Schubert's Songs
Sung by HELEN HENSCHEL (Soprano)
An die Musik (To Music)
Gretchon am Spinnrade (Margaret at the Spinning
Wheel)
Der Fischer (The Fisherman)
Heidenroslein (Hedge Roses)
Rastlose Liebe (Restless Love)
IN his thirty-one years Schubert set to music over six hundred poems. How many of these songs are commonly sung at concerts ? Probably not a tenth. Not all are masterpieces, but an amazingly large proportion of them have power to move us strongly. It is good to have this week's selection of a score or more, many of them great favourites, and a few less familiar.
For his authors Schubert went to Goethe,
Schiller, William Muller , Frederick Schlegel , and other German poets, besides our own Shakespeare, Scott, Cibber, and Pope.
To Music (the words of which are by Sohober, one of Schubert's earliest friends) is an invocation to the ' divine voice ' to enlighten the darkness of the heart, and to fill the soul with the love of noble things.
The words of Gretchcn am Spinnrade are from
Goethe's Faust. Margaret, left alone, is filled with dread. She recalls her lover's attractions—his eye and the sound of his voice, and lingers lovingly on the thought of his kiss. Here she pauses in her spinning for a moment, and the accompaniment tells how she re-starts her spinning-wheel. She continues her meditation, longing for the bliss denied her.
Der Fischer tells of the surprising thing that happened to a fisher-lad, to whom appeared a mermaid, inviting him to come down beneath the waves and visit her lovely land. Nobody knows what happened, but no mortal eye ever again saw that fisher-boy !
Goethe's tiny poem about the boy who would pluck the wild rose, and so pricked his fingers. may or may not have a moral. Schubert doesn't, trouble about that, but simply wafts us in music a breath of the rose's freshness and beauty.
Rastlose Liebe has its counterpart in Schubert's music, which has an unquiet accompaniment and fails to settle down in any one key until the last page, on which the words' Crown of life, Jov without rest, thou art Love,' are much repeated in the key of C.
