7 Lieder

Im Walde (Waldesnacht) D708 (1820)

Totengräbers Heimweh D842 (1825)

Die Wallfahrt (edited by Reinhardt van Hoorickx) D 778a (1822-3)

Greisengesang D 778 (1822)

Das war ich (completed by Reinhardt van Hoorickx) D 174a (1816)

Nachtstück D672 (1819)

Der Pilgrim D 794 (1823)

Many Schubert Lieder are set at night. Few, however, are as extensive in construction or as fervent in expression as Im Walde – a Friedrich Schlegel setting published four years after the composer’s death as Waldesnacht (presumably to distinguish it from the already published Im Walde to words by Ernst Schulze). Perhaps the longest of Schubert’s through-composed songs, it is above all a paean to creativity, the exhilarating sensation of which is experienced with breathtaking intensity in the darkness of the forest at night. It is driven – except, briefly, towards the end of the vividly illuminated second stanza – by the rapid semiquaver figuration first heard on the piano in the opening bars. While it is astonishingly diverse in harmony and melodic material, after the lyrical third stanza and the climactic fourth it secures a kind of recapitulation in the last.

Another night-time soliloquy, the extraordinary Totengräbers Heimweh not only pleads for peace but also secures it as the unhappy 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.

The availability of Die Wallfahrt we owe to the late Belgian cleric Reinhardt van Hoorickx, who made it his mission to track down Schubert song fragments, complete them “for practical use” and edit them for publication. Die Wallfahrt is exceptional in that, unlike most of the 70 Lieder he issued in this way, it was complete as Schubert left it, although he might well have elaborated it if he had thought it worth preserving. While it is one of the shortest and technically least ambitious of Schubert’s songs, it is enhanced in significance on this occasion by its relationship with Der Pilgrim, another account of a pilgrimage which fails to reach its goal, at the end of the programme.

A more distinguished Rückert setting, Greisengesang is a masterpiece worthy of comparison with better known examples from the same source. It is true that it is not a love lyric like the others (Sei mir gegrüsst, Dass sie hier gewesen, Du bist die Ruh and Lachen und Weinen) and is made of sterner stuff – or so it is in the stony B minor piano harmonies applied to the first two lines of the first and second and fifth and sixth stanzas. The old man’s inner resources, however, equip him not only with a B major answer on each occasion but also with a vocal line which, from the middle of the third stanza onwards, proliferates so melodiously that by the end it represents the nightingale that brings such cosy advice.

Having written a perfectly good, strophic setting of Körner’s Das war ich in 1815, Schubert began a second version a year later but got no further than the first six bars of the vocal line – a challenge the indefatigable Reinhardt van Hoorickx clearly could not resist and which he met with characteric stylistic discretion. If his completion of Das war ich pales into insignificance alongside Nachtstück, Schubert’s own version wouldn’t have fared much better in the circumstances. One of the most beautiful of all his songs, Nachtstück effects an inspired transformation from a gloomy beginning to a valedictory middle section and, by way of a magical modulation, a transfigured ending.

The two themes of night and old age having been linked in this way, the programme ends with another pilgrimage to complement the one so briefly observed in Die Wallfahrt. One of the last of Schubert’s more than 40 Schiller settings, Der Pilgrim is a vividly expressed study in disillusion. It sets out out bravely with a major-key chorale made for marching and retains its fervour until it gets into harmonic situations as problematic as the impasse the pilgrim meets on the mountains. After the deceptive comfort offered by the river, it ends in minor-key despair all the more poignant for an exclamation of defiance finally negated by the piano.