Composers › Richard Strauss › Programme note
3 Liebeslieder
Gerald Larner wrote 2 versions of differing length — choose one below.
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
3 Liebeslieder
Rote Rosen (1883)
Die erwachte Rose (1880)
Begegnung (1880)
Rote Rosen has been designated the last of Strauss’s boyhood songs and, in the sense that it was the last he wrote before the first of his songs to be published, the Gilm settings Op.10 of 1885, it clearly is. At the same time, it could equally well be claimed as the first of his mature songs. It was written not for his Aunt Johanna, as so many of its predecessors were, but for a Miss Lotti Speyer, whom he had met on a summer holiday in Heilbrunn in 1883 and to whom he dedicated it “in deepest adoration.” Technically, it looks both ways - forwards
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Rote Rosen”
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
3 Liebeslieder
Rote Rosen (1883)
Die erwachte Rose (1880)
Begegnung (1880)
Rote Rosen has been designated the last of Strauss’s boyhood songs and, in the sense that it was the last he wrote before the first of his songs to be published (the Gilm settings Op.10 of 1885) it clearly is. But it could equally well be claimed as the first of his mature songs. It was written not for his Aunt Johanna, as so many of its predecessors were, but for a Miss Lotti Speyer, whom he had met on a summer holiday in Heilbrunn in 1883 and to whom he dedicated it “in deepest adoration.” Technically, it looks both ways - forwards in the characteristically enraptured vocal line of the outer sections, backwards in the clumsily written middle section. Perhaps it was the second stanza of Karl Stieler’s poem Strauss had in mind when he told Lotti that “the text does not really lend itself to composition.”
When he sent Rote Rosen to its dedicatee Strauss enclosed two songs he had written two years earlier, Die erwachte Rose and Begegnung. The three manuscripts came to light only after Strauss’s death, among the posessions of Lotti’s niece, and were published, reasonably enough, as a set of Liebeslieder (Love Songs) in 1958. While it is attractively melodious and cleverly shaped to set the closing lines in high profile, Die erwachte Rose has little of the future Strauss in it. Begegnung, on the other hand - which is linked to the other two songs by its allusion to roses just before the end - is a witty anticipation of several, similarly coquettish songs he was to write later in his career.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Begegnung”