D 672

2 Lieder

Nachtstück D672 (1819)

Der Zwerg D771 (1822)

Both Nachtstück and Der Zwerg are set at night and both end in death. Death, however, has a quite different meaning in the two cases. From the piano introduction to Nachtstück with its chromatically descending bass line characteristic of the baroque lamento, which is repeated on the first entry of the voice, it seems that there can be no consolation. Even so, proceeding from the C minor arpeggios where the old harpist takes up his instrument for the last time to the E flat major harmonies where nature whispers in sympathy, it achieves a serene C major as death releases him in the closing bars.

In Der Zwerg the Queen dies in her youth and, though not unwillingly, at the hands of her jealous dwarf lover. A dramatically articulated ballad of erotic dominance and submission, it has no room for consolation. Beethoven’s fate motif, which makes its first entry in the pianist’s left hand in the opening bars and recurs more than forty times, is not destined to find a major-key resolution here. At the same time the semiquaver figuration in the right hand, of a kind familiar from some of the the minor-key episodes of the Quartet Movement and the first movement of the “Unfinished” Symphony, persists obsessively throughout.