Tod und die Maedchen is a performance of a song (Lied) by Franz Schubert, a setting of a poem by the German poet Matthias Claudius. The song is an intensely expressive miniature, about 2 minutes and 40 seconds long. A You-Tube video documents a performance of the song by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and and Julia Varady. The video is also less than than 2 minutes and forty seconds. This tiny gem is a masterpiece, far more moving and profound than most feature films. I can't recommend this short film enough and hope that you will seek it out.
Schubert's song was composed in 1817. It's about 41 bars in length. A young woman, feverish with illlness, imagines that death as skeletal figure (she calls him a Knochenmann -- that is, a "bony man") had come to her bedside. She cries out that she is too young to die and asks death to pass over her bed and spare her. She pleads with Death asking him not to touch her. Death replies that she must give him her hand. He is her friend and has come "not to punish" (strafen) but to take her in his arms so that she can "sleep" (schlafen). He admonishes her to be of good cheer because his is not wild or fierce but gentle.
The film shows a man and woman in a tastefully decorated music-room. They seem to be comfortable in their home. The man plays the piano with singular, dispassionate intensity. His eyes staring at the score on the pianoare focused like lasers, and his features are composed, but immensely concentrated on playing the accompaniment to the woman's song. The grave and sober, but mathematically precise, attention with which the man reads the score and plays the piano, contrasts with the woman's passion. The woman sings with ferocious intensity, first impersonating the girl's panic at the apparition that has appeared at her bedside: Voruber! ach, Voruber! ("Go past! Oh, go past!) she cries in a tone harsh as a crow's cry, an expression of desperate terror. In the song's first stanza, the woman's voice stutters and leaps with repulsion and anguish. The second stanza is Death's reply, an implacable monotone constructed of the same note repeated as a rhythmic pulse, the chant lightening at the end into a lullaby admonishes the girl to sleep.
At the start of the song, the woman, who stands next to the pianist, puts her hand on the man's shoulder left shoulder next to her hip. The woman is wearing an elegant earth-colored blouse. The man is clad entirely in black and wears steel-rimmed glasses. The black and brown tones harmonize with the autumnal colors of the room in which the song is performed. Several close-ups show the accompanist leaning forward to play the song's simple melody before and between (and, then, after) the poem's stanzas. At the end of the song, when the Death invites the girl to sleep, the camera portrays the woman in a huge close-up. She has a faded, beautiful face with high cheekbones and wears long black eyelashes. She is not weeping but her eyes seem moist. The camera cuts to the pianist playing the last seven or eight bars, a dying fall. This shot corresponds to the close-up of the woman who has now finished singing. As the pianist concludes the song, the woman's hand tentatively touches the man's right bicep, her fingers appearing for an instant at the corner of the image before the screen fades to black. The effect of the woman's reticent gestures and the two portrait shots (the woman's face first and, then, the man indifferent it seems to everything but the demands of the music) that conclude the film is immensely moving.
In a reversal of roles, the pianist is Dietrich Fischer Dieskau, the world's most famous baritone and the greatest of all proponents of the German Lieder or Art-Song. Here Fischer-Dieskau, who was about 82 when the film was made doesn't sing. Instead, the renowned singer is eerily silent, showing total absorption in the simple piano part that he plays. The woman is Julia Varady, in the film in her late sixties. Julia Varady was Fischer-Dieskau's wife from 1977 to 2012, when he died. She was a famous opera singer in her own right, celebrated for her beauty and exquisite performances. (Varady was born in Hungary in 1941; Fischer-Dieskau was born in 1925.) One thinks of Fischer-Dieskau as built a little like Franz Schubert, a big man with soft features and a bit chubby. In the video, he is very thin and his face, although smooth and unlined, seems a bit drawn; he looks like the young inmate in the American POW camp in archival pictures, the place where he was confined for two years and where he first demonstrated his genius to the guards and the other prisoners -- old age and sickness, it seems, has made him slender and youthful-looking again. Julia Varady furrows her brow with the effort of personifying the maiden first and, then, Death. Death says "Gib deine Hand" ("Give me your hand");it is Julia Varady who gently extends her hand to touch the arm and wrist of her pianist. The soprano's engagement with the lyrics is intense, passionate, eloquent; by contrast, the pianist seems already detached from life, his face a theorem of intense concentration, already, perhaps, posthumous.
Watch this video -- it will change your life and make most of the rest of things that you see on screen or TV seem trivial.
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