2 Mörike Lieder (1888)

Der Knabe und das Immlein

Er ist’s

“I have just written down a new song,” Wolf wrote to a friend on completing Der Knabe und das Immlein, “a divine song, I tell you! Quite divinely marvellous.” The composer’s excitement is understandable: one of the first of the fifty-three Mörike settings he completed between February and November 1888, it is an extraordinary inspiration. The beginning is comparatively bleak and expressionless, the middle a delightful study in insect characterization as the bee buzzes ever more decoratively in the piano part, the ending warmly passionate. Er ist’s, which was written ten weeks and more than thirty Mörike songs later, is perhaps the most successful of all answers (including one by Schumann) to the challenge represented by a poem that needs to be set in one surge of rhythmic vitality and harmonic and melodic exhilaration. It is so dynamic, in fact, that its energy spills over into a piano postlude almost as long as the song itself.