Schubert: Frühlingsglaube ("Die Linden Lüfte"), song for voice & piano (3 versions), D. 686 (Op. 20/2)

Franz Schubert set just one of influential early Romantic poet Ludwig Uhland's works to music; Frühlingsglaube, D. 686, however, became one of Schubert's most dearly beloved songs . No fewer than four separate versions of the song exist, three in B flat major and dated 1820 (one of which was only recently discovered), the other in A flat major and dated 1822. It was the 1822 incarnation of the song that the publishing firm of Sauer and Leidesdorf put to print in 1823 as Op. 20, No. 2.
Uhland's poem Spring Faith celebrates spring and the necessary and unavoidable rebirth that it brings with it each year. Schubert sets both of its stanzas to the same flowing, Mässig (moderato) musical strophe. The accompaniment left hand rustles with gentle sextuplets, the right-hand with dotted rhythms that clash deliciously with the sextuplets. The singer's tune is at first a limber reweave of the piano introduction; in the second half of the musical strophe there is a bit of written-out ornamentation (differently executed in the different versions of the song) and just a hint of departure from the B flat (or A flat) major whose ground is heard through the song.
The four versions of the song display some interesting metric and rhythmic differences. Schubert at first began the song in the middle of the bar, but with the third B flat version, shifted the beginning over to the downbeat and adapted the music a few bars later to compensate. Some of the dotted rhythms in the first version are smoothed out in the second version (they are in fact smoothed out by the second strophe of the first version, indicating that Schubert had, during the composition of the first version, already changed his mind about them). In the fourth (A flat) version -- which was the only version published until the 1970s and so remains more or less the standard -- the empo indication is iemlich langsam (rather slow) rather than Mässig. ~ Blair Johnston, All Music Guide