Die Männer sind méchant D866 No.3

Die Gebüsche D646

Du bist die Ruh D776

Der Schmetterling D633

Johann Gabriel Seidl was not the most sophisticated of Schubert’s poets. He was, on the other hand, one of his favourites - Schubert set eleven of his texts between 1826 and 1828, including Die Taubenpost - and the composer clearly enjoyed his folky style. The coy little Die Männer sind méchant is a characteristic Seidl example. Set to a cheerful country-dance rhythm throughout, the song was published in 1828 as the third of four “Refrain-Lieder,” all to words by the same poet. Friedrich von Schlegel was intellectually more ambitious. His Abendröte volume of poems was a constant source of fascination to Schubert between 1819 and 1820, when he set no fewer than ten of them, and he returned to the collection for one more setting in 1823. Die Gebüsche is the earliest of the Abendröte songs and perhaps the most inspired as, supported by a smoothly flowing arpeggio accompaniment, the vocal line so freely traces the harmonic implications of the various sounds of nature.

Friedrich Rückert was surely the greatest poet of the three, however. Although Schubert chose only six of his poems, his Rückert settings are among the best of his songs. Du bist die Ruh, which was written in 1823, is remarkable above all for the quietly sustained economy of the vocal line which so effectively offsets the rapturous expression of the final stanza. After that, the flighty Schmetterling, another Abendröte setting, seems even more capricious than ever.

7 songs to words by Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866)

Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

Lachen und weinen D777 (1822–3)

Du bist die Ruh D776 (1823)

Robert Schumann (1810–56)

O, Ihr Herren Op.37 No.3 (1841)

Volksliedchen Op.51 No.2 (1840)

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)

Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft (1901)

Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder! (1901)

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (1901)

“It is I myself,” said Mahler on reading Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen. Rückert might not be in the very top rank of German poets but some exceptionally fortunate composers, Schumann and Mahler foremost among them, found that they could identify more closely with his verse than that of most others. Brahms and Wolf were less susceptible, though not totally immune, and Strauss was more successful in setting Rückert for chorus than for solo voice. Schubert, however, the first major composer to adopt him, produced at least three masterpieces – Dass sie hier gewesen, Du bist die Ruh, and Lachen und Weinen – out of six Rückert settings, all of them written between 1822 and 1823 and all of them based on poems taken from the recently published Östliche Rosen (a clear tribute to Goethe’s West-Östlicher Divan).

The text of Lachen und weinen could almost have been written by a poet with an intimate knowledge of Schubert’s music and an ambition to bring out the most personal aspect of his genius. Rückert almost certainly knew nothing of Schubert and yet, while engaging the composer’s most spontaneous melodic and rhythmic instincts, his words inspire harmonies poignantly poised on the major-minor ambiguity so distinctive of Schubert. After more time for reflection in Du bist die Ruh – one can imagine the same lover some years later – love now amounts to religious devotion. It is expressed in holy tranquillty in the first four stanzas and transcended in the last as the vocal line twice rises to its highest point and has nowhere else to go but awed silence.

Another case of Rückert apparently foreseeing a distinguished musical future for his poetry is the series of poems, collected under the title Liebesfrühling, which he wrote to celebrate his engagement in 1821. It supplied the opening and closing songs of Myrthen, Schumann’s wedding present to Clara, and it turned out to be ideal material for a joint celebration of their marriage in Zwölf Gedichte aus “Liebesfrühling” on which they collaborated between January and June 1841. Clara’s modesty about her creative ability restricted her contribution to just three of the 12 songs but it is to her that we owe what was probably the earliest setting of Liebst du um Schönheit. She might well have had a part in the composition of O, Ihr Herren, an essentially feminine inspiration even though the delightful little postlude seems characteristic of Robert rather than Clara. Written possibly in 1840 for a Mozart album, the publication of which was intended to coincide with the unveiling of the Mozart Monument in Salzburg, the appropriately Mozartian Volksliedchen was included in the Lieder und Gesänge Op.51 published in 1850.