Preview: Gretchen am Spinnrade
Listen
Look
Share
Details
Description
SKU: A0.1346468
Composed by Franz Schubert. Arranged by D. Jason Bishop. 19th Century,Classical,Instructional,Romantic Period. 18 pages. Tully Road Music #931255. Published by Tully Road Music (A0.1346468).Gretchen am Spinnrade (D. 118, Op. 2) is one of Schubert’s first, most successful, and most widely recognized accomplishments in the genre of the Lied, a 19th-century German art song for solo voice and piano. Schubert composed over 600 Lieder, but the breadth and compositional maturity of this 1814 example are an early indication of his gift for the form. The text is a strophic poem taken from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play Faust, depicting a scene in which Gretchen, sitting at the spinning wheel (spinnrade), daydreams about Faust, a man with whom she is infatuated though she has only just met him and barely knows him. Schubert employs the first stanza as a refrain, repeating the text (“My peace is gone/My heart is heavy/I will never again find them”) to heighten the dramatic intensity as Gretchen becomes increasingly overwhelmed by her feelings. The piano accompaniment, with its relentless sixteenth notes in the right hand, depicts both Gretchen’s accumulating madness and the perpetual motion of the spinning wheel. Sixty-five measures pass before the pattern breaks, when Gretchen is so overcome by her emotions that she stops spinning while imagining Faust’s kiss. It then takes three tries to get the spinnrade turning again, which we hear in measures 69-71 before the spinning figure resumes in measure 72 to accompany Gretchen’s doleful refrain.
This arrangement is also available for 3-part treble (SSA) voices published by Hal Leonard Corporation, 00140699.
This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard’s global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.
Digital Downloads are downloadable sheet music files that can be viewed directly on your computer, tablet or mobile device. Once you download your digital sheet music, you can view and print it at home, school, or anywhere you want to make music, and you don’t have to be connected to the internet. Just purchase, download and play!
PLEASE NOTE: Your Digital Download will have a watermark at the bottom of each page that will include your name, purchase date and number of copies purchased. You are only authorized to print the number of copies that you have purchased. You may not digitally distribute or print more copies than purchased for use (i.e., you may not print or digitally distribute individual copies to friends or students).