Birds - The Nightingale

'An die Nachtigall'/'To The Nightingale'  

- Franz Schubert

With fewer cars on the road, you might have noticed sounds that you rarely heard before: birdsong, for example, seems so much more abundant than it might have done previously. There are many composers who have had a fascination with birdsong, especially Olivier Messiaen (in this video he deconstructs the song of nightingale and other birds). 

Listen to Franz Schubert's short, but incredibly beautiful song 'To The Nightingale', An die Nachtigall performed by Renée Fleming. (Spotify)

Poem by Matthias Claudius (German):

Er liegt und schläft an meinem Herzen,
Mein guter Schutzgeist sang ihn ein;
Und ich kann fröhlich sein und scherzen,
Kann jeder Blum' und jedes Blatts mich freun.
Nachtigall, ach! Nachtigall, ach!
Sing mir den Amor nicht wach!

English translation © Richard Wigmore:

He lies sleeping upon my heart;
my kind tutelary (protective) spirit sang him to sleep. 
And I can be merry and jest,
delight in every flower and leaf. 
Nightingale, ah, nightingale,
do not awaken my love with your singing!

Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828)

Born in Vienna, Austria, Franz Schubert's life fits the cinema's ideal of the musical genius living in poverty whose music is heard only by a few during his lifetime, and who dies tragically young and almost unknown. Schubert wrote more than 600 songs during his lifetime and although he wrote much chamber music and a number of symphonies, it was in his songs where we was in a class of his own. With him, melody, however striking, was of lesser importance to the text, while the accompanying piano part, when considered independently of both, was a thing of beauty in its own right. 

Information taken from Jeremy Nicholas, The Great Composers