Variations on “Das Dirndl is harb auf mi” (1882)

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Variations on “Das Dirndl is harb auf mi” (1882)

for string trio

Having started writing music at the age of six, and having developed a characteristically high rate of productivity when he was still in his teens, Richard Strauss was an experienced composer even before he was twenty. So the accomplishment of the scoring for string trio in his variations on the Bavarian folk song “Das Dirndl is harb auf mi” should not be too surprising. While it is nowhere near as ambitious a piece as the Violin Concerto that he completed at much the same time, or the First Horn Concerto that he was just beginning, it is no less entertaining for that. According to a note on the manuscript, the Variations were written in 1882 “for the 32nd Festival of the Order of the Harbni” - a sociable gathering of friends and relations of the composer’s mother whose “Harbni” motto would have been understood by those conversant with Bavarian dialect as “unfriendly never.” It is presumably because the word “harb” also occurs in “Das Dirndl is harb auf mi” (The girl is cross with me) that Strauss chose the tune for his variations.

The mock-tragic posture of the introduction suggests that the Variations are not very seriously intended. Indeed, they are not, least of all in the early stages. But as they go on - in a heroic episode for double-stopped violin and pizzicato cello, in an intimate conversation between violin and viola, in a hesitant contrapuntal invention in three parts, in a lament for viola - they reveal more and more of the string trio’s potential for textural and expressive variety. They are effective above all, as the coda confirms, in reflecting the young composer’s witty and never unfriendly demeanour.