By Dale Smith (Baritone) and Peggy Cochrane (Violin)

Dale Smith

Even the listener to whom a song is interesting chiefly because of its text, because he can understand from the words 'what it is all about,' can hear for himself, that the accompaniment to Who is Sylvia ? has a large share in the whole impression which the song makes. It is no mere melody with harmonies supporting it; the pianoforte part is quite definitely one with the voice, like a picture in which the background has every bit as important a share as the figures which catch the beholder's eye first. In his earlier days especially, Schubert chose the poems for his songs without any very great regard for their worth or beauty; but, in the songs which belong to his last years, the poems are almost always worthy of his music, such as might well inspire those melodies. One feels, indeed, that the songs must have been definitely inspired by the poems, not, as is sometimes the case with his more youthful work, that almost any good-going versa might start him off on an equally good-going tune. This setting of a Shakespeare lyric is of itself so beautiful a melody as to be popular in all sorts of arrangements; listeners have heard it often as an instrumental piece.