Three Songs

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Three Songs

Hat gesagt - bleibt’s nicht dabei, Op.36, No.3

Die nacht, Op.10, No.3

Cäcilie, Op.27, No.2

One reason why Richard Strauss was such a prolific song composer - 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.

Strauss’s delight in writing for a voice he knew so well, and which he himself would accompany, is particularly evident in the witty scoring for both voice and piano in Hat gesagt - bleibt’s nicht dabei, one of two settings of folksongs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn composed between 1897 and 1898. Die Nacht, on the other hand, dates from before he knew Pauline. Written in 1883, it was one of Strauss’s earliest published songs and yet - like the other seven settings of words by Hermann von Gilm grouped together as Op.10 - it is abundant in anticipations of the mature composer. The seductively shaped melody which opens the song, and which recurs in varying harmonic circumstances in each of the four stanzas, is just one example.

Cäcilie, one of fours songs 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 Heinrich Hart’s declaration to his wife Cäcilie found an immediate and spontaneous response in the composer.