Schwanengesang & Quintette à cordes

Description

Here are two works that Schubert composed at the very end of his short life. Schwanengesang (The Swan Song) was written in Vienna in the autumn of 1828. He passed away on November 19 at the age of 31, and it is said that Die Taubenpost (The Carrier Pigeon), which concludes the collection, is his very last composition. Alternately light, dark, and melancholic, these fourteen Lieder were written to poems by Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine, and Johann Gabriel Seidl. It was during the summer of the same year that he composed his String Quintet in C major, known as the "Quintet with Two Cellos," which was premiered in 1850 at the Musikverein in Vienna. The strength and orchestral dimension of the work make it a pinnacle of 19th-century chamber music. One could not dream of better instrumentalists and singer to record these two masterpieces by Schubert. Fanny Mendelssohn's Schwanenlied (also by Heinrich Heine) completes the program, along with Felix Mendelssohn's Nocturne No. 1 for piano, composed a year after Schubert's death, and an earlier version of Schwanengesang (D744) composed by Schubert, this time to a poem by Johann Senn.