Suleika I D720

Geheimes D 719

Suleika II D717

Geheimes and the two Suleika songs are all settings of words from the Westöstlicher Divan - a collection of poems inspired partly by Goethe’s love for Marianne Willemmer, who lived in the Rhineland in the West of Germany while he lived in Weimar in the East. There is far more than that to the “West-East” title of the collection, which is an extensive and complex tribute to the Divan of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz. For Schubert, however, the main source of interest was the East-West and West-East exchange of erotic verses between Hatem and Suleika, or Goethe and Marianne in their Persian disguise. Although he cannot have been aware of it, the two Suleika poems he chose to set were actually written by Marianne von Willemer who, in spite of being married to a man who had until recently been her guardian, was clearly as carried away by the affair as Goethe was.

Marianne was very pleased with Schubert’s setting of the first Suleika song, or “East Wind” as she preferred to call it. Brahms thought it “the loveliest song ever written” and, though many lovely songs have been written since then, his high opinion of this one has not lost its validity. Beginning with a muffled rumble on the piano, reflecting the initial stirrings of the wind from the East, it breezes through all but the conclusion of the poem on the same rustling figuration in the pianist’s right hand and the same rhythmic pattern in the left. When the tempo slows down for the last stanza and Suleika’s enraptured anticipation of reunion with her lover from the East, the piano’s restlessness is stilled and the key changes from an impatient minor to a fulfilled major.

Geheimes was written at much the same time in 1821 as the two Suleika songs (together with another Westöstlicher Divan setting, Versunken, which is not included in this recital). In this case a mischievous little poem inspires a capricious little song, which offers a delightfully witty series of variations on a two-note rhythmic motif in the piano part, a vocal line likely to expand or contract its phrases at any point, and unpredictable shifts in harmony.

Because of its dedication to the Berlin soprano Anna Milder-Hauptmann, with whom Schubert was in correspondence in 1824, the second Suleika song (“West Wind”) is thought by some authorities to have been written three years after the first. But that is not necessarily the case and, anyway, the two settings are indisputably congenial companions. Like the East wind in Suleika I, the West wind in Sueleika II carries the song through most of its duration on repeated figuration in the right hand of the piano part and an ostinato rhythm in the left. This one is in the major from the start, however, and when the tempo changes it accelerates into the intimately whispered West-East message at the end.