'But the idea of giving a woman's anguish center stage. 'Everybody thinks that lieder is something incredibly outdated and non-relevant,' he says. And if you argued that no one really cares about songs like this anymore, Johnson would tell you otherwise. 'It becomes synonymous with the whirring, the dislocation, of a young woman's discovery of her sexual vulnerability.' And that was a radical departure for German art song.īut that was 200 years ago. 'There is a feeling where we no longer care about it being the spinning wheel,' Johnson says. But Johnson says it's much more than a brilliant musical metaphor. In the right hand, you can hear the spinning of the wheel, in the left, the staccato clacking of the bobbin. The piano plays a key role of its own in the song. You can hear it sputter in the piano, finally coming back up to speed as the vocal refrain returns. Because it builds and builds and builds and then finally, with the release, it's the most powerful thing she experienced - his kiss.'Īfter the outburst, Gretchen tries to get the spinning wheel going again. 'And that's such a brilliant thing that he understood that people really want to have that moment where they just let it out.

'One of the things I like about that moment is that it's primal,' says soprano Renée Fleming, who included the song on her Schubert album. And those feelings explode with operatic intensity half-way through the song when Gretchen stops the spinning wheel cold and screams 'Sein kuss!' (His kiss!). 'The most amazing thing is that a 17-year-old boy can somehow enter into the female pysche with such an incredible amount of understanding as if he himself had experienced such feelings,' Johnson says. Over the next three minutes, Johnson says, all cylinders are firing - melody, harmony voice and piano. 'I'll never find peace again, my heart is heavy,' Gretchen sings as the song opens. And it's this intimate scene that Schubert set to music. There's a point in the story where Gretchen, alone in her room, has a freakout moment over her new boyfriend, Faust, as she spins yarn. The story Schubert read was Goethe's Faust - the one where the guy sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a swinging lifestyle which of course includes a girl, Gretchen. 'There is a real distinct feeling of Schubert blown away by the drama and the story he has read,' Johnson says.

Songs by franz schubert