Schubert - Heidenröslein

By David Govertsen

Many of you commented on how much you enjoyed my valentine serenade of ‘Plaisir d’amour’ on guitar.  I thoroughly enjoyed putting that together, so I have been cooking up a few other similar projects.  A number of Schubert songs came to mind that might be possible to adapt for guitar, and with spring upon us I thought ‘Heidenröslein’, a song about a little rose, might be the perfect choice. 

Photo by Biel Morro on Unsplash

Composed on August 19, 1815 (a day on which Schubert also set four other poems of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to music), ‘Heidenröslein’ tells the story of a boy who encounters a beautiful rose which he decides to pick, despite the little rose’s warning that she will prick him if he does so.  The metaphor is difficult to miss; the little rose that the boy spies represents a young girl, and the boy feels the sting of thorns as he attempts to court her.  In fact Goethe’s poem has inspired numerous illustrations over the years, and nearly all of them feature an eager young man inquiring after a demure young woman, with a field of roses essentially incidental to the scene.

Perhaps the thing that I most enjoy about ‘Heidenröslein’ is that it offers the singer a chance to portray multiple characters in the space of just a few lines of text and music.  The narrator sets the scene, the boy makes his move, the rose strikes back, and the refrain seems to comment on the action after each verse: ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden.’  Of course the music ties it all together, and Schubert in his usual way has managed to create a song that is simple like a folksong and yet full of variety and color.  Although the musical material is identical each time, the instrumental coda that follows each strophe is somehow able to capture three different moods; from the excitement of seeing the rose in the beginning, to the admonishing tone of the rose in the middle, to the inevitable moral of the story at the end. 

The alternating bass line and chord structure of this song seemed a natural fit for the guitar idiom, and my fingers got a bit of a workout on the instrumental interludes after each verse.  I hope you enjoy my six-stringed version of this classic Schubert song!

Author

Bass-baritone David Govertsen joined Fourth Coast Ensemble in 2017.  He has been active as a professional singer and educator for nearly twenty years, portraying a wide variety of opera’s low-voiced heroes, villains, and buffoons.  He discovered Schubert’s magical marriage of text and music as an undergraduate and has been hooked on art song ever since.