Poem of the week: Schubertiad by Fiona Sampson

From Guardian Books:

"Details of the composer's life are weaved together with themes from his work and echoes of his music in Fiona Sampson's deft sequence, Schubertiad

This week's poem, the four-part sequence, 'Schubertiad', by Fiona Sampson, seems, at first glance, a kind of translation – of music into text. As the epigraph tells us, it is written 'After the String Quintet in C, D956' and, if you know the quintet, you might hear an echo, in the first poem, of the mysterious opening of the Allegro, or recall the Adagio's pizzicato passages in those very short lines at the end of the second. But the translation analogy doesn't take us far. What these small, song-like poems seem to do is create a parallel world. They are impressionistic, and, in their swift movement and glancing, sun-and-water imagery, they realise the essential, mercurial quality of Schubert's music.

It's a quality demonstrated in the way the composer can take a single song through such varying tonalities it seems almost to encompass the emotional range of an opera. Sampson is a poet who shares something of this legerdemain. 'Schubertiad' also weaves in a biographical thread. In the Quintet, an unusual second cello adds gravitas. In the sequence, darker harmonies arise from the conflict of the composer's time-poor life with the power of his genius to re-make time on its own terms.

The Quintet was completed during Schubert's final illness in the autumn of 1828. His deathbed forms the closing image of the poem. 'Schubertiad' begins, though, by tracing an uncertain miracle closer to birth. 'One moment before it starts - / one breath.' This is the pause before the music happens – before the composer writes down the first notes, before the ensemble, poised to breathe as one, begins to play. But the opening stanzas are not tied down to a particular narrative, and the reader might equally see a love affair unfolding, or any emotional event that tunes anticipation to concert pitch.

The risk of being out of time, in both senses, fades in the second poem, where there is a gorgeous, sensuous present tense. The Schubertiaden were organised by Schubert's devoted friends to promote his work and fund its publication. They could be sumptuous affairs: after the performances (entirely of Schubert's compositions) there would be food, drink and dancing. At the party imagined by the poet, there is a Turkish flavour (lokum is the sweet we call Turkish Delight) reflecting the Austrian fascination with Turkish culture after serious threat from the Ottoman empire had receded. The sense of abundance is confirmed by the shift from two to three-lined stanza, though the writing is still spare and delicate, with touches of assonance and one strong internal rhyme ('throws/rose').

The singing girl seems casual and fluent, like the river (a recurrent motif) and like Schubert himself. It's said he once composed eight songs in a day. This ease of composition perhaps connects to the allegorical figure of the wanderer, often found in German romantic poetry and in Schubert's music. 'Das Wandern' (wandering) is a delightful freedom celebrated in the earlier part of Die Schöne Müllerin. Conversely, 'Der Wanderer', one of Schubert's greatest songs, sets a poem by Georg Philipp Schmidt in which the exile faces up to permanent estrangement: 'There, where you are not, there is your happiness.' A similarly sombre mood shadows the third poem, the most fully rhymed of the sequence, with its opening apostrophe, 'Wanderer'. It hints at the aberration which exiled Schubert from his own life, through venereal disease, and 'kiss' finds the darkest rhyme imaginable: 'Dis'.

In the last section, the patterns described are architectural rather than musical. The river of melody, blocked in the previous poem, strains impotently to flow again. We are brought very close to Schubert when the elaborate metaphor of the 'spring ice/ yawing on its tethers' gives way to the colloquial intimacy of the exclamation, 'You poor soul.' The man is 'quite bare' and painfully visible in those quickly sketched details: the spectacles, the 'soiled bed'. There is no sentimental suggestion that, because he has written transcendental music, his death doesn't matter.

('Schubertiad' is from Fiona Sampson's fine recent collection Rough Music and is reprinted by kind permission of the author and Carcanet.)

Schubertiad

After the String Quintet in C, D956

One moment before it starts –

one breath.

Light stills

in the meadow,

stalls at oaks

and the river's silver line.

For an instant

your stomach turns over –

as if you missed yourself

and this minute

and the next

were already a memory.

*

Sometimes,

world slips from beat to beat

like a song.

The afternoon fills

with lokum's evasive scent,

deep notes of cherry,

and there are saucers of honey

and peaches and a girl

who leans on a cushion to sing –

Open your notebook,

catch

how she throws out the tune

as if she tongued

a rose

between her lips –

*

Wanderer, the wide river

shines in the morning sun.

Between the country and the city -

see it run.

You'd like to run with it

to a quiet place, in fields

time and sickness never visit

and joy shields.

Too soon the flood and battened sluice,

the detritus of a life

that's been turned adrift

on this tide

which now seems beautiful and bright:

the river's backdrop to the kiss

you borrowed from daylight

and bring to Dis.

*

Waiting (stateliest of the modes)

among Greek key, acanthus,

shuttered glass

and the light snagged in stucco –

where each façade rises

in stillness

and stone grows

infinitesimally –

you feel a creak and strain:

spring ice

yawing on its tethers.

You poor soul.

Without summer's garlands and girls

you're quite bare,

bespectacled and alone

in that soiled bed."

I don't know what's better, the preface to the sequence or the sequence itself. I am a sucker for poems inspired by music, especially classical.