King James V (1512–1542), heir to a war-torn kingdom, in an attempt to suppress the over-powerful Border chiefs, has banished the entire Douglas clan. This includes the aged Earl of Bothwell who has been the king's mentor. Despite the royal ukase, the old man is drawn back to his beloved native land; he and his wife and daughter (the beautiful Ellen Douglas) are given secret refuge in the domain of Roderick Dhu, chief of the Clan-Alpine, who defies the king in open rebellion.

Scott tells us that it was the custom of both James IV and James V to walk through their kingdoms in disguise, the better to understand their subjects. At the opening of The Lady of the Lake, the king, disguised as James Fitz-James 'the Knight of Snowdon' is hunting in the vicinity of Loch Katrine, the beauties of which he discovers by accident when he has lost his steed and is separated from his hunting companions. Climbing up a precipice, he catches sight for the first time of the bay with its islands which seem to him in the failing light like an enchanted part of another world. Scott's descriptions of this area brought hundreds of visitors to the Trossachs within weeks of the poem's publication. As 'Fitz-James' prepares to sleep in the open, a small skiff crosses the lake, rowed by a beautiful dark-haired young woman, dressed in the plaid of a chieftain's daughter.

Ellen had heard the sounds of a hunting horn and believes it might be her lover Malcolm Graeme on the lake shore. Instead Fitz-James introduces himself. In the solemn tradition of guest-friendship of those parts, Ellen invites Fitz-James home, and they row the boat back to a small rocky island in the middle of the loch. There, hidden away, is a 'rustic bower', a makeshift house made of wood and matting, half castle, half hermitage. Fitz-James recognizes an old sword as belonging to the banished Earl. Ellen's mother Dame Margaret is courtesy itself, but all enquiry about the head of the house is lightly turned away—indeed Ellen jokes that she and her mother cast spells on wandering knights, and as if to prove her point:

'She sung, and still a harp unseen
Filled up the symphony between'.

This is the background to Schubert's masterful rondo 'Raste Krieger! Krieg ist aus', a story with which the composer was completely familiar—which is more than can be said for countless performers who have treated this song as a dirge or battle requiem. There is nothing of death in this poem; Ellen sings to Fitz-James in order to draw attention away from the awkward subject of her father's whereabouts, and in welcoming her mysterious visitor she attempts to enchant him, more or less tongue-in-cheek, with beguiling music worthy of a Scottish Lorelei.

Schubert knew that in these mysterious circumstances, and in this strange hideaway, Ellen's music would have to make time stand still. He succeeds in doing this by its elongated time-span; in song terms, it has the long-term harmonic vision of the Great C major Symphony which we now believe to have been composed in the same year, and something of the 'heavenly length' ascribed to that symphony by Schumann. Schubert is not to be hurried, and he is not afraid of building arches of sound on harmonic foundations which move slowly, almost cosmically, from one chord to another. The opening ritornello in D flat is taken from a passage in the Klopstock ballad Hermann und Thusnelda, D322 (1815), where a handsome and victorious warrior is welcomed home by his beloved; a decade later, Schubert allows old music to float in a new delirium of spell-induced fancy. Verse 2 is an episode in C sharp major/minor and is (I believe) in the same tempo, a crotchet in the alla breve 'Langsam' equalling a crotchet of the 3/4 'Mässig'. In this way the work glides along through the second appearance of the rondo (Verse 4) for ninety bars. At just the right moment the hypnotic calm is broken by the martial sounds of battle; the poet lists what will not disturb the warrior, but the composer, as if to lay potential dangers at rest like a Celtic shaman, invokes the horrors in musical illustration, the better to negate them. In any case, for variety's sake, the song needs the changes of pace in Verses 5 and 6. The fourth line of each of these verses switches from 'Fast' to 'Slower', although the piano's left hand timpani still rumble ominously. In a masterstroke of tempo engineering, Verse 7 is slower still, and it is here, when the harmony changes from B flat major to minor before 'Doch der Lerche Morgensänge,' that Schubert seems to be especially in touch with the spirit of Celtic simplicity and folksong-tinged enchantment. By the simple expedient of raising the piano's bass line by an octave, Schubert makes his horns of fairyland sound magically etiolated for the third and final appearance of the refrain.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1991

In Scott's poem, Ellen's second song is a continuation of the first; the heading is Song continued, and the two pieces are separated by only a few lines of narration to give Ellen pause for breath. Directly after it is sung, Fitz-James's bed is prepared and decked with mountain heather. His dreams are disturbed by the beauty of Ellen, and memories of the loyalty of her father. Schubert's marking of 'Etwas geschwind' has encouraged many a performer, perhaps a bit embarrassed at the length of the first song, to treat Jäger, ruhe von der Jagd! in an altogether different manner for the sake of contrast: jaunty, perky, ebullient even. It so happens that interpretative help is at hand in the documents through a letter Anton Ottenwalt wrote to Josef von Spaun from Linz in July 1825. Ottenwalt's articulate and perspicacious impressions of the Scott songs are of enormous value because they were formed by hearing the accompaniments played by the composer himself.

'Jägers Ruhe. Another slumber song, … in the accompaniment, the tune of horns, I should say, like the echoes of a hunting song in a beautiful dream … The most generally appealing by the loveliness of its melody and the rocking horn music … My dear fellow, how we wished each time that you could hear it! If only we could send those tunes into your dreams, as we ourselves hear them around us deep into the night.'

The emotions aroused in Ottenwalt by a song he links with gentle dreams (as indeed the words suggest) are far from the Highland Fling mood of many a modern performance. It is a dance of delight perhaps, but one that is conjured by Ellen's 'slumbrous spells'. The key is E flat, with the soft horn calls ever evoked by that tonality (cf Beethoven Sonata Op 81a, Les Adieux). Sleep is a land through the looking glass and conscious and unconscious diverge in opposite directions. The first horn call rises upwards, and is answered by one which falls. In a similar way Bar 4 answers Bar 3. As the right hand descends the lines of the stave, the left ascends; as the vocal line climbs in the refrain, the piano moves in mirroring contrary motion. The song has a simple ABA form with a middle verse which magically modulates into C minor by a rise of a semitone (just before 'Schlaf! der Hirsch ruht in der Höhle') which is like a door opening into a new chamber of the unconscious. As in Ellen's first song, the composer illustrates what is not supposed to disturb the dreamer (urgent horn calls with a suggestion of stamping steeds), the better to allow him to exit from momentary nightmare when soothing dreams return; in the third line of Verse 2, nightmares are heard to recede during the word 'Schlaf' set to a dotted minim (after the second 'erlag'), and peace is restored fully as 'Seele' sinks to the security of the home key. The song's gentle dance rhythm and the repetition of the question and answer phrases somehow suggest a Scottish folk music dreamed up by the travelling-power of Schubert's imagination.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1991

Schubert’s music manages somehow to capture a flavour of robust Scottish folksong. Beethoven was still making versions of folksongs with piano trio accompaniment for George Thompson of Edinburgh in 1825; perhaps Schubert knew some of that master’s earlier arrangements. But there is little in those works which hints at the rugged Scottish landscape evoked in this craggy music. The gruff key of C minor proclaims that these clansmen are not to be trifled with, and the doubled octave unisons of the accompaniment give the music a stern sense of resolve. There is also doughty use of the strident dotted rhythms which Schubert associates with warfare. This is all very much in the style of Lied eines Kriegers, a march rather than the rowing music (two dips of the oar for each line of poetry) envisaged by Scott. (This smoother metre is lost in this translation.) The truculent mood of the minor-key opening thaws to a note of radiant admiration in a blaze of C major. No group of Scottish rugby supporters will have ever greeted their heroes with more enthusiasm. Scott’s poem contains four verses: only the first is performed on this disc. The opening phrase of the song’s bilingual edition suffices to illustrate Schubert’s problems with English accentuation: the essential word ‘Hail’ is thrown away on a semiquaver while ‘to’ is set to a dotted quaver.

This poem was at one time extremely famous. The first line of the original (printed above) may strike some people as familiar—particularly Americans. It is of course the title of the ‘theme tune’ of the President of the United States, the musical motto which accompanies his public appearances. This dates back to a song published in 1812 in Washington when one James Sanderson made his own version of the poem which was tailored to the presidency. Nowadays the music is never heard with its text. It is curious that a version of Hail to the Chief is still in use, and that it pre-dates Schubert’s setting by thirteen years.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2002

Schubert’s music for this lament of ‘village maids and matrons’ is a three-part female chorus of the deepest seriousness, the rumbling left-hand basses signifying the muffled drum of funeral music. Clashes of A flat against G, and D flat against C emphasise the mourners’ anguish. In the part-writing for women’s voices in three parts (something unique in his output) he has made a remarkable, and purely instinctive, attempt to capture the sound of Celtic keening. But unlike Bootgesang there is no raw edge to this music; instead there is a hushed dignity leading to forte passages that are heartfelt rather than a ‘wild expression of lamentation’. An interest in the music and words of peasant peoples would develop throughout Europe into a real study of folksong, but only some time after the composer’s death. Nevertheless, Schubert is trying his best to respond to age-old traditions beyond his ken. He was already a practised mind-traveller to the Scottish north; his settings of the so-called Scottish minstrel Ossian were amongst the most inspired songs of his youth, and here he draws on that experience. Like Bootgesang the music is simple and stoic as befits the people who sing it. But it has its own magic too, and for this we can thank Schubert. Even straightforward changes between minor and major (here from F minor to the relative major of A flat, thence to F major) are affecting beyond their means.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2000

The tale of knightly Norman, 'heir of Armandave', is one of the various fragmentary stories which embroider the main narrative of Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake. The author no doubt included it to press home the point that loyalty to clan and chief were paramount in sixteenth-century Highland life. Like Annot Lyle, Norman faces the conflict between love and duty, a variant of the incompatibility of sex and religion. The overall theme of this epic poem, despite the central love story of Ellen Douglas and Malcolm Graeme, is the conflict between crown and clan at a time when Scotland was rent by internecine strife. The reconciliation brought about by the wisdom of a merciful king is Scott's broad historical lesson. Norman owes his allegiance to Roderick Dhu, chief of the Clan-Alpine, and sworn enemy of James V of Scotland. No sooner has he come out of the church with his bride Maria, than Angus the heir of Duncraggen appears with a fiery cross (having swum a turbulent stream to reach the chapel—all excellently recounted) to summon Norman to arms.

The text gave Schubert the chance to compose one of the two famous horse-riding songs of 1825 (the other is Schulze's Auf der Bruck) and one of the most effective of a favourite genre which included Wilkommen und Abschied and Erlkönig. Like those songs, Normans Gesang is a moto perpetuo, full of grim resolve. It is more authentically equestrian than the other accompaniments; we feel the rider bounce in the saddle as the horse gallops over uneven ground. The composer made it the finale of a group of Scott songs which he performed with Vogl in Linz in late July 1825. Anton Ottenwalt wrote to Josef von Spaun about this informal concert in a letter of 27 July; his remarks on Normans Gesang are worth quoting in full:

The warrior with his sacrificial torch, the summons to arms, sings as he fares across the country. Hurrying without respite he thinks of his errand, of the bride he has left at the altar, of the morrow's combat, of victory, of reunion … Schubert himself regards this as the best of the Scott songs. Vogl himself interprets it heavily (a syllable, often a word, to each note) but splendidly.

Modern listeners would perhaps place Ellen's songs on a higher plane than Norman's horse-ride but Schubert must have been proud of the symphonic scheme—artfully modified repetition, and the avoidance of monotony by changes of key at just the right moments—which holds a long song together; the Scott settings are all characterised by an inspired use of ostinati which unify long stretches of rhapsodic melodic invention. Normans Gesang is sung here in the tenor original of C minor; the first verse stays in this key, but the excursion into the G major dominant and a totally new second tune gives the impression of modulation in the second verse. This pattern is repeated for verses 3 and 4, and seems set to govern verses 5 and 6 also, until the dream of victory and reunion prompts an unexpected and touching modulation to C major for the last strophe; when we hear this, we are somehow made to feel that it may indeed be Norman's swansong. Schubert has exactly understood the young knight's character—he is the salt of the earth, simple without being stupid, romantic without being sentimental. He invokes Maria's name at the end of the verses like a sacred litany; as he does so the vocal line blooms into high-lying melisma (the only such moments in a taxing piece where, as Vogl discovered to his cost, there is a tongue-twisting word for every syllable) and the final 'Maria' is even embellished with a turn as if in knightly homage. It seems fickle of Scott not to have let his readers know whether Mary ever sees her groom again or remains a virgin bride; it is perhaps enough that we are told that the Battle of Beal' an Duine was an extremely bloody one.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1991

The song was an immediate favourite in the Schubert circle, and the composer, in Upper Austria with the singer Vogl, half on holiday, half on a concert tour, seemed proud of it. In a letter to his father of 25 July 1825, he writes, 'They wondered greatly at my piety which I expressed in a hymn to the Holy Virgin and which, it appears, grips every soul and turns it to devotion. I think this is due to the fact that I have never forced devotion in myself and never compose hymns or prayers of that kind unless it overcomes me unawares; but then it is usually the right and true devotion.' Six weeks later Schubert mentions the song again, this time to his brother Ferdinand. In an age less touchy about sexing songs, he and Vogl have been performing it everywhere. 'The manner in which Vogl sings and I accompany, as though we were one at such a moment, is something new and unheard-of for these people.'

Such is the world-wide popularity of this song, and so often has it been performed with Latin text, that most people never connect it with Ellen Douglas and the plight of her father. In Scott's story this prayer follows hard on the heels of Norman's summons to arms. When the conflict between the king (whom she still does not realise is none other than Fitz-James) and Roderick Dhu comes to a head, Ellen joins her father in hiding in his rocky eyrie, fit more for wolf and wildcat than human habitation. Roderick Dhu, whose love of Ellen is unrequited, lingers in the vicinity and overhears her 'melting voice' which, harp-accompanied, seems to be that of an angel.

There is no doubt that Schubert, not conventionally religious, has been inspired by Scott to write a piece which reflects Ellen's character and purity, as much as that of the Virgin to whom she prays; her supplication to the Heavenly Mother is mirrored by her selfless devotion to her father on earth. Perhaps a devotion celebrating human goodness and love, as much as divine, is what Schubert meant by 'a right and true devotion'. The song, hypnotically strophic, has the same ineffable span as the opening pages of Ellen's first song. The music is relaxed and it glows the more for its unforced quality; the composer is happy and at peace with himself in this contented and productive summer. The vocal line reflects maidenly sorrow and religious devotion, but in the flowering of the melismas we hear also the ecstasy of a young woman with her whole future before her, a woman in love. This music does not deny that religious ecstasy and erotic impulse can be closely related. Despite her fears Ellen believes, or perhaps it is that Schubert believes, that life is, after all, beautiful. Modulations and effects never seem engineered, as they might have been (no matter how cleverly) in songs from earlier years; they seem to happen of their own accord. This song can be easily ruined by gratuitous rubato in the pianist's pervasive sextuplet figurations. Capell suggests that this accompaniment was inspired by Bach's 'Bell' cantata and, whether this is true or not, the music needs the selfless flow of the pre-romantic age. This style has sometimes been referred to as Bach's unstoppable 'sewing machine', but this song is powered rather by Gretchen's spinning-wheel raised to a higher power, no longer mirroring frantic unhappiness but slowly turning in a rhythm of undisturbed tranquillity, its movements governed by a cosmic energy more universal than the romantic fancy of any particular performer. One is in the grip of something extraordinary when performing this song, and audiences sensed that when they heard Vogl with Schubert at the piano. Each verse is really one long paragraph, flowing ineluctably to the final cadence of repeated litany. It is as if nothing can, or should, interrupt the flow of communion between Mary and her supplicant.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1991

This ballad appears in the sixth and last canto of this long poem, almost at the end of Scott’s epic. Ellen Douglas, on a mission to Stirling Castle, finds herself in a ‘latticed bower’ beneath one of the castle turrets. As this song wafts down from the tower she recognises the voice of her beloved Malcolm Graeme. This incident, reminiscent of the story of Blondel and Richard the Lionheart, soon leads to a happy ending. Ellen’s protector, James Fitz-James (who is also the mysterious guest to whom the first two of Ellens Gesänge had been addressed in the poem’s opening canto) is at last revealed as none other than the king of Scotland who pardons both Ellen’s father, Lord James of Douglas, and Graeme. With regal generosity he gives Ellen’s hand in marriage to his former enemy.

Richard Capell’s commentary on Lied des gefangenen Jägers is interesting in that in analysing what he takes to be the song’s weaknesses, he points out its strengths. Capell begins by acknowledging that ‘the chivalric rhythm and the bold tune start well’ but he finds the song ‘cloying’. He continues: ‘The song is, for one thing, contained within an octave. The pianoforte never rises above a D on the treble stave, and all modulation is denied’. Without realising it, Capell is actually describing Schubert’s ability to respond to the dramatic background of his characters: in using the words ‘contained’ and ‘denied’ he is summing up Malcolm Graeme’s plight as a prisoner, and Schubert’s response to it. The critic might have realised that the boundaries within which this song moves were not imposed by the limits of Schubert’s abilities, but by the King of Scotland’s prison cell. (In the same way, the long and static strophic conclusion of the Schiller ballad Ritter Toggenburg is not a sign of the composer’s waning invention but a reflection of the knight’s ever-stationary vigil until death).

The introduction is both stirring and regal—six bars of music recalling the sound of the distant hunting-horns that so tantalise the singer. The pervasive polonaise rhythm is effective for the same reason that it is so moving in the music of Chopin: it is a dance of contained, steel-sprung energy with overtones of pride and defiance. It is also associated with the struggle for liberation of a nation in servitude, and Schubert almost certainly knew this about it; in fact Chopin had begun to write polonaises of his own as early as 1817. The unbiddable Malcolm Graeme embodies the pride of the Scottish clans, jealous of their independence and notoriously unwilling to acknowledge fealty to a central authority. Adam Storck’s translation of The Lady of the Lake opens with an extended essay (65 pages long) designed to furnish the German-speaking reader with the historical background necessary to understand Scott’s poem. If Schubert read this (and there is no reason to suppose he did not) he would have known of Malcolm Graeme’s proud lineage, his youthful resentment against the royal family, and his frustration at not being able to do anything about it. And we hear all of these things in this music as two small oppressed communities, Poland and the Scottish Highlands, join hands and dance within the small spaces permitted them. As in the opening of Totengräbers Heimwehe, also governed by a tightly structured motivic accompaniment, the shape of the vocal line emerges seemingly by chance: in both songs the anger and discomfort of the protagonist is of paramount importance—neither of these men is in a mood to embark on a melody, and yet the sum total of their seemingly spontaneous phrases, as if muttered in anger rather than sung, amounts to something memorable: not a conventional tune perhaps, but a compelling and memorable pattern. The accompanying fanfare motifs in the piano dictate a voice part moulded to their harmonic movement—banks of repeated notes climbing in steps up the stave, but soon reaching their ceiling. Schubert knows that anything above the baritone’s vocal passaggio will sound heroic and unconstrained; accordingly, the prisoner’s voice is capped and never goes higher than a D. The descending phrase on ‘Und mich kränkt des Turmes Einsamkeit’ is a textbook example of Schubert’s use of a vocal line doubled by piano octaves to denote loneliness or abandonment. The answering phrase in the piano interlude, also in double octaves, mounts the stave as a mirror-image, a powerful analogue for someone pacing up, and then down, the length of a tiny cell.

Schubert must have immediately noticed that the first four lines of each strophe referred to the prisoner’s present circumstances, and the next four to past happiness. This allows him to change to the major key (in the manner of certain songs in Winterreise) as Malcolm’s mind is flooded with the comfort of sweeter memories before returning to hateful reality. After four lines of bemoaning his fate, tiny verbal keys (the subjunctive ‘wär’’, the nostalgic ‘zuvor’ and ‘sonst’, the regretful threefold ‘nicht’ and ‘dahin’) lead us into dreams of better times. This is genuinely affecting, and as little as we know of the character of the singer of these words, the composer manages to paint him in music as someone who will prove to be a tender and loving consort for Ellen. (His macho devotion to blood sports, unfashionable in our own time, would have made him more of a gentleman in her eyes).

As in all Schubert’s best strophic songs, the later verses fit the music surprisingly well. The composer makes tiny adjustments, and ‘Ich hasse der Turmuhr schläfrigen Klang’ (verse 2) is fitted out with extra semiquavers which suggest a vehemence absent from the equivalent passage in the first verse. The crawling sunbeams which symbolise the dragging of time in verse 2 also seem well suited to dragging unison octaves, and the arrival of dawn is aptly reflected by the gentle glow of the major key at ‘Sonst pflegte die Lerche den Morgen zu bringen’; here the semiquaver pulsations in the accompaniment can be made to twitter like birds. In the third verse the darting semiquaver melisma on ‘Hirsch durch den Wald’ is as nervous as a hounded deer, and the descending scale passage at ‘ihr zu Füssen mehr legen’ performs the gallant gesture of laying something precious at the beloved’s feet. The bitterness of ‘dahin ist Lieben und Leben’ and the postlude, now a pale piano echo of the more defiant introduction, bring this superb piece of song-theatre to a close. If the public experiences a sense of claustrophobia and constraint in this music as Capell did, the composer has entirely succeeded in his aims.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2000