No sketches, no delay, no anxious period of
preparation, no revision appear to have been necessary. He had but to
read the poem, to surrender himself to the torrent, and to put down
what was given him to say, as it rushed through his mind."
Schubert was the most omnivorous song composer that ever lived. He
could hardly see a poem--good, bad, or indifferent, without being at
once seized by a passionate desire to set it to music. He sometimes
wrote half a dozen or more songs in one day, and some of them
originated under the most peculiar circumstances. The serenade, "Hark,
hark, the lark," for instance, was written in a beer garden. Schubert
had picked up a volume of Shakespeare accidentally lying on the
table. Presently he exclaimed, "Such a lovely melody has come into my
head, if I only had some paper." One of his friends drew a few staves
on the back of a bill of fare, and on this Schubert wrote his
entrancing song. "The Wanderer," so full of original details, was
written in one evening, and when he composed his "Rastlose Liebe,"
"the paroxysm of inspiration," as Grove remarks, "was so fierce that
Schubert never forgot it, but, reticent as he often was, talked of it
years afterward.
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