Five Lieder

An die Entfernte D765 (1822)

Nacht und Träume D827 (1823)

Versunken D715 (1821)

Ständchen from Schwanengesang D957 No 4 (1828)

Die junge Nonne D828 (1825)

The range of the Schubert group is almost as wide as that of song itself, from the near-recitative of An die Entfernte to the near-cantata of Die junge Nonne. Not the most sensational of them, An die Entfernte is perhaps the most sensitive in that is so flexible in its response to Goethe’s words and imposes no musical pattern on them. It is true that the song has a clearly ternary shape, completed by the piano’s opening and closing allusions to the first notes of the vocal line. But the liberated harmonies, the painfully probing modulations of the second stanza and the tempo changes associated with them seem to be entirely spontaneous reactions to the poet’s bereft emotions. Nacht und Träume, which is to be sung pianissimo throughout, is as serene as An die Entfernte is distressed. It is so slow in tempo, so sustained in line, so even in the rhythms of the piano part that sense of movement is confined largely to the changes in harmony which, far from disturbing the moonlit atmosphere, heighten the magic inspired by Collin’s verse.

One of the earliest settings of poems from Goethe’s West-Östlicher Divan - which was to become a favourite source of inspiration for Schumann and Wolf - Schubert’s Versunken is an uncommonly vivid expression of erotic arousal. The semiquaver movement in the accompaniment is as even as that of Nacht und Träume but here, at a very much quicker tempo and urged on by rhythmic syncopations in the left hand, it gives an entirely different impression, this time of breathlessly impatient excitement. Ständchen, a Rellstab setting from Schwanengesang, represents a more conventional kind of love song. It is Schubert’s last word on the serenade, its melodiously plaintive vocal line accompanied by an imaginary guitar in the pianist’s left hand, its cadences echoed in the right, its eloquence in the closing stanza rewarded by a hesitant but gratifying change to the major.

The name of Jacob Nikolaus von Craigher de Jachelutta is not prominent in the annals of German literature. But for Schubert’s settings of three of his poems, all of them composed in 1825, he would probably be entirely forgotten. On the other hand, but for his ballad Die junge Nonne we would not have one of the most dramatic of all Schubert’s Lieder. Extended in construction and operatic in style, Die junge Nonne is carried on the tremolando figuration in the accompaniment which, while it varies in colour and harmonic meaning, is sustained in the pianist’s right hand from the first bar to the last. In the first two stanzas it is continually crossed by the left hand, the storm rumbling in the bass and the cloister bell tossed by the wind in the treble. But as the young nun’s thoughts turn inwards, from the storm raging in the night to her inner serenity, the minor harmonies turn to the major, the piano imagery gradually adapts itself to the new situation, and the vocal line finally expands into a repeated “Hallelujah!”