Schubert's Ständchen, D. 957 No. 4 — written in August 1828, three months before he died at thirty-one. It sits in Schwanengesang, but Schubert neither assembled that collection nor gave it its name: after his death a publisher gathered fourteen songs he had to hand, put them in one volume and titled it. This is a nineteenth-century piano arrangement, folding singer and accompaniment into one pair of hands. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
A collection he never assembled, named by a publisher
Schubert wrote this song in August 1828 to a poem by Ludwig Rellstab. On 19 November that year he died, at thirty-one.
Schwanengesang is not a song cycle he composed. After his death the Viennese publisher Tobias Haslinger bought the manuscripts to hand and issued fourteen songs in one volume — seven to poems by Rellstab, six by Heine, one by a third poet. They had not belonged together; they were put together. The title, meaning swan song, came from the publisher and borrows the old idea of the swan singing as it dies.
So the piece sits oddly: Schubert wrote it, but somebody else decided where it goes. It is performed alone constantly, while the thirteen songs printed beside it usually are not.
Most nineteenth-century listeners met this music as an arrangement. With no singer in the house, a piano version was how you heard it; Liszt's transcription is the famous one, and this recording uses a plainer piano version by another nineteenth-century Leipzig musician, August Horn, which stays closer to the original.
Someone singing below a window, and no answer from the house
The left hand is plucking from the first bar — a chord broken into three notes, one per beat — which is a guitar's motion, because a serenade was originally sung under a window with an instrument in your arms. The left hand barely leaves that figure all the way through.
The melody enters at bar 9, not high and not loud, like someone keeping their voice down. Schubert wrote it in D minor, but it is not sad so much as careful not to wake the house.
The same melody is sung three times: thin at first, a little thicker underneath the second time, and fullest in register and density the third (2:34). Between them come short interludes — the bars where, in the song, the piano is left alone.
Each phrase is followed by a small echo — in the original another voice answers there, and the arrangement puts it an octave lower in the right hand. Listen for those few notes; they are the easiest detail to miss.
The last two bars fall to six notes and settle at the quietest point. It makes very good background: one dynamic band from end to end, nothing sudden, three minutes eighteen.
Eighty-two bars, and the top note arrives three times
Eighty-two bars and one thousand four hundred and seventy-one sounding notes, with fourteen grace notes besides, in 3/4 and D minor, with no repeats. The score carries fourteen dynamics, one hairpin and twenty-five pedal spans.
The melody's top note, D6, occurs only three times in the whole piece, in bars 9 to 16, 41 to 48 and 65 to 72 — the three statements of the same tune. Everywhere else the ceiling sits between A-sharp 5 and B5, a clear step lower.
The bar counts move between twelve and twenty-seven, averaging eighteen; the denser groups, around twenty a bar, line up with the three statements, and the thinner ones, sixteen to seventeen, are the interludes between them.
Bar 9 with twenty-six notes and bars 29 and 47 with twenty-seven are the three peaks; the last bar holds six.
The range runs from F1 to D6, four and a half octaves, and the shortest note lasts 0.065 seconds.
The left hand should pluck, not strum
First, separate the left hand's three notes. It is imitating a guitar, and each note should be heard in its own place; glued together they become one chord and the original disappears.
Second, sing the melody at one level. There are no large swings here, and the difficulty is holding a long line at a single height without dullness — which comes from the direction of the phrase, not from volume.
Third, those echoes. The answer an octave below each phrase-end should be lighter than the phrase; they are not the same person speaking.
Fourth, distinguish the three statements. The first is the plainest and the third the fullest; play the first one full and there is nowhere for the third to go.
Fifth, keep the pedal shallow. All twenty-five pedal spans are short, and clarity matters more than resonance here.
The tempo is 76 to the quarter. No metronome mark is printed in this source, where bar 1 carries only Moderato with a playback value of 80; another piano encoding of the same song in the corpus prints 76 against the same Moderato, and this recording follows it, running 3 minutes 14.
We rate this 3 out of 5.
Liszt's version, and other Schubert
The same song exists in Liszt's piano transcription, S. 560 No. 7, far longer and far harder — he rewrote the accompaniment figure entirely and threads the melody through the inner voices. Placed side by side the two show how different the aims of an arrangement can be: one to be playable at home, one to be heard in a hall. That version has not been made yet.
This channel already has two Schubert impromptus: the G-flat major, Op. 90 No. 3, the gentlest of them, and the C minor, Op. 90 No. 1. All three sit in the Schubert playlist.
