Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: George Eliot’s love of music is well known, and the role of music in her novels has been much discussed.1 Music is especially significant in her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), since it is song that marks out key stages in the relationship between the eponymous protagonist and Mirah Lapidoth and signals the nature and values of these and other characters.2 On their very first encounter, when Daniel rescues Mirah from the river Thames, the two are brought together by a shared song: Dantean lines from the final act of Rossini’s Otello.3 Daniel is subsequently charmed by Mirah’s consummate vocal skills: She sang Beethoven’s ‘Per pietà non dirmi addio’, with a subdued but searching pathos which had that essential of perfect singing, the making one oblivious of art or manner, and only possessing one with the song. It was the sort of voice that gives the impression of being meant like a bird’s wooing for an audience near and beloved. Deronda began by looking at her, but felt himself presently covering his eyes with his hand, wanting to seclude the melody in darkness; then he refrained from what might seem oddity, and was ready to meet the look of mute appeal which she turned towards him at the end. ‘I think I never enjoyed a song more than that,’ he said, gratefully. ‘You like my singing? I am so glad,’ she said, with a smile of delight.4 Songs are often included in novels at moments of heightened significance and intensity, with the song choice revealing much about a character’s predilections, emotions, and culture and enabling the forging of intimate connections between characters.5 Lawrence Kramer, commenting specifically on Mirah’s Beethoven song among other notable novelistic examples, has coined the idea of a ‘song pact’ between author and reader which is modelled on the ‘emotional bond’ between characters created by a shared moment of song.6 For Kramer, the author has in mind a ‘preferred reader’ who will recognize the specific song, understand its significance, and feel an affinity with both character(s) and author thanks to comparable cultural experiences and reference points.7 In this light, it is interesting that behind this scene lies a different song pact, as an earlier version had Mirah singing a different song: ‘She sang Schubert’s “Adieu”, filling out its long notes’.8 Delia da Sousa Correa comments on this substitution as follows: Originally, Mirah was to have performed, not Beethoven, but the final song of Schwanengesang, ‘Abschied’, which Eliot gives its French title […]. At the suggestion of Charles Lee Lewes [her stepson], Eliot changed the reference to a song by her other favourite composer, Beethoven. Beethoven’s song was certainly more closely relevant to Mirah’s situation in the novel at the point where she fears that Deronda is about to abandon her.9 Correa makes a convincing case here for the greater relevance of the Beethoven song, and from this example moves to her broader argument about Eliot and Schubert, namely that despite this erasure, ‘Eliot’s original choice of Schubert left its imprint on the text of Daniel Deronda’.10 Indeed, even in this scene of song, Schubert is not wholly excised but rather only temporarily displaced: ‘She [Mirah] went on willingly, singing with ready memory various things by Gordigiani and Schubert’.11 It is tempting to imagine that these ‘various things’ may have included Schubert’s ‘Adieu’.12 But why did Eliot cite this song by its French title before going on to delete the reference? And what of Correa’s identification of the song as ‘the final song of Schwanengesang, “Abschied”’?13 To take the second question first, ‘Abschied’ is not the ‘final song’ of Schwanengesang but rather the seventh of fourteen, with all the usual caveats about this song cycle being published posthumously, drawing on texts by three different poets (Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine, Johann Gabriel Seidl), and arguably betraying as much the hand of the publisher Tobias Haslinger as that of the composer.14 Arguments over the authenticity and unity of Schubert’s Schwanengesang need not, however, detain us here. More significant for the purposes of our investigation is the fact that the usual nineteenth-century French translation of ‘Abschied’ is not ‘Adieu’ but rather ‘Le Départ’, as included in the first complete French translation of Schwanengesang (Chant du cygne) translated by Bélanger (1842), as well as, for example, in Pauline Viardot’s important edition of 50 songs of Schubert published in 1873.15 A song named ‘Adieu’ is, however, included as one of twelve songs in the first two-volume French anthology of Schubert songs (published by Richault in 1833–35).16 This ‘Adieu’ has a special place in the history of Schubert in French, as, reputedly, the only song written by Schubert to French words, which accounts for Eliot’s citation of it by its French title. It appears in French Schubert anthologies into the twentieth century, though its absence is notable from Viardot’s top fifty.17 It is even explicitly cited as ‘l’Adieu de Schubert’ in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, when it is sung by the protagonist as he melodramatically comforts himself through song to mark the end of his infatuation with the duchesse de Guermantes.18 Yet turning to Proust reveals what Eliot scholarship on the whole does not yet seem to have realized: that Schubert’s ‘Adieu’ is not, in fact, by Schubert, as a note to this citation in the Pléiade edition of Proust’s novel helpfully points out.19 The song is actually by August Heinrich von Weyrauch, published in 1824 and originally a setting of words by Karl Friedrich Gottlob Wetzel under the title ‘Nach Osten’.20 Yet by 1835 when the song was published in the French translation of Bélanger under the new title ‘Adieu’ it was attributed no longer to Weyrauch but rather to Schubert.21 Bélanger’s French version was soon translated into English with the new incipit ‘Adieu! ’tis love’s last greeting’ (1839), whence the common English name for this song of ‘Last Greeting’. More surprisingly, Bélanger’s text was translated not only into English but back into German by J. C. Grünbaum under the new name ‘Lebewohl’ (Berlin, 1840). A further French translation of this new German text ensued, this time by Émile Deschamps (1841), subsequently published as the opening song of the anthology Quarante mélodies choisies par F. Schubert (Paris, 1851). The story does not end here: the song continued to be included in volumes of Schubert’s Lieder as well as to be retranslated and rearranged, whether for solo piano or (in one of its more surprising permutations) for trombone trio.22 In all these travels, the identification of the composer as Schubert and the title as ‘Adieu’ are constant, giving rise to the tradition of this being Schubert’s only originally French song. It is for this reason that Eliot cites the song by its French title, something that would in contrast be strange in the case of a song from Schwanengesang, even granted the importance of French editions of Schubert within the English market for Lieder. As George Grove noted in his entry on Schubert in his Dictionary of Music and Musicians, it is ‘the Quarante mélodies de Schubert of Richault, Launer, etc. […] to which many an English amateur is indebted for his first acquaintance with these treasures of life’.23 That the song called ‘Adieu’ was not by Schubert was already known by the mid-nineteenth century, as attested by a caustic note in Wilhelm von Lenz’s Beethoven et ses trois styles (1852)24: Un mot sur les abus qui se glissent parfois dans les éditions d’oeuvres complètes. Les mélodies de Schubert ont été publiées à Paris, par Madame Launer […]. La mélodie Nach Osten de M. Auguste de Weyrauch y a reçu le nom d’Adieu, un texte à l’avenant et encore le nom de Schubert. M. de Weyrauch, amateur, composa ce Lied à Dorpat en Livonie, l’année 1820. A cette époque on connaissait peu Schubert. Weyrauch n’emprunte d’ailleurs rien à personne dans cette composition. Mais qui dit Lied à Paris dit Schubert. Un autre amateur, le prince Gr. W***, ayant de sa belle voix présenté la mélodie de Weyrauch dans les salons de Paris, y dit un jour qu’elle était de Schubert, pensant sans doute que Paris lui saurait gré de lui éviter la difficulté de prononcer un nom allemand de plus. (A word about the errors which sometimes work their way into editions of complete works. Schubert’s songs have been published in Paris, by Mme Launer […]. In it the song ‘Nach Osten’ by M. Auguste de Weyrauch has been given the name ‘Adieu’, a text to match and again Schubert’s name. M. de Weyrauch, an amateur, composed this Lied at Dorpat in Livonia, in the year 1820. At this time Schubert was little known. In any case Weyrauch does not borrow anything from anyone in this composition. But in Paris Lied means Schubert. Another amateur, prince Gr. W***, having presented Weyrauch’s song with his beautiful voice in the salons of Paris, one day said there that the song was by Schubert, thinking no doubt that Paris would be grateful to him for having saved her the difficulty of having to pronounce yet another German name.)25 Launer’s edition does not in fact seem to be complete, despite Lenz’s suggestion, but rather another selected edition of Quarante melodies (as Grove’s entry on Schubert highlights).26 And in any case the attribution of this song to Schubert pre-dates Launer’s edition, as we have seen, appearing already in the 1830s under Schubert’s name. But still Lenz offers two plausible accounts of how the song came to be attributed to Schubert, as a result of its publishing and performance history, with some jokes about the French pronunciation of German names thrown in for good measure. Lenz’s discovery was more widely promulgated in the anonymous ‘A Word to Musical Novelists’ published on 2 October 1868 in The Pall Mall Gazette: Let us warn novelists of musical tendencies against the common mistake of supposing Schubert to be the composer of the song attributed to him under the title of the ‘Adieu’. Sentimental heroines are always playing Schubert’s melodies to their lovers, or to themselves in their lovers’ absence; and if the novelist does not happen to have read Gospodin [sic] Lenz’s capricious and fantastic, but highly valuable and interesting work, entitled Beethoven et ses trois styles, he is apt (as more than one has already done) to fall into the error of making the young woman go into raptures about ‘Schubert’s “Adieu”’, which is no more Schubert’s than Schubert’s waltz, published under the title of ‘Sehnsuchtswaltzer’, is Beethoven’s, or than Reissiger’s waltz published under the title of ‘Weber’s Last Waltz’ and ‘Weber’s Last Thought’ is by Weber.27 The reporter goes on to summarize Lenz’s findings as to the true identity of Schubert’s ‘Adieu’, before concluding: If ‘books have their fates’, it is at least not often the fate of a book to get ascribed, through the carelessness or stupidity of a publisher, to an author who would never have thought of claiming it. It is otherwise with musical compositions, and M. de Weyrauch’s ‘Nach Osten’ having been published, sold, and generally adopted as ‘Schubert’s Adieu’, will, to all appearances, continue to be so known until it is forgotten altogether. The same sort of thing has often taken place with dramas, but then dramatists are often deliberately dishonest. Authors, as a rule, are honest. Composers are unfortunate.28 Did Eliot perhaps take note of this warning and might it have contributed in part to her expunging of Schubert’s ‘Adieu’ from Daniel Deronda? Was she aware of its misattribution? Eliot herself published four articles in The Pall Mall Gazette in the newspaper’s first year of publication (1865), only a few years prior to ‘A Word to Musical Novelists’, demonstrating her familiarity and involvement with this newspaper.29 ‘A Word to Musical Novelists’ also evidently predates the writing of Daniel Deronda (begun in 1874 and drawing on notebooks from 1872 on).30 The Pall Mall Gazette article demonstrates that Schubert’s ‘Adieu’ had become a novelistic cliché by the second half of the nineteenth century; so too does its later uptake by Proust’s protagonist at a particularly self-indulgent moment of tearful song. By avoiding the singling out of Schubert’s ‘Adieu’ (though Mirah does go on to sing other, unspecified songs by Schubert), Eliot knowingly or unknowingly sidesteps two pitfalls: on the one hand, the risk of cliché; on the other, issues surrounding the song’s attribution. Mirah is rescued from the rank of ‘Sentimental heroines […] always playing Schubert’s melodies to their lovers’, in the terms of the ‘Word to Musical Novelists’, by the greater breadth of her repertoire. The final song pact (to return to Kramer’s term) is something more distinctive and special, where the authorial attribution is uncontroversial. Correa finds the Beethoven song ‘certainly more closely relevant to Mirah’s situation in the novel’, but this conclusion is based on the assumption that the less relevant alternative that Eliot had previously had in mind was ‘Abschied’ from Schwanengesang. Is the song known as Schubert’s ‘Adieu’—but actually with music by Weyrauch, setting a plethora of possible texts—more or less relevant than Beethoven’s ‘Per pietà non dirmi addio’? The answer depends partly on what specific translation of Schubert’s ‘Adieu’ Eliot was thinking of (which is difficult to ascertain, whether German, French, or English), partly on the reader’s own musical competencies—as Kramer highlights, whether the reader is able to enter into the song pact by recognizing the song or not—, and, of course, on the rather slippery notion of relevance. We are predisposed to find Beethoven’s ‘Per pietà non dirmi addio’ more relevant because it is the song that Mirah sings in the published version.31 The singer of the Beethoven song exhorts ‘non dirmi addio’ (do not bid me adieu) and warns that her death would result from the pain of parting. The singer of the Schubert song, in contrast, begins by mourning the death of the beloved but concludes with the hope of future reunion in heaven. This ‘Adieu’ is less relevant because of its focus on death both recent (that of the beloved) and imminent (that of the singing lover), and because of its Christian elements, namely, an injunction against grief (‘dare I mourn’), an understanding of death as ‘a fresher life’, and the hope of ‘meet[ing] in bliss again’.32 In short, death is feared in the Beethoven song as the lamentable consequence of rejection, but welcomed in the pseudo-Schubert song as a means of reunion. Notwithstanding these differences, the two songs—beyond their obvious linguistic connection of ‘adieu’ or ‘addio’—share a refusal of farewell, in different ways. As the novel itself later acknowledges, the Beethoven song, understood as a painful song of farewell, proves to be much more relevant to Gwendolen’s situation than to that of Mirah: He [Deronda] awaited her [Gwendolen’s] coming in the back drawing-room—part of that white and crimson space where they had sat together at the musical party, where Gwendolen had said for the first time that her lot depended on his not forsaking her, and her appeal had seemed to melt into the melodic cry—Per pietà non dirmi addio. But the melody had come from Mirah’s dear voice.33 In short, the song’s ‘melodic cry’ is ultimately relevant not for its singer (Mirah) but for another (Gwendolen). Accordingly, Kramer’s reading of the choice of Beethoven song focuses not on its relevance (though he does comment that ‘its theme of abandonment is germane to her [Eliot’s] narrative’) but rather, ultimately, on ‘its difference’ and ‘disparity from the novel’s narrative’.34 As he writes: ‘The novel’s narrative reverses that of the song, and the song, in the singing, becomes an agent of that reversal precisely by expressing so fully the feelings that would occur otherwise.’35 In other words, the song makes itself irrelevant, since in conjuring up the fear of farewell it conjures this same fear away.36 We are better able to appreciate Eliot’s process of writing and her ideas about Schubert if we can at least understand what the song is that she (like so many others) refers to as Schubert’s ‘Adieu’. The song pacts between Mirah and Daniel are what save Mirah, lead Daniel on his journey of Jewish self-discovery, and bring the two to eventual marital union. The two different song pacts that Eliot offers her reader first in draft and then in final form have the capacity to send us on a different journey of discovery, through the history of Schubert’s French reception. In so doing, we are invited to consider the relevance and significance of Eliot’s choice of songs in Daniel Deronda through a more accurate and contextualized appreciation of the songs she both cites and discards. Finally, beyond specific questions pertaining to Eliot’s drafts and sources, the misattribution of this song to Schubert stands as a striking example of the persistence of such fallacies, and of their perpetuation not only via more obvious, direct routes—such as musical scores, anthologies, and catalogues—but also via literature and literary criticism. In this respect, the case of Schubert’s ‘Adieu’ takes its place in a strange pantheon of famously and persistently misattributed compositions, alongside works such as J. S. Bach’s ‘Bist du bei mir’ (actually by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel) or Albinoni’s ‘Adagio’ (actually written in the twentieth century by Remo Giazotto). Such misattributions cast a spotlight on the importance of canonical connections in ensuring the circulation of musical works and on our lingering attachment to assumptions about the composer as an indicator of the value of the composition. To return to the prescient words of The Pall Mall Gazette: ‘“Schubert’s Adieu”, will, to all appearances, continue to be so known until it is forgotten altogether.’37
Source: Notes and Queries
Author: Jennifer Rushworth
Institution: University College London
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,296
OpenAlex ID: W4415718815
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: