Fresh beginnings, rebirth, resurrection

Some weeks back, in midsummer, I sat at my worktable as night drew to an end, when sunrise broke out magnificently in my window wall (see photo #1 in my 8/25 posting “Where I live”) and filled me with joy at the gift of a new day. Also triggering an avalanche of musical associations — conveying fresh beginnings (as here), or rebirth (both of them in Schubert lieder, to come below), or (as in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, also to come below), resurrection. (There’s more, lots more; I’ll list only a tiny sampling, from the odd trio of Haydn, Grieg, and Grofé — ok, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, they’re not)) Schubert. Morning light, the glow of fresh beginnings and rebirth, was one of the obsessions of his (disastrously short) life, worked into one composition after another; he was always on the lookout for poets he could mine for their texts, and he gathered in free-spirited artistic circles with them. Just one example: Morgenlied, D. 266 “Willkommen, rotes Morgenlicht” (which you can listen…