Serenade

About this Piece

In the feverish months of 1828, Franz Schubert found himself curating the literary leftovers of Ludwig van Beethoven. Ludwig Rellstab, a poet whose verses are now charitably described by scholars as fustian drivel, had originally aimed his work at the elder master. According to the notoriously unreliable Anton Schindler, a dying Beethoven passed these poems to the nonentity Schubert, essentially delegating his musical homework. Ständchen is the resulting miracle of transformation, a work that breathes life into Rellstab’s wooden characters with a sincerity the text hardly deserves. Set in the original key of D minor, the work abandons the Mediterranean serenity its English title suggests in favor of a nervous, northern European secrecy. The word Ständchen signifies a song performed while standing upright, implying an urgent, outdoor plea rather than a relaxed evening lounge. The piano accompaniment mimics the skeletal strumming of a guitar, while the characteristic echo effect between the vocal line and the keyboard simulates the physical acoustics of a quiet grove. It is a delicious historical irony that this pillar of the Romantic repertoire was only preserved through the predatory marketing of publisher Tobias Haslinger. Haslinger bundled these Rellstab settings with the works of the vastly superior Heinrich Heine to create Schwanengesang, a posthumous cycle that Schubert never actually intended as a unified work. That such profound, timeless yearning was born from professional desperation and mediocre verse remains one of music history’s most elegant jokes.