wasn't it a bit more than an 'intimation' of mortality in Schubert's case? It's ages since I've read them but isn't it possible to read some of his letters as hinting that he knew pretty well what was coming?
He certainly did. Rather famous letter to Leopold Kupelweiser, 1824:
In a word, I feel myself the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair over this ever makes things worse and worse, instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom the happiness of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain, at best, whose enthusiasm (at least of the stimulating kind) for all things beautiful threatens to disappear, and I ask you, is he not a miserable unhappy being?—“My peace is gone, my heart is sore, I shall find it never and nevermore”. I may well sing every day now, for each night, I go to bed hoping never to wake again, and each morning only tells me of yesterday’s grief. I see a reasonably clear reflection of that in the music but not in the sense of it somehow demanding slow tempi (is that how people looking at death in the face see the world anyway? I wouldn't know but I can see a firm case for the opposite). To me it's in the pieces like the late piano sonatas and the last symphony that don't want to end. Or in
Winterreise: I'm not personally convinced by performances which milk
Der Leiermann for all it's worth; for my money he wrote all the pathos out of it. I remember many years ago singing it through with a pianist and being (wet behind the ears as I was) startled by the fast tempo he took for the opening. But rather than do the old singer thing of imposing my own tempo I gave it a go and we continued in a moderate and absolutely fixed tempo. Which has been how I've seen it ever since: there's no rhetoric in the music as far as I'm concerned, any more than there is in the playing of the kind of street musician who's the Leiermann's archetype.
Couldn't agree more with all that. If the 'heart on sleeve' expressivity comes anywhere, it's surely in
Die Nebensonnen, after which
Der Leiermann is some type of bleak, hopeless, numb epilogue (to my mind its sense of emptiness is slightly foreshadowed by the silences in
Im Dorfe). The situation is even more complex in
Die schöne Müllerin, where I hear an emotional (in the sense of explicitly emotional) apotheosis in
Tränenregen and then, cruelly, in
Mein!. Then a long disintegration towards the nirvana through death in
Des Baches Wiegenlied. Actually, I find, in a psychological sense,
Winterreise to be more straightforward in some ways, because it plays much less with the presentation genuine innocence (even in
Die Post, which comes the closest), which continually re-emerges then is dashed in
Müllerin. In
Winterreise I hear a clear sense of self-foreboding and awareness from the outset, which rarely diminishes; in this sense it is less obviously a tragedy (which
Müllerin certainly is) as a meditation from the perspective of suffering.
