This is the tenth and latest volume in Bärenreiter's excellent Urtext series of Franz Schubert's Lieder, with its striking goldenrod-coloured covers that make for an easily spottable section of a library shelf.Footnote 1 The editions themselves are drawn from the Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke (New Edition of the Collected Works), edited by the late Walther Dürr (1932–2018), re-placed here into compendia mainly for the use of performers who want to present historically informed renditions of the songs. The tenth volume includes the songs Schubert wrote between September 1816 and August 1817 that he did not publish in his lifetime, drawn from volumes 10 and 11 of the Collected Works (series IV).Footnote 2 The volume is available in three versions, for high, medium and low voice; I consulted the medium voice edition (which I, as a high baritone, would most likely sing from). Aside from the transpositions of some songs, the notes appear exactly as they do in the Collected Works. The typesetting is slightly larger here than in the original, for ease of performing, so that a song that takes two packed pages in the Collected Works might be more comfortably spread out on three in the Urtext edition.
The score includes a short prefatory note by tenor Christophe Prégardien and keyboardist Andreas Staier, attesting to its performance bona fides; a detailed preface compiled from Dürr's notes on the songs by Wolfgang Thein that contextualizes the songs in this period of Schubert's life and gives a few critical notes for each one; a note about early nineteenth-century keyboards by Matthew Gardner (these all both in German and in English translation by Margaret Hiley); the German texts of the songs with English translations by Richard Wigmore; and an index of the entire edition so far.
The edition in its three versions for different voice types is user friendly, especially with the clear and well-sized musical typesetting, the accurate translations, and the notes in the preface. It allows performers to have more or less musicological context depending on their desires, as they can go directly to the scores, which have only occasional notes and variants on their pages, or to the material in the preface for more options and background. Of course, the critical apparatus is not nearly as extensive as in the Collected Works; these compendia should not replace it, nor are they intended to. The apparatus in the collected works being only in German, however, the fact that the new compendia include some highlights in English will be useful to musicologists who do not read German, or who are only starting to study it, as a way into tackling the full version. Sometimes the highlights don't seem fully thought through, however; a critical note for ‘Abschied’ (D. 475) says that ‘the copy in Anton Schindler's songbook contains minor variants; they probably serve only to avoid the low b′ (xx), but to see what those variants actually are, one has to consult the Collected Works. While we do not know whether those variants came from Schubert or were added by Schindler, singers might like to see them if they find the low b uncomfortable.
‘Abschied’ is given in its original B minor in the middle-voice edition, that being a comfortable baritone or mezzo-soprano key, but that note would be confusing in the transposed high- or low-voice editions since it would no longer be a notated low b. There is not room here to go into the question of transposing Schubert, but I would have liked to see some information about this in Gardner's note about keyboards; if using historical (especially historically tuned) instruments, the effect of transposing, say, ‘Liedesend’ D. 473 (the first song in this collection, given here in Schubert's second version) from its original C minor to the B-flat minor version given in the medium-voice book would be extreme. Also, the visual effect of the profusion of B double-flats when Schubert modulates there (the flat submediant of the relative major!) during the song's first verse is psychologically very different from the tidier-looking C-flat major in the original. Something that for Schubert was a bit unusual now looks quite outrageous. Then the next verse, here in C major, loses the military key connotation of its original D major (it's about a ‘Siegessang’, victory song). The new key signatures and accidentals in this transposition make Schubert's extraordinarily modulations in this song seem rather unhinged. A short comment with some guidance for students who might not be aware of the history of temperament or of Schubert's careful choices of key would have been welcome in a pedagogically oriented edition like this one.
The rough chronological arrangement of songs in this series (going by Deutsch number) allows for interesting juxtapositions and lets the reader have a micro-level view of Schubert's developing style and tastes. The collection begins with two relatively little-heard multi-sectional narrative songs, ‘Liedesend’ and ‘Lied des Orpheus als er in die Hölle ging’. These are followed by the more frequently performed ‘Abschied’ (D. 475), one of Schubert's simple but highly expressive slow songs, supposedly based on a pilgrim song. Several more straightforward strophic songs come next. When strophic songs have many verses, the music is re-written with new underlay so as not to clutter the page (for example, ‘Ferne von der großen Stadt’, which has eight verses, is written out twice with four verses under each vocal line). When songs exist in multiple versions, only one is chosen (other than when the settings of a text are completely different, as with ‘Zufriedenheit’, D. 362 and 501, and ‘Fischerlied’, D. 351 and 562). It is not explained in the critical apparatus why one version was chosen over another. As with the full critical notes, the alternate versions all exist in the Collected Works so performers can consult it if they like, but it would have been useful to print other complete versions in this edition as well.
The English translations given are the now-standard ones by Richard Wigmore (as they appeared in his 1988 Schubert: The Complete Song Texts rather than the revised versions in Graham Johnson's magisterial encyclopaedia Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs).Footnote 3 The translations are sensitive yet clear, and they give a good idea of the poets’ meanings for non-German speaking performers. I would have liked more than just a paragraph in the introduction on the poets, especially Johann Mayrhofer, given how many of his texts Schubert set in 1816–17. The other poets represented in the volume are dismissed simply as ‘“sentimental” poets popular at the time’ (xvii). Despite the welcome presence of the properly lineated texts and translations, this is very much a composer-centred edition, and therefore feels somewhat out of date considering the shift in musicological attitudes over the last 30 years towards the poets, exemplified by work by scholars such as Susan Youens and Lorraine Bodley.Footnote 4
But these are minor quibbles about this edition, of which the pedagogical potential is high both for performers and for students in theory and analysis courses (as long as the latter are careful to use the non-transposed versions). Volume 10 of the series offers mostly relatively little-known songs, therefore lending performers and scholars alike the chance to discover some new repertoire. This and the other volumes in the series would be welcome on the shelf of any voice teacher, collaborative pianist, singer, or music library.
