“Communications From the Beyond” — A Winter Journey With Schubert and Joyce
By Stuart Mitchner
“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again.” That’s James Joyce’s snow, falling outside a Dublin hotel room, the first notes of the sublime last movement of his long story “The Dead.” Snow is also falling on the nameless lovesick wanderer in Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey).
Though I make a point of listening to Schubert and reading Joyce every year at this time, I’ve never brought them together in the same column — under the same roof of the same imaginary inn, as it were, the short plump bespectacled composer at the piano accompanying the tall, thin, bespectacled Irish tenor whose singing voice was “clarion clear” according to Oliver St. John Gogarty, otherwise known as “stately plump Buck Mulligan” in the opening sentence of Joyce’s Ulysses. Given the preoccupation with songs and singers in Joyce’s life and work, it’s not all that unlikely a pairing, allowing for a little poetic license in the matter of time and space. True, Schubert was born in Vienna on January 31, 1797, Joyce 85 years and 1300 miles away in Dublin on February 2, 1882, but online the distances and years disappear in “that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead,” their “wayward and flickering existence” sensed but not apprehended by Joyce’s Gabriel Conroy seconds before he turns to the window and sees the snow “falling obliquely against the lamplight.” Think of the settings Schubert might have composed for the poems in Joyce’s Chamber Music, or any number of passages in Ulysses, and above all for the wintry aria that concludes “The Dead.” While Conroy may not sing it, it’s fated to be his song as he follows a westward path as sad and snowy as that of the wanderer (“a stranger I arrived, a stranger I go”) in the Winterreise.
The singer Johann Michael Vogl, the first person after the composer himself to undertake the Winter Journey, called Schubert’s songs “the utterance of a musical clairvoyance.” Writing on the occasion of Joyce’s 49th birthday, Padraic Colum noted that Joyce was “very much influenced by correspondences which seem to disclose something significant in man’s life” and that “the whole of Ulysses is a vast system of correspondences.”
The Uncanny
The sequence of correspondences leading to this column began with Alex Ross’s piece about the first movement of Schubert’s final piano sonata (“The Trill of Doom”) in the November 2, 2015, issue of The New Yorker. The B-Flat Sonata was completed in 1828, two months before the composer’s death. Calling it “a work of vast dimensions and vertiginous depths,” Ross suggests that the sonata “has long struck listeners as a kind of premature communication from the beyond.” He describes pianist Sir András Schiff “contemplating a great musical mystery … the most extraordinary trill in the history of music.” While Ross credits the trill for supplying “the otherworldly atmosphere” and is mindful of a metaphorical “shadow, tremor, shudder,” Schiff thinks of the sea, wherein “a spacious major-key theme gives way to an ominous tremolando … a very distant murmuring, maybe of an approaching storm. Still very far, but approaching. It is not a pleasant noise, this murmuring. Maybe it is also the approach of death. And then silence. What other work is so full of silence?” For Ross, “The trill — a gesture that formerly served a decorative function — becomes a sign of the uncanny.”
The same dark gesture and depth of silence is noted in a video from 1968 in which singer Peter Pears and pianist/composer Benjamin Britten discuss (and perform) the song “Im Dorfe/In the Village” from Winter Journey. As Britten plays the eerie, insistent figure that creates the song’s uneasy undercurrent (“the most extraordinary piano writing of all”), he singles out, with a certain awe, “the silences.” He also finds “one of the most alarming things about performing this work is there’s so little on the page … he gets the most extraordinary moods and atmospheres with so few notes ….”
“The Dead”
The notion of “so few notes” seems a long way from the fabulous abundance of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, but the way Joyce employs a relatively limited store of notes, silences, moods, and atmospheres, including subtle equivalents of the B-flat sonata’s unsettling trill, makes “The Dead, in the opinion of T.S. Eliot, among numerous others, “one of the greatest stories ever written.” While the stranger trudging through the snow-haunted landscape of the Winter Journey is forever outside his sweetheart’s door, barked at by dogs, stalked by crows, mocked by weathervanes, Gabriel Conroy is indoors and apparently very much at the center of the busy lively music-filled setting of Kate and Julia Morkan’s annual dance and dinner celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany, where he’s to be a sort of master of ceremonies, the giver of a speech and the carver of the goose.
Besides being Kate and Julia’s favorite nephew, Gabriel is a university professor with a lovely wife and children, and his only concern would seem to be whether his speech will be over the heads of a gathering whose “grade of culture differed from his.” If anything, something very like the “shadow, tremor, shudder” that Ross hears in Schubert’s trill marks Gabriel’s peculiar entrance, since he’s actually introduced outside the house in the cold, calling a greeting “from the dark” while he scrapes the snow off his galoshes. When he finally enters, his wife is already on her way upstairs with his two aunts and there’s no one to talk to but Lily, the caretaker’s daughter whose “bitter and sudden retort” to his cheery greeting casts “a gloom over him.”
After taking “the wrong tone” with Lily, Gabriel is beset by a series of upsetting occurrences, including a difficult piano piece that has “no melody for him” and ends with, shades of the Schubert sonata, “a trill of octaves in the treble and a final deep octave in the bass.” Next he’s confronted by Miss Ivors, an Irish nationalist who subjects him to a cross-examination about his weekly column in a newspaper with unionist sympathies (“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”), an “ordeal” that has him blushing and glancing nervously “right and left.” Although he feels “quite at ease” when carving the goose, the dinner table conversation takes a morbid turn regarding the custom that the monks at Mount Melleray sleep in their coffins “to remind them of their last end,” a note Joyce sounds again in the story’s extraordinary last paragraph. That the disturbing subject is “buried in a silence” rouses thoughts of the motif of unease and silence that inspires Schiff to speak of the sonata’s “ominous tremolando … a very distant murmuring, maybe of an approaching storm.”
The last movement of “The Dead” begins when Gabriel’s wife hears someone singing a song she associates with Michael Furey, a boy she was once in love with; the memory makes her thoughtful, remote, and, for Gabriel, suddenly poignantly desirable. When they get back to the hotel she bursts into tears. Asked why, she tells him about “the person long ago who used to sing that song.” Everything she goes on to reveal is all the more wounding to Gabriel after his night of petty ordeals: “I think he died for me.” “I was great with him at that time,” “Poor fellow … he was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy,” “O, the day I heard that, that he was dead!”
Like the wanderer in the Winterreise, Gabriel has been shut out by his love, sent on his way in effect (“The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward”). In the story’s final paragraphs all the murmurings, silences, portents, and music of the previous pages come into play, sealed with a coda that in the best of all afterlifes Schubert would set: “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Singing On and On
Schubert “sang continuously” during the last days of his life, according to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s book Schubert’s Songs (Knopf 1997). Since the only work he was able to focus on at the time was the score of his Winter Journey, we know the music he was singing even if we can only imagine how he sounded; it’s said that he had “a weak tenor voice.” We don’t have to imagine how Joyce might have sounded. He can be heard online reciting “Anna Livia Plurabelle” from Finnegan’s Wake. “Reciting” is a poor word for the soft singing lilt of Joyce’s night music, recorded in 1929.