Lied des Orpheus, als er in die Hölle ging D474 (1816)

Der Tod und das Mädchen D531 (1817)

Dass sie hier gewesen D775 (1822-3)

An den Mond in einer Herbstnacht D614 (1818)

Johann Georg Jacobi was far from the most distinguished of Schubert’s poets. Even so, in less than two months, shortly after the posthumous publication of a Jacobi collection in Vienna in 1816, Schubert set no fewer than seven of his poems – including Litanei, which inspired one of his greatest songs, and Lied des Orpheus, which gave rise to one of the most extraordinary. In fact, Orpheus (as it is titled in its second, more commonly performed version) can scarcely be described as a song, still less a Lied. It is presented more as a dramatic scena which draws on the composer’s experience of opera, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in particular and perhaps Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte too. Beginning with a peremptory piano introduction in G flat major, the first section offers bold defiance of the flames and shades of Hades. The lyrical aria (“Von der Erde”) that follows in E major is not, however, Orpheus’s standard entreaty to the Furies but a reminder to the underworld’s “whimpering inhabitants” of the joys of life on earth and an appeal to their better nature. After a rise in tempo and a change of key to B flat major (at “Hoffnung”), the work ends with an exhilarating assurance from a poet of the Enlightenment that the “good gods” will not have them atone for ever but will lead them to the Elysian fields.

There is more reassurance, of a sort, in Der Tod und das Mädchen, where Death’s implacable but not uncomforting answer to the plea of the Maiden evoked in Schubert one of the greatest of all musical images – one he was to remember, preserving not only its grim tread but also its last-note change to the major, in the slow movement of his tragically inspired String Quartet in D minor. The sense of loss in Dass sie hier gewesen is mitigated by a lingering fragrance miraculously captured by the impressionistic dissonances in the opening bars of the piano part. The two-note melodic phrase associated with them holds together a a construction which, paradoxically, their harmonies threaten to subvert. There is, however, no more vividly expressive study in mixed feelings than An den Mond in einer Herbstnacht. It begins confidently, if less than joyously, in march time but is so vulnerable to disturbing reflections – in bewildering variety but each one with its own harmonic, melodic and textural identity –- that, in spite of two explicit revivals of the spirit of the opening bars, it ends in a mood of elegiac resignation.