Alla cetra (An die Leier) D737 (1822-3)

Guarda, che bianca luna D688 No.2 (1820)

Da quel sembiante appressi D688 No.3 (1820)

Mio ben ricordati D688 No.4 (1820)

Nel boschetto (Im Haine) D738 (1822-3)

Felice arrivo (Willkommen und Abschied) D767 (1822)

While we tend to think of Vienna in the fifty years round the turn of the nineteenth century as the city of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, for much of that time musical life there was dominated by Antonio Salieri. Appointed court composer and conductor at the opera in in 1774 and court Kapellmeister 14 years later, Salieri had enormous influence not only politically but also musically: as the senior representative of the Italian musical tradition, his example was a significant factor in the development of the Viennese classical style. Mozart, who had learned all he needed to know about Italian music in Italy in his youth, had no need for Salieri’s advice. Beethoven, on the other hand, did, as he acknowledged by taking lessons from the Italian master in his early thirties. Schubert, whose exceptional musical talent was recognised by Salieri when he was still a boy, had twice-weekly composition lessons from him for a period lasting as long as four years (from 1812 to 1816) in spite of the young composer’s inistence on writing songs in the “barbarous German language.”

Although Schubert wote only a handful of songs to Italian words, Salieri’s schooling in that particular art must have had some effect on his writing for voice in German, as his lasting interest in recitative perhaps confirms. The operatic quality of An die Leier, for example - which was published, along with Im Haine and Willkommen und Abschied, in both German and Italian versions in 1826 - is clear enough in the original but when sung in Italian as Alla cetra it is dramatically obvious.

Among the fifteen surviving Schubert songs set originally to Italian words are the Vier Canzonen he wrote in 1820 for Franziska Roner, who was later to marry his friend Joseph von Spaun. As far as the composer was aware, all four texts were by Pietro Metastasio, the Italian opera seria librettist who had lived and worked in Vienna from 1740 to 1782. As court poet, he was well known to Salieri, who regularly gave his pupils, including Schubert, Metastasio verses as exercises in word-setting. While the idiomatic ease of these canzoni (the first two of them, as it turns out, to words by Metastasio’s younger contemporary Jacopo Vitorelli) surely derives from Salieri’s teaching, their melodic charm seems to owe more than a little to Rossini.

Nel boschetto, the italian translation of Im Haine, fits the dancing 9/8 rhythms and the vocal line, including the ornamentation, so well that it could easily pass as the original version. Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s Willkommen und Abschied is a rather more serious matter, of course. Central to the Lied repertoire though it is, there is a significant operatic element in it, above all in the passage of recitative at the end of the fourth stanza - as Felice arrivo with its cries of “oh Dei!” so characteristically emphasises - but also in the vocal exuberance in the closing bars.