Hyperion Records

An enchanting song this, one of those little Schubertian jewels that are always a happy surprise to encounter in those pages of the Gesamtausgabe ignored by all but the avid enthusiast. Schubert found Kosegarten one of his most potent sources of inspiration in 1815; between June and October of that year he composed no less than twenty settings, all of them strophic and none of them of ground-breaking originality. Instead these songs have a gentle sweetness and inner radiance that achieves perfection of a modest but nevertheless endearing kind. For songs of this unpretentious type it seems that E major was the composer’s favourite key. According to John Reed it is the tonality of innocence and joy, and six of the Kosegarten settings from this year are in E major. The same key dominates a group of the 1816 strophic settings, particularly those like Hölty’s Erntelied and Seligkeit which border on folksong. In mood and key Die Täuschung is similar to Die Erscheinung another Kosegarten setting written on the same day, but in its gentle and confidential tone it also prefigures two Hölty settings from May 1816, Die frühe Liebe and Blumenlied.

Among the felicities of Die Täuschung is the gently rocking quaver accompaniment for the left hand; the right hand enters at the end of the first bar and forms a delicate descant throughout, flute music which dances gravely over the slightly old-fashioned Alberti bass. The first thing we hear in the accompaniment’s treble is a sighing motif of five notes which signifies perhaps the gentle sound of the pastoral pipe, or a mysterious smiling presence hovering high over the picture, as separate from the singer as the right hand is from the left. The second half of the strophe (from ‘Vor seinem Lächeln klärt sich schnell’) provides transformation music which reaches its apogee on a high A on the first syllable of ‘Paradies’. The clarity and tessitura of this radiant passage suggests purity, but its chromaticism betokens deception; it is accompanied by a delightful motif of descending thirds phrased into gentle sighs and tremulous trills. The reverse of the song’s coin of simplicity is a gently exquisite sensuality; perhaps that is also a part of the ‘deception’ at the song’s heart. There is no sign here of the unhinged parody of Viennese Gemütlichkeit that characterises the waltz song which, but for the lack of a definite article, is this song’s namesake – Täuschung from Winterreise.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1994