Graham Johnson’s unrivalled three-volume commentary on the song cycle will be your companion for life
There can be no good reason for the reviewers’ neglect hitherto of this quite marvellous, beautifully produced three-volume encyclopaedia, published several months ago. There are two possible bad ones: the first is the price-tag, which at £200 may deter the faint-hearted, though (at nearly 3000 pages) it would justify twice the outlay; the second is that its date of publication coincided with Ian Bostridge’s A Winter’s Journey, which could hardly be a more different book, albeit on an overlapping subject. Perhaps editors have thought one Schubert book enough. Ironically, one of Johnson’s few serious reviewers so far has been in the New York Review of Books – by Ian Bostridge.
It’s time to set this right. Readers of these pages don’t require persuading of the appeal of Schubert’s Lieder. This is – to get straight to the point – THE book, the best written, the longest, the most insightful and informative, the last, beautiful word on its sublime subject. The product of a lifetime’s work, it promises a lifelong companionship. Emerging from the already superb accompanying notes to the Hyperion complete Schubert song CD series, it offers not only an essay – which may run to many pages – on each song (as well of course as the words in German and English, and a musical incipit), but also wide-ranging accompanying essays on 120 poets, many friends, musical subjects, cultural and historical context, excellent and frequent illustrations, so that the book ends up as an accessibly presented, definitive treatment of the German-speaking world at its musical and literary apogee in the late classical and early Romantic period.
The closest that any forebear had come to such an undertaking was in John Reed’s Schubert Song Companion (1985). This too contained a concise treatment of every song, running typically to a couple of paragraphs, (though not a great deal beyond). One doesn’t need to diminish Reed’s achievement in praising Johnson’s, and indeed the later author pays frequent tribute to the earlier, as well as building on other authorities, particularly Capell and Fischer-Dieskau.
The truth, however, is that Johnson offers us a treatment, and learning, of a different order of magnitude. Appropriately, he writes at heavenly lengths. This is someone who, with all 650 plus songs literally at his fingertips, knows them from the inside, or as I would prefer to say, from the bottom up. People who listen to music from the top down, who take the high line or are seduced by the first violin and ignore what lies underneath, are missing most of the point. Johnson ensures here that the reader knows what’s going on in the engine-room.
At the heart of what this encyclopaedia does is to tell the reader – with unerring perception, in the most lucid and affecting prose, with a wealth of relevant scholarship and deft humour, and with that especial tenderness which is particular to the music of Schubert and the way in which we who love him listen to it – just why it is that this song, this melody, this harmony, this moment breaks the listener’s heart. And so we listen with new ears and with fresh gratitude at the generosity of Schubert’s gift. There is a moving passage, worth quoting at length, where Johnson compares Die Taubenpost, the very last of the solo songs, with the earlier Frühlingsglaube:
“The determination to believe that a milder spring is just around the corner is admirable, but the music tells us that this optimism is misplaced. The combination of self-delusion and gentle rapture engenders our compassion. Similarly, the lover too shy to woo with word and gesture, who sends forth his affection day after day in the form of mute and fluttering longing, is someone whose constancy we can admire, but only with tender concern for his real happiness. Like the nightingale in Wilde’s fairy story, there are those who press their hearts to the rose-thorn and sing with exultant happiness, and Schubert is one of them. … We might imagine that here is unalloyed joy until we read, or listen, between the lines. And then we are almost embarrassed to feel pity, so dignified and self-sufficient seem the bright-eyed singers of both songs. We know something they do not: that spring will never arrive, and that one day soon the pigeon will fade away on its homeward journey. How we know this is another Schubertian mystery, but we do, and it is somehow audible in the music. Thus Schubert seems to engage our pity without asking for it; and the radiance of the music draws us even closer to the hidden suffering.”
Johnson shares his wisdom in wonderfully diverse ways. We may be led, through the force of his persuasion, to reassess a song that others have hitherto dismissed, such as the strophic setting of Goethe’s erotico-exotic ballad Der Gott und die Bajadere, recently championed in live performance by the author and baritone Florian Boesch. Or his means may be purely musical: in Der Winterabend, an extended song about an old codger at evening contemplating his past life with a melancholy contentment, we have the intuition that something special happens at the point towards the end when he calls to mind his long-deceased wife. But Johnson tells us how it’s done: “she makes her reappearance not in some distant tonality but in the home key, her presence signified by a glorious counter-melody in the piano [which] serves as a descant to our song’s by now familiar vocal theme. This passionate combination transfigures what we are now made to realise has only been half of the whole, half of the music for a story of shared lives; as the husband’s theme joins the wife’s we briefly hear the complete story. The memory of happiness prompts a brief moment of exaltation, for there is life in the old boy yet.” Or again, Or Johnson may put his literary imagination at the song’s service: in Der Doppelgänger, Johnson refreshes the implacable encounter of the rejected lover and his ghost-double with an unexpected but apt quotation from Hardy’s equally horrifying Titanic poem, The Convergence of the Twain. After insights and connections like this, things are never the same again.
If Neville Cardus had reviewed this encyclopaedia, he might have called it the Wisden of Schubert Lieder. But then perhaps not. It hurts a cricket-lover to say so, but the indispensable almanack never provided the quality of prose, the depth of penetration, the sheer companionship of Johnson on Schubert’s songs. It will become one your favourite possessions.