5 Lieder

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

5 Lieder

Schlechtes Wetter Op.69 No.5 (1918)

Das Rosenband Op.36 No.1 (1897)

Morgen Op.27 No.4 (1894)

Die Nacht Op.10 No.3 (1882-3)

Schlagende Herzen Op29 No.2 (1895)

There are Strauss songs for most times of the day. Of those set after dark, none is more entertaining than Schlechtes Wetter, which begins by matching Heine’s irony in the overstated storm imagery in the piano part and ends by excelling it in an exuberant waltz coloured by harmonies which, had they been written ten years later, could be described as jazzy. Klopstock’s Das Rosenband, set at an indeterminate time of the day but when the loved one is asleep, inspires a seriously expressive vocal line with a particularly eloquent closing cantilena on the word “Elysium.” In the nocturnal Morgen, one of four songs the composer presented to Pauline on their wedding day in 1894, the melodic interest is in the piano part, in the sustained line reflecting the erotic intensity of John Henry Mackay’s words, while the voice anticipates the rapture of the coming day in quiet wonder. After the gloomy observations of Gilm’s Die Nacht, reflected by Strauss in a romantic vocal line supported by harmonies appropriately drained of colour, the setting of Bierbaum’s Schlagende Herzen offers a timely escape into youthful optimism and a cheerfully sunlit landscape.

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

5 Lieder

Das Rosenband Op.36 No.1 (1897)

Meinem Kinde Op.37 No.3 (1897)

Du meines Herzens Krönelein Op.21 No.2 (1888)

Morgen Op.27 No.4 (1894)

Cäcilie Op.27 No.2 (1894)

One reason why Richard Strauss was such a prolific song composer was that he was married to a highly accomplished soprano. Most of the eighty or so songs completed between 1887, when he first met Pauline de Ahna, and 1906, when he temporarily abandoned song to concentrate on opera, were written specifically for her. Not surprisingly in the circumstances, many of them are inspired by poetic expressions of domestic bliss of one kind or another - like Das Rosenband, the uxorious sentiment of which must have been as pleasing to Pauline as its voluptuous closing cantilena. The speculatively tender cradle song Meinem Kinde, written in anticipation of the event, was presented to Pauline, with the rest of Op.37, on the birth of their son Franz.

The difference between Du meines Herzens Krönelein, which is surely not a portrait of Pauline, and Morgen, which is one of a group of four songs presented to her on their wedding day six years later, is a measure of the inspiration he found in her. The safe though appropriately modest Schubertian accompaniment of the earlier song contrasts significantly with the daring piano part of Morgen, which carries the melodic interest in its expressively sustained line while the voice reacts to the rapture of the situation in quiet wonder. Cäcilie, another of the wedding-present set, is said to have been written in a few hours on the very eve of the ceremony. Its ecstatic vocal line and its sweeping momentum certainly suggest that Hart’s declaration to his wife Cäcilie found an immediate and spontaneous response in the composer.

The whole point of the song is the lovely nostalgic melody which gently rises and falls in the accompaniment but which, ironically, never enters the vocal part. It suggests the memory of a blissful past and, at the same time, the hope for a similarly blissful future. The singer, all too aware of the present reality, can dream of that happinness but she cannot actually grasp it in the vocal line. In the original version the composr has to stress the need to sustain that slow-moving arching melody in the piano part.

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

5 Lieder

Ständchen Op 17 No.2 (1885–7)

Allerseelen Op10 No 8 (1885)

Ruhe meine Seele Op27 No1 (1894)

Blaue Sommer Op.31 No.1 (1896)

Schlechtes Wetter Op.69 No.5 (1918)

Infinitely resourceful though he was in his piano parts, Wolf wrote none more brilliant than that of    Strauss’s Ständchen. It is pianistically so irresistible, in fact, that Walter Gieseking seized on the song for one of his delightful solo- piano arrangements. And yet – highly effective though the piano part is in suggesting the quivering excitement of the lovers and the nocturnal activity of nature around them – the greatness of the song rests in the ecstatic expansion of the vocal line into a new melodic shape in the climactic last stanza. From his first published set of songs Allerseelen – inspired perhaps by the young composer’s fairly hopeless love for Dora Wihan, wife of the Czech cellist Hanus Wihan – Strauss transforms the frank sentimentality of the poem into the melodic beauty of the piano prelude and postlude while the actual word-setting is breathtaking in its harmonic spontaneity and linear flexibility.

Ruhe mein Seele, a surprisingly sombre member of the group presented by the composer to his bride on their wedding day, finds neither happiness nor melody in a dramatic recitative shaken by a stormy piano part and deprived of harmonic security until the very end. More appropriate to a wedding perhaps is Blauer Sommer, which is one of several songs written to celebrate the marriage of the composer’s sister Johanna. The ecstatic melody introduced by voice and piano in the opening bars reappears four times in the piano part, each time a minor third lower than the last so that it ends up (on “und rote Rosen”) in the key in which the song began. At that point of tonal consummation the voice, having in the meantime having wandered off in melodic developments of its own, rejoins the piano with a variant of the opening melody and, in the closing bars, a last glimpse of summer roses.

There are Strauss songs for every season. Of those set in winter, none is more entertaining than Schlechtes Wetter, which begins by matching Heine’s irony in the overstated storm imagery in the piano part and ends by excelling it in an exuberant waltz coloured by harmonies which, had they been written ten years later, could be described as jazzy. A masterpiece of comic characterisation, the song is so brilliantly scored for piano that Gieseking pounced on it for another of his piano-solo arrangements.