Schubert | Symphony 8 & Strauss | Death and Transfiguration

Oct 26, 2019
Montclait State University Symphony Orchestra

Deaths and Transfigurations

 Two years ago, I finally visited the Grand Canyon for the first time. As we drove in from the East amid view-obstructing thickets of gnarled desert spruce and juniper, there came a very sudden moment when the persistence of trees gave way to the canyon revealing itself. From that angle, we were looking up the length of the canyon. My wife, who, just fifteen minutes earlier had been wondering aloud exactly how grand this canyon was going to be, made the kind of audible gasp that if it had been made in the context of a Hollywood movie would seem over-acted and unbelievable.

As we lingered dreamily at various spots on the South Rim, watching the colors and shadows below shift with the clouds and the light above, we noticed a pattern: a group of visitors would approach the edge, contemplate silently for between 3 to 30 seconds, and invariably, one person within the group would break their mesmerized silence with a joke about how they “would hate to fall in there…” It was like clockwork.

It is not often in our everyday lives we are afforded the opportunity to stare with open eyes through the hazy scrim separating us from whatever it is that is not us and simply…look. The canyon is grand, certainly, but I wonder if the core of its appeal is this chance it affords – the chance to sit on the literal edge of existence, and…perhaps…eat a sandwich. 

This “staring into the void” is stupendously moving, and it is what unites the two pieces on the MSU Symphony Orchestra’s program today. Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, though written without a specific narrative in mind, and left abandoned a robust six years before Schubert’s untimely death at 35, does not explicitly deal with the void. But within the first movement are such menacing aberrations of contemporary symphonic composition that the work practically heralds the end of the symphony as a meaningful way for composers to organize musical thought. Everything about it hovers on some kind of brink or another.

We know that the more Schubert encountered Beethoven’s symphonies, the more Schubert, who was famous for his 600+ songs, was increasingly insecure about his forays into this grander, more public genre. We know that around the time Schubert abandoned work on this symphony was around the same time he received the diagnosis of syphilis that would ultimately be his end, and that also around this time Schubert left a heap of sketches and unfinished works. We know that he suffered from depression throughout his life.

Knowing all of this helps us understand the circumstances as to why this work was left unfinished, but these circumstances offer little insight into the half of the symphony that is finished. To that end, I would offer two observations about the first movement:

The low b-minor cello melody that opens the piece returns relentlessly. It returns too many times, such that it is almost as if the composer is haunted by it. It never undergoes a triumphant shift to a major key, as would be expected in this kind of symphonic movement. There are only more repetitions, more turning corners and discovering it again, waiting for us.

Subsequently, when Schubert gives us one of the most delightfully charming melodies he ever put to paper, (the melody that may have been responsible for making this symphony famous – you’ll know it when you hear it…), he gives it twice in quick succession: once in the cellos, and an immediate response from the violins. As the violins are about to finish the melody, however, there is a gaping silence. It is a moment of silent contemplation stumbled into rather unexpectedly, like the sudden revelation of an incomprehensibly large hole in the earth where previously all you saw were the most beautiful little trees. This sequence of events happens twice in the first movement. We might expect the second occurrence of this gap to be altered or developed in some crafty fashion, but no. We find exactly the same silence, exactly the same unfinished melody left hanging in the air, exactly the same glance into grim nothingness. These two silences last only a moment, but it is enough.

If we allow ourselves to let go of delicious speculations about what might have been if only Schubert had finished the entire symphony, and to accept the piece for what it is, we have a work made up of two movements standing in opposition to each other, the second movement a perfect foil to the first. The first movement is thick with foreboding, butting up against various glimpses into the void; the second offers a sublime completeness: Schubert’s transcendence, Schubert’s transfiguration. All that was dark in the first movement is light in the second.

Strauss’s tone poem, written a full 60 years before Strauss’ death, overtly sets out to explore in music a dying man’s last minutes, his recollections of his life, his pains, his death, and, perhaps somewhat speculatively on the part of the 24-year-old Strauss, his transfiguration. As Strauss neared his own end half a century later, he famously remarked that he had gotten it just right in this early tone poem, that his voyage was unfolding just as he had composed it 60 years earlier.

Even by the standard of a composer who made his career with brilliant musical depictions of stories, characters, and landscapes, the vividness with which Strauss assembles this piece is remarkable. Whereas some of Strauss’ other tone-poems attempt to describe an entire lifetime in 20 or 30 minutes of music, Death and Transfiguration seems to unfold in real time: now the man is lying in his bed, now his breathing becomes labored, now he remembers his childhood, now the memory passes and a cold shiver grabs him again. We could almost study the score note by note and understand this journey second by second. As Strauss’ tone-poems go, it is decidedly the most literal in its scheme.

Strauss, like Schubert, does not leave us in the throes of despair. The second half of the piece, the transfiguration, contains some of Strauss’ most simply lyrical writing. As it should be. None of us can truly speak from experience, but I like to imagine that as the critical moment that unites us all draws near, our thoughts will be simple, and with any luck, lyrical. Perhaps it will be like sitting on the edge of the earth, watching the colors and shadows below shift with the clouds and the light above.

© 2019 Nicholas DeMaison