How I Found and Have Come To Understand Schubert's "An Die Musik," with Help from the Negro Spiritual "Over My Head"

"Heart of Gold in Black and Blue," fractal art by the author, Deeann D. Mathews

I was supposed to be doing "A Recovering Composer's Autumn" this week, showing how I am putting a piece together to meet the needs of my children's choir.

However, I also knew, six months to the week in the spring, that I still had unfinished business with grief.

I set a great deal on seeking to live a consistent life ... integrity is just easier than not, because as a major creative, I don't have brainpower to spare trying to juggle a great number of lies and rationalizations to make things work where they cannot. I will hang in there with people for a long, long time ... as much as I wish sometimes that I were different, I am the Commendatore's daughter ... I will wrestle with people to the edge of the pit with a stone grip, in the hopes that they will choose to do and be better.

But those of you who have read me here this year know I have learned my lesson about that... if one is not to have to deal with all the problems that come with being smoked and scorched because people love their foolery and will pursue it to destruction, it is necessary to do what any proper Commendatore would do -- drop the hand of those who want the foolery and walk away, leaving people to experience their own consequences.

It never gets any easier. Never. I knew this week was coming, all the way from January ... perhaps even from last June ... there is a gravity of the ordinary, and then there is the path of those who would go upward. One can prepare intellectually and mentally for the grief as those paths must divide. One can even choose the day to say goodbye to those who must be left behind while still living ... but then one must still break one's own heart, and there is no preparation that can ease that anguish.

As a composer, I do not think it has ever crossed my mind or would ever cross my mind, given that I do not come from a cultural faith tradition in which music is personified among the Muses (from whence it gets its name), to thank music itself for anything ... but I do certainly thank God for the refuge of music, and that it "just happened" that a recording of my beloved bass Kurt Möll (1938-2017) singing "An die Musik" popped up, when I really needed it! I was five years old when the recording was made in the autumn of 1986, and 37 years later, I have found it!

My favorite musician and his butter-smooth consonants, though ... I listened to bass Gunther Wäwel on Sunday for the first time, and his German annunciation rang with the hardness I am accustomed to in modern German speech because my teacher in college had one of the firmer dialects ... so, as it often is with Herr Möll, the master singer and teacher makes me have to go study because I cannot understand a word he is singing!

But, it was not immediately necessary ... for when I consider a long-term voice presence in my ear even from online, I have the same requirements everywhere I have in real life. Herr Möll's choices of things to sing were consistent with the testimony of his life: he was a man of powerful, loving integrity. The one great critique of him seems to have been that he messed up the villain roles he sang in opera every time ... he could make them ridiculous and even hilarious, but not terrifying ... yet that is a compliment to him, that he could do anything on stage but convince anyone that he meant them any harm.

So, it was possible for me to take refuge in the glorious sound of this most beloved voice singing sweetly for a little while without needing to fully understand the words, just as I later discovered the character in the song describes taking refuge in music itself ... the lovely art to which he turned for relief in many gloomy hours, the art which returned the feeling of warmth and love to a troubled heart ... and even, to get a few translations to agree here that I looked at, to transport the singer to the "Heaven of better times" ... of fond memory ... music does so much for memories...

Now here I do disagree with Schubert just a little ... I tend not to look back ... given that I am only 42, perhaps the temptation is not as strong as it will be in later years ... but also because I know Heaven is forever in front of me ... that is the meaning of "eternity" in one aspect. But I do understand where the song is coming from ... music connects so much to our memories, good and bad. I am just an odd sort of person in that to me, music is more a means to step forward. Perhaps that is because I am a composer. Perhaps that is because I am a particularly stubborn Christian, refusing to look behind me for better, refusing to get hung up on the past. My future does not lie there. My hope does not lie there.

Perhaps this is also why I passed "Der Einsame" so quickly this week ... although Herr Möll's singing of it will always be stunningly beautiful, I already picked up the lesson there. It would have been all too easy, all too easy with fresh, hard grief pressing upon me, to begin circling the abyss of despair. Herr Möll's beautiful singing there is like being given a long-range scan of the bright event horizon around a black hole, from which there is no escape -- a clear sign to change course, IMMEDIATELY!

So I did ... and found rest and refuge for my broken heart on its long and often painful journey forward in the right song, with the right voice singing it, right on time ... which course confirms the wider point of "An die Musik": we are blessed to have music for all things, at all times, for it does, as the song also says, lift us into a better world. Notable in this song as in many others is the common tension between the created world and the world system. The general traditional German view is that whatever pulls us back toward Creation and toward art is pulling us back toward our best state and toward Heaven -- as it is said in the song music "toward a better world enraptures [us]." About this I have no disagreement, for the wisdom of the Negro Spiritual tells me exactly the same thing ... let the great Kathleen Battle beautifully explain it ...

"Over my head, I hear music in the air ... there must be a God somewhere" ... that is not far from Schubert's sense that away from the noise of the world system, there one can again hear the holy harmony -- what another writer called, "the lost chord" -- that mankind was created to live in. It is just that the directionality in "Over My Head" is higher than to art itself -- it gets to how Beethoven at last agreed with Schiller in 1823 about Kant being wrong ("Our morality within ourselves, above us the starry heavens"), and scored the music of his Ninth Symphony so that it could be declared, "Brothers, above the starry heavens, surely a loving Father dwells!" But Schubert was much younger than Beethoven at that same time, and I will not quibble with him ... it takes everyone time to get to a fuller understanding. I am 42 now. It took me time to understand as well.

In Herr Möll's own case in singing "An die Musik" in his late 40s, at around the halfway point of his career, I hear his deep, great gratitude for a blessing to him -- the blessing of being a master singer, from the operatic stage to the concert hall to the studio to his local neighborhood singing groups, according to some who knew him. Such a blessing grows and is greater the more it is shared, and he knew that. Music is for everyone, everywhere, and it is indeed among humanity's greatest blessings. He rejoiced in being a master steward of that blessing.

Just how masterful a steward was Herr Möll? This recording is a rare show even for him of just how good he was at what he loved to do. The master singer masters himself, of course, and does not permit his deep emotion to go too far ... but far enough to overlay his normal, caressing low wind instrument timbre with something of the throbbing sweetness of the high A string on the cello. Now this is a far riskier position in technique for a basso profundo than one would think. A cello string has the ability for vibrato, and so does the human voice because we have vocal cords or folds (depending on who you ask). However, people with lower voices have thicker, sometimes longer vocal cords, and that can be a dangerous thing with vibrato. I remember, being a trained contralto myself, that lower-voiced singers are generally advised to keep the voice smooth and straight with little vibrato because we can get into an actual wobble much easier than others ...

... but then again, this is Kurt Möll we are listening to, whose understanding of how to use his voice to communicate the meaning of the songs he sang is still legendary. Less legendary because the knockout beauty of his voice covers the tracks of his intellect: the rarity of a huge and equally mobile and stable voice matched in him with meticulously planned and boldly executed approaches to conveying the story of a song. First verse ... from gray hours to warm love to a better world ... up to a big enough peak, and then down again ... second verse ... the holy gift of music quietly comes from Heaven and lifts us all the way back up, and when at last there, the heart bursts in gratitude. This would be the equivalent of a mountain guide taking his clients on a nice early autumn climb to the top of an Alps peak like the Eiger on day 1, the top of Mt. Everest on day 2, and home safely by day 3. That is what Kurt Möll gets done, musically, in three minutes, and carries us all the way up!

I was five when this recording of "An die Musik" was made, and found it this week ... and song and singer both did what they had come to do, right on time. The blessing of tears of joy ... to be able to hear this lovely song now when I most needed it, sung with so much earnest feeling by one who I could trust my heart and rest my mind with for a moment ... to be reminded also that a life of integrity is possible and someday that the full joy such a life brings will also again meet me, so that I may also share that joy with others, past these sorrows ... to be reminded of that future ... how indeed "An die Musik" has blessed me, and how indeed gratitude for the blessing of music lifts the heart from its pains!