German Song Onstage. Laura Tunbridge

marriage to and separation from Carl August Liman). In a letter from Liman to Rahel on March 26, 1816, some seven months after Bethmann-Unzelmann’s death, Friederike describes Milder as “good-hearted … not stupid, as many believe, and somewhat childlike” (Hertzens gut … nicht dum, wie viele glauben und etwaß kindisches).³⁶ The flare-up of sexual attraction—“my fever” was her designation for Milder—would burn out quickly, or so she reports (one is allowed to wonder), allowing her to become a “pure Plato or Plata,” a contemporaneous designation for platonic same-sex relationships.³⁷ According to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense in his sketch of Liman’s friendship with Rahel, Liman’s attachment to Unzelmann had generated pernicious gossip, but Milder was so revered that no such unpleasantness troubled them thereafter.³⁸ One hopes his account was true.

      Example 1.3. Jeannette Bürde, “Der Berghirt,” op. 4 no. 1, measures 1–14.

      Another, and quite wonderful, anecdote about Milder and her partner can serve as segue to a discussion of the two Suleika songs. In the summer of 1823, Liman and Milder were in Marienbad, where Milder visited Goethe on 15 August. After her departure, Goethe wrote to his daughter-in-law Ottilie and to Carl Friedrich Zelter, the latter on 24 August, that she sought to make small songs large and that the memory brought tears to his eyes; the songs were, we learn from Friederike, Conradin Kreutzer’s “Lebe wohl, lebe wohl, mein Lieb” and “Will ruhen unter den Bäumen hier” from Neun Wanderlieder von Ludwig Uhland of 1818. (Schubert respected this work.)³⁹ “Goethe was completely dissolved in tears” (Gö war gans aufgelöst in trähnen), she reports. In 1828, Goethe would inscribe a “splendid edition,” a Prachtexemplar, of his drama Iphigenie auf Tauris for Carl Friedrich Zelter to present to Milder on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her ascending the stage; this ageless tale, the great poet declared, achieved a higher goal when it was set to music by Gluck and sung by her.⁴⁰ It is Goethe’s repeated statement to both correspondents that she made small pieces of music large that I find fascinating; the word surely has connotations of something beyond the extraordinary size of her voice, as it identifies how she could imbue “small songs” with profundity and grandeur. The Suleika songs are, of course, also “large” in their amplitude: these are not miniature Lieder but extended Gesänge, each in two different tempi with rich tonal plans.

      Having received the Suleika songs from Schubert, Milder performed either just “Suleika II,” with her sister accompanying, or both at a concert in Berlin on June 9, 1825, before leaving for Paris.⁴¹ Among the other works performed that evening were the overture to Così fan tutte, “Gruss an die Schweiz” by Carl Blum,⁴² a duet by Saverio Mercadante (perhaps the same one she had previously performed in Vienna in January), Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” and the overture to Rossini’s L’inganno felice. By quickly surveying Blum’s yodel-song written for Milder (example 1.4), we see the sort of strains Schubert would raise to a much higher level in “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen.” A reviewer describing this concert in the Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung, however, went into raptures about Milder’s “silvery-bright and golden-pure voice” (still more metal metaphors, but precious metals this time) as she portrayed these “noble children of Nature” (Swiss shepherds) in Blum’s bundle of clichés.⁴³

      According to a London review of this event in The Harmonicon, she sang “two airs from Goethe’s Westöstlichem Divan, the music by Franz Schubert, and Erlkönig, also by Goethe and Schubert … which pleased extremely. This lady has the judgment and good taste to select such pieces for her performance as are calculated to afford her an opportunity for her powers of moving the soul, not of showing off the compass of her voice.” The Janus-faced jab both at her somewhat restricted range and at bravura singing or, what Carl Maria von Weber called “Italian Larifari,” is clear.⁴⁴

       The Two Suleika Songs: Hafiz, Goethe, Marianne von Willemer, and Schubert

      Schubert, of course, thought that Goethe wrote both of the poems he chose from the Divan; he knew nothing of Marianne, nor did any of the other composers drawn to these works. (Schubert’s Shakespearean ventriloquism in music is astonishing: a German male poet had, so he thought, assumed the sensibility of a pseudo-Persian female persona expressing herself in a Western adaptation of an exotic verse form, and he, a twenty-four-year-old Austrian man, would set these words to music.) “Suleika I,” D720, was, we know, composed in March 1821, in two versions that differ by one measure. The first version, the autographed manuscript of which resides in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, was published in 1822 by Cappi and Diabelli and dedicated to Franz von Schober. The autographed manuscript of the second, “Suleika II,” D717, is lost, and the date of composition is therefore uncertain. Was it composed alongside the first, “Was bedeutet die Bewegung?,” in 1821, as Otto Erich Deutsch thought was most likely, or did Schubert, at Milder’s request for something “oriental,” go back to Goethe’s Divan and pluck a pendant poem from the anthology in late 1824?⁴⁵ If the latter is the case, one wonders whether he could have been at least slightly influenced by her words to him about the nature of the first song as too profound for hoi polloi. Schubert was hardly one to kowtow to diva behavior from singers, but such was his respect for Milder that choosing and fashioning a second song that would slant somewhat more to “the public taste” seems not unlikely, if its genesis was in 1824. Andreas Mayer has aptly suggested that “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen,” composed four years later, is located somewhere in the middle ground between “popular” and “pure” taste in accord both with the singer’s desires and the composer’s refusal to write dross on command.⁴⁶ With “Suleika II,” she could have her cake and eat it too: she could charm the public and do so with music of genuine worth, on the sort of “oriental subject” she had requested for an opera. She was born in Constantinople, we remember; she was only there for five years in infancy, but perhaps early childhood impressions as well as musical fashion influenced her attraction to orientalism in music.

      Example 1.4. Carl Blum, “Gruss an die Schweiz,” measures 1–29.

      If she performed both Suleika songs on that June day in 1825, the listeners could have heard what the two songs share, in Graham Johnson’s typically astute observations:⁴⁷ the busy accompaniments with the imputation of continuous breeze, the incessant alternation of major and minor modes, the phrase repetitions, the importance of leaps of a sixth in the vocal lines (the ballon, the lilt, of this music is due in part to this element), and the doubling in thirds or unison or octaves between the voice and piano, especially the right-hand part. The contours of the vocal line at the start of “Suleika II” (“Ach, um deine feuchten Schwingen”) recall “Ach, die wahre Herzenskunde” in “Suleika I,” and the melody of “Eile denn zu meinem Lieben” in “Suleika II” is so closely akin to “Und so kannst du weiter ziehen” in number I as to defy mere coincidence (see example 1.5).

      Schubert clearly had a mind somewhat like a computer, in which instantaneous recall of gestures from years earlier was a matter of nanoseconds. Furthermore, the two songs are complementary opposites in terms of large-scale design. Not only do both engage strophic variations, but also number I ends with an “Etwas langsamer” section and number II with an “Etwas geschwinder” section whose jog-trot rhythms bespeak messages borne more by horse-drawn coach than by wind: a galop (a lively dance of Hungarian or German origin that became popular in Vienna in the 1820s, just in time for Schubert to appropriate it) in 3/4 meter rather than the customary duple meter.⁴⁸ But if there is undeniably complementarity, there is also difference, possibly originating with the composer’s awareness of Milder’s preference for popular taste in the second song. The East Wind song, composed in Beethoven’s “dark key” (“schwarze