch Anderson in his notes for the Janet Baker/Sir John Barbirolli recording re-released in 1975.

Note on the translations:
Ravel was exacting in his rhythmic setting of the French text, and the intent in my English version was to match the rhythm of the French original, syllable for syllable as closely as I could (but not with the intent that the English version might be substituted in performance!). Consequently a few words, mostly adjectives, not explicit in the French have been added to "fill-in-the-blanks" of the English -- these additions appear in gray font, and I would have no problem if they were omitted in reprinting. Less frequently a French word or two may have been omitted as long as the meaning isn't altered. A few other minor liberties have been taken in hope of making the English sound a little more linguistically idiomatic or "poetic," e.g., in the third line, "Où dort la fantaisie ..." which literally translates as "Where sleeps the fantasy ..." has been rendered: "Where sleeping fantasy lies ..."

Asie