There was a time when this Ständchen (Serenade) was
the most famous serenade in the world. Of course, that
time was after Schubert had been popularized (and
sanitized) by the film Lilac Time, a film in which
Richard Tauber played the composer as a jovial fat man
whose most salient characteristic was his infinite
sentimentality and in which Ständchen became the theme
song and leitmotif of the film. After Lilac Time,
Ständchen showed up everywhere in all sorts of
arrangements: as background mus...(+)
There was a time when this Ständchen (Serenade) was
the most famous serenade in the world. Of course, that
time was after Schubert had been popularized (and
sanitized) by the film Lilac Time, a film in which
Richard Tauber played the composer as a jovial fat man
whose most salient characteristic was his infinite
sentimentality and in which Ständchen became the theme
song and leitmotif of the film. After Lilac Time,
Ständchen showed up everywhere in all sorts of
arrangements: as background music, as a popular song
and, perhaps most memorably, in a klezmer version.
Nevertheless Ständchen is still the most famous
serenade in the world. However, its fame has all but
cost the song its identity. In far too many
contemporary interpretations of the song, Ständchen
becomes a tear-jerking piece of sentimental puffery, a
lonely swain singing of his love into the night
breezes, rather than the altogether more sublte piece
of sweet melancholy it is. Rescuing the song from its
interpreters requires seeing the song for what it
really is and not what decades of sentimentality have
turned it into.
To start with, of course, there is the melody. Like
most of Schubert's greatest melodies, it only seems
sublime in its apparent simplicity. But there are so
many subtleties to it: the opening line's arching rise
and aching fall through the tonic minor chord, the
central phrase's yearning leaps to the minor sixth of
the dominant, the closing line's supple turns around
the tonic. And then there is the heartbreaking
harmonies' movements to the relative major and then the
tonic major which relapse into the tonic minor which
mirror the melody's sweet melancholy. And then there is
the song's structure of two strophically set verses
followed by a climactic third verse in which the singer
entreats his sweetheart to join him and "make me happy"
set to music which rises to the heights of submediant
minor passion only to sink back to tonic minor
melancholy. But, still, the singer has his hopes and,
in a final stroke of genius, Schubert ends the song in
the tonic major.
Although originally created for Solo Piano, I created
this arrangement of "Ständchen" (Serenade D.891) for
String Quintet (2 Violins, Viola, Cello & Bass).
PARTITION