The second version of this song (from April 1815) is a passionate outburst, a real lyrical effusion accompanied by throbbing triplets – a song very different from the composer’s first efforts. These are not negligible, however, and would have been lost to the performer if it had not been the indefatigable detective work of Father Van Hoorickx who has made an imaginative reconstruction of the song as it might have been if all of Schubert’s sketch had survived. All that has been left to posterity is four bars of the vocal line (the music for the end of the song at the words ‘Glanz des Guten und des Schönen strahlt mir dein hohes Bild’) and two bars of piano postlude. Van Hoorickx has simply used this haunting little postlude (a musing little figure unlike anything else in the composer’s output) as an introduction and has crafted a most credible vocal line for the rest of the strophe, supported by an accompaniment of the same flowing triplets found in the extant fragment. This completion is not very ambitious perhaps, but it works better than many a more sophisticated attempt to emulate the master’s notoriously inimitable style. Van Hoorickx’s work conserves what is special about the fragment and one can listen to the complete song without denouncing it as an obvious impostor. Italics in the text above denote those passages which are not genuine Schubert.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1994