Classical Music | Soprano

Recorded on 08/02/2009, uploaded on 11/05/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

In 1814-15, Schubert composed his two masterful settings of lyrics taken from Goethe’s Faust—Gretchen am Spinnrade (“Gretchen at the Spinning-Wheel”) and Szene aus Goethes Faust. The former, indeed, was his first successful lied and remains today, though a challenging work for singer and pianist alike, one of his most popular. It is somewhat curious then that Schubert did not complete his third selection, titled Gretchens bitte (“Gretchens plea”) and begun in 1817, from Goethe’s masterful play. Five of its eight stanzas were set to music, which then suddenly breaks of in the middle of a cadence. One may speculate the reasons, and even lament, why the song, like other pieces in Schubert’s oeuvre, was left unfinished. It seems unlikely that Schubert suffered some incurable writer’s block, preventing him from envisioning the song’s conclusion. A far more likely reason, though remains solely conjecture, is after plunging to such emotional depths, Schubert felt unable, or perhaps even unworthy, to descend to the degree required by Goethe’s text. In 1943, English composer Benjamin Britten, himself a great admirer of Schubert’s music, provided a completed version of Gretchens bitte. Though it is considered a fitting conclusion to Schubert’s fragment, it is in the end no better than the spurious conclusion of, say, Mozart’s Requiem or Puccini’s Turandot—the work of another hand and another mind.

Schubert begins his setting of Goethe’s text in a mournful and poignant B-flat minor. A single measure, in slow tempo, is the only introduction given the voice, yet in a display of sheer genius amply sets the emotional stage of the drama to unfold. The first three stanzas are somewhat impersonal, as if a prayer spoken by rote, and this is reflected in both the vocal melody and the accompaniment. However, in the fourth stanza, the focus turns to the inward torment of the narrator. So, too, the music descends into the distantly related key of F-sharp minor (enharmonic of the flattened submediant). The vocal melody becomes more inflected with emotion and at times wells up from the singer’s low register like impassioned and uncontrollable cries of distress. The accompaniment likewise becomes more agitated. Though the music reaches the key of A major, there is no relief in the acquisition of the major tonality, and soon passes on into other keys. Following the close of the fifth stanza, the piano begins to modulate toward the key of F minor, no doubt as the first step in a climatic return to the tonic key. However, after marking the key change, Schubert put down the song and never returned to it.      Joseph DuBose

The Steans Music Institute is the Ravinia Festival's professional studies program for young musicians.