Wanderers Nachtlieder

Chris and I had a most satisfying music lesson this afternoon. We have one of those most Tuesday afternoons, when Gavan meets us at 5 p.m. online to check on our progress learning various songs, usually by Franz Schubert, and gives us advice on how to improve. With a microphone plugged into the computer, Chris does the voice part and I accompany him at the keyboard. 

It was 2002 when we started taking these duets seriously. Chris had just turned down a job offer in California and was wanting something to substitute for the challenge he had missed, so he told me he was going to start learning Schubert's famous Winterreise song cycle and taking voice lessons. Jack Cook was his first singing teacher, who died in 2013. As for the piano parts, I had a big uphill struggle ahead of me! 19 years later, here we still are, still working on Winterreise and other Lieder from the repertoire.

Wanderers Nachtlied 1 

Der du von dem Himmel bist, 

Alles Leid und Schmerzen stillest, 

Den, der doppelt elend ist, 

Doppelt mit Erquickung füllst; 

Ach, ich bin des Treibens müde! 

Was soll all der Schmerz und Lust? 

Süßer Friede, 

Komm, ach komm in meine Brust!

Anyway, this afternoon we concentrated on two short songs, the Wanderers Nachtlied 1 and Wanderers Nachtlied 2, as they are called: Wanderer's Night Songs. They are settings of two poems by Goethe, both about peacefulness at the day's end: he had scribbled the second poem onto the wooden wall of a gamekeeper's cabin as a young man in 1780 and returned there as an old man in 1831, without long to live, to see if his words were still decipherable. They were. It is said that Goethe burst into tears when he rediscovered his graffiti; this may or may not be a romantic fiction. This poem does have a valedictory tone to it. 

Wanderers Nachtlied 2 

Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh 

In allen Wipfeln 

Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; 

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. 

Warte nur, balde 

Ruhest du auch.

Schubert set both songs to music in the 1820s. The first one is only 11 bars long, the second 14 bars long, but the subtlety in their melodic expression and harmony is phenomenal, Schubert's modulations being a sort of tribute to the words. 

Chris and I assumed these short songs would be easy to master. Quite the contrary!

As a performer, you have to understand which notes / syllables / chords to emphasize, and how to do that. Over-emphasizing is not good at all. It's not obvious for a teacher how to give instructions in how to change the mood of a song from phrase to phrase. Gavan says things like, "This section has to start gently, tenderly, with more warmth ..." but what does that mean exactly? Some students may not understand what he's talking about, although I think Chris and I usually do. The singer also has to know where to snatch a breath or refrain from breathing; the pianist must learn where to make the left hand more predominant and which chords to tone down in the right hand, or where to bring out the melody line, and both performers have to know when to hold back and slow down slightly, where to pause, crescendo or decrescendo ... There's no end to what needs thought and experimentation while preparing to perform songs like these. But an audience must experience the performance as a spontaneous one. 

Here's an old recording of Fischer-Diskau singing the second song:

During today's lesson Gavan gave us, as he often does, an analysis of the harmonic progression in both the melody and its accompaniment. An unexpected sliding from major to minor and back again is characteristic of Schubert and we're beginning to think that his favourite chord may have been the diminished seventh. I wondered whether Wagner (creator of the "Tristan Chord"!) was familiar with Schubert's compositions, but Gavan thought probably not. Wagner would have preferred a more bombastic sound, he thought, such as a Beethoven symphony.