May I remember always when / your glance in secrecy met mine,
And in my face your love was like / a visibly reflected sign.
May I remember always when / your chiding eyes were like my death
And your sweet lips restored my life / like Jesus’s reviving breath.
May I remember always when / I was a canopy unfurled
That shaded you, and you were like / the new moon riding through the world.
May I remember always when / the jewels of verse Hafez selected
Were set out properly by you, / arranged in order, and corrected.62
“Ach, um deine feuchten Schwingen” also “turns,” like the east wind ghazal, in the end to go deeper, to arrive at the heart of the matter. The message-bearing breeze at first purports to be sorrow-laden, invoking the tears of lovers’ grief shared by all of nature (and it is Schubert’s singular perception to see that melancholy underlies rapture throughout much of “Suleika I,” while determined optimism underlies enunciated sorrow throughout most of “Suleika II”). It is here that we remember Goethe’s home was in the east of Germany, in Weimar, while Marianne’s was in the west, in Frankfurt am Main.
| Ach, um deine feuchten Schwingen, West, wie sehr ich dich beneide: Denn du kannst ihm Kunde bringen Was ich in der Trennung leide! Die Bewegung deiner Flügel Weckt im Busen stilles Sehnen; Blumen, Auen, Wald und Hügel Stehn bei deinem Hauch in Tränen. Doch dein mildes sanftes Wehen Kühlt die wunden Augenlider; Ach, für Leid müßt’ ich vergehen, Hofft’ ich nicht zu sehn ihn wieder. Eile denn zu meinem Lieben, Spreche sanft zu seinem Herzen; Doch vermeid’ ihn zu betrüben, Und verbirg ihm meine Schmerzen. Sag ihm, aber sag’s bescheiden: Seine Liebe sei mein Leben, Freudiges Gefühl von beiden Wird mir seine Nähe geben. | Ah, West Wind, how I envy you Your moist wings: For you can bring him word Of what I suffer being parted from him! The motion of your wings Awakens a quiet longing within my breast. Flowers, meadows, woods, and hills Grow tearful at your breath. But your soft, gentle breeze Cools my sore eyelids: Ah, I should die of grief If I had no hope of seeing him again. Hasten then to my beloved, Speak softly to his heart; But forebear from causing him distress And conceal my suffering from him. Tell him, but tell him humbly, that his love is my life, and that his nearness will bring me a joyous sense of both. |
By now, the message-bearing wind is heavy, sorrow-laden, and the tears of lovers’ grief are shared by all of nature. But at the hinge-word doch, Suleika refuses to surrender to despair, despite confessing that the thought of never seeing him again would be her death. Then in the last two stanzas, she describes the pure, unselfish quality of her love for Hatem, and she ends in affirmation and in hope. The final verb is not subjunctive possibility but firm expectation of future reunion.
West-East reciprocity in words was one thing, but what of music? While the occasional German traveler had ventured into Persia and written travelogues about their experiences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ethnomusicology was not yet a recognized scholarly discipline; the Abbé Vogler had traveled to North Africa and transcribed some of the music he heard there, but such ventures were few and far between. The perceptions of music from elsewhere were inevitably filtered through Western ears, as in Engelbert Kaempfer’s 1712 Amoenitatum exoticarum, in which he writes of “a noise rather than an ensemble” on display in Persia and of music “unencumbered by any rules of harmony but nevertheless neither confused nor disagreeable;” he knew nothing of the dastgāh system of Persian melody types on the basis of which a performer produced extemporized works.63 Instead, Western composers resorted to stereotypes of Janissary music on the one hand and sultry arabesque melodies laden with augmented seconds on the other; we find both in popular light operas such as Michael Kelly’s Illusion, or, The trances of Nourjahad: An Oriental Romance of 1813—a specimen of what Ralph Locke has dubbed music of “cutthroats and casbah dancers.”64 In these works, a vague and generalized East functions as sign or metaphor, as imaginary geography, against which Westerners constructed a varied sense of self. Schubert would have known all the clichés: in fact, the opera in which he invested his greatest hopes, Fierrabras, is about a Moorish prince who converts at the end both to Christianity and to Charlemagne’s armies. A reviewer in the Berlinische Nachrichten for June 11, 1825, praised Schubert for the way he “marvelously captured in tones the Oriental spirit of a poem that breathes love’s ardent, radiant desire;” aside from general praise for the “rhythms, modulations, melody, and accompaniment,” he does not elaborate, nor does he define Schubert’s way of fashioning subliminal hints of things Oriental by indubitably Western means.65 Had “Suleika II” been truly “Oriental,” he would hardly have known what to make of it.
For Cognoscenti and Hoi Polloi
Given boundaries of length and space, I will restrict my contrast between utmost radical refinement on the one hand (Suleika I) and a more popularizing tone (Suleika II) to beginnings and endings, the frames around these two songs. Schubert begins “Was bedeutet die Bewegung?” with a bit of enigmatic magic at the outset, namely five famous introductory measures that are a masterpiece of ambiguity. These winds blow from who knows where, nor can we divine their purpose immediately. We can hear this evocative rise from pianissimo depths up to those two rolled chords that at last define a key in several ways: on the level of onomatopoeia, as winds rolling in gently from foreign places, bearing the symbolic dust of Persian poetry with them (the figure at the beginning of example 1.6 will be used soon after for the light clouds of dust in stanza 2).
On the level of subjectivity brought to sounding life in music, we can hear some sort of sensuous/melancholy/erotic presentiment rising from the depths of the psyche, while on the level of musical logistics, we hear a nontonic beginning with an initially ungrounded German sixth chord (Schubert loved that harmony) that finally goes to the dominant seventh and thence to tonic in measure 6, when the dust settles. Not until the wind finally arrives is B minor a certainty. The chromatic dust particles swirl around the initial harmony as it arrives in three stages, three cumulative beginnings that rise higher and higher until they come to full awareness, if not to understanding, with Suleika forced to ask, “Was bedeutet die Bewegung?”
Example 1.6. Franz Schubert, “Suleika I,” D717, measures 1–5.
The winds, having arrived, begin to harp on their message in the piano before Suleika puts her query into words, and its repetitive swaying motion is one Western musical signifier of the Oriental languorous-exotic, here contained in scalewise motion within the span of a diminished fourth D C-sharp B A-sharp. So many elements at the beginning of this song add up to foreboding, from the open fifth in the bass with the ostinato repeated pitch emphasis on the fifth scale degree (very “Gretchen am Spinnrade”) to the Beethovenian rhythmic tattoo in the tenor voice: Marianne’s Suleika may wonder whether the east wing brings her “happy tidings,” (“frohe Kunde”), but Schubert’s music tells us that darker possibilities (“tiefe Wunde”) haunt his Suleika. We also hear his Suleika’s effort to persuade herself that reunion is in the offing, as manifested in the relative major and parallel major mode invocations of the words “seiner Schwingen frische Regung kühlt des Herzens tiefe Wunde”: