Schwanengesang at Nationaltheater Mannheim

»It moans, it sings bemoaning its fate, protesting loud, until its life is ended. That is its swan song!«

This is how it is described by Johann Chysostomus Senn in his poem by the same name. In northern mythology the swan is considered a wise animal, that raises its voice in song when it dies. Franz Schubert’s publisher Tobias Haslinger wanted to remember this myth when he published a song collection with the title Swan Song choosing fourteen songs written in 1828, the year Schubert died. The songs based on poems Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine and Johann Gabriel Seidl do not constitute a connected cycle. They are much more like loosely connected profiles that tell stories about not only about love and desire, but also loss and loneliness.

There is no other composer with whom one connects with the genre of Lieder than Franz Schubert. Handed down to us are over six hundred songs which are compositional realizations of the underlying poems. In order to accomodate widening expressive possibilities, they expand the genre’s boundaries and its tonalites. The piano part is no longer a subordinate accompanist but rather an independant partner. Similar to a stage partner that reacts to the lyric self, meeting him in agreement, with scepticism, or neutrally.