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The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
I'm Laura Tunbridge, I'm a Professor of Music at the University of Oxford.
Classical music, including art song, is often thought of as being somehow above everyday concerns, as being unaffected by political and social change. There's also a tendency to think that a composer's original version, however that might be understood, is the one that should be honoured. Composers do, though, change their minds and revise pieces, and musicians can radically change the way in which a score is performed. That adaptability means that a song can change its meaning according to its time, place and style.
It is that transformative process, the cultural history of a song, that has been a focus of my research. One of the peculiarities of the classical music industry are the number of recordings that are made at the same repertoire. This works according to a different logic than the cover in rock music, which Gabriel Solis defines as follows: “A cover is a new version of a song in which the original version is a recording, and for which musicians and listeners have a particular set of ideas about authenticity, authorship, and the ontological status of both original and cover versions.”
So, we can describe Sid Vicious’ version of ‘My Way’ as a Frank Sinatra cover, or Beyonce's ‘Blackbird’ as a Beatles cover. But according to Solis, we wouldn't say that a Dizzy Gillespie recording of ‘Stardust’ is a Hoagy Carmichael cover, or that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's performance, or even recording of Beethoven's seventh Symphony is a Beethoven cover. This doesn't mean that the performance of a piece transmitted by a written score, like a Beethoven symphony, is not informed by what has happened before. A musician’s background, their training and experience always informs their interpretation, even if they're rebelling against it. And a piece can be changed to such an extent that not only its sound, but its message is transformed.
I'd like to explore this through looking at one example, a famous song by Franz Schubert: ‘Die Forelle’, the Trout. Some people will know it as the tune played by Samsung washing machines when they reach the end of the cycle. Presumably, it was chosen as a chirpy tune with a watery theme.
Schubert was just turning 20 when he composed this song in 1817. ‘Die Forelle’ is about enjoying watching a trout swim in clear waters, evading the anglers rod. Unfortunately, inevitably, the fish is eventually caught.
The first two verses of the song are set to the same stable, happy-go-lucky music. For the final verse, Schubert moves to a different harmonic area, an end suggesting a greater sympathy for the tricked trout than for the victorious fisherman.
Schubert didn't set the final verse of the original poem, which warns young women to avoid men with fishing tackle. No doubt that was because it would be inappropriate to be so direct about sex in an early 19th century song. But it also means that the song ends with the onlooker’s disappointment at the trout being hooked.
The moral message might then have been political. The poet Christian Friedrich Schubert wrote it in 1782, while imprisoned for his opposition to the Duke of Württemberg. He might have felt like the captured fish. Over the next few years, Schubert devised four further, slightly different versions of ‘Die Forelle’, and it tends to be the last which adds a piano prelude with the fishy flourishes that is performed most often today.
But this does suggest that there is no fixed version, and that Schubert could not decide how quickly the songs should be sung. He changed the tempo marking from ‘mäßig’ (moderate), to ‘nicht zu geschwind’ (not too fast), to 'etwas geschwind’ (somewhat fast), to 'etwas lebhaft’ (somewhat lively) and back again to 'etwas geschwind’ (somewhat fast).
Schubert also used the melody as a basis for a set of variations for a movement of his a-major piano quintet known as ‘The Trout’. Even the composer, in other words, came up with multiple takes on the same piece.
There are hundreds of recordings of ‘Die Forelle’ for different voices and at a variety of speeds. While the poem was originally written in German, it has also been sung in a variety of languages. Singing translations is another way in which musicians can enter or engage with different cultures.
There have also been arrangements of the song for various ensembles. Devising arrangements was common practice in the 19th century as a way to include whatever musicians were available to get to know repertoire. This was as true of operas and symphonies as it was of songs. The work was not sacrosanct but could be interpreted in many different ways. Some of those arrangements were made for practical reasons. For example, the piano did not carry well in early recordings and so was replaced by small ensembles.
I want to close with three versions of ‘Die Forelle’ that suggest alternative readings of Schubert’s song, updating and translating them, and also changing the musical style.
First, Benjamin Britten's arrangement from 1942, which uses the orchestra to enliven, almost colour in, the watery figures in the piano part.
The second is American composer Michael Ching's arrangement, played by the ARK Trio.
The singer breaks off to explain that the music becomes quite dark when you understand the words. The fish succumbs at the end. It is ‘die’ Forelle, not ‘Die’. Here, an online performance made during the 2020 lockdowns, because everyone is kept in their own homes, both emphasises the domestic and how music-making maintains communities. While seemingly irreverent and even silly in its extreme use of a false friend between languages – ‘Die’ and ‘die’ – Ching’s version points out the need to engage with the meanings of these songs, to understand them as more than just pretty music.
My third example also provides a different reading of Schubert's song, not really updating, but allowing for a response to the melody and arrangement as much as the words. The English translation used by The Erlkings is fairly faithful to the story of the trout, however they defy the sense of foreboding by converting the piano's figuration into yodeling at the end of each verse.
While the genre of art song was originally performed among friends in homes and salons, these days it's thought of as something for the concert platform or the recording studio, thus demonstrated by Britten's version for orchestra. Now to talk about variations on the original has become more transgressive than it would have been thought of even a century ago.
Michael Ching’s and The Erlking's arrangements of Schubert's ‘Die Forelle’ are irreverent, even silly, but Ching's version points out the need to engage with the meanings of these songs to understand them as more than just pretty music, and The Erlking's yodeling brings together performers and their audience in a way that Schubert and his friends might have recognised.