In
Wie des Mondes Abbild zittert, the moon’s ghostly image, shaken by the wild surge of the sea’s waves, is mirrored in the lover’s own sense of torment as he remembers his beloved. Stanford’s sense of control – the tangential opening on the dominant, the avoidance of cadence, the interplay between voice and piano, the perfect reflection of the poem’s meaning in the modified ternary design, and the closing rhetorical gesture of the final bars – is masterly.
from notes by Jeremy Dibble © 2000
