The Genius Cycle

There are enclaves, however, where the art song receives the attention it deserves. Founded in 2002, the Oxford Lieder Festival last October devoted its entire fortnight to the songs of Franz Schubert. The Schubertiade (Song Salon), in its 40th year in the small town of Hohenems, Austria, runs from May to October and features some 30 vocal recitals in honor of the provider of the feast, although it is no longer all-Schubert-all-the-time, as it was during its early years. The Liederstube, an offshoot of Chicago’s own Schubertiade, features “an intimate evening of Lieder jamming” every other Friday all year long in the Windy City.  

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is the genius of the place wherever Lieder are sung, and the modern Schubert-iaden take their inspiration from the informal recitals that Schubert’s friends and admirers delighted in during his lifetime, especially when the finest vocalists in Vienna would sing to Schubert’s own accompaniment. Schubert composed nine symphonies, seven masses, gorgeous chamber music, and a handful of operas that failed to cause the sensation he so desired and only one or two of which are revived as curiosities these days. But it is as the author of some 600 songs that he stands apart, presiding over a comparatively obscure but resplendent kingdom.

Schubert set over 70 poems by Goethe to music, matching genius with genius, enriching texts that were invaluable to begin with. Among the other poetic masters Schubert served were Petrarch and Shakespeare (both in German translation) and Heinrich Heine, six of whose pungent lyrics are incorporated in Schwanengesang, literally Schubert’s Swan Song, less a proper cycle than an assortment of gems strung handsomely together.

But the two song cycles that Schubert composed to poems by a writer hardly famous then, and even less familiar today, have enshrined him as the nonpareil master of the art song: In Die schöne Müllerin (The Lovely Maid of the Mill) and Winterreise (Winter Journey), the poetry of Wilhelm Müller finds its perfect musical rendering and Schubert finds his perfect subject. As the most celebrated 20th-century Lieder singer, the late baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, declared in Schubert’s Songs: A Biographical Study (1976),

Schubert did not look the part of the agonized artist. In appearance, he resembled no one so much as Mr. Pickwick as pictured by Phiz: roly-poly, bespectacled, emphatically ordinary, genial but quite without the markings of genius that distinguished Beethoven and Goethe, and evidently content with such simple pleasures as happened to come his way 

Looks, in Schubert’s case, could not have been more deceiving: Infected with syphilis in his early 20s, he lived out his brief blighted days in physical and mental anguish, cut off from hope of a woman’s love and believing himself the unhappiest of men. And yet he poured out song, much of it joyous, sweet, and celebratory, as though he were someone else when he made music. Die schöne Müllerin, however, ends with the millstream’s address to the suicidal jilted lover who finds rest in the waters that close forever over his head, and Winterreise burns with ineradicable pain, the fleeting moments of consolation overshadowed by the prevailing desolation. For the wanderer who will never see his beloved again—she is “a rich bride,” not for such as he—but who cannot stop tormenting himself with thoughts of her, the soundest available option is to die as soon as possible. But even death cannot come soon enough. 

This is art produced with the knife’s edge of despair at the composer’s throat, and the songs will not stop coming until he has completely used himself up. Friends reckoned that Schubert’s unrelenting labor on this, his final major work, hastened his appallingly early death. And just to sing or listen to this music is to enter an area of darkness that is hard to escape even after the piece is over. 

Every generation of classical music performers has its acknowledged masters, and among the distinguished contemporary cohort of Lieder singers that includes Matthias Goerne, Thomas Quasthoff, Gerald Finley, Christian Gerhaher, and Florian Boesch, the English tenor Ian Bostridge is remarkable for the florid passion that encompasses but does not overwhelm his exquisite attentiveness to verbal and musical detail.

Like Fischer-Dieskau before him, and even more like Hans Hotter and Jon Vickers, Bostridge is the thinking man’s singer, and his reputation for going over the top tends to enhance that status rather than erode it. And now he has written Schubert’s Winter Journey, which attempts to illuminate Winterreise from every possible angle. Bostridge has performed the peerless cycle 100 times over the past 30 years, and no other singer, and certainly no musicologist, could write a study like this one. 

Bostridge largely eschews the scholar’s customary and often parching technical analysis, confessing that he lacks academic grounding in such things; but mostly he avoids it because even adept musicians focus on “less relentlessly theoretical” aspects as they study a piece of music and prepare to perform it. Yet the academic training that Bostridge did have is telling, for he composes here an ambitious work of intellectual history, enfolding Schubert’s songs in the revelatory art and constricting politics of his time and place, and discerning traces of his influence on subsequent generations of makers and performers. 

Schubert announced his genius at the age of 17, with settings of famous poems by Goethe. Goethe, however, preferred his poems as set by Johann Friedrich Reichardt: in simple, limpid, classical versions now utterly forgotten. As Bostridge puts it, Schubert’s renderings inclined toward “Romantic hysteria, the sickness which [Goethe] dreaded.” Here was the germ of Winterreise, which Schubert would finish 14 years later, and in which he would bend Müller’s verses—simple, limpid, melancholy, but not fatally so—to the needs of his darker and more frantic suffocating, just managing to bite back a scream.

It is startling to read that Samuel Beckett was a fervent admirer of Winterreise. But when Bostridge goes on to recall his performance of the cycle at the 2012 Enniskillen International Beckett Festival and cites a Beckett fragment with which an actor introduced him, the kinship becomes patent: “It’s a winter’s night, where I was, where I’m going, remembered, imagined, no matter, believing in me, believing it’s me, no, no need.” 

Franz’s Last Tape? This familiar “absurdity of existence, that Beckettian riff” is complicated by subtle indications of Müller and Schubert’s “political or social engagement” on behalf of disaffected intellectuals and downtrodden proles. These indications had to be subtle in order to elude the censor’s unwelcome attentions, which buttressed “a reactionary regime” determined to prevent another Robespierre or Rousseau from upending the shaky Biedermeier order. 

Some of Bostridge’s sightings of subversion are dubious at best, like reports of a yeti in the mountains. But with the final song, “Der Leiermann” (“The Hurdy-Gurdy Man”), an image of horror unprecedented in song and still unequaled—a broken beggar, barefoot on the ice, wearily playing the simplest tune on the crudest instrument—Bostridge’s remarks ring absolutely true: 

Bostridge’s aim is nothing less than to demonstrate the excellence of this supreme masterpiece of an artform unjustly neglected: 

To make his case, Bostridge piles on prodigious learning, enlisting artists and thinkers—from Lord Byron to Thomas Mann, Alfred de Vigny to Clemens Brentano, Hans Holbein to Caspar David Friedrich, Sigmund Freud to Lucian Freud—along with excursions into the making of charcoal and the structure of snowflakes.

This book is an amazing omnium gatherum, a work befitting a life devoted to music of genius. And if he fails to convince one that Winterreise is a masterpiece on the order of King Lear or the Divine Comedy, Bostridge has nevertheless served the song cycle well. For his most important effect is to turn the reader once again, or even for the first time, to Schubert’s songs, not least as sung by Bostridge himself. 

Algis Valiunas is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.