As all veteran serenaders know, the enterprise comes with no guarantee of success

Serenade by Judith Leyster (1609-1660), in the Rijksmuseum

Let's see how these randomly chosen serenaders make out --
and how they handle, er, lack of response (oops, spoiler!)

Brigitte Fassbaender, mezzo-soprano; with women of the Bavarian State Opera Chorus, Munich; Erik Werba, piano. EMI, recorded in the Bürgerbräu, Munich, June 18-20, 1973

Sarah Walker, mezzo-soprano; with male vocal ensemble (6 tenors, 5 baritones and basses); Graham Johnson, piano. From Vol. 8 of the Hyperion Schubert Edition, recorded May 29-31, 1989

Peter Schreier, tenor; András Schiff, piano. Decca, recorded in the Mozartsaal of the Vienna Konzerthaus, August 1989

Håkan Hagegård, baritone; Emanuel Ax, piano. RCA, recorded in RCA Studio A, New York City, Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 1984

Matthias Goerne, baritone; Alfred Brendel, piano. Decca, recorded live in Wigmore Hall, Nov. 5 & 7, 2003

by Ken

To recapitulate: We have slid through a wormhole into the world of Schubert's serenades. We came by way of matters larkish -- originally my fondly remembered old trio of larks: Haydn's Lark Quartet (Op. 64, No. 5), Nicolai's setting of Shakespeare's "Hark, hark, the lark" in Act II of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Vaughan Williams's "rhapsody for violin and orchstra The Lark Ascending. (The relevant posts are "Just so you know what we're up to: Three familiar larks, a bonus lark, and (oh yes!) Death and a maiden," Oct. 16, and "If we're musical-lark-harking, we really need to count the number of: (1) 'hark's and (2) stanzas ['finally' (?) updated version]," Nov. 21.


THEN I REMEMBERED THAT SCHUBERT
TOO HAD SET "HARK, HARK, THE LARK"

From the Loose Ends Dept.:Yet another Schubert serenade

TEMPORARY POST, I think (so that, with this chunk of music "ready," I can hear it in this form -- and I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to too)

FRIDAY UPDATE: We've added a performance each for D. 920 and D. 921 -- featuring big-time talent: Janet Baker and Christa Ludwig

Brigitte Fassbaender (born 1939): Listen to either of her performances of the serenade "Zögernd leise" (she recorded both of Schubert's versions) and see if you don't feel you've been in the presence of a great singer.

❡

What we'll be doing, as best I can scope it out at present, is rehearing "the" Schubert Serenade, "Leise flehen" (you know, the one from the song collection Schubert had done so much work on without putting it in final form, published posthumously as Schwanengesang, or "Swan Song"; maybe in some performances we haven't heard?) and "the other" Schubert Serenade (the "Hark, hark, the lark" setting that got us into this whole territory) along with this utterly captivating "newcomer," of which we have these four quite different but pretty wonderful peformances (just note, in the piano introd, as dramatic and grabbing as it is brief, how differently our four pianists hear it, setting such interestingly different tones for the performances to come), and we may want to fill some of the gaps we've left from these staggeringly productive last couple of years of Schubert's life.

Example: The earliest of the three serenades, "Horch, horch, die Lerch' im Ätheblau," D. 889, was written days after he finished what would be his last string quartet, No. 15 in G major, D. 887 (though the sublime String Quintet was still to come), and especially considering the overpowering need Schubert felt near the very end -- as Graham Johnson laid it out for us -- to hear Beethoven's Op. 131 Quartet (which friends managed to arrange for him to hear, and we heard it too), which tells us so much about where his head was musically at this point, I'm thinking maybe we should hear not just the G major Quartet but its predecessor, No. 14, the Death and the Maiden Quartet (an imposing work in its own right, but still a leap behind the G major), and the String Quintet as well. Meanwhile . . . . -- Ken

SCHUBERT: Ständchen, "Zögernd leise, in des Dunkels nächt'ger Stille" ("Lingering quietly, in the dark's nighttime stillness"), 1st and 2nd versions, D. 920 and 921