Please listen to Christa Ludwig and Geoffrey Parsons perform Schubert’s “An die Musik” (“To Music”). It’s less than three minutes long. If you’ve heard it before, listen to it again. I will talk in detail about the poem in another post; for now, all you need to know is that the poet is apostrophizing the art of music, and thanking it for giving him a glimpse of “a better world”.
https://youtu.be/7LKGBeQJ1FE?list=RD7LKGBeQJ1FE
I have to write about music sooner or later, though the futility of it daunts me. I’m convinced that you can never really understand what goes on in another person’s head, no matter how sympathetic you wish to be, or how good at communication both parties are. Similarly, you can analyze the stuffing out of a piece of music and never be able to figure out why it affects you as it does.
A few weeks ago I played a short piece for visiting family members. When it was over, my sister Janet asked, “What do you like about that piece?” I was blindsided. I wasn’t prepared with a lecture on aesthetics. I suppose I could have given a superficial, basically meaningless answer (“It’s pretty”?), but instead I said “It’s complicated”. Later, as I thought about what else I might have said, it occurred to me that it would have been more evocative of the truth, though equally unhelpful, to have said “What do you like about breathing?”
So, with no hope whatever of actually explaining anything, let me point out a few things about “An die Musik” that may at least be interesting.
I’m engaged with this song right now, because I’m playing it for student lessons. Though I’ve known the song most of my life, an issue came up in the course of working on it that led me to study its history for the first time.
Schubert wrote the song in 1817, when he was twenty years old. Ten years later, he revised it and published it. The year after that, he died at the age of thirty-one, most likely of syphilis. Where was penicillin when we needed it?
This song was very popular among Schubert’s friends. He made copies of it and gave them away before it was finally published. It served as a sort of artistic manifesto in his circle, and I’m sure it was frequently peformed in the musical parties that Schubert and his friends became famous for, known as “Schubertiades” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schubertiade)
The issue that came up during the voice lesson was that the music we were working from seemed wrong in a few details, to both the voice teacher and to me. A little research turned up the fact that we were inadvertently using a printout of the first version of the song, instead of the more familiar second version.
This led me to discover that not only did Schubert write more than 600 songs in his short lifetime — a fact that many music lovers know — but that many of them exist in more than one version, as he continued to tinker with them. It’s fascinating to study the improvements he made between versions.
The biggest “aha!” moment I had when taking a fresh look at the song is this — the song isn’t really for voice and piano; the accompaniment is a string quartet, and it just happens to be “arranged” for piano. I don’t think you have to be a musician to see, when you look at the score (linked below), that the pianist’s right hand is playing repeated chords, as if it were taking on the roles of the two violins and the viola, and the left hand is doing its best to be a cello. The whole song is a dialog between the singer and the cello. The cello actually has the first word; it prompts the singer with the opening phrase, then again with the second phrase, and continues the duet throughout the song.
I haven’t seen this analogy in any commentary I’ve read, but then I’m not widely read in the literature on either Schubert or accompanying. I’m sure I’m not the first (or even hundredth or thousandth) person to notice this. But even if you don’t “see” it explicitly, if you’re a sensitive pianist, you will play this piece exactly as if you did. And if you don’t play it like that, you have no business playing Schubert.
https://youngholm.com/py/assets/schubert_an_die_musik_2nd_version.pdf
https://youngholm.com/py/assets/schubert_an_die_musik_1st_version.pdf
https://youngholm.com/py/assets/schubert_an_die_musik_holograph.pdf
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