7 Lieder

Neue Liebe Op.19a No.4 (1830)

Der Mond Op. 86 No.5 (?1847)

Es weiss und rät es doch keiner Op. 99 No. 6 (1842)

Romanze Op.8 No.10

Im Frühling Op.9 No.4 (1830)

Frage: Ist es wahr? Op. 9 No.1 (1827)

Hexenlied Op. 8 No. 8 (1827)

The first two items in the Mendelssohn group are both night-time songs but very different in content – a delightfully eerie minor-key elfin scherzo in Neue Liebe and a passionate plea for peace in Der Mond. Also set at night, Es weiss und rät es doch keiner is so wittily constructed that no one could know or even guess from the first two stanzas how the song will take off, changing both key and tempo, when day dawns in the third. A morning-after reflection perhaps, Romanze (intriguingly labelled “from the Spanish” in the score) is thought to be a refugee from Mendelssohn’s Cervantes opera Die Hochzeit des Camacho. Certainly, it is not lacking in what would have passed in those days as local colour. The night-time setting of Im Frühling is less significant than the spring-time thrill which so impulsively animates it.

Frage had a special meaniing for Mendelssohn – or so it seems from its pervasive presence in the String Quartet in A minor Op.13 which he wrote a little later, presumably under the same erotic influence, in 1827. Distinguished by a rare simplicity, it encounters a violent contrast here with the picturesque imagery of the characteristically scary Hexenlied.