Five Schubert Lieder

Sei mir gegrüsst

Auf dem Wasser zu singen

Du bist die Ruh

Liebesbotschaft

Ständchen

Between Schubert and Liszt there is a very special relationship. Their lives overlapped by only seventeen years and they never met – although they were both among the fifty composers invited to contribute to the composite Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli round about 1820 – but Liszt was no less fascinated by Schubert than he was by a contemporary as close to him and as influential as Richard Wagner. Over the course of not far short of forty years Liszt based no fewer than eighty pieces on Schubert material of one kind or another and, inevitably, that close and prolonged contact with another composer’s music left its mark on his own development – not least on his own Lieder, which he started writing at about the same time as he made his earliest Schubert transcriptions.

Liszt’s version of Sie mir gegrüsst, which was published – with Auf dem Wasser zu singen, Du bist die Ruh,    Ständchen and eight others – in his first volume of Schubert song arrangements, Zwölf Lieder, in 1838, is a characteristic example. Until half-way through Liszt does little more than replicate the original accompaniment while integrating the vocal line in the tenor register between the left and right hands. When the melody is taken by the right hand he still retains Schubert’s harmonies but enriches them with octaves, thirds and sixths and extravagantly expressive figurations. Auf dem Wasser zu singen follows the same pattern except that this time the transformation from Schubert to Liszt is made more gradually as the piece evolves from song arrangement to tone poem boasting a coda six times longer and ten times more dramatic than than the original. Du bist die Ruh dispenses not only with Schubert’s introduction but also with his restraint in keeping the dynamic level down to pianissimo in all but a few bars. But if, in this instance, Liszt noisily betrays the spirit of the song he certainly produces a most colourful piece of piano music, its effect heightened as in the Schubert original by the occasional bar of silence.

The arrangements of    all 14 songs of Schwanengesang, which was completed shortly after the Zwölf Lieder in 1839, are in most cases respectful of the original – by the standards of the day, that is. In Liebesbotschaft, for example, Liszt clearly recognised that Schubert’s inspired if technically modest piano writing is perfectly conceived for its function and, in the outer sections, virtually beyond improvement. With the central change of mode to the minor he elaborates somewhat, though not distastefully, and contents himself on the change back to the major with an octave doubling of the melodic line. With Ständchen (not the one from Schwanengesang but “Horch, horch, die Lerch’” from the Zwölf Lieder) Liszt begins most effectively by doing little more than securing brighter colouring from high on the keyboard. If his treatment of the repeat seems rather overdone in places it is also inoffensively delightful in others, as in the addition of    lively counterpoints to the melodic line and the witty closing bars.