Schwanengesang (Swan Song), D 957, is a set of 14 songs composed by Franz Schubert near the end of his life. These songs were published after his death.

The original handwritten version of this collection is kept at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Background

The song cycle Schwanengesang was named by its first publisher, Tobias Haslinger, who probably wanted to present it as Franz Schubert's final work. Unlike earlier song cycles such as Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, Schwanengesang includes songs based on poems from different writers. Seven poems by Ludwig Rellstab (1799–1860) are followed by six poems by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856). The final song, based on a poem by Johann Gabriel Seidl (1804–1875), may or may not have been included according to Schubert's wishes. All 14 songs were composed in 1828, and the collection was published in 1829, a few months after Schubert's death.

Composition and publication

The Rellstab and Heine settings were written in one session on consecutive pages of the manuscript in Schubert's handwriting. Seidl's "Die Taubenpost" is considered Schubert's final Lied, forming the basis for Haslinger's sequence, which people over time have accepted along with the belief that a cycle exists. (The true cycles "Die schöne Müllerin" and "Die Winterreise" sold well, encouraging the publisher.) The title "Schwanengesang" was not chosen by Schubert, but all the song titles were; Heine, for example, did not name his poems.

On 2 October 1828, after the manuscript was completed, Schubert offered the Heine set of six songs to a Leipzig publisher named Probst. This suggests Schubert initially intended to create two separate collections of songs by a single poet. Additionally, the order of songs numbered 8–13 in the manuscript differs from the order Heine published them: 10, 12, 11, 13, 9, 8. These numbers were not in a continuous sequence, as shown in the table below. It was common for Schubert to follow the poet's chosen order; the manuscript may not reflect Schubert's intended arrangement. The Seidl song, "Die Taubenpost," is unrelated to the rest of the cycle and was added by Haslinger at the end to complete a collection of Schubert's final works.

AnotherSchwanengesang

At the start of his career, Schubert set to music a single poem titled Schwanengesang, his work D 744, by Johann Senn.

Liszt transcriptions

Franz Liszt later wrote down the entire set for solo piano. He kept the original music by Schubert mostly the same but changed how the piano sounded to share his own ideas about the text and music. Liszt reordered the songs in this order: 11, 10, 5, 12, 7, 6, 4, 9, 3, 1, 8, 13, 14, and 2.