Franz Peter Schubert (1797 – 1828) was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short life, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works (mainly lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include the art song "Erlkönig", the Piano Trout Quintet in A major, the unfinished Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the "Great" Symphony No. 9 in C major, a String Quintet, the three last piano sonatas, the opera Fierrabras, the incidental music to the play Rosamunde, and the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. He was remarkably prolific, writing over 1,500 works in his short career. His compositional style progressed rapidly throughout his short life. The largest number of his compositions are songs for solo voice and piano (roughly 630). Schubert also composed a considerable number of secular works for two or more voices, namely part songs, choruses and cantatas. He completed eight orchestral overtures and seven complete symphonies, in addition to fragments of six others. While he composed no concertos, he did write three concertante works for violin and orchestra. Schubert wrote a large body of music for solo piano, including eleven incontrovertibly completed sonatas and at least eleven more in varying states of completion, numerous miscellaneous works and many short dances, in addition to producing a large set of works for piano four hands. He also wrote over fifty chamber works, including some fragmentary works. Schubert's sacred output includes seven masses, one oratorio and one requiem, among other mass movements and numerous smaller compositions. He completed only eleven of his twenty stage works.

"Die Vögel" (The Birds) D.691 Op. 172 No. 6, is a delightful little tune in 3/8 time, so full of inevitable Schubertian singability and charm that to question how the composer manages to spin out a melody of this kind would be like asking the birds how they fly in the heavens. The answer they would give us (if they managed to converse with us as Schlegel might have imagined) is 'Some can, and some can't!' Birds are bird-brained, and their harmonic vocabulary is not large; however, within their own parameters they are kings and, to reflect this, Schubert proves that he is king of the Ländler, as highly prized for his dance music by his toe-tapping young friends as for his Lieder. The composer has given the birds a village dance of this kind because they have all the advantages and limitations of the rural life: they are unselfconsciously beautiful creatures with little intellectual versatility; they think anyone who is not like them is stupid, in the same way the countryman pities the town-dweller, who in turn dismisses him as part of a lesser species. In their innocence, and happiness in their own environment, with a complete lack of concern for more complicated matters, the birds are both wonderfully healthy and incredibly complacent.

"Die Vögel" brings Friedrich Schlegel’s poem to life. Schlegel’s ostensible purpose in writing the Abendröte poems was to interpret the multiple voices of the natural world and of human beings at sunset (see D 690 Abendröte). However, in doing so he paid more attention to the significance of external nature for humans than for its own sake. In this, he was more similar to Wordsworth than to Coleridge (whose ‘Lyrical Ballads’ are contemporary with Schlegel’s work). Where Coleridge maintained a critical interest in the findings of modern science (particularly through his work with Humphry Davy), Wordsworth tended to consider Nature in abstract terms and primarily in how it related to humans’ spiritual life.

Schlegel’s birds are therefore strangely interested in human beings. They state that their flying about is an expression of freedom, in contrast to the earthbound tendencies of human beings to grumble in the face of difficulty. They state that their inclination to eat fruit and seed cultivated by farmers and gardeners is a form of mockery and defiance of the human desire to attack them. Any genuine ornithologist would be able to point out that birds are unlikely to see things in this human-centred way. Could there even be such a concept as ‘mockery’ in bird thought or any avian language? Birds’ singing and their flying is almost certainly less about enjoyment and freedom than basic survival (and there is plenty of evidence that flying is hard work and many birds do everything they can to avoid having to fly when it is not necessary)..

Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Schubert)

Although originally composed for Voice and Piano, I created this Interpretation of "Die Vögel" (The Birds D.691 Op. 172 No. 6) for Flute & Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).