Before his death in 1828, Franz Schubert had completed portions of two projected song cycles—one on poems by Ludwig Rellstab, and the other on poems of Heinrich Heine. These cycle fragments, representing a total of thirteen songs, were collected after the composer's death by his brother, Ferdinand Schubert, and one of his publishers, Tobias Haslinger, who then added "Die Taubenpost" and published all fourteen as Schwanengesang (Swan Song) in 1829.

It is impossible to know how much thought these men gave to their hodgepodge; it is likely that their motives were entirely commercial (the Heine songs, in particular, showed promise as moneymakers). So one should not examine Schwanengesang in the same light as Schubert's two earlier cycles, Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, both of which were conceived of as wholes by the composer. Schwanengesang lacks the literal sense of journey that accompanies the other cycles, and so also their sense of interpretive architecture; however, true "cycle" or not (a debatable point), it possesses enormous musical variety and emotional scope. It crystallizes the musical and literary currents present in Schubert's thinking at the time of his death, and hints at the creative paths he might have followed had he enjoyed the luxury of more time. At the very least, Schwanengesang showcases Schubert's flexible response to poetry and revisits the archetypes of song and sentiment that populate his output overall. Here we have "riding" songs and "wandering" songs, the friendly brook and the crashing wave, virtuosity and musical economy, all juxtaposed—as appropriate a swan song as could be for one of the greatest song composers of all time.

The seven Rellstab poems that form the first half of Schwanengesang were originally given to Beethoven for consideration, but Beethoven died before he had a chance to set them. The composer's secretary then passed them on to Schubert. Schubert's settings magnify the robust and conventional style of Rellstab's language; they exploit the composer's fondness for unusual modulation and active piano figurations, but they rarely challenge one's sense of the normal or expected. The joy of the Rellstab songs lies in their journey from one mood to the next in the seamless way that is so typical of Schubert.

Schubert became acquainted with Heine's Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs) through one of the reading groups that gradually displaced the famous "Schubertiades" (informal concerts of his works) in the last years of the composer's life. The six settings from this collection that are included in Schwanengesang clearly demonstrate the degree to which Schubert rethought musical structure in response to poetry. A conventional setting like "Das Fischermädchen" (The Fisher Girl)—full of tongue-in-cheek elegance—finds itself juxtaposed with "Die Stadt" (The City), in which the composer actually departs from functional tonality. These songs are entirely about mood and irony, and they leave traditional concepts of beauty and lyricism behind. In "Der Doppelgänger," Schubert weaves together the archaic technique of ostinato with vocal declamation that comes strikingly close to Sprechgesang ("speech-song")—a device that was fully a half century ahead of its time.

"Die Taubenpost" (The Carrier Pigeon) is a charming setting of Johann Gabriel Seidl, who provided texts for a number of Schubert's songs ("Der Wanderer an den Mond" is a well-known example). If anything, "Die Taubenpost" is an example of the way Schubert could transform a poem of modest quality into an especially memorable song. Not relating to the rest of Schwanengesang in any way, it was perhaps included to mitigate the very dark sentiment of the Heine settings and end the cycle on an upbeat note.

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1.Liebesbotschaft

As far as Schubert was concerned, he wrote no Schwanengesang, in either the literal or figurative sense. That his Rellstab and Heine songs of his final year were later printed under that title by Haslinger is only the result of a publisher cashing in on Schubert's death—a death wholly unexpected even by Schubert. Thus, Schubert's Rellstab and Heine settings were conceived neither self-consciously as his last songs nor a cycle. "Liebesbotschaft", therefore, is just another great song from Schubert, the greatest song composer the history.

Setting the mediocre verses of Ludwig Rellstab was conceived as an homage to Ludwig van Beethoven. Rellstab's poems had been passed on to Schubert by Beethoven's amanuensis Anton Schindler and Schubert undertook setting them in honor of the great man's memory. But he did not undertake to set the songs in Beethoven's grand manner; if Schubert was to assume Beethoven's mantle, it would be on his own terms.

"Liebesbotschaft" (Love's Greeting) alludes to the songs from Schubert's 1823 cycle, Die schöne Müllerin (The Miller's Beautiful Daughter). The water imagery of Rellstab's opening line—"Rushing brook, so silver and bright"—calls forth from Schubert musical imagery similar to that used in the earlier cycles' water songs. The thirty-second-note figure which serves as the embodiment of the "rushing brook" in the piano's right-hand continues throughout the duration of the song. The left-hand of the accompaniment at first serves as the bed of the brook but it, like the right-hand, expands to include countermelodies to the vocal melody. The vocal melody itself is one of Schubert's typically miraculous tunes: a subtle and highly nuanced melody which mirrors every word of the poem but which also seems as natural as a folk song.

The real Schubertian miracle of "Liebesbotschaft" is the harmonic structure. Starting in a straightforward tonic major, Schubert modulates to the subdominant for the end of the first verse and then uses this as a pivot to the super-tonic minor for the second verse. The second verse depicts the narrator's sweetheart lost in daydreams and pining for her distant beloved but closes with her learning from the brook that he will soon return to her. As if in sympathy, the music returns effortlessly to the tonic after having moved from the super-tonic minor through the mediant major. The result is a return at once utterly simple and a stroke of genius.

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3.Frühlingssehnsucht

When is a strophic setting not a strophic setting? When the strophic setting is by Schubert. In Fruhlingssehnsucht (Longing in Spring), the third of the Rellstab settings from the songs published as the Schwanengesang (Swan Song), Schubert sets the first four verses strophically, that is, with each of the verses sung to the same music. The arching, aching melody, tender modulations, hesitant pauses, and hasty tempo perfectly match the impetuous exhilaration of Rellstab's verses. But in the fifth and final verse, when Rellstab's narrator's thoughts turn from the natural world of breezes and brooks to his inner world of "restless longing" filled with "tears, cries and pain," Schubert's music changes slightly but meaningfully: the tonic major turns minor, the exuberant melody is colored with flats, and the modulations move to darker keys. But the pause returns at the same point, and the music moves once again to the exalted close of the first five verses.

With a simple yet telling change, Schubert deepens what might otherwise have been a conventional strophic song.

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4.Ständchen

There was a time when this Ständchen (Serenade) was the most famous serenade in the world. Of course, that time was after Schubert had been popularized (and sanitized) by the film Lilac Time, a film in which Richard Tauber played the composer as a jovial fat man whose most salient characteristic was his infinite sentimentality and in which Ständchen became the theme song and leitmotif of the film. After Lilac Time, Ständchen showed up everywhere in all sorts of arrangements: as background music, as a popular song and, perhaps most memorably, in a klezmer version.

Nevertheless Ständchen is still the most famous serenade in the world. However, its fame has all but cost the song its identity. In far too many contemporary interpretations of the song, Ständchen becomes a tear-jerking piece of sentimental puffery, a lonely swain singing of his love into the night breezes, rather than the altogether more sublte piece of sweet melancholy it is. Rescuing the song from its interpreters requires seeing the song for what it really is and not what decades of sentimentality have turned it into.

To start with, of course, there is the melody. Like most of Schubert's greatest melodies, it only seems sublime in its apparent simplicity. But there are so many subtleties to it: the opening line's arching rise and aching fall through the tonic minor chord, the central phrase's yearning leaps to the minor sixth of the dominant, the closing line's supple turns around the tonic. And then there is the heartbreaking harmonies' movements to the relative major and then the tonic major which relapse into the tonic minor which mirror the melody's sweet melancholy. And then there is the song's structure of two strophically set verses followed by a climactic third verse in which the singer entreats his sweetheart to join him and "make me happy" set to music which rises to the heights of submediant minor passion only to sink back to tonic minor melancholy. But, still, the singer has his hopes and, in a final stroke of genius, Schubert ends the song in the tonic major.

For all the infinite sentimental abuse to which Ständchen has been treated, the heart of the piece—its hope even in the face of the hopeless—remains pure and strong.

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5.Aufenthalt

Aufenthalt (Resting Place), Rellstab's title for the poem Schubert set in August 1828 (the setting became part of the set known as Schwanengesang, suggests one of the few examples of irony in all Schubert's Rellstab settings. How could the singer of the song find rest amidst the "surging rivers" and the "roaring forests" described in Rellstab's verses? Unless, of course, that is the point of Rellstab's poem: there is no rest, no comfort, no consolation, because the whole world is full of surging rivers and roaring forests. But whether or not Rellstab was being ironic, Schubert certainly wasn't being ironic at all; his setting of Aufenthalt is full of musical symbols of surging rivers and roaring forests, full of pounding chords and anguished themes; full, in other words, of symbols of unrest and disquiet. And yet the song rarely leaves the tonic key except for brief modulations to the relative major in the third verse and to the submediant minor at the song's fortississimo climax. And even then the music returns very quickly to the tonic. In fact, by dwelling so obsessively on the tonic minor, Schubert does impart a sense of rest to the music. Even if all the world is full of surging rivers and roaring forests, there is a kind of peace in knowing it, a kind serenity in accepting the tonic minor as the singer's destiny.

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7.Abschied

Abschied (Farewell) is the last of Schubert's Rellstab settings and also his last song of farewell. In addition, this may be his cheeriest song of farewell: most of the others range from the melancholy Abschied von einem Freunde (Farewell to a Friend) to the morbid Abschied von der Erde (Farewell to the Earth) to the frankly suicidal "Gute Nacht!" (Good Night!) from Winterreise. But this Abschied is none of the above: it has a bright-eyed tune over a bouncy accompaniment in a more or less simple strophic setting (at this point in his career, it was apparently impossible for Schubert to compose a truly simple strophic setting). But the subtle changes that Schubert introduces the music for the sixth and final verse of Rellstab's poem slightly, but significantly, alter the song's bright mood. When Rellstab's words hint that the singer's farewell may have been prompted by a beloved's faithlessness, Schubert's music slips from the tonic major to the tonic minor, and then to the submediant major, casting a harmonic cloud over what had started a jaunty and seemingly lighthearted farewell.

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9.Ihr Bild

The fundamental question of Hamlet is not "To be or not to be?"—the fundamental question is whether or not Hamlet is crazy. The fundamental question of Schubert's Ihr Bild (Her Portrait), the second of his Heine settings in his final Schwanengesang set, is not "does the painting actually come to life?"—as with Hamlet, the fundamental question is whether or not the singer is nuts. After all, paintings do not, generally speaking, come to life, but lovesick young men often may go mad. And the only way to find the truth in this case, of course, is to listening carefully to Schubert's music.

In Schubert's bare 36 bars there are precious few notes; indeed, there is not even any harmony until the upbeat to the seventh bar. But there is plenty of music. Schubert condenses Heine's 12-line poem into six pairs of lines in a ternary form. The openings of the outer sections begin with very simple melodies wrapped around the tonic of B flat minor. But the outer sections close with a modulation to B flat major, the first time representing the portrait coming to life, the second time in a confession that the singer has lost the heart of the woman in the portrait. The central pair of lines modulates to the relative major of G flat to describe the weird smile that curls the lips of the portrait and the uncanny tears that moisten her eyes.

There is something strange about all this normality. Schubert was capable—and usually much more interested in—modulations to far more distant tonalities than the tonic major or the relative major. And Schubert's melodies—especially at this point in his career—are usually far more strange in profile than these straightforward tunes circling the tonic within a range of a third or fourth. One gets the sense that while the character in the song may in fact be crazy, he himself has no idea that this may be the case. His mental processes as embodied in Schubert's music are, if anything, nearly prosaic in their normality.

And that is the genius of the song. With the very simplest means, Schubert creates a portrait of a madman who has no idea that he is mad. No wonder Ihr Bild is so haunting.

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10.Das Fischermädchen

Franz Schubert's last song cycle, Schwanengesang, D. 957, published in 1829 just a few months after the composer's death on November 19, 1828, was in fact never meant to be a song cycle. It was Schubert's wish that the fourteen Lieder that eventually found their way into Schwanengesang (the title, Swan Song, was the publisher's idea, and was simply a nifty notion to make the composer's demise salable—a tactic quite familiar to modern publishing houses and record companies) be published in groups according to their text's authors: the seven songs to verse by Ludwig Rellstab would form one group and the six songs to texts by Heinrich Heine would form another; the odd man out of the bunch, a famous setting of Johann Gabriel Seidl's Die Taubenpost that is now known as the final number of Schwanengesang, dates from several months after any of the other Lieder in the opus and originally had nothing whatever to do with any of the other thirteen Lieder—its inclusion in the "song cycle" is difficult to justify on either musical or dramatic grounds. The tenth song of Schwanengesang, Das Fischermädchen, D. 957/10, is one of the Heine songs, and is really the only Lied in Schwanengesang that does not burn with passion, moan in agony, or fold inside itself introspectively; and yet there is thoughtfulness enough in these three brief stanzas of song—one could hardly call Das Fischermädchen a simple, happy tune.

There is a different tone to each of the three stanzas of Heine's poem. In the first stanza, the poet calls out to the beautiful fisher maiden, asking her to row her boat ashore so that the two of them might "nestle hand in hand"; in the second stanza, the poet remarks that the fisher maiden's fear of him is ill-placed, since she is constantly trusting the "wild sea"; in the third stanza the poet's musings take a more thoughtful turn as he reveals something of himself to the fisher maiden—"My heart is exactly like the sea: it has storms, it ebbs and flows, and many delightful pearls lie deep inside."

What it was that made Schubert decide to set so dynamic and evolving a text in strophic fashion cannot be said, and, for some, the fact that the carefree first verse and the intimate admissions of the third verse are set to precisely the same music is somewhat disconcerting. Schubert allows for a some welcome tonal variety by providing a piano interlude between the first and second stanzas that modulates from the home key of A flat major to a rich C flat major (the music of the second stanza remains the same as that of the first and third stanzas except for a few clever modifications to the voice part that prevent uncomfortably high notes from creeping into the melody); a second interlude takes the singer back to A flat major for the last stanza.

There is something of the Venetian gondoliers' barcarole in Das Fischermädchen—the accompaniment's constant 6/8 meter figuration (long-short, long-short) is like the steady lapping of the waves at the poet's feet on the shoreline. The singer's melody spans great intervallic distances and contains all sorts of melodic leaps but seems always to be floating wherever it goes. Never is a dynamic above pianissimo allowed to infiltrate this gentlest of Lieder, which closes with the same seven-measure piano solo that began the song—identical, but now somehow going rather than coming.

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12.Am Meer

Part hymn and part spook-show, Schubert's Am Meer is one of the most disquieting and unsettling songs he ever wrote. Only the spectral portrait of Ihr Bild and the ghostly city of Die Stadt can compare with it and only the horror of Der Dopplleganger can surpass it. And it is, of course, precisely because it is part hymn and part spook-show that Am Meer is unsettling; to fuse the musical symbol of the divine with the musical image of the demonic, to make each partake of the other, is truly terrifying.

Heine's poem is disquieting enough in itself. The two characters of Am Meer (By the Sea) once sat, silent and alone, by a fisherman's hut while the sea and the sky roiled around them. One of them cried; the other drank the tears; and since that hour, his body has wasted away and his soul rotted away in his chest. Yet, as horrific as these poetic images are, they are nothing compared with the fear embodied in the music. From the dissonant cadences at the song's start to the dissonant cadences at its close, Am Meer moves from dread to terror. The first and third verses are set as hymns in pure C major with neither the melody or the harmony leaving the simple tonic-dominant cadences. But just before the second and fourth verses start, C major turns to C minor and the chordal accompaniment turns to rolling thunder. And when the voice joins in, the music turns darker and darker, from C minor to G minor to D minor to F minor so that when C major returns at the end of the second and fourth vereses, it is a C major that has been deformed and destroyed by the darkening modulations. By the song's end, the clear serenity of C major has been suberverted and overthrown by the the black modulations which have corruped it's purity.

Am Meer is the very image of decay.

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13.Der Doppelgänger

Four of Schubert's six Heine settings are frankly frightening. In Ihr Bild (Her Portrait), the singer sees a painting of his beloved come to ghostly life. In Die Stadt (The City), the singer sees the city in which he lost his love shimmer spectrally on the horizon. In Am Meer (By the Sea), the singer drinks the poisoned tears of his beloved and his body is consumed by disease. But by far the scariest song of the six Heine settings—indeed the single scariest song Schubert ever composed—is Der Doppelganger (The Ghostly Double). In Heine's poem, the narrator walks the street of a dead city and meets beneath the window of the woman he loves his own doppelganger, wringing his hands with agony and grief. In Schubert's song, the shock and the terror of recognition is more than the singer can bear and he is realizes that he is in fact what he already was before the song began: quite mad.

Schubert's music is absolutely unique and absolutely unlike anything else that had ever been composed. Only Mussorgsky's On the River can compare with its staggering simplicity and stunning transparency. The accompaniment is nothing but chords—unavoidable, inescapable chords, nearly all of them minor chords—which fall on the downbeat of every bar with only two tiny embellishments to relieve their grim monotony. And the vocal melody is not much more; in fact, it is more recitative than melody: the voice circles obsessively, endless around a single pitch, climbing at the song's first fortississimo climax on the word Schmerz (pain) to the octave above but then collapsing hideously back down to the original pitch. But the agonizing pain is palpable from the first note and the first climax simply states the obvious. But at the song's second climax, the melody again rise to the same fortississimo climax on the same awful pitch but this time on the word Liebesleid (love pain). And at that moment we know that the singer is mad, that the pain of love has driven the singer mad, and that this doppelganger is not his ghostly double but the singer himself.

One of the most frightening works of art ever created, Schubert's Der Doppelganger was written when he was only thirty years old. He would only live to write one more song. He would not live to create songs more terrifying than this. Is that his curse and our blessing?

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14.Die Taubenpost

Die Taubenpost(The Pigeon Post), Schubert's last song, was written in October of 1828, about one month before he died in his thirtieth year. Schubert did not know he was dying. One gets the feeling from reading his final letters and recorded comments that he was as much surprised by his death as any of his friends. And there is nothing elegiac, nothing final about Die Taubenpost. It is not in a sorrowful fare-well to life but rather a joyous affirmation of the goodness and beauty of life. It is not a magnum opus, not a self-conscious attempt by a young composer at the height of his powers to write one last great song but rather a simple hymn to life and love, a song which is less to be sung to the public from a concert stage than Schubert alone but contented, writing only for himself about the things closet to his heart.

After setting the mediocre verses of Ludwig Rellstab and the brilliantly ironic verses of Heinrich Heine for most of the year of 1828, Schubert turned to a naive poem by the minor poet Johan Seidl. Indeed, so naive is Die Taubenpost with its guileless metaphor of a carrier pigeon taking the singer's tears to his beloved that it borders on sentimentality and even Beidermeir kitsch. But so completely does Schubert enter into the poem, so utterly is he as one with its singer's longing, that the song seems wholly heart-felt in its innocent happiness.

Seidl's poem tells of a young man whose love is mute, who longs ardently but hopelessly for a woman who will apparently have nothing to do with him. Yet everyday, in melancholy joy and wistful bliss, he sends her his love, knowing that it will never be reciprocated. All this would be unbearably mawkish except that Schubert's music elevates it to the highest idealism and the greatest art.

The song itself starts Ziemlich langsam (Rather slowly) in cut time but it does not feel slow: the music of the piano's introduction, which continues throughout the song, sounds jaunty, even jolly. Schubert's melody repudiates Seidl's cloying verses with its anapest rhythm and folksong-like cheerfulness. The song seems to set Seidl's seven verses in an ABABA pattern with each central section modulating effortlessly in flights of musical and metaphoric fancy. But the finale return of the opening section is not a literal return. Schubert's harmonies ascends again and again from the tonic as his melody rises again and again from its original tessitura to climax on the song's final lines: "It's name is longing. Do you know it? Do you know it? The message of faithfulness, the message of faithfulness."

In his last song, Schubert sent for one final time his love and his longing into the world, expecting neither return nor reward. If it is true that the love you take is equal to the love you make, than Schubert died filled with love.

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