Classical Music | Soprano

Recorded on 08/16/2005, uploaded on 01/10/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Edvard Grieg was a master of the miniature. Except for his well-known Piano Concerto in A minor and a handful of other works, he ventured little towards the large-scale forms that were the staple of so many composers during the 19^th century. Instead, Grieg composed mostly in the smaller forms, such as his numerous “Lyric Pieces” and his Norwegian folksongs and dances for piano. In the realm of vocal music, he also composed a substantial amount of songs. His 6 Songs, op. 25 was composed in 1877-78 and contains settings from Henrik Ibsen’s, the Norwegian-born author of Peer Gynt, only collection of poetry.

“Med en vandlilje” (“With a water lily”) is the fourth song of the opus 25 set. Within the poem’s four stanzas, Ibsen compares the water lily that floats peacefully on the water to the same flower upon the bosom of a young woman, whose heart and dreams parallels the unknown, and possibly terrifying, aquatic depths. A gently rippling accompaniment pervades throughout Grieg’s setting, broken only at the close of the first and second stanza, and by the final punctuated chords. The vocal melody is at first light and charming in the key of A major, but soon captures the darker tone of Ibsen’s poem with persistent inflections of the minor mode. The first two stanzas are treated strophically, but the third introduces a significant change in the music. The vocal melody becomes more fragmented, and by the fourth stanza, is reduced to two-measure utterances, while the key changes first to A minor and then ventures further away into C minor. At the close of the fourth and final stanza, Grieg repeats the first, creating in essence a ternary form, which gives the song a more fitting and dramatic close.        Joseph DuBose

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Med en vandlilje (With a water-lily),  Op. 25, No. 4           Edvard Grieg

Lyrics by Henrik Ibsen

Look, Mary, what I bring you;

A flower with white wings.

It floated on quiet currents,

Dream-filled, through spring.

Would you like to dedicate it to your home?

Then fasten it on your bosom, dear Mary,

And still, quiet waves will gather beneath its leaves.

Beware, dear child, of the currents beneath quiet waters.

It is a dangerous place for dreaming,

For a monster lurks below,

Lilies play on the surface.

Child, your bosom is like a whirlpool,

A dangerous place for dreams.

Lilies play on the surface,

But deep down the monster is lurking.

Look, Mary, what I bring you;

A flower with white wings.

It floated on quiet currents,

Dream-filled, through spring.

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.