Classical Music | Soprano

Recorded on 11/05/2008, uploaded on 05/02/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Upon hearing Schubert's Suleika I, a setting of a poem from Goethe's Das Buch Suleika, it is hard to disagree with Johannes Brahms's remark that it is the "loveliest song ever written." Schubert, however, was unlikely aware of the poem's origin. Though published under Goethe's name, its true author was actually a woman by the name of Marianne von Willemer. In late September 1815, Goethe met von Willemer in Heidelberg for a three-day visit—it was to be the last time the lovers would ever see each other. Von Willemer set the words of both poems that became Schubert's Suleika I & II. With her permission, Goethe revised the poems and published them as part of the eighth book (Das Buch Suleika) of his West-östlicher Divan ("West-East Anthology").

Suleika I, written as von Willemer traveled to Heidelberg, tells of Suleika, who is also traveling to meet her lover, Hatem, and listens for tidings of him carried by the east wind. Schubert's setting instantly captures this imagery of the "east wind" in the piano introduction. Furthermore, with the unusual flattening of the fifth scale degree in the opening scalar passages, one feels instantly carried off by the "east wind" into another world—albeit, a Western Romantic's idealized view of the East.

The form of the song is ingeniously cast to give ultimate expression to the words. Neither entirely strophic nor entirely through-composed, the tonal wandering of each stanza heightens the emotional state of the song. Beginning in B minor, with the unabated murmuring of the east wind in the piano accompaniment, the first four stanzas move out into the keys of B major and D major, both related keys, but always returns to the B minor tonic. The fifth stanza, when Suleika sees the "high walls" behind which she'll find her beloved, the music becomes more harmonically unstable, venturing through C major and B-flat major, before arriving on the beginning of a prolonged dominant pedal in B major. This dominant pedal becomes the foundation of the passionate final stanza. Persisting until the final cadence of the song, the bass pedal is like the heart eager to be in the presence of one's beloved, barely held at bay, and only fulfilled in the final meeting—in this case, the meeting of two lovers which must follow the B major conclusion of the song.      Joseph DuBose