Wiedersehen

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 2016
Original album - (none)
Producer - Pet Shop Boys
Subsequent albums - (none)
Other releases - bonus track with the single "Twenty-something"

This slow, stately, and deeply forlorn ballad, dominated by acoustic piano, was composed by the Boys in February 2015 during their highly productive writing sessions for the album that eventually became Super. Neil has described it as "a very beautiful song," noting that it's "about the Jewish Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig fleeing his country before the Nazis' arrival…. He's saying auf wiedersehen to his life in Austria." (Neil's professed inspiration was a book he had recently read about Zweig.) He also added that it should "find its place somewhere, probably as a b-side." Sure enough, he and Chris decided to release it as one of the bonus tracks for the single "Twenty-something."

"Wiedersehen" has some unusual elements both musically and lyrically. Quite atypically for PSB, the music shifts time signature back and forth between common time (4:4) in the verses and compound duple time (6:8) in the chorus. It's also one of a small handful of PSB songs—"Miracles" being another—that employs a harmonic device, particularly common during the Baroque era, known as a Tierce de Piccardie, or "Picardy third," in which a piece composed in a minor key (as "Wiedersehen" is, not surprisingly given the subject matter) unexpectedly ends with the corresponding major chord. The resulting emotional effect on the listener can vary widely depending on the circumstances, often lending an air of joy and triumph but sometimes coming across as mildly unsettling. In the particular circumstances of "Wiedersehen," the latter is probably more likely.

As for the lyrics, one's initial impression is that it's sung directly from Zweig's perspective, as if Zweig himself were the narrator as he offers doleful goodbyes to the "mountains," "trees," and "ski slopes" of his beautiful homeland. But it soon becomes apparent that, no, Neil has adopted a third-person omniscient narrator who, while occasionally addressing Zweig as "you" (as in the line "Your old friend Freud has helped you," among others), is nevertheless entirely privy to his innermost thoughts. In this way Neil astutely manages, so to speak, to have his lyrical cake and eat it, too—blending the present-time immediacy of Zweig's situation as he says farewell to Austria while simultaneously being fully attuned to things of which Zweig himself probably wouldn't be fully conscious under such circumstances.

Even amidst a string of literal, seemingly mundane observations—"The train is on the platform…. Your suitcases are sitting on the luggage rack"—Neil interjects the painful metaphor "The knife is in your back," expressing the profound sense of loss, threat, and betrayal the fleeing author must be feeling. Could this even be a hint at Zweig's eventual suicide as he later comes to despair at the miserable state of the world during the depths of the Second World War? That is, perhaps Zweig isn't merely saying goodbye to Austria, but it's also his first step toward bidding farewell to the world altogether.

Interestingly, the title is indeed simply "Wiedersehen" (meaning "see again") as opposed to the much more familiar idiomatic German expression auf wiedersehen (literally "on seeing again," paralleling the English "until we meet again," but idiomatically simply "goodbye"). Neil does indeed sing it both ways in the chorus, both with and without the "auf." German-speakers do in fact commonly say simply "Wiedersehen" rather than the full expression in much the same way that English-speakers very often say "bye" as opposed to "goodbye." As one of my German site visitors has pointed out, said by itself, "Wiedersehen" is used as an informal expression of parting with no strong emotional connotations, whereas the full expression "Auf wiedersehen" is more formal and carries far more emotional weight, specifically expressing the hope of a future meeting.

The chorus, incidentally, is entirely in German, with the added words "Wie wir gehen" (literally "As we go"). In the context of the song, this might also be interpreted "As we say goodbye," "How do we go?" or "How do we say goodbye?" Several of my German site visitors told me that to their "native speaker ears" the phrase didn't seem to make much sense. But Neil checked with both Goetz Botzenhardt (who mixed the track) and Sven Helbig (the composer who orchestrated Battleship Potemkin, The Most Incredible Thing, and A Man from the Future for the Boys), themselves Germans, who confirmed that it was just fine—in Helbig's words, "like poetic German"—for Neil's intended meaning, "As we go," or, as he articulated it in his notes for this song in One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem, "This is how we are leaving."

Speaking of that chorus, Rufus Wainwright—a personal friend of the Boys as well as a man with a good deal of experience working with them—sings support harmonies in its third and fourth iterations, as well as on the second half of the final verse.

A number of people—including the Pet Shop Boys themselves via their official website—have commented on the seemingly prescient irony of "Wiedersehen" being released on the very day that the British electorate voted to leave the European Union. Goodbye, indeed.

Annotations

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a Jewish Austrian author who worked in a variety of formats: novels, short stories, plays, biographies, and journalism. Highly prolific as well as internationally famous and commercially successful during his peak years (the 1920s and '30s), he had the foresight to flee his native land in 1934, shortly after Adolf Hitler rose to power in neighboring Germany. He and his wife first settled in Britain, but as World War II erupted and Hitler initially seemed unstoppable, the Zweigs decided to move across the Atlantic to the United States. They remained there only a short time, however, and soon moved to Brazil, where in 1940 they settled Petrópolis, a largely German-speaking community not far from Rio de Janeiro. Despairing over the spread of Nazism and other doctrines of intolerance, Zweig and his wife committed suicide together by barbituate overdose in their Petrópolis home on February 23, 1942. His reputation as an author went into decline following his death, but there has been a resurgence in interest since the 1990s. Among his best-known works today are the novellas The Royal Game, Amok, and Letters from an Unknown Woman, the novels Beware of Pity and Confusion of Feelings, and the biographies Erasmus of Rotterdam, Balzac, and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. There have been several biographies of Zweig, but the most recent is Oliver Matuschek's Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig, originally in German but translated into English to critical acclaim in 2011 by Allan Blunden. Perhaps this is the biography that Neil had read, thereby inspiring the song.
"Salzburg is a cradle rocking you no more" – Although Zweig was born in Vienna, he spent much of his life in the Austrian city of Salzburg, which is where he was living at the time of his departure from the country. With these words, Neil describes the way in which Salzburg (and Austria in general), where Zweig had once felt so sheltered and comfortable, was no longer a place of safety for him.
"The civilized rejected / Modernity attacked" – The Nazis as a matter of course expressed pathological hatred and fear of modern ideas and artworks, which they reviled as "decadent."
"Your old friend Freud has helped you" – Zweig was a personal friend of the famed Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Like Zweig a Jew, Freud would himself flee Austria in 1938, roughly four years after Zweig had left.
One of my site visitors has pointed out that this track could be viewed as something of an echo of the song "So Long, Farewell" from the famed 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music—also set in Austria and even partly in Salzburg—and which the Boys themselves recorded in 1993 as a special goodbye to the long-running British radio program The Simon Bates Show. (The PSB recording has never been officially released but has long been available as a "bootleg.") "So Long, Farewell" appears twice in the musical: in the first act, rather innocuously, as the Von Trapp children say goodbye to houseguests, but again much later, near the end of the musical, under far more serious circumstances (and as a double entendre to which only the real-life audience members, as opposed to the observing Nazis, are fully aware) as the family bids farewell both to their audience at the end of a performance and to Austria itself since they're planning to flee to Switzerland as soon as they leave the stage. It's obviously in this second appearance that the song—which also includes "auf wiedersehen" in its lyrics—most strongly presages the Tennant-Lowe composition.

List cross-references

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