6 songs from the Spanisches Liederbuch (1889-90)

Auf dem grünen Balkon

Komm, O Tod

Ach im Maien war’s

Wer sein holdes Lieb verloren

Und schläfst du, mein Mädchen

Herz, verzage nicht geschwind

Composing forty-four songs in six months could scarcely be described as a relaxation. Wolf’s work on Geibel and Heyse’s translations from the Spanish between October 1889 and April 1890 was certainly less intense, however, than his unremitting application to the poems of Goethe and Mörike (well over fifty in each case) a year or so earlier. The songs of the Spanisches Liederbuch are no less inspired for that. While it is their relaxed, sunny atmosphere that make many of them so appealing, they nearly always have something else to offer. There is no song in the whole collection more engaging than Auf dem grünen Balkon. Superficially, it is a serenade of the kind you might expect from a Spanish lover with a guitar in his hand standing below the window of the coy object of his affections. But on another level of the texture, above the strummed accompaniment and in counterpoint with the melodious vocal line, there is a brilliantly informative commentary running along in the pianist’s right hand. Ostensibly decorative, it actually changes its mood with the singer’s every doubt and fear and, at the end, it seems to confirm that the final, hesitant “No!” need not be taken too seriously.

The death-obsessed Komm, o Tod is a very different matter. But it is not as gloomy as the words suggest it might be: its interest, in fact, is in the contradiction between the piano’s continually tolling, sometimes painful four-note ostinato and the major harmonies to which, finally, it is reconciled. Ach im Maien war’s is another paradox. On the one hand, it is a cheerfully tuneful serenade with simple guitar accompaniment. On the other hand, given the claustrophobic situation, it is profoundly, even cruelly ironic. The earliest of Wolf’s Spanish settings, Wer sein holdes Lieb verloren, offers a different, Mahlerian kind of irony in the contrast between its lively dance tune and the minor harmonies that go with it.

What attracted Wolf to Und schläfst du, mein Mädchen was presumably its cryptic scenario. Who are they, where are they going and why in such a hurry? The correspondingly cryptic setting presents no answers but, to judge by the unhurried departure taken by the short postlude, the circumstances are not as serious as the urgent piano gestures in the first two lines of each stanza seem to suggest. As for Herz, verzage nicht geschwind, it is another song that is not all it seems: it does not so much protest against women being women as protest too much. A vividly written caricature, Wolf used it five years later in his opera Der Corregidor, where its comic rather than misogynist intentions are made perfectly clear.

Die ihr schwebet

Mühvoll komm ich und beladen

Köpfchen, Köpfchen, nicht gewimmert

Ob auch finstre Blicke

Bedeckt mich mit Blumen

Sie blasen zum Abmarsch

Geh, Geliebter, geh jetzt

Most selections from the Spanisches Liederbuch - Wolf’s settings of German versions by Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse of mainly 16th and 17th century Spanish verse - favour the love songs, particularly the more charming and more flirtatious of them. There are certainly many delightful examples to choose from. The collection does have a more serious side to it, however, not only in the section headed Geistliche Lieder (sacred songs) but also among the Weltliche Lieder (secular songs), from which pain is by no means excluded. At the same time not even the Geistlche Lieder are devoid of charm.

The charm of Die ihr schwebet (after Lope da Vega’s Cantorcillo de la Virgen) is partly in the spontaneously inflected vocal line and partly in the melody rising and falling in the pianist’s left hand under sustained rustling figuration in the right. It is true that both the voice and the piano melody are subject to dynamic and harmonic pressure but, in spite of stormy winds, tenderness prevails. There is little charm, on the other hand, in Mühvoll komm ich und beladen, one of several poems attributed to a certain Don Manuel del Rio but almost certainly by Emanuel Geibel himself. If Wolf was aware of the deception, or suspected it, that could explain a setting so extreme in its dissonances, so extravagant in its modulations, so obsessive about the rhythmic patterns in the accompaniment, so tearful in the vocal line that it seems almost ironic.

Chosen, like the remaining items in the group, from the 34 songs in the Weltliche Lieder section, Köpfchen, Köpfchen is sheer charm. Although (following Heyse) the composer described it as “Preciosa’s prescription against headache,” the Spanish text, from a short story by Cervantes, is actually Preciosa’s teasing response to her lover’s dismay that she has other admirers. Wolf’s delightfully pointed setting fits both interpretations equally well. In Ob auch finstre Blicke pain is registered in the chromatic line of the piano’s opening phrase, which is immediately taken up by the voice and, in spite of a briefly hopeful modulation to the major, remains the definitive motif. As for Bedeckt mich mit Blumen, it is so serious that it is presented as a kind of Liebestod, clearly echoing Wagner but, in its wilting harmonies and the interweaving of vocal and piano melody, no less beautiful for that.

The pathos of Sie blasen zum Abmarsch derives from the contrast between the bright bugles and stirring march rhythms of the piano part and the bereft the vocal line. There is a parting too in Geh, Geliebter, geh jetzt - the last song in the collection - , but, while it is operatic in its proportions and the dramatic intensity of its expression, purgatory is only for a day.