Images of Love, Death, and Nature Lieder by Franz Schubert
Paul Thomason
Beginning and ending with the words of a woman expressing her deepest concerns for those she loves, tonight’s concert explores a wide range of themes dear to the hearts of the Romantics. Hagars Klage is the earliest of Schubert’s songs to have survived. The copy used for the first edition is inscribed, “Schubert’s first song composition, written in the Konvikt at age fourteen, 30 March 1811.” There is little doubt that he wrote at least a few others songs before this one, since his brother Ferdinand said that by the age of ten Schubert was already composing “songs, string quartets, and piano music,” although none of them seems to have come down to us. The words of Hagars Klage are by Clemens August Schücking, but rather than on the original poem Schubert based his work on the 1797 setting by Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg. A good friend of Friedrich von Schiller, Zumsteeg composed the first instrumental music for his drama Die Räuber in 1782, as well as more than 300 songs. His dramatic ballads were extremely popular. “Zumsteeg’s ballads, with their rambling alternations of recitative and arioso, show him blithely unaware of the inescapable fact that music cannot serve words unless it also serves itself… there must be a degree of interesting musical incident to engage the ear,” says Brian Newbould, adding, “[Schubert] had no difficulty in outshining his mentors in musical interest from an early age.” Schubert discovered Zumsteeg’s songs while a student and they opened a world of possibilities to the boy. His friend Josef von Spaun recalled visiting him at school in 13
