4 Lieder

Im Frühling D882 (1826)

Heiss mich nicht reden D877 No.2 (1826)

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt D877 No.4 (1826)

Ellens Gesang (Ave Maria) D839 (1825)

One of the most beautiful of all spring songs, Im Frühling is so relaxed that it is almost indolent – or it is until memories of lost love intrude so painfully that the harmonies are chilled into the minor and the blissful piano melody is displaced by stabbing syncopations. The not quite reconciled closing stanza restores both the major mood and the piano melody but retains the syncopations until the very last line.

Schubert’s first setting of a Mignon song from Goethe’s novel Wilhlem Meisters Lehrjahre was his Nur were die Sehnsucht kennt of 1815. By the time he came to write his fifth and sixth settings of those same challenging verses eleven years later he had completed three other Mignon songs – Kennst du das Land a few days after the first version of Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt in 1815 and Heiss mich nicht reden and So lasst mich scheinen in 1821. Although the 1821 version of Heiss mich nicht reden is probably better suited, in its comparative simplicity, to the character of the waif-like Mignon, the 1826 version is probably more interesting, in its near-operatic variety, from the musical point of view. There can be little dispute, on the other hand, that the last of the four solo settings of Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt is the best even though it is based on material created for another song, Ins stille Land, ten years earlier. What with another composer might have been a merely cynical exercise in recycling is actually a stroke of genius in this case. It is as though, after struggling repeatedly, as Beethoven had done before him, to capture the elusive essence of Goethe’s verse, he realised that he had already solved at least the melodic problem in a song to words by a different poet but on a not unrelated theme. He made changes of course – introducing, for example, the disturbing harmonies and figuration associated with the two lines beginning “Es schwindelt mir” – but for the most part preserving the yearning simplicity so well suited to his subject.

Another of Schubert’s literary heroines, Ellen of Scott’s Lady of the Lake, inspired three songs, most famously this Ave Maria which, as the composer himself said, “seems to touch all hearts” – in whatever arrangement it is heard, one might add. The composer attributed its appeal to what he described as its devotional character, although it is at least as much an opera-house as an ecclesiastical kind of prayer.