Allerseelen Op10 No 9 (1885)

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Allerseelen Op10 No 9 (1885)

Zueignung, Op.10, No.1 (1885)

Morgen, Op.27, No.4 (1894)

Cäcilie Op.27 No2 (1894)

Richard Strauss’s first published set of Lieder - written in 1885 to texts by Hermann von Gilm - includes two or three of the most popular of all his songs. Inspired perhaps by his fairly hopeless love for Dora Wihan, wife of the Czech cellist Hanus Wihan, Allerseelen 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. Though addressed to the loved one “from afar,” Zueignung, the first song in the Op.10 set, is as engaging an example as any of the composer’s characteristically soaring vocal line and irresistibly impulsive rhythms.

The scarcely less popular Morgen and Cäcilie both come from the Vier Lieder, Op.27, that Strauss dedicated to his bride Pauline de Ahna as a wedding present in 1894. In Morgen the melodic interest is in the piano part, in the expressively sustained line reflecting the erotic intensity of John Henry Mackay’s words, while the voice reacts to the rapture of the situation in quiet wonder. Cäcilie 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 - discreetly but effectively held back by changes in harmony and colour in the central stanza - certainly suggest that Heinrich Hart’s declaration to his wife Cäcilie found an immediate and spontaneous response in the bridegroom composer.