In the ongoing war between hope and longing, passion and anxiety that is this song, Schubert has the piano corridor in measures 36–39 seem as if about to deliver us to G minor, the B-flat major tonic key’s melancholy kin, but he deflects the song to the pastoral zephyr’s F major at the last minute. (This is a temporary deferral.) The mere mention of “Sehnen,” longing, darkens Nature and the music alike and does so by stages.
Example 1.8. Franz Schubert, “Suleika II,” D720, measures 1–16.
At the end of the first section, Suleika repeats the words “Ach, für Leid müsst’ ich vergehen, / hofft’ ich nicht zu sehn ihn wieder,” three times (measures 92–120). On the first statement, it is the final word “wieder” that trips the end of the returned music from the beginning (measures 84–99) and a move to G major—the reiterated E-flat neighbor note to D helps convey the mixture of hope and suffering in this passage. At the end of this stanza, in the piano interlude in measures 120–27, we seem to be returning to B-flat major, but then Schubert’s Suleika stops short of resolution for one of this composer’s trademark measures of silence: a held breath, a pause in which resolutions are made, in which suffering turns into new hope. This moment always makes me think of “Dove sono” and the countess’s sudden resolve “di cangiar l’ingrato cor” at the end of an aria that begins with passive pain. What follows the arresting pause in “Suleika II” is the irresistibly light and lively galop, with the characteristic hoofbeat rhythms made almost weightless. A quite difficult piano part must sound effortless. For the dance-mad Viennese, this would have been as catnip to a cat, and its charm is only heightened by the tiny touches of B-flat minor (measures 139–42), D flat major (measures 153–55), and G minor (measures 160–63) along the way, as this Suleika too repeats Marianne’s words over and over, not to bring out the different emotional layers but to revel in the dance of love (example 1.10).
In the end, Milder received from Schubert music for those who could easily appreciate such vivacity, as do we, but Schubert refuses to end with all-out display. The dreamy musing “mit halber Stimme” (“with half voice”) as the scherzo dies away restores a measure of interiority to a Suleika II who is elsewhere less profound than the singer we meet in “Suleika I.” How lovely that her final vocal phrase begins as a fanfare, loud and triumphant, and yet hints at the end, by the descent to quietude, at her capacity to mull over the totality of love in more inward fashion.
Whenever I hear the two Suleika songs, I recall Marianne von Willemer’s poem “Was ist Gesang?” written, we are told, for a singer.
Example 1.9. Franz Schubert, “Suleika II,” D720, measures 35–49.
Example 1.10. Franz Schubert, “Suleika II,” D720, measures 135–58.
| Was ist Gesang? | What Is Song? |
| Was ist Gesang? Was, kaum gehört, | What is song? It’s that which no sooner |
| Dich faßt, dich hält, dich mit sich nimmt | Heard, takes you, holds you, carries you along |
| Und, wie durch Liebe schön bethört, | And, as when delightfully perturbed by love, |
| In seinen Ton die Seele stimmt, | Attunes your soul unto its harmony, |
| Dich Ernst macht, dann bald hoch dich schwingt | Brings you down to earth, then swings you high, |
| Zu dem was heilig, ewig groß, | Up to what is eternal, holy, great, |
| Bald dich zum Mitgefühle stimmt | Soon to attune you to sympathy |
| Mit Erdenschönheit, Menschenloos, | With the world’s beauty, the fate of men, |
| Was du erlebt, in dir erneut | Revives within you your experience |
| Und rein und mild dir’s nun gewährt, | And with purity and gentleness grants it |
| So daß, was schmerzte, sich verklärt, | Currency, so that which pained you is now |
| Was freute, inniger erfreut. | Transfigured, what brought you joy is more heartfelt and sincere. |
| Was dieß nicht wirkt, ist nicht Gesang, | Is nought but sound, a pretty sound at best. |
| That which fails to bring about all this, that is not song, | Ist Klang nur, höchstens hübscher Klang.66 |
Schubert resists “merely pretty sound” in both Suleika songs, but the allusions to Viennese Gemütlichkeit and pseudo-Oriental charm in “Suleika II” are nowhere in evidence in “Suleika I”: pure “Gesang” in Marianne’s most elevated sense.
* * *
In the fascinating diary of Lili Parthey, whose father Gustav Parthey once praised Milder for “ennobling the thoroughly frivolous content of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro”[!] with her performance of Susanna,67 we encounter still more lively anecdotes of this extraordinary singer. Lili, who married the composer Bernhard Klein, was herself a singer, albeit not of professional quality, and is touchingly possessive about “Dove sono”—“my aria,” she called it—and was a trifle jealous when someone else sang it at a salon with the young Felix Mendelssohn as the main attraction and Anna Milder performing as well.68 The anecdote she recounted on Whitsunday, May 18, 1823, is utterly charming: Milder and Klein went to dine with friends in the Tiergarten, and then the little group sang their way through Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf’s Der Apotheker und der Doktor of 1786. “None of us knew the notes,” she confided.69 In another entry for June 6, 1823, Lili described a piano rehearsal with Milder singing the role of Dido in Klein’s opera of the same name and wrote, “I cannot describe how beautiful, how directly appealing to my heart, and how inwardly moving is this lone woman as portrayed by Milder. I could sit still forever and just listen and watch.”70 Anna Milder had that effect on a great variety of people fortunate enough to hear her. We are fortunate that Schubert was among her fans; that Lieder were an occasional component of “olla podrida” programs; and that he wrote immortal songs for her.
Notes
1.The proper term in the chapter title is not “Olla Patrida” but “olla podrida,” a Spanish stew of pork, beans, and a variety of other ingredients that depend on what is at hand. See William Weber, Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), for much more on this subject. Weber (1–2), however, rightly warns against placing too much emphasis on “miscellany programs” and observes that there were limits, that formal and informal types of music were usually kept apart; that is, no tavern songs or the less refined specimens of male-chorus songs were to be found in programs featuring the likes of Anna Milder-Hauptmann.
2.See Till Gerrit Waidelich, Renate Hilmar-Voit, and Andreas Mayer, Franz Schubert: Dokumente 1817–1830
