4 Lieder

Richard Struass (1864-1949)

4 Lieder

Ich schwebe Op.48 No.2 (1900)

Nachtgang Op.29 No.3 (1895)

Die Nacht Op.10 No.3 (1885)

Ständchen Op 17 No.2 (1887)

Never a composer to duck a challenge, Richard Strauss was clearly not put off Karl Henckell’s Ich schwebe by its allusion to “the sweetest of melodies.” He turned to the sketches for his unfinished Kythere ballet and extracted a plum of a Viennese waltz tune which, attractively presented in sixths in the piano part and deflected into an intriguing harmonic diversion at the crucial point in the last stanza, is by no means unworthy of the poet’s fantasy.

Whether or not he consciously set himself a challenge in his setting of Bierbaum’s Nachtgang, Strauss could scarcely have invested more harmonic enterprise in one song than he does here. Seductive though it is in its magical modulations and exquisite dissonances, however, it seems perhaps a little over-sophisticated in comparison with an earlier night-time song, Die Nacht from his earlier published set, where the varying harmonic circumstances of the recurring opening melody seem not so much self-conscious as inevitable.

Although he has not much of a reputation as a composer of piano music, Strauss’s accompaniments to his songs are among the most accomplished of their kind. Ständchen is so brilliantly written for piano that at one time it was almost as popular in Walter Gieseking’s solo arrangement as in the original version. And yet, highly effective though the piano part is, the greatness of the song rests in the ecstatic expansion of the vocal line into a new melodic shape in the climactic last stanza.