3 Lieder

Hat dich die Liebe berührt (1912)

Traumgekrönt (1910)

Und gestern hat er mir Rosen gebracht (1908)

Joseph Marx, on the other hand, was a composer with no ambitions as a performer and little,    apart from his activities as a teacher and critic, to distract him from his creative work. Even so his orchestral and chamber music is all but forgotten and he appears in present-day concert programmes largely as a composer of songs, most of which were written in his early 20s. One of his projects was to set those poems from Heyse’s Italienisches Liederbuch that Hugo Wolf had avoided. Hat dich die Liebe berührt would not have suited Wolf but it certainly suits Marx’s resourceful use of the voice and does not conflict with his tendency to hold nothing in reserve. Though no more a modernist than Walter, he devised modestly dissonant, glittering piano sounds for Rilke’s silver stars and made an effective change of harmony between the second and third stanzas. Und gestern hat er mir Rosen gebracht is an exhilarating example of its jubilant kind.