RomAntics: Spotlight on… Schubert’s ‘Wiedersehen’ D. 855

Caspar David Friedrich, 'Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist', 1818

I rave about Schubert nearly as much as I do Wordsworth. In fact, although I doubt they’d have been friends - Schubert was rather too insalubrious and lascivious than his more ostensibly stolid, morally ascetic counterpart - they share a vast amount in common. 

Sadly, neither knew of each other’s existence, but here I hope we can gauge a sense of their mutual affinity with some of Romanticism’s fundamental principles: yearning (or ‘Sehnsucht’), wandering (‘das Wandern’ - the Romantic-Gothic figure of the Werther-ian youth traipsing over moorland in search of some inchoate unity), the joy of nature (‘Frühlingstraum’) and social equality (both poet and composer interested in giving voice to the voiceless and oppressed).

Schubert falls within the same generational bracket as the second-gen romantics - Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Keats - and he lived about as long as they all did too. Who knows where his middle and old age could have taken him if he hadn’t succumbed to tertiary syphilis (likely combined with poisoning from the mercury used to treat his syphilis, and also typhoid fever). 

Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797, one year before Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads were published - the innovative product of history’s most exciting poetical partnership. Closer to home, 1797 marked ‘The Year of the Ballad’ for German poets Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang Goethe - a vibrant ballad-writing competition and fiery letter-exchange singing the praises of classical poets.

Caspar David Friedrich, 'Monk by the Sea', 1808-10

Best known for his song-cycles, Schubert has a huge underbelly of barely known, and even more rarely performed, work. The focus of this spotlight article is on his song ‘Wiedersehen’ (‘Seeing You Again’) composed exactly 200 years ago. The song is not even two and a half minutes long, but is delicate and extraordinary. Ian Bostridge’s exquisite recording can be found here.

The song is a setting of August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s poem of the same name; and his lyrics seem utterly at one with Schubert’s composition, testament to the Austrian’s immense genius. The first stanza is dewy and fresh with the dawn, a ‘beauteous smile of the spring sun’ as the tenor lover hears ‘joy’s gentle announcement’ over the mountain winds. Schubert’s rippling piano accompaniment enacts the rapid and fleeting invocation of this news which ‘float[s]’ over the ‘rapid wings of song’. 

The piano’s introduction, with its soaring peak-and-trough chords, forms a motif which extends throughout the piece. Again, this is an audial representation of the singer’s ebbing and fro-ing, up-and-down movements and vacillation: in the first stanza he quite literally ascends and descends ‘over valley and hill’ in search of his lover; and the second expresses the nail-biting anticipation of one waiting, ‘a lonely sailor watching and listening’ hoping for the ‘star’ who swore ‘without being loved in return’ to descend from the heavens. 

The piano accompaniment between the two stanzas is some of the most perfect writing Schubert ever achieves. It is almost plodding and pedestrian, but so short-lived, fading away at the top of a phrase just in time for the youthful, hopeful, bright-eyed quixotism of the lover to return, singing his thanks for the wonder of a ‘greeting of love from someone faithful’.

Schubert’s music gives weight and attention to its focal words, which linger, prized with extended time and expression: ‘Morgenrot’ (‘dawn’s red sky’) is granted six individual notes; ‘Aufgebot’ (‘summons’ or ‘announcement’) is extended via a gruppetto ( 𝆗 ) trill, then echoed in the piano; ‘Wonnegeberin’ (‘bestower of bliss,’) receives five notes; seven notes goes to the song’s most important word, ‘Gegenliebe’ (‘requited love’); and ‘allwaltenden’ (‘all-ruling’ - in relation to nature, ‘Natur’) receives lingering attention, pitching the lover’s professed ‘everlasting homage’ to the woman against his care for the almighty force of the natural world.

The song ends, its closing image the young romantic, alone in the night, waiting for a star to fall. And the music is fled just as soon as it came. 

Although Schubert’s composition stops here, the poem actually continues for two stanzas - during which the young lover bemoans the rift of ‘fate’ separating the couple. The final stanza’s opening is a beautiful example of Romantic love - a rare Romantic portrayal of mutual, requited love. The poignant sadness of this unarticulated separating force (‘das schnell dich wieder von mir reißt’, that ‘so quickly tears you away from me again’) refracts in the piano’s gentle conclusion, but the poem's abiding sentiment is one of exuberant, loving ecstasy:

‘You love me, you divine exalted being!

You love me, you gentle, tender woman!

That is enough. I feel that I have been cured,

And I feel the fullness of life in my soul and body’. 

Perhaps Schubert chose not to include Schlegel’s latter two stanzas for this very reason; preferring the open-ended, baited-breath and anticipation crafted with the moonlit waiting of the young lover portrayed at the end of stanza two. 

In this song Schubert lays some of the groundwork for his later song-cycle Winterreise (1828), where his settings of poems by Wilhelm Müller would occupy a similar, if more explicitly tragic territory, narrating the sad history of a wanderer, blighted by ill-fated love from the off: ‘Fremd bin ich eingezogen,/ Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus’ (‘a stranger I arrived here,/a stranger I go hence’). 

If this song sustains its listeners with such spiritual restoration and joy as it does (which it does for me at any rate!), one can only imagine how sublime it must have felt for Schubert to give it birth and existence within his own mind and soul.

And although his life was marked by illness, depression and brevity, perhaps there is some solace we can take from that, even 200 years on, as his aesthetic disciples - if I may be permitted such pretentiousness: that the notes, tunes, and words floating through him must have offered him such an ineffably absolute source of joy and pleasure. 

Copyright translation credits for this article go to Malcolm Wren and schubertsong.uk.