7 Lieder

Erlafsee D586 (1817)

Iphigenia D573 (1817)

Heidenröslein D257 (1815)

Die Männer sind méchant D866 No.3 (1828)

An die untergehende Sonne D457 (1816-17)

An den Mond D193 (1815)

Wanderers Nachtlied D768 (1822)

Two songs written at much the same time by the same composer to words by the same poet could scarcely be more different. It is true that Schubert changed the focus of Mayrhofer’s Erlafsee by cutting it and reshaping it into a ternary form. But the music and what is left of the words combine in a precise evocation of an elusive mood in the midst of nature, its romantic longing encapsulated in the flattened sixth in the vocal line when the words “so wohl, so weh” are repeated. Ipheginia is also set in nature but it is alien nature which, far from inducing romantic reflection, stimulates an appropriately classical-style reaction in a dramatically coloured Gluck-like recitative leading to a short prayer-aria in the dominant.

After a pair of songs which in their very different ways – the first with simple nursery-song symbolism, the other with mock horror – arraign the male sex for wilful misbehaviour, the Schubert group ends with three nocturns. Like Mayrhofer’s Erlafsee, Kosegarten’s An die untergehende Sonne was adapted by the composer to create a musical shape, in this case rondo which twice repeats the opening lines with their slowly sinking inflections. There are two episodes (“Still und ruhig” and “Es segnen die Völker”) the second of them quicker than the first and modulating on a rush of emotion before returning to the opening material. Like Erlafsee, Schubert’s setting of Hölty’s An den Mond is a ternary construction, its outer sections recalling in the piano part the opening of the “Moonlight” Sonata – which might have been deliberate but, bearing in mind that the Beethoven Sonata was still to acquire its nickname, but was probably a matter of poetic coincidence. Though far less elaborate in construction than either the Kosegarten or the Hölty setting, Schubert’s last Goethe inspiration, Wandrers Nachtlied, represents the ultimate in evening tranquillity, a condition secured not by musical uniformity but by way of a central section betraying just a hint of unease.