The ESMUC Master's Degree in Lied visits us: Der Lindenbaum

We are already in summer, it begins that hotness we all know, and we avoid being exposed to burning sunbeams. What could be better than a fresh shadow, surrounded by the nature, with a sounding fountain, under a green and leafy tree like the linden: “Der Lindenbaum”. Starting this popular poem from Wilhelm Müller we meet our main character, a person who tell us how he lived and enjoyed this relaxing and peaceful scenery; the linden, a place for lovers, tree that for Müller has a close relationship with society and love, which contrasts with the loneliness that this poem exposes.

We should remember that this lied belongs to the famous cycle “Der Winterreise” (Winter Journey) from Franz Schubert. It’s quite right to be the fifth lied: it’s too soon to get into the deep melancholia of the cycle and the good memories of the past summer are yet remembered. Our poor protagonist has just been leaved by his couple in the first lied of the cycle, and in a cold night of winter he decides to start a journey. This idea of the journey has a strong base in the ideology of romanticism: “wandern” means to walk, the unconformity with what one has, the necessity of traveling in order to get away from unsatisfactory reality, to be happy there where you are not, etc., in other words, the human condition. Walker there is no path, the path its made by walking.

Be sensible to this music which is plenty of subtleties that aproach us to all these ideas. The contrast between the summer, a pleasant memory, and the current and cold night can be sensed in the piano part, in which the torrent of notes (that could represent the cold wind) changes radically into the other extreme: two notes. This happens in the very beginning but it’s perpetrated during the whole lied.

Just when our protagonist passes in front of the linden in the deep night, the tonality changes into minor (E minor). This gives to the music a darker and dismaler tone. The night is closely related with the world of dreams and the irrational, which explains what is coming, and that’s the linden murmuring a few words. I would say that the traveler gets afraid, but he decides to keep walking, the wind blows coldly in his face, he loses his hat and, empowered by the fear, he doesn’t even turn to get it back. In my opinion this is the climax of the lied, it reaches a strong sound and in a specially low tessitura for the singer.

Later, our traveller is already far from that linden, far from that surreal experience, the music comes back to the initial tonality (E major), the calmness is back again, but something is not the same, something has changed. If you focus in the piano accompaniment, it remains disturbed. It has now a different rhythm that could represent a kind of instability, the kind of emotional instability that suffers the walker, in which memory still resounds the murmured linden’s words: “Komm her zu mir, Geselle, hier findst du deine Ruh’!”, that means: “come here, my friend, here you’ll find the peace”, or could it mean the death?