Suleika

Erwartung

Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass? ed Asti (1834)

Erinnerung (1841)

Das erste Veilchen Op.19a No.2

Neue Liebe Op.19a No.4 (1833)

Andres Maienlied (Hexenlied) Op.8 No.8 (1827)

The first four Mendelssohn items are among the 46 “Unbekannte Lieder” – unpublished, undiscovered or forgotten songs – brought to light by the pianist and scholar Eugene Asti. Thanks to recent issues by Hyperion Records, however, they should not remain “unknown” for very long. Even if some of them are less inspired than one might expect from a composer of Mendelssohn’s stature they are all fascinating in their different ways. Not to be confused with two other Suleika songs Op.34 No.4 (to the same words) and Op.57 No.3, this one,    attractive though it is, remained unpublished presumably because of its all too clear echoes of Schubert’s Ganymed. Already published in 1882, Erwartung, a modest setting of a poignant words by an anonymous poet, must have caused Asti rather fewer problems than Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass? which the composer failed to finish and which is performed today in a version expertly completed by its editor. A work of Mendelssohn’s maturity, Erinnerung is not one of the most ambitious but is still one of the best of many settings of a favourite Heine text.

Valuable though they are, however, the “unknown” songs are in general less convincing than the ones we have always known, like Das erste Veilchen with its engagingly elaborated piano part and its poetically effective changes of harmony. The piano part of Neue Liebe – a brilliant example of the delightfully eerie Mendelssohn minor-key scherzo – is so vivid that it seems scarcely to need Heine’s words. Andres Maienlied appears in the Zwölf Gesänge Op.8 immediately after a conventionally lyrical Maienlied to which, in its virtuoso description of    Walpurgisnacht celebrations, it presents a scary contrast: hence the alternative title Hexenlied.