A Companion to Schubert's Schwanengesang : History, Poets, Analysis, Performance (review)

A Companion to Schubert's Schwanengesang: History, Poets, Analysis, Performance. Edited by Martin Chusid. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. [ix, 230 p. ISBN 0-300-07289-9. $35.]

What may we expect from the many handbooks and companions that have flooded the market of music publishing in recent years? What is their relation to preexisting scholarship? The eight chapters and the individual authors of the present volume assume different stances toward these questions. There are several original contributions. Steven Lubin has a stimulating discussion of three stylistic tendencies, dubbed "pleasing," "learned," and "avant-garde," in late Schubert. Walburga Litschauer offers an informative essay on the origins and early reception of the collection of songs known as Schwanengesang. At the heart of the volume is an engaging and perceptive new essay by Edward T. Cone considering matters of form and repetition in the songs. There is much to learn from it. Richard LeSueur has compiled a helpful discography. The editor of the volume, Martin Chusid, is most heavily represented, with chapters on the poets of Schwanengesang, discussions of each of the individual poems and songs, a full chapter marshalling responses to the reordering of the Heinrich Heine songs proposed in separate articles by Harry Goldschmidt and Richard Kramer, and a chapter coauthored with Walther Dürr on matters of performance practice, adapted in part from Dürr's earlier publications on the subject. Finally, a new facsimile edition has been issued as a separate volume (Chusid, ed., Schwanengesang: Facsimiles of the Autograph Score and Sketches, and Reprint of the First Edition [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000]), giving all who missed out on obtaining these original sources in earlier printings a second opportunity.

Regrettably, the relation to earlier scholarship in Chusid's multiple contributions is often discomfiting. His chapters are largely summaries of previously published work, much of it readily available (sometimes only pages away). Yet no distinctive critical perspective emerges from these distillations, nor are they models of editorial impartiality and care. The author intrudes everywhere with his personal reactions, as here, discussing "Ihr Bild":

Schenker suggests . . . that the two-bar introduction, the octave b flat and its repeat, represents the protagonist staring at the portrait. Joseph Kerman acknowledges that "The two chords [sic] are remarkable, evocative" and that "Schenker was on to something [but] . . . did not get to the bottom of it." If there is a bottom, I wonder if it doesn't relate somehow to the function of all song preludes or introductions, namely, to establish a tempo and provide the singer with a clue to the first pitch. Schenker rhetorically asks "why the Master sounded the same note [actually an octave] twice" and then presents his idea of staring. Another possible answer might be that Schubert wanted to set the tempo--slow--and that the pitch involved, b flat, was to be the first pitch sung by the vocalist. (pp. 128-29)

Anyone who has read Heinrich Schenker's breathtaking essay in Der Tonwille (no. 1 [1921]: 46-9; reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1999]), or knows Kerman's discussion of it, will remember that he begins by pondering the meaning of the solitary octave Bb's in the two-bar introduction:

As one cannot yet discern a motive in these bars, the question arises: what purpose do they serve? Are they there merely to introduce the tonality or to prepare the singer's opening pitch, or both? Be that as it may, however, one must still ask why the master chose to intone the same pitch twice, when it would also have been possible simply to hold it out for two bars. In point of fact, it is only the answer to this question that will supply us with a solution to the riddle. To repeat the tone in slow tempo, and furthermore to restate it after a pause, amounts to the same thing as to stare at it, and in doing so, we feel...