Poems Set to Music by Schubert

Franz Schubert is among the Western musicians who are very famous with us, for he is the composer of the Unfinished Symphony, which the cinema houses of Beirut have presented more than once, and which a great elite of the lovers of fine music has come to cherish. This evening we shall present from him a kind different from all the kinds we have presented before, yet more familiar to us than all of them, because it resembles what we call the setting of poems to music — which is very nearly all that our own music confines itself to. Schubert chose brief poetic pieces by more than a hundred poets, among them — of those we shall hear this evening — Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller. And he showed such art in creating melody for these pieces that we sometimes see him joining three or four of them in a single melody, while still marking the particular atmosphere of each poem; and at other times we see him giving each piece a melody of its own, linking one with another in a magical way. It is related of this mighty musician that he could create a melody in less than an hour, under the influence of an inspiration that came near to prophecy. And strangest of all, he could at times hold the balance between freedom in creating the melody and fidelity to the poetic meanings and images to a degree past believing — as though the poem and the melody had come down from a single window of inspiration, so that they could not be otherwise than as Schubert willed them. This shows itself with clear distinctness in the last excerpt we shall hear this evening, the one known as the Sérénade.