Classical Music | Soprano

Recorded on 11/09/2004, uploaded on 01/10/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Mädchenblumen, Op. 22 (Felix Dahn)           Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss concentrated on different genres of composition (chamber music, symphonic poems, operas, etc.) at different periods, but he composed songs throughout his life.  He composed 214 vocal works, approximately 150 of which are lieder. 

Many of Strauss' finest songs pay tribute to his wife Pauline, who was at first his pupil, and then his wife.  Pauline was a very fine soprano, and considered one of the best exponents of his beautiful works.  Mädchenblumen, a rather early set of songs - were composed in 1888 to poems by Felix Dahn. The songs contain soaring lyricism and beautifully reflect the varying moods of the poems, which compare girls to their botanical equivalents:  a flowing melody for the cornflower, lively brilliance for poppies, clinging sentiment for ivy and delicate fantasy for the water lily.   Tamara Matthews

Kornblumen (Cornflowers)

Cornflowers I call these figures

that gently, with blue eyes,

preside quietly and modestly,

placidly drinking the dew of peace

from their own pure souls,

communicating with everything that is near,

unconscious of the precious sensitivity

they have received from the hand of God.

We felt so close to you,

as if you were going through a field of crops

through which the breath of evening blew,

full of pious quietude and full of mildness.

Mohnblumen (Poppies)

They are poppies, those round,

red-blooming, healthy ones

that bloom and bake in the summer

and are always in a cheery mood,

good and happy as a king,

their souls never tired of dancing;

they weep beneath their smiles

and seem born only

to tease the cornflowers;

yet nevertheless,

the softest, best hearts often hide

among the climbing ivy of jests;

God knows one would wish to 

suffocate them with kisses

were one not so afraid

that, embracing the hoyden,

she would spring up into a full blaze

and go up in flames.

Epheu (Ivy)

But ivy is what I call that maiden

with soft words,

with the simple, bright hair,

gently waving brown about her,

with brown, soulful doe's eyes,

who so often stands in tears,

in her tears simply irresistible;

without strength and self-consciousness,

unadorned with secret blossoms,

yet with an inexhaustible, deep

true inner sentience

that under her own power she can

never yank herself up by the roots;

such are born to twine

lovingly about another life:

upon her first love 

she rests her entire life's fate,

for she is counted among those rare flowers,

those that only blossom once.

Wasserrose (Waterlily)

Do you know the flower, the fantastic

waterlily, celebrated in myth?

On a slim, ethereal stem bobs

its translucent, colorless head;

it blooms by reedy pools in groves,

protected by the swan, who circles it in solitary vigil;

it opens only in the moonlight

with which it shares its silver glimmer:

thus does it bloom, the magical sister of the star,

idolized for its dreamy, dark tendrils

which by the edge of the pool can be seen from afar,

never reaching what it years for.

Waterlily, so do I call the slim

maiden with night-dark locks and alabaster cheeks,

with deep foreboding thoughts showing in her eyes

as if they were ghosts imprisoned on Earth.

When she speaks, it is like the silvery rushing of water;

when she is silent, it is the pregnant silence of the moonlit night.

She seems to have exchanged radiant expressions with the stars,

whose language, of the same nature, she has grown accustomed to.

You can never grow weary of gazing in those eyes

fringed with silky, long lashes,

and you believe, as if blessedly, terrifyingly bewitched,

whatever the Romantics have dreamed about Elves.

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.