Mozart's songs have come a long way since these recordings were made in 1967. The annotator of this reissue, Horst Seeger, reflects older attitudes when he writes that Mozart's lieder "play a very peripheral role" in his output, "are, so to speak, byproducts." What the holders of those attitudes really objected to was the semi-popular and even sexy quality of the texts Mozart set, and they made an exception for Das Veilchen, K. 476 (The Violet), to a text by
Goethe. Later recordings have approached the songs as valuable windows on Mozart's inner circle and even as expressions of his inner life. Mozart's songs, done right, reveal no casual attitude in their composition; they have the combination of melodic naturalness and free-ranging formal imagination that characterizes Mozart's work in other genres. This recording, by one of the top Mozart sopranos of the time, suffers from the attitudes that surrounded it.
Erika Köth had an ideal Mozart voice: spot-on in intonation, sweet, but with a mature attitude. She never sounds less than pleasant in these songs, but she doesn't approach them as individuals, with the result that a romp like Die Verschweigung, K. 518 (track 2), comes off as cutesy. Better to pick a recording such as that by
Suzie LeBlanc, or, for an unusual male reading
Werner Güra, or even
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's classic readings.