Der Einsame, D. 800 (孤独，作品800)-Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

It so happens that Dickens wrote eloquently of the eponymous Cricket on the Hearth (1845) in one of his Christmas books and the characters in that story feel the same gratitude to the house cricket—Gryllus domesticus or acheta domestica—as the singer of this song: 'There are not, in the unseen world, voices more gentle and more true, that may be so implicitly relied on, or that are so certain to give none but the tenderest counsel, as the Voices in which the Spirits of the Fireside and the Hearth address themselves to human kind.' We find the cricket on the hearth in English literature as early as Milton's Il penseroso (one suspects that there are not many hearths today which boast of a cricket next to the kettle) and in the eighteenth century Southey wrote of a place on earth 'Where … Contentment sits and hears the cricket chirp'. This is a different species from the cicada, the rampant songsters immortalized in La Cigale by Chausson, and Chabrier's Les Cigales who 'sing better than violins'. Even Ravel's Le grillon with its more fastidious chirrupings lives outdoors and is a different type of cricket, acheta campestris. Unlike the unceasing song of massed cicadas in the summer heat, the domestic cricket chirps only from time to time; it can fall into silence, or it can suddenly begin a concerto (in Dickens's story it is the humming of the kettle which sets it off in competition).At the very beginning of the song we hear a dry little chirp on the first and third beats of the bar where both hands play together—in the left a motif of a rising fifth, tonic to dominant. This seems to imitate splendidly the sound of the scraping of one tiny forewing against the other, as left hand grates against right. There follows a gentle shudder of four semiquavers preceded by a grace note, also in the left hand, while the right hand continues with its comparatively bland mezzo staccato chords. This is no doubt meant to be a continuation or an elaboration of the cricket's song. But, as is often the case in Schubert, the motif does service for a number of ideas: the fact that it is echoed in the vocal line on the words 'erwärmten Herd' and 'Flamme hin' suggests that this is also the music of the flickering flame of the hearth, the acciaccaturas suggestive of sparks and a lick of flame. There is a delicious complicity in the way that this semiquaver figure is bounced between voice and piano.