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.
The poem dates from September 1780, some months after
Goethe had penned Grenzen der Menschheit and sent it to
Charlotte von Stein, together with a drawing of a
pig-sty. Wandrers Nachtlied came into being in even
more unlikely, and almost legendary, circumstances. The
story of its composition is well known to most Germans
from their early schooldays. The poem was first written
in pencil on the wall of a small room on the upper
floor of a hunting chalet on the Kilckelhahn in the
Thuringian hills, Ilmenau, near Weimar. Goethe was an
energetic thirty-one-year-old who had climbed up high
to view the sunset. ‘Apart from the smoke rising here
and there from the charcoal-kilns, the whole scene is
motionless’ he wrote to Frau von Stein. Some
fifty-one years later, on 27 August 1831, at the age of
82, Goethe returned to this spot. On visiting the same
chalet he recognised his own handwriting, now faded on
the wall, and pondered the significance of the passing
of time. When Goethe himself recounted this incident to
his friend, the Berlin composer Karl Friedrich Zelter
(letter of 4 September 1831), his observations were
dryly philosophical; he reflected on how much had
happened in the intervening time, how much life had
changed – in effect, how much water had passed under
the bridge. But on that day, the poet had been in the
company of the civil servant Johann Christian Mahr who
left a much more emotional description of the incident:
‘Goethe read these lines and tears flowed down his
cheeks. Very slowly he drew a snow-white handkerchief
from his dark brown coat, dried his eyes and spoke in a
soft, mournful tone: ‘Yes, wait! Soon you too will be
at rest!’.
The key is B flat major, one of Schubert’s more
neutral tonalities, although one can think of another
spellbinding night-scene in this key – Der
Winterabend. On reflection, because the scene is beyond
emotion and in a sense impersonal, one understands the
choice. The introduction in solemn dactyls announces
something softly significant and universal; the
composer uses this rhythm for the turning of the earth
and the movement of the stars, and here we immediately
sense the inscrutable majesty of a defining moment in
nature. The piano sound is cushioned and smooth, the
spacing of the chords suggesting the solemnity of
ceremonial. This is the tessitura of tenor and bass
singing in close harmony, and the pitch that we might
hear the mournful tone of an alphorn resounding across
the valleys. (Schubert chose B flat major to depict the
wide open spaces of Der Hirt auf dem Felsen.) There is
a hint of a melodic shape in the introduction which
pre-shadows the contour of the vocal line, and the 6
– 4/5 – 3 cadence in this first bar makes magic of
an harmonic cliché. The second bar, a V – I cadence,
is another commonplace somehow turned to gold. With
Spartan economy Schubert later uses this figure as the
accompaniment to the song’s two closing bars.
Source: Hyperion
(https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dw.asp?dc=W1774_GBA
JY9903419)
Although originally composed for Voice & Piano, I
created this Interpretation of the "Wandrers Nachtlied"
(Wanderer's Nightsong D.768 Op. 96 No. 3) for Flute &
Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).
PARTITION