To celebrate NYFOS’s 30th Anniversary Season, Song of the Day is featuring some recordings from our archives, along with excerpts from program notes that accompanied them. (If the recording does not appear below in your email, please click on the title above to play the song on our website.)
Du bist die Ruh, D. 776 (“You are repose”) [1823]
Music by Franz Schubert; poem by Friedrich Rückert
Performed by Theo Hoffman, baritone and guitar
in Schubert/Beatles (2016)
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Du bist die Ruh, Ich weihe dir Kehr ein bei mir, Treib andern Schmerz Dies Augenzelt |
You are repose, I consecrate to you, Tarry with me Drive every other sadness This sanctuary of my eyes |
From the Program Notes by Steven Blier:
I heard my first Schubert Lieder around the same time I heard my first Beatles songs. I was twelve years old and in eighth grade. As a budding “longhair” musician, I had a distinct sense that I was supposed to like Schubert songs, and I sort of did. Hearing them sung by Elisabeth Schumann on an Angel Records “Great Recordings of the Century” reissue, they seemed like precious artifacts of a long-lost civilization. The LP transfer from 78s recorded in the 1920s and 30s only added to their ghostly, foreign aura. As a Jewish kid whose dad had fought in World War II, I continued to have mixed feelings about hearing the German language, even at its purest and loftiest. Still, there was something about that music that allured me, even as it troubled me.
I am happy to report that my feelings about Schubert have also developed over the last half- century. No, I have not exactly gravitated to his music; I’ve been through too many master classes where Schubert’s songs were used to make every singer and pianist feel impossibly tight and incompetent. But working on his music in the context of the Beatles has shone a new, contemporary light on this beloved composer. His songs deal with the same themes the Beatles wrote about 140 years later, and his music often shares their oracular simplicity. And it seems clear that Schubert’s own singing voice was a high tenor, whose falsetto extension was not unlike John Lennon’s or Paul McCartney’s. (That is why it is can be so hard to sing them in their printed keys.)
But I have also come to understand Schubert on a more personal level. It has come to light in recent years that he was a promiscuous man with a strong sexual urge—and that his main attachments were to men. Of course this discovery has been hotly debated; everyone rushes to defend composers from what is still perceived as the terrible taint of homosexuality. But Maynard Solomon’s article Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini is extremely persuasive. Solomon paints Schubert as a hedonist whose prodigious musical creativity was tied to a healthy appetite for sex, food, and drink. Casting aside conventions and societal norms, Schubert courageously forged a life based around sexual freedom in the company of like-minded men. His bohemian circle allowed for the free flow of emotion and the expression of same-sex love on a full spectrum, from Platonic to carnal. They formed a subculture that blended fierce idealism with their shared orientation. But Schubert’s circle also led a clandestine existence; their renegade sexuality and political beliefs made them subject to police raids and even to exile. This is why Beethoven’s nephew wrote, “They greatly praise Schubert, but it is said that he conceals himself.”
Like several of his friends, Schubert was diagnosed with syphilis in 1823, and lived under a death sentence for the next five years. Always prone to melancholy, he vacillated between temporary remissions and crushing setbacks until the disease claimed his life. My mind flashed to the AIDS epidemic, when I watched so many friends fighting for their survival against similar odds. Suddenly Schubert seemed achingly real to me. My view of Schubert had been colored by the arch, cloying interpretations of his songs so prevalent in my early days—and the strangulation of those who attempted them in their original keys. But now I saw a human being I recognized, a brilliant, embattled gay man determined to live life on his own terms.
Schubert wrote his 600-plus Lieder over the span of thirteen years, from 1815 when “Erlkönig” first appeared, to 1828 when he composed his last song, “Die Taubenpost.” We chose that one for tonight’s concert—it was at the top of practically everyone’s wish list, including my German art song guru J.J. Penna. How appropriate that Schubert’s final envoi, a bittersweet paean to “Sehnsucht” (longing) became the last of his songs in the program. Schubert and his friends used the term “hunting for peacocks” to refer to their cruising escapades; that bit of code casts an ironic, tender shadow on the central metaphor of this song, an apostrophe to a carrier pigeon, a symbol of yearning.
I read that every era creates the Schubert they need, and I have no doubt I have created my own image of this great artist, the one I need. The Romantic era liked to portray him as a man composing music in a trance, writing from a deep well of unconscious genius rather than from anything as mundane as a technique. But I see something else: a prolific, deeply gifted young man claiming the right to be who he was, reveling in all his natural urges. I also see a young man fighting for his life. And I meditate on all he yearned for as he sickened and died, his own personal “Taubenpost.”
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