8 Lieder

Die Sterne D939 (1828)

Im Abendrot D799 (1825)

Nähe des Geliebten D162 (1815)

Geheimes D 719 (1821)

Rastlose Liebe D138 (1815)

Gretchen am Spinnrade D118 (1814)

Litanei auf das Fest aller Seelen D343 (1816)

Wandrers Nachtlied II D768 (1822)

Schubert clearly enjoyed contemplating the stars. He wrote four songs under the title Die Sterne but none more remarkable than the last of them, a setting of words by Karl Gottfried von Leitner that are so given to dactylic rhythms that the composer not only goes along with them but repeats the same four-note rhythmic motif in every bar from the very first to the last but one. To compensate, with every third line of each four-line stanza he jumps abruptly into a different key and then drops back again - a procedure arbitrary in theory but delightful in effect. Dedicated to another heavenly phenomenon, Im Abendrot is a devout and sustained hymn to the sunset.

One of the earliest of Schubert’s Goethe songs, Nähe des Geliebten is also one of the most inspired - an unambitious strophic setting, it is true, with repeated rhythms and a modest ritornello in the piano part, but one perfectly calculated to reflect the haunted imagination and heightened perceptions of the lover. The later Geheimes is a technically more sophisticated but similarly unpretentious Goethe setting: a mischievous little poem is matched by a capricious little song offering a witty series of variations on a two-note rhythmic motif in the piano part allied to unpredictable shifts in harmony.

Going back to the first few months following Schubert’s discovery of the musical potential of Goethe’s verse, Rastlose Liebe seems to have been conceived as an explosive physical impulse, generating the rhythmic energy that drives the vocal line on its impetuous and erratic course. The freshness of discovery is even more evident in the first and most famous of all Schubert’s Goethe songs, Gretchen am Spinnrade, where - without fearing to distort the form of the poem to perfect the form of the song - he instinctively and miraculously created a spinning-wheel image which is not only inocently picturesque but also capable, not least when it falls silent, of reflecting the extremities of Gretchen’s erotic passion.

To end with, two visions of peace. Litanei auf das Fest Allerseelen, poised on a vocal line so tenderly sensitive that it transcends its ecclesiastical associations, is a prayer for heavenly peace. Wandrers nachtlied (a setting of the second of two Goethe poems under the same title) represents the ultimate in earthly peace - a condition secured not by musical uniformity but by way of a central section betraying just a hint of harmonic and rhythmic unease amid the prevailing stability.