Background. #1
When I was a teenager, one of my favourite musical pieces was Franz Schubert's Wanderer Fantasie. (In fact, it still is.) I often listened to it and thought about it. There was something enchanting about it, which I couldn't put my finger on. The strangest thing, as it seemed to me, was that the title totally didn't reflect the music. When thinking about a "wanderer" I imagined an old man with a stick on his shoulder and a little sack at the end of that stick, walking slowly, being tired from that long walk. Mikhail Lermontov's brilliant translation of Goethe's "Wanderer's Night Song" always came to mind:
Горные вершины
Спят во мгле ночной;
Тихие долины
Полны свежей мглой;
Не пылит дорогоа,
Не дрожат листы...
Подожди немного,
Отдохнёшь и ты.
Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde,
Warte nur, balde
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde,
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
But the music, starting pretty diabolically, then changing into an angelic melody in the middle and changing back and forth, surely meant something else. The vigor also suggested a young fellow rather than an old man... Besides, this is quite a challenging piece for pianists. There is a well-known story about Schubert - how when he was playing it for his friends and broke down in the last movement, he sprang up from his seat with the words: "Let the devil play the stuff!"
(Thank you, Anton Nel, for the beautiful performance!)
Background. #2
I'll start again. When I was a teenager, my favourite writer was Honore de Balzac. I read all of his books that were translated into Russian, some of them several times. There was one short story which I liked but didn't quite understand. It was called "Melmoth Reconciled". I loved the story itself, even though I didn't know what it referred to. Balzac was making fun of poor Sebastian Melmoth, saying that to sell his terrible sin which he couldn't get rid of, all he had to do was come to Paris - which was so full of vices. And in this story, Melmoth comes to Paris and first "sells" his sin to a wealthy banker. Then the banker realizes that what he'd bought was not that great, and sells it to somebody else, and so the sin goes down the social ladder until acquired by a very insignificant man.
Development
When I was in my 3rd or 4th year at the university, I once asked my cousin Naden'ka to recommend me a book to read. And, quite excited, she handed me a thick academic volume and said: "Read this. It's a very strange but fantastic book. The theme is the same as in Goethe's Faust, but it's different. It's like a matryoshka doll. One story within another". I read the title: "Melmoth the Wanderer". I immediately started to wonder...
Charles Robert Maturin. Melmoth the Wanderer.
As I read the story of Sebastian Melmoth who had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for 150 extra years of life and then spent these years vainly trying to find someone who would buy this "sin" from him, ranging from a prisoner of the Inquisition, about to be executed, to a naive young girl who had grown up on an uninhabited island in the Indian ocean having survived the shipwreck, I was thinking more and more about Franz Schubert's Wanderer. Could it be that Schubert wrote his brilliant piano piece after having read this book? Let's look at the odds.
Chronology
- Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer was published in 1820
- FranzSchuberts's Wanderer Fantasie was composed in November 1822, although some sources state late 1820
Melmoth's Popularity
Why would Schubert read Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer? The answer is simple: even though almost completely forgotten today, Melmoth the Wanderer was an extremely popular book back in those days. I have already mentioned Balzac's short story based on it. There are many more examples. One of them is Eugene Delacroix's The Interior of the Dominican Convent in Madrid painted back in 1831 and depicting one of the scenes from the book.
Another spectacular example is Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin which starts exactly as Melmoth the Wanderer and where Pushkin several times alludes to Maturin's book:
Порок любезен и в романе,
И там уж торжествует он.
Британской музы небылицы
Тревожат сон отроковицы
И стал теперь её кумир
Или задумчивый Вампир,
Или Мельмот, бродяга мрачный.
Melmoth can be traced in books by Mikhail Lermontov (Demon, A Hero of Our Time), Oscar Wilde - whose mother was Charles Robert Maturin's niece (The Picture of Dorian Grey) , Robert Louis Stevenson (The Bottle Imp), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Possessed) and many others. So why not Franz Schubert's as well?
Schubert's Wanderers
If you look at Franz Schubert's music you will find several Wanderers, not only the piano Fantasy. There are several songs or Lieds that bear the same title. Now, with songs it is easy. The words will tell you what the music is about!
- One of the songs is written to the poem by Schmidt von Lübeck and called Der Wanderer. Here's the English translation:
I come from highlands down to shore,
The valleys steam, the oceans roar.
I wander silent, joyless here:
My sigh keeps asking, Where? Oh, where?
Their sun appears to me so cold,
their blossoms limp, their life so old;
and what they speak of, empty fare:
I am a stranger everywhere.
Where are you, land, beloved home?
Imagined, sought, but never known!
The land, the land, whence hope does flow,
the land where all my roses grow,
where friends shall never meet in vain,
where all my dead shall rise again,
the land that speaks my language true:
Oh land, where are you?...
I wander silent, joyless here,
my sigh keeps asking, Where? Oh where?
The specters answer my distress:
"Where you are not, there's happiness."
- Another one is written to the poem by Johann Gabriel Seidl and called The Wanderer Speaks to the Moon. Here's the English translation and the YouTube performance follows:
I on the earth, you in the sky -
we both wander briskly on:
I stern and troubled, you mild and pure;
what might be the difference between us?
A stranger, I wander from land to land,
so rootless and unknown;
up mountains and down, into forests and out,
but nowhere am I - alas! - at home.
But you wander up and down,
from the eastern cradle to the western grave,
on your pilgrimage from land to land;
and wherever you are, you are at home.
The sky, endlessly spreading,
is your beloved homeland;
o happy is he who, wherever he goes,
still stands on native ground!
- There is still another Wanderer written by Friedrich von Schlegel. The original German version and the YouTube performance follow:
Wie deutlich des Mondes Licht Zu mir spricht,
Mich beseelend zu der Reise;
"Folge treu dem alten Gleise,
Wähle keine Heimat nicht.
Ew'ge Plage Bringen sonst die schweren Tage;
Fort zu andern Sollst du wechseln, sollst du wandern,
Leicht entfliehend jeder Klage."
Sanfte Ebb und hohe Flut, Tief im Mut,
Wandr' ich so im Dunkeln weiter,
Steige mutig, singe heiter,
Und die Welt erscheint mir gut.
Alles reine Seh ich mild im Widerschein,
Nichts verworren In des Tages Glut verdorren:
Froh umgeben, doch alleine.
- Still another Wanderer was written to the poem by Goethe quoted at the beginning.
Just reading and listening to all the other Wanderers written by Schubert
makes it obvious that the piano fantasy is nothing like any of them. It is
something totally different. It is a different concept of a wanderer. Not a
tired man searching the meaning of life. Not a person who was not
understood by others. Not someone looking for his place on earth. It is
desperation that you feel in the music. Not the matter of earthly life and
death - it is eternity that is at stake...
So, the conclusion is...
Conclusion
We will probably never know whether Schubert's piano
Fantasy called The Wanderer is based on Charles Robert
Maturin's book or not. But it is a beautiful hypothesis - is it not?
