Youens, Schubert's Winterreise and Mahler's Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen (M&L 67-3, 1986)

Schubert, Mahler and the Weight of the Past: 'Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen' and'Winterreise'Author(s): Susan YouensSource: Music & Letters, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Jul., 1986), pp. 256-268Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/735888 .

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SCHUBERT, MAHLER AND THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST:

'LIEDER EINES FAHRENDEN GESELLEN' AND 'WINTERREISE'

BY SUSAN YOUENS

THE ADVENT of historical consciousness and the rediscovery of musical treasures of the past brought composers in the nineteenth century face to face with a typically early-Romantic dilemma that had previously beset eighteenth-century poets, haunted by the ghosts of Milton and Shakespeare (Goethe's frank rejoicing that he was not an English writer and therefore not forced to compete with Shakespeare's achievement comes to mind). Compositions were no longer produced largely for their own milieu and age, consumed on the spot and then superseded, in the natural evolutionary order, by new works; instead, they lived on as models for subsequent generations-to be both loved and dreaded, for at the same time younger artists were enjoined to be original. The resulting, uniquely modern, conflict was one that each composer had to resolve in his own way. In Samuel Johnson's words, 'It is, indeed, always dangerous to be placed in a state of unavoidable comparison with excellence, and the danger is still greater when that excellence is consecrated by death'.' Malraux paraphrased the same observation much later with regard to creative artists in their youth: 'Every young man's heart is a graveyard in which are inscribed the names of a thousand dead artists but whose actual denizens are a few mighty, often antagonistic, ghosts'.2 Later works became, at their core, responses to earlier works in the assertion, whether conscious or unconscious, of priority: 'Where my predecessor's creation was, there let mine be'. The longing is impossible because the precursor irrevocably exists, nor would the late-comer wish him out of existence, but the desire to deny formative influences from others and to assert one's own uniqueness in an age that placed so high a premium on originality is part of the innermost fabric of music after Beethoven. The sense of creative impotence in the face of prior greatness is perhaps most marked when the dominating influence is immediate-Chausson's remark about the Wagnerian splendour that leaves behind it a darkness in which his successors grope vainly to light their own candles is an example;3 but the powers exercised by an earlier master on later artists can and do extend across several generations.

For any German song composer in the later nineteenth century, particularly in Vienna, the great precursor was inevitably Schubert. The achievement was so prodigious, not only in number but in range and breadth, from the smallest-scale, finely carved miniatures that represent a ne plus ultra in intimacy to the dramatic ballad-cantatas and the splendour of the Muller cycles, that later composers might

I Quoted in W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, New York, 1972, p. 3. 2 Quoted without reference in Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry, Oxford, 1973, p. 13. 3 Robin Holloway, Debussy and Wagner, London, 1979, p. 13.

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well have wondered what remained for them to do. (T. S. Eliot's remark that every great poet [composer, artist] and even minor ones 'use up' for ever some possibility of the language and therefore leave their successors with lessened resources is one version of the same anxiety.) Schubert himself, as one of the progenitors of a newly Romanticized Lied, seems largely to have escaped the anxiety of influence, at least, in the sphere of song composition (though his creative relationship to his older contemporary Beethoven is a fascinating subject, especially, in this context, when one recalls that An die ferne Geliebte was an experiment in a genre never thereafter resumed). When he speaks of Mozart in his diary,4 the passage breathes unalloyed rapture, the joy of turning to Mozartian beauty for its support to the heart and spirit, with no trace of the Emersonian invective against one's creative ancestors: 'They engross our attention, and so prevent a due inspection of ourselves; they prejudice our judgement in favour of their abilities, and so lessen the sense of our own; and they intimidate us with the splendour of their renown'.5 But for Brahms, Mahler, Wolf and their contemporaries Schubert was just such a Great Ancestor, a glorious figure to be venerated but also an inhibiting and demoralizing presence from the past whose accomplishments could not be equalled or challenged without trepidation and self-depreciation (the modest Schubert would undoubtedly have been amazed to know that he was to become a spectre of such power). The mature Brahms who wrote the following passage to a certain Geheimrat Wendt in 1887 knew what it meant to write songs in the wake of a titanic predecessor, knew both the spiritual enrichment and the burden placed on composers in the present by this 'enchantment' from the past:

The true successor to Beethoven is not Mendelssohn . . . nor is it Schumann, but Schubert. It is unbelievable, the quality of music contained in these songs. No composer understands as he does how to set words properly. With him perfection is always so naturally the outcome that it seems as if nothing could be otherwise . .. The way he treated a ghasel by Platen is enchanting. I have tried it too, but in comparison to Schubert everything is botching.6

The Schubertian homages and echoes that abound in Brahms are by no means the only symptoms, or even the most complex, of the modern dilemma of influence. Another way of combating the prior claims of a great man or a great work is to rewrite it, to appropriate it to oneself and alter it in some way to make it uniquely one's own and force it into conformity with one's own vision. It is precisely this phenomenon which is manifested in Gustav Mahler's first song-cycle, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, at its heart a response to Schubert's Winterreise. Mahler never acknowledged the relationship and may well have hidden it even from his own

Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: a Documentaiy Biography, trans. Eric Blom, London, 1946, p. 60: 'A light, bright, fine day this will remain throughout my whole life. As from afar the magic notes of Mozart's music still gently haunt me. How unbelievably vigorously, and yet again how gently, was it impressed deep, deep into the heart by Schlesinger's masterly playing. Thus does our soul retain these fair impressions, which no time, no circumstances, can efface, and they lighten out existence. They show us in the darkness of this life a bright, clear, lovely distance, for which we hope with confidence. 0 Mozart, immortal Mozart, how many, oh how endlessly many such comforting perceptions of a brighter and better life hast thou brought to our souls!' (13 June 1816).

5 Quoted from 'Self-Reliance' in Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 27. 6 Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, i (Vienna & Leipzig, 1904), p. 229. Brahms is referring to Schubert's 'Die

Liebe hat gelogen', D.751, set to a ghasel by August von Platen-Hallermunde; no setting by Brahms is known. Brahms quotes Schubert's 'Der Doppelgiinger' in his 'Herbstgefiihl', Op. 48 No. 7, and the last song of Winterreise, 'Der Leiermann', is the basis of his Riickert setting 'Einf6rmig ist der Liebe Gram', Op. 113 No. 13, one of the canons for women's voices.

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consciousness, but lack of awareness on the artist's part is no denial of the fact of influence-it may in fact be indicative of its deep significance.

The writer or artist may be self-revealing enough in other ways. But when his anxiety has to do with the all-important matter of his craft, and his achievement or fear of impotence there, he naturally prefers to wrestle with it privately or to express it only indirectly.7

The evidence of a struggle with tradition for one's own name, likeJacob wrestling with the Angel, is in the work itself, both text and music, since Mahler wrote the poetry for three of the four songs himself. He summarized his new composition in a letter to a close friend, Dr. Friedrich Lohr, on New Year's Day 1885: 'The idea of the songs as a whole is that a wayfaring man, who has been stricken by fate, now sets forth into the world, travelling wherever his road may lead him'.8 The same brief description could apply as well to Wilhelm Muller's and Schubert's longer, more complex work, and thematic resemblances between the Lieder einesfahrenden Gesellen and Winterreise are easy to find: the solitary farewell, and the leave-taking by night, the sweetheart who has married another man, the longing for death and the linden tree are all readily apparent. All are also common currency in nineteenth-century Germany, and the ubiquity of these images and themes might seem an argument against the claim for a specific relationship between the two cycles-there are groves of linden trees in nineteenth-century German verse and Wanderlieder by the hundred (Muller, who was an advanced case of Wanderlust himself, wrote dozens of them). But Mahler does more than merely borrow a vignette or two from the storehouse of German Romanticism: he also inverts elements that could only come from Muller and Schubert: it is the winter journey from 50 years earlier that we see through a glass darkly in the 'yellow field' and 'dark little room' of the later work.

It has been known for some time that the texts of Mahler's Lieder einesfahrenden Gesellen are a latter-day descendant of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn;9 more specifically, the first song, 'Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht', is adapted from a poem in the third volume of the Arnim-Brentano collection. In Des Knaben Wunderhorn the two quatrains of 'Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht' form the first portion of a quodlibet consisting of several parts, different in tone, subject, metre, provenance, even language (the second section, which Mahler did not use at all, is in Swabian dialect).

Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht, Hab ich einen traurigen Tag: Geh ich in mein Kammerlein, Wein um meinen Schatz.

I Bate, The Burden of the Past, p. 8. 8 Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Knud Martner, trans. Eithne Wilkins et al., London & Boston, 1979

p. 81. In this letter Mahler tells Lohr that he is sending him the last poem of the cycle, the one containing the most Schubertian echoes, but he did not do so.

I The date of Mahler's first acquaintance with Des Knaben Wunderhorn is a vexed question, but it was certainly earlier than Mahler himself stated: see Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: the Wunderhorn Years, London, 1975, pp. 117-19.

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Blumlein blau, verdorre nicht, Du stehst auf griiner Haide; Des Abends, wenn ich schlafen geh, So denk ich an das Lieben. 0

Mahler preserves virtually all eight lines of the folk poem intact but makes a few significant and characteristic changes of wording. 'Einen traurigen Tag' is personalized and becomes 'meinen traurigen Tag', and the last line is similarly altered. The lover in the folk poem thinks of love at the end, Mahler's introverted and melancholy alter ego not of Liebe but of Leide, of his sorrow, which he claims as a possession. In the last line of the quodlibet segment the rejected lover says, 'So denk ich an das Lieben', the word 'So' encompassing the previous lines of the quatrain-he implores the blue flower not to fade so that he may think of love or of his beloved when he goes to bed in the evening. The flower has become the symbol of his love; there is perhaps also the subsequent association for later readers with Novalis's 'blaue Blume', one of the primary symbols of German Romanticism. Mahler changes the scenario: he too tells the blue flower not to wither and fade, but he then changes his mind when he hears the 'sweet little bird'. The 'Voglein siuss' is entirely Mahler's contribution, sound added to the colours of the landscape and a link furthermore between the first song and the second, with its talkative finch (a 'Fink' who sings 'Zink! Zink!' is a charming, childlike touch and a variation on the 'Kukuk! Kukuk!' refrains in Des Knaben Wunderhorn). The wayfarer cannot bear the dissonance between nature's beauty and his own sorrow; unlike the folk protagonist, he would have the landscape change and darken at his behest, in accordance with his misery. There is no conflict in the quodlibet between the beautiful landcape and the jilted lover, who cherishes the sight and memory of the blue flower, but Mahler's wayfarer, an inheritor of the pathetic fallacy, feels his pain heightened by the stark contrast with a brilliant, sunlit, summertime ('Lenz ist ja vorbei!') scene.

Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht Fr6hliche Hochzeit macht, Hab' ich meinen traurigen Tag! Geh' ich in mein Kaimmerlein, Dunkles Kaimmerlein! Weine, wein' um meinen Schatz, Um meinen lieben Schatz! Bliimlein blau! Bliimlein blau! Verdorre nicht! verdorre nicht! Voglein siiss! Voglein siuss! Du singst auf griiner Heide Ach! wie ist die Welt so schon! Zikuth! Zikuth! Singet nicht! Bliuhet nicht! Lenz ist ja vorbei! Alles singen ist nun aus! Des Abends, wenn ich schlafen geh' Denk' ich an mein Leide! An mein Leide!

10 Achim von Arnim & Clemens Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, iii (Berlin, 1968), 124. The original text has 'Wann . . .'2

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Mahler had no thought of writing im Volkston, of creating folk poetry that could possibly be mistaken for the real thing; he assimilated folk idioms in a manner quite different from Muller's (who was praised by the young Heine for his true understanding of folk verse"), as the starting-point of his own works. If he was not as good a poet as Muller, the 'German Byron"2 (no master himself, although his 'Winterreise' is often underrated'3), he was an ardent and often beautifully lyrical one. Comparing the first poem of the Lieder einesfahrenden Gesellen with its source in Des Knaben Wunderhorn reveals clearly Mahler's technique of rhapsodic expansion, his idiosyncratic mixture of folk idiom and contemporaneous traits and his extension of the simpler, more concentrated substance of the folk poem. The Wayfarer poems are undeniably of their time-in fact they anticipate some of the sinuosities and curves ofjugendstil art-with their deliberately irregular line lengths and varying poetic rhythms, the heightened emotional tone, the abrupt changes of mood. The contemporaneity of the Mahlerian style helps to explain why both the source in Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the link with Winterreise remained hidden from view for a time.

The antithesis between joy and sorrow, the 'happy' wedding and the wayfarer's 'sorrowful' day, is augmented by means of a technique that appears several times in the course of the poem-the repetition of all or part of a phrase for emphasis, with an additional adjective:

Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht, Frohliche Hochzeit macht,

Geh' ich in mein Kiimmerlein, Dunkles Kaimmerlein! Weine, wein' um meinen Schatz, Um meinen lieben Schatz!

When Mahler repeats and elaborates these fragmentary phrases, the second, paired line is both shorter and metrically altered:

Wenn Mein Schaitz Hochzeit macht, Frohliche Hochzeit micht

Metre, caesura and accent shift and change throughout the poem, although the division of the line into two halves, each half in trochees with a masculine ending, as in the first line, is the most frequent construction, one created either by simple repetition ('Bliimlein blau! Bliimlein blau!', 'V6glein siuss! V6glein siiss!'), by parallel imperatives ('Singet nicht! Bliuhet nicht!') or by a caesura within a line, such that the weight of the phrase is concentrated at the centre ('Wenn mein Schatz I Hochzeit macht'). To a certain extent Mahler derives his shifting poetic accents and metres from the quodlibet in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, where the varied rhythms and line lengths (although they are varied much less than in Mahler)

1 Heinrich Heine: Briefe, ed. Friedrich Hirth, i (Mainz, 1950),169-70. See Susan Youens, 'Poetic Rhythm and Musical Metre in Schubert's "Winterreise" ', Music & Letters, lxv (1984), 28.

12 Muller was among the best-known German champions of the Greek struggle for independence from the Turks. The poems that won him immediate recognition were the 47 Griechenlieder.

13 See Susan Youens, 'Retracing a Winter Journey', 19th Century Music, ix (1985-6), 128-35.

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create an effect of naivety, a lack of artfulness, and a particular kind of expressivity which Mahler then exaggerates-changing inflections of sorrow. In the first quatrain of the Wunderhorn poem three lines contain four poetic feet each, the fourth line three, while the second stanza employs four-foot lines throughout. The first verse is exclusively trochaic; the second, after one trochaic line, is iambic. The first stanza ends with the shortest line of the verse; the iambic close of the second is two syllables longer. The second and third lines of the first verse are parallel to one another rhythmically and syntactically in a fashion not duplicated in the second stanza: 'Hab ich einen traurigen Tag: / Geh ich in mein Kaimmerlein'. Even here the 'extra' syllable in the word 'trau-ri-gen' has no equivalent in the paired line that follows, in which the trochees are quite regular. There is no end-rhyme, only assonance of a sort and near-rhyme in the first verse-'macht', 'Tag', 'Schatz'- and a predominance of 'ei' sounds in the last two lines ('Geh ich in mein Kaimmerlein, / Wein um meinen Schatz'), and the second stanza lacks even those elements.

All four texts set to music'4 in the Wayfarer cycle are stylistically like the transformed folk verse of the beginning, an emphatic, rhapsodic style much like Nietzsche's poetry in Also sprach Zarathustra, exactly contemporaneous with the Lieder einesfahrenden Gesellen. In the first three songs the lines are all short-breathed; only in the last, the Trauermarsch, does Mahler write longer, more deliberately paced lines, for obvious reasons. Even there the ending, like many passages in Nos. 1-3, consists largely of fragmentary phrases, at times single words ('Alles! Alles!'). Because of Mahler's propensity for exclamation marks (24 of them in the second poem alone), the texts share a marked breathlessness, although the rapidity with which the brief phrases flash by on the printed page is mitigated or cancelled altogether by their prolongation in music. In the vocal line Mahler will occasionally fragment a phrase of poetry even further for emotional effect, as in the line 'und hore ... klingen ... ihr silbern Lachen' from the third song. Where there is rhyme at all in the second, third and fourth songs it is either very simple ('Lust-Brust', 'Gast-Rast', 'seh'-weh-geh' ') or dependent upon assonance and alliteration, naive rhymes, as in 'hing-Fink' in the second song. The style, the themes and images are all an amalgamation of traditional and Romantic motifs in their most recent apparition; the fusion of the two streams distinguishes the four poems set to music from the one other extant poem explicitly on the Wayfarer theme. 'Die Nacht blickt mild aus stummen, ew'gen Fernen', dated Kassel December 1884 and first published in Der Merker of I March 1912, is written in iambic pentameters-a metre never found in the Wunderhorn poems-with end-rhyme, not only in rime embrasse'e but rimes riches:

Siehst du den stummen, fahrenden Gesellen? Gar einsam und verloren ist sein Pfad, Wohl Weg und Weiser der verloren hat Und ach, kein Stern will seinen Pfad erhellen 15

" Manuscript versions of the Wayfarer poems exist that differ significantly from the texts as set to music. Mitchell (The Wunderhorn Years, pp. 247-8) suggests that these were most likely intended as separate and self-sufficient literary works.

'5 Mitchell, op. cit., pp. 124, 247-8. Mahler's letter to Lohr refers to six songs; the sixth poem was probably 'Die Sonne spinnt ihr farbig Netz', also dated Kassel, December 1884 (Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler, i (London, 1974), 826-7, 831).

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This wayfarer does not speak until the end of the poem, unlike the texts of the song cycle, in which the rejected lover speaks throughout. The exclamations scattered here and there in the Lieder einesfahrenden Gesellen, the vivid, jagged style of the four familiar texts, do not occur here; the tone and style are more literary, more 'elevated', more Byronic, even, and the wanderer's destiny owes nothing to folk poetry; he encounters the Sphinx, cannot answer its riddle and must atone with his life. The bird-song and meadows of rural Germany are gone, and there is no mention at all of love or a false sweetheart, only 'des Weges Leid'. This is another wayfarer on another journey, one that ends very differently.

The 'fahrender Gesell' ' of Mahler's title for the cycle recalls the travelling journeyman in Die schone Muillerin, but it is the wanderer in Winterreise, who is not a journeyman, whose presence we sense more strongly in Mahler's cycle. The two cycles, Schubert's last and Mahler's first, take place in utterly different landscapes, however; the 'winter journey' becomes a 'summer journey' near the end of the century, set in the world of the Third Symphony and the Wunderhorn song 'Ich ging' mit Lust durch einen griunen Wald'. In each of the four Wayfarer songs the bereaved lover goes out into the meadows and fields, sunlit and beautiful in all but the last song-the 'grine Heide' of the first, the finch's 'schone Welt' in the second, the 'gelbes Feld' of the third, but the 'dunkle Heide' of the fourth. There are parallels with Winterreise in the first song: Mahler's wayfarer speaks to the bird, Schubert's wanderer, in his fifteenth song, 'Die Kraihe', to the crow that had accompanied him thus far. The wanderer too laments, in No. 12, 'Einsamkeit', when the skies are blue and sunny and the breezes soft-'Ach! dass die Luft so ruhig! / Ach, dass die Welt so licht!'-because he and his surroundings are not in accord. But Mahler's fourth song, the night-time Lied, is the locus for most of the Winterreise references, both direct and inverted, musical and textual: the wanderer's much longer journey begins immediately with the first of Schubert's 24 songs; the wayfarer's shorter road to death is entirely contained within the one song, the last of Mahler's cycle. Mahler's wayfarer, like Muller's wanderer, leaves the 'allerliebster Platz' and sets out alone and at night, with no one to bid him farewell; both take pains to steal away under cover of darkness, and both resent and mourn the fact that their departures and subsequent journeys are unseen and unattended, that they are completely friendless and solitary. The frozen river in 'Auf dem Flusse' cannot even vouchsafe the wanderer any words of parting, and in 'Einsamkeit' he goes on his way 'solitary and without greeting', while the wayfarer sings that no one bade him farewell. Both emphasize their lonely condition by reference to mute and non-human 'companions', a moon-cast shadow in 'Gute Nacht' ('Es zieht ein Mondenschatten als mein Gefahrte mit') and love and sorrow for Mahler's wayfarer ('Mein Gesell' war Lieb' und Leide!').

Even the opening image in the fourth song may have its origins in Winterreise. Mahler carefully links the songs in the cycle one to another by means of repeated images and phrases-the 'sweet little bird' in the first song and the finch in the second song both sing of how beautiful the world is. The eerie metonymic vision of the sweetheart's two blue eyes first appears in the third song: 'Wenn ich in den Himmel seh', / seh' ich zwei blaue Augen steh'n!', reminiscent of the multiple suns in 'Die Nebensonnen', the penultimate song in the winter journey. Throughout Miuller's cycle the wanderer relates aspects of the landscape around him to his own thoughts, feelings and reflections; for example, the crows that perch on the pointed

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eaves of houses and whose motions as they shift to and fro displace the ice and snow that have accumulated there seem in 'Riuckblick' to mock him, to throw snowballs at him. In 'Die Nebensonnen' he sees, not a hallucination, as so many have assumed, but the optical-atmospheric phenomenon called parhelia, in which refraction produces a neighbour image of the sun on either side. The two reflected suns that eventually disappear when the atmospheric conditions change are 'die besten zwei', symbolic of his former sweetheart's eyes, now also vanished from his sight, though they once seemed so steadfast ('Und sie auch standen da so stier, / als wollten sie nicht weg von mir'). Mahler's wayfarer too looks up in the heavens and sees there the image of his beloved's eyes.

The ending of the cycle, the last section of 'Die zwei blauen Augen', is the most revealing, the place where one is most conscious of the roots in Winterreise. The wayfarer finds a linden tree by the side of the road and goes to sleep-sleep a trope for death; here for the first time he 'rests in sleep'. Earlier, the burning knife in his breast gave him no peace, no rest, by day or night ('Nicht bei Tag, nicht bei Nacht, wenn ich schlieff', in the third song), like the wanderer's 'burning wounds' and the 'Wurm' that gnaws at his heart in 'Rast', but at the end he finds the peace that has eluded him. Beneath the linden tree in bloom, with its blossoms 'snowing' down upon him, everything painful in life-love, sorrow, the world itself, dreams- becomes 'good' once again, transformed:

Auf der Strasse steht ein Lindenbaum, Da hab' ich zum ersten Mal im Schlaf geruht! Unter dem Lindenbaum! Der hat seine Bliuten iiber mich geschneit, Da wusst' ich nicht, wie das Leben tut War alles, alles wieder gut! Ach, alles wieder gut! Alles! Alles! Lieb' und Leid, Und Welt und Traum!

It is the identification of the linden tree with death that points to the origins in the earlier work, specifically Schubert's fifth song, 'Der Lindenbaum'. Since the time of the Minnesingers the Lindenbaum, as the spot for lovers' rendezvous and hence, by extension, a symbol of all that is gentle, sweet (lind) and good in nature, is a commonplace in German lyric poetry. Walther von der Vogelweide's beautiful 'Under der linden an der heide', in which a young woman sings of the sheltered spot beneath the linden tree where she and her lover lay together, is the prototype for many poems that followed, and it is a poem that nineteenth-century folksong enthusiasts such as Muller probably knew; it was (mistakenly) included in several anthologies of German folk poetry in the early years of the century, among them the Sammlung deutscher Volkslieder of 1807 by Gustav Biisching and Friedrich von der Hagen, a collection that Muller mentions in his diary.'6 Elsewhere, in the poem 'Das Weltende' from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a young man begins by saying, in truest traditional fashion: 'Because I do not have a sweetheart, I will find one right away ... I walk up and down the narrow streets until I reach the great linden tree ... there sat my sweetheart'. Mahler himself was later to set Friedrich Riickert's

16 See Diay and Letters of Wilhelm Miller, ed. Philip Schuyler Allen & James Taft Hatfield, Chicago, 1903, p. 28.

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'Ich atmet' einen linden Duft', a poem in which the gentle scent of a single twig from a linden tree evokes an entire love. But the linden tree in Winterreise is no longer a lovers' meeting-place; instead, the wanderer makes a crucial decision in 'Der Lindenbaum', the turning point of the cycle, and Mahler subsequently makes of that moment the basis for the ending of his own work.

The wanderer in Winterreise hears in memory the sound of the linden leaves rustling in a tree that he has just that very night passed by. The remembrance is impelled by what happens in the previous song, 'Erstarrung', in which he searches frantically for a trace of green grass or flowers, something alive and blooming, along the river-bank where he used to stroll arm-in-arm with his sweetheart. In the ice and snow of winter the search is futile, and he soon gives it up, realizing that he will inevitably forget her when the pain she has caused him ends. (This is an admission that Mahler's wayfarer, whom we perceive somehow as less mature, more sentimental, than Muller's wanderer, never makes.) However, the panic- stricken, short-lived attempt to find a bit of greenery produced in turn a 'green' reminiscence of the linden tree in happier days, when he 'dreamed sweet dreams' in its shade and carved words of love in its bark.

The remembered rustling of the linden leaves sounds to the wanderer like voices, which seem to say to him, 'Come here to me, companion! Here you will find your rest'. Their message could mean either of two things: that the wanderer actually return to the past, an impossible delusion, or that he die, a dissolution into nature itself and a return possible only in death. Thomas Mann interpreted the song as emblematic of death near the end of The Magic Mountain, when Hans Castorp becomes obsessed with music, his last 'tutor' in this Bildungsroman. Each night he listens over and over again to five works in particular, always ending with 'Der Lindenbaum', which symbolizes for him the German spirit, the Teutonic past, the country itself. His love for Schubert's song, however, is an uneasy one, full of darker resonance: 'What was the world behind the song, which the motions of his conscience made to seem a world of forbidden love?', asks the author-narrator and concludes: 'It was death'.'7 At the end, as Hans runs into battle in World War I, he sings, without realizing it, two phrases from 'Der Lindenbaum', first 'Ich schnitt' in seine Rinde so manches liebe Wort' and finally 'Und seine Zweige rauschten, als riefen sie mir zu . . .', breaking off at that point.

Mann's recognition of the realm of death in Schubert's and Muller's song is supported by a similar passage in the fifth and sixth verses of 'Thranenregen' from Die schone Muillerin:

Und in den Bach versunken Der ganze Himmel schien Und wollte mich mit hinunter In seine Tiefe zieh'n. Und fiber den Wolken und Sternen Da rieselte munter der Bach, Und rief mit Singen und Klingen: Geselle, Geselle! mir nach.

7 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, New York, 1969, p. 625.

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The brook, the miller-lad's confidant throughout the cycle, calls him 'Geselle', a motif repeated later with the linden leaves and the wanderer, and seems as if it wishes to draw him within its depths in a veiled invitation to death that the youth either does not acknowledge or does not recognize. At the end, perhaps remembering the brook's earlier words, the despairing and bereft miller-lad indeed drowns himself (the brook's lullaby, 'Gute Ruh', gute Ruh', thu' die Augen zu', has its latter-day echoes in the Mahlerian lullaby-farewells at the end of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied von der Erde, where long and unhappy journeys culminate in the peace and longed-for rest of death).

Unlike the miller-lad, the wanderer refuses to heed the linden leaves. His hat blows off his head in the cold wind, but he does not turn back to retrieve it, and his austere, almost curt words, 'Ich wendete mich nicht', are a double refusal: to turn back and find his hat, to heed the linden voices and join them in death. The temptation to stand still in the midst of a winter storm and freeze to death lingers long after he is distant from the place where he heard the 'voices', whose true provenance is within his own mind, but it is a temptation he resists. (Hans Castorp fatally misinterprets 'Der Lindenbaum', recognizing rightly the attraction of death-and a uniquely Teutonic death at that-but paying no heed to the wanderer's heroic rejection of the invitation.) After this crucial turning-point the journey continues, but Mahler's wayfarer ends his 'Reise' there in a reversal and revision of 'Der Lindenbaum' and ultimately the entire Muller cycle.

There are musical links as well. It hardly seems coincidental that the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen begin in D minor, followed by D major at the start of the second song, and D minor again as the initial tonality of the third-the keys of 'Gute Nacht'. In the earliest extant manuscript of the Wayfarer songs the third song, 'Ich hab' ein gliuhend' Messer' begins in B minor, a familiar Schubertian key for songs of desolation, grief, melancholy, all shades of sorrow, and ends in C minor, one of the principal tonalities in Winterreise ('Erstarrung', 'Rast', 'Der greise Kopf, 'Die Krahe'); revised, the song begins in D minor and ends in E flat minor, whose tonic major is also important in the earlier work. The fourth and last song, perhaps most significantly, begins in E minor, the tonic minor key of the E major of 'Der Lindenbaum'; the third stanza of Schubert's song is set in E minor. The linden tree episode at the end, though, is set by Mahler largely in F major with touches of tonic minor, like the lullaby conclusion of Kindertotenlieder; curiously, F major is the principal tonality in Winterreise only once, in 'Das Wirtshaus', when the wanderer is actually at a cemetery, the longed-for 'Ruhestatte' of Mahler's wayfarer, when he is most hopeful of peace, refuge and solace in death. There are also a few thematic reminiscences. The opening of 'Die zwei blauen Augen' (Ex. I a) bears an undeniable similarity to that of Schubert's 'Der Wegweiser' (Ex. 1 b). The two songs are also notably alike in tempo and atmosphere."8 Mahler's marchefune'bre has the dotted rhythms characteristic of the genre, unlike Schubert's song, but the resemblance is still startlingly close.

To our present knowledge, Mahler never mentioned or wrote of any resemblances between the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Winterreise, but the

18 See Susan Youens, 'Wegweiser in Winterreise', Journal of Musicology (forthcoming). The anacrusic motif rising by step through the interval of a third, followed by non-legato repeated notes, also occurs in 'Gute Nacht' and elsewhere in Winterreise.

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Ex. 1 (a)

9 I s r, - k bs k

Die zwei blau - en Au - gen von mei - nem Schatz, die ha - ben

p.

5

mich in die wei -te Welt ge - schickt. Da-... musst' ich Ab - schied

( f\ . W I-- -I--

pp sempre pp

O* .z -! . . F F Y ,

i; ~~~~~~~i

-A 1 L _ *

nech in di men - ae Wel gee -shct Die mussten ich A b - scie

(b)~~ ~~ 6

Was ver meid ich denn die We ge, wo die an dern Wan drer gehn,

{ ~~~~~~~~J j t . _II6 - J I

IPP_IPP smpe

(~~~~~~ Q--r - r ,,-,-152r

_ 0 0 _ S . I I . I266



echoes and inversions of Miiller-Schubert in the later cycle could nevertheless only be the product of Schubert's influence, all the stronger as the latter-day composer began work on his first essay in a genre the earlier composer had so forcefully defined near the end of his life. Mahler was not, of course, the only fin-de-siecle composer for whom the overwhelming influence of a previous master had to be overcome, if never entirely and often many times: Debussy's long struggle with the Wagnerian legacy, 'the ghost of old Klingsor', is a case in point. The anguish of coming immediately after a great creative achievement echoes throughout the words and music alike of belle 6poque France, summed up most poignantly perhaps in Chabrier's cry 'Wagner m'a tue','9 and in every bar of Gwendoline, Le Roi Arthus of Chausson, d'Indy's Fervaal, Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and Debussy's own Pelle6as et MAlisande, a work whose very resistance to Wagner's influence defines Wagner's power even more cogently than the leitmotifs and faint reminiscences of Parsifal.20 Song composers after Schubert and Schumann had to contend with the dual burden of both a musical and a literary past, particularly when they set the same poetry to music as their predecessors. The young Brahms's setting of Eichendorffs 'Mondnacht' ('Es war, als hatt' der Himmel') is, for all its intrinsic qualities and distinctively Brahmsian touches, one instance of the inhibiting effect of a prior model; it was written within fifteen years of Schumann's masterpiece in the Op. 39 Liederkreis and published in 1854, while Schumann was still alive. In the same year Brahms's Op. 3 contained a setting of 'In der Fremde', with which Schumann opened his Op. 39, and the result was a somewhat pallid derivative. Yet the Op. 3 set begins with Brahms's first extant masterpiece in the field of song, 'Liebestreu', to a text by Robert Reinick. Brahms (in 1885?) told a friend that he had in his youth set all of Eichendorff and Heine (a tall order) to music but had desisted from publishing his settings because he knew of 'better compositions'; the distinction between 'other compositions' and 'mine' makes it clear that the 'other works' were not his own.

. . . I set the whole of Eichendorff and Heine to music. There were some really nice little songs among them. .. And you will grant me, I hope, that I once wrote a setting of [Heine's] 'Du bist wie eine Blume'? But you probably won't remember that I set [Geibel] (and even Eichendorff and others) extensively as a boy. When the time for publication came I was happily shrewd enough to recognize other compositions as better and to let mine lie.21

None of the early Heine songs survives, and Brahms did not return to that poet until the first song of the Ffinf Gesange, Op. 71, 'Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze'. By then he knew, as he had not known in his youth, to avoid those texts by Heine, Goethe, Riickert and others that had previously been set by Beethoven, Schubert or Schumann, in tacit acknowledgement of the difficulty, or rather the impossibil- ity, of banishing their sounds from his mind when faced with texts they had unforgettably rendered in music. Wolf could do so, but only as a conscious effort:

" See Francois Lesure, preface to Martine Kahan & Nicole Wild, Wagner et la France, Paris, 1984, p. 7. 20 See Holloway, Debussy and Wagner, passim. Holloway quotes Chabrier's remark on hearing Tristan for the

first time, at the age of 38: 'There is enough music for a century in this work; the man has left us nothing to do' (op. cit., 2?. 12). Kalbeck, Brahms, i. 138-9.

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he set only those texts that he felt had not received their fullest potential musical expression from Schubert-texts which, indeed, could not be fully realized until the development of a 'post-Wagnerian' harmonic vocabulary22-and at considerable cost in peace of mind, knowing as he did the inevitable comparisons that would result. 'They fairly threaten me with Schubert, but I cannot keep my mouth shut because a man of genius lived before me and wrote splendid songs 23 a statement that is the epitome of the anxiety of influence; the words 'splendid' and 'genius', the obvious veneration, are as notable as the bristling, defensive posture. (It is remarkable that the considerable influence of Carl Loewe on Wolf seems not to have been a source of nearly so much perturbation as that of Schubert.) The Schubertian 'threat' was omnipresent in Wolf: he worked in the same genre, on the same scale, set the same poets and even the same poems. For Brahms to begin his first published piano sonata with a quotation from the 'Hammerklavier', for Wolf to place the ten Goethe texts previously set by Schubert at the head of his Goethe-Lieder, was to admit and even emblazon what could not be hidden anyway, but Mahler is another matter. There is no Brahmsian hommage in the form of a direct quotation, nor is there the wish to supplant Schubert's 'unsuccessful' setting of a poem with his own. Instead, the influence is more internalized: the composer who would take unto himself and then alter a masterpiece by Schubert might not be willing to proclaim the fact to himself, much less the outside world.

22 Speaking of his own settings of Goethe's 'Prometheus' and 'Ganymed' in a letter of 1892 to Emil Kauffmann, Wolf says: 'I share the view that Schubert was not successful in setting these two poems; it was reserved for a post-Wagnerian time to set these splendid poems to music in the spirit of Goethe' (Hugo Wolfs Briefe an Emil Kauffmann, ed. Edmund Hellmer, Berlin, 1903, p. 25).

23 Frank Walker, Hugo Wolf: a Biography, London, 1951, p. 248.

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Documents

Youens, Schubert's Winterreise and Mahler's Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen (M&L 67-3, 1986)