Release Date: 12 January 1999
Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 4891030504769
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: SCHUBERT
Description
Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828)LiederAlthough not of Viennese parentage, Franz Schubert was born in Vienna, the son of a schoolmaster, and spent his short life there, often in the company of friends, who took particular pleasure in the music he wrote for their entertainment. Unlike Beethoven, who died a year before him, he never enjoyed the patronage of the nobility, and occupied no official position in the musical life of the city, although at the time of his death publishers were showing increasing interest in his work. Schubert's early musical training had been as a chorister of the Imperial Chapel, a position that allowed general education at the Staats-Konviktin Vienna. Rejecting the offer of further study at his school, he trained briefly as a teacher, and from 1815 taught intermittently at his father's school, while concentrating his energies on composition. He showed a particular gift in the writing of songs, and in 1815 wrote some 150, with 100 more the following year. By the time of his death in November 1828 he had written over 600 songs of unfailing inspiration, miraculous couplings of words and music, in which both melody and piano accompaniment serve a dramatic purpose. The poems chosen vary in quality, with more than seventy settings of words by Goethe, and others of verses by less gifted contemporaries and friends, works to which the music has given life and eternity.An die Musik (To Music), written in 1817, sets words by Schubert's friend Franz von Schober, into whose rooms in the inner city he had moved in 1816. It was here that he first met the singer Michael Vogl, a distinguished performer at the Kärntnertor Theatre, who was soon to be singing Schubert's songs. An die Musik is a prayer of gratitude to the art, the shape of the melodic opening dictated by the first words, Du holde Kunst, a consolation in periods of melancholy. Heidenröslein, a setting of a poem by Goethe, composed in 1815, is of deceptive simplicity. A boy sees a rose and picks it, but with the rose there is a thorn that pricks him. The melody could be that of a simple folk-song, but words and music both suggest something much deeper. There is something of the same feeling in Die Forelle (The Trout), with words by the eighteenth century poet and musician Christian Schubart, its first version composed in 1817 and later to serve as the basis of a variation movement in the famous Trout Quintet of 1819. The poet sees an angler and a trout that bids fair to outwit him, only to be caught in the end.Auf dem Wasser zu singen, the song written in 1823, the year in which the first signs of the illness that was to bring Schubert's death five years later became apparent, takes words by Count Friedrich Leopold Stolberg, a friend of Goethe. A little boat floats on the water in the evening light, reminding the poet of the human spirit, gliding through the waters of joy and of the transitory nature of life, as days fly away. A strophic song, in which the t
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
The Brahms Trio
Roman Fediurko
London Symphony Orchestra; Rafael Sanz-Espert
