Sacred night
On Schubert's Nacht und Träume
A dream that descends through a quiet heart: the song Nacht und Träume (D827), Night and Dreams, by Franz Schubert.
Based on a poem written by Matthäus Karl von Collin, first published in 1813, Nacht und Träume was set to music by Schubert in 1822 or early 1823. The timing is important because 1823 is the year Schubert’s health began to decline, inaugurating the later period of his career. As I wrote in an essay on Der Kreuzzug, a song that Schubert wrote in 1827, his later compositions often mix contrasting emotions.
According to a biography by Christopher Gibbs: ‘Many of Schubert’s last songs inhabit a different world… they often juxtapose hopeless fatalism with blissful serenity.’ Of his late lieder specifically, Gibbs says that Schubert tested the genre, using it ‘to explore darker realms.’ I find these observations very true. Schubert’s juxtaposition of powerful themes and emotional complexity often make his work difficult to categorise, especially his lieder, at times expressing sadness and joy all at once.
But Night and Dreams, written shortly before Schubert’s illness, is more characteristic of his earlier style. To me it’s more straightforward, a hopeful prayer for dreams. Here are the words, as translated by Eusebius Mandyczewski:
Sacred night, you descend, dreams, also, flow down—as your moonlight does through space—through people’s quiet, quiet hearts. They listen to them with pleasure, they listen to them with pleasure, and call when the day awakens: ‘Return, lovely night! Lovely dreams, return, lovely dreams, return!’
I like this translation because it conveys the emotional intensity of the song. Often the lyrics to Night and Dreams are printed as an eight line poem. But this is not how Schubert set the piece. As seen in Mandyczewski’s prose translation, there is repetition throughout. Stille, or quiet, is repeated. Entire phrases are also repeated, what in the poem amounts to a repetition of the entire fifth and eighth lines. This lengthens the poem like a psalm: amplifying its meaning by repetition. It also helps maintain its simplicity.
Unlike in some of Schubert’s other work, like Abendlied or Der Kreuzzug, or like Gabriel Fauré’s Après un rêve, there is no sense of loss or deception in Night and Dreams. There is no sense that the darkness of night should be regretted. On the contrary, night is the realm through which dreams descend, flowing down and filling our imagination. Both the night and its attendant dreams are welcome, illuminating, and, most importantly, ‘sacred’.
‘Heil'ge Nacht’, that is sacred or holy night, is the opening phrase. Perhaps the singer is addressing the night directly. Or perhaps the God addressed is for us to infer, having been reminded that night is not as an absence of the divine but a moment when somehow the divine is more apparent. At night, the Lord made a covenant with Abram (Gen 15.17). At night, Jacob lay down and dreamed of angels ascending and descending from heaven (Gen 28). At night, Nicodemus the Pharisee met with Jesus Christ and questioned him face to face (Jn 3.1-21). At night, we are less embarrassed to be seen in prayer, to search for the divine, to confess that we have offended against God’s holy laws.
In a sense, our search is ended in the midst of Schubert’s song. The broken chords, rumbling in the lower register, are soon joined by a singing voice, gradually descending an octave from one D to another. Dreams descend and we ‘listen to them with pleasure’. We hear these dreams and as we listen, the holy night becomes a ‘holde Nacht’, a lovely Night. The holy is recognised as what is lovely. The song itself is the dream, a shared dream descending through our quiet hearts.