Five Songs without Words

in E major, Op.19, No.1 [1830-1832]

in A minor, Op.19, No.2 [1830-1832]

in A major, Op.19, No.3 [1830-1832]

in F sharp minor (“Venetian Gondola Song”), Op.30, No.6 [1833-1834]

in G minor, Op.53, No.3 [1840]

Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words have for too long been victims of their Victorian success. It was inevitable that, having gathered so many drawing-room associations and sentimental accretions, they would lose their prominent place in the recital repertoire - even though it took them a long time to go. But to continue to avoid them even now, when most of the audience is in a position to approach them without preconceptions, is not only to distort musical history but also to miss out on much lyrical beauty.

“If we could be satisfied today with a simple beauty that raises no questions and does not attempt to puzzle us, these pieces would resume their old place in the repertoire,” says Charles Rosen in the one, short paragraph he devotes to the Songs without Words in his “The Romantic Generation.” “They are not insipid,” he goes on to say, “but they might as well be.” That is just words without a song. The opening number in the early Op.19 set - first published in London as Original Melodies for the Pianoforte in 1832 - is pure romantic poetry. Schumann was clearly aware of that and, although there was still room for him to add an erotic frisson to the harmonies, he was happy enough to echo the gently descending melodic line on any number of tender occasions. The next piece in the same volume represents one of the few attempts by any composer in Mendelssohn’s generation to explore the implications of Beethoven’s Bagatelles, discreetly though he goes about it. Op.19, No.3 in A major - traditionally known as “Jaegerlied” (Hunting Song) - is another essential romantic image which, though obviously not Mendelssohn’s invention, is so exuberantly written as to stimulate echoes of its horn calls and galloping rhythms for decades to come.

Of the mere five (out of a total of forty-eight) Songs without Words to which the composer himself attached a title, three of them are called “Venetianisches Gondellied” (Venetian Gondola Song), a form he probably did invent. Certainly, he wrote some seductive examples and, in the closing number of the Op.30 set, anticipated Chopin in applying deorative keyboard figuration to a melodic line poised above a barcarolle rhythm in the left hand. If the comparatively extended Song without Words in G minor, Op.53, No.3, doesn’t really anticipate Brahms, as is often claimed, it is none the worse for that and, indeed, is all the better for being so characteristic of Mendelssohn in its expressive urgency.