2 Songs

Lauf der Welt Op 48 No 3 (1889)

Zur Rosenzeit Op 48 No 5 (1889)

Grieg’s first songs were settings of German poetry, in the German original and in the German manner, written during or just after his student years at the Leipzig Conservatoire in the early 1860s. But once he had begun to develop his distinctive style through settings of words by Scandinavian poets – beginning with Hans Christan Andersen in Danish and then going on to Andreas Munch, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and, most decisively, Henrik Ibsen in Norwegian – he rarely set German verse again. In 1884, however, he made settings of Heine’s Gruss and Geibel’s Dereinst, Gedanke mein and five years later incorporated them in the Sechs Lieder Op.48 dedicated to the Swedish soprano Ellen Gulbranson, who had a taste for the German repertoire and was to become a prominent performer in Wagnerian roles.

While the Norwegian composer is still evident in these German songs, they are, as he said, “more cosmopolitan,” tending to avoid the strophic form natural to the Norwegian settings and the modal harmonies that go with them. Uhland’s cheerful little Lauf der Welt is given a folk-like treatment, it is true, but in a German, perhaps even Schubertian, rather than Norwegian manner. Constructed in much the same way, Zur Rosenzeit is as thoughtful in comparision to Lauf der Welt as as Goethe’s poem is to Uhland’s. The wide intervals of the expressive melody shared by voice and piano in octaves in the first and last stanzas of the Goethe setting are most effectively offset by the cramped vocal line and the torturned modulations in the middle of the song.