But there are so many subtleties to it: the opening line's arching rise and aching fall through the tonic minor chord, the central phrase's yearning leaps to the minor sixth of the dominant, the closing line's supple turns around the tonic. Like most of Schubert's greatest melodies, it only seems sublime in its apparent simplicity. To start with, of course, there is the melody. Rescuing the song from its interpreters requires seeing the song for what it really is and not what decades of sentimentality have turned it into. In far too many contemporary interpretations of the song, Ständchen becomes a tear-jerking piece of sentimental puffery, a lonely swain singing of his love into the night breezes, rather than the altogether more sublte piece of sweet melancholy it is. However, its fame has all but cost the song its identity. Nevertheless Ständchen is still the most famous serenade in the world. After Lilac Time, Ständchen showed up everywhere in all sorts of arrangements: as background music, as a popular song and, perhaps most memorably, in a klezmer version. Of course, that time was after Schubert had been popularized (and sanitized) by the film Lilac Time, a film in which Richard Tauber played the composer as a jovial fat man whose most salient characteristic was his infinite sentimentality and in which Ständchen became the theme song and leitmotif of the film. There was a time when this Ständchen (Serenade) was the most famous serenade in the world.
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