Die Nonne (The Nun) - Ludwig Hölty

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Die Nonne - Ludwig Hölty, June 1815

Hölty's exercise in the macabre is remarkable for its early date. Schubert's setting now seems no more than an interesting curiosity. It begins well, as though telling a story (the marking is Erzählend, but the horrors are faintly comic: when, for example, the nun stamps the heart of her faithless lover under foot, Schubert obliges with a series of sforzando descending chords. The last three verses are set to a 6/8 tune in F minor, ballad style.
Source: The Schubert Song Companion, John Reed

[Synopsis]
Once long ago in Italy a fair young nun, Belinda, was wooed ardently by a knight. He swore 'by image of the Virgin, and by her Jesus child' that he would love her until death. Beguiled, she renounced her vows, risking eternal damnation to become his paramour. She left cell and clouster, only to discover that man is fickle. Tiring of his lover, he pursued a life of pleasure with other women, drinking and roistering and boasting of his conquests.

At last the nun, her Latin temperament inflamed, began to think of nothing but revenge, and she hired a band of assassins to murder him. His black soul departed to hell and his bleeding body was thrown into a vault. At nightfall the nun fled to the village chapel, taking the body of the dead knight with her, cut out his false heart and trampled it under foot.

Legend has it that her ghost, in its blood-stained shroud, rises from the grave at midnight, weeping and wailing and carrying a bleeding heart, which she raises three times to heaven, then dashes to the ground. At daybreak, when the cock crows, she vanishes.

The village watchman has often seen her as she shakes the blood from her veil and rolls her eyes in rage.