Franz Schubert 1797–1828 1 Viola D786 13.06 17 Der Winterabend D938 7.20 2 Pilgerweise D789 5.41 18 Der Unglückliche D713 5.56 3 An die Musik D547 2.28 19 Totengräbers Heimweh D842 5.59 4 Der liebliche Stern D861 2.42 20 Auf dem Strom D943 7.59 5 Tiefes Leid D876 3.45 Timothy Brown horn 6 Auf der Bruck D853 3.11 21 Ständchen (Horch, horch, die Lerch) D889 3.41 7 Der Wanderer D649 2.50 22 Lachen und Weinen D777 1.44 8 Fülle der Liebe D854 5.15 23 An die Laute D905 1.27 9 Wiedersehn D855 2.21 24 Der Tod und das Mädchen D531 2.23 10 Vom Mitleiden Mariä D632 3.25 25 Pflicht und Liebe D467 1.16 11 Im Walde D780 6.06 26 Allegretto D900 in C minor 1.55 12 Der Schmetterling D633 1.21 27 Lebensmut D937 0.53 28 Allegretto D346 in C 4.28 Gesänge des Harfners D478 29 Johanna Sebus D728 2.19 13 Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt 3.51 30 Andantino D348 in C 2.42 14 Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß 4.03 31 Abschied von der Erde (Melodrama) D829 2.39 15 An die Türen will ich schleichen 1.52 Ian Bostridge tenor 16 Die Sterne D939 2.51 Leif Ove Andsnes piano 2 Schubert: Lieder Whereas Schubert was already a master of song at 17, it took him ‘verglüht’ – fades – at the line ‘Ehe der Geist verglüht’, which several years longer to find his individual voice as a composer of Schubert then caps with an even more breathtaking modulation instrumental music. In his early keyboard works, especially, he when the words are repeated. struggled to reconcile the influence of Haydn, Mozart and middle- period Beethoven with his own evolving subjective vision; and Jacob Craigher’s morbidly disenchanted gravedigger in Totengräbers between 1815, when he was 18, and 1818, he abandoned more Heimweh (1825) may seem like a melodramatic Shakespearean sonatas and single movements for piano than he completed. parody. But from these unpromising verses Schubert creates a song of tragic grandeur, growing from the grim ‘digging’ music of Two of the three fragments on this disc date from these years: the the opening, via an ominous unison passage that quotes from the Andantino D348, a rondo that breaks off just after a stormy first movement of the A minor Piano Sonata D845 (at ‘Von allen episode that freely varies the main theme; and the Allegretto D346, verlassen’), to the final transfigured dance. which may originally have been intended as the finale of the Piano Sonata D279. This is another fragmentary rondo structure, with a The gravedigger’s cry of ‘O Schicksal, o traurige Pflicht, ich trag’s breezy, buffo main theme bandied between treble and bass (one länger nicht’ could stand as a motto of the blind old Harper from more instance of Schubert’s ‘string quartet’ thinking), and a minor- Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre who, with the equally keyed episode that recalls the Rondo alla turca of Mozart’s A major enigmatic Mignon, haunted the 19th-century imagination. The Sonata, K331. Opening with a doleful, hesitant march theme, the Harper has escaped to Germany from an Italian monastery, and is Allegretto in C minor, D900, probably dating from 1820–23, is the tormented by a secret guilt: his incestuous love for his sister, most hauntingly Schubertian of these fragments, making it all the Sperata, of which Mignon is the fruit – though neither father nor more frustrating when it breaks off in mid-air after just two minutes. daughter knows it. Like so many other 19th-century composers, Two songs here are also technically fragments, though in each case Schubert was drawn to the Harper’s three famous lyrics, only a few bars are missing. Pflicht und Liebe (1816), Schubert’s touchstones of Romantic alienation: Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt, only setting of words by the translator and librettist Friedrich Gotter, Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß and An die Türen will ich schleichen. has the dignified melancholy of an opera seria aria. Schubert was Published together in 1822 (though the first and third songs date probably attracted to Gotter’s poem (or the verses he chose to set) from 1816), they form a miniature cycle, linked by a common because it mirrored his own gentle rejection in the summer of 1816 tonality, shared motifs and a similar mournful, dragging gait. In the by his first love, Therese Grob. Twelve years later, in 1828, first two songs, strummed chords and triplet arpeggios evoke the Schubert abandoned the exuberantly cascading Rellstab setting accompanying harp, while the austere, archaic textures of An die Lebensmut – somewhere between a waltz and a polonaise – after a Türen suggest an organ prelude that the old man might have heard single verse; and although the Peters edition prints all three in his youth. verses, it is unlikely that Schubert would have used the same music for the intimations of mortality in the final verse. Among the In early 1821 the omens looked good for Schubert. Championed by song’s delights is the magical turn of harmony to illustrate the famous baritone Johann Michael Vogl, his songs were beginning 4 to cause a stir beyond his own immediate circle. In March the self- Unusually, Pilgerweise is constructed as a free palindrome: the effacing former schoolteacher’s growing reputation in Vienna was music of the opening is repeated for the final verse, rounding off reinforced when Vogl scored a huge public success with Erlkönig at the design; that for verse two returns in the penultimate verse, a charity concert. And despite Schubert’s well-documented aversion while the music of the fourth verse (‘Und geb’ ein Lied’), with its to social niceties, he and Vogl were now in demand in Vienna’s illustrative ‘zither’ accompaniment, recurs in the sixth (‘Vom fashionable salons. It was through Vogl that he met the poet and Überfluß’). As many commentators have noted, there is a close novelist Karoline Pichler, whose twice-weekly soirées were a magnet affinity between the song’s bare, bleak opening theme and the for the capital’s artistic élite. Schubert had already composed Andantino – likewise in F sharp minor – of the late A major Sonata. settings of two of her poems in 1816. And in January 1821 he added a third, Der Unglückliche, doubtless for Vogl and himself to A special parlour favourite in Victorian England, Ständchen (aka perform at one of her celebrated gatherings. ‘Hark, hark, the lark’) sets lines sung by Cloten’s musicians to the sleeping Imogen in Cymbeline (the second and third verses were With Vogl’s histrionic talents in mind, Schubert set Pichler’s heated, tacked on by the actor-poet Friedrich Reil when the song was self-lacerating verses as a quasi-operatic cantata in several published in 1830). Schubert casts the serenade as an airy waltz, contrasting sections. The melancholy B minor opening (which with a little chirping high in the keyboard to evoke the lark, and a recalls the Andante of the ‘little’ A major Sonata, D664) melts in wonderful, dusky modulation at the repetition of the line ‘Der typically Schubertian fashion into the tonic major. Then, as the poet Blumenkelche deckt’. moves into full masochistic mode, Schubert writes some of his most tormented, rebarbative music, culminating in a shock A setting of verses from Friedrich Rückert’s hedonistic collection fortissimo chord at the climactic ‘Harte Hand des Schicksals’. The entitled Östliche Rosen (‘Eastern Roses’), the ever-popular Lachen memory of happier times provokes an episode in a carefree, und Weinen paints with delicious economy and grace the young cantering 6/8 time which is quickly shattered by a melodramatic lover’s rapid mood swings from major-keyed happiness to minor- recitative. The gentle rocking rhythm of the opening now returns, keyed wistfulness and (with the equivalent of a smiling shrug at ‘ist the music made more poignant by the major tonality. But the mir selb’ nicht bewußt’) back again. nostalgic vision is banished in the final section, which reasserts B minor – and the poet’s grim fate – with implacable dotted An die Laute, to verses by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz (best known as rhythms. the editor of the influential Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung), is a waltz-serenade, and one of the most beguiling of Schubert’s lighter By April 1823, when he composed Pilgerweise, Schubert’s life had songs. An innocent first cousin to Don Giovanni’s mandolin- been irrevocably darkened by the syphilitic illness which was to kill accompanied serenade, it has a confiding enchantment all of its him less than six years later. And the song’s text, by Schubert’s own, not least in the magical dip to the ‘flat’ side of the harmonic close friend Franz von Schober – who clearly modelled his poem on spectrum at ‘Wie die Wellen sanfter Lüfte’. the Harper’s song An die Türen from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister – may well reflect the composer’s sense of suffering and alienation in Der Tod und das Mädchen, whose ‘death’ theme Schubert was to the wake of his illness. Schubert, though, transmutes the rather use in his D minor Quartet, D810, reminds us that life in the maudlin self-pity of the verses into a song of stoical resignation. disease-ridden Vienna of the early 19th century could be brutally 5 cut short at any moment. Schubert conceives the song as a an overt homage to the composer whom Schubert revered yet miniature operatic scena.