Schubert was, until long after his death, virtually unknown except to a circle of friends and connoisseurs in and around Vienna. Goethe for many years enjoyed esteem and status beyond that of any literary figure in Europe. Schubert's important work was concentrated into a period of 15 years at most. Goethe's writing career extended from the 1770s, when Enlightenment writing was at its height, to his death in 1832, by which time Romanticism was in full flood. Unlike Goethe, who lived into his 80s, Schubert died at the age of 31. But their careers and experience could not have been more different. If Goethe is regarded as the greatest German poet of his time, Franz Schubert (see Figure 1) is generally accepted as the greatest songwriter of the period. You are not expected to be able to read the music, but even if you are not very familiar with musical notation, you may well find the scores useful in identifying what is happening in the songs. The poems, in German with parallel translations into English and the music scores of four of the song settings are also included. Schubert's Lieder, once they became widely known, influenced succeeding generations of songwriters through to the present day.Ī selection of Schubert's settings of Goethe's poems is discussed in this course, with recordings provided for you to listen to. Their characteristic distillation of the emotional essence of a poem illustrates Romanticism at its most intimate. These are miniatures, but in Schubert's hands they become miniatures of an exceptionally concentrated kind. This course focuses on a selection of short poems in German that were set to music by Franz Schubert (1797–1828) for a single voice with piano, a genre known as ‘Lieder’ (the German for ‘songs’).
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