Classical Music | Soprano

Recorded on 08/11/2011, uploaded on 09/26/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

When Richard Strauss married the operatic soprano Pauline de Ahna on March 10, 1894, it seemed a rather unlikely match. De Ahna had garnered a reputation for being a hot-tempered and bossy singer, and by all measures unsuited for Strauss’s rather calm and self-composed personality. However, the marriage was a happy one, and de Ahna was the inspiration for many of Strauss’s compositions. One such composition was the 4 Lieder, op. 27, which Strauss dedicated to de Ahna, and presented to her on their wedding day. She often performed them when her husband toured as a guest conductor.

Heimliche Aufforderung is the third song of the set, and the first of two on poems of the Scottish/German poet John Henry Mackay. Its four stanzas depict the scene of a joyous feast, the look of two lovers’ across the crowd of revelers as they partake of their meals, and finally an invitation to an amorous meeting in the garden with a passionate, impatient plea for night to fall upon them. Strauss’s setting is sensual, to say the least, with arpeggios in the piano that ebb and flow beneath a vocal melody that can hardly contain its anticipation. At the third stanza, the mood changes as the poet begins his invitation. The piano subsides into anxiously repeated tones, and the vocal melody momentarily abandons its luscious melody to become nearly fixated upon a single B-flat. From thence, Strauss builds to a powerful climax at the beginning of the last line of text. The music subsides and the piano closes the song with an affectionate coda.         Joseph DuBose

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