4 Mörike Lieder (1888)

Um Mitternacht

Auf eine Christblume I

Gesang Weylas

Lied vom Winde

Wolf was no less susceptible than Schubert to the poetry of night. His setting of Mörike’s Um Mitternacht could even be his answer to Schubert’s Nacht und Träume, poised as it is on a gentle rocking rhythm sustained in the piano part throughout. While Um Mitternacht is more varied in expression, as it must be with the intervention of the streams singing of the day that has passed, it too depends (in its very much more elaborate way) on the harmonies rather than the vocal line for its nocturnal effect. There are night-time associations also in Auf eine Christblume. A comparatively long song, it is regularly criticised as “diffuse” although – taking into account the the left-hand paino line that enters with the deer and reappears with the elf at midnight – it falls into a regular double-binary pattern concealed though the underlying structure might be by the magical transformations on the surface.

The last two items, which have nothing of the night about them, are both associated with Mörike’s novel Maler Nolten, which includes a shadow-play set on the poet’s magical island of Orplid and a scene where, in her madness, the heroine Agnes climbs to the top of a hill to “sing the wind song.” No two Lieder could be more different from each other than the goddess Weyla’s mystic hymn to Orplid, accompanied by harp-like chords in a ritually regular rhythm, and Agnes’s dialogue with the wind amid the deranged harmonies and stormy virtuosity of the piano part.

An eine Äolsharfe

Auf einer Wanderung

Lied eines Verliebten

Der Jäger

When Wolf wrote An eine Äolsharfe he had never heard an Aeolian harp. When he did hear one a few weeks later he was delighted to find that it sounded much as he had imagined it – or perhaps as Brahms had imagined it and he had elaborated it. While the Brahms and Wolf settings of Mörike’s ethereal evocation of the spirit of a dead brother have much in common, the latter is the more ambitious. Wolf’s conventionally arpeggiated accompaniment to the recitative introduction seems to challenge the wind to produce a different sound as it blows from another world through the harp strings    – which in the next two stanzas it certainly does, above all in the apparently accidental and yet precisely evocative modulations characteristic of its liberated harmonic language. It is true that the arpeggios rising from the bass of the piano part retain much the same triplet rhythm throughout but the chordal melody in the right hand above it has its own rhythmic shape while the voice, hovering uncertainly between them, has yet another. Auf einer Wanderung is similarly adventurous in harmony and no less magical in effect but to a very different end. By means of multiple variants of the piano ritornello introduced as the wanderer trots into the little town at sunset, it both reflects in detail the many-sided enchantment he experiences there and endows the scene with a rare musical unity.

The other two Mörike settings are both songs of a lover tormented by the evidently headstrong temperament of the object of his devotion. A brief episode in a sleepless night, Lied eines Verliebten tosses and turns on a restlessly passionate melody in the pianist’s left hand. In Der Jäger the huntsman lover is driven by his distress, through impulsive rhythms and defiant minor harmonies, to a climax of impotent frustration symbolised by his failure to find a quarry and by a shot which produces exhilaratingly violent echoes but then a depressingly dull rumble –    an irony reflected in exaggeratedly hollow tremolandos low in the piano part. The impulse is revived but now in the opposite direction, towards completely new melodic material in the closing bars and a major-key reconciliation.