goethe’s tell and other heroes

“Lovely world, where are you?” sings the narrator in Franz Schubert’s setting of Schiller’s poem “The Gods of Greece”, which the composer shortened from sixteen stanzas to one. Ancient Greece served as a model for many poets, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. In this fulsome, beautiful lament, it is venerated both as a golden age and as an ideal for contemporary life; and it is transfigured and contrasted with the dreary present of our Christian age. Schiller’s poem casts its yearning gaze towards Utopia and tells us how the ancient gods retreat into “the fairyland of songs”. Schiller locates this fairyland in the imaginative world of (Classical) poetry, but Schubert leads us along its “fantastic paths” into the realm of (Romantic) music.

It was Goethe who first came across the tale of “William Tell” in Switzerland, though he left it to his friend Schiller to adapt for the theatre. With this as our starting point, we shall be taking a close look in Andermatt at these two poets, the most famous of the Sturm und Drang movement, and at the heroes they celebrated in their work. The tenor Julian Prégardien has curated a song recital especially for the second edition of the Andermatt Goethe Days, entitled “Goethe’s Tell and other Heroes”. These heroes include both Ancient gods and a human being who rebelled against them and held up his own genius as their equal (“Prometheus”). But even the moon gazing down benignly from above (“To the Moon”), and a faithful friend (“The Surety”) can be turned into either model heroes or their tragic counterparts. William Tell is the very epitome of a hero from historical legend. This concert programme features Franz Liszt’s songs about Tell as well as excerpts from the same composer’s “Swiss Year of Pilgrimage” for piano solo, in which he conjures up a musical portrait of both Tell and the natural world of Switzerland. This song recital takes up several of the most important motifs of the Sturm und Drang – freedom, genius, emotion and Nature – as conceived in the music of Liszt and Schubert.

These topics and others will be the focus of a panel discussion with Adolf Muschg, Barbara Bär and Thomas Seedorf at 4.30 pm.; admission is included with the concert ticket. Further information can be found here.