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 Vögel" (The Birds) D.691 Op. 172 No. 6, is a
delightful little tune in 3/8 time, so full of
inevitable Schubertian singability and charm that to
question how the composer manages to spin out a melody
of this kind would be like asking the birds how they
fly in the heavens. The answer they would give us (if
they managed to converse with us as Schlegel might have
imagined) is 'Some can, and some can't!' Birds are
bird-brained, and their harmonic vocabulary is not
large; however, within their own parameters they are
kings and, to reflect this, Schubert proves that he is
king of the Ländler, as highly prized for his dance
music by his toe-tapping young friends as for his
Lieder. The composer has given the birds a village
dance of this kind because they have all the advantages
and limitations of the rural life: they are
unselfconsciously beautiful creatures with little
intellectual versatility; they think anyone who is not
like them is stupid, in the same way the countryman
pities the town-dweller, who in turn dismisses him as
part of a lesser species. In their innocence, and
happiness in their own environment, with a complete
lack of concern for more complicated matters, the birds
are both wonderfully healthy and incredibly
complacent.
"Die Vögel" brings Friedrich Schlegel’s poem to
life. Schlegel’s ostensible purpose in writing the
Abendröte poems was to interpret the multiple voices
of the natural world and of human beings at sunset (see
D 690 Abendröte). However, in doing so he paid more
attention to the significance of external nature for
humans than for its own sake. In this, he was more
similar to Wordsworth than to Coleridge (whose
‘Lyrical Ballads’ are contemporary with
Schlegel’s work). Where Coleridge maintained a
critical interest in the findings of modern science
(particularly through his work with Humphry Davy),
Wordsworth tended to consider Nature in abstract terms
and primarily in how it related to humans’ spiritual
life.
Schlegel’s birds are therefore strangely interested
in human beings. They state that their flying about is
an expression of freedom, in contrast to the earthbound
tendencies of human beings to grumble in the face of
difficulty. They state that their inclination to eat
fruit and seed cultivated by farmers and gardeners is a
form of mockery and defiance of the human desire to
attack them. Any genuine ornithologist would be able to
point out that birds are unlikely to see things in this
human-centred way. Could there even be such a concept
as ‘mockery’ in bird thought or any avian language?
Birds’ singing and their flying is almost certainly
less about enjoyment and freedom than basic survival
(and there is plenty of evidence that flying is hard
work and many birds do everything they can to avoid
having to fly when it is not necessary)..
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Schubert)
Although originally composed for Voice and Piano, I
created this Interpretation of "Die Vögel" (The Birds
D.691 Op. 172 No. 6) for Flute & Strings (2 Violins,
Viola & Cello).