Arts
Schubert: tune and melody
Hans Keller
On the surface, Sunday's 150th anniversary of Schubert's death finds the reputation of his mature output in better health than did the hundredth. Admittedly, I wasn't all there to witness it, but there I was, nevertheless: even the child noticed that Schubert was marginally non-U as a great composer, and felt prompted to write a 'Schubert Symphony by Hans Keller' in his defence. Nor did Vienna's highbrows consider Schubert the greater for being able to sound pronouncedly Viennese. On the contrary, had there been a German word for 'tune', Schubert would have been known as a tune-smith by the symphonic elite, who granted him inspiration on a small formal scale, but considered him incapable of melodic evolution a la Mozart or thematic development a la Beethoven: no wonder the 'Unfinished' had to remain unfinished! What, then did he do in the movements he completed; what, for that matter, did he do in the endless C major Symphony, whose 'heavenly length' was regarded as the euphemism of musical history? He repeated, endlessly — a legitimate method ma strophic song, the only possible method, in fact; but a sin against the symphonic ghost when committed in a sonata, a trio, a quartet or a quintet, a symphony. As the century ground towards and beyond its middle, the elite, now European rather than merely Austrian, turned into a downright, or rather upright, secret society, publicly professing its admiration for Schubert's genius, but continuing to lament its limitations, albeit privately, confidentially: only know-ails were allowed to know. As a pitiable result, the anti-Schubert snob who used to turn up his nose at Schubert's repetitions has gradually been replaced by the Schubert snob — the man who pretends he likes them. There isn't much to choose between the two: neither is able to distinguish between the wellrepeatable and the ill-repeatable, between intensification of meaning and loss of meaning through repetition, between repeatable tune and not so repeatable melody. The snob, any snob, is spontaneously convinced that repeatability is proportionate to the complexity of that which is being repeated. His instinctive criterion, after all, is his own unconfessed incomprehension: as soon as something is difficult to understand, it deserves repetition. Inevitably, therefore, the Schubert snob who has to like Schubert's repetitions points to an illusion the complexity of Schubert s deceptive simplicity: genuine simplicity is the one thing which he — like his predecessor, the anti-Schubert snob — caret take, depending as he does on understanding what you can't.
Nor is he without his counterpart on the creative side: many are the all too respectable composers who, reacting against the all-out repetitions of . our composing jungle-animals (Caged or un-Caged), only allow themselves repetitions when they are sure they are able to mystify the listener the first time over, thus turning composition into a listening practice. It is as if the composer of a hair-raising concerto decided to make relative unplayabilities the subject of repetition, inviting the virtuoso to succeed at the second or third attempt where he is bound to have failed at the first.
Yet all one has to do in order to solve the question of repeatability is to have a look at what, precisely, one or other great master considered repeatable — assuming, of course, that one understands his music in the first place. If one does, one realises how and why he invariably succeeded with his repeated repetitions — and let's leave Schubert himself out of it for the moment, in order not to beg the question, and all the more reliably to arrive at the conclusion that he does not need the snobs to establish him as a great master (as, say, Schoenberg still does, notwithstanding his great mastery).
In fact, with heartless logic, let's pick the opposite of a tune-smith —the non-repeater, the thematic developer par excellence, Beethoven, who was so little interested in the tune-in-itself that Stravinsky even denied him melodic genius, by way of the most naive projection recorded in musical history, the biggest beam in thine own eye. Did Beethoven repeat his stunning complexities? On the contrary, he even went so far as to drop the seemingly obligatory repeat of the exposition in the opening movement of his F major String Quartet, Op.59, No.1 .
But when he did decide upon repetition, prototypically when he employed variation technique with a deliberate minimum of variation and a maximum of accumulation of tension through reiteration, the last thing he sought in his inner world was one of his complex melodies. And when he came to compose what he must have considered the paradigm of this repetitive approach, the finale of the Ninth, he spent years whittling down his first invention to an extreme degree of simplicity, until he had captured, for once, a sheer tune and (to begin with) nothing but a tune — the theme of the Ode to Joy, the `Ur-Thema' (primal theme), as Furtwangler called it. Repetitive within itself, divested of any trace of complication or sophistication, it proved the ideal basis for largescale repetition, and has thus proved itself ever since.
It is the simple tune, then, not the contrast-laden thought, that is repeatable — ad infinitum in its simplest form. Why? Because at its most primitive level, music is repetition: the beat, the elementary jungle-motif, demands to be heard again and again, depends for its existence, its definition, on regular recurrence: there is no beat without another beat, in and outside the heart. Thus the pulse of life and of life's basic activities, from our first sucking moments onwards, is re-created in preartistic creation, whose stimulating and indeed hypnotic influence need not, therefore, surprise us.
But at that stage, nothing has yet been said. Art, communication arises with the first contradiction of the expectation of repetition — with contrast. And the art of meaningful repeatability is the art of having it both ways, of retaining elemental simplicity in the very process of simply contradicting it: from the Ode to Joy, it isn't far to another strophic song instrumentally extended by way of variations, another simple tune whose internal repetitions ask for its own repeated repetition — albeit a tune in the opposite emotional area — the theme of the slow movement from Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet.
There are no variations without a theme, but there are plenty of limping variations without a tune: 'Tune and Variations' would be a better technical description than 'Theme and Variations', if less easily translatable into other languages. Schubert's tune features 14 keynotes within the first 8 bars, four of them successively, before anything else happens; and the tune has a single contrasting motif in the middle — which merely changes the basic motif's two repeated and repeating crotchets into a repeating minim. Otherwise, contradiction of the expectation of repetition is confined to the central turn from G minor to E flat. Hence the tune's repeatability, including those repetitions of the internal repetitions which result from the repeats of two parts of the tune.
True, the tune and its repeating variations would not yet make Schubert a great master: they would just make him a master of small forms and elementarily extended forms. His greatness arises, in the simplest language, from his tuneful melodies, which carry repeatability into his symphonic thought, where variation gives way, less to development, than to evolution by repetition or reiteration. Though (let's face it) he has never really been forgiven his melodious melodies, they are responsible for symphonic structures as unique as is, on the other hand and at the other end, the tuneless first movement of Beethoven's Fifth, whose anti-melodism the noteworthy composer Louis Spohr failed to understand.
It is at this point that one can demonstrate to the secret Anti-Schubert Society that Schubert was a great master — prove it even, in the Society's own terms, or lack of terms. We recall that what they all moan about is Schubert's repetitions. Now, if it can be shown that Schubert's symphonic build-ups are capable of hiding sheer (if not mere) repetitions from them, as well as from the Schubert snobs, to the extent of their being unaware of the rate and frequency of repetition, the case against both camps has been won: the Schubert snobs themselves will have to confess that they like something they haven't noticed, while the antiSchubert snobs hate something they haven't noticed.
Here goes. In a movement which, like the Death and the Maiden, I have previously mentioned in these pages, in another context, i.e. the opening allegro ma non troppo of the A minor Quartet, the theme starts as a tune and evolves into a melody: at first repeating, and then departing from, the antecedent, the consequent achieves so wide open an end that it is interchangeable with the antecedent, as well as separable from it. At the same time, the internal repetitiveness and proportionate simplicity of either produces the need for repeating each: the basic entity, the model, the seminal tune, becomes ever more profoundly repeatable. Now, Snobs of the World, how many repetitions are you conscious of, how many can you remember?
You can't, you know: there are no fewer than ten occurrences of this theme-tune, six in the exposition, one in the development (the only one not in the tonic minor or major!), and three in the recapitulation. When we hear jungle-repetitions, we notice them and nothing else; when we hear Schubert's symphonic repetitions, they tell us so much that we don't notice them for what they are, even though it is our jungleneeds that have made thempossible, desirable, indispensable even. This is both the difference and the common ground between stimulation and communications.
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