This well-loved piece, heard in many a church over the
last hundred-and-fifty years and at many an eisteddfod,
feis or village festival, owes its existence to a
commission, or at least a request (we are not sure
whether money changed hands or whether Schubert merely
provided the score out of personal kindness). It was
written for the pupils of Anna Fröhlich (1793-1880), a
singing teacher at the Wiener Konservatorium. It was
also this Anna who cajoled Schubert into writing the
Grillparzer Ständ...(+)
This well-loved piece, heard in many a church over the
last hundred-and-fifty years and at many an eisteddfod,
feis or village festival, owes its existence to a
commission, or at least a request (we are not sure
whether money changed hands or whether Schubert merely
provided the score out of personal kindness). It was
written for the pupils of Anna Fröhlich (1793-1880), a
singing teacher at the Wiener Konservatorium. It was
also this Anna who cajoled Schubert into writing the
Grillparzer Ständchen D920 for mezzo and women's
chorus in (July 1827) when the soloist was Josefine,
her sister. The four sœurs Fröhlich were either very
insistent (although Schubert never seems to have
composed music against his will) or very charming and
persuasive. (Grillparzer was hopelessly in love with
one of them, Katharina.) The composer delivered the
score of Der 23. Psalm on completion in December 1820,
and the work was first heard seven months later, in
August 1821, at a pupils' concert in the Gundelhof. It
was immediately popular, taken up by older performers,
and given on several further occasions in Schubert's
lifetime, most notably on 7 February 1828 when it was
part of the programme at the Musikverein under the
direction of Franz or Josef Chiami. Ludwig Finscher
avers that this music is in the style of the Austrian
Landmesse, the homespun liturgical music heard in small
country churches of the period. That it was conceived
for a concert illustrates the way that the barriers
between the performance of sacred and secular music,
once rigidly upheld by the authorities, were
disintegrating during the composer's lifetime.
Male choruses were a long-established Viennese
tradition, and it is hardly surprising that Schubert
wrote the majority of his choral music for men's
voices. About a third of these ninety or so works are
piano-accompanied as are the seventeen works for mixed
voices and piano. The list of songs for women's voices
is much shorter. Only seven works specifically require
an all-female cast, five of these with piano. When
Schubert came to compose this Psalm he had written only
one such work, five years previously in 1815 (Das Leben
D269) but others were to follow, including the haunting
Coronach from Scott's Lady of the Lake settings. The
Ständchen mentioned above is probably the most
substantial work in this genre. Probably from force of
habit the composer originally conceived that work for
men's chorus and female soloist; he immediately
rectified his mistake by providing another version for
women's voices.
Schubert chooses the key of A flat major to express
calm and glowing faith. The opening piano triplets waft
and weave with the utmost delicacy as a tonic pedal
underpins subtle harmonic changes. Some years later the
composer was to use this device even more effectively
in the introduction to Im Abendrot. The entry of the
voices (two sopranos and two altos) is a magical
moment: Schubert exploits the lack of a bass line in
the voices to conjure a tessitura which seems
unconnected to the earth and its worldly concerns. The
spacing of the four voices also gives an ethereal
quality to the music. It is difficult for the ear to
disentangle this insinuating blend of close harmony for
women's voices, an effect which has been much exploited
in popular music: from the Supreme Being to The
Supremes, from Schubert to the Spice Girls, is one way
of charting the so-called 'progress' of the medium.
In the beginning the musical calm established is such
(so smooth is the vocal line and so soothing the
accompaniment) that we see only unending vistas of
gently rolling Elysian fields. At 'er lagert mich auf
grüne Weide' ('He maketh me to rest in green
pastures') the pianist's fingers become more active.
Dancing little sequences in dotted rhythm, where the
sopranos and altos are briefly separated in imitation,
are buoyed up by gentle Schubertian water music—at
this heavenly banquet the waters are sparkling rather
than still. At 'seines Namens Ruhm' (literally, 'for
the fame of his name') there is a sudden outbreak of
forte singing accompanied by grandiose triplets which
prophesy Die Allmacht. At 'Und wall' ich auch im
Todesschatten-Tal' ('Yea, though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death') the music becomes
mysterious and tense, the triplets now pulsating in the
bass, a tessitura of the piano which the piece so far
has pointedly failed to exploit; in this we hear a
ghostly premonition of the song Schwestergruss where
Franz von Bruchmann's sister supposedly returned with a
message from the grave. These central sections provide
the only passing moments of doubt and drama, and the
music soon returns to the higher regions, in terms of
both the tessitura and the spirit. The piece as a whole
seems to be the music of angels, materializing out of
thin air and returning to ether—but not before an
extremely apt setting of the final words 'in des Ew'gen
Haus' (literally, 'the eternal home') where the idea of
immortality occasions a broadening of the word-setting
and a lengthening of note-values. The first soprano
holds a high E flat for six beats as the second climbs
a chromatic scale as if aspiring to eternal heavenly
light. The piano's arpeggios become more ecstatic for a
moment, but it is not long before the gently plucked
harps of Seraphim re-establish themselves. It is as if
they have been resounding for all eternity, and we have
been permitted to tune in to them for only the allotted
time of five minutes and twenty-three seconds.
Schubert turned to the translations of Moses
Mendelssohn (published in 1783) for the texts of Psalms
13 and 23. When the unaccompanied Psalm 92 (originally
in Hebrew) was first published with a German text in
1870, the Mendelssohn text was also used. It is
difficult for English-speaking music-lovers to
appreciate that, because of his place in the history of
philosophy and the development of German thought, Moses
Mendelssohn is considered even more important a
historical figure than his grandson Felix, the
composer. Abraham, Moses' businessman son, remarked
that he was either his father's son, or his son's
father. He decided to baptize his children (thus the
suffix Bartholdy to the family name, still used in
Germany but never considered necessary in England). As
an adult, Felix Mendelssohn, proud of his grandfather's
achievements, bitterly regretted his father's decision.
Moses Mendelssohn had worked within the bounds of his
ancestral faith to effect changes in Jewish life. He
argued that the deism of the Enlightenment, which he
had developed into a universal religion of reason, was
identical with Judaism. Without in any way renouncing
his faith he believed in a cultural and political union
for Christians and Jews, separation of church and
state, and civil equality for his people. For this he
was reviled by both anti-Semites and conservative Jews.
If Schubert identified with Goethe's pantheism, he owed
a great deal to Mendelssohn, as did Goethe via the
great Jewish philosopher Spinoza.
Like the poet Wilhelm Müller, Mendelssohn was born in
Dessau. His progress from a poor background to a
position in the forefront of German intellectual life
was the result of an astonishing auto-didactic capacity
for hard work. His home language was Yiddish, and his
first school was one of Talmudic and Hebrew studies.
From these beginnings he mastered not only German, but
also French, Latin and Greek. In his youth he was a
teacher, and then a bookkeeper to a silk manufacturer's
business, and in the midst of his tasks as thinker and
writer he developed this business into an extremely
prosperous one- something from which his children and
grandchildren benefited. Mendelssohn, noted for his
moral authority and goodness as much as for his
intelligence, became extremely famous on a number of
levels- as a critic, aesthetician, philosopher,
translator (from ten languages) and as the 'German
Socrates'. He was well-known as Gottfried Lessing's
model for the eponymous hero of the play Nathan der
Weise. In the same year as the Psalm translations were
published appeared Jerusalem oder über religiöse
Macht und Judentum- perhaps Mendelssohn's most
important book on the Jewish question. Since the end of
the Second World War there has been a renewed German
interest in Mendelssohn studies which had been harshly
suppressed during the Nazi era.
Source: Hyperion
(https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dw.asp?dc=W1834_GBA
JY3303109)
Although originally composed for Chorus (SATB) and
Piano, I created this Interpretation of "Der 23. Psalm"
(Psalm 23 D.706 Op. 132) for Winds (Flute, Oboe, French
Horn & Bassoon) & Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).
PARTITION