Schubert on the guitar

"Quietly my songs plead / Through the night to you..." - the setting of Ludwig Rellstab's Serenade by Franz Schubert in the posthumously published song collection Swan song has inspired many other composers and editors to make instrumental arrangements. The version for two guitars, as now presented to us by Winterthur guitarist Jury Clormann, is also musically rich and also easy to play on the twelve strings.

The piece was part of the repertoire of Clormann and his duo partner Elisabeth Trechslin and can be listened to on Youtube be. Clormann cleverly based his arrangement not only on Schubert's original, but also on the piano version by Franz Liszt and the solo guitar version by Johann Kaspar Mertz. He adopted Liszt's small-scale fugal triplet motifs, but borrowed from Mertz in the final section with its various arpeggios. What Mertz had omitted from Schubert's musical material was added to by Clormann. All of this in the service of the romantic intimacy of Schubert's music and Rellstab's lyric: "Let your chest move too, (...) Come, make me happy!"

The sheet music edition also contains the arrangements of three short piano pieces: Minuet and Trio, a Waltz (the first of 36 original dances from op. 9 and D. 365) and a German dance and Ecossaise - all exemplary edited, with score and individual parts, but without fingerings.

Franz Schubert: Serenade, Minuet, Waltz, German Dance and Ecossaise, edited and published by Jury Clormann, first edition, BP 2883, Fr. 19.50, Amadeus, Winterthur