Schubert: Die junge Nonne, D828

The Lied is at the heart of Schubert’s output. Throughout his short life, and right up to the weeks immediately before his death, he took a keen interest in every aspect of this genre, which constituted the most intimate expression of the German psyche, of which Schubert was from very early on well placed to act as a vehicle for its sentiments and its torments (love, friendship, pain, loneliness), ranging widely across its joys and its sorrows in all their subtle shadings. Schubert composed quickly, occasionally writing as many as nine or ten Lieder in a single day, with a prodigious fluency that won the admiration of Schumann.

A born song-writer, he loved to perform his own Lieder, accompanying himself on the piano; he admitted that he could get carried away by singing for hours on end. In Schubert’s songs, the voice is always the focus of attention, while the piano accompaniment provides a psychological backdrop. Less discriminating in his choice of poems than Schumann or Wolf, Schubert was more interested in verbal colouring and the emotional content of a text than in its literary value, and although his some six hundred Lieder are in a wide range of forms – from simple strophic songs to dramatic scenas – they are still characterised by their exceptional simplicity, freshness and spontaneity of utterance.

The pieces selected for this recording mark out the milestones of a brief, rich and critically important career as a song composer, ranging in time from 1814 to 1826.Alongside the classic Schubert themes found here, such as deliverance and night, death, flight from the world and hope, we also encounter poets who were more than merely fixed stars in the composer's cosmos, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the writer he most often set, and Johann Baptist Mayrhofer.We can hear for ourselves a captivating, evocative musical language. It speaks of the constant struggle of an individual, his bitterness, his longing, and his desire for deliverance. Yet, however deeply Schubert bathed in this Romantic current, throughout his life art remained for him the only key that might perhaps lead to a 'better world'.And so, in 1817, he took up a text by his friend Franz von Schober to compose an ode to the all-placating 'blessed art' in An die Musik D547: music, which for Schubert, as he wrote to Schober in 1818, was nothing less than 'my beloved'. Bernarda Fink, has sung in numerous opera productions and has made over fifty recordings with a repertoire ranging from Monteverdi to Brahms and Bruckner, many for harmonia mundi and with René Jacobs. She has been flatteringly referred to as the natural successor to the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and to both [the living] Brigitte Fassbaender and Dame Janet Baker. Gerold Huber studied with Friedemann Berger and Helmut Deutsch in Munich, then attended Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's lied class in Berlin. In addition to his regular appearances with Christian Gerhaher, he also performs with Ruth Ziesak, Cornelia Kallisch, Diana Damrau and Franz-Josef Selig and has also performed with the Artemis Quartet.