Franz Peter Schubert (1797 – 1828) was an Austrian
composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras.
Despite his short life, Schubert left behind a vast
oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works
(mainly lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred
music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of
piano and chamber music. His major works include the
art song "Erlkönig", the Piano Trout Quintet in A
major, the unfinished Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the
"Great" Symphony No. 9 in ...(+)
Franz Peter Schubert (1797 – 1828) was an Austrian
composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras.
Despite his short life, Schubert left behind a vast
oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works
(mainly lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred
music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of
piano and chamber music. His major works include the
art song "Erlkönig", the Piano Trout Quintet in A
major, the unfinished Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the
"Great" Symphony No. 9 in C major, a String Quintet,
the three last piano sonatas, the opera Fierrabras, the
incidental music to the play Rosamunde, and the song
cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. He was
remarkably prolific, writing over 1,500 works in his
short career. His compositional style progressed
rapidly throughout his short life. The largest number
of his compositions are songs for solo voice and piano
(roughly 630). Schubert also composed a considerable
number of secular works for two or more voices, namely
part songs, choruses and cantatas. He completed eight
orchestral overtures and seven complete symphonies, in
addition to fragments of six others. While he composed
no concertos, he did write three concertante works for
violin and orchestra. Schubert wrote a large body of
music for solo piano, including eleven incontrovertibly
completed sonatas and at least eleven more in varying
states of completion, numerous miscellaneous works and
many short dances, in addition to producing a large set
of works for piano four hands. He also wrote over fifty
chamber works, including some fragmentary works.
Schubert's sacred output includes seven masses, one
oratorio and one requiem, among other mass movements
and numerous smaller compositions. He completed only
eleven of his twenty stage works.
"Die Liebe hat gelogen" (Love has lied D.751 Op. 23 No.
1) ranks as one of Schubert’s single-page
masterpieces, in the same extraordinary aphoristic
class as Wandrers Nachtlied and Erstes Verlust. The
pace and metre are those of Death and the Maiden—a
dactylic rhythm which, in Schubert’s motivic
language, underlines the harsh and irreversible
sentence of Fate. To lose one’s love is to die a
little, and in this song we sense that the loss of love
is as inevitable as death itself, a terrible shock and
yet somehow expected as part of the sufferer’s
life-sentence. In the beginning we sense an
aristocratic and frozen dignity, the vehemence of the
feelings concealed under a façade of iron-willed
control—the principal dynamic is piano, and not until
the end of the middle section is there an outburst
where the emotional catastrophe is matched by a
sustained forte dynamic. Until the middle section this
is music of stiff upper lip and iron will.
The original tonality is C minor. The poet and
musicologist Schubart described this as the key of
unhappy love, and we have only to think of another song
of slighted love in C minor, Mozart’s Als Luise die
Briefe, to see Schubart’s point. In Die Liebe hat
gelogen the mood is of the highest drama, and yet
everything is reined-in by the implacable dactyls. The
two bars of introduction announce the gravity of the
situation, and there is a surprising shift to a forte
chord (the first inversion of D flat major, the
flattened supertonic) on the third beat. This stab of
pain, the twisting of a harmonic knife, subsides, and
another bar of chords, muted and heavy like a dead
march, return us to the dominant from whence the singer
launches his plaint. The words are intense and bitter,
the articulation of them remote and noble. Only in the
height of the tessitura do we detect an inward wail,
the sound of someone trapped in an emotional situation
from which there is no escape. At ‘Betrogen, ach,
betrogen’ there is a sudden shift into C major for
the first ‘Betrogen’, and, if this were not
astonishing enough, to A major for the second. Only a
composer of Schubert’s genius and empathy would have
played this unexpected card. The change sounds majestic
and pomposo, as if a king is trumpeting the betrayal in
a proclamation to the heavens, but there is a subtext
to this grandeur. Here is the major key of
self-laceration, of ‘yes, I thought so! I expected it
to happen—it always does’. This is a triumphantly
masochistic assertion that life remains as bleak as
ever, and that one has been hurt again because,
deep-down, one knows it is a deserved punishment.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Schubert)
Although originally composed for Voice and Piano, I
created this Interpretation of "Die Liebe hat gelogen"
(Love has lied D.751 Op. 23 No. 1) for Flute & Strings
(2 Violins, Viola & Cello).