Five Songs

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Five Songs

Heimliche Aufforderung Op27 No3

Allerseelen Op10 No 9

Ich trage meine Minne Op32 No1

Ruhe meine Seele Op27 No1

Cäcilie Op.27 No2

Heimliche Aufforderung - like Ruhe meine Seele and Cäcilie - was one of the Vier Lieder Op27 that Richard Strauss presented to the soprano Pauline de Ahna on their wedding day in 1894. It is highly appropriate to the occasion, a celebration at once public and private, the jubilant vocal line and swirling piano figuration associated with the festivities dying away to set up the secret meeting in the middle and returning at the end, this time in anticipation of the night to come. Allerseelen is, by contrast, a commemoration rather than a celebration. Written nine years before Heimliche Aufforderung and included in Strauss’s first published set of songs, it is an early indication of his ability both to match the poetry of the text in spontaneously inflected melody and to intensify its sentiment through a flexible construction embracing a lyrical piano introduction and postlude.

Ich trage meine Minne and Ruhe meine Seele are both settings of words by Strauss’s friend Karl Henckell. They could scarcely be more different. The later song, Ich trage meine Minne, one of a set of four written for Pauline in 1896, is happy in its folk-song simplicity, in spite of the intrusion of a darker atmosphere in the central stanza. 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. Cäcilie, on the other hand, is the perfect wedding present. Written in a few hours on the very eve of the ceremony, it demonstrates in its ecstatic vocal line and its sweeping momentum - discreetly but effectively held back by changes in harmony and colour in the middle - that Richard Strauss was no less intensely devoted to his Pauline than Heinrich Hart to his Cäcilie.