I’ve been working on tidying up the recording of the recital which Sarah Wilkinson and I did in June of Schubert’s song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin, so it does now fit on a CD properly. As well as the usual useful experience of learning from hearing yourself singing, it’s also reminded me of the challenge of which language to sing it in, that I struggled with before the performance.
On the one hand, one of the things that Schubert does best, is to combine the music with the sounds of the words themselves in Wilhelm Müller’s poem cycle, originally written in German. Along with the strong preference of the musical establishment over the last few decades to perform music ‘authentically’, ie exactly as the composer intended and as he himself would have heard it, this makes a strong case for singing the songs in the original German. This would be the generally accepted way of performing the cycle these days (although personally I have significant differences with the whole authenticist movement, but that’s a topic for another post!).
However I do also feel very strongly that the actual meaning of the words is also integral to appreciating the songs, and Schubert’s achievement in setting the poems to music. The words and sense of the poems are so subtle and nuanced, and Schubert does such a good job of building the music around them, that I just think that if people can’t understand what is being sung, then there is almost no point in singing them. The songs are not just notes which the singer happens to be singing to a random collection of vowels and consonants – the words and music together form a whole experience communicating the poet and the composer’s subtle – and in the case of this cycle, extremely powerful – meaning.
And to a London audience, this means singing the cycle in English.
After much thought and discussion – and in the end taking into account the significant practical problem of finding an English translation that does the original words justice – we eventually came down on the side of performing them in German. But we issued the audience with a programme with the words from both languages interleaved, and backed this up further with stern exhortation from the performer at the start of the concert that if they didn’t follow the words they would be missing out on a large part of the performance!
This seemed to work – the singer at the front has a good vantage point to see who is following the programme – and many of them did, while others by not doing so, let us wonder whether it was because they preferred to listen only to the music, because they’d brought the wrong glasses, or because they understood German well enough not to need them!