This is a relatively short song, but here Schumann proves himself Schubert’s equal when it comes to the composition of a ballad. It was a genre of which Carl Loewe was a master, of course, and Schumann worked hard all his life to contribute to this old and honourable tradition of vocal music-making that is a separate art from the lied. Despite all the melodic and narrative felicities of such works as Die Löwenbraut2 and Blondels Lied3, however, there is something static about Schumann’s treatment of these stories. Only the finest performances of these works succeed in sweeping us away in the manner of the young Schubert at his best (Der Taucher, Die Bürgschaft, or the Ossian ballad Die Nacht, to name but three). Abends am Strand, however, is an exception. Of course, it is a much shorter poem, but it is as jam-packed with as much incident and fantasy as any of the longer lyrics. Schumann allows his imagination and fantasy free rein and creates a convincing mini-opera staged in the mind’s eye and ear.
The performer too is given a freedom which he has to learn to handle. The marking is ‘Ruhig, nach and nach bewegter’ (‘Peacefully at first, then gradually faster’). This is all very well, but in giving the singer and pianist carte blanche one cannot help but feel that Schumann is abandoning his responsibilities. (It is not the only time in his output that such vague directions make performers cry out for greater and more detailed explication; one bitterly misses the book about the Schumann songs and their tempi which Clara Schumann, or even Brahms, might have written.) If one ‘goes with the flow’ however, reads the words carefully, and responds to the piece in the spirit of a game where the performers’ contribution is more creative than usual, the chances are the music will come alive.
And what music! In the first verse the accompaniment gently rolls its way around the bass stave like mist coming in from the surface of the water. The blue-grey depths of both twilight and sea are reflected in the long and sonorous bass notes in the left hand. These engage with the twistings and turnings of the right hand, and the two forces pull against each other like the tugging of a powerful and quietly threatening tide. This is a tessitura that would have suited a setting of Shakespeare’s Full fathom five. The sinuous piano writing, arpeggios made up of broken chords and sixths and thirds doubling back on themselves, brings to mind the opening of Mozart’s Abendempfindung which was also such a potent source of inspiration to Schubert. And mention of that composer reminds us too of Schubert’s own flowing water music in the same tessitura (and in the same original key of G major), Danksagung am Bach from Die schöne Müllerin. At ‘Abendnebel kamen und stiegen in die Höh’’ the accompaniment music accordingly climbs the stave towards the region of the treble clef while the voice remains laconically in the tessitura of speech.
The music for the second verse of the poem runs on from the first. The illumination of the lighthouse is beautifully conceived: lamps appear one by one, gathering together in a concerted chorus of light. At ‘Im Leuchturm wurden die Lichter allmählich angesteckt’ the rolling vocal line gathers strength and brilliance as it goes, taking the pianist’s right hand with it, then the left in its wake – a canon at the distance of two beats, like a back-up of more powerful beams. This gradual illumination of the song-theatre – its impressionable public comprising enthralled young Fischermädchen – is crowned by the vocal line which leads the twinkling of these various strands of light in a melismatic dance, two notes for each syllable of the text. The lighthouse reminds us of sailing-ships and those in peril on the sea. It is then that those on the beach are able to make out a ship sailing in the distance.
It is this sight which triggers the beginning of the various fantasies which make the song the extraordinary piece that it is. It is as if everyone looking out to the horizon has an insatiable curiosity as to where that ship may be going, and one outlandish theory leads to the next. It is surely here, after the crucial word ‘entdeckt’ in the poem’s second verse, that the tempo must quicken according to Schumann’s vague instructions. Vertical chords in brusque quavers – brave, hearty and suitable for the ever-upright professional sailor used to dealing with storm and shipwreck – are suddenly imposed on a musical landscape that has hitherto been painted in horizontal brush-strokes. Those gentle rocking figurations that had served for tide and sea-mist are now pressed into more hectic service to depict the movement of storm-tossed vessels on the ocean wave.
The voyage depicted in the piano under the words ‘Wir sprachen von fernen Küsten, vom Süden und vom Nord’ (fourth verse) is a miniature tour around the world (and keyboard) where the piano writing rises and plunges alarmingly with each four-note figuration. The uncomfortable conditions of the queasy ride merge imperceptibly with the cultural challenges to be faced at the end of the voyage – all those foreign places and people (‘und von den seltsamen Menschen [Heine writes ‘Völkern’] und seltsamen Sitten dort’). Here one must remember that the cynical poet is quite capable of amusing himself by playing on the fears and prejudices of the simple fisher-folk who are bewitched by his exegesis. The stormy piano interlude of five bars is a portmanteau of expression – it can be taken to be the intrepid voyage as the ship continues to thrash its way through the seas; or the ominous threat of unfriendly natives and savages; or pioneering exploration (as if Schumann imagined himself as Columbus) as the music rises bravely in ever-ascending sequences to discover a new continent.
It is the latter theory which proves the most likely. Immediately over the horizon of this interlude the fifth strophe begins in a glorious blaze of sunlight; with two unashamed and unremitting bars of B major chords in shiningly bright quavers, we find ourselves, ‘auf Flügeln des Gesanges’, on the Indian subcontinent. Schumann had already set Heine’s Die Lotosblume in February 1840 and the slow-moving harmonies of that infinitely dignified piece showed some understanding of, and feeling for, far-eastern ritual. Here he seems to have imagined some aspect of Indian worship taking place accompanied by the brightest of colours and the grandest of ceremonies – every bar a durbar. Even within a fast tempo, the harmonic progress of these ‘schöne, stille Menschen’ is stately. It is also in stark contrast to what follows.
The sixth verse, intensely insulting to the poor Lapps, is the nearest thing we find, apart from some Wolfian indiscretions, to racism in lieder. Heine, who suffered numerous anti-Semitic slights, should have known better, although he would not have understood our present-day cult of political correctness. After due apologies have been made for the outlooks of a different epoch, these words provide Schumann with vivid and memorable musical images. Wagner could have done no better for Alberich and the Nibelungs; note the distaste of ‘schmutzige Leute’ with its dismissive plunge of an octave in the vocal line. The words have the Lapps seated at the fire, but Schumann sees them scurrying around like a race of crazed dwarfs, their croaking and yelling implicit in the hectic accompaniment. The piano part, relentlessly doubling the vocal line, hounds the words ‘quäken und schrein’ (which are repeated) up to the top of the stave as if with a whip. Once there, the voice is required to sing the most extraordinary melisma that Schumann ever wrote. The second ‘schrein’ (howl), true to its meaning, is placed on a top G (in the song’s original key of G major) which then moves down in tied minims to F sharp, E and back to a semibreve F sharp. The effect of this slow-motion cadence is purposefully grotesque, the depiction of the not-so-noble savage in all his frightening crudeness. It also masterfully conveys that the narrator, out to impress the girls, has got carried away by his own audacity.
This is certainly not the reportage of an experienced traveller but the ridiculous invention of a Walter Mitty wannabe. That yelling into the night air is the high point (or low point) of the song, and it leaves its listeners in stunned silence. There is no more to be said. In any case the ship that has been the reason why the travellers’ tales were recounted in the first place has disappeared from view. It is the pianist’s tricky task to effect the transition between two sections so utterly unlike each other: the yodelling of the Lapps and the canoodling on the beach. (We may be sure that the girls have been frightened by these tales and will receive due comfort from their valiant boyfriends who have done much to stir up the fear in the first place!) In the last verse the accompaniment is cut down to mysterious quavers alternating between the hands in the bass clef. In turn even these harmonies gradually etiolate until there is nothing more than bare alternations of Gs two octaves apart. This draining away of all harmony in the music is a powerfully apt description of nightfall. That bewitching twilight hour of telling tall stories is over; now no doubt it is time for lap dances of different kinds. But the most astonishing thing is that so much has happened on these three pages of music in such a remarkably short amount of time, and that Schumann has somehow managed to make a bewitching unity out of it all.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2000