Halfway through Schubert’s Winterreise comes the moment of lilting sweetness - and of sweetness defiled - which is the song Fruhlingstraum. It is a problematic song, in some ways almost sugary, as Ian Bostridge admits in his searching new book on the great song cycle, not least when the music reaches the word Seligkeit, meaning bliss or happiness.
It’s a word ominously familiar in Schubert, and there is a separate, buoyant little Schubert song of that very title, which was one of the first I ever got to know and love. I was still a schoolboy when I bought Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s early recording and I chose it for what lay on the other of this ten-inch blue-label Columbia 78rpm disc, which happened to be Die Forelle, The Trout, source of the Trout Quintet.
This was a song I already knew and adored and wanted to hear again and again. These were the days when Schwarzkopf’s voice had few of the mannerisms it gained later in her career and when Gerald Moore was her sublime accompanist.
But though her youthfully exuberant recording was fleet and blissful, Seligkeit (like so many Schubert songs) has its undercurrents, which were ominously caught by the mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender in a more recent recent recording which was her contribution to the vast CD collection of Schubert’s songs devised by the pianist Graham Johnson. On the front of the plastic box is a picture of a graveyard and Fassbaender’s is a Seligkeit to remind us that Schubertian bliss - as we are increasingly coming to realise - all too easily ends in despair. It is something that Ian Bostridge, in his exhaustive new study, rightly devotes much space to explaining.
3 March 2015
It’s a word ominously familiar in Schubert, and there is a separate, buoyant little Schubert song of that very title, which was one of the first I ever got to know and love. I was still a schoolboy when I bought Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s early recording and I chose it for what lay on the other of this ten-inch blue-label Columbia 78rpm disc, which happened to be Die Forelle, The Trout, source of the Trout Quintet.
This was a song I already knew and adored and wanted to hear again and again. These were the days when Schwarzkopf’s voice had few of the mannerisms it gained later in her career and when Gerald Moore was her sublime accompanist.
But though her youthfully exuberant recording was fleet and blissful, Seligkeit (like so many Schubert songs) has its undercurrents, which were ominously caught by the mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender in a more recent recent recording which was her contribution to the vast CD collection of Schubert’s songs devised by the pianist Graham Johnson. On the front of the plastic box is a picture of a graveyard and Fassbaender’s is a Seligkeit to remind us that Schubertian bliss - as we are increasingly coming to realise - all too easily ends in despair. It is something that Ian Bostridge, in his exhaustive new study, rightly devotes much space to explaining.
3 March 2015
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