All mein Gedanken Op.21 No.1 (1889)

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

All mein Gedanken Op.21 No.1 (1889)

Wiegenlied Op.41 No.1 (1899)

Ich wollt’ ein Sträusslein binden Op.68 No.2 (1918)

Waldseligkeit Op.49 No.1 (1901)

Schlechtes Wetter Op.69 No.5 (1918)

One of the most modest of Strauss’s Lieder, All mein Gedanken is also one of the most attractive. As Max Reger was evidently aware when he made a solo piano arrangement of the song, the delight is in the detail – the change of metre from 2/4 to 3/4 for just one bar so as to dwell on the allusion to “die Liebste” in the second line, the little run up the keyboard to join the birds in the air, the gently percussive chords knocking on the door, the elaborate flourish of the greeting and its witty recall in the closing bars. While the major attraction of Wiegenlied, on the other hand, rests in the seductive curves of its long-drawn melodic line, it would be a mistake to underestimate the value of the undulating piano accompaniment on which it so efforlessly floats and which so effectively reflects the changing emotional perspective of Dehmel’s poem, not least in the change of harmonies on “Knospe meiner Sorgen” in the first line of the second stanza. The composer’s own orchestral version, written to accompany Muttertändelei and Meinem Kinde in a group of “mother songs” for his wife Pauline, is a masterly demonstration of the importance he attached to every nuance.

There’s a similar contrast between the next two songs in the Strauss group. One of six Brentano Lieder dedicated to Elisabeth Schumann, Ich wollt’ ein Sträusslein binden is appealing above all for the decorative and yet poignant, chromatically inflected detail of the vocal line and its echoes in the piano part. Waldseligkeit, another Dehmel setting written for Pauline, sustains an ecstatically soaring vocal line over a gently murmuring piano accompaniment. Far from gentle, Schlechtes Wetter is a masterpiece of comic character observation. As the fond mother bravely ventures out, Heine’s vision of the foul weather is matched by extravagantly stormy imagery in the piano part. Then, as the poet turns to the spoilt daughter reclining at home, even Heine’s irony is excelled in a luxuriant waltz coloured by harmonies which, had they been written ten years later, could be described as jazzy. The song is so brilliantly scored in fact that Walter Gieseking couldn’t resist appropriating it as a piano solo.