Saul (Stehle, Johann Gustav Eduard)

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Johann Gustav Eduard Stehle (1839-1915)

J. G. Eduard Stehle, as he was usually known, spent his whole life within a radius of hardly twenty-five miles around the Lake of Constance, whose waters touch Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Born north of the lake in what was then the Kingdom of Württemberg, he spent most of his professional life on the south side in Switzerland: in Rohrschach from 1869, when he turned thirty, and as organist and choirmaster of the cathedral of St. Gallen from 1874 until two years before his death in 1915. Though now virtually extinguished, by 1884 his fame had spread as far as New York, where he was offered (and declined) the organ and choir of St. Francis Xavier. By far the larger part of Stehle’s many compositions were vocal, both sacred and secular, among them twenty masses and two oratorios. He was active in the late-nineteenth-century German “Caecilian” reform of church music, in which he supported modernizing tendencies, and he became a passionate admirer of Liszt. After 1900, however, his tastes ceased to evolve with the times, and by 1905 he could not say enough in condemnation of the cacophony of Richard Strauss and other moderns.

Stehle’s arrival at St. Gallen coincided with the rebuilding and enlargement of the cathedral organ by the Swiss firm of Kuhn. While he wrote few important works for organ, and those mainly concentrated in the years between 1872 and 1880, Saul, composed in 1877 and published the following year, was the most ambitious. Praised by Liszt but rarely played even when new–an article of 1900 cites its intensely programmatic character and immense difficulty as possible reasons–it has totally disappeared from the repertory since.1 Nevertheless, among the half-dozen or so organists who played it before the turn of the century were two Americans, John Withe (sic, for White?) in New York and Clarence Eddy in Berlin. In 1888, Stehle made an orchestral arrangement transposed from the original B-flat-minor to C-minor; it was performed in 1894 but has remained in manuscript.

Unlike the the Reubke sonata, which can be thoroughly enjoyed without a knowledge of its program, Saul unfolds in a series of musical events that can hardly be explained except by reference to the events in Saul’s life that they are intended to illustrate. Yet the piece is so long and complex that the listener can rarely orient himself in the narrative. A review of a performance by the composer in 1882–the critic admitted, to be sure, that he disliked program music on the organ–made precisely this complaint. Stehle’s score is headed by a “program,” but no index links the listed events to places in the music, and there are more contrasting sections of music than there are events in the program to explain them. Thus it has been necessary to some extent to guess which part of the “program” the composer might have meant to illustrate with a given musical passage. One prominent theme, indeed, seems to correspond with nothing in the printed program, though it makes excellent sense as the illustration of something in Saul’s story (the mocking song of the women of Israel; see below).

The story of Saul is told in the first book of Samuel2, where it is complicated by the problem that certain events are recounted twice in differing versions, as if conflicting sources had been unsatisfactorily conflated. The following summary has been reduced to a bare outline of elements relevant to Stehle’s work: The elders of Israel, angered by the corruption of their rulers (the “judges”), demanded of the prophet Samuel that he should give them a king. Samuel prayed to God, who, acting through Samuel, and with great reluctance (since it was as if His people were rejecting Him in favor of a king), chose Saul. Saul was a proud, complex, and unstable man who soon offended both God and Samuel. Samuel rebuked him bitterly and prophesied his downfall. God regretted His choice and secretly chose David to succeed Saul. Saul’s servants, observing that from time to time an evil spirit descended upon him, advised him to summon David, whom they knew only as a skilled player upon the lyre, to play soothing music to him on these occasions. This David did, to Saul’s great relief. David also slew the Philistine giant Goliath, and Saul made him commander of a thousand troops. David was so successful in war with the Philistines that all the women of Israel came out to greet him singing, “Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” (Samuel 1, 18:7) Saul was enraged by the derisory comparison, saying, “They have ascribed unto David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed but thousands,” adding prophetically, “and what can he have more but the kingdom?” And Saul was again visited by the evil spirit, and again David soothed him with music. But now Saul was suspicious, he held a spear, and he hurled it at David, missing him. From this time forward, Saul treated David with extreme ambivalence, and he became increasingly unsuccessful in war. Finally, abandoned by God, he fell upon his own sword.

Stehle’s “program” reads as follows: Triumphal march of the proud conqueror; his defiant arrogance; the prophet’s rebuke; he is gradually overcome by the spirit of desolation and night; the struggling king rises up magnificently; gentle consoling song of the shepherd boy from Bethlehem, interspersed with dark looks from Saul; the catastrophe; the genius of consolation [David] escapes, lamenting; the fulfillment of unalterable fate.3

The opening march, of almost frenzied grandiosity, celebrates Saul’s first victory over the Philistines. The introductory trumpet fanfare doubtless represents the biblical line, “And Saul blew the trumpet throughout all the land, saying, ‘Let the Hebrews hear’”. (Samuel 1, 13:3) The music slowly subsides to near silence, after which we hear two passages of recitative. The first is evidently Saul boasting of his conquest; the second is Samuel’s rebuke of Saul and the prophecy of his downfall. The main motif of Samuel’s recitative (ex. 4–strikingly reminiscent of Reubke) will become the principal thematic germ of the whole piece; we already heard it as it briefly interruped Saul’s blustering recitative. Samuel is answered by a defiant outburst from the king that becomes increasingly vociferous until it finally subsides to a quiet new theme (ex. 5). This appears to be the theme of night and desolation, again reminiscent of Reubke; it gradually grows into a struggle at the climax of which the king with a mighty lurch tries to free himself from guilt and oppression (grossartiges Aufbäumen des Ringenden: literally, magnificent rearing-up of the wrestler). But again the music subsides inconclusively and another dark theme is heard as the process repeats (ex. 6), this time with a longer buildup of both speed and volume until what can only be the derisive song of the women of Israel bursts out (ex. 7). Saul reacts with a struggle similar to the preceding one, after which the music again subsides, this time with a motive reminiscent of the fate motive in Wagner’s Ring, coming to rest on the same chord of the minor ninth that Reubke used to signal the end of a movement. Now David is brought with his lyre, and after a quiet prelude made of extraordinarily elusive chromatic harmonies, he plays the three stanzas of his consoling song (a “transformation” in the manner of Liszt, with intervals expanded, of the first theme of night and desolation: ex. 8). The stanzas are separated by suspicious looks from Saul, his spear in his hand. The prelude returns as a postlude, then Saul recalls the prophecy of Samuel. David begins his song again, but in a sudden fury Saul hurls his spear to pin David to the wall, as the organ makes the loudest possible smashing sound. (It was reported that at this moment during the premiere, a woman in the audience fainted.) But the spear misses, there is silence, and David departs, lamenting. Again we hear Reubke’s ninth chord as the movement ends.

The dénouement begins with a fugato on the motif of Samuel’s prophecy (ex. 9). This builds gradually to a fragment from the opening march over rising chromatic scales (ex. 10), after which a strangely distorted version of what we have called the women’s song again bursts out (ex. 7). The music continues with the prophecy motive, until a cadenza brings us to the second half of the movment. Just as in Liszt and Reubke, the fugue subject returns against fast-moving counterpoint. From here to the end the music focuses more and more on the motive of Samuel’s prophecy (ex. 4), which grows louder and more insistent until, in a passage of detached chords over a pedal cadenza nearly copied from Reubke, the work reaches its massive and savage conclusion. -David Fuller

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1. W. Widmann, “J. G. Ed. Stehle,” Schweizerische Musikzeitung 40 (1900), 233-4; 243-4. On Saul, p. 243. The principal monograph on Stehle is Alois Koch, Johann Gustav Eduard Stehle (1839-1915) und die katholische Kirchenmusik in der deutschen Schweiz zur Zeit der caecilianischen Reform (Lucern: Edition Cron, 1977).

2. The David Story, a lavishly annotated new translation of Samuel 1 and 2 by Robert Alter (New York: Norton, 1999), has been of great help.

3. See the German translation of these notes for the original. For Stehle’s own performance of the work in the Grossmünster in Zürich on 11 July 1882, the word “energetic” (energisch) was substituted for “magnificent” (grossartig). A review of the work by A. W. Gottschalg (1827-1908), a Weimar organist and friend of Liszt, written just after publication, evidently from the score without an opportunity to hear more than the reviewer could sight-read himself, also seems to guess at the relations between program and music and does not always agree with my analysis. Contrary to the bible, Gottschalg has Saul’s spear pierce David, who falls to the floor where “from the breast rich in song life’s crimson fluid gushes out.” The motif that I have assigned to the women’s mocking song is labeled by Gottschalg “motif of power” (Kraft). Gottschalg, who was an ardent partisan of the “new German school” of Liszt and Wagner, calls Saul “the first symphonic poem for organ” and heaps praise upon it for its audacious embrace of all that he considered progressive. (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 74 [1878], 249-51; 261-2). Another reviewer called it “music of the future” (Zukunftsmusik). For an unenthusiastic review by A. Ruthardt of Stehle’s performance in Zürich, see Schweizerische Musikzeitung 22 (1882), 115; reprinted in Koch, p. 139, note 98.