Susan Youens

University of Notre Dame

January 25th, 4pm

Reentering Mozart's Hell:
Schubert's 'Gruppe aus dem Tartarus', D. 583

In September 1817, Schubert returned to a poem he had attempted to set a year-and-a-half earlier:  Friedrich Schiller's "Gruppe aus dem Tartarus," or "Group from Tartarus." In this song, in which the antique damned are impelled towards eternal doom in the lowest realm of Hades, Schubert created a virtuoso exercise in ombra style, music of the dark shadows where demons, furies, and malevolent deities lurk. The most famous example of ombra music by far is the Damnation of Don Juan in the Act II finale of Mozart's Don Giovanni:  the Don and damned beings in Schiller's poem are all making a "harsh passage" against their will, and this is perhaps why both great composers resort to what earlier treatises called the "passus duriusculus," or "harsh passage." These ascending or descending chromatic scales saturate both of these works; while there are distinctive differences in Mozart's combination of utmost instability and utmost architecture and Schubert's treatment of chromatic scales, both men create chromaticism-within-chromaticism designs of utmost sophistication, the one (I believe) inspiring the other.