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Ständchen (Serenade) – Franz Schubert (Guitar arr.) with sheet music.
During what would be his last year of life, Franz Schubert wrote one of his most popular works: the Ständchen (Serenade) D. 957. Although widely distributed in various orchestral versions, the Serenade was originally another lied that the composer created with lyrics of the German poet Ludwig Rellstab (*).
The last songs that Franz Schubert composed – in the summer of 1828, a few months before his death – were each dedicated half to poems by Ludwig Rellstab and half to Heinrich Heine. Only later did the publishers summarize this legacy under the lurid title Schwanengesang into a so-called song cycle, which is not one at all.
The dark, visionary Heine songs on the one hand and the genre-like Rellstab songs on the other are too different in character. Among the latter, only the serenade with the text Leise befehen meine Lieder, whose piano accompaniment literally calls for the guitar, became world-famous. Schubert has captured the image of a singer who accompanies himself on the guitar at night.
Listened with devotion, it moves the depth of the feeling that Schubert reflects in her, her beauty and serene melancholy. Schubert perhaps sensed his near end, but there is no bitterness or despair, only the desire to find love and peace.
Leise flehen meine Lieder
Durch die Nacht zu dir;
In den stillen Hain hernieder,
Liebchen, komm zu mir!
Flüsternd schlanke Wipfel rauschen
In des Mondes Licht;
Des Verräters feindlich Lauschen
Fürchte, Holde, nicht.
Hörst die Nachtigallen schlagen?
Ach! sie flehen dich,
Mit der Töne süßen Klagen
Flehen sie für mich.
Sie verstehn des Busens Sehnen,
Kennen Liebesschmerz,
Rühren mit den Silbertönen
Jedes weiche Herz.
Laß auch dir die Brust bewegen,
Liebchen, höre mich!
Bebend harr’ ich dir entgegen!
Komm, beglücke mich!
(*) Ludwig Rellstab
(April 13, 1799 – November 27, 1860) was a German poet and music critic. He was born and died in Berlin. He was the son of the music publisher and composer Johann Carl Friedrich Rellstab. A skilled pianist, he published articles in several newspapers, including the influential liberal Vossische Zeitung, and launched the music magazine Iris im Gebiete der Tonkunst, which was published in Berlin between 1830 and 1841. His outspoken criticism of Gaspare Spontini’s influence on Berlin led him to jail in 1837.
Rellstab had considerable influence as a music critic, and because of this he had some power over what music could be used for German nationalist ends in the mid-19th century. Because he had ‘an effective monopoly on music criticism’ in Frankfurt and because of the popularity of his writing, Rellstab’s approval would have been important to any musician’s career in areas where German nationalism was present. .
The first seven songs of Franz Schubert’s Schwanengesang have lyrics by Rellstab, who had left them in 1825 with Beethoven, whose assistant Anton Schindler passed them on to Schubert. His work was also set to music by Franz Liszt.
He is also known to have performed Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor, Op. 2/27, his famous nickname Moonlight Sonata.
Serenade
English Translation
Softly my songs plead
Through the night to you;
down into the silent grove,
beloved, come to me!
Slender treetops whisper and rustle
in the moonlight;
my darling, do not fear
that the hostile betrayer will overhear us.
Do you not hear the nightingales call?
Ah, they are imploring you;
with their sweet, plaintive songs
they are imploring for me.
They understand the heart’s yearning,
they know the pain of love;
with their silvery notes
they touch every tender heart.
Let your heart, too, be moved,
beloved, hear me!
Trembling, I await you!
Come, make me happy!
Franz Schubert’s biography
Franz Peter Schubert (January 31, 1797 – November 19, 1828) composer. He was born in Vienna, Austria. He was the composer responsible for introducing musical romanticism and enduring the classical sonata following Ludwig van Beethoven. Furthermore, he was a great composer of lieder (compositions for voice and piano), as well as of piano, chamber and orchestral music.
Franz Schubert is considered for this and many reasons as the representative of the classical style. His music always expressed a romantic lyricism. He was representative of the lied for voice and piano, one of the paradigmatic genres of Romanticism. Musicians like Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf and Gustav Mahler took influence from him.
His father was a school teacher; taught him to play the violin and his older brother the piano, from the beginning he was very skilled at learning to play, at eleven years of age, he entered to study music at the imperial chapel in Vienna, shortly after he entered the choir and was student of the Stadtkonvikt, in this place he was a disciple of the master composer Antonio Salieri.
At that time, the young Schubert began to compose, and his first pieces were performed by the Stadtkonvikt disciples’ orchestra, where he was a violinist.
In 1813, he retired to begin work as an assistant in his father’s school. He brought to light the first masterpieces of his: The King of the Elves, inspired by a poem by Goethe, one of his favorite writers.
After leaving his performances at his father’s school, Schubert tried to make a living solely with his music, but his success was not overwhelming. He occasionally tried to get into opera and theater, but he didn’t have many skills, so he quickly dropped out.
Schubert decided despite the obstacles to produce and dedicate himself to composition, so from 1815 to 1816 he composed as many as one hundred and fifty lieder, each one of great quality. Many of them were written on texts by his friends, such as Johann Mayrhofer and Franz von Schober. These were popularly called schubertiades and were usually performed at private gatherings. The baritone Johann Michael Vogl was the recipient of many of these short compositions.
His best titles were: the cycles The beautiful miller and Winter trip, The walker, The trout, To music, Death and the maiden or the famous Ave Maria. Despite the beauty of these compositions, and the good reception they found among the public, and his great talent, his economic situation was never good, his work was sometimes not valued or financially rewarded. As of 1824 his musical production was diminishing because he fell victim to a serious illness that little by little was destroying his vitality.
Unfortunately, his works were more valued after his death. In addition, many others came out of anonymity and others were no longer unpublished, it was learned that a significant number of songs were only known by his family and close friends. So, authors like Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn began to bring them to light.
It is, above all, the case of his mature instrumental production, of his last piano sonatas, his string quartets and his last two symphonies. We must mention that these productions are comparable to the level of those of Beethoven.
Schubert’s complete works were published between 1884 and 1897 by the Breitkopf & Härtel publishing house. The edition of the songs, entrusted to the musicologist and composer Eusebius Mandyczewski, who carried out such meticulous work, was especially relevant, which is why it is currently a great reference for many music scholars.
In 1951, the scholar Otto Erich Deutsch took over the task of cataloging his works and replacing the traditional numbering of Schubert’s works. The notation is made up of the letter D followed by a number and, in some cases, a lowercase letter for later inserts or finds. It is assured that the Austrian musician suffered from syphilis, but that this did not cause his death, but a typhoid fever contracted by the low defenses of his body.
Despite this, he did not completely abandon his lifestyle: Schubert led a Bohemian life surrounded by intellectuals, a lover of taverns and popular environments, he was always far from the halls and spaces frequented by the nobility. Although, the music from him was largely consumed by the nobles of Vienna.
However, Schubert’s music was characterized by dealing with love, travel and death, typically romantic themes. In the History of Music, Franz Schubert is one of the most important composers; his production is on a par with that of Brahms and Tchaikovsky. Today, his music is popular, many of his lieder are still sounded in rural areas of Austria and Germany as genuine folk music, like the “Ave Maria”.
In July 1947, the Austrian composer Ernst Krenek discussed Schubert’s style, embarrassedly admitting that he had initially ‘shared the general opinion that Schubert was a lucky inventor of pleasant melodies … lacking the dramatic power and searching intelligence that distinguished the ‘real’ masters like Johann Sebastian Bach or Ludwig van Beethoven».
Krenek wrote that he arrived at a completely different assessment after a close study of Schubert’s pieces at the urging of his friend and fellow composer Eduard Erdmann. Krenek noted that the piano sonatas gave ‘ample evidence that [Schubert] was much more than a simple melodic builder who did not know, and did not care, about the craft of composition’.
Each printed sonata, in his opinion, exhibited ‘a great wealth of technical delicacy’ and revealed Schubert as ‘far from being satisfied with pouring his charming ideas into conventional molds, on the contrary, he was a thinking artist with a great appetite for creativity.’ experimentation’.
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