7 Mörike Lieder (1888)

Begegnung

Agnes

Der Gärtner

Heinweh

Das verlassene Mägdlein

An eine Äolsharfe

Er ist’s

Whatever the attractions of Wolf’s vocal lines – and they are always melodically engaging, often positively tuneful – the heart of his songs is in the piano part. While the same could be said of other composers in the Lied tradition, it applies to none of them, not even Schumann, as consistently as it does to Wolf. The chromatic rise and fall in syncopated rhythms in the    swirling piano part of Begegnung might actually derive from Schumann but the witty point of the setting is the way that at the end, like the girl in Mörike’s poem, the piano quietly disappears round the corner. Even in Agnes, where the verse suggests a folk-song treatment, the dissonant harmonies in the short piano introduction tell us all we need to know about Agnes’s state of mind before a note of vocal melody is heard. The elegant trotting rhythms in the piano part of Der Gärtner evoke not only a picture of the prettily prancing princess but also the distance in status between her and the adoring gardner spreading sand under her horse’s feet.

Interestingly, in setting Heimweh, a poem that calls Wilhelm Müller irresistibly to mind, Wolf sets it in a style as much like Schubert’s as his own. He gives the expressive lead to the voice and has the piano, hovering between major and minor, adapt the harmonies applied to its four-note motif according to the changes in mood, briefly finding consolation in a brook picturesquely represented by Schubertian tremolandos. Related to Agnes by subject matter and Heimweh by the dactylic rhythm that runs throughout, Das verlassene Mägdlein resembles the latter also in that the harmonies of the short piano introduction tell the whole story in spite of the briefly illusory change to the major and the upward inflection in the vocal line as the sparks fly in the second stanza.

When he wrote An eine Äolsharfe Wolf 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. His 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. Last in this group, Er ist’s, 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. The piano sets the pace while the voice introduces the theme that is to explode at the beginning of a postlude almost as long as the song itself.