Although this song was published in 1870, Franz notes it as one of his earliest—an indication that this composer put many of his works to one side, publishing them, possibly after revision, only at a later date. Gentle triplet semiquavers pervade the accompaniment; Franz avoids Schumann’s controversial split between ‘ängstigt’ and ‘Sich’ (in his setting from Myrten, Op 25 No 7).

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2017

Franz is here, unusually, more violent, more dramatic and restless than Schumann, with sudden outbursts of angry triplets as if a forte call to arms.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2017

The heart of this album consists of setting of the poetry of Heine. With no fewer than sixty-seven settings of this poet (twenty-five of them recorded here), Franz may have claimed to be the quintessential Heine composer, although the familiar charges levelled against Schubert and Schumann—that they fail adequately to encompass the poet’s bitter sense of irony—may also be aimed, in even greater measure, at Franz. He could hardly resist setting many of the same poems that Schumann had chosen for his Dichterliebe (Op 48, 1840), although it seems that he deliberately published these ‘matching’ settings gradually in quite a number of opus numbers, and over quite a number of years. The sequence of poems in Dichterliebe is so well known to many generations of music lovers that we have gathered together Franz’s corresponding settings (nine out of Schumann’s sixteen) and placed them in the order of the Schumann cycle, thus constructing what might be termed a Robert Franz Dichterliebe, confronting lieder audiences with very familiar texts in unfamiliar, but very sympathetic, settings. No one knew his Schumann better than Franz, and no one thought harder about alternative ways to look at these poems. Many of these songs were composed thirty years after Schumann’s, although it would be difficult to tell on stylistic grounds. Certain small transpositions have been made here to allow the songs to enchain as a putative cycle.

Schumann’s Im wunderschönen Monat Mai is in 2/4—so famous that one may think that duple time is the only musical metre that could work for these words. Franz proves otherwise—although a flowing semiquaver underlay is common to both. The birdsong effects (split thirds) in the accompaniment at the beginning of the second verse are unusually illustrative. The difference between the settings of ‘aufgegangen’ (rising) and ‘Verlangen’ (falling) is telling.

There is no Franz setting of the second song of Schumann’s Dichterliebe: Aus meinen Tränen spriessen.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2017