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In antique myth, swans—those most beautiful of birds—sing their only song just before dying, and their last utterance is of unearthly beauty. Two of many who made use of this symbolic lore to hymn the final achievements of great artists were the Viennese publisher Tobias Haslinger and Ferdinand Schubert, Franz Schubert’s older brother, in whose cramped apartment in the house dubbed “Zur Stadt Ronsperg” Schubert died on 19 November 1828. On 17 December 1828, Ferdinand sold a manuscript containing seven songs on texts by Ludwig Rellstab and six on texts by Heinrich Heine, as well as the manuscripts of the last three piano sonatas, to Haslinger for some 500 florins; an unrelated song, “Die Taubenpost,” dated “October 1828,” was sold to the same publisher shortly thereafter. The day following the sale, on 18 December 1828, Haslinger published an announcement in the Wiener Zeitung to say that he “had purchased as his legal property Franz Schubert’s last compositions for voice and piano from the estate of the recently deceased, incomparable composer,” fourteen songs in all. On 31 January 1829, he announced in the same periodical the impending appearance of the Schwanen-Gesang: “Under the above title are offered to the numerous friends of the composer’s classic muse, the last blossoms of his noble spirit. These are the compositions he wrote in August 1828, shortly before he left this world, works which proclaim in the most definitive manner the consummate nature of his mastery.”

                                                                                  —from Susan Youens’ liner notes

Van Egmond and Slowik at the Smithsonian’s ca. 1830 Graf fortepiano

Lyrics to “Der Doppelgänger”