German Song Onstage. Laura Tunbridge

      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 (Tutzing, Ger.: Hans Schneider, 1993), 1: 227 (doc. no. 302), for a facsimile of the program. In the review of the concert in the Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung (later the Vossische Zeitung) for January 19, 1825 (229–30), we are told that “Die Forelle” was the tenth “dish” in this “Kunst-Soupés” and made a truly delicious dessert; the writer points out that Schubert, “who has also composed numerous operas,” was not yet well known in Berlin.

      3.For example, the program for a concert directed by the violin prodigy and conductor Franz Joseph Clement (he commissioned Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, op. 61)—advertised in the Wiener-Zeitung for January 13, 1825, 37—included Schubert’s male quartets “Geist der Liebe,” D747 (1822, text by Friedrich Matthisson) and “Frühlingsgesang,” D740 (1822, text by Franz von Schober), began with the overture to Luigi Cherubini’s Lodoïska (1791), and ended with Mozart’s Don Giovanni overture (Waidelich, Hilmar-Voit, and Mayer, Franz Schubert, 1: 226 [doc. no. 300]).

      4.Other works composed for or dedicated to Anna Milder are Conradin Kreutzer, Lieder und Romanzen von Uhland mit Begleitung der Guitarre, op. 70 (Leipzig: Probst, 1826), Bernhard Klein, Vier geistliche Gesänge (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1819), and Joseph Wolfram, “Lied” (Bonn: Simrock, 1820).

      5.This work and its composer, Carl Wilhelm August Blum (1786–1844), who studied with Antonio Salieri in Vienna and was named composer at the Prussian royal court in 1820, are invoked in The Harmonicon 1825, 162. The critic writes, “The concert of the greatest attraction has been that of the celebrated Madame Milder on which occasion she sung, with great effect, the Troubadour, a new song, composed expressly for her by Carl Blum, accompanied by him on the guitar” (165). Blum’s operatic and vaudeville works include Aladin die Wunderlampe (1828), Gänserich und Gänschen (1822), and Doctor Johannes Faust, der wundertätige Magus der Nordens (1829); he also arranged Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz for guitar accompaniment.

      6.The French court harpist Xavier Desargues wrote Cours complet de harpe, advertised in the Journal général de la littérature de France (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1811), 14: 281.

      7.The singer, actor, theater historian, and librettist Eduard Devrient wrote Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1848–74) and Briefe aus Paris, 1839: Ueber Theaterschule, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1846); the libretto for Heinrich Marschner’s opera Hans Heiling (for which he sang the title role); and Meine Erinnerungen an Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy und seine Briefe an mich (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1869)—to which Wagner responded with the venomous Eduard Devrient und sein Style: Eine Studie über dessen Erinnerungen an Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Stilke and Van Muyden, 1869).

      8.See Nicola Zingarelli and Giuseppe Foppa, Giulietta e Romeo: Tragedia per musica, da rappresentarsi negl’ imperiali regi Teatri di Corte (Vienna: Gio. Batta Wallishausser, 1806); my excerpted copy of “Dunque il mio bene!: Duetto in the opera of Romeo e Giulietta” was published in London by S. Chappell circa 1825. Other excerpted versions include “Naught e’er should sever” (= Dunque il mio bene) (London: Dicks, 1873) and “Dunque il mio bene: Duetto, sung by Made. [Giuseppina] Ronzi de Begnis and Made. [Giuditta]