Academic literature on the topic 'Schubert, Franz, Songs'

Franz Schubert's "Du liebst mich nicht" (D. 756) has often been discussed as an extreme example of chromatic harmony, but one important possible motivator of the song's extravagance--its representation of one of the most exotic of the Orientalizing texts that Schubert set--has largely been overlooked. By considering the song and its interpretation by several recent critics, this essay suggests that the exotic is here represented not by overtly Orientalistic stylistic features, but rather by a pervasive ambiguity, which parallels the features ascribed to the Oriental in a variety of contemporary sources, including a review by Schubert's acquaintance Matthaus von Collin. Unlike such public evaluative texts, however, Schubert's song directly evokes the patterns of emotion and experience associated with the Orient rather than describing and critiquing from a critical distance. A brief consideration of the other songs of op. 59, "Dass sie hier gewesen" (D. 775), "Du bist die Ruh" (D. 776), and "Lachen und Weinen" (D. 777), reveals that "Du liebst mich nicht" opens the collection with an extreme representation of otherness from which the remaining songs gradually retreat.

Biographical background and musical analysis reveal a remarkable relationship between Franz Schubert’s early lieder ‘An die Geliebte’ and ‘An die Nachtigall’. In ‘An die Geliebte’, tonal ambiguity underscores the indeterminate nature of its narrative, permitting multiple coexistent and contrasting expressive meanings while favouring an ironic interpretation and an intriguing subtext. In ‘An die Nachtigall’, whose introduction and first phrase are similar to the opening of ‘An die Geliebte’, multiple expressive meanings also may be discerned, including an ironic interpretation that emerges when the song is considered in the context of its predecessor. Proceeding from a prior discussion of these lieder by Susan Youens, this essay will reveal unsuspected layers of meaning and a contextual process that unfolds in these unassuming yet engaging songs of Schubert, which uniquely converse with one another and frame an important episode in the composer’s life.

This article presents a multimodal dataset comprising various representations and annotations of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise . Schubert’s seminal work constitutes an outstanding example of the Romantic song cycle—a central genre within Western classical music. Our dataset unifies several public sources and annotations carefully created by music experts, compiled in a comprehensive and consistent way. The multimodal representations comprise the singer’s lyrics, sheet music in different machine-readable formats, and audio recordings of nine performances, two of which are freely accessible for research purposes. By means of explicit musical measure positions, we establish a temporal alignment between the different representations, thus enabling a detailed comparison across different performances and modalities. Using these alignments, we provide for the different versions various musicological annotations describing tonal and structural characteristics. This metadata comprises chord annotations in different granularities, local and global annotations of musical keys, and segmentations into structural parts. From a technical perspective, the dataset allows for evaluating algorithmic approaches to tasks such as automated music transcription, cross-modal music alignment, or tonal analysis, and for testing these algorithms’ robustness across songs, performances, and modalities. From a musicological perspective, the dataset enables the systematic study of Schubert’s musical language and style in Winterreise and the comparison of annotations regarding different annotators and granularities. Beyond the research domain, the data may serve further purposes such as the didactic preparation of Schubert’s work and its presentation to a wider public by means of an interactive multimedia experience. With this article, we provide a detailed description of the dataset, indicate its potential for computational music analysis by means of several studies, and point out possibilities for future research.

Abstract The lied represents a fundamental form of expression of the cantability and of the relation of the melody with the poetic. And, although the model of the cultural lied could still be heard in the music of the 18th century in the compositions of the Viennese classical school - in Haydn folk songs and, especially, in forms somewhat akin to the aria of Mozart or Beethoven – the landmarks of this genre were established precisely by the romantics of the 19th century, representatives in most of the German school. Schubert, Schumann, Franz, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Wagner, Brahms, Wolf etc. transformed the song into a cultural art form, incorporating images of popular origin into literary-musical structures for voice and piano making use of technical possibilities and expressiveness specific to romanticism.

Johann Herbeck (1831–1877) served in his native Vienna as conductor of the leading choral and instrumental organizations. He showed his devotion to the legacy of Franz Schubert in his performances and also in his edition, published by C.A. Spina and successors, of 51 selected works of the master for men’s, women’s and mixed chorus. Originally conceived as part-songs for ensembles of soloists, this repertoire had become choral music by Herbeck’s time. Included also are arrangements by Herbeck and others of pieces originally written for different performing media. Surviving copies of numbers in the edition, as well as two additional publications, reveal startling inconsistencies in editorial technique, ranging from a lack of intervention to a much freer approach, including liberal sprinkling of unauthentic markings and other deviations from the originals. In the latter category, the editor’s additions may be said to document the performance practice of these works during his time. His choice of sources was also inconsistent, in some cases resulting in faulty versions of the works presented. This study also documents the production and reception history of Herbeck’s edition.

Certain anomalous events in the history of Franz Schubert's family raise the possibility that he and his family inhabited a more tumultuous and conflict-ridden domestic universe than has been suspected. Among these are a series of painful losses in his mother's early life, the out-of-wedlock conception of Schubert's eldest brother, Ignaz, and Ignaz's subsequent omission from a schedule of heirs to some family property, along with his extended relegation to the lowly post of assistant teacher for more than a quarter century, until the death of his father, Franz Theodor Schubert, in 1830. In the background of these anomalies is the young Franz Theodor's unexpectedly rapid rise to prosperity in his profession, in which he and his sons had the decisive support of Bishop Josef Spendou, Vienna's superintendent of elementary schools, who was regarded as their "benefactor." Spendou's remarkably extensive devotion to the family's interestsÑincluding supplying a "scholarship" for Ignaz and a valued schoolteacher's post for young FerdinandÑopens for inspection several possibilities--that he may have been Ignaz's biological father, and that he and Schubert's parents may have entered into an arrangement whereby he furnished material and professional support to them in exchange for their raising his son as their own. Ultimately, when Franz Theodor died, Ignaz became the sole inheritor of the family's prosperous school, perhaps thereby closing the circle of pledges and obligations that bound Bishop Spendou and the Schuberts together. Left unexamined here are the potential reactions of Schubert and his siblings to their presumed knowledge of these veiled arrangements.

The printed version of Franz Schubert's song shows two main improvements over the draft. The aesthetic principles that become visible in a comparison of the two versions of the song surprisingly are not at all unfamiliar to Beckett scholars. Hence, the link between Beckett and Schubert can be established on a philological basis.

When Franz Schubert's friend Franz von Bruchmann returned to Vienna in 1821 from his studies in Erlangen, he brought with him August von Platen's Ghaselen just off the press. Soon after, Schubert set two Platen texts. A reviewer for the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung singled out "Die Liebe hat gelogen" as particularly incomprehensible, in part because he found Schubert's radical harmony to be unmotivated by the text. The daring harmonic language of the second Platen song has struck even recent critics as excessive, yet none have addressed the textual motivation for Schubert's extreme expression. Both poems concern ill-fated homosexual love, "Du liebst mich nicht" most explicitly, if obliquely: the poem is a veiled reflection on the myth of Narcissus, a myth Platen frequently drew on as a symbol for his own homosexuality.

Abstract This article examines the significance of music and musical performance in Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal (1893), an anonymous pornographic novel attributed by some scholars to Oscar Wilde. It draws upon historical material on late-Victorian concert venues, queer literary sub-cultures and sexology to illuminate the representation of musical spaces in the text. Teleny exists in two different versions: an English text, which is set in Paris, and a French text, which is set in London. The opening section of the article suggests that Teleny’s dynamic engagement with cosmopolitan cultural exchange between Paris and London is brought into sharper focus by situating the musical performances in the novel in the precise built environment of London’s Queen Hall. The second section explores the novel’s concern with queer geographies (the Orient, Eastern Europe) in the context of other texts that address music and homosexual identity in the period. The third section examines the significance of space in the novel’s presentation of musical listening, arguing that its focus on the materiality of sound and the haptic transmission of desire responds to sexological conceptions of embodied musical response by homosexual subjects. The significance of this sensory experience of listening is understood in the light of Sara Ahmed’s theorization of ‘queer phenomenology’. Finally, the article traces the significance of musical allusions to songs by Franz Schubert to show how they form part of the novel’s broader concerns with the spatial articulation of same-sex desire and the representation of queer urban geographies.