HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
David Sanborn~Spooky👻
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There was a renewed interest in Greek mythology in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and Friedrich von Schiller wrote a lot of poems on classical themes. The Greeks had a different idea about the afterlife than Christians. The Aryan standard was whether a life was lived gloriously or shamefully, and little things like love and goodness didn’t enter into the equation. Tartarus, their idea of hell, was presided over by the god Hades, played to delicious perfection by James Woods in Disney’s “Hercules”. In the second Percy Jackson movie, Tartarus was located in Cleveland!
Schubert set Schiller’s poem twice, once incompletely at age 19, and then a year later, when he produced a masterpiece that points the way to Wagner.
It starts in C minor, rising by semi-tones, as though a stage mechanism is causing a tableau of torture to rise into view.
Hear! Like the angry murmuring of the sea,
Or a brook sobbing through pools in hollow rocks,
From the depths arises a muffled groan,
Heavy, empty and tormented!
Schubert springs the trap in D minor, the Viennese key of death, with a chorus of horror. The semi-tones rise, creating a sense of a lack of melody. It cadences quietly.
Pain distorts
Their faces – in despair
Their mouths open wide, cursing,
Their eyes are hollow – their frightened gaze
Strains toward Cocytus’ bridge,
Following as they weep that river’s mournful course.
The damned ask when their suffering will end. A lesser composer would have set the answer, “Eternity”, in a minor key. But Schubert states it in a massive blaze of C Major. Forever! You’ll be here forever! The mechanism lowers the scene of horror back into the stage, and the piano illustrates the rings of Saturn with a little C minor arpeggio.
Anxiously, softly, they ask one another
If the end is yet near.
Eternity sweeps in circles above them,
Breaking Saturn’s scythe in two.
This is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau accompanied by Gerald Moore.