In this great 18th century play, Mephistopheles has made a bet with God, that he can corrupt the righteous mortal Faust. Faust is lured into a pact with the devil, in which the poor scholar Faust gets whatever he wants on earth, with a promise to serve Mephistopheles in Hell. One of the things that Faust wants is Gretchen, but the romance ends in murder and infanticide. In Scene 18 of the first part of Goethe's two-part drama, Gretchen narrates the story of her tragic relationship with the scholar and Doctor Faust.
My peace is gone, My heart is heavy, I will find it never and never more. Where I do not have him, That is the grave, The whole world Is bitter to me. My poor head Is crazy to me, My poor mind Is torn apart. His tall walk, His noble figure, His mouth's smile, His eyes' power,. And his mouth's Magic flow, His handclasp, and ah!
My bosom urges itself toward him. Ah, might I grasp And hold him! And kiss him, As I would wish, At his kisses I should die! Select options.
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I consent to the storing of this data as outlined in the privacy policy. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Podcast Subscribe:. However, Schubert's extra repetition of some of the words alters the broader structure of the poem in fundamental ways. Goethe repeats the opening verse twice, to form a recurring refrain, but he does not return to it at the end. Schubert repeats Goethe's final verse, so extending the climax of the song, and then, after the piano part has quietened, repeats Goethe's refrain one last time.
This final repetition of the refrain is made especially poignant by the fact that Gretchen does not complete it: she sings only the first two lines. This has the wonderful effect of making the song sound unfinished — it does come to an end, but the feelings hang in the air, heightening the impression that Gretchen can never escape from them. Schubert intensifies the effect of this refrain with an internal repetition which is not so obvious. This might seem a small point, but it has the effect of creating a longer phrase than at any other time in the song.
Every other phrase in the song is two bars long. Those phrases often form pairs, four bars long, like a pair of lines in the poem. But lines 3 and 4 of the first verse are moulded into one continuous, longer phrase, five bars long or six, if you count the bar that the piano plays at the end of it.
It is not important to know how many bars long the phrases are, though you may like to check my analysis on the score. Because Gretchen comes back to it twice, it seems like the heart of the song. And then at the end, when she fails to reach it, this intensifies the feeling of something unfinished and ongoing. Goethe's stage instruction specifies that Gretchen is at her spinning-wheel. Schubert's accompaniment does not literally sound like a spinning-wheel: the rhythm is quite different.
But he has created a musical analogy, with a whirling pattern of rapid notes which repeats constantly, changing pitch and key as the song progresses, but never changing its basic pattern and rhythm. If you look at the piano part in the score, you can see that, in the right hand, the pattern of six notes is repeated throughout the song, only very occasionally being varied.
There is also a regular pattern through most of the left hand. This generates not only an effect suggestive of a spinningwheel, but also a sense of something that cannot be escaped. There is one obvious, basic difference between the song and the poem. The song has an enormous emotional range, beginning softly and rising twice to great climaxes. This gives the impression that Gretchen is getting the spinning-wheel going again; but it also conveys a sense of hopelessness, as she realises that her overwhelming passion has doomed her to a sense of loss.
But is it right to say that the song has a greater emotional range than the poem? Certainly the singer of the song is asked by Schubert to encompass a massive range of volume, from pianissimo at the beginning to fortissimo at the climax, and from low notes at the start to high notes at the climax. Readers of the poem, whether in the context of the play or not, would never do that. It is easy to imagine how ridiculous it would sound if the actor playing Gretchen were to speak or sing it with massive climaxes, as in Schubert's song.
But does that mean that the poem is less emotional than the song? Music certainly has its own emotional structures and dynamics, and one of the hallmarks of Romantic music is the use of greater freedom and more extreme contrasts than were used in the time of Mozart. Although nineteenth-century singers often sang Lieder which seem intended for the opposite sex, only women are reported to have sung this song in Schubert's lifetime.
There is no record, as far as I know, of Vogl singing it.
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