The Spirit’s Song (1795)

5 English Canzonettas

A Pastoral Song (1794)

She never told her love (1795)

The Spirit’s Song (1795)

Piercing Eyes (1795)

Fidelity (1794)

One of Haydn’s best friends in London was the poet Anne Hunter, who collaborated with the composer on the two sets of Original Canzonettas he completed on his second visit to this country in 1794 and 1795 respectively. She wrote all six texts for the first set and compiled those of the second from various sources, selecting just one of her own in this latter case. Conventional her verse might be but it prompted settings that have never left the repertoire, like A Pastoral Song long treasured (not least by Jenny Lind) for its melodic purity and its discreet harmonic pathos. True, the mere five lines of She never told her love from Twelfth Night inspired a song of extraordinary originality. But so did Hunter’s The Spirit’s Song which, apparently under the impression that it was by Shakespeare, Haydn treated with all due seriousness (publishing it as a separate song some years after the others). A delightful scherzo of a song on an anonmyous text, Piercing Eyes is well placed here between The Spirit’s Song and the initially stormy but ultimately serene setting of Hunter’s Fidelity.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

from Lieder und Gesänge aus Goethes Wilhelm Meister Op.98a (1849)

Kennst du das Land

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt

Heiss mich nicht reden

Singet nicht in Trauertönen (Philine)

So lasst mich scheinen

Kennst du das Land, Schumann’s first setting of verses from Wilhelm Meisters Lehjahre, was originally published as the last item in his collection of songs for children, Liederalbum für die Jugend Op.79. If it seems out of place in a children’s album, it is because the complex psychology of the waif-like Mignon – a child of a brother-sister relationship abducted from Italy and forced to work in a circus in Germany – requires mature understanding. It is better placed at the beginning of Op.98a, the collection of nine Wilhelm Meister songs completed shortly afterwards, where the melodious regularity of its comparatively unsophisticated strophic construction so effectively offsets the spontaneity of the three other Mignon settings, Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, Heiss mich nicht reden, and So lasst mich scheiden.

In Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, which is the next item in the Wilhelm Meister collection after Kennst du das Land, Mignon seems to be making up the song as she sings it, securing a shape for it by repeating, though still tentatively, the twelve short lines that make up Goethe’s poem. Heiss mich nicht reden is almost an operatic scena, beginning dramatically in C minor with a recitativo accompagnato, modulating to C major for the more lyrical aria-like middle section and ending not unhopefully, in spite of the piano’s stony intervention, in the major again.

Philine, the soubrette of Wilhelm Meister’s theatre company, is in comparison with the tragic Mignon a shallow personality with neither the heart nor the intellect to be very interested in rehearsing Hamlet, the seriousness of which she counters by singing “a ditty with a very graceful and pleasing melody.” In his setting of Singet nicht in Trauertönen Schumann duly and ingeniously supplies just what Goethe ordered.

The last of the Wilhilm Meister songs, So lasst mich scheinen – sung to zither accompaniment by Mignon dressed in angel costume in a charade and, as she knows, with little time to live – is even more impulsive than Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt. There is an element of recapitulation in the fourth stanza but it is the dying fall of the piano postlude that sets the seal on the song.

Alban Berg (1885-1935)

Sieben frühe Lieder (Seven Early Songs) (1905-8, revised 1928)

Nacht

Schilflied

Die Nachtigall

Traumgekrönt

Im Zimmer

Liebesode

Sommertage

Berg’s Sieben frühe Lieder we owe, in a sense, to the composer’s wife Helene. It was his love for her that inspired him to write some of them in the early days of their relationship before their marriage in 1911 and it was she who, seventeen years later, persuaded him to extract them from what he had hoped was oblivion and to prepare them for publication. He had plenty to choose from. Before he started his studies with Schoenberg in 1904 he had been unable to write anything else.

Berg’s extraordinary, though obviously untutored promise was clear to Schoenberg from the start: “When I saw the compositions he showed me I recognised at once that he was a real talent.” By 1908 when he wrote Nacht, which is not only the longest of the Seven Early Songs but also the one he chose to open the collection, he had developed well beyond that. Its harmonic idiom clearly suggests that he was well aware of the music of Debussy: the unity of the song, like much of its melodic and harmonic beauty, derives from the whole-tone phrase to which Berg sets the first line and which recurs in a variety of shapes throughout. Schilflied, which was written at much the same time as Nacht, is a rather more conventional song constructed on more or less straightforward ternary lines. From a year earlier, Die Nachtigall shows something of the Brahms influence Schoenberg detected in his pupil. It is another ternary construction offering a slightly anxious middle section between particularly melodious outer sections.

If Die Nachtigall is the most immediately attractive of the Seven Early Songs, the Rilke setting, Traumgekrönt, is probably the most inspired. Like Nacht, it spontaneously shapes its own construction, following the lead of the words rather than conforming to a preconceived pattern. Im Zimmer, the earliest of the seven songs by a year or more, also creates its own form but is so short that it needs no motivic organisation to hold it together. Liebesode – written in 1906, apparently before Berg met Helene – is a particularly sensual inspiration. While it is closely worked thematically, it is also erotically evocative as the three-note motif from the opening bars mingles with the musical imagery associated with the summer wind and the scent of the roses. The last and latest of the songs, Sommertage, is also the most prophetic of the mature Berg. It vaguely adheres to a ternary form but, for all its passion, it is so rigorously worked that its thematic organistion is not very different from that which Schoenberg and his pupils were to apply to their serial material several years later.

Gerald Larner ©2006