Of Lovers, Gods, and Warriors A Schubert Recital
S u s a n Yo u e n s
Among Franz Schubert’s large circle of friends was a number of amateur poets and lesser-known literary names, and many songs heard in the first half of tonight’s recital are based on their works. All of these were written in the 1820s, during the last six years of Schubert’s life. Earlier in his career, as a student of the Italian composer Antonio Salieri, he had become familiar with the libretti of the operatic reformer Pietro Metastasio (the pseudonym of Antonio Domenico Trapassi, 1698–1782). His works, set to music by many com posers, form the backbone of the 18th-century Italian opera seria tradition. We hear three of Schubert’s Metastasio settings tonight, as well as one song to a text believed to be Metastasio’s at the time. The final part of the program is dedicated to one of the German literary world’s most brilliant luminaries: Goethe, whose poems are the source of 75 solo songs by Schubert. Many facets of Goethe’s genius come to sounding life even in this small selection of songs: Greek mythology reinterpreted for a new age, the erotic life, pastoral traditions, a new relationship to nature, and folklore. Like several of Schubert’s poet friends, Franz von Schlechta, of Bohemian baronial ancestry, did not win literary glory, becoming a government official instead. But he is remembered as the author of the words for one of the composer’s perennial favorites, Fischerweise, possibly composed in March 1826. Here, motor rhythms tell of joy in one’s work. Matching Schlechta’s glee at the escape from feminine wiles—women seen as fishers of men, men as the “fish that got away”— Schubert imbues the repeated words “schlauer Wicht” (“cunning minx”) with merry, if slightly misogynistic, relish. Another close friend of Schubert’s, the charming dilettan te poet Franz von Schober, penned the mini-allegory Schatz-
