Loewe: Goethe songs

Day 343

Loewe: Six Goethe Songs

Hochzietslied Op 20 no 1

Der Fischer Pp 43 no 1

Dir Zauberlehring Op 20 no 2

Der Totentanz Op 44 no 3

Wirkung in die Ferne Op 55 no 1

Erlkönig Op 1 no 13

Werner Hollweg

Roman Ortner

This was a very pleasant surprise.  I knew the name Loewe because he had written a setting of Erlkönig but I don’t think that I had heard any of his songs before. He was an almost exact contemporary of Schubert but lived on to 1869 - one wonders what Schubert would have been writing had he lived that long. Loewe was well connected musically - he conducted the first performance of Mendelssohn’s overture to A Midsummer Night’s dream.

These are really ballads rather than songs - narrations telling a story in continuous music rather than, for the most part, in strophic form. What surprised me is how witty and charming they were. There is a real sense of story telling here - in some places with real comic effect such as the ever faster declamation in the first ballad, where the singer (deliberately) almost stumbles over his words in an effort to get his speech over with. There is also a freshness in the lyricism and some touches of Schumannesque harmony,

Loewe’ Erlkönig is a fine song - dramatic and full of energy. Had Schubert not set it we Loewe’s version might well have entered the repertoire. There is still a place for it as an alternative but nothing really can compare with Schubert’s masterpiece.