Ex. 13-3: Die Mondnacht

Composed on 25 July 1815, to a poem by Ludwig Kosegarten. The song is in F-sharp major. The poem describes a moonlit night — silver light on the leaves, the water, and the hills — that slowly grows into longing, until "heaven and earth disappear."

Schubert was eighteen, working as an assistant teacher at his father's school — a job he disliked. Even so, 1815 was one of his most productive years — he wrote around 140 songs, plus symphonies and stage works. Another of his 1815 songs is also in this app. (Ex. 10-3: Jägers Abendlied by Franz Schubert)

This is one of about twenty songs Schubert wrote to Kosegarten's poems within a few weeks in July 1815.

The best-known "Mondnacht" is Robert Schumann's, from 1840 — but that is a different poem, by Eichendorff. By coincidence, both are built on the note F-sharp — Schubert's in the major, Schumann's in the minor — twenty-five years apart.

Schubert was very short-sighted and wore his glasses almost all the time. Legend even says he slept in them, so he could start composing the moment he woke.

The song was long overlooked, partly because it was left out of the standard edition of Schubert's songs — though the scholar Graham Johnson praises it as unusually bold for such an early work.

From the album Schubert: Lied Edition 22 – Poets of Sensibility, Vol. 5 by Lydia Teuscher and Ulrich Eisenlohr (2006)
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