Four Songs

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Four Songs

Die nacht, Op.10, No.3

Zueignung, Op.10, No.1

Befreit, Op.39, No.4 - was orch 1933

Cäcilie, Op.27, No.2

Strauss was little over twenty when he completed his first published set of songs, the Acht Gedichte, Op.10. Bearing that in mind - together with the not very exciting quality of the texts chosen from the late work of the Tyrolean poet Hermann von Gilm zu Rosenegg - it would not be at all surprising if they were merely conventional settings with nothing much to distinguish them from so many others of their kind and of their time. In fact, although the young Strauss was clearly not averse to the conventional gesture, there are anticipations of the mature composer in every song in the set: the seductively shaped melody which opens Die Nacht, and which recurs in varying harmonic circumstances in each of the four stanzas, is just one example. As for Zueignung, with its    impulsive rhythms and soaring vocal line, it is not only unmistakable Richard Strauss - in spite of its Wagnerian associations - but also one of the most popular songs he ever wrote.

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 is difficult, on the other hand, to imagine a more truthful reflection - with sentimentality for the most part deflected by the sensitivity of the modulations - of Dehmel’s paradoxically joyful Liebestod. Strauss, who was to make a significant allusion to the recurring line O Glück in Ein Heldenleben, clearly had no doubts about the quality of his setting.

Cäcilie, one of Vier Lieder, Op.27, dedicated to Pauline Strauss as a wedding present in 1894, 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.