Classical Music | Baritone

Recorded on 07/01/2011, uploaded on 10/24/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Between 1890 and 1896, Hugo Wolf produced the forty-six songs that make up his Italienisches Liederbuch (Italian Songbook). The first twenty-two were composed between September 1890 and December 1891, and make up Volume I of the collection. They were published in 1892. Volume II, consisting of the remaining twenty-four songs, was composed in 1896. Despite this lengthy hiatus between the two volumes, Wolf managed to achieve a remarkably unified style across the entire collection. In part, this was due to the nature of the texts. Wolf selected the poems to set to music, which except for one were all love poems in some fashion, from a collection of anonymous Italian poetry translated into German by Paul Heyse, who also translated many of the poems in his Spanisches Liederbuch.

In “Sterb ich, so hüllt in Blumen meine Glieder” (“If I should die, then shroud my limbs with flowers”), the thirteenth song of Volume II, the poet finds peace in dying for his beloved. He implores that he not be buried in a grave, but instead laid beneath the wall, where she so often beheld him, and covered with flowers. An A-flat pedal, with a gently pulsating syncopated rhythm, underpins the entirety of Wolf’s setting of this poem, perhaps symbolic of the poet’s realization of his mortality. Throughout the entire course of the song, the music virtually does not waver from the hushed pianissimo dynamic established in the one-measure introduction of the piano. The vocal melody is likewise subdued, entering quietly in the second bar on a dominant harmony, and largely adhering to the A-flat major tonality. Beneath this solemn tune, the piano provides a restrained accompaniment, built from a motif of falling fifths that becomes modestly varied and embellished during the song’s progression.       Joseph DuBose

The Steans Music Institute is the Ravinia Festival's professional studies program for young musicians.