Dilettante Music

Four of Schubert's six Heine settings are frankly frightening. In Ihr Bild (Her Portrait), the singer sees a painting of his beloved come to ghostly life. In Die Stadt (The City), the singer sees the city in which he lost his love shimmer spectrally on the horizon. In Am Meer (By the Sea), the singer drinks the poisoned tears of his beloved and his body is consumed by disease. But by far the scariest song of the six Heine settings -- indeed the single scariest song Schubert ever composed -- is Der Doppelganger (The Ghostly Double). In Heine's poem, the narrator walks the street of a dead city and meets beneath the window of the woman he loves his own doppelganger, wringing his hands with agony and grief. In Schubert's song, the shock and the terror of recognition is more than the singer can bear and he is realizes that he is in fact what he already was before the song began: quite mad.

Schubert's music is absolutely unique and absolutely unlike anything else that had ever been composed. Only Mussorgsky's On the River can compare with its staggering simplicity and stunning transparency. The accompaniment is nothing but chords -- unavoidable, inescapable chords, nearly all of them minor chords -- which fall on the downbeat of every bar with only two tiny embellishments to relieve their grim monotony. And the vocal melody is not much more; in fact, it is more recitative than melody: the voice circles obsessively, endless around a single pitch, climbing at the song's first fortississimo climax on the word Schmerz (pain) to the octave above but then collapsing hideously back down to the original pitch. But the agonizing pain is palpable from the first note and the first climax simply states the obvious. But at the song's second climax, the melody again rise to the same fortississimo climax on the same awful pitch but this time on the word Liebesleid (love pain). And at that moment we know that the singer is mad, that the pain of love has driven the singer mad, and that this doppelganger is not his ghostly double but the singer himself.

One of the most frightening works of art ever created, Schubert's Der Doppelganger was written when he was only thirty years old. He would only live to write one more song. He would not live to create songs more terrifying than this. Is that his curse and our blessing? ~ All Music Guide