Heimliche Aufforderung Op27 No3 (1894)

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Heimliche Aufforderung Op27 No3 (1894)

Wenn Op.31 No.2 (1895)

5 Lieder, Op.32 (1896)

Ich trage meine Minne

Sehnsucht

Liebeshymnus

O süsser Mai

Himmelslboten

Heimliche Aufforderung was one of the Vier Lieder Op27 that Strauss presented to his soprano bride 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. Another bridal song, one of three written for the wedding of the composer’s sister Johanna, Wenn is an impetuous declaration driven by the rhythmic energy of the theme introduced by piano in the opening bars and recalled three times, on the last occasion so recklessly as to tip the harmonies into the wrong key.

A peculiarity of the five Lieder Op.32, which Strauss wrote for Pauline two years into their marriage, is that they include four charming, even beautiful but scarcely ambitious songs – three to verses by his friend Karl Henckell, the other to words from Des Knaben Wunderhorn – and one of the most profound of all his works of this kind. It is as though he needed a comparatively modest context for his first, uncommonly inspired Liliencron setting – a thought borne out perhaps by an outer framework of Ich trage meine Minne at the beginning, happy for the most part in its folk-like simplicity, and a true folk song at the end. In contrast, the desolate situation of the lover in Sehnsucht is established at the start by the piano’s disturbingly eerie arpeggiated dissonances and, as the closing bars confirm, the situation is not transformed by his increasingly ecstatic fantasies in the last three stanzas. In spite of the fervour of Liebeshymnus, the delightfully detailed effusions of O süsser Mai and the artful naivete of Himmelsboten, even the erotic mischief at the end, the three remaining songs cannot reverse the unsettled impression left by Sehnsucht.