Schubert's bass clef

Laboriously practising the piano part of our Schubert songs, I've been noticing how many of them are written for both hands in the bass clef, so that the accompanist has to lean over at an angle from beginning to end. You can't play these pieces with weak muscles. They constitute a full-body workout.

Some of the Schöne Müllerin songs (D795) stick entirely to the low notes for their accompaniments, Das Wandern, Wohin, and Danksagung an den Bach, for example, and Schubert must have liked that effect, for he keeps the piano down there for Die Nebensonnen in the Winterreise cycle, too.

In Schubert's D957 posthumous collection, his swan song, as they call it, it seems as if his music were acquiring darker and darker tones, the older he got.

Im Dunkel wird mir wohler sein.

Not that he was very old when he died: thirty-one, and he'd only just acquired his own piano. In der Ferne, an absolute masterpiece, goes on for over six minutes and yet (at least in the arrangement "for low voice" that we have here) only two bars of its accompaniment are in the treble clef (two little answering phrases on the penultimate page). Four other songs in that cycle—Der Atlas, most of Fischermädchen, Am Meer and Der Doppelgänger—also remain in the bottom half of the piano.

The best example of all, I think, is one I haven't yet learned to play but have tried to sing occasionally: the very slow and gentle Nacht und Träume, the deep notes of the accompaniment a lullaby, but not for babies. That one not only needs stupendous muscle control from the pianist, it also demands infinite breath control from the singer. Click here for a recording of Gerald Moore introducing and playing the accompaniment for Teresa Stich-Randall.