Inspiring Bluebells in Cumbria

Driving out of London at Easter through interminable roadworks that seem to have been grinding on for decades, tantalisingly offering improvements that never fully materialise, I had a minor epiphany.

We all know the world goes green in spring, but I had never realised quite how many shades of green nature puts out, just for a few short weeks every April and May – even on the fringes of a suburban dual carriageway. No wonder Robert Browning, writing from Italy where spring ripens so much faster, wrote with yearning, “Oh to be in England, now that April’s here!”

My favourite of all the current greens is the pale bluish green of the whitebeam leaves that burst vertically like magnolia flowers, or candles; nothing the whitebeam produces subsequently, especially its rather commonplace flowers, can match the heart-stopping beauty of this April offering. Browning singled out the tiny leaves breaking from “the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf/ Round the elm-tree bole”: a tender green I remember from my childhood that you hardly see any more in England, since Dutch elm disease destroyed nearly all our elms. But there are so many other tender greens; the almost fluorescent young beech leaves, the strong matt green of the chestnuts; then, later, the mustardy yellow-green of the first oak foliage.

If Browning is the poet for these weeks, then the composer has to be Schubert; no composer can have given green so much attention. But the colour can be profoundly ambivalent for Schubert. In his first great song cycle, Die Schöne Müllerin, green is the favourite colour of the young miller’s girlfriend. But when she is unfaithful, green becomes unbearable for him, except as the colour of the grass growing on his grave. For him, truly, April was the cruellest month.

The song I can’t get out of my head right now is Schubert’s 1826 setting of Ernst Schulze’s “Im Frühling” (In Spring), which expresses the pain and loveliness of green with even more subtlety. I remember when I first heard this song, broadcast on the radio on a spring morning about 20 years ago, finding it utterly haunting – both exquisitely beautiful and almost unbearably sad.

In the text, a young lover walks out into the spring countryside and finds everything just as lovely as when he walked out with whoever it was, the “she” who has now broken his heart. Just a standard piece of early 19th-century romanticism by a poet few now remember, you might say, who had the tragic luck to die even younger than Schubert, at 28.

In fact, Schulze’s poem is better than that, finely crafted and individual in sound and imagery. But the music goes even further than the deeply felt and well-wrought words. The words tell us that the spring world is beautiful but the poet is heartbroken; the music simultaneously enacts both the beauty and the heartbreak. And the setting adds something that the words could never achieve on their own; the dialogue between voice and piano, in which the piano accompaniment, adding new rhythms and textures, constituting an impromptu-like theme-and-variations in its own right, is sometimes like an older, wiser brother who can put the immediate situation in perspective, sometimes like the memory of the loved girl.

A year after he set Schulze’s “Im Frühling”, Schubert wrote another spring song, “Das Lied im Grünen” (The Song in the Green), to words by Friedrich Reil (a less inspired poet than Schulze, who lived to the ripe age of 70). Schubert had less than 18 months to live, and he had just composed the first 12 songs of Winterreise, perhaps his greatest and most sombre achievement, so you might expect “Das Lied im Grünen” to be even sadder than “Im Frühling”. In fact it is a miraculously light-hearted work.

The secret of the relative light-heartedness of “Das Lied im Grünen” is that this is not a song of romantic love in spring but one of friendship and fellowship. When Schubert wrote it he had just come back from a two month holiday around Dornbach, just outside Vienna, with his friend Franz von Schober, a major dilettante and minor poet whose only real claim to fame is his supportive friendship with Schubert. Schober wrote the libretto for Schubert’s opera Alfonso and Estrella, which according to Liszt “virtually crushed” the composer’s “delicate and interesting music”; he also provided the words for the sublime song “An die Musik”, in which Schubert transmutes Schober’s worthy sentiments into undying gold.

But Schober’s real contribution seems to have been an easy charming fellowship that raised Schubert’s spirits, and a generosity that provided the composer with accommodation both in the countryside and in Vienna; Schubert lived in Schober’s apartment for the last 18 months of his life. Reil’s words for “Das Lied im Grünen” capture a carefree enjoyment that was perhaps the lightweight Schober’s gift to his genius of a friend. “In the green countryside we contentedly dwell on this and that ... many a little plan takes wing, and the future suddenly looks less grim.”

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres