4.5 Two mythological songs: ‘Prometheus’ (1819) and ‘Ganymed’ (1817)

Outline

4 The songs

Goethe's poem ‘Heidenröslein’, with which we began, is a mock folksong; ‘Erlkönig’ is a mock ballad along the lines of Scottish models. They are, so to speak, poems in fancy dress. ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Ganymed’ are songs on subjects from ancient Greek myth, but they are in no way imitations of ancient classical models. In these two poems Goethe has taken myths and created modern meditations on them of startling, but quite distinct, kinds.

‘Prometheus’

Both the poem and the song are quite different from the others considered in this unit. The poem does not rhyme, and its rhythmic patterns are irregular. It is more like an extract from a drama than a conventional poem – and indeed it comes from a play that Goethe began writing in 1773 and never finished.

Prometheus was, in ancient Greek mythology, one of the Titans, who created the human race out of clay. Zeus, the king of the gods, tried to destroy humanity by denying them access to fire. Prometheus saved them by stealing the fire back. For this offence Zeus condemned him to be chained to a mountain-top, where his liver was pecked out each day by an eagle and regrew each night. The myth of Prometheus attracted a number of writers and musicians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Shelley wrote a verse drama on the subject; Beethoven wrote music for a ballet called The Creatures of Prometheus. Schubert wrote a substantial cantata on Prometheus in 1816, which had several successful performances during his lifetime, but was lost after his death (this was the cantata written for the name-day of a law professor, and which gave him his entree to the Sonnleithners' weekly concerts).

In Goethe's drama, Prometheus delivers this speech in his smithy. Schubert's song is like a miniature cantata, or perhaps a scene from an opera. It takes the form of a short, dramatic monologue – a form which is often referred to by musicians by the Italian term scena.

Exercise 8

Click the link below to read the poem ‘Prometheus’. How would you describe the substance and tone of what Prometheus is saying? Then play the performance by clicking the audio link and follow the words. In what way is Schubert's setting like a scene from an opera? How does he characterise each section of the poem?

Click on 'View document' to read the poem.

View document

Click below to listen to Prometheus.

Listen in separate player (MP3 audio - To make the most of this unit, you will need to install the latest Flash plug-in.
) Click play to start.

Now read the discussion

Discussion

The predominant tones of the poem are defiance and revolt. But Prometheus does not merely defy the king of the gods: he views him and the other gods with disdain, declaring that they survive only because credulous fools continue to believe in them. He glories in the fact that he has achieved what he has without the help of the gods, and he ends by extolling the full range of human experience, from suffering to joy.

This is a poem of defiance against the rule of gods, and in praise of human accomplishment and human emotional experience. It is very much in tune with the anti-religious sentiments of much Enlightenment writing, and it places a Romantic emphasis on the primacy of the emotions.

Schubert's setting sounds somewhat like a scene from an opera because much of it is written in recitative, the operatic style which can also be found in Mozart's Don Giovanni, in which the freedom of the vocal line comes close to the rhythms of speech. If you imagine it accompanied by orchestra rather than piano, it is close in style to the accompagnato recitative that Mozart uses from time to time.

Schubert's scena has no obvious formal structure. Though it is in sections, they do not repeat – it is through-composed. It has the character of a psychological drama, emphasising the emotional force of each part of the poem as it occurs. But the song nevertheless falls into distinct and contrasted sections. As in ‘Gretchen’ and ‘Erlkönig’, it is the piano which both sets the tone and drives the song forward. The assertive rhythm which begins the song punctuates the opening section from time to time, giving a coherent sense of defiance to a passage which would otherwise seem like nothing more than a piece of speech set to music. Schubert continues this section through to the first two lines of the second verse in the original, so shifting the break by two lines. Then, at ‘Ihr nähret kummerlich’ (‘Meagrely you nourish …’), the tone changes completely. The sliding harmonies in the piano give the passage a smooth, almost creepy character, perhaps intended to be ironic.

At ‘Da ich ein Kind war’ (‘When I was a child …’) the piano adopts a walking tread, giving a sense of narrative. The voice reaches up at the description of the young boy gazing up at the sun, and the ‘ear to listen’ and the ‘heart to pity’ are set to high, plaintive phrases. This is abruptly interrupted by fierce chords at ‘Wer half mir’ (‘Who helped me …’), returning to the mood of the opening. Then the pace increases at ‘Ich dich ehren?’ (‘I honour you?’), with an impatient-sounding, lurching rhythm in the piano. And the scene ends magnificently, with Prometheus's final shout of defiance, at ‘Hier sitz’ ich’ (‘Here I sit …’), punctuated by forceful chords, like a yet fiercer version of the rhythm with which the song began.

Unusually, the song ends in a different key from its beginning. After the opening bars, the music settles into G minor for the first entry of the voice. The final section, from ‘Hier sitz’ ich’, is in C major. This absence of any formal structure of keys adds to the impression of a song which proceeds freely from one mood to the next.

This unusual informality of structure is something that Schubert exploits to even more striking effect in the last song we shall consider, ‘Ganymed’.

‘Ganymed’ (‘Ganymede’)

‘Ganymed’ is another through-composed setting of a poem inspired by ancient Greek mythology. Ganymede was a boy of exceptional beauty, and Goethe's poem describes the feelings of the young lad as he is transported up to heaven by Zeus to become cup-bearer to the gods.

Like ‘Prometheus’, this is a freely written poem, with no consistency in the length of lines nor any formal metrical scheme. There is only one rhyme (‘Nachtigall’ and ‘Nebeltal’ in lines 18–19), and there are only occasional suggestions of half-rhymes (in the first verse there are ‘Liebeswonne’, ‘Warme’ and ‘Schone’, which have enough similarity to sound associated).

Exercise 9

Click the links below to read the poem ‘Ganymed’ and its translation, and then listen to the song. What has Schubert done to Goethe's poem? Does the combination of words and music suggest further similarities with ‘Prometheus’, or with the other songs you have studied?

Click on 'View document' to read the poem.

View document

Click below to listen to Ganymed.

Listen in separate player (MP3 audio - To make the most of this unit, you will need to install the latest Flash plug-in.
) Click play to start.

Now read the discussion

Discussion

Perhaps the most obvious similarity to ‘Prometheus’ is that the poem is written in the first person. The two poems/songs are expressions of personal feelings. But unlike Prometheus, who is raging against the gods because of past events, Ganymede is expressing his feelings while the most important event of his life is actually taking place. In this sense, he has more in common with Gretchen at her spinning-wheel (though even she is describing her feelings about what has already happened).

Another feature which ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Ganymed’ share is that the music, like the poems, is extremely free. About ‘Prometheus’ I wrote that Schubert's setting has no obvious formal structure and that it has the character of a psychological drama, emphasising the emotional force of each part of the poem as it occurs. The same applies to ‘Ganymed’.

As in several of the songs we have discussed, Schubert has been rather free in the pacing of ‘Ganymed’, dividing up Goethe's verses where they are continuous, and continuing where they are divided. The first eight lines are continuous, as in Goethe, and Schubert emphasises the effect of ‘Unendliche Schone’ (‘Infinite beauty’) by drawing the phrase out, giving several notes to a syllable for the first time in the song. In the poem, the next two lines (‘Dass ich dich …’) stand on their own, separated from what follows. But Schubert ignores this, carrying straight on for four lines to a gap at ‘Lieg ich, schmachte’. Then he introduces a gap after another two lines (’… an mein Herz’), another gap three lines later (after ‘… Morgenwind’), and another, coinciding with the end of Goethe's verse, at ‘… aus dem Nebeltal’. Schubert has used these gaps in the vocal line to emphasise the sense of ecstatic calm in the poem, as if Ganymede is looking around him, drinking everything in. There is a charmingly naive touch just before the mention of the nightingale, where, during the pause which Schubert has introduced in the vocal line, the piano plays trills to suggest the bird's song.

From ‘Ich komm …’ the character of the piano part changes: the rhythm becomes insistent and staccato, and Schubert gives the instruction ‘un poco accelerando’ (‘accelerating slightly’). There is a distinct sense of ‘We're off’. The song drives through, reaching two climaxes. The second climax is achieved by repeating the last seven-and-a-half lines of the poem, and then repeating again the final cry of ‘Alliebender Vater!’ (‘All-loving father!’). This repetition is certainly taking liberties with the poem, but the changing character of the music is, one could argue, simply a response to what is already in the verse, as the lines and phrases become shorter and more urgent towards the end of the poem.

As in several of the songs we have studied, it is the piano which sets the mood, the pace and the rhythm as the events unfold, with the voice, so to speak, floating on top of the piano part – almost as if the voice is the ‘accompaniment’, as in ‘Gretchen’. A big difference between ‘Ganymed’ and ‘Prometheus’ is that, whereas ‘Prometheus’ falls into distinct and contrasted sections, ‘Ganymed’ does not. It all flows smoothly on, and even when the voice pauses, the piano continues. This helps to convey the impression of events unfolding which are not within Ganymede's control – the piano, like Zeus, sweeps him away.

As in ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Gretchen’, we are not told the story in the poem. It is as if the poet and composer have thought ‘What would it be like to be Ganymede/Prometheus/Gretchen in this situation?’, and have sought to convey that directly, assuming that the audience would know the stories from which these characters come (and Goethe and Schubert could assume some knowledge of classical myths in the well-educated circles to whom their work was principally addressed). This is very different from the narrative of ‘Erlkönig’, in which the song tells the whole story, as well as conveying the feelings of the characters in it.

Schubert ends the song with six bars of the piano, rising higher and higher, pianissimo. Like the song of the nightingale earlier, this has an effect which is both powerful and naive: it conveys both a strong sense of mystery and the suggestion of Ganymede physically disappearing up into heaven.

More than in any of the other songs we have discussed, I would say that, by the end of ‘Ganymed’, we have the sense of having travelled a long way since the song began. There is one particular musical reason for this: as in ‘Prometheus’, the song ends in a different key from the beginning. It starts in A flat major and ends in F major. During the song, the music progresses through a variety of keys so gradually that the listener is not necessarily aware of how far from the original key it has travelled. But if you replay the beginning of the song immediately after listening to the ending, you will hear the contrast between the F major of the ending and the A flat major of the beginning.