Heimweh: Schubert Lieder

“No one,” Franz Schubert once confided in his journal, “no one understands other people’s pain, and no one understands other people’s joy! People always believe they’re coming together, but they’re merely walking side-by-side. Oh, what anguish for those who realize it!” The torture of being an outsider; inner restlessness; the search for happiness, security, home — all major themes in Schubert’s life as well as forces driving his artistic work. With the lieder on this album, Anna Lucia Richter explores different facets of Heimweh (homesickness) in Schubert’s works.

Mignon, the mysterious girl in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, sparked Schubert’s imagination again and again with her longing for warmth and homeland, her insatiable thirst for the absolute. In Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, Ellen yearns for protection, peace of mind, and security — and Schubert’s music underscores how impossible these very things are to find in times of war. In one of Schubert’s darkest songs, the gravedigger questions the meaning of human existence; the Shepherd on the Rock wanders through nature in an effort to overcome his loneliness; and the dwarf pines for the Queen, agonizing over the taboo of loving her. Nowhere is pain more beautiful than in music — especially in the music of Schubert, who, as his contemporary Heinrich Heine would say, makes our “hearts bleed most pleasantly.”