Program Notes Franz Schubert composed more than 600 hundred songs in his rather short life, which establishes the cornerstone of nineteenth-century German Lieder. He achieved a wide variety by exploring numerous possibilities of style and structure in his song writing. He had an extraordinary ability to transform a poem into beautiful lyrical melodies with the piano accompaniment being an essential part of the unity. Auflösung was composed in March 1824, the same month that Schubert penned his most famous string quartet (the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, D. 810). The word Auflösung may refer to dissolution, disentanglement, denouement, etc. Moreover, Auflösung was an important concept for nineteenth-century aesthetics. The song and other three composed at the same time also mark both a return and farewell to the poetry of Mayrhofer. Young Schubert was attracted to the philosophy in Schlegel’s verses, starting from Die Gebüsche. The most important musical allusion in this work is a reference, at the close of the first movement, to a melody taken from Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte. This song is one of the high points of what might be termed Schubert's “experimental” years. As the first great masterpiece in song by Schubert, Gretchen am Spinnrade is a landmark in the history of the form. The text is by Goethe, same as his another masterpiece Der Erlkönig. Schubert showed genius for dramatic characterization in both songs, such as the piano accompaniment depicting the spinning wheel.
Franz Liszt, as the piano virtuoso of his time, was a nineteenth-century superstar throughout Europe. Liszt travelled to various European countries, spending most of his time on tour. His songs are in many languages with a tremendous variety of melodic styles. Liszt also constantly revised or made orchestral transcriptions of his own songs, possibly out of the desire to improve on his first efforts. The text of Enfant, si j’étais roi is the twenty-second poem of Hugo’s Les feuilles d’automne, a love song as shown in Hugo’s original title “Une femme”. Compared with the first version, this revision has several fundamental changes, such as the meter, shortened prelude, less prelude and full-sounding piano accompaniment, etc.