A soldier who deserts for love and finds happiness in the countryside – and in verse form: Schubert’s early stage work Der vierjährige Posten falls between genres.
Der vierjährige Posten after a libretto by Theodor Körner is one of the first stage works which Schubert composed. It tells the unbelievable, but apparently true story of the French soldier Düval who remained behind in a German border village during the Napoleonic Wars so he could marry Käthchen, the daughter of the village magistrate, and exchange his sword for a plough. When the French occupying forces returned to the village, he was threatened with the death penalty. Düval then brazenly asserted that, when the troops withdrew he had not been relieved as a guard, and hence remained at his post for four years. In fact, the deserter was unexpectedly pardoned when his general recognised that Düval had only left the army in pursuit of love.
Soldiers’ anecdotes such as this were found daily in the newspapers during the Napoleonic Wars. And so Körner’s appeal to humanity seemed perfectly credible. The poet’s unusual life story also vouched for the authenticity of his work: in 1813 he volunteered for Lützow’s corps of hunters, a guerrilla unit of opponents to Napoleon, and fought against the French. With his patriotic war poems, Körner stirred many young Germans to take part in the Wars of Liberation, but fell in the same year, becoming a national hero. In 1815, when Napoleon was able to escape from his exile on Elba, the whole of Europe feared a new war. At this historic turning point Schubert set sixteen poems by Körner, which were unexpectedly topical once again, together with the Singspiel Der vierjährige Posten.
Körner, an equally free spirit in the writing of poetry, had written the libretto entirely in verse, which was highly unusual for a Singspiel at that time. As appropriate to the bourgeois milieu of the comedy, dialogues were usually spoken in prose. However, in line with Körner’s concept, the entire text was to be sung. But Carl Steinacker’s first setting of the work, which followed this scheme closely, failed miserably at its Viennese premiere in 1813 – the critics made fun of peasants who spoke in verse.
Schubert probably knew nothing of Körner’s requirements; perhaps his teacher Salieri also prevented him from breaching the etiquette of accepted theatre practice. At any rate he assumed that the text would be spoken and began by writing the stage music – a peasants’ song, a march and a canon, all directly inspired by the plot. Otherwise he concentrated on the dramatic high points of the text, such as the quartet “Freund, eilet euch zu retten!” Here, his composition often moves virtuosically from speaking to singing – the music always begins when the plot demands greater emotional depth.
As an enthusiastic supporter of “rescue opera”, Schubert aligned himself with the model of the French opéras comiques which were being performed widely in German theatres at the time. Even in the overture, military fanfares combine with rural horn calls, allowing audiences to feel that an idyll is under threat. The highly-dramatic diction of his ensemble completely breaks out of the tranquil framework of the Singspiel. In particular, Käthchen’s monologue “Gott! Höre meine Stimme” shows that Schubert by no means interpreted Körner’s libretto as a comic farce, but rather as a Fidelio en miniature.
There is a certain irony in the fact that Schubert set the libretto of the anti-French Körner as an opéra comique, a genre which first became known in Europe with the French occupation. But the young Schubert evidently did not feel constrained in aesthetic terms and did not blindly follow the patriotic ideology of his day, but stood up decisively for peace among nations.
Christine Martin
(from [t]akte 2/2013)