LOEWE - Abeille Musique

evelation (‘Mein Töchterlein liegt auf der Todtenbahr’)
with a shock fortissimo on an alien chord. The third lad’s
avowal of eternal love is crowned by a lingering descent on
‘Ewigkeit’, and a seraphic postlude that seems to pre-echo
Schubert’s Ave Maria.
While Loewe is known today primarily through halfa-dozen
of his 200-odd ballads, he also composed some
350 Lieder. If some are trite or conventional, the best,
including the two Goethe Wandrers Nachtlied settings,
reveal a mastery of shapely cantabile melody and apt,
atmospheric accompaniment. Goethe wrote Über allen
Gipfeln ist Ruh’, his sublime meditation on nature as
harbinger of the soul’s rest, on the wall of a wooden
shooting-box in the Thuringian hills while contemplating
a late-summer sunset. Loewe’s touching settings of this
poem (1817), and the prayer for inner peace Der du von
dem Himmel bist (1828), are both more operatically
Italianate than Schubert’s famous songs.
One of Loewe’s finest Lieder is his rapt, bel canto
setting—somewhere between Schubert and Bellini—of
the last of Goethe’s great lyrics, Lynceus, der Thürmer
(1833). In the Part Two of Faust, the lynx-eyed watchman
on the tower, and by extension the aged Goethe himself,
contemplates the beauty of all he surveys, and hymns
his gratitude for the gift of sight. Süsses Begräbnis and
Hinkende Jamben come from a set of twelve settings of
Friedrich Rückert published in 1837, the former a tender
elegy, the latter a witty jeu d’esprit that reflects the poet’s
limping iambics in both rhythm and melodic contour.
4
Im Vorübergehen (1836) is an alternative ‘Heidenröslein’
with a ‘happy’ end, whose comfortable, Biedermeier
sway betrays its origins as a vocal quartet. (The solo
arrangement is by one Fritz Schneider.) Gabriel Seidl’s
allegorical poem Die Uhr may seem coyly whimsical to us
today. But Loewe’s 1852 setting has a charming delicacy
of touch, darkening for a moment of impressive solemnity
as the poet imagines the clock stopping for good (‘Doch
stände sie einmal stille’). The composer recalled that
when he sang the song for the first time in public, a small
boy in the audience listened attentively and then sighed: ‘I
wish I could have a clock like that too.’
The final four songs here come from the Liederkranz
für eine Baßstimme that Loewe wrote around 1859 for a
professional bass, August Fricke, who evidently possessed
a sonorous middle and bottom register. Meeresleuchten
is a languorous—and distinctly Italianate—barcarolle.
The image of the grave at the end of the first verse prompts
a descent to a sepulchral bottom E. In contrast, Im
Sturme is all declamatory vehemence, with the piano
evoking the storm in seething tremolandi. Heimlichkeit
is set as a lulling pastoral, with a charming flourish to
paint the spring bud (‘Knospe der Frühlingszeit’), while
the horseman of Reiterlied proclaims his credo (‘I give
my blood, I give all I have / To go out riding’) in swaggering
bolero rhythms.
RICHARD WIGMORE © 2011
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