Sehnsucht nach dem Frühling K596 (1791)

Das Veilchen K476 (1785)

Als Luise die Briefe ihres ungetreuen Liebhabers verbrannte K.520 (1787)

An Chloe K.524 (1787)

While he liked the idea of song set to German words, Mozart had no ambition, still less a strategy, to create a new and distinctive repertoire. He wrote more than 30 examples himself but haphazardly, according not to any consistent stylistic principle but according to the circumstances at the time – the text, the occasion, the singer he had in mind. The nearest he came to thimking in terms of a set was on one day in January 1791 when he wrote three spring-time songs which were to be published as a group later in the year. The first of them Sehnsucht nach dem Frühling he presented as a simple, appropriately child-like piece, strophic in form with the melodic line (which he had used a few days earlier in the Piano concerto in B flat K595) doubled in the piano part.

Goethe’s Das Veilchen he could also have set in strophic form to reflect, as Schubert was to do with Heidenröslein, the folk-like character of the text. In fact, his setting is through-composed, discreetly dramatic in its change to the minor in the second stanza and its pause as the flower is crushed. It scarcely touches, however, on the operatic – at least in comparison with Als Luise which was written, perhaps with hint of parody, as a miniature operatic scena for the composer’s good friend and amateur bass singer Gottfried von Jacquin. An Chloe, on the other hand, is a delightul little rondo perfectly suited, in its urbane Viennese rather than folksong style, to the artful words of Johann Georg Jacobi.