Until the 20th Century, when Palestine suddenly found herself a target to thousands of usurpers, likely Aryan in origin but purportedly adhering to an ancient Semitic belief, others of our “tribe” had been celebrated throughout the world for two disciplines: music, and mathematics. Residing as he does on the art world’s fringes, Mendelssohn has little acquaintance with the latter science. But music…

Today, faced with the jubilation amongst the Jabotinski soldiers brought up on the Holocaust Education Project as they raze Gaza and put her people to the sword, it may not be otiose to review the thoughts, feelings and intimations of immortality once prevalent in Europe and more especially in Judaism. Bearing in mind that our tiny sect of dissidents, day-dreamers and free-thinkers sheltered under the wing of a more advanced religion eschewing the notion of vengeance, nämlich Christianity, which, before sinking beneath the waves in 1914, permeated life both East and West of the Urals.

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Can one imagine Franz Schubert joining the Jabotinski forces to perpetrate obscene murders in Gaza? Obvious perhaps the answer, less obvious the cause, which lies in the structure of the musician’s mind.

Without a word, an image, without surface, weight or volume, the greatest space-time density of all human activity occurs in classical music.

Breasting the waves between the pre-conscious and conscious, it is in music that thought manifests its changes, almost unobstructed.

Spurred on by love for one’s fellow man, swayed by no authority other than himself, the composer sets out a challenge with which he struggles, before inventing the next. Meanwhile heeding Wilhelm Furtwaengler’s warning to avoid outright abstraction, a domain where few men will care to follow.

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In order to keep to actual matter that the reader can himself hear and judge, we propose to listen to Richard Tauber, an Austrian tenor of Mendelssohn’s er, “tribe,” in the tricky Lied number 8, from Schubert’s Winterreise, “Rückblick”—tricky, as making use of the technique I call S’legato—a quasi-legato where each note is detached as though spoken and nearly as distinctly as though it were staccato. In this recording made sometime in the 1920s, chosen for its singular qualities (although the wax imprint is fresher on other recordings), Tauber’s pianist is probably a Russian coreligionary, Mischa Spoliansky.

Straight off, one acknowledges that Tauber’s marked Austrian accent, flamboyant personality and above all, style of singing—idiosyncratic perhaps but rock-solid—are completely out of the fashion, in favour of the current impersonal-arbitrary; but, as Forbes-Robertson said, “I know only the BAD old style, and the GOOD old style.”

Be that as it may, “Out of the fashion” is a conceit, while Richard Tauber is still considered to be amongst the most eminent singers of all time.

Unlike Fritz Wunderlich, for example, Tauber’s voice is neither notably beautiful nor melodious but rather proteiform, “all Things, to all Men” (1 Corinthians 9).

Although the song-line seems enormous, moving at will from the faintest ripple to a tiger-like bound, that is an illusion proper to a great artist: Tauber was no Heldentenor. The true volume was quite unsuited to Verismo or Wagner, not something Mendelssohn would deplore.

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Now to “Rückblick” (Winterreise, Lied 8, Franz Schubert to Wilhelm Müller’s cycle of poems).

In Tauber’s interpretation—and Spoliansky hardly qualifies as a spare wheel!—the listener’s attention is drawn neither to the interpreters, the voice, the keyboard, the words of the poem nor even the score in and of itself but rather to the whole—”a single ardent thought,” as Alastair Macaulay once wrote. The Lied becomes a “thought-object,” an idea that takes to the open seas relative to Müller’s text, an idea intangible—but intelligible. The two artists’ submission to the idea allows the shifts (Schattierungen, Zwischentöne) that characterise Schubert to manifest; shifts that guide one’s thought to indefinite unknowns, the metaphorical “ferne Geliebte.” This, despite each word, each note, being clearly enunciated and given proper weight.

Most likely, song preceded spoken language, and thus at first, most languages were doubtless tone-languages, i.e., the same phonemes produce two or more words of different meaning, depending on the frequency. In the Indo-European group, although Swedish and Norwegian are readily acknowledged to be tone-languages, English is notoriously so. Black bird and blackbird are differentiated only by tone. As for words thought to be single-tone (cat, dog, day…), if one listen carefully, they have two or more tones. Within the Western system of tonal music, the singer remains within the perimeter traced by the overtone, halo, aura, Oberschwingung around each note, without exceeding a quarter-tone; the aura nevertheless exists, nor is it entirely under conscious control.

In the recording with Tauber here, while each verse has its fullness, the arrow necessarily falls on the verb. Take the words “glühten” and “geschehn.” In theory, F sharp/E on “glühten,” and G/ D on “geschehn.” However, around each of the verbs’ two notes, flits an aura. Whereas the nouns “Krähen” and “Bäll” (harshly stressed by most singers apart from Tauber) are marked with the little symbol for “accented,” these accents are less telling than the verbs “glühten” and “geschehn,” to which Tauber lends the halo or aura, faint, fleeting but there nevertheless.

A further, capital aspect pointed to by our coreligionary, the musicologist Elam Rotem: before the War, the strong beat on the melodic line—here, the voice-line—was not mechanically pasted onto the orchestral strong beat—here, the keyboard. There was nearly always a tiny and deliberate gap, a hiatus, leaving the soloist a certain freedom.

Plainly, rhythm and melody are the two more primitive components of music, while harmony and counterpoint occupy the higher planes. The moment a soloist aware of what he decides “staggers” the vocal line relative to the keyboard, a slight syncopation occurs and a slight dissonance as well. For example, the syllable “Krä” of Krähen, on E; rather than placing the Krä on the A-E chord of the keyboard, Tauber presses it closer to the dissonant E/F sharp of the keyboard chord—which adds something like a further “voice” to the keyboard + vocal lines.

With many such moments within scarcely two minutes’ space, Rückblick quits the domain of “charm” and “melody” for that of thought, where out of the dusk appear ideas and emotions which now strike us as quite foreign. Indeed, under the massed blows of Hollywood, video-games, pop-rock-techno pseudo-music and GAFAM entertainment, what Schubert and his like once represented have vanished from the Earth, rather like sparks flying towards us from stars and planets extinct thousands of years ago.

If, amongst our purported co-religionaries one were to meet up with an Artur Schnabel, a Richard Tauber, a Clara Haskil only… or perhaps even an Elam Rotem who sticks to his own kale-patch, namely, early Italian music… well, a Man may Dream! As it happens, more’s our rotten luck, we are saddled with the Recht Gern faction, the Hélène Gordon Lazareffs of this world who according to her magazine’s designer Peter Knapp, was wont to invite to Sunday fêtes at Louveciennes, most excellent company such as the pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. And a Knapp can be found to boast of it.

Text of the Lied “Rückblick.”

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Mendelssohn Moses writes from France. 

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Featured: Richard Tauber, cigarette card, ca. 1932.

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