Alban Berg - Die Nachtigall

Early Songs (7), for voice & piano (or orchestra) (1905-1908; revised and orchestrated 1928)

Nacht (Night)
Schilflied (Song amid the Reeds)
Die Nachtigall (The Nightingale)
Traumgekrönt (Crowned in Dreams)
Im Zimmer (Indoors)
Liebesode (Ode to Love)
Sommertage (Summer Days)

Anne Sofie von Otter
Wiener Philarmoniker
Claudio Abbado

Songs for voice and piano constitute the greater part of Alban Berg's earliest efforts at composition. Though completed 1905 - 08, the composer's Seven Early Songs were not published until 1928. (Berg also made orchestrations of the accompaniments at this time.) These songs, the product of the early years of Berg's apprenticeship to his most important mentor, Arnold Schoenberg, present an apparent simplicity. Upon closer examination, though, they reveal a subtlety and imagination beyond what might be expected of a composer of such relative inexperience. Musicologist Mark DeVoto notes that Berg's earliest songs are technically and creatively superior to those of fellow pupil Anton Webern, who became particularly known for his lieder, and who worked in this genre more prolifically than in any other.

The Seven Early Songs have a strong motivic structure; some are built upon a single motivic cell, extensively manipulated and layered. Harmonically, the songs exist in the world of late-Romantic expanded tonality, with a certain ambiguity between major and minor modes, suspension, delayed and sometimes avoided resolutions, and occasionally superfluous key signatures. DeVoto also points out that the Seven Early Songs exemplify a Bergian harmonic tendency, namely "creeping"--that is, harmonic progressions related not by conventional rules but by "stepwise relation and common tones." This means that, for example, successions of chords may simply be related chromatically, descending or ascending by semitone. The Seven Early Songs also display Berg's penchant for symmetrical melodic structures, a characteristic evident in the composer's frequent use of inversion. [Allmusic.com]

Lyrics by Theodor Storm:

Das macht, es hat die Nachtigall
Die ganze Nacht gesungen;
Da sind von ihrem süßen Schall,
Da sind in Hall und Widerhall
Die Rosen aufgesprungen.

Sie war doch sonst ein wildes Kind;
Nun geht sie tief in Sinnen,
Trägt in der Hand den Sommerhut
Und duldet still der Sonne Glut
Und weiß nicht, was beginnen.

Das macht, es hat die Nachtigall
Die ganze Nacht gesungen;
Da sind von ihrem süßen Schall,
Da sind in Hall und Widerhall
Die Rosen aufgesprungen.