Notes for: August 2, 2011
Schubert made his living as a composer of hausmusik, mainly lieder (songs) and easy-to-play piano pieces that could be performed in Viennese homes. He produced more than 600 lieder, of which nearly 190 were published during his short lifetime. In fact, he wrote so many lieder that publishers were unable to keep pace with his productivity – in the three years following his death, they issued another 100 of them.
In these lieder, Schubert was the first master of a German song style in which the music is closely wedded to the verse. The poetic images inspire the musical language, while the music illuminates and intensifies the emotional expression of the words. From his earliest lieder, moreover, Schubert assigned a major role to the accompanying piano, using it to paint a tonal picture of the scene, story, object or emotional mood depicted in the text. To fully grasp the beauty and inventiveness of Schubert’s songs, it is essential both to follow the words and to listen to the voice and piano as integral parts of the whole.
Schubert composed Der Hirt auf dem Felsen in October, 1828, a month before his death, and it was one of his last two songs. Published in 1830, the song is unusual in requiring both a virtuoso clarinetist as well as a piano accompanist.
Schubert composed the song belatedly for Anna Milder-Hauptman, the prima donna of the Berlin opera, who had written him four years earlier asking for material to sing on her concert tours. Long an admirer of his songs, she had sung two of them at a concert in Berlin in June 1824, and had sent him a clipping of the favorable newspaper review. She also tried, unsuccessfully, to arrange the performance in Berlin of one of his operas.
After Schubert’s death, his brother Ferdinand found “The Shepherd” in Schubert’s papers and sent it to a Viennese publisher and to Milder-Hauptman. She gave the first performance in March 1830, but the song, possibly because of its unusual instrumental requirements, then disappeared from sight. It was finally revived in 1902 by the Vienna Schubert Society and is now a concert favorite.
The text of the song is a hodge-podge in three sections – two abstracted from the poetry of Wilhelm Müller, who wrote the text for Schubert’s song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, and one by Wilhelmine von Chézy, who wrote the play Rosamunde for which Schubert composed the incidental music. It is a virtuoso vocal piece. While the shepherd “pipes” his distant call, the singer, perched high on a rock and looking down into the valley, joyously welcomes the coming of spring.