We hear the ploughman’s contented treble whistling in the piano interlude (merriment that echoes his own “singend” and then migrates to the bass), his quarter-note “moving up and down” in the fields, and a bit of minor-mode harmonic coloration to hint at graves in the ground. Schubert loved making songs about minstrels who hymned their own art: this was among his testaments to the power of music at all ages and stages of human existence, from its dawn to dusk. He also loved swan songs, and Abschied von der Harfe is among them. Three introductory harp chords usher it in: an outpouring of pure melody set to an accompaniment that one could readily transfer to the harp, with plucked bass tones and broken-chord harmonies. Intense emotion takes the form of near-incessant chromaticism in the interior of each tiny strophe. The poet of Grablied auf einen Soldaten, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, suffered even more severely at the hands of Karl Eugen of Württemberg than did Schiller. Observing the funeral of a soldier from his prison cell, he penned these lines on an “upright German” now spared life’s harshness for eternal bliss. Schubert may not have known the biographical background, but in 1816, he would have seen many a suffering soldier in Vienna’s streets after decades of war and occupation. Once again, this is a small strophic song with wonderful characteristic details: the elongation of the crucial word “Grabesruh” and its shift from funereal minor mode to major, as well as the dark Neapolitan harmonies—a Schubertian fingerprint.
An admirer of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (whose story includes elements of the Orpheus myth), Schubert must have pounced with alacrity on the Lied des Orpheus, als er in die Hölle ging as his chance to celebrate the ultimate singer-poet, who—for a time— conquered death with his music. The priests of the Temple of Wisdom who sternly enjoin Tamino, “Zurück!” in the Act I finale of Die Zauberflöte inspired the piano introduction of this dramatic-operatic song, and Gluck’s shades speak again from within Orpheus’s song to the divinities of Hades. Schubert’s friend Mayrhofer, whose Augenlied we heard earlier, came from Linz, and he harbored no great love for Vienna, where politics and intrigues held sway and he 16