Die Zufriedenheit K.349 (1780-81)

Abendempfindung an Laura K.523 (1787)

Die ihr des unermesslichen Weltalls Schöpfer ehrt K619 (1791)

“That would be an everlasting blot on Germany, if we Germans were seriously to begin to think as Germans, to act as Germans, to speak German and, Heaven help us, to sing in German!!” Although he was exercising his irony on behalf of German opera - in a letter addressed to an ambitious librettist in May 1785 - Mozart must have had similar, if less passionate, feelings about German song. Indeed, no more than a few days after he wrote that letter he created what, with some over-simplification, could be claimed as the prototype of the Lied in his folksong-style setting of Goethe’s Das Veilchen, K.476. There was nothing systematic in Mozart’s song writing, however. It was always a casual matter for him, the work of an entertaining hour or so, undertaken in many cases to please a particular singer, whose qualities and tastes - rather than any ambition to set an agenda for the future of German song - would determine the choice of the text and the form and style of the setting.

Die Zufriedenheit K.349, the earlier of two Mozart songs with the same title, dates in all probability from the winter of 1780-81 when the composer was in Munich to rehearse Idomeneo. Since it was scored originally for voice and mandolin, it was presumably intended as a companion piece to Komm, liebe Zither K351, which also has a mandolin accompaniment and which, according to a note on an old copy, was written in 1780 for a Munich horn player called Lang. Although the piano version, by Mozart himself, lacks the pretty instrumental ritornelli of the mandolin version, it is entirely in keeping with the simple strophic setting of the poet’s simple sentiments.

Abendempfindung, which was written six or seven years after the mandolin songs, is a different matter. While speculation that it is a reflection on the recent death of the composer’s father has to reckon with the fact that the irrepressibly cheerful An Chloe was written on the same day, it remains one of the most inspired and most expressive of Mozart’s Lieder - through-composed and thoroughly spontaneous both in the freely melodious inflections of the vocal line and in the unpredictable directions taken by the harmonies. The continuity is in the piano part, which sustains the atmosphere of the dying day in its legato arpeggios and supports the construction by means of its recurring cadential figure. Certainly, it anticipates Schubert, but Strauss’s Zueignung is not far away either.

Die ihr des unermesslichen Weltalls Schöpfer ehrt was commissioned in 1791 by a Hamburg merchant called Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen, who wrote the words and published the score after the composer’s death. No ordinary businessman, he was not only a Freemason - Emanuel Schikaneder, librettist of Die Zauberflöte, was at one time a member of the same lodge in Regensburg - but also a fervent disciple of Rousseau with an ambition to set up a utopian community in Alsace. Having bought the land for his project, he apparently killed himself before he could realise it. Mozart’s severely classical-style setting of Ziegenhagen’s propagandist if high-minded text bears no relation to his song settings. From the peremptory introduction to the jubilant coda, the piano part is conspicuously orchestral in character while the vocal part passes from recitativo secco to arioso and recitativo accompagnato to aria in a manner entirely compatible with the alternative title of the piece, Eine kleine deutsche Kantate.