2 Lieder

Schlafendes Jesuskind (1888)

Nun wandre Maria (1889)

Wolf’s Mörike setting, Schlafendes Jesuskind, is much the most developed song in today’s programme. Based on a poem inspired by a painting by Francesco Albani - depicting the infant Jesus lying asleep on a cross-shaped piece of wood - Schlafendes Jesuskind is an extraordinary conception. It is remarkable not only for its sustained mood of contemplation but also for its melodic and harmonic freedom as Wolf takes up and imaginatively expands on Mörike’s allusion to the baby’s dreams. The recall of the chorale at the end and the repeat of the first line (the composer’s idea rather then the poet’s) give at least an illusion of cyclic shape to a song with, otherwise, no inhibition on its expressive development.

Having devoted himself obsessively to some of Germany’s greatest literary figures - Goethe, Eichendorff, Mörike - Wolf no less obsessively applied himself to the mainly obscure Spanish poets featured in Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse’s Spanisches Liederbuch. Elegantly turned though the German translations are, the appeal in this case was not so much the literary value of the poems as their insights into human nature. Nun wandre Maria, Heyse’s translation of a text by the seventeenth-century poet Ocaña, is a particularly touching example. Wolf’s setting reflects the relationship between Joseph and Mary in the companionable thirds moving in a walking rhythm in the piano part while, accompanied by infinitely subtle nuances of harmony, a modestly but melodiously inflected vocal line offers its comforting expression of compassion.

Nachtzauber (1887)

Lied vom Winde (1888)

Another night-time poem by Eichendorff inspired one of Wolf’s most magical songs. Elusive, even obscure in its imagery, Nachtzauber does not invite the direct approach adopted by Pfitzner in Nachtwanderer. The stream of semiquavers introduced by the right hand in Wolf’s piano introduction and sustained almost throughout clearly represents the “Quellen” mentioned in the first line. But until the entry of the voice, and even then only in passing, it is of uncertain tonality and it is combined with a three-note motif in the left hand which is not so much a harmonic statement as a question mark. The question is asked nine times in the first stanza , at lower and lower levels on the keyboard, and is then displaced by rising pairs of quavers as night falls. More questions are asked to introduce the    exotic flower image in the second half of the song. But it is only when love invades the scene, in the same terms as night had done, that there is an affirmative answer and a confirmation of the F sharp major tonality which has only briefly been touched on before.

Lied vom Winde – set to words from Eduard Mörike’s novel Maler Nolten, where the heroine Agnes climbs to the top of a hill to “sing the wind song” – is the direct antithesis of Nachtzauber. As stormy in its Wagnerian manner    as Nachtzauber is fragile in it near-impressionism and as deranged in its F sharp minor as Nachtzauber is poetic its F sharp major, it is a virtuoso study in dramatic colouring for pianist and singer alike.