Rain of tears

A boy and a girl are sitting on the banks of the brook, in silence. They look at their reflection and the moon and the stars are their only witnesses. What an idyllic scene! And suddenly the girl says: "The rain comes. Farewell, I am going home". There's something odd in this story. I'm talking about Tränenregen, one of the Lieder from Die schöne Müllerin and, as we know, there are some strange things in this song cycle.

Tränenregen is the tenth song of the cycle; For the first time, the boy and the miller-maid are alone and together. I usually imagine the boy is very young, a teenager. He's sitting next to the girl and he doesn't know what to do nor what to say. They have been there for a while and he doesn't even look at her, he just looks at her reflection. He's the very image of shyness and inexperience. For the first time, too, the young man feels that the brook calls him, as if instead of the reflection of the girl he would see in the water an undine that sings for him. It's somehow disturbing.

The eyes of the boy fill with tears in the final verse, so the reflection disappears and the spell is broken. And then we find the last two verses; They're from Müller, of course, but they remind us of Heine. The anticlimax shows that the thoughts of the boy and the girl went in different directions during that time. The girl should have been really bored, with that guy sitting next to her. Or maybe she's slightly upset, she hardly knows him. The point is that, unexpectedly, she stands and leaves.

Schubert composes a pure strophic Lied with the first six stanzas of the poem, every two stanzas there's a musical one. The first musical stanza describes the scene, the young couple sitting by the riverside. At the second one, the boy is absorbed in their reflection in the water. At the third one, he feels the call of the brook. Since the three stanzas are musically identical, we must rely on the ability of the performers to differentiate between the three situations. The last verse of the poem, the seventh, corresponds with a new musical verse, where we can hear the frustration of the boy when the girl leaves him.

And after this song, what's next? The joy of the boy when telling that his beloved is his. But we'll talk about that another day; Today we're listening to the wonderful Tränenregen, performed by Matthias Goerne and Eric Schneider. Next week will enjoy a great schubertian week in Barcelona: this baritone, accompanied by pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, will sing the three Schubert's great cycles. On Monday, Die schöne Müllerin; on Tuesday, Winterreise; on Thursday, Schwanengesang. We're lucky, aren't we?