*The Complete Songs

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)-The Complete Songs-Graham Johnson (piano)

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Der Erlkönig

Nacht und Träume

Ich wollt, ich wär ein Fisch

Gute Nacht

Licht und Liebe

Gretchen am Spinnrade

It took Franz Schubert eighteen years (1810–1828) to write his lieder. It has taken Hyperion Records exactly the same amount of time (1987–2005) to record all the songs, to issue them on thirty-seven separate discs (with over sixty solo singers), and now to re-issue the vocal music with piano in an edition remastered in the order of their composition. Otto Erich Deutsch established a chronology in his catalogue (1951); this was superseded by a posthumous second edition (1978) that re-dated many compositions while retaining Deutsch’s numerical sequence. This catalogue is now in itself out of date. Despite advances in Schubertian scholarship (paper tests and so on) work-order is a problem that will neither be solved entirely nor to everyone’s satisfaction. (Putting the songs in alphabetical order by title, as in John Reed’s indispensable Schubert Song Companion, is a solution that is not possible on disc.) Some of the compositions’ dates are very precise (day, month and year), but sometimes only a month is known (which year?) or a year (which month?), and autographs are sometimes undated. Nevertheless, this is the first time in the history of the gramophone that the entire body of Schubert songs has been available to the listener in a chronological sequence. Included with the lieder are all the vocal quartets and other part songs with piano – indeed a more accurate description of the set would be The Complete Vocal Music with Piano, although even this does not take into account a number of unaccompanied items that were included because they throw light on the accompanied settings of the same poem. There are forty discs in this new collection; thirty-seven of these feature the material already issued, and an extra three, more recently recorded, offer music by Schubert’s friends and contemporaries. Some of these are songs he knew, music that inspired him; others are songs (often to texts which Schubert was later to set, or had already set) created by people whose lives in one way or another touched his own – even if at a distance. Every composer on these three supplementary discs was working during some part of Schubert’s lifetime.