Winterabend

Sometimes in the mornings, as Cleo writhes and wriggles on her play mat and the sun rises, or near the end of a day, as we wait for L. to get home from work, I place a CD of Schubert lieder into the CD player in the nursery, and I forward to track 11. The machine whirs briefly, and then a varied, ruminative piano motif quickly takes shape, and we hear the baritone Dietrich Fischer's Dieskau's voice from across the decades.

Entitled Der Winterabend, or The Winter Evening, the song was written in 1828, and based on an 1825 Karl Gottfried von Leitner poem that begins like this: "It is so still and secret all about me. The sun has set, the day has gone; how quickly now the evening grows grey. I like it so; the day is too loud for me. But now all is peaceful; no hammering from the blacksmith..."

While it evokes the pensive mood of dusk, though, Schubert's song isn't necessarily restrained; as John Reed wrote, in The Schubert Song Companion, "A mood of stillness and serenity can be established either by music that scarcely moves at all or by music that is constantly in motion, like a dance. In this song..., Schubert uses the second method." And the result, I'd add, is quite bewitching: a texture of melancholy and gratitude, interwoven.

Cleo dances, in her way, with her Whoozit, and I think about the advent of the coming winter, and Fischer-Dieskau sings: "How good it is to have this blessed peace."