During the 1890s, Strauss looked to contemporaries such as Karl Henckel, John Henry Mackay, Otto Julius Bierbaum (with whom Strauss had wanted to work on an opera) and Richard Dehmel for literary inspiration. Their intense, psychosexual poetry provided the springboard to an even headier musical idiom, prefiguring the operas that came in its wake. ‘Nachtgang’ the third of three settings of poems by Otto Julius Bierbaum (published as Op. 29 in 1895), is typically penetrating. The text speaks of profound love, prompting tears of joy and, from Strauss, consequent musical profundity. The flattened notes of the melodic line are echoed in the accompaniment. But as the lover’s gaze at last falls on the object of his affection, the music comes to a pause. Stasis is brief, however, and the final lines elicit yet more revelatory harmonies.
Click here to listen to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's performance with Gerald Moore.
The painting is a portrait of Berthe Jacques by Ferdinand Hodler.
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