It was on October 19, 1814, that Franz Schubert composed this song, the first of 71 on poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; in the opinion of some, it was upon the wings of the near-deified German Bard that Schubert was lifted to his highest musical heights. As one critic argued near the beginning of the twentieth century, "In the 30 songs that came before...Schubert had toiled, tested himself, and had his charming moments, and now and again had fumbled. This time he was transported by his genius."

The poem, taken from Part I of Goethe's monumental recasting of the Faust legend, finds Gretchen sitting by the window waiting for her love to return. She spins as she waits, and—though the text excerpt used in Schubert's song mentions nothing of these activities explicitly—the composer translates the rising and falling motion of her foot on the pedal, the rotation of the wheel, and the twisting of the thread into an undulating and omnipresent accompanimental figure. As Gretchen spins, her mind is racked with dread and longing; she recalls her love's endearing traits—his "noble form," his "witching words," and, most importantly, his kiss. From the outset, her prediction is not optimistic: "O, my heart is sad, my rest is o'er, / And never, alas! shall I find it, ne'er find it more."

Schubert's setting at first seems to be a simple backdrop for the poem, with the spinning wheel figure serving as sonic wallpaper. The text/tone relationship is, in fact, much more involved than that. As obvious as it may seem, what we're hearing really isn't just the spinning, we're hearing Gretchen's restlessness. Schubert enhances this tension through harmonic means, moving over the course of the verse from D minor, up to E, then F. In addition, he alters the text delivery so that the ominous opening lines reappear throughout the song, always pulling the harmony back to the original key. The most striking moment in the piece occurs as Gretchen, with an exhilarating fortissimo ascent to B flat major, thinks of her lover's kiss—at which point she can maintain the pretense of work no longer: having worked herself into a fit, she stops spinning completely, and only after several faltering efforts is she able to regain her composure and resume her task. She voices a wish for death upon his bosom, then utters once again the sorrowful refrain.

If one enjoys tracing musical genealogies, Gretchen am Spinnrade makes a good subject for speculation. By 1823, Schubert had turned the unbearable tension of the spinning wheel into the more subdued angst of the mill wheel, in Die Schöne Müllerin. Less than a century later, the anxious spinner would become the nightmarish and murderous psychopath in Schoenberg's Erwartung. Certainly, Gretchen am Spinnrade can be considered one of the prime harbingers of high Romantic expression.

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