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At first Schubert was not asked to write accompaniments for any of the exercises undertaken for Salieri; here, however, the piano’s introduction and postlude are both the composer’s own, as well as the vocal and bass lines. The musicologist Alfred Orel made the realisation recorded here. Orel’s commentary on this work, and in particular on Salieri’s many suggestions and improvements, shows that Anton Holzapfel was wide of the mark in depicting the Italian as a lazy and disinterested teacher. On the contrary, he went into great detail in his ‘marking’, and Schubert would have picked up a great deal during these sessions of change and revision. Salieri helped Schubert to achieve what the teenager had not managed before – a large and heroic through-composed aria, difficult to sing certainly, but not stupidly impossible (like some of the earlier ballads). It is well conceived for the larger type of tenor voice, and capable of generating considerable musical excitement. If the melodic invention is nowhere near what we have come to expect of Schubert, it as well to remember that he was writing an exercise in C major celebratory pomp with little room for subtle touches of human feeling.
The choice of text in favour of a heroic emperor may well have been influenced by the political events of the time. Napoleon’s catastrophic lack of success in Russia had re-focused the hopes of Austrians on the Emperor Franz I who was now preparing for the so-called ‘Befreiungskrieg’ – the war of liberation against French domination. Naturally, it would be interesting to know if Schubert knew the Mozart opera at this stage (he certainly never saw a production of it), but one thing is certain: he set this text from Metastasio’s original, not from Mozart’s libretto which uses a shortened version of this choral text. This was because Metastasio’s libretto was adapted by Caterino Mazzola for the Mozart opera’s first performance in Prague in 1791. It is more likely that Salieri knew the text because his teacher Gluck had set it as early as 1752.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 1999
Schubert: The Complete Songs ‘This would have been a massive project for even the biggest international label, but from a small independent … it is a miracle. An ideal Christ ... ‘Please give me the complete Hyperion Schubert songs set—all 40 discs—and, in the next life, I promise I'll "re-gift" it to Schubert himself … fo ...» More |