Gretchen am Spinnrade

Franz Schubert

For tenor sax and piano

Written in G major, range F♯4 to B5

Gretchen, a young woman in Goethe’s play Faust, sits at her spinning wheel and can’t stop thinking about Faust, the man she has fallen in love with: “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy.” The piano plays the whirring wheel; when she remembers his kiss, it stops, then slowly starts again. Schubert wrote it in 1814, at seventeen.

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