Ex. 13-3: Die Mondnacht

Die Mondnacht (The Moonlit Night) is a song Schubert wrote on 25 July 1815, when he was 18. At that time he was teaching the youngest children at his father's school, and he hated the work. Still, in that one year he wrote about 140 songs. This song was not printed in his lifetime. It came out only in 1894, in the first complete edition of his works.

The poem is by Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten (1758–1818), a poet and a pastor on the island of Rügen, in the Baltic Sea. In the fishing season the men who caught fish could not come to church, so he went to them and spoke to them in the open air, on the cliffs by the sea.

Schubert set more than twenty of Kosegarten's poems to music, almost all of them in 1815. He wrote seven of these songs in a single day, 19 October.

In the poem, the moon shines silver on the fields, the stream and the trees. The poet longs for someone who will love him. In the last verse he finds her, and in his joy "heaven and earth disappear."

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