In Gruppe aus dem Tartarus ('Group from Tartarus'), published in the 'Anthology from the Year 1782', the young Schiller devised a description of the Underworld, taken directly from a passage in Vergil's Aeneid, the great epic of Latin antiquity. The suffering of the damned, by the river of tears, the Cocytus, provides the central point of reference of that description.

In his forceful, really through-composed, setting of 1817 Schubert devised music that was correspondingly dark. A long tremolo in the lower register comes before the entry of the singer. Gradually rising to a height, the musical character of the song is established further in multiple waves of crescendo 'wie Murmeln des emporten Meeres' (like the murmuring of the angry sea). When the concentrated energy of the tremolo is finally released into that 'Ach' which marks the climax of the first verse, Schubert creates an impressive musical analogy to Schiller's dramatic construction - the poet first introduces the subject of his long sentence in the final word of the verse. Time and again in the vocal part of this Schubertian view of the Underworld are chromatically rising melodic lines that respectively encompass a whole series of bars. Only in the closing part, the beginning of which is marked by an arching, brilliant C major fortissimo chord, is the chromatic melodic line not in evidence. It becomes an objective answer, so to speak, to the preceding question the scythe of the god of time, Saturn, the Greek Chronos, can accomplish nothing here in the timeless eternity of the suffering of hell. For the closing section, however, chromaticism plays a leading role at the structural level. Yet the last line of the text cadences first, in a strong evasive movement, after the minor harmony a semitone above the final key, before, twice, the final tonality is thus established (a escape from 'eternity' is not really possible).

Writer: Wolfgang Gersthofer
Translated by: Keith Anderson