More than two hundred years ago, a 17-year-old kid from Vienna wrote a song that would change the way composers thought about songwriting. That young man was Franz Schubert, and his song “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel) put German art song on the map. The song’s dramatic punch and bold innovations still reverberate today.
Schubert had read Goethe’s story ‘Faust’— the one where the guy sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a swinging lifestyle which of course includes a girl, Gretchen. There’s a point in the story where Gretchen, alone in her room, has an amazing moment over her new boyfriend, Faust, as she spins yarn. And it’s this intimate scene that Schubert set to music.
The composer was able to identify with the lonely feelings which explode with operatic intensity half-way through the song when Gretchen stops the spinning wheel cold, and she screams “Sein kuss!” (His kiss!).
Years later, long after Schubert died, the composer Franz Liszt arranged this dramatic song for piano solo. One can hear both the girl (the singer), as well as the piano accompaniment and the rhythmic sound of the wheel in this marvelous arrangement, played for us so beautifully by pianist Yuja Wang:
