Allmacht d852

Dem Unendlichen D291 (1815)

Im Abendrot D799 (1825)

Gott im Frühling D448 (1816)

Die Allmacht D852 (1825)

Whatever Schubert’s religious beliefs – which has long been a matter for conjecture and controversy – there is surely little room for doubt that the perception of God in nature was a potent source of inspiration for him. He was by no means reluctant to write for the Church but it would be difficult to find in his six Latin masses anything as sublime as his setting of, say, Goethe’s Ganymed, which so passionately confirms his allegiance to his favourite poet’s pantheistic convictions. Although it took some years for an instinct to develop into a conscious awarness and to find a distinctive reflection in his music, it was there from an early stage.

Schubert was only 18 when he completed his Klopstock setting, Dem Unendlichen, which is not so much a song as a recitative and aria, the lyrical section beginning where, to the sound of harps and trumpets, nature joins in praising God. Ten years later in Im Abendrot, far from calling on the oratorio tradition to support him, he expresses his love of God’s creation in apparently artless, effortlessly beautiful, almost hymn-like terms. Only a year after Dem Unendlichen, in Gott im Frühling he was moved to a clearly spontaneous expression of the joys of spring sent by the “father of nature.” So this group of Schubert Lieder is not the most likely place to find a setting of verse by a high-ranking Churchman. But the composer’s meeting with Johann Ladislaus Pryker, Patriarch of Venice no less, at Gastein in 1825 was, according to a friend, “one of the most inspiring of his life.” It was then that, to 13 hexameters extracted from Pryker’s Die Perlen der heiligen Vorzeit, he wrote Die Allmacht, a monument to pantheism in music. More a tone poem than a song and sustained by throbbing piano triplets throughout, it is the mature composer’s harmonically liberated fulfilment of the prophecy represented by the youthful Dem Unendlichen. ­