Franz Schubert

(1797-1828)

Franz Schubert began at least 17 works for the stage, but they remain the least known aspect of his output, and many of the surviving works are hard to evaluate, since they have not survived complete. This is the case of Die Freunde von Salamanka, where the musical numbers have come down to us, but without the spoken text of this two-act comic Singspiel, whose libretto was from the pen of Schubert’s friend Johann Mayrhofer.

As the liveliness of the Overture suggests, Mayrhofer came up here with something quite untypical of his gloomy, difficult, introverted personality. Schubert composed more lieder to texts by Mayrhofer than by any other poet from his intimate circle. Here Mayrhofer seems to have been more concerned with providing his friend with a basis for success in the theatre, an expansion of the Singspiel genre, than with expressing his deeper self. The plot involves the mock abduction and rescue of an heiress, devised by two young men, Diego and Fidelio, to win her for a third, Alonso. The scheme succeeds, and she is saved from marriage to a vain and foppish Count.

Salamanka (Salamanca) is the famous university town in Spain, and Mayrhofer was influenced here by the Spanish playwrights Lope de Vega and Calderón. As the name of the Countess heroine, Olivia, suggests, there are affinities also with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

Schubert’s music for Die Freunde von Salamanka was not performed in his lifetime, and had to wait until the centenary of his death to be heard. The music of one number from the opera, however, is familiar: Schubert re-used the theme of the duet between Diego and Laura, a pastoral idyll in praise of love, for the variation movement of his Octet of 1824.

The score of Die Freunde von Salamanka is inscribed ‘The music is by Franz Schubert, pupil of Herr Salieri, 1815’. Salieri no doubt taught Schubert that the overture to an operatic comedy should be an effective curtain-raiser, and here we have a festive work in the key of C major. But the 18-year-old Schubert was already looking beyond the world of his teacher – Sonnleithner claimed that Salieri ‘was incapable of teaching a youth who was inspired and permeated by Beethoven’s genius’. This same Sonnleithner had prepared the libretto of Beethoven’s Fidelio, which Schubert is said to have pawned his school books to hear in 1814.

Schubert’s treatment of the orchestra, in this overture, strains to achieve a more powerful sonority than one might expect in such a context. The second subject is a light-hearted yodel-like figure, but the treatment throughout seems concerned less with tunefulness than with contrasting densities, and alternations of strings and winds. Even by comparison with Beethoven, Schubert here seems to anticipate the orchestral music of the Romantics, even of Schumann. What Schumann wrote about Schubert’s ‘Great C major’ Symphony (heard later in this concert) seems to be illustrated in embryo: ‘It is likely that initially the brilliance and novelty of the instrumentation, the breadth and extensiveness of the form, and the whole new world into which we find ourselves transported, may well confuse some people’. This prophetic trailer for the later, greater symphony makes a good introduction to Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, in a program showing the range that can be explored in the same key.

First published, 2005