Köhlerweib

If there was ever a systematic song composer, as distinct from an occasional one like Mozart, it was Hugo Wolf. He was surely unique in an application to the art so obsessive that he could complete major collections in just a few weeks – like his 53 Mörike Lieder written between February and November 1888, sometimes more than one on a single day. As it happens, the composition of the first of the four Mörike songs in this group, Auf einer Wanderung, one of the longest of in the set, was spread over a few days. Unusually searching in harmony, even for Wolf, and flexible in tempo, it both magically reflects the enchantment experienced by the poet and ingeniously preserves the musical unity through the multiple variants of the piano ritornello introduced as he first trots into the little town at sunset. Though inspired by a quite different sentiment, In der Frühe resembles Auf einer Wanderung at least in that the rhythms of the opening bars recur throughout while the atmosphere varies according to the changes of harmony. Another morning scene, Begegnung is not so much an internal meditation as a wry observation of others: two young people meet in the street, the girl apparently unmoved by the whirlwind encounter of the night before even though the storm still rages not only in a    wonderfully vivid piano part but also in the memory of the boy. Elfenlied, on the other hand takes place at night and is a delightful combination of verbal pun (untranslatable, since the German for eleven is “elf”) and miniature scherzando tone poem. Scarcely less colourful in the piano part, Wolf’s unforgiving setting of Das Köhlerweib ist trunken is one of six Alte Weisen which he intended as a tribute to Gottfried Keller on his 70th birthday but unfortunately failed to complete before the Swiss poet’s death.