Liszt on Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella
INTRODUCED AND TRANSLATED BY ALLAN KEILER
During the winter and summer months and into the fall of 1854, Liszt published a series of articles on twelve dramatic works, all but two of them operas, connected with performances he conducted in Weimar. The pieces, in the order they were performed, were Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Auber’s La muette de Portici, Weber’s Euryanthe, Beethoven’s music for Egmont, Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer, Boieldieu’s La dame blanche, Donizetti’s La favorita, and Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella. Liszt’s first six articles, as well as the one on Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer, were initially published in the Weimarer Zeitung within a week or two after the performance, many in several installments. Throughout the year, all of them, in their final form and definitive order, appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.1
The premiere of Alfonso und Estrella, which Liszt gave in Weimar on 24 June 1854 to celebrate the birthday of the Grand Duke Karl Alexander, entails a journey with more than its share of false starts, mishaps, and ironies. If we turn to the article, little of the difficulties and drama that led to its performance by Liszt are discernible. What we have is a deeply heartfelt appreciation of Schubert’s gifts as a song composer as well as a more general rumination on the nature of talent and genius. When it comes to the work itself, Liszt in at least one regard is more practical than usual in comparison with the other essays of the series. Because neither the work nor the libretto was published, he provides his audience with a detailed summary of the plot and action, scene by scene and act by act.
In biographical matters, Liszt often resorts to uncritical generalities or guesswork, as in his biography of Chopin, for example, and in this essay too he is vague and inaccurate when he explains that “the work in question [is] a product of [Schubert’s youth] … its weaknesses … understandable given the rapidity with which he went about his work.” Schubert wrote Alfonso und Estrella between September 1821 and February 1822, during a period of his creative life that was crucial for him compositionally as well as personally. During this time he acquired new ambitions, particularly in works for the stage, left many pieces unfinished, including the “Unfinished” Symphony and the single movement “Quartettsatz,” but also completed, by the end of the period, such works as Der Musensohn, the Mass in A-flat, and the “Wanderer” Fantasy. It is a period of tremendous growth, new aspirations, and wildly fluctuating challenges. If anything, then, Alfonso und Estrella is a product of this first maturity.
Figure 1. Playbill of Alfonso und Estrella, Weimar 1854.
Contrary to Liszt’s view, composition of the opera proceeded with somewhat less haste and spontaneity than was often the case with Schubert, and for the most part in a more relaxed and concentrated manner. Schubert began the first act toward the end of September 1821. His librettist arranged for the two of them to work together without distraction at St. Pölten, where the bishop, a relative of the librettist, gave them accommodations. They returned to Vienna before the second act was finished. Encouraged again at the end of the year to resume work, composer and librettist completed the opera sometime in February.
The reader will notice that I have failed to mention the name of Franz von Schober, the librettist of Alfonso und Estrella, a somewhat disingenuous way of calling attention to the similar omission on the part of Liszt, who in his essay does not once identify him by name, although he does not hold back in criticizing the inadequacy of the libretto. Whether consciously or not, this omission could hardly have been inadvertent, as the reader will come to understand. Liszt’s relationship to Schober, which lasted for more than a decade, is an integral part of the story that would eventually lead to the first performance of Alfonso und Estrella by Liszt, an “act of reverence,” “the settlement of a debt of honor,” he writes, but one that, as Maria Eckhardt has rightly argued, “probably precipitated the alienation of their friendship.”2
Franz von Schober is well known as an intimate and influential member of Schubert’s circle, and his close friendship with the composer is also well documented. His relationship to Liszt is less familiar and for the most part haphazardly documented, with inaccuracies and lacunae that await clarification. In the meantime, what interests us is the role he played in connection with Liszt’s premiere of Schubert’s opera. It is not clear when they first met, probably sometime during the late 1830s. In the documented record we encounter them together for the first time in Pest during Liszt’s return to his native Hungary from December of 1839 to the end of January 1840—after his childhood one of the most famous and colorful episodes of his career. The central image amid the nationalistic fervor that accompanied Liszt during those weeks is the famous “sabre of honor” presented to him at his concert at the Hungarian National Theater by a small group of noblemen and civic officials. The entire episode—idolatrous outpourings about Liszt by the Hungarian press, Liszt parading in the streets of Pest in Hungarian costume, attempts to remake him as a symbol of Magyar nationalism—became easy prey for the European press, especially French journalists, who ridiculed his posturing, the presentation of the sabre, and much else. Liszt, with the aid of his mistress Marie d’Agoult, made repeated attempts at damage control, but the whole affair made him keenly defensive over his seriousness of purpose as an artist, his pride in and his fervor over his homeland.3
Figure 2. Portrait of Franz von Schober by Leopold Kupelwieser.
It was at this point that Schober entered Liszt’s life. He was an eye-witness to the presentation of the sabre and accompanied Liszt to other Hungarian cities, to Vienna, and then again to Hungary. Whatever conversations the two may have had at the time, Schober was sympathetic enough to Liszt’s aims and ideals to write a series of articles in the German press about his experiences traveling with the Hungarian idol. For his part, Liszt was pleased enough with the series to propose that Schober publish the pieces, which resulted in the pamphlet Briefe über F. Liszts Aufenthalt in Ungarn (Letters About F. Liszt’s Sojourn in Hungary). Schober’s account takes its place, then, among a series of biographical sketches and reportages from the early 1840s—those of Johann Wilhelm Christern, Ludwig Rellstab, and J. Duverger (an alias for Marie d’Agoult)—that formed a part of Liszt’s active attempts to create a biographical image in the French and German press that would reflect his ideas and objectives about art and society.4
Schober was a versatile talent, but he lacked perseverance. He gave up the study of law after only a single year; he then tried his hand at landscape painting, and for two years flirted with the profession of acting, and then changed course entirely when he assumed the directorship of the Viennese Lithographic Institute. What drew Liszt to Schober was not simply that he revealed himself to be a sympathetic ally in the midst of a highly troublesome and even embarrassing episode. Surely Liszt also admired his attractive and engaging personality. Schober was a brilliant conversationalist, well traveled, charismatic, a figure of cosmopolitan background with an enormous knowledge of German literature, the latter particularly appealing to Liszt. Just as important was his connection to Schubert, a composer Liszt held as much admiration for and drew at least as much influence from as he did Beethoven. Whether the subject of Alfonso und Estrella came up during these early years between Schober and Liszt, we do not know, but it would arise soon enough.
In the meantime, Schober was valuable to Liszt in various ways. He acted as translator, and provided Liszt with the poem “Titan,” on whose setting Liszt worked for a number of years. When Liszt was appointed Kapellmeister in Weimar in 1843, Schober accompanied him as he arrived to take up his duties. Eventually Liszt used his influence with Grand Duke Alexander, recommending that he appoint Schober Legationsrat (legation counsellor). In the years following his appointment, Liszt continued to depend on Schober to help spread his ideas about his future plans in Weimar. When Liszt finally settled there, Schober provided other texts, for the cantata Hungaria and the dithyramb Weimars Toten, for which Liszt provided musical settings.5 Liszt must have found Schober useful in discussing his plans for the musical and cultural revival he was contemplating for the years ahead, so it is not surprising that the idea emerged of a performance of Alfonso und Estrella: Schubert’s lone through-composed opera and, along with Fierabras, his major dramatic work. It may have been Schober who raised the idea in the first place, for, in fact, he had striven for several years to have the opera performed.
The first evidence we have that Schober and Liszt reached some conviction that a performance of Alfonso und Estrella should be given in Weimar is a letter dated 7 February 1848 that Schober wrote to Schubert’s brother Ferdinand, asking him to send the opera to Liszt. We learn about this request about a month later, in a letter that Ferdinand writes to Breitkopf & Härtel, with which he is in negotiations to publish the opera as well as other works of Schubert: “On 7 February I received a letter from the librettist of this final opera, who is at present Legationsrat in Weimar, in which I was asked in the friendliest terms to send this opera to Weimar, because Franz Liszt (who is now Hof-Kapellmeister there) wants one of Franz Schubert’s operas to finally see the light of day.”6 Only a few weeks later, Liszt writes to Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein about his intention: “And perhaps there is still time to stage one of Schubert’s unpublished operas, Alphons und Estrella, for which my friend Schober wrote the text.”7
Of course, Ferdinand Schubert and Schober were attached to the future of Alfonso und Estrella in quite different ways. Ferdinand saw himself as the responsible custodian of his brother’s works in a manner that looked to the future and the eventuality of other performances as a result of publication with Breitkopf. Schober, on the other hand, had his mind set on this specific performance of a piece that he helped create and worked tirelessly to hear performed. “For eight years, in alliance with your dear brother, I strove to bring it to the stage under such auspicious conditions as would never again return, applying in vain to theaters in Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Prag, Pest, Graz, etc,” wrote Schober in a blistering letter to Ferdinand, in response to the latter’s unwillingness to act quickly to send the score of the opera to Liszt.8 Schober saw the whole affair as an issue of ownership: “Does some kind of pronouncement, purchase, exchange, or contract give you the right to call the text of Alfonso und Estrella, which belongs to me, your own property and thereby dispose of it high-handedly, and without asking me?”9 Liszt’s interest in producing the opera had by then become something of an obsession with Schober—the answer to his prayers—and he tried to convince Ferdinand to cooperate. By the end of Schober’s appeal, there was understandably more than a hint of desperation: “There is still time. Send the opera at once or I will hereby prohibit every one of your provisions concerning this work and will accordingly inform Breitkopf & Härtel and will publicly explain both of our courses of actions…. I will wait no longer than ten days for an answer.”10
Ferdinand, perhaps out of pique, did not reply, but six months later he was ready to launch an agreement between Breitkopf & Härtel and the Weimar Hoftheater. A performance of the opera in Weimar under Liszt now seemed assured. But there was a hitch: Liszt had not yet seen the libretto or the score. Once he did it would be six years full of disappointments, aborted attempts at producing the opera, and even plans for a revision of the libretto, before the opera was finally staged.
The first such attempt occurred early in 1849. We learn the details from Eduard Genast, the Regisseur of the Hofoper, with whom Liszt had clearly discussed the viability of performing the opera. “Liszt had proposed Franz Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella for February 16. As Regisseur I was opposed to this, for as much as I admire and love Schubert as a Lieder composer, this work cannot be called an opera, for it offers nothing more than a sequence of beautiful melodies and Lieder, for which reason a monotony arises that cannot but become painful. Liszt has stood by his choice. A number of piano rehearsals have already taken place and as a result he himself has come to the fortunate idea to set the opera aside and to choose instead Tannhäuser.”11
Liszt’s next attempt to perform the opera came in the early months of 1850. We learn that again Liszt has held piano rehearsals for the opera, intending to begin full rehearsals at the end of February and perform the opera sometime during the beginning of April. But again the whole affair was aborted, this time because Liszt was now at least open about his dislike of the libretto. He wrote to Breitkopf in February: “As for the Schubert opera, a recent experience has confirmed me entirely in the view that I had already taken at the time of the first piano rehearsals we held last spring: the view that the delicate and interesting score of Schubert ends up as if crushed under the weight of the libretto! However, I do not give up hope to be able to present this work successfully—but this success appears to me possible under only one condition: that of adapting another libretto to Schubert’s music.”12 From the end of the year until the first weeks of 1854, Liszt busied himself with what he considered a viable solution, one that was directed exclusively at the libretto. His idea was to have a new libretto prepared, this time in French, and have the opera given at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. With this scheme in mind he entered into negotiations not only with Breitkopf to obtain permission for this new arrangement but with music publisher Léon Escudier in Paris as well.
The first task in this new scheme was to have a piano-vocal score prepared to send to Escudier. Liszt appealed first to his colleague Joachim Raff as early as December 1850: “As soon as everything is in order concerning your Alfred, do not entirely forget Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella. Escudier is waiting for it. The piano arrangement must be comfortable and easy to play.”13 By March of the following year there seemed to be no progress, and Raff was urged again to prepare a version of the score, “to take up and bring to a conclusion the piano arrangement of the Schubert opera. If the arrangement bores you, entrust it to Reissmann or someone else.”14 In April Liszt told Sayn-Wittgenstein that he was still intending to have the piano score completed. A month later he told her merely that “I will still deliver to them [Escudier] Schubert’s opera.”15 In June, the score was not yet complete, as we learn in a letter to Raff: “Reissmann should send me here as quickly as possible the other acts of the Schubert opera.”16 Several years went by. We hear nothing until the beginning of 1854, when Liszt informs Escudier that he is still thinking of adapting the opera, with a new libretto in French, for performance in Paris. It was never to be, and no trace of Raff’s or Reissmann’s endeavors has survived.
It seems that Liszt, in spite of his interest in an eventual performance of the work in Paris, was also still planning to perform the work in Weimar later that year. We know this from a letter to Louis Köhler: “I believe that for the last theater performance of this season (the end of June) we will still perform Franz Schubert’s opera Alfonso und Estrella,” a work he found “altogether interesting, fully endowed with inner, natural charm.”17 At the end of March, in a letter to Breitkopf, Liszt makes clear more of what he has been up to: “So far, we have held a half-dozen rehearsals, which have clearly resulted in a sufficiently large number of cuts, and which I have not hesitated to carry out, and if you should later have the intention to publish the piano reduction, I myself would see to it that you arrange your edition so that it corresponds to our performance—with the reservation that the deleted passages be added at the end as an appendix.”18
On the evening of 24 June 1854, the Hoftheater was brilliantly lit to celebrate the birthday of the new Grand Duke Karl Alexander, whose father Karl Friedrich had died the previous July. Karl Friedrich had been a cautious administrator, inevitably more concerned with bolstering the city’s flagging economy than in reviving Weimar’s artistic past. “It was left to … Karl Alexander,” as Alan Walker has written, “to dream of reawakening Weimar’s past glories, and it was to his everlasting credit that when the twenty-three-year-old duke first set eyes on Liszt, he recognized a man of genius around whom Weimar’s artistic regeneration might be accomplished.”19 This was to be the first of such birthday celebrations, which Liszt continued each year for the remainder of his tenure as Kapellmeister. The work Liszt chose for the occasion was Alfonso und Estrella, the culmination of his years of hopeful but troubled planning. To mark the musical occasion even more auspiciously, Liszt conducted before the opera a Festival Overture of Anton Rubinstein, and at the end of the opera, a Festival March on melodies by Eschinbach and Ofterdingen orchestrated by one von W. Stade. The cast of the opera could not have been more brilliant. Froila and Estrella were sung by Herr and Frau von Milde, the two most celebrated and beloved singers of the Hoftheater ensemble.
Liszt’s letter to Breitkopf makes it clear that what the audience heard in the Weimar Hoftheater the evening of 24 June was not, strictly speaking, Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella but Liszt’s revised version of the opera. The performance of the opera, given the program as a whole, could not have lasted for much longer than two hours—somewhere between thirty and forty minutes were thus cut from the score. A small number of arias or ensembles were removed entirely. Of Froila’s two arias, each one placed at the beginning of the first two acts as part of the parallel dramatic whole of the first six numbers of the first two acts, Liszt cut entirely the second aria. In the second act, Liszt made cuts in all but one of the eleven numbers. What Liszt was after, apparently, was to create greater dramatic and musical concision and continuity. In the opening Introduction of the first act, with both choral and soloistic sections, Liszt cut the solo portions. In the fourth and fifth numbers—a duet for Alfonso and Froila, and a recitative and aria for Froila—he cut introductory passages. In the second of these two, he also cut the recitative material. Often his cuts included additional strophes or some identical recapitulatory passages. In keeping with the strict use of accompanied recitatives in the opera and the many long through-composed sections, he seized on these, sometimes eliminating recitative or closing and opening material and adding newly composed transitional material for the purpose. The result of these many cuts and revisions must be considered a new, rather radical performing edition of Schubert’s opera.20
Liszt’s efforts to bring Alfonso und Estrella to the stage of the Weimar Hoftheater were long and sustained. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this journey is the psychological strain those efforts must have caused him. This was not simply a case of pure selfless musical admiration of an unknown or unpublished work that concerned Liszt deeply, in one way or another, during most of his active musical life. He made the decision to perform Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella without any foreknowledge of it musically or dramatically. Schober had of course played a decisive role in convincing Liszt to perform a work in which he himself had been so deeply engaged. The decision, through the agency of one of Schubert’s closest associates and friends, created a musical link for Liszt to the actual figure of Schubert, for whose talents Liszt had unbounded admiration. Having made the decision to do honor to Schubert in this way—“an act of reverence” as he says in the essay that follows—he had to live with the consequences once the work came into his hands. Surely Liszt came to the same musical conclusions as Genast had in early 1849. But he had made a vow or promise to himself (and as he must have felt, to Schubert), and would not be deterred. The reader will notice that although Liszt was willing to criticize openly the libretto, even planning to replace it with a French text, he must have admitted the dramatic weaknesses of the work to himself, found excuses for them, and convinced himself one way or another that they could somehow be overcome in actual performance. Only after the act of performance was Liszt able to set aside these psychological maneuvers and detach himself enough from the opera to judge it according to his true musical convictions. And these are what we find in the essay that follows.
Schober’s struggle during the years that led to the first performance of Alfonso und Estrella was more removed and private than Liszt’s, one that no doubt included its share of resistance to criticism and eventually estrangement. In the end he himself confirmed what Liszt had written in his essay. In 1876, more than twenty years after the premiere of Alfonso und Estrella, Schober wrote these touchingly self-critical words to a friend: “Such a miserable, stillborn concoction of a libretto that even such a genius as Franz Schubert could not bring it to life.”21
Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella Franz Liszt
This work was written in 1818, ten years before the death of the composer, and given its first performance in 1854, that is, thirty-six years later.
We are well aware of the great mission Schubert fulfilled in the service of the art of music, of how he devoted virtually his entire life to the poetry of tones. Whereas the act of creation is for many artists no more than an episodic occupation of a life engrossed in every possible storm and stress and in personal distractions, and others ruminate tirelessly over works they have completed—the former devoting only a few hours a day to the act of creation, the latter only a few years—Schubert removed himself from the real world, from the urges of his private feelings, from his personal life, so to speak, so that he might aspire only to poetry, to breathe music. He breathed out his very soul in its fragrance; his vitality seemed to gush forth in the full torrent of his pen. In this way, time rushed forward for him, years crowded together into months, and although snatched from art while still young, he lived long enough to experience the maturity of his artistic genius, for in the last ten years of his life he exceeded three times over in the number and significance of his creations what someone else might accomplish in a lifetime. This last period of his life was for him the richest in the experiences that taught him to understand the nature and range of his genius.
We must, therefore, look upon the work before us as a product of his youth. Moreover, its weaknesses are understandable given the rapidity with which he went about his work, which did not give him enough time to think through the layout of his works, about how to refine them carefully as he was working or once they were completed, or to judge for himself how his creations would stand in relationship to the art of his time and to the past. Quickly following his inspiration, he gave immediate expression to the feelings ablaze in his soul. As if enflamed by the noblest of wines, he gave life to his enthusiasm for great poetry, finding pleasure only when he could pour forth in divine song the overabundance of his spiritual and poetic life.
One finds it difficult to accept the premise that a soul like Schubert, accustomed to substantial, refined, and poetic fare, should not have noticed the inadequacy of the libretto he had chosen. However, accustomed as he was to conveying impressions conjured ardently and vividly out of lyric poetry without examining the literary design of his subject beyond the feelings expressed in the verses, so too did he proceed with the composition of his opera without, in this case, subjecting the verses to criticism. Furthermore, seeing that Italian operas based on the most mediocre texts enjoyed great success day in and day out, he fell easily into the error of believing that the literary insignificance of an operatic text might be an unavoidable misfortune, and not rack his brains for long over the reasons for it. Because he did not live in close contact with the literary heroes of his time, he could not possibly expect any libretto from them; besides, it is doubtful whether even in the most fortunate instance they would have furnished him with a libretto that would have easily revealed to him its shortcomings in regard to a musical setting.
If one considers the poetic material that even a Goethe chose as the basis for operas or cantatas, one is easily persuaded how hastily highly gifted poets of this time dealt with material intended for music. Schubert lived in too modest and humble seclusion to reach the envied regions of composers whose music was regularly performed. Alfonso und Estrella was never performed nor published. If the opera had been performed, it could most likely have given pleasure and would probably have allowed him to achieve fame more quickly than his songs which, although more a token of his genius, were slow to be recognized. The demands placed on drama by the previous generation had not yet reached that stage of development where the poetic text would necessarily have appeared as inexcusably insipid as it does to our generation.
The literature of the French Empire had propagated a taste for idyllic situations, unexpected scenes of recognition, gradual achievement of universal happiness, for a mixture of military peripeteia and pastoral scenes. Overthrown kingdoms and tender love exercised a daily influence on their mutual fates, and the events portrayed blended with reality. Paris greatly admired Les Battuécas of Mademoiselle de Genlis and its portrayal of the native folk hidden away in the Spanish Sierras, very much like the native folk raised in pastoral happiness by the dethroned King Froila in Schubert’s opera. In melodic quality, the opera outweighs those of Gyrowetz, Winter, or Weigl that were so popular at the time. But just as those operas have today nearly disappeared from the stage, so a performance of Alfonso und Estrella can only be seen as an act of reverence: the settlement of a debt of honor owed by unrelated heirs that could not be settled with the creditor during his lifetime. Had the work been performed successfully when it was written, it would have enjoyed a revival only with difficulty. Since it was made to suffer unjustly, however, it is the task of the artist to present it as an accepted fact of history, one that could lead to interesting observations.
In the first act we see Froila, the King of Léon, who, overthrown by a rival king, has taken refuge in a valley, where he brings happiness to its small number of isolated inhabitants. His son (Alfonso) has just carried off the prize in games and exercises that turns the victor into the leader of the valley’s youth for one year. But this renown does not satisfy his burning desire for action. He would like to break through the boundaries set by his father’s strict rules, which have held back his subjects for many years. He expresses to his father his distress over such a frustrating obstacle, though he keeps his impulsive drives at a distance. In turn his father makes him a promise that, as a sign of good will, the prohibition will be removed one day, and gives him a golden chain as a pledge in fulfillment of his promise. The scene changes to the palace of the usurper (Mauregato), whose Commanding General, returning victoriously from battle, asks for the hand of the King’s daughter, Estrella, since the King promised to grant him any reward he might choose for his heroic deeds. Estrella, however, dislikes the General. Her father, though condemned for being a notorious tyrant, is unwilling to break her heart and explains that, by virtue of a holy dictum, the only one who will possess the hand of Estrella is he who wins back for him the holy chain of St. Eurich, missing from the treasure house since the overthrow of the previous King.
In the second act we see Estrella lose her way in Froila’s hills during a hunt and come upon Alfonso by chance. Their young hearts become aflame with love as they stare at each other, captivated with each other’s charms, and when they part Alfonso gives her, as a token of this moment, the golden chain his father had given him. Meanwhile the love-lorn General, having ravaged and plundered every nearby Moorish and Christian castle yet failing to discover the fateful chain anywhere, finds it easier to remove his King from the throne. He conspires toward this end with the leaders of the army, which happens at just the right moment, for his resolution gives rise to two of the best numbers in the opera: the chorus of conspirators, who have gathered together at night among the ruins; and the chorus of nobles, who remain loyal to Mauregato and promise to defend him. The latter receives news of the insurrection at the moment his daughter, having returned from the hunt, tells him about the charming stranger who had presented her with the chain—at once revealed as the treasure of St. Eurich, for which our Orlando furioso ed innamorato had been searching in vain.
In the third act the insurgents are victorious in battle in a region not far from the mountainous region where Froila dwells. The General encounters the fleeing Estrella and is just about to drag her away when, at her cry for help, Alfonso rushes to her side, frees her and takes the guilty General prisoner. When he learns that his heart’s desire is the daughter of the defeated King, he calls his comrades to arms and rushes to assemble under his command the faithful soldiers who had been scattered by the defeat. The young Princess has for some time found asylum in this lonely valley, where fate has also guided Mauregato, pursued by the insurgents. Mauregato, suddenly catching sight of Froila, takes him now to be the vengeful spirit of the legitimate King and, seized with terror, begs for mercy and lays the stolen chain at his feet. Estrella arrives, followed by Alfonso, victorious over the rebellious troops. The two kings, after reaching an agreement, renounce their rights to the throne of Léon, and entrust it to the pair of lovers, thus uniting the parties and fulfilling the dictum.
The role of Froila was written for the Viennese singer Vogel [sic] and includes some of the most beautiful parts of the opera, in which virtually everything, from beginning to end, is nobly sustained. Much is graceful and charming and reveals the distinguished composer at every turn. Only one thing is lacking: the element of drama.
The opera must be considered in the fullest sense a Singspiel. It consists of a series of light and pretty vocal numbers sustained in a broadly melodic manner. Everything carries the stamp of Schubert’s lyricism and much must be included with the best of his song collections. Often one comes across his favorite intervals, cadences, and turns of phrase. But the lack of theatrical experience and dramatic understanding is noticeable at every turn, and the symphonic virtues, for example, do not compensate for the work’s defects, since the musical effect is nowhere strong enough. The instrumentation plays a very subordinate role; it is really only piano accompaniment arranged for orchestra. The frequently employed violin arpeggios, the so-called batteries, are especially tiresome, so too is the monotony with which chords, figures, and passages are doubled by different instruments without the others introducing the slightest episodic contrast or variety. Schubert allows the orchestral accompaniment to sink far below the significance that Gluck and Mozart, not to mention Beethoven, gave to it. In his songs, on the other hand, he allows the piano to play so important a role as to effectively unify the whole; his accompaniments create a kind of instrumental miniature, a scenic background and decoration for the vocal line. Duets and trios appear in this work like a sequence of romances which the characters sing, one after the other, until they join voices at the conclusion in a small ensemble. So naive and simple, yet so far from adequate.
Schubert, so masterful within smaller frameworks, suffers the loss of much of his natural genius in broader expanses. He fulfilled the important mission of raising the level of lyric composition, of endowing it with an unimagined artistic significance, of placing it on an equal footing alongside the most important artistic genres. But though he broadened the dimensions of the lyric, those of the stage exceeded his powers and might have actually crushed them. The rich, powerful flow of his melodies, diverted into too broad a channel, lacked depth. One has to say that the rays of his genius possessed more intensity than range, and reached the stage from too far a distance for the objects they encountered to cast enough of a shadow to emerge. And so I could compare his opera with Peter Schlemihl, which was also robbed of this property so necessary to give reality to his actual person. So too, as with Peter Schlemihl, do we find here melodic character in truth and reality, yet we are tempted to doubt its very existence since it does not cast the indispensable shadow.
If indeed the libretto promised little in the way of scenic development, then we must ask how much better Schubert would have fared if he had had a better subject. He poured out the whole of his gift for lyric song into this opera, but dramatic contour and declamatory expression are missing everywhere. Whoever wishes to do so can find evidence of how much the balance between the lyric and the dramatic fluctuates for composers, and how silly the generally held view is that anyone who possesses all of the special musical-technical skills also simutaneously possesses the necessary qualities to compose an opera. We have before us not only a significant musician, but an exceptionally gifted, brilliant tone poet who utterly misjudged the requirements of stagecraft, which entitles us to doubt whether he would ever have completely fulfilled these requirements, since his theatrical attempts—among which Alfonso und Estrella, if not the last, is certainly the most important—support such a view.
Certainly the last thing we want to do is deny richly endowed organizations the capability to present very different emotions and feelings in the most varied artistic genres, or even in different art forms. We have always argued on principle against the usual manner of ordering artists into particular categories and then treating prejudicially those works that belong to a different genre than those that were once successfully cultivated by them. One does not need to adduce the example of a Mozart or Michelangelo or anyone else in order to repudiate the notion of classifying artists like shops or cities that become well known because of certain foodstuffs or a choice morsel, some because of their wine, others by virtue of their cheese, some on account of their patés, others because of sweets. Still, it would be a mistake not to realize that a genius does not always have the ability to manage all the genres of an art form. Like the forms of nature and all forms adopted by our emotions, individual art forms have a legitimate essence of their own, and each will be brilliantly and fully developed through the powerful outpouring of a specially endowed genius. We admired in Chopin the example of an extraordinary ability to limit itself to that framework most congenial to it. Schubert warrants something similar. In his extraordinarily creative life, his attempts at dramatic and symphonic works can only be considered secondary. The theater in particular possessed too broad a scale for someone of his outlook. Moreover, the dramatic texture demanded by the stage was too complicated for his impulsive and direct inspiration.
How different it is to express emotions in limited or sharply distinctive contours, in pleasing yet brief formulations, in energetic yet concise expressions that one would like to call aphorisms of the heart—how different from giving life to the feelings of fictitious characters, allowing these characters to preserve a firmly logical character when actions conflict with one another, to confer on them forceful yet natural language in complicated situations, providing them with the true accent by which their emotions may come to light as they struggle. Schubert had the gift of dramatizing lyrical inspiration to the highest degree. He understood how to develop out of poems small in range the entire quintessence of feeling and the compelling power of the emotions, by bestowing on the often more apparent than actual pains, joys, and sentiments of a few verses a power of expression, dazzling brilliance, penetrating intensity, wonderful delicacy, and a glaze of color, so that we see them flare up before our eyes, take possession of our souls, and enjoy the delightful or bittersweet aftertaste of impressions he pours into our hearts like drops of magic elixir. In the short duration of a Lied he transforms us into observers of brusque but deadly conflicts, allows us to behold and perceive the broken sighs and overflowing tears of agony, or feel the fluttering pulsation of blessed love; he leads us through all the misery and sorrow of hopeless pain or lifts us into the regions of the ideal and eternal. Might he have reached the same goal within an expanded frame by intensifying the reach of his characters?
Moral constitutions, like physical ones, are diverse; intellectual qualities and preferences are just as manifold as corporeal ones. One moment the eye is sharper and more acute, another, less so, the ear more or less accurate and true; in some, the muscles are better developed, in others, the nerves. In one temperament, melancholy, dreaminess, and feeling prevail; in another, reflection, conjecture, calculation. In one case, liveliness and the momentary, in another, reserved and lasting ardor. Some are full of simplicity, like single-stringed instruments, others create a fully harmonious sonority. The latter are the rarest and only to these is it granted to encompass what appears to be mutually exclusive, to combine the most heterogeneous qualities, to be at the same time spontaneous and reflective, enthusiastic and erudite, forceful and gentle, vivacious and profound. And whoever wishes to choose the stage as his realm must belong to the ranks of the latter, for though the lyric is for the most part subjective by nature, dramatic works require the objectivity of character and action. Thus it is more likely that a dramatic poet will distinguish himself as a lyric poet than that a lyrical nature will fasten upon dramatic elements with lasting success. Or that one will encounter as rarely among us musicians as one will among writers talents who are endowed with the necessary profusion of intellectual virtues—especially since the musician who wishes to master the stage must demonstrate all the qualities of the tragic poet. Before one embarks on dramatic works, therefore, a serious testing of powers is of increasing and pressing necessity.
Schubert was destined to render an extraordinary service, albeit indirectly, to the dramatic Muse. He has exercised on operatic style perhaps a greater influence than has until now been recognized. By employing and bringing into relief harmonic declamation in a more highly intensified manner than Gluck, he has raised it to a power and energy not yet considered possible in the Lied, exalting poetic masterworks with its expression. In this way he disseminated and popularized declamation, facilitated its acceptance and understanding. By teaching us to value the joining together of noble poetry and profound music, he imbued the latter with the affecting accents of the pathos inherent in poetry; he made natural, as it were, poetic thought in the realm of music, uniting them like body and soul, and thereby instilling disgust and aversion toward the kind of vocal music that clings annoyingly to bad verse, verse without heart or soul.
It was Schubert’s nature to sing out in the purest way, full of vitality and life; he was ablaze with divine fire and anointed with the chrism of the Holy Spirit, but his heavenly Muse, her glance lost in the clouds, liked above all to let the folds of her azure mantel stream over elysian fields, forests, and mountains, in which she wandered about in capricious strides, at first contemplatively, then jumping about, ignorant of the artificially winding path upon which the dramatic Muse carefully strolls between the wings and rows of lights, his winged strophe experiencing an uncanny fear of the clattering of gears and stage machinery. Schubert is to be compared more to a mountain stream that breaks free from the bosom of a snow-covered mountain peak, and in steep, frothy waterfalls inundates the rocky descent with a thousand colorfully sparkling drops, than to the majestic river that waters the plains and reflects the images of cathedrals on its mirror-like surface. In art he is and remains great because in art—as in nature—greatness, nobility, and grandeur are not measured in terms of material dimensions, because its creations are not measured in terms of the size and weight of commercial products, but according to those incorporeal laws whose secret the human spirit possesses yet is unable to reveal.
NOTES
1. A thirteenth essay, on Wagner’s Das Rheingold, is now generally grouped with the others, though it has a somewhat different genesis because it was not associated with any performance. At the end of September Liszt received the completed score of the opera from Wagner, and, as he told the composer, permitted himself a slight indiscretion in bringing to the attention of the public without his consent the vast tetralogy Wagner intended: “I hope you will not be angry with me. I meant well by it, and it cannot do any harm to have made the public a bit more aware of the whole thing.” (Unless otherwise specified, translations are those of the author of the present article.) The essay appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik at the beginning of the New Year 1855. For a careful chronological study of the publication history of all of the essays, see Franz Liszt, Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 5: Dramaturgische Blätter, ed. Dorothea Redepenning and Britta Schilling (Wiesbaden, 1989), 154–59.
2. For an important study of the relationship of Schober and Liszt, see Maria Eckardt, “Schubert’s and Liszt’s Friend and Poet: Franz von Schober,” in Liszt Saeculum I, no. 56 (Budapest, 1996), 13–19.
3. On the Pest affair, see Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, the Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847 (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 319–42. For a valuable corrective to Walker’s uncritical defense of Liszt, see Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge, 2004), 117–56.
4. For more on these biographical sketches, see Allan Keiler, “Ludwig Rellstab’s Biographical Sketch of Liszt,” in Franz Liszt and His World, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley (Princeton, 2006).
5. Eckardt, “Schubert’s and Liszt’s Friend,” 13–19, discusses these works in some detail.
6. Ferdinand Schubert to Breitkopf und Härtel, Vienna, 2 March 1848, in Schubert: Die Erinnerungen seiner Freude, ed. Otto Erich Deutsch (Leipzig, 1957), 482.
7. Franz Liszt, 28 February 1848, in Franz Liszts Briefe, ed. La Mara (Marie Lipsius) (Leipzig, 1899), 4: 24.
8. Franz von Schober to Ferdinand Schubert, Weimar, 18 March 1848, in Deutsch, Schubert: Die Erinnerungen, 485.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid, 486.
11. Eduard Genast, Aus Weimars klassischer und nachklassischer Zeit (Stuttgart, 1904), 316.
12. Liszt to Breitkopf und Härtel, 24 February 1850, in Deutsch, Schubert: Die Erinnerungen, 372.
13. Liszt to Raff, 30 December 1850, in Helene Raff-München, “Franz Liszt und Joachim Raff: Im Spiegel ihrer Briefe,” Die Musik 1/10 (1902): 863.
14. Liszt to Raff, 19 March 1851, in Helene Raff-München, “Franz Liszt und Joachim Raff: Im Spiegel ihrer Briefe,” Die Musik 1/13 (1902): 1162. August Friedrich Wilhelm Reissmann (1825–1903) was a music critic and composer. He resided for a few years, in the early 1850s, in Weimar.
15. Liszt to Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, 13 May 1851, in La Mara, Franz Liszts Briefe, 4:119.
16. Liszt to Raff, Eilsen, 8 June 1851, in Helene Raff-München, “Franz Liszt und Joachim Raff “: 1167.
17. Liszt to Louis Köhler, Weimar, 2 March 1854, in La Mara, Franz Liszts Briefe, 1:151.
18. Liszt to Breitkopf und Härtel, Weimar, 27 May 1854, in Deutsch, Schubert: Die Erinnerungen, 493.
19. Walker, Franz Liszt: The Weimar Years 1848–1861 (Ithaca, NY, 1989), 92.
20. A fairly detailed summary of Liszt’s revisions can be found in Till Gerrit Waidelich, Franz Schubert: “Alfonso und Estrella” (Tutzing, 1991), 41–46. Also see discussion of revisions in Keiler, “Liszt and the Weimar Hoftheater,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 28 (1986), 431–50.
21. Franz von Schober to Heinrich Schubert, 2 November 1876, in Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, ed. Otto Erich Deutsch, trans. Rosamond Ley and John Nowell (London, 1958), 208.
