Abend ("Wie ist es denn"), song for voice & piano, D. 645 (fragment)

• Date: 1819
• Composer: Franz Schubert
• Period: Romantic (1820-1869)

Review

Abend (Evening) (D. 645) is Schubert's only setting of a poem by Ludwig Tieck, or, rather, the only fragment of a never-completed song. Schubert set 29 lines of Tieck's 43-line poem as 119 bars of vocal melody with indications of the piano accompaniment in early 1819 before he abandoned work on the song. Why he left the song unfinished is anyone's guess, but it has been proposed by more than one scholar that the poem -- a diffuse and despairing plaint of a disappointed lover -- proved ungainly or even impossible to Schubert and he broke off after having expended little energy at the task. As it stands, Schubert's setting is itself diffuse -- it starts in 3/4, moves quickly to 2/4, then as quickly back to 3/4, to end in 3/8, and the key changes are equally prolix -- and has defied even the efforts of the nearly indefatigable Dutch musicologist Reinhard van Hoorick to complete it. ~ James Leonard, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs	2005
Schubert: The Complete Songs, Vol. 34	2000

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