Five Lieder

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Five Lieder

Ständchen Op.17 No.2 (1887)

Allerseelen Op.10 No.8 (1885)

Befreit Op.39 No.4 (1898)

Morgen Op.27 No.4 (1894)

Cäcilie Op.27 No.2 (1894)

One reason, perhaps the main reason, why Richard Strauss was such a prolific composer of songs - he wrote as many as two hundred Lieder over a period of nearly eighty years - 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. Many of them they performed together on the concert tours.

As it happens, the first song in this group Ständchen was written in 1887 just before Strauss met Pauline. One of Sechs Lieder Op.17, it owes its popularity partly to the delicate activity of the piano part - which so aptly suggests the murmuring of the stream, the trembling of the leaves in the breeze, the elfin footsteps of the lovers as they might at night - and partly to the seductive vocal line. The even earlier Op.10, Strauss’s first published set of Lieder, also contains one or two of his most popular 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.

Written in 1898, the Fünf Lieder Op.39, are thirteen years more sophisticated than the Acht Gesänge, Op.10, not least in the composer’s choice of texts and his illumination of their meaning. Even so, the author of Befreit, Richard Dehmel, was unhappy with Strauss’s setting, which he seems to have considered too sentimental. It must, however, have oc­cupied a special place in Strauss’s affections since it is the only piece of its kind quoted in the “Works of Peace” section of Ein Heldenleben. When he came to orchestrate it in 1933, incidentally, he added not only a coat of oil-paint to the modestly etched original but also decades of experience of married life.

Morgen and Cäcilie were written with Pauline very much in mind: they were both included in the group of Vier Lieder Op.27 the composer presented to her on their wedding day in 1894. In Morgen the melodic interest is in the piano part, in the perilously but 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 Hart’s declaration to his wife Cäcilie found an immediate and spontaneous response in the composer.