ExclusiveSchubert: Schwanengesang, D.957 - 13. Der Doppelgänger

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Schubert: Schwanengesang, D.957 - 13. Der Doppelgänger. This beautiful piece was played by Justin T. Plank and Margaret McDonald. It has common licence (Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal) and is provided through musopen.org.

The poem Der Doppelgänger by Heinrich Heine was published in the year 1827 in Buch der Lieder von H Heine Hamburg bei Hoffmann und Campe.

What is known as "Schwanengesang" (Swan Song) is not a song cycle à la Schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Miller Girl) or Winterreise (Winter Journey), but rather a rather arbitrary compilation of Schubert's late songs (7 after Rellstab, 6 very recent ones after Heine poems [Heine was Schubert's contemporary], plus the isolated Seidl poem Die Taubenpost) compiled in 1829 by the Viennese publisher Tobias Haslinger, whom we already encountered in the first concert of the season. Even more than the Rellstab settings, however, the Heine songs form a kind of cycle in themselves. Here, in his most modern literary phase, Schubert once again finds a whole new expressiveness in his setting of six poems from Heine's book Heimkehr (Homecoming). In addition to the mostly sombre character – listen, for example, to the eerie final piece Der Doppelgänger (The Double) or Die Stadt (The City), which is reminiscent of contemporary paintings by Caspar David Friedrich (Brahms reprised a piano figure from this song in his Piano Quartet, Op. 26) – unusual harmonic devices are used, for example in Atlas, where “the whole world of pain” weighs heavily on the singer.

Source: Kammermusik Basel

The doppelgänger

The night is quiet, the alleyways are at rest,
My treasure used to live in this house;
She left the town long ago,
But the house is still standing in the same place.

There is a man standing there too and he is staring up high,
And he is wringing his hands as a result of overwhelming pain;
I feel terrified when I see his face, –
The moon shows me my own form.

You doppelgänger, you pale guy!
Why are you aping my love agony,
The pain that tormented me on this spot,
So many nights in the old days?

Translation of the lyrics: Malcolm Wren, schubertsong.uk

The video was captured in Switzerland by Christian Schlegel and was edited by Wenjing Ma.



#classicalmusic, #Music, #古典音樂, #klassischemusik, #GJWexclusive, #Switzerland, #Schweiz, #Natur, #Nature, #KlassischeMusikundNatur, #ClassicalMusicAndNature, #古典音樂小站,