Review Summary: Elevating Lied from Amateur to High Art.
Composer Masterpiece Series. No. 2.
Until recently, I’ve had less than zero interest in vocal music. From the time I discovered my love for classical, I’ve spent close to one hundred percent listening to, enjoying, and analyzing the “absolute” music of the great instrumentalists. I had no warmth for egomaniacal and obnoxious vocalists, whose warmup routines, especially those of the sopranos, whether performed loudly in the adjacent practice room or infuriatingly out in the open, grated my ears and disrupted my person. I had two problems: my displeasure with the timbre of the human voice, and at best an apathetic attitude toward the subject matter of vocal music, at worst a contemptuous one.
The remedy has come with time. Over the years I’ve obtained a firmer grasp on the mechanics and essence of baroque, classical, and romantic instrumental music. Today I better understand the principals of sonata-allegro form, the polyphony of the fugue, and the chromaticism and atonality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And so, a feeling of familiarity, I think, led me to subconsciously look for previously hidden pastures, as my desire, like anyone else’s, grew to try new things. Quite suddenly, I’ve no longer found myself irritated by the sound of the human voice, and actually interested in the forms of vocal music.
It certainly helps that there are vocal pieces with incredible instrumental accompaniment out there, pieces without which I would be less likely to enjoy. For me, then, the most obvious source to have piqued my interest was in the Lieder of the late, great Franz Schubert. And it was so upon hearing Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade”, otherwise known as “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel.”
Widely acknowledged as his first bona-fide masterpiece, Schubert composed Spinnrade for soprano and piano accompaniment in 1814, at seventeen years of age, having set the music to a lyric in Goethe’s Faust. If you don’t know anything about Faust, which I definitely did not, the plot boils down to a man and his escapades with the devil. Basically, God and Mephistopheles (the devil) wager on whether or not Mephistopheles can turn the virtuous Faust into an immoral man. Mephistopheles travels to earth and convinces Faust to sell him his soul in return for undiminishing earthy rewards. This brings us to Gretchen, a beautiful and virtuous maiden, whom Faust lusts insatiably for, yet behaves abhorrently towards. In the scene for which Schubert composed his Lied, Gretchen, whom Mephistopheles has manipulated into falling in love with Faust, sits at her spinning wheel in the depths of despair over her anxiety about Faust’s potential abandonment of her.
The first thing you’ll notice about Gretchen am Spinnrade is how accurately Schubert manages to mimic the sound of the spinning wheel. He does this through rhythm manipulation where the right-hand plays unceasing 16th notes in 6/8 to the step of a constant left-hand staccato 3-1, 3-1, 3-1 bounce. Fantastically, even though the tempo never changes, Schubert manages to mimic the sound of the wheel speeding up and slowing down. This he does through harmonic manipulation. The more excited Gretchen gets, particularly when she’s singing about Faust, Schubert uses chromatics and non-tonal harmonies. The piece, for example, Schubert sets to D minor, the tonality in which Gretchen sings and the accompaniment plays when Gretchen is pondering her losses but not yet in the grips of despair. Particularly exciting is the passage that leads to the climax where Schubert goes from F#dim to Gmaj to Eb7 to Ab to F7 to Bb and so on until he reaches a particularly harsh fortissimo vii-I progression in A major that supports Gretchen at her loudest and most despairing.
After employing a fermata to break the piece in two, you can feel Gretchen’s exhaust. There is silence for the first time in the piece, interrupted only by a few attempts to begin spinning anew; Schubert uses the same rhythmic formula from measure one, but this time to mimic the sound of the wheel starting and stopping and starting and stopping and starting again, as if Gretchen has become so exhausted by her woe.
Nobly, Gretchen musters the energy to get the wheel turning again. A harmonic reprise of the first few stanzas is expected as Schubert begins again in D minor. Gretchen’s despair, however, is deep. Her thoughts quickly return to Faust and become violent. She yearns even more deeply for Faust, and then soars up to an A-5, the highest note in the piece, wishing for death. For his part, to really up the drama Schubert has the accompaniment go through an even more wild series of harmonic progressions during the final two stanzas. We end quietly in pianissimo with a reprise of the Lied’s first two lines, “My peace is gone/My heart is heavy”, as if Gretchen has returned to a more baseline level of grief.
Before Schubert came along serious musicians considered the Lied, while understandably popular, a genre ultimately for amateur composers. They believed that the miniature-esque nature and undisciplined formula of the Lied prevented it from ever being able to equal the symphony or the opera in weight. Schubert, however, showed the world that despite its diminished proportions the Lied could plumb the depths of Beethoveninan emotion and soar to the heights of Mozartean beauty, and Gretchen am Spinnrade was his first step along the path of elevating the Lied from amateur to high art.
