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Track(s) taken from CDJ33035

Die Wallfahrt, D778a

First line:
Meine Tränen im Bussgewand
composer
1823 (?); sketch, edited by Reinhard van Hoorickx; first published in 1969
arranger
author of text

Maarten Koningsberger (baritone), Graham Johnson (piano)
Recording details: January 1998
St Paul's Church, New Southgate, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by Antony Howell & Julian Millard
Release date: April 2000
Total duration: 0 minutes 58 seconds
 

Reviews

‘Throughout the disc, Graham Johnson's accompaniments are typically illuminating with numerous touches of detail glossed over by many pianists. And, as ever, his vastly comprehensive notes, amounting to no less than a book, are in a class of their own’ (BBC Music Magazine)

‘Revelatory’ (The Guardian)

‘McGreevy's Lachen und Weinen is simply the best performance I know. No lover of Schubert's genius should miss this CD’ (International Record Review)

‘Even if you haven't been collecting this first-rate series of recordngs, the quality of the singing and the appealing variety of the programme provide a delightful encounter with Schubert's lyric genius’ (bn.com)
This is a relatively recent Schubert discovery—the music emerged only in 1968. The late Reinhard Van Hoorickx discovered a copy of the song (not the autograph) as a result of his patient excavations in the Cornaro family’s library, a source of a number of significant Schubertian treasures. The text was identified as coming from the Östliche Rosen of Rückert, the collection of that poet’s work, published in 1822, from which all the other Schubert Rückert settings were taken. In that volume the poem is printed opposite that of ‘Dass der Ostwind Düfte’ (pp. 368/9) which Schubert named Dass sie hier gewesen!. As he was working on that song, the composer’s eye was probably distracted to the opposite page, and these sixteen bars were almost certainly the result of a few minutes’ work.

Die Wallfahrt was probably not considered by Schubert to be worth preserving. All the other Rückert songs (Lachen und Weinen, Du bist die Ruh, Greisengesang, Dass sie hier gewesen!, Sei mir gegrüsst—only the last of these not to be heard on this disc) have love as their raison d’être. Mention of the ‘temple of Beauty’ hints at a futile love-related pilgrimage, but the sombre mood of the words does not seem truly to have inspired the composer. If it had, this song might have turned into a Schubertian equivalent of Schumann’s Aus den hebräischen Gesänge, a resemblance suggested by the song’s lachrymose opening bars. But the poem is a short one, and thus also the song; this is no fragment, and its effect is limited by the brevity of its text. The simplicity on the page might well have been reworked into a more sophisticated form (like the first version of Greisengesang, initially without any of its enlivening coloratura) if Schubert had been bothered. What we have is more like a sketch for bass voice, simple and noble, though hardly memorable. It must be admitted that the composer, with very few notes at his disposal (the accompaniment remains confined to semibreves and minims until the crotchets and quavers of the song’s closing bars) somehow conjures a middle-eastern atmosphere in this music, as if appropriate to intone from a minaret.

The poet’s mention of the Ka’bah (the very sacred small temple of stone at the centre of the Great Mosque in Mecca and the goal of all Islamic pilgrims) is typical of Rückert’s oriental learning, although the fanciful image of a ‘Kaaba der Schönheit’ would not appeal to a devout Muslim. Schubert, attracted to medieval imagery involving the crusades, is a dab hand at pilgrimages, and often manages a tone of holy consecration. We can see the beginning of something of the like here; but a song like the Leitner setting Der Kreuzzug from 1827 is a fully realised (and western) version of a similar idea.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2000

Other albums featuring this work

Schubert: The Complete Songs
CDS44201/4040CDs Boxed set + book (at a special price) — Download only
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