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Hugo Wolf (1860–1903)
Goethe Lieder –
Frühling übers Jahr
Gleich und gleich
Die Spröde
Die Bekehrte
Anakreons Grab
After his youthful outpouring of
songs between 1878 and 1883,
Hugo Wolf experienced long
bouts of creative torpor. These
were the years when he earned his
living primarily as Vienna’s most
barbed music critic, indulging,
inter alia, in his fanatical hatred
of Brahms’s music. It was only in
February 1888 that the floodgates
opened. As Wolf wryly put it:
‘Eventually, after much groping
around, the button came undone.’
The upshot was the 53 songs of
the Mörike Songbook, composed
in two torrential bursts that year.
A letter to his friend Edmund
Lang gives an idea of the manicdepressive
Wolf’s state of mind.
I have just written down a
new song, a divine song, I
tell you … I feel my cheeks
glow like molten iron with
excitement, and this state of pure
inspiration is to me exquisite
torment, not pure happiness.
Even before he had penned his
final Mörike song Wolf was pitting
himself against the greatest and
most universal of the German
poets, Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe. In another surge of
euphoric creativity, he composed
the 51 songs that make up his
Goethe Songbook between
October 1888 and February 1889.
As with the Mörike Songbook,
Wolf arranged the Goethe songs
in thematic groups, beginning
with the Harper and Mignon
songs from Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre (and thus challenging the
settings of Beethoven, Schubert,
Schumann et al) and ending
with the great philosophical
trinity, ‘Prometheus’, ‘Ganymed’
and ‘Grenzen der Menschheit’,
likewise set by Schubert.
The Goethe Songbook also
includes a group of lyrics that the
poet deemed especially suitable
for singing, four of which Renée
Fleming includes in her recital.
Two are flower-songs of exquisite
delicacy: ‘Frühling übers Jahr’,
whose chiming, shimmering moto
perpetuo accompaniment was
surely inspired by Goethe’s image
of the swaying snowdrop bells;
and the tiny, diaphanous ‘Gleich
und gleich’. ‘Die Spröde’ and ‘Die
Bekehrte’ are piquant settings of
a pair of Goethe poems in the
rococo pastoral convention, the
first blithely coquettish, the second
rueful, with the piano evoking both
the faithless Damon’s flute and
rustic musette drones. The finest of
these Goethe songs, both as poetry
and as music, is ‘Anakreons Grab’,
a tender, tranquil meditation
on the Greek poet traditionally
associated with the beauties of
nature, the delights of the grape,
love and song. As so often, Wolf’s
keyboard writing here suggests
the textures of a string quartet.
Gustav Mahler
(1860–1911)
Rückert-Lieder –
Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft!
Liebst du um Schönheit
Um Mitternacht
Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder
Ich bin der Welt
abhanden gekommen
As Mörike was to Wolf, and Heine
to Schumann, so Friedrich Rückert
(1788–1866) – poet, philologist,
orientalist – was to Mahler. The
composer identified profoundly
with the mingled directness and
refined sensibility of his verses,
declaring that ‘after Des Knaben
Wunderhorn I could not compose
anything but Rückert – this is lyric
poetry from the source, all else is
lyric poetry of a derivative kind’.
Apart from the earliest, ‘Um
Mitternacht’, all of the so-called
Rückert-Lieder were written in the
idyllic lakeside setting of Maiernigg
in Carinthia, where Mahler had
built a summer villa as a refuge
from the habitual turbulence of
the Viennese opera season. Four
of the songs were completed, in
both piano and orchestral versions,
by August 1901. A fifth, the
radiant ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’,
followed a year later, as a gift to
his new bride, Alma Schindler. It is
Mahler’s only overt love song, and
the only one of the Rückert-Lieder
he never orchestrated, doubtless
because of its intensely personal
significance. When a plausibly
Mahlerian orchestral version by
the Leipzig musician-cum-critic
Max Puttmann appeared in 1916,
Alma, predictably, protested.
In response to Rückert’s delicate,
intimate verses, the five so-called
Rückert-Lieder are, with one
exception, Mahler’s most tender
and lyrical songs. ‘Ich atmet’ einen
linden Duft!’ is an enchanting
evocation of drowsy summer
murmurings. Mahler himself
spoke of the song as expressing
‘the feeling one experiences in
the presence of someone one
loves and of whom one is quite
sure, two minds communicating
without any need for words’. He
regarded ‘Blicke mir nicht in die
Lieder’ (‘Look not into my songs’:
he hated anyone prying into his
unfinished works!) as the least
3 Programme note