5 Lieder

Frühlingsglaube D686 (1820)

Am Bach im Frühling D361 (1816)

Der Tod und das Mädchen D531 (1817)

Nacht und Träume D827 (1822)

Der Zwerg D771 (1822)

The first two items in this group are related not only by their early-spring theme but also by the way their respective protagonists compare their own emotional state with the signs of renewal in nature around them. They are, however, very different kinds of song. Frühlingsglaube retains its lyrical radiance in spite of the anxious modulation as thoughts turn inwards towards the end of each stanza: faith in the restorative powers of spring is preserved not least by the consistent presence of the initial rhythmic pattern in the piano part. There is no such consolation in Am Bach im Frühling, where there is so little hope that, though discreetly, Schubert calls on the expressive potential of the aria to accommodate the despair. It begins lyrically enough, in a manner not very different from that of Frühlingsglaube, but then turns to the minor in the personal reflections of the second stanza, reverts to recitative in the third and then, as in the da capo aria, repeats the first two, confirming the unhappy situation.

The sutuation at the end of Frühlingsglaube is surely not terminal, however, as it clearly is in Der Tod und das Mädchen, where Death’s implacable but not uncompassionate answer to the plea of the Maiden evoked in Schubert one of the greatest of all musical images - one he was to remember seven years later in the slow movement of his tragically inspired String Quartet in D minor.

Of the two Collin settings, the first is as serene as the the second is grim. Nacht und Träume, which is to be sung pianissimo throughout, is so slow in tempo, so sustained in line, so even in the rhythms of the piano part that sense of movement is confined largely to the changes in harmony which, far from disturbing the moonlit atmosphere, heighten its magic. Written at much the same time, Der Zwerg is driven throughout by the turbulent ostinato in the right hand of the piano part - which means that the left hand assumes the dramatic function of articulating the dread three-note rhythm that echoes from bar to bar until it even more alarmingly introduces the Dwarf and doubles in heavy octaves his sentence of death on the Queen.

Der Wanderer D489 (1816)

Rastlose Liebe D138 (1815)

Wandrers Nachtlied I D224 (1815)

Totengräbers Heimweh D842 (1825)

Wandrers Nachtlied II D768 (1822)

While there are only five Schubert songs with “Wanderer” in the title, the wanderer figure treads his lonely journey through dozens more of them, culminating in the Winterreise cycle in 1827. Der Wanderer was written eleven years before Winterreise, which is a long time in terms of Schubert’s life span, but surely no other single song represents more vividly the plight of the alienated stranger. Its expressive power derives above all from Schubert’s liberated treatment of Schmidt von Lübeck’s text. Far from a strophic setting, it is a mixture of song and dramatic monologue, beginning with a recitative in the minor, changing within a couple of lines to a a cantilena in the major, passing through a particularly desolate second stanza (which later became the basis of the “Wanderer” Fantasy) to an elated memory of home and a sombre ending all the more poignant for its resigned conclusion in the major.

In Rastlose Liebe Goethe presents the suffering experienced by the wanderer, fighting his way through snow and rain, as far preferable to the anguish of a new love, from which there is no escape. A tumult of mixed emotions, it is driven in Schubert’s masterly setting on an impetuous flight of semiquavers in the piano part and, although the key changes and the semiquavers become triplet quavers in the second stanza, generates ever more energy until explodes into the exultant final bars.

Goethe’s wanderer will find peace, however, as the second of his two Wandrers Nachtlieder so sincerely promises. Schubert applied himself to the first of them, a prayer for peace rather than a reflection of it, when he was still only 18 but, if his setting falls short of the perfection he was to achieve with the other seven years later, he nertheless produced a song of great lyrical beauty. The extraordinary Totengräbers Heimweh not only pleads for peace but also secures it as the miserable old gravedigger experiences a kind of transfiguration in death at the end. What is extrardinary about it is not so much Craigher’s text, egregious though it is, as Schubert’s bold rejection of most conventional notions of unity. He allows the opening section with its grim digging rhythms to fade and to pass, after a pause, into a premonition of imminent death for voice and piano in unadorned unisons (on a theme from the first movement of the Piano Sonata in A minor D845) and than into a final stanza floating on a serene transformation of the once gravedigging rhythm.

Wandrers nachtlied II represents the ultimate in tranquillity, a condition secured not by musical uniformity but by way of a central section betraying just a hint of unease. It is as though the wanderer is listening for sounds that might impinge on the prevailing silence, which makes the return to harmonic and rhythmic stability all the more moving. Goethe wrote the words of the poem on a mountain hut in Thuringia in 1780 and when, as an old man, he renewed the inscription 33 years later he wept. Although Schubert cannot have been aware of that, his use of the rhythmic figure he regularly associates with death (as in Der Tod und das Mädchen) indicates that he shared the aged poet’s feelings.