3 Michelangelo Lieder (1897)

Wohl denk’ich oft

Alles endet, was entsteht

Fühlt meine Seele

There is an uncanny correspondence between Wolf’s Michelangelo Lieder and Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge. It’s not just that they are both very serious indeed, that they are the last set of songs by their respective composers, and that they were completed in the same city within ten months of each other. The last song Brahms wrote, O Tod, wie bitter bist du, and the last Wolf wrote, Fühlt meine Seele, end in the same key with the same four notes in the vocal line.

Wolf had originally intended to make a group of four songs from Walter Robert-Tornow’s German translations of poems by Michelangelo but one of his settings, Irdische und himmlische Liebe, he considered inadequate and destroyed it. The remaining three are among the greatest and at the same time the most problematic of all his works. In a letter written as he was working on them Wolf describes, without irony, how the first song, Wohl denk’ich oft, “begins with a mournful introduction and maintains that tone up to the penultimate line, unexpectedly assumes a robust character (developed from the previous motif) and concludes solemnly with triumphal fanfares, like a flourish of trumpets sounded for Michelangelo in homage by his contemporaries.” And yet it is difficult to believe that those G major ff fanfares, arising in the last two lines after a mere six -line transition from the desolate G minor beginning, are meant to be taken at face value.

Certainly, the second poem is, as Wolf wrote, “more significant” and the C sharp minor setting, with its use of major harmonies economically restricted to the two lines beginning “Menschen waren wir,” is an intensely disturbing experience. “I’m literally afraid of this composition because,” he said, “it makes me apprehensive about my own sanity.” Fühlt meine Seele, the last work he was able to complete before he did indeed lose his sanity, is a love song addressed in Michelangelo’s original to a “Signior” but in Robert-Tornow’s translation to a “Herrin.” Not that questions of gender are significant in a song that, from its brooding beginning in E minor, achieves an erotic rapture in a chromatically inflected E major recalling, not inappropriately, the sensually inspired Peregrina songs from the Mörike Lieder.