NEW YORK, NY.- I feel myself the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world, Franz Schubert, suffering from syphilis and reeling from professional failures, wrote in March 1824 to his friend, painter Leopold Kupelwieser. Imagine a man, he said, who will never be healthy again, and whose most brilliant hopes have perished.
In the same breath, Schubert expressed sorrow over the fate of his attempt at a grand Romantic opera, Fierrabras, which had been canceled in Vienna, and that of another stage work, Die Verschworenen, which didnt make it past a private performance. I seem once again, Schubert, then 27, wrote in his letter, to have composed two operas for nothing.
He wouldnt return to the genre again. And even after his death in 1828, at 31, when many of his works enjoyed posthumous adulation and were performed widely, none of his theatrical undertakings entered the standard repertoire.
Its surprising that opera eluded Schubert, who by most counts started about 20 stage works, completed fewer than a dozen and saw the premieres of just two. After all, he wrote some of the most beautiful vocal music in the repertoire: the song cycles Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, and hundreds of beloved lieder like Gretchen am Spinnrade and Ave Maria.
And yet the operas remain curiosities better heard than seen, often composed to clumsy librettos and denied the revisions that could have accompanied rehearsals.
Without championing the stage works as worthy of revival on their own, a production at the Opéra Comique in Paris, LAutre Voyage, or The Other Journey, is mining their gems. It assembles arias, excerpts from the oratorio Lazarus and arrangements of lieder to create a kind of jukebox opera with a story thats entirely new and entirely, gorgeously true to Schubert.
At its finest, Schuberts music feels at once like the outpouring of an aching soul and the consoling wisdom of a friend who tells you that the thing youre feeling, that youre going through, that youre afraid of he feels it, too. LAutre Voyage accomplishes something similar with little vignettes, intimate and universal, mysterious and bittersweet, that overwhelm as they accumulate. Its the greatest opera that Schubert never wrote.
Its also not an opera that Schubert ever would have written. His early stage works, like the fantastical Des Teufels Lustschloss, were in the vein of popular singspiele (the form of Mozarts The Magic Flute). And his later efforts, especially Alfonso und Estrella and Fierrabras, were attempts at grand Romanticism. His characters were kings and castle-dwellers, coming from exotic locales or the time of Charlemagne, and his idiom was more fashionable than forward thinking.
Schubert had been trained to write for the stage by Antonio Salieri, beginning in 1812. He was interested in and, under Salieri, encouraged to write across musical forms and genres. The next year, Schubert completed his First Symphony, and quickly began work on Des Teufels Lustschloss, which would become his first completed stage work. In March 1814, when he was 17, he presented his teacher with the complete draft; Salieri read it with delight, Lorraine Byrne Bodley writes in the recent biography Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer.
Lustschloss went through a substantial revision, but Schuberts sense of craft was already present. Beyond lessons, he had learned a lot as an audience member. He had seen Cherubinis Médée and The Magic Flute, popular Italian works and both Iphigénie operas by Gluck. After attending an 1813 performance of Iphigénie en Tauride, according to an account in the collection Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, he was beside himself, saying, there could be nothing more beautiful in the world.
Still, Lustschloss didnt make it to the stage. At the time, nothing he wrote did; although Schubert was prolific, his music wouldnt be performed publicly for several more years, and he wouldnt be published until the 1820s.
When Schubert gained some popularity, it was as a lieder composer, which set him up for opportunities in the opera house. Two came in quick succession: a singspiel called Die Zwillingsbrüder at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna, and the melodrama Die Zauberharfe, nearby at Theater an der Wien, where Beethovens Fidelio had premiered.
Both received just a handful of performances, but, Byrne Bodley writes, Schubert had his foot in the door of two of Viennas most important theaters. The citys opera culture, though, was becoming hostile to his style. As eminent operatic composers dispersed or died, Schubert was caught in the shift of mood, Byrne Bodley observes. For a while there came over German opera a sultry stillness, which could offer his reactive mind neither support nor stimulus.
The house that had premiered Die Zwillingsbrüder, Theater am Kärntnertor, was taken over by an impresario from Italy, leading to the resignation of German singers and the advent of a Rossini craze in Vienna. But Byrne Bodley also questions whether Schubert truly had what it takes to make it as an opera composer. He was determined and musically capable, she writes, yet he lacked the roll-up-your-sleeves practicality and political acumen which Meyerbeer and Donizetti displayed.
And without performances, Schubert was unable to see the flaws in his stage works. He loved the score for his Alfonso und Estrella, but opera, like any music theater, relies on rehearsals and revisions to succeed. It also didnt help that he was setting poorly written librettos, including by his friend Franz von Schober, who wasnt practiced in the form.
Circumstances might have been most against Schubert in the case of Fierrabras. It had a promising librettist in Josef Kupelwieser the brother of Leopold, to whom Schubert wrote so despairingly but had been planned for the now Italian-run Theater am Kärntnertor.
Josef Kupelwieser worked at the theater, but lost his job over an affair. And, shortly after Schubert finished the score for Fierrabras, Carl Maria von Webers costly Euryanthe premiered to little enthusiasm and a lot of boos (including from Schubert); Byrne Bodley writes that it brought the curtain down on German music theater. Kupelwiesers libretto was rejected, and Fierrabras was canceled. Schubert didnt even get paid.
After Schuberts death, his stage works slowly premiered well into the 20th century. But the reception tended to be the same: good music, bad opera. That is the belief of the brilliant French conductor Raphaël Pichon, who with his instrumental and choral ensemble Pygmalion, has made an art out of Schubert collages first, with the concept album Mein Traum in 2022, and now with LAutre Voyage. (The production travels in March to Opéra de Dijon, with the same performers as in Paris.)
In a program note, Pichon says that in Schuberts opera catalog, there is no forgotten masterpiece to revive. But while going through those works, he added, he came across moments of almost spiritual meditation, in which Schubert the composer of the universal voice emerges. From those, he and director Silvia Costa assembled LAutre Voyage.
The show begins, though, not with opera but with song projected text from Gute Nacht, the opening of Winterreise that gives way to the spare chords of the cycles ending, Der Leiermann. Hence the title: From the winter journey of Schubert comes this other journey, one more expansive and lasting a lifetime.
Yet, in Schubertian fashion, its expansiveness is contained within something quite small. Der Leiermann is sung by a woman (Siobhan Stagg) at a spinning wheel who lets out a red string that stretches across the stage. From it she cuts a fragment barely more than a foot long.
That red string, the most heavy-handed metaphor in LAutre Voyage, represents one life in the continuum of human existence, that of a male protagonist sung by the elegant baritone Stéphane Degout, who was also heavily featured on Mein Traum. Costa is a director who builds images more than scenes, which suits the nonlinear nature of this show. Through those tableaux we see the man happy at his wedding, or watching his child sing at the piano but also in unbearable pain. His child dies; he gets older; he sometimes feels as though he, too, is dead.
There can never be resolution to a story like this. But LAutre Voyage suggests there is serenity in realizing that whatever we live through, it is all part of the ever-changing human experience. Along the way, Schuberts music arias and lieder, and other excerpts is strung together with slight alterations, particularly in the arrangements by Robert Percival that, while occasionally anachronistic, maintain the shows dramatic heft and a sense of consistency.
Works that Schubert wrote for just two musicians or forces as large as an entire orchestra and choir come out sounding nearly, neatly the same. But the moments that stand out most for their poetry, their lyrical turns of phrase, their sensitive beauty tend to come in the lieder. And thats not a bad thing. Schubert might have failed in opera, but he was a master of the art song.
Few lieder composers have approached Schubert in his power to move listeners. And he nudged the form in new directions, especially on the dramatic, evening-length scale of his two song cycles. Those, among his most lasting contributions to music, have taken on a life beyond what he intended. Its now not unusual to see a staged Winterreise; you could call it the greatest opera that Schubert ever wrote.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.