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.
"Schwanengesang" (Swan song D957) and "Selige Welt"
(Blessed world D743) are from poems which are not found
in Johann Senn's published Gedichte. There is good
reason to believe that they were brought back to
Schubert in manuscript by his friend Franz von
Bruchmann who visited Senn (exiled in his native Tyrol
for alleged political offences) in the autumn of 1822.
Schubert had been at school with the poet, and
sympathised with his anti-authoritarian views. The
settings were published in August 1823 as part of an
opus which also included a bitter song of
disillusionment in love (Platen's Die Liebe hat
gelogen) and Schatzgräbers Begehr by Schober in which
the treasure hunter digs his own grave and longs to lie
in it. There is nothing to prove that Schubert set the
Senn poems immediately on receipt of them. We have no
firm dates for any of the Opus 23 Lieder and it may
well be that some of these dark songs, and
Schwanengesang in particular, were composed in the
spring of 1823. They would thus be contemporary with
Schubert's health crisis and the poem entitled 'My
Prayer' (quoted, in part, in the introduction). The
longing for destruction in order to find
transfiguration in Senn's poem finds an exact echo with
the end of Schubert's. The composer had become, in his
own way, as much an establishment outcast and exile as
Senn. Not only are the poet's words 'presentiment of
death', and the 'dissolution that flows through my
limbs', uncomfortably near the composer's own
circumstances, but the music itself has a poignancy and
immediacy which suggests a heightened subjective
response. The song shares the alla breva's pace of Der
Tod und das Mädchen (the death motif rhythm is
invoked); but these two gigantic miniatures stand at
opposite poles. In the Claudius setting the mastery of
death is in the inhuman ease and gliding simplicity of
his harmony; the Senn setting bristles with the
tortured chromaticism of vulnerability and human
emotion. There is a positively Wagnerian moment on the
word 'auflösend' where an unusually dense bank of
accidentals flattens and dissolves the harmony, an
illustration of both the word's significance in the
poem, and its technical meaning in musical theory for
the resolving of a suspension or discord. The music
rages less against the dying of the light than shows a
steely determination that the singing will be ever more
striking as the light fails. In August 1823, just after
the publication of the Opus 23 songs, Schubert wrote to
Schober, 'I rather doubt whether I shall ever be well
again'. Whether Schwanengesang was written just before
or during Schubert's crisis, it sounds like a wounded
bird's promise to sing ceaselessly for the time left to
him. The song of Oscar Wilde's nightingale, with his
heart pressed against the rose thorn of life, could not
have been more heart-rending.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Schubert)
Although originally composed for Voice and Piano, I
created this Interpretation of "Schwanengesang" (Swan
song D.744 Op. 23 No. 3) for Flute & Strings (2
Violins, Viola & Cello).