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For several days last week it seemed all I did for 5 or 6 hours each day was play the Liszt arrangement of Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (“Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”). It is an addictive little piece which I find to be more theatrically dramatic in the piano arrangement than in its voice-with-piano original.
I usually hear this piece with heavy pedal, but as I rambled through the song yesterday I began thinking that the opposite — a chunky staccato sound — more evocatively summons the sound of a spinning wheel. As an alternative to the traditional pedaled sound I had fun imagining I could literally evoke the sound of the spinning wheel.
But wait. What do I know about spinning wheels? I don’t think I have ever heard one. My childhood was not filled with countless hours of slave labor spent churning fabric out of the spinning wheel.
Regardless, today I let myself imagine that such a contraption would sound something different from smooth and burbling.
Playing the piece pedal-free makes it more difficult, but today I found that it made the melody sing in a different way. I think the word for the sound was “troubled,” a word which also characterizes the text of the song. The traditional way of performing this song is not exactly un-troubled, but absent the river-like flow of sound I think the troubles become more exposed, and tremulous.
Any time I get to measure 97 I think “holy s*** this is strong stuff.” Liszt adds a crushing minor 9th to the left hand in M.97 and again in M.99. This stays true to the Schubert original on one level: the first notes of those measures in the original are literally A and B-flat. But Schubert softens that dissonance by safely spacing it 2 octaves apart, summoning nowhere near as much war-like thunder as Liszt brings to the passage.
There is so much good stuff in this song.