Fussreise (1888)

Anakreons Grab (1888)

Bei einer Traung (1888)

Nimmersatte Liebe (1888)

Abschied (1888)

“When you have heard this song,” said Wolf of the recently completed Fussreise in March 1888, “you can have only one wish – which is to die.” Clearly intoxicated by the inspiration he was finding in the poetry of Eduard Mörike – he had written over twenty Mörike songs in the last five weeks and was to write thirty more before the end of the year – the composer might just have been overstating his case. Certainly, marching along in a briskly regular rhythm, whatever the changes of harmony in the more thoughtful second stanza, Fussreise is a stirring expression of the exhilaration of feeling at one not only with God and nature. But surely the song to die for in the Wolf group is the setting of Goethe’s affectionate tribute to the master of the Greek idyll, Anakreons Grab, not only because of its elegiac sentiment but also because of the exquisite sensitivity of the vocal line and the beauty of the harmonies.

Wolf did not, however, cultivate harmonic beauty for its own sake. Indeed, given the appropriate poetic context, his harmonies can be positively ugly, as in his reaction to Mörike’s wry account of a loveless wedding in Bei einer Trauung, which begins with the minor triads of a funeral march and accrues some extraordinary dissonances before returning to its lugubrious starting point. Nimmersatte Liebe is a masterpiece of harmonic flexibility, searching in vain for fulfilment until the entry of what Wolf called “a regular student song” in the last stanza. As for Abschied, it runs completely out of control, reflecting the events of Mörike’s grotesque little scenario with such liberated harmonies that it ends with an exuberant parody waltz song in the wrong key.